Page 113 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
Sandrine’s cellphone rings. “Hello, Sebastien,” she says. “Yes, we just saw the updated arrival time. Helene and I are headed over to the cybersecurity department now.”
He stays on the line with us as we run to the elevator, take it to the basement, and tear into the windowless room. It’s a vast space of metal and concrete, all gray but for the glowing lights of all the screens, various hacking devices, and power strips.
Calvin is hunched over his computer. Most of his team, a dozen hackers including pink-haired Aimee, are hammering at their laptops, too.
“Six minutes,” Sandrine says.
“I thought we had half an hour,” Calvin says, not tearing his eyes from the screen.
From the phone, Sebastien says, “Atmospheric wind speed today is not on our side.”
One of the hackers pulls up the airline’s flight status page on his computer and projects it on the wall so we can all see the countdown.
“I’ll do what I can do,” Calvin says. “Where’s my dirty dossier?” he yells at his team.
“Coming!” Aimee shouts back from the other side of the room.
“Report what we’ve got!”
“We found what Helene told us to look for!” Aimee says. “Instant message transcripts from Merrick to his reporters, encouraging them to ‘embellish’ their stories or make up sources. He’s paid to plant stories, too. And for Aaron, we found evidence of him bribing cops to get access to celebrity mug shots and confidential police reports. Emails, bank wires, everything.”
Sandrine nods curtly. I dare to take a breath.
This is why I told Calvin to look for this. It’s better than the dirty pictures. Because who’s going to believe a story about Sebastien being immortal if it’s peddled by two guys who fabricate stuff? Plus, Merrick’s and Aaron’s careers areeverythingto them. Youcan’t win a Pulitzer if there’s evidence that you’ve instructed your reporters to lie. Hell, you can’t even be a journalist anymore.
And Aaron would go to prison if it was revealed that he’s been bribing cops.
“Upload that file now!” Calvin yells. His fingers fly so fast over his keyboard I swear they almost blur. My pulse races at the same blistering pace.
Four minutes until the plane lands in L.A.
“Final sweep of Montague files complete,” Calvin announces. “All copies in the cloud accounts have been nuked.”
Three minutes.
“Replacing the Montague files with our dossiers now,” Aimee says. “If—when—Merrick or Aaron go to open the evidence they had on Sebastien, they’ll be greeted with a data dump of their own trash instead.” She looks over at me with a nod of approval, like we’re both members of a secret sisterhood of badasses.
I have to admit the plan is genius. And I came up with it.
The uploading bar seems to take forever.
Sixty seconds left.
Upload complete!
Calvin smirks, thinking of one more thing. His hands type even faster than before.
As the flight status on the wall shifts from “estimated arrival time” to “arrived,” Calvin pounds on one more button, then throws his arms up in triumph. “Done! Locked those bastards out of all their accounts and changed all their passwords. That’ll keep them busy for a while before they even discover that we’ve swapped out their files.”
Sebastien speaks from the phone. “And you deleted all their sources where they got the original material?”
“Pillaged and torched,” Calvin says, propping his feet up on his desk and twirling his Rubik’s Cube victoriously. “As far as the internet knows, you never existed, other than as Sebastien Montague. And we’ll be here to help you, technology-wise, going forward.” He makes it sound like no big deal that his client is immortal, and I am so, so grateful at this moment for the Weiskopf Group.
I sink into an empty office chair. The whole room seems to exhale in relief, even the concrete walls.
“Thank you,” I say to Calvin, Aimee, the entire team, and Sandrine. “You literally just saved Sebastien’s and our baby’s lives.”
“You were the general,” Sandrine says with a rare smile. “We were only the foot soldiers who carried out your stratagem.”
