Upside Down(54)

I won’t be on the bus. I hit Send without really thinking it through. He would assume I was bailing on him, so I quickly thumbed out another. I’m not cancelling. Work is crazy and I’ll meet you at the restaurant. Is that okay?

I could see his reply text bubble and let out a relieved sigh.

Sure. I’m sure I’ll survive the bus ride home, alone. All by myself. By my lonesome. Without you.

I laughed at my phone. LOL The Soup Crew will assist, I’m sure. No taking seats from pregnant ladies.

I won’t need to if you’re not there.

“Hennessy?” Rachel asked from the hallway. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I was just…”

“Laughing at your phone? Skipping out on a meeting with Mr Sleazebag to text your new guy?”

I chuckled, totally busted. “Guilty as charged. I’m meeting him for dinner and didn’t want him to think I was gonna be a no-show if I’m not on the bus.” I sighed. “I better get back in there.”

“Good luck,” she said with a wink.

I went back into the room, and the report I’d given Rob still sat on the desk, untouched. “Did you sort out your personal life on my time?” he asked, smug and smiling.

“Your time?” I questioned. “No, what I did was waste my time when I wrote you a full, extensive report that you didn’t even read.”

He didn’t even flinch, but his tone took a cruel turn. “How’ve you been, Hennessy? You settling into your new life okay?”

I smiled at him. “Perfectly, thank you. It’s almost like minimal living, getting rid of the useless shit that cluttered your life. Does wonders for the soul.”

His gaze hardened and he shifted in his seat. “I’m not paying you a fortune to be insulted.”

“No,” I replied flatly. “You’re paying me to evaluate the security of your website, your brand, your livelihood, and identify vulnerabilities in your system, networks, and system infrastructure. You wanted me to run extensive penetration measures to find security exposures within your system configurations, hardware and software vulnerabilities, as well as operation witnesses in process for technical countermeasures.” I shrugged. “If you had read the report, you would know this.”

“The report was eighty-two pages of scripting, coding, and hardware engineering jargon.”

“There was a detailed summary on page seventy-nine.”

He smiled like he was enjoying this. “I hired you to give me a report from the fundamental understanding of our network vulnerabilities.”

If he thought challenging me to be some kind of game, I wasn’t here to play. “Then let me dumb it down for you,” I said, not breaking eye contact. “I skimmed ports to find vulnerabilities, scrutinised patch installation processes, performed detailed traffic analysis, and fixed your intrusion detection and prevention systems. What I found were eight bugs spread across four main access ports on your site. One was a clickjacking vulnerability, which could easily become a sitejacking if not stopped. Several others were cross-site scripting liabilities, an especially flexible and malicious type of attack in which hackers inject their own code into the domain web application, gaining access to not only your staff’s personal information but that of your clients as well. The staff login portal was susceptible to infiltration, making it relatively easy for hackers with malicious intent to steal data from other visitors’ browsers and possibly even impersonate them. And all the usual phishing scams.”

Rob stared at me and it took him a second for what I’d just said to register. “Did you fix it? Oh my God. Tell me you fixed it!”

“Of course I did.”

“And we’re still right to transfer and go live next week? We have so much depending on this—”

“Of course, everything is fine. You wanted the best and you got it.”

Michael smirked before he schooled his features. “Thanks Hennessy. Did you, uh…” He smiled. “Didn’t you have somewhere to be tonight? We’re almost done here.”

I shot to my feet, unable to keep the grin from my face. “I do, thanks.” I walked out without even pausing, grabbed my laptop, my messenger bag, only pausing at the elevator to say goodbye to Rachel. “Bye!”

“You could cab it,” she called. “Or Uber it! It’s the twenty-first century, you know?”

But I was already in the elevator, and as soon as the doors opened, I ran for the next bus.





I raced home, dumped my gear, changed my shirt, freshened up, and not knowing much about Newtown, I booked an Uber. I got to the restaurant barely two minutes late, feeling a rush of relief when I saw Jordan sitting at a table with Merry.

Merry nodded pointedly at me and Jordan turned around, and his whole face lit up when he saw me. He stood just as I got to his table, and I couldn’t resist putting my hand to his back and kissing him hello. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Oh,” he said with a little laugh, blushing beautifully. “Hi.”

I nodded to Merry and said, “Nice to see you again.”

She smiled cheerfully. “Same.”

Jordan pulled out a seat at the table for me. “And not to worry, you had a crazy day at work, huh?”

I nodded as we sat down. I sat next to Jordan, Merry sat across from him, and I had an empty chair across from me. “Yes, busy with demanding, obnoxious clients.” Then I noted the vacancy at the table. “I thought I was meeting Angus? Did he not come with you?”