Page 49 of V-Day
“Maybe,” Parris said, digging in her pack once more. “If I’m quick and we move fast enough, it won’t be an issue. Things are moving, though. I have to find out if anything vital has changed. And I have to tell them what we’re doing.” She grimaced. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m just a Captain, even if Iamtaking my orders directly from the President.”
“Youare?” Cristián breathed.
“It’s a long story,” Parris assured him. “My CO was in the Sit Room and President Collins kinda took over.” She opened the heavy duty laptop she extracted, and the screen glowed as it booted up.
Chloe reached out and dropped the lid once more. “Wait,” she said, taking off her backpack. “I have some software which will mask you from everything.”
“Chloe, no,” Cristián said. “You can’t give it to them.”
Parris looked from one to the other of them.
Chloe shook her head. “No, they need it.Weneed it.”
Cristián gripped the wrist of the hand she had in the backpack and shook it. “Youcan’t. Parris is American and military. She’s obliged to give it to her superiors. They’ll give it to everyone else. That’ll make your software open source. You’ll lose every royalty you could have made on the thing and it’s…it’sbrilliant. You can’t give it away.”
Chloe looked at Parris, who shrugged. “I have no idea what software you’re talking about. If it works, though, then yeah, I’d have to pass it on, because it would help everyone else in the Army, too.”
Chloe shrugged. “It will help you. It will help Vistaria. In fact…” She pulled the USB tab out and handed the one-centimeter square fob over to Parris. “Put it in the port, then boot up. It’ll self-install. Then you can do whatever you want and nobody will see a thing.”
Parris nodded and inserted the fob and opened the laptop once more.
Chloe turned to Cristián. “You have the command version on your cellphone—is your phone charged now?” He had placed the charger’s solar panel on his pack shortly after leaving the house. The matt black pad absorbed sunlight all day, although the sunlight under this canopy was filtered and intermittent.
“Maybe forty percent,” he said quietly. “What are you thinking?”
“Send it out, Cristián,” Chloe told him. “Give it to absolutely everyone.”
“If I do, it’ll fall into Insurrecto hands,” he pointed out.
“So what? They can’t reverse-engineer it. I wrote it. I know they can’t. It’s as unhackable as I could make it and if anyone gets too nosey, it’ll wipe itself out before they spot the code.”
“They could use it for themselves,” Parris pointed out, proving she was following along just fine.
“And again, so what?” Chloe said.
“She’s right,” Cristián said. “All that will happen is they’ll go dark on us, just as we will for them.”
“They won’t go dark on me, though,” Chloe said, with a grim smile.
Parris glanced at her startled. Then she smiled, too.
Cristián pulled out his phone and swiped. His smile was as pleased as Parris’. “You planted a honey trap,” he breathed.
“Nope. The cloak leaves signatures only I can read with a special app and no one gets that, not even you. With it, I can open any channel of communications and look at it, just as if they weren’t using the cloak.”
Cristián bent and pressed his lips to her cheek. “I love the hacker streak in you. You make a good rebel.”
Chloe should have felt pleased by the back-handed compliment, only the small voice in her brain which coldly assessed everything whispered,you’ve given away everything of value. Now, there is no going back. If you try, you’ll go back to nothing.
It didn’t help that Cristián had said nearly exactly the same thing, begging her to rethink her decision.
What on earth was she doing here?
Was she trying to make a wrong decision go right? Did her lizard brain think this would bring Cristián through the invisible wall which was keeping him from her? Was she back in military school, rebelling against authority, trying to make the world go the way she wanted, not the way they insisted it go?
You make a good rebel, Cristián’s voice echoed in her mind.
Only, in the Academy, she had failed miserably at being a rebel and had run away, instead.
She didn’t have that option, this time.
