The Enlightened (Mind Dimensions #3)(31)
I, Darren, disassociate.
Poor Bert. I’ve had my own run-ins with bullies, but never this bad. For starters, no one could ambush me since I always scouted things out in the Quiet. Plus, there was no way the school could’ve kept me in the cafeteria during the entire lunch break. I always had a way of weaseling my way out of this type of situation. I would’ve gotten my doctor to give me a note of some kind, or I would have convinced my shrink, Liz, that I had the first known case of cafeteria anxiety. Still, I totally relate and sympathize with my friend’s experience. Bullying is a hazard that even befalls kids who haven’t skipped grades like Bert and I did. For kids who do skip grades, the chances of being preyed upon increase drastically, since they’re likely to be much smaller than the would-be bullies.
Did Bert deal with this f*cker at some point? If he didn’t, I will, as soon as this thing with my mom blows over. This Roger guy might find himself naked and using his boss’s office as a bathroom, or something worse.
I focus on Bert’s recollections that deal with revenge. As I do, I feel the heaviness I associate with fast-forwarding through memories.
We get an invitation to our high school reunion in our inbox, and it reminds us of that scum, Roger Blistro. It’s funny how memory works sometimes. We haven’t thought of that f*cker in years. Now that we have thought of him, though, Roger’s luck has just run out. We’re getting a very strong urge for some payback.
We look around. Everyone is at lunch. We wonder whether our work computer at the FBI is the best place to do this. Then again, why not? It’s unlikely anyone is tracking our computer, and besides, we’ve taken a number of counter measures, which the FBI would require an expert of our caliber to defeat. Good luck with that.
It takes us only a few dozen keystrokes to look up the creep, and a few more to find some useful details.
Interesting. Looks like someone has expensed a trip to Aspen, claiming it was a professional conference. Given the honeymoon suite, the flower deliveries, and the room service for two, it sure looks more like someone took his mistress on a getaway. If true, this is borderline embezzlement, or at least that’s how his employer will see it. Furthermore, he wrote off that same trip on his taxes, claiming, in this case, that it was for his consulting firm, which has nothing to do with his day job. We know these things are probably lies. We wonder what the IRS would think of double-dip accounting. Yes, the IRS might indeed be interested in this. We see this trip is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our old pal Roger’s tax-dodging activities.
The keyboard sings its little song as our fingers dance around it. We get into the IRS’s system and flag Roger for an audit. That should be plenty of fun for him, but we’re just getting started.
After a few more keystrokes, we locate his wife’s email and anonymously inform her of the trip, making it clear that if she wasn’t with Roger on his Aspen vacation, he was cheating on her. We try to sound like a disgruntled mistress. We’d bet good money that the wife wasn’t on the trip.
Next, we hack into his employer’s intranet. Aha! His secretary was away during that same week. Bingo. We’d now put double the money on his wife being upset. We look around some more and locate a nifty ‘see something, report anonymously’ program on the HR part of the website. We write a memo about the Aspen trip and how Roger is having indecent relations with his secretary (even if the second part is false, the first one will get him in deep shit).
That was mere karma. Now for the real payback. This last part would be harder to pull off if Roger hadn’t trusted his banking needs to Citibank. It just so happens that Citibank is the very bank we found a back door into a year ago. We haven’t used it, since we knew we’d be treading on extremely dangerous ground, but we decide to push aside our concern over such minor details for this important task.
We get in through Citibank’s back door, and our fingers dance some more around the keyboard. We do some quick mental calculations along the way. Assuming a reasonable rate of twenty percent, and the starting principal of one grand (rounding up), with compounded interest (again, rounding up), Roger owes us five grand. No, that’s not enough. We add a zero at the end for emotional damage and what not. That number turns out to be perfect, since fifty grand is about the amount he has in his account.
We decide against taking the money for ourselves. That could get us into trouble, and it’s not like we’re desperate for cash. Some more clicks of the keyboard, and we smile. How noble is it of Roger to give all his money to the Stop Bullying Now Foundation? How admirable, given how he’s about to need this money quite desperately to hire a tax attorney.
I, Darren, feel proud of my friend and decide I don’t need any more proof.
*
“You worked for the FBI?” I ask as soon as I’m out of the Quiet.
“I mentioned that to you—”
“Did you ever tell me about that * from your high school? Roger?”
He looks taken aback. “No. I’m fairly sure I haven’t. I don’t like talking about that shit...”
I proceed to tell him what I just saw through his younger self’s eyes, down to all the little details. When I recall it, I even mention the hacking techniques he used, saying terms that are foreign to me, such as ‘SQL Injection’ and ‘buffer overflow.’