Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(82)

Break into a private genetics lab on the verge of a breakthrough.

Plant kiddie porn on a congressman’s laptop.

Like taking candy from a fucking baby.

But even the creative jobs were fee-for-service, and the overhead was higher. He paid his operators very well. Call girls who could carry on a conversation didn’t come cheap. Ethics-free supergeeks were downright expensive. And Shepard took his share, too.

Chip was careful to keep Shepard happy.

The man was like a scary robot without a human operator.

But high seven figures take-home just wasn’t enough for Chip Dawes.

You could only make so much with fee-for-service. The two biggest things Chip had learned working the tech industry? You want to be digital, and you want to be scalable. Building the software and rolling it out to the first customer cost a certain amount. But rolling it out to every customer after that cost basically nothing. Two millionth customer paid the same amount as the first customer. It was like printing money.

So that’s what Chip was after. His killer app.

Seven figures was nice, but he wanted eight or nine. Hell, he wanted ten, the big B.

1000x venture cap money. IPO money. Google Facebook Twitter money.

He wanted his own island. His own fucking nation-state.

And to do that, he needed a big score.

He was pretty sure he’d found one.

Thanks to a client, it fell right in his lap.

Hazel Cassidy’s algorithm.

Chip had worked for this same client years before, when Citadel was just starting out. He’d had the potential to be a serious whale, so Chip agreed to upgrade the guy’s security protocols, a small project but it got his foot in the door for more work down the line.

The client turned out to be completely irrational, fucked in the head, a colossal pain in the ass to work for. The added work never materialized, and the job was over in a few months. Chip padded his invoices like crazy and the man paid without a question, so it wasn’t exactly time wasted. You could always tell new tech money. They knew so much about some obscure little fucking thing, but were na?ve as hell about everything else. Half of them felt they didn’t deserve the money, the other half thought they deserved twice as much, and they all loved to write those checks. Proving to themselves and everyone else that they’d made it.

When the client emailed him again a few months ago, something had changed. He was much more opaque. Now he worked through Nicolet, a notorious tech industry legal shark Chip had known for years. And the client refused to meet in person. Which was weird as hell, because on the creative side of Chip’s work, all the truly important business was done face-to-face. Who wants to leave a trail of bread crumbs?

Instead the client sent some middle-aged broad named Sanchez to run interference, his executive secretary or something. She was at least fifty, flew into Lake Union on a goddamn floatplane wearing last year’s business casual, with dirt under her fingernails and skin like leather. He wanted to tell her to get a manicure and put on some sunscreen, but she was too far gone for that.

Chip had to admit she was a serious ball-buster, smart as hell with a take-no-shit attitude. Maybe that was why the client had gone this route, the attorney and the personal rep. Maybe he’d realized he wasn’t tough enough for this kind of work. Either that or he’d gone even farther around the bend.

Regardless, the client somehow had gotten access to Hazel Cassidy’s working notes. He hadn’t shared the notes with Chip, but Chip had used the backdoor he’d built into the client’s system years ago to get himself a copy. The notes were cryptic and brief, but Chip could read between the lines.

The algorithm’s potential was crystal clear.

He took the guy’s money—it was perfectly good money—and began planning the operation. But he’d already decided to keep the acquisition in-house. The algorithm was far too valuable to hand over to the fucking client.

Besides, if the guy complained, there was always Shepard.

Maybe even if the guy didn’t complain. Maybe even include the attorney, and the personal rep with dirt under her nails.

This was going to be big.

Chip didn’t like witnesses.

As for Shepard, Chip would take care of him personally.

Profit sharing was for suckers.

? ? ?

HE PUT HIS SUPERGEEKS on the project full-time for two months, and they got nowhere. The Cassidy woman made none of the usual mistakes. She actually used the fingerprint reader on her phone and her brand-new personal laptop, the one she took home with her. Her password wasn’t PASSWORD or her birthday or her daughter’s name backward or anything else that simple.

As it turned out, she wasn’t just any professor. She was in fact a big-shot Stanford computer science star. She had real discipline and major skills and random long-string passwords. It was infuriating. Chip was actually impressed that the client had gotten her working notes, because Chip’s supergeeks couldn’t even get that far.

So he went old-school. He planted infected USB drives in the parking lot, on the hallway floor outside her lab, in the backpacks and messenger bags of her staff, even in Cassidy’s own purse, all in the hopes that someone would plug a drive into a lab computer. He got a few takers for his virus and a lot of naked pictures of Stanford coeds, but no access to Cassidy’s systems.

He’d already hired a dip to lift her personal access card, planning to make a duplicate and put it back into her purse, but before the dip did the deed, Cassidy went and added fucking retinal scanners to her lab doors, so unless he was going to pop her eyeballs out of their sockets, he wasn’t getting in that way. He sent a team to assess the physical security of the place, but she had multiple layers over Stanford’s already decent measures, and short of a sledgehammer and a very large crowbar, or quite possibly the jaws of life, the place was tight as a fucking drum.