“Are you jealous?” Mia asked with a wink.
“You know I’ve been on a suspected terrorist list for years, and so have you. But you’re a different list now. It’s a list reserved for known terrorists. So, tell me. What did you do?”
Mia sucked in a breath through her teeth and grimaced. “I may have stolen a few files from a CIA agent at a hotel in Prague recently.”
“That’s all?”
“I also may have sold them on the black market to the highest bidder,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Have you lost your mind?” Lord Override said as he paced in front of the fireplace.
“It wasn’t like I sought it out,” she said. “But I went to a club, met a guy, yada, yada. We went back to his place for drinks, and I may have snooped through his things while he was down the hall fetching some ice.”
“That seems beneath anything the Helenos-9 I know would do.”
She shrugged. “Desperate times, desperate measures? Without access to my bank accounts and no brother to help me land gigs, I’ve had a hard time getting the jobs I used to. I’m not as savvy as he was, hence the fact that I allowed you to pull a gun on me today. So, I needed to do something to generate some positive income.”
“All you had to do was reach out to me. I would’ve been more than willing to support you for a while, maybe even given you some jobs myself.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. I went into a depression and fell apart. It’s hard to ask for help when you live the way I did.”
“Did?”
“I’m trying to change that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here soliciting your help.”
Lord Override placed the gun on the kitchen table and walked back over to the couch. He sat down and took Mia’s hands.
“I know what I did was wrong,” she said, “It was even against my own internal moral code, but I felt as if I didn’t have a choice.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know things were that bad off for you, much less that you even existed. But now that I do, I might be willing to help you get off that list, if that’s what you’re really asking me to do, because for some reason I think this is about more than just getting your assets unfrozen.”
She nodded. “You’re right. That’s only part of it.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be any fun if it that was all there was to it. So, what exactly are we doing?”
“We’re going to hack into the CIA database.”
His eyes bulged. “Excuse me. I thought this might be about falsifying some documents or siphoning off money from a bank.”
Mia shook her head. “No, I need you to help me hack into the CIA database and get my name off that list, as well as some other information while we’re in there.”
“What kind of information?”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you that just yet.”
He sighed. “Then I’m out. Your brother would’ve never kept me in the dark on a project. We went in with eyes wide open or we didn’t go in at all. Stealing secrets doesn’t mean we have to keep them from each other.”
“Never mind. It’s not important. My most immediate needs are the ones I already outlined. I need my accounts unfrozen and my good name—however good it is—restored.”
Lord Override clapped his hands. “Then let’s put on a pot of coffee and get to work.”
The sun beamed into the room through the slits in the blinds. Mia watched motes illuminated by dawn’s light dancing through the air. She blew softly at one particle, which was violently swept away.
That’s how she felt at the moment. Working with the Phoenix Foundation had given her a renewed sense of purpose. But the allure of the hacking underworld had a two-fisted grip on her soul at the moment. Absconding with a ton of cash was tempting, but she couldn’t leave her new friends hanging. A decision like that would come back to haunt her. And she couldn’t bear to abandon the people who’d nursed her through the darkest hours following her brother’s death. They’d become like her family, the one she’d lost far too early.
Lord Override handed her a steaming mug of black coffee. She moved her face over the top and inhaled the aroma.
“Great smelling stuff, isn’t it?” he asked.
She smiled and nodded.
He led her into his office, which looked more like a science project gone wrong. His chaotic workspace stood in stark contrast to the neat space she once set up in her home. Wires criss-crossed on the floor and along the ceiling. Documents and dot matrix printouts covered up one keyboard. With the swipe of his hand, he cleared one desk and pointed toward the chair.
“Here’s your spot,” he said. “If I would’ve known you were coming, I would’ve tidied the place up a bit.”
“As long as I have a functioning computer and a place to put my coffee, I’ll be just fine.”
The two hackers sat down to get to work. It took them three hours to penetrate the CIA’s firewall, but the moment they did, Mia knew the clock was running.
“We’ve got no more than ten minutes before they get our location,” she said.
“I’m on it,” Lord Override said.
Their fingers whirred across the keyboard. She started collecting information and securing it onto a flash drive. Lord Override was tasked with unlocking her funds, something she’d requested to be done before as a cover. He was a genius when it came to breaking down firewalls but had been known to linger in certain places while searching for pertinent data. However, with a directed focus, Mia could occupy him while she scraped up all the intel necessary to determine who was responsible for inserting the fraudulent information into the CIA’s database.
“Have you freed my money yet?” she asked. “I’m just waiting to transfer it to
