Half A Rye by M. K. Dreysen - An R. M. Danelev Story

The conversation was one of those types; long on talk, short on information. The man and the woman filled the empty spaces with food and tea and water, and people watching. The deli was busy, the perfect place to let the words get lost in the buzz.

She asked him, when they got to the point where they were both starting to worry about cleaning up and getting out, "Do you want the job done, or not?"

He hemmed and hawed. She was used to it. They always did this. When it came down to the money. "Cheap, fast, good, pick two," she continued.

"I'm an engineer, I know the catechism," he replied. "Fast and good is best if I can get it."

"Which means you can afford it," she said. "I like that. It's always nice to work with someone who's ready to pick up their responsibilities." She gave the theatric sigh. "Unfortunately, I think fast is off the table for this one. So you're getting the discount by default."

He didn't ask why there would be no fast resolution. He knew the answer, he'd set her the problem, after all. And he'd worked the idea himself, projects and plans were bread and butter, the things that paid the bill she'd hand him. "How much, then?"

There were no standards for this sort of thing. The costs were always more than she'd anticipate, up front; the risks similarly vague. No worries. "Ten grand now," on top of the five she'd charged just for meeting, "Here's the account number." She passed him a piece of paper, empty on both sides except for the routing and account numbers. "Twenty when I'm done. Look for the account numbers in your mail."

She left that place then, and him settling the check behind her. Her mind wanted to work the problem, get started. She made it focus on the immediate. Was she being followed? Drones, the flyspecks she'd never notice, except that she'd trained herself to look for them anyway. She used them, she knew what they could do.

Cars that showed up more often than they should? The old standards worked because they worked.

She didn't see anyone following her. Maybe that meant she and the man whose name she didn't know were clear. Maybe it meant the company he worked for hadn't yet twigged to the fact of his duplicity.

And maybe if she looked under her pillow in the morning she'd find change from the Tooth Fairy. Sure, the dude's company might not have people following him around on the street.

That didn't mean they weren't keeping track of him. Given what he did, the projects he worked on, she could book it. Big-time companies with property to protect didn't let their engineers far off the leash. They couldn't afford to, not when there were governments the world over ready to kill for what was in the dude's head. And competitors willing to do worse.

No, it was given. His emails were logged, his phone calls as well. Every trip; his passport tracked, his accounts monitored. The dude wasn't in any danger of getting out from under the umbrella they'd crafted. Company man living over the company store, all but indentured.

And he was looking for the big score, the one that would free him. Send him down the road to a beach somewhere warm. One of the quiet ones, no cell phones and by God no major corporate presence.

She'd spent her own time in the life, she knew how it was done. That was the part where "Fast" was off the table. She'd get him his score all right. It just wasn't going to happen quickly. It might have to wait until he'd shown a little faith.

Maybe she'd push it until the day he walked off the job, told them he'd found a community college that needed an E.E. to fill in the night classes; could be he'd stumbled over a little startup working on prosthetics for the poor and the disabled. Whatever it was, Randi just might make him sweat until he'd plunged into the unknown before she stole the thing, sold it, sent him the proceeds. Less commission and the thirty-five already deposited, of course.

The dude wasn't public-facing. No social media accounts, those were right out. No jobhunter websites; he was probably listed in his professional society directories, too bad she didn't care enough to pay the fees and find out. No matter, he'd whispered what it was, and she was tech, she knew enough to guess at the value of the project. A board, not a quantum computer itself, just a communications board. That would let the bits on the inside talk to the bits on the outside. The kind of thing that was expensive now, cheap tomorrow, but would eventually be ubiquitous, and rolling in a few pennies on the dollar every time another copy shipped out.

By the standards of the bigwigs at his company? Nothing major, the thing was a sideline. By the standards of a forty-year man who'd never quite been in on the IPO's and the big money splits?

Oh, it would do. If he could cash in, it would do nicely. There were only two problems. He had to get it out to the world, and he had to time it so that the competitors didn't have their own projects getting ready to roll. If Apple and IBM and Microsoft all had their own versions, maybe not perfect but good enough, why would they pay for his? Why would they care?

Right now they would care, because they, and the others in that class, had only whiteboards and powerpoint presentations. He had the board, sitting in his little corner lab, counting electrons and photons and, best of all, putting out the numbers just as his simulations predicted. Wait six months? Yeah. Wait six years and the opportunity would be gone. He was smart, her dude, but he wasn't unique. Not when everyone and their dog knew where the next generation of computers were going, and were throwing money to lay the weeds down and build the path to that future.

Assuming the guy wasn't a plant. A dangle, bait on the hook for someone foolish enough to come along and take a big bite of.

Which was her second problem. Preparing for the doublecross. But that was ok. For now, it was time to get the crew together.

"We'll need the plans, and we'll need the prototype," she told them. "And we'll need to put together the bids."

Sami volunteered to find the bidders. Marlan took on the acquisitions side of the project. "Careful of the timing issues," she told them both. "We need room to maneuver."

Marlan shrugged. "No promises, Randi," the big man said. "But you know that."

She did, they all did.

She took the unstated part of the problem. The other half, the one where they ended up with a trail of private security folks and FBI and CIA agents.

She wrote email, worked contacts new and old. Security teams, management, human resources, there were handles all over the place, she turned them all. Until she got the first meeting, the pitch over lunch. And then the second meeting. The one where she bid the contract for grey-hat services. "Stress tests."

Randi had shaken the tree until she'd found the vice-president with the budget and the interest. Same company as the guy, the engineer, who'd brought her the gig, but not his boss. A branch or two over on the hierarchy.

"I'm most worried about our manufacturing lines," the lady told her. "Anybody who can read patents can figure out what our boards look like. It's putting them together where we make our money, though."

Randi didn't scoff. She wasn't the one stuck running the company, why question where the manager put her time and worries. "If I'm to be comprehensive, I'll need to work on the other divisions. Their interfaces with the fab lines are also points of vulnerability."

The manager nodded her agreement. With one caveat. "My authority runs out at half a million."

'Ok, a million,' Randi translated to herself. 'With the proper leverage.' Not that the board would fetch that. Setting up a real auction was out of the question, under the circumstances. "I'm sure we can keep it in budget," Randi said out loud.

Marlan greeted the news with elation. And stress, because it didn't matter how soft the net was, they still had to walk the rope up above. "Well, if we do end up on somebody's cameras, we've got a story to go along with it. Best not though." He walked Randi through his plans. The building, the cameras, well, the cameras they both assumed were there. The security team, onsite twenty-four seven. Hi-tech they were, all the tools would be hidden from casual viewing but they'd be there.

Randi noticed something, about halfway through the walkthrough. "Wait, where am I in this?"

"In the van with me, as usual. We'll be down the street at the Mall."

"You're making everyone walk?" The building where the engineer worked his magic wasn't part of some giant complex. It hid in the trees; she didn't know whether they still called the Woodlands a mixed development or not, but that was the effect. Office buildings sheltered by the pines, precious few roads through the trees, neighborhoods suggested but never found unless you knew where to drive. "Why not just pull into the parking lot? There are people there all day long, right?"

"In theory, yes. In practice, the only one I've seen work nights, besides the janitors, is a woman with agoraphobia. Half a dozen cars in the parking lot, and the cops pull through two, three times a night. We'd stick out like a clown at a funeral."

The thing that impressed Randi the most was the detail about the engineer working nights. Agoraphobia, sure it was an ADA accommodation, the company says, "Set the schedule you need to." Marlan finding that information, well that's why she loved her team.

She had a few edits, though. A tweak, here and there.

On the night. "I'm doubling my rates," that was Squeaks' comment. "You're making me do real work tonight, Randi. We talked about that."

She and Marlan sat in the van, about a mile and half away from the site. "You're telling me you can't do a night's honest work, Squeaks?"

"It sort of goes with the territory, doesn't it?" his partner, Dave tonight, put in. "We work nights so we don't have to. Work, I mean."

"Gentlemen of leisure?" she asked.

"I'd love to be so," Dave continued. "But first I've got to deal with this crap job my boss shoved on me."

Sami'd worked the lines to set it up. First, she tracked down the janitors, the contract and the company filling it. Then, she'd done a one and done, show up, get a temp gig, find out who and where the HR for the janitor company was hiding. Ghost away after a couple days, then spend a week or two making noises, showing up saying, "Just coming to get my check, I'm not causing trouble."

Put a USB stick into a convenient port when no one was looking, they all being distracted by finding her paperwork and making her just go away. Pull the stick's payload up and get the back door open, just a crack. Enough so that Sami could make a tweak to the schedule. Well, a couple of tweaks, three or four false trails so it wouldn't be obvious, if anyone ever came looking, which one of the buildings had been the target. They'd put it together, of course, if the tech company made a nuisance of themselves.

So, on the night, four of the janitor teams in the area found themselves with paid holidays. Sami'd appended notes to each, "Paid time off" for company reasons. Private parties, that's the rumor that went around the janitors, not that they cared much because a paycheck and a night to sleep in was nothing to complain about. Just so long as the companies didn't leave them a mountain of trash to clean up.

Randi and her team weren't going to leave a mess. They had standards.

Borrowing a van wasn't necessary. The usual janitor team drove their private cars to their gig, they'd all been badged into the building. Sami's other trick was replicating the other half of the deception. "Yes ma'am," she told the HR rep at the tech company. "We've got a few temporary staff we need to badge into your facility. No ma'am. Well, one of the new hires will be full time, I think, after the new year, when Sandy retires." Amazing what Sami picked up in just a couple days working with the janitors. "We're rotating staff, as well, making sure we've got you covered for sick days and so on. Tomorrow? Yes ma'am, I'll be happy to come in tomorrow, should I send you the files?"

While she still had the email address that went along with the deception. The HR team had been happy to work with her. "We very much appreciate that, you're so thoughtful. Most places, they'd just shortstaff us if someone couldn't show up."

"We're always working to give our clients the most professional work we can," Sami responded.

Sami walked out with half a dozen badges. "They'll expire Saturday night, of course," the HR lady told her.

"Do you need me to send them back to you when they're done?" Sami asked.

"No, not at all. This way, when one of your new hires needs to fill in for our permanent team, we can just renew the badge and they're good to go." The lady gave Sami the big smile, the one that said she was doing Sami a favor, matching the one that she thought she was getting from the janitor company.

Sami didn't disappoint her. "That will be a big help, thank you! And thank you again for all your help with this."

Since she'd shown up on cameras, Sami wasn't part of the team that hit the tech company on the night. That fell to Squeaks and Dave and Yala. Three person team, matched up to the three janitors who worked the four story building every night. Sami had promised they'd deliver a full staff, and she tried always to keep promises.

The other question she'd made sure to answer, was how the agoraphobic engineer figured into the picture. "Oh, her? She stays in her office all night. I make sure to knock when I need to get into her office, close the door behind me. She's nice, a sweet lady." So Sami warned Yala.

"I treat her with kid gloves?" Yala asked.

Sami shrugged. "I don't know the woman, all I know is that she stays in her office while the janitors are working. Mena said she talks to her all the time, she just makes sure she doesn't sneak up on her."

"I'm not sure about this," Yala said. "Do I need to mask up?"

"We'd have to put some weight on you to look like Mena," Sami replied. "Just remember the story, you're a temp learning the ropes."

Yala kept up her stream of worries; since she was the one showing her face, everyone on the radio understood her concerns. She'd work through it, they all knew. They'd just all have to listen to her do it.

Just the way the team worked, Randi reminded herself. Like her and Marlan, sitting here in the van trying not to grind their teeth down to the nubs, watching video streams listening to chatter counting down the hours. "Who's bright idea was this anyway?" she asked the air in the van.

Empty air because Marlan wasn't one to rub her nose in her own impatience.

The whole thing was tedium more than it was an exciting hit. Dave took the top floor, all offices, the place where the managers of the tech company, the vice-presidents but not the one that Randi had talked into funding a grey-hat hack team, that was another part of the company, this was the R&D division. The interface was there of course, that was the whole point, she had brief for her team to go anywhere hit anything that might put the v.p. at risk, so this counted, please God let this count.

Yala was on the next floor down, the one with the night shift of one. More offices, the design team, where their guy had had his office. Not his lab. Just his computer, still up and running, gathering dust in the office just two doors down from the lady with the fear of open spaces and people. Yala did her thing, plugged the USB drive into the port and went about cleaning up the rest of the floor.

Marlan sighed relief when the breaker program called home. Not to send data, the drive had more than enough space to store what it needed, the program just pinged Marlan's phone with a random port access sequence. It told him it was starting its business, copying everything on the drive.

The labs were on the second floor. Squeaks worked that one, where the rest of the night's business rested on his shoulders. He didn't have clean room access, but he didn't need it. The rest of the lab spaces were all open to his badges, the workstations where half-built boards, pieces of computers and boxes of chips, wiring diagrams decorating whiteboards and coming together in red and green and black and blue bits of wire on benches scattered around the floor. "Which one was it again?"

Marlan and Randi rolled their eyes; neither one of them rose to the bait. Yala did, though. She was getting ready to knock on the engineer's door, her nerves were at their highest pitch so far. "You're kidding right? Dude, if I have to come down there and roll your ass over..."

"Sorry, Yala, I'm getting there, I'm getting there. We're flying slow, right, just cleaning the offices, right? How's the drive doing?"

Marlan keyed the mike, two quick bursts and a slow one. Enough for the team to know they were getting where they needed to be.

Squeaks had made sure he knew where their target sat, like it was almost as forgotten as the guy who'd put it together. Just another board, this one finished at least, half a dozen wires sprouting from it. Their target wasn't plugged in, it sat in a protective clear plastic sleeve, on a shelf in the back with a few other completed projects. Squeaks left it there while he went about the rest of his business. Cleaning the lab space.

Yala knocked on the door. Waited for "Come in" from the other side, then slowly snuck her head around the jamb. "Ma'am, I'm filling in for Mena tonight, my name's..."

The radio reception was poor, so the rest of the team heard a mumbled staticky conversation with no details. They all held their breath, waiting, until the vacuum cleaner roared to life and drowned out everything else. The collective sigh over the link would have made Yala laugh, if she could have heard it over the sound of the vacuum. When she was done, she said "Thank you", closed the door, and trundled back down the hall. "She was nice," she said.

Randi and Marlan shook their heads. The uniforms would have to do their work, would do their work because that's what uniforms and hats did, anonymized and made everyone wearing one just another part of the crew, part of the background.

The rest of it was just waiting. For the second set of pings, knockbacks telling Marlan the program had finished transferring all their guy's files; that Marlan could send out two slow pulses and a fast one over the radio. Then Yala pulled the cord and stuffed the drive into her pocket. Finished up, with a knock on the only closed door on her floor and a "Good night" and a mumbled "Good night" from the other side, and then it was time for Yala to get on the elevator with Dave.

And meet Squeaks and his cart on the second floor. "Finish up the first floor?" "Yep." "Might as well do it right."

The first floor was bathrooms, conference rooms, a lobby and the elevator bay. Vacuuming and a quick swipe here and there and they were all out of there just about three in the morning, a good eight hour shift like clockwork. Or like they'd planned it or something. Squeaks put his backpack with the board stuffed inside it over his shoulders, and the three of them got out of that place.

Marlan and Randi met Squeaks at the pre-arranged spot, a hospital just up the road where all-night comings and goings didn't mean anything special. Squeaks passed them the backpack, and then they were all on the road again. The van, the rest of the cars, they'd return to the rental companies they'd got them from.

And then Randi began the rest of the operation. Well, she would have begun it, except that she'd already prepped the v.p. of the tech company for the possibility. "You and your team really do deliver. It was that easy?"

Randi met the lady at the company's other main campus in the Houston area, way out toward Katy. The company had followed all the latest trends and built a nice cafeteria for their high-tech, high maintenance workforce. Randi was comfortable making the meeting, the open design of the first floor didn't allow for a really intrusive level of snooping. Not to the level it would have taken to detect the contents of the bag at her feet.

She wasn't badging into the upper floors, where the scanners and the x-ray machines were hidden discreetly in bays just past the elevators. That was the v.p.'s problem. If she came up with a good price, of course. "No, it actually wasn't all that easy."

Randi wasn't interested in giving away all her secrets, either. There'd been a few other finished projects sitting on the shelf next to their guy's work. If she gave away too much, there wouldn't be any ripe fruit for picking at a later harvest date. Not that she was aiming for anything in particular. Randi just liked to keep her options open. "My team's good at their job, though."

"I'll need a complete rundown, a report to send along to my security teams. They need to know the holes to plug."

'And you need a justification when you're defending the money you're about to spend,' Randi added to herself. "I'll be happy to put a report together. It's all part of the service." She'd just have to make sure she left herself a backdoor, that was all.

The negotiations were almost too easy. In the end, Randi had guessed right. The v.p. had more purchase authority than she'd wanted to admit to. Then again, Randi reminded herself, it was one thing to ask a consultant to put together a threat assessment.

It was another thing entirely to have that board sitting there, stolen so cleanly that the R&D division had yet to discover it missing. The v.p. paid up the million without blinking.

Randi walked out of the building split between emotions. Glad, that she'd never promised the guy one way or another who she'd sell the thing to. And, kicking herself for not asking for more. She was halfway home before better sense took over from the momentary flush of greed. "Team's paid, our guy gets his retirement topped off, and we get out of this clean."

She celebrated by stopping by the deli where she'd met the guy in the first place. They made a killer corned-beef on rye.