Page 35 of Play the Game

I did the same at Jason’s computer station, where he would sit after he’d explained everything to us, but I wasn’t sure he’d be able to eat. He had a decent poker face, but I could see right through it. He was worried about Pasco.

He shrugged in response to Kessler’s question. “Lots of people in the hacking community knew about Tuesday’s competition. One of the winners goes off the grid, it probably doesn’t raise eyebrows. Two disappear, people will start getting suspicious. Or maybe it’s as simple as him refusing to cooperate and her agreeing. Either way, she’s going to have to watch him remotely, which allows us to intercept what the Carbonados are sending to her.”

“And then what?” Li asked. “Isn’t it too late by then?”

“If we were trying to stop the hack, yes,” Jason said. “But we don’t need or even want to do that. Today’s hack will be a trial run and a test of Pasco’s obedience. If Bee tells them he’s been a good boy, he’ll live to hack another day, presumably the day they need him for their big operation.”

“Sneaking in the dirty bomb,” I said.

“And setting it up,” Kessler added.

“How can you be so sure of what they’re doing, or when, for that matter?” Hart asked.

I gave the answer we were all thinking, the one that was second nature when you worked with one of the world’s best hackers. “Because that’s what Jason would do.”

Jason smiled at me again, and my insides felt warm and gooey. This was not the time to think dirty thoughts, despite the competence porn happening right in front of my eyes. I pulled my shit together and focused on everything he was telling us so I could do my damn job.

“But if we don’t need to stop the hack, why intercept the signal?” Kessler asked. “Why not just watch?”

“Because Pasco will not be a good boy,” Jensen answered.

“Because that’s also what you would do,” Hart said.

“And because he and I have a protocol.” Jason glanced at me, and I knew what I’d suspected earlier was true.

“Because before he was your frenemy, he was your friend,” I said.

Jason nodded. “We had our own one-on-one competition going on for years, breaking into more and more secure databases. It was prudent to assume one of us would get caught one day, and we wisely worried about disappearing into some government black site. So, we worked out a whole signal system. We each created our own code and gave the other a program to translate it. Before you ask, we were too competitive to let the other guy set up the system for both of us. And we set up a place to send the code, a corner of the web no one else knows about or can access. I’m counting on him to send messages there, and he’ll be counting on me to find it.”

“Which we’ll do,” Alder said, “but we also have to get clean code to Bee so she can report that Pasco’s behaving himself.”

“Yep.” Jason shook his head. “It’s like nobody trusts a hacker. His first line of code will include a tiny message, an SOS that will hit our private chat, too tiny for Bee to worry about, but enough to ping me. He’ll count on me to have an alarm turned on to alert me and then to be smart enough to follow the code backward and start monitoring his direct feed.”

“Wait,” I said, realizing the increased danger Pasco was causing for himself, “are you saying he knows another hacker will be watching him and will send encoded messages anyway?”

“All I can tell you is—”

“It’s what you would do,” several of us said in unison.

“Here’s how this will work,” Jensen said. “As soon as I connect to his feed, I’ll leave the channel open to the database he’s accessing, but I’ll grab everything headed to me. I’ll strip out the code that’s for me, dump the clean code over to Alder, and she’ll push that to Bee, who will then be able to report to the Carbonados that Pasco is doing exactly as he’s told. The code that is for me will need to be translated.” He pointed to two of the computer stations on the conference table. “Kessler, Li, the code will come into these computers. I’ve loaded Pasco’s translation program, but I don’t have time to automate a feed. You’ll need to take each piece of code I send you and cut and paste it into the search bar, then hit the send arrow. The translation will show up below it. You’ll send that to Sparks.”

“And I’ll be here?” I walked to the whiteboard that was set up at one end of the conference table.

He nodded. “Put up the messages in order so we can all follow them. Kat, you’re at the computer right beside Sparks. If anything doesn’t make sense to her, like a series of numbers or letters that don’t form known words, she’ll assign them to you for research.”

We all took our places as TJ approached the conference table and clicked on the conference line. “Bee has entered a café ten minutes away from her apartment. Surveillance teams are in place and team A is ready to enter on Jensen’s say-so.”

“Samson, Alder has taken over your phone,” Jensen said.

“What the—”

Jensen cut off his complaint. “You need to get within six feet of the target and maintain that distance.”

“Fine,” Agent Samson muttered.

“Jones, put your camera in your back pocket with the top 20 percent exposed. Your phone will provide our video feed.”

“We have literal eyes on her here,” the agent protested.

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