it was nice to get the confirmation.
“Don’t let your head get too big,” Keats said. “She also told me you had a checkered history at MIT.” I could tell he was trying to lighten things up by getting a rise out of me. I appreciated it.
“And you still trust me?” I asked, half joking.
“I trust Eve,” he said in all seriousness, and I could tell the moment of levity had passed.
In other words, I was still proving myself here. Not that I minded. I was just glad to know where I stood.
It was time to get back to work.
CHAPTER 7
BY THE END of the day, I’d finished everything there was to do at the Petty home in Lincoln and leapfrogged back to my little gray cubicle in the field office downtown. There was still a mountain of work to do, given all the electronics they’d pulled out of the Petty home, and I threw myself into it. Day stretched into night. And night stretched into late night.
I wasn’t naive about the work they did at the FBI. But even so, I felt like I was staring into some unknowably dark abyss. What sort of monster killed entire families?
The whole thing made me want to call my mom, like I was a homesick college freshman all over again. It was probably just as well that it was one in the morning by then. So instead I called A.A., who I knew had Red Bull running through her veins.
Sure enough, she answered on the first ring.
“What’s up, Piglet?”
“Hey, Pooh Bear,” I said.
She was always Pooh, and I was whoever else, depending on her mood, or mine. Piglet for general bestie status, Eeyore when I was being cynical, Owl when I was smart—that kind of thing. It was embarrassingly juvenile, but it was just between us.
“I’m still at the office,” I said.
“Damn, Angela, I can’t believe it. You sure landed on your feet. How’s it going over at the Fun Bun Institute?”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Just fine?”
I didn’t want to talk about work. I didn’t want to talk about me at all. The whole point of this call was to get out of my head for a few minutes. Or at least to try.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “Did Darren finally drop off the face of the earth?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “He showed up drunk in the lobby the other night, with all kinds of blah-blah-blah about how he’s changed.”
“Right,” I said. “Because he’s so evolved. Please tell me you called security.”
“He’s harmless,” she said.
“Harmless? He posted naked-ass pictures of you after you broke up with him!” I sputtered.
“And you took care of that,” she said. “You’re my little fairy godhacker.”
“I just gave him the rope. He hung himself,” I said. “Seriously, any MIT student who opens a supposed hot-wings coupon from an unknown source doesn’t deserve to set foot on that campus.”
The “coupon” I sent Darren had been a little home-brewed bit of malware for his laptop. It installed a keystroke logger and then broadcast his entire online life to the MIT student body and faculty—every message, every email, every disgusting little porn site he ever visited.
In a creative flourish just for myself, I’d named the program Sorry/Not Sorry. Not that he’d ever figure that out.
A.A. and I were both laughing now. It felt good to slip back into my old life for a few minutes.
“He still hates your guts, you know,” she told me.
“And he still hasn’t learned his lesson,” I said.
He really hadn’t, apparently. Not if he was still coming around drunk, after everything else that had gone down. So while A.A. and I kept on talking, I got online and sent Darren a little more rope.
His laptop wouldn’t be vulnerable anymore, but any hacker worth her salt knows the value of a good backup. In this case, it was Darren’s beloved Android. I’d parked a little of my handiwork on there months earlier, one morning while he was in the bathroom using up all our hot water. Then I’d just left it dormant, waiting for the right rainy day.
All it took was a quick update order and I was done. Now, the next time he turned on his phone, it was going to be frozen with a message emblazoned across the lock screen: “Darren Wendt is a boil on the ass of humanity.” And it was going to stay that way, even when he took it to the Verizon store to get his unfixable phone fixed.
Sorry, Darren.
Not sorry.
Maybe I