Greyhat: Issue 1 - Hacker and the Agent

“The best we can offer you is 45k,” the stiff in the center of the U-shaped boardroom desk announced after huddling with the other suits. “And that’s our final offer.”

            “What a pity,” I replied. “I have an ‘independent buyer’ willing to offer 50k.” I shrugged and turned my back to leave.

            “Wait!” the lead suit mewled. “You would jeopardize this company by selling to an independent? You know what they do with that information, right? Have you no scruples? No humanity?”

            “Why sir!” I hammed it up. “You would dare impugn the honor of my buyer?” I looked back at him over my shoulder and feigned hurt as best I could before continuing my exit.

            “Wait!” he whimpered again. Or maybe yelled. I can’t tell the difference any more, honestly. “Tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods could potentially be put at risk if this exploit were to fall in the wrong hands. We need to patch this exploit before it goes public.”

            I turned and put my fists on my hips and stood feet apart just like those self-help things always say: Assume a “power pose” if you want to be taken seriously. “Well, if you can out-bid my private seller, then the exploit is yours.”

            The suits huddled together again. I could clearly hear hushed whispers, but they seemed practiced enough that I couldn’t actually make out anything they were saying. When they pulled away, Mr. Stiff put his palms flat on the table, straightened his back, and announced, “We can match the independent’s offer and extend preferential treatment should you find any future issues,” through an up-turned nose, avoiding eye contact.

            “Alright,” I shrugged nonchalantly. “Talk to the lady out front?” I pointed at the door. “I take cash, check, credit, wire transfer, gold bullion, bitcoin, stock options, first born children…”

            “Yes,” one of the lackeys held a hand up, “Grace can take care of you out front.”

            “Grace? Really? Why are front desk ladies always named ‘Grace?’” I couldn’t hide a smirk. “Do you actually, like, put that in the job posting? ‘Seeking secretary, must be named ‘Grace,’ ‘Beth,’ or ‘Carol.’’” I chuckled. They didn’t.

            “Please,” the lackey shook his head. “We have other business to attend to.” He implored me to the door. I obviously wasn’t going to get any laughs out of these suits so I bowed and “took my leave.”

Grace was pretty cute. She was in the center of a circular blue desk that itself was in the center of the massive white-tile lobby of the office building. It was punishingly bright in the lobby as well, the giant “glass roof” letting in the blinding summer sun. I leaned on the desk and turned the charm to 11. “’There, but for the grace of God, go I.’” I winked.

            “How would you like your money, Mister…” she trailed off, cold-shouldering me. Bitch.

            I stood up and smoothed my suit. Oh, I didn’t mention I was wearing a suit? Yeah. Bespoke tailor. Trendy cut. Imported silk tie. Hand-made shoes. The whole deal, no biggie. I know a guy down on Garment Alley. He hooks me up.  “Here’s the bank number,” I pulled out a business card and wrote it on the back. “’But by the grace of God I am what I am.’” I winked again, walked away, and didn’t look back. Never look back. It’s a sign of weakness. “Car, please” I said aloud as I walked out the door. My black Mercedes pulled up and I got in back.  “Home, please,” I instructed. The automation pulled into the next slot in the Flow and spirited me away.

            “So, what was the haul?” The voice came from across me.

            “Ugh,” I jumped. The shadows hit the corner just right and I hadn’t noticed her there. “50k and ‘preferential treatment,’ whatever that means,” I pushed a button on the touchscreen under my arm and a glass of scotch rose up on a little elevator in front of it. “Also, don’t do that. It makes you seem…shady.”

            “Ugh,” she sighed. I thought it was a good pun, at least. “Also, that’s 10k more than we thought, nice job.” She made a head gesture without moving any other part of her body at my breast pocket. “And she won’t message you.”

            “Money on that?” I asked as I pulled my phone out.

She tsk’ed. “5 grand.”

“’’His grace toward me came not in vain, but more abundantly than they all did I labor, yet not I, but the grace of God that is with me.’ My mom named me after that passage,’” I held my phone up and shook it, the text message on screen.

“Ugh,” she sighed again. “I’ll never understand women.”

“All those front desk girls are jumping for Jesus,” I clicked off my phone’s screen and put it back in my breast pocket. “It’s the look back. If you look back, they never message you.”

“Or, it’s the fancy suit, Mercedes, and the fact that she just transferred 50 grand to your bank account,” she snuffed back.

“See, you do get women,” I held up my wrist and tapped the gold watch on it. “Oh, and the watch, don’t forget the watch. They always notice it on the lean. Women love it when you’re so rich you can waste money on something as useless as a real, analog watch. Also, I pulled the ‘independent buyer’ line to get the extra ten thou.”

“You know I hate the independent buyer thing,” she scowled at me, arms and legs remaining crossed, shoulders firmly planted against the back corner, “we’re better than that.”

“You’re better than that,” I smirked. “Which is why I do the wheeling and dealing and you just feed me the goods.”

“You gonna fuck her?” She nodded down to my breast pocket again.

“No,” I sneered indignantly, “I’m not going to ‘fuck her.’ I’m going to invite her out to drinks tonight and if I happen to offer to make her dinner, and she happens to want to come back to my place for some videos and ‘chill,’ then so be it. Does it matter?”

“No,” she finally uncrossed her arms and legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You just get so much pussy already, I wish you’d throw some my way.”

“Oh? Looking to get back in the game?” I took a long pull off of my scotch. The ice had melted to dilute it just enough to really let the flavors come out.

“I’ve been mourning her too long and my crotch is on fire,” she shifted uncomfortably and leaned back, crossing her legs and arms again. “I just need something to take the edge off.”

“I hear ya,” I raised my glass and took another belt.

“No one could give face like she could,” she sighed and stared off into the middle distance plaintively.

“’She’ was a robot,” I furrowed my brow.

“SHE WAS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERED TO ME” She put her hands on her knees and yelled at me. I jolted back. It was actually really scary.

“Alright, alright, I know, I know,” I held my hands up defensively. Last time I forgot to humor her she started throwing things at me. “Look, I don’t think Grace swings your way, but we’ll go out and get you laid, alright?”

“She totally swings my way,” she said as she leaned back and pulled her phone out of her purse. “Her Personal History page shows she had two girlfriends in college, was in a male-female poly last year, and her dating profile says she’s looking for men and women.” She held her phone up and shook it a few inches from my face.

“Alright, jeez,” I pushed her phone back, downed the rest of my scotch, and put it back on the elevator. It sucked it back into the arm rest. “Three-way?”

“Maybe. You’re a total pussy-hog, though,” she leaned back again and started tapping away at her phone. “And if she lets you, don’t splash her until she sits on my face, alright? Last time I got a salty surprise and I was not happy about it.”

“I remember. Sorry about that, it just sort of happened.” I pulled out my phone again and tapped out a quick reply to Grace: My pastor just gave a sermon on it last Sunday. It moved me. Maybe we can chat over drinks tonight? “What can I say,” I stuffed the phone back into my breast pocket, “if I’m doing all the work to pick them up, I feel like I deserve the lion’s share of pussy-time. And, maybe if you pulled in some dick for me, I’d be more willing to share.”

“I hate dick,” she said deadpan, eyes not lifting from her screen.

“And this is why I get to hog the pussy,” I crossed my ankle over my knee and leaned back in the tan leather seat.  “Give and take, love.”

The Mercedes exited the Flow, and I looked up to see it was already pulling into our garage. It alighted in the front row next to the BMW and Porsche, the sliding door shifting out on both sides. I waited for her to get up first, but she stared blankly at her phone. “Mmm?” I indicated with a head tilt.

“Oh, right,” she piled out without lifting from her phone. “So, I have something else you should look at.” She walked briskly toward the door following a memorized path.

I sighed. “Car, turn off.” With my command, the Mercedes went dark and the doors closed with a near-silent thud. “And what is that?” I said loudly across the massive garage as I jogged to catch up with her. She stood motionless in front of the closed door, still pecking away at her phone. She held it up to my face once I was in front of her. I pushed her arm back until the screen was in focus. “What am I looking at?”

“New exploit,” she looked up to make eye contact with me from behind her phone. God, she was a mousy little thing, wasn’t she? Still not sure how she wasn’t just swimming in pussy.

“And?” I was looking at half-a-dozen lines of code underneath a banking website.

“Dershewitz PMed me on Bugfind this morning but hasn’t claimed it with the Bounty Office yet,” she pulled her phone back and started pecking away at it again. “Said he’d sell me the rights for 8 grand, but he has an independent who’ll give him 10k if I don’t take it.”

“Then how do you have it already?” I opened the door and guided her in by the small of her back, flipping the light switch and shutting the door behind us.

“I reverse engineered it right after he PMed me.” She hadn’t moved since I shut the door. I took her by the small of the back again and lead her down the hallway into her room. She dropped her phone from in front of her face and directly into her purse, which she threw on her bed, and strode over to her computer workstation.

“So, you’re saying we can sell it to the indie for 10k?” I walked up to the station and sat at the, ok my, stool next to her.

“No, I’m saying we can give him 8k for the rights,” she picked up where she left off on her 6-monitor behemoth rig. “I’m not going to steal his exploit, he’s been working on it for 3 months. We can pay him and I don’t care what you do with it after.”

“Well, what kind of exploit are we talking here? Arbitrary code?” I tracked her cursor over to the upper-left screen of the rig.

“Not for 8k.” she chuckled as the bluish-white glow of the screen highlighted her face in the dark room. “

“This is just an identity skimmer. Looks like it’s been in the code for about 6 months.”

“Pshhh,” I shook my head. “6 month old identity skimmer? That’s not worth 8 hundred, let alone 8 thousand. Identity exploits aren’t popular at all anymore after last year’s massive social network leak.”

“Wait a second, you didn’t see the best part,” she popped open a page in the top-middle of the screen.

“Wait, is that Swiss Black?” I stood up to try and get a better view.

“Yeah, it is,” she went back to the other screen and made a few clicks. “Now, watch this.” She did a quick compile on the lines of code and a little box popped up. She dumped a vault number from a text file into the text box and clicked a little ‘decode’ button. After some thinking, a window popped up with a sleek-cut businessman’s social network profile. “Gotcha.”

“Wait, is that the guy who owns the vault?” I stood slack-jawed.

“Yep. Pretty cool, huh?” she leaned back and smiled to herself. “Think it’s worth the 8k?”

“8k? This is worth 80k or more!” I sat down and flopped my arms to my side. “Why the hell is Dershewitz selling it to a private buyer for only 10k? Why is he selling to you for only 8k?”

“Because he doesn’t have an agent anymore and he said he’s never filed a patent on an exploit since they went legal,” she shrugged and turned to face me.

“Really? What happened to Milton?” A cracker without an agent always scares me.

“He got nicked in Liberia last month,” she turned back to the rig and pulled up a news article: International hacking regulators arrested Davis Milton of Milton Consulting in Liberia this month on accusations that he was trafficking black market security exploits to rebel groups which linked directly to cr1.7 million in stolen funds used to support terrorist activity. “No one will touch Dershewitz because they think he’s hot and don’t want to lose their accreditation.”

“Yeah, I kind of don’t want to touch anything Dershewitz is moving, myself.” A shiver went up my spine. “A paper trail connecting to us would be bad news bears.”

“That’s why he reached out to me. He told me he knew I could reverse it if he gave me the trick, and that he’d take bitcoin,” she closed out the article. “Can you work with that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling out my phone. I sent a text to my lawyer: Bern, you know about Dershewitz? He’s auctioning an exploit. Will take bitcoin. What’s our liability? Grace also sent me a message: “Sure, your place? Have you seen ‘My Heart But Not My Soul’ yet? It’s streaming, maybe we could watch it?” “This is too easy, mija,” I handed her my phone with Grace’s text message open.

“It’s the jawline bro,” she handed the phone back to me. “Also, Bern says we’re clean.” Indeed, a notification from Bern said: You’re good, I got you. I texted Grace back: Sure, I’m in Holly Hill. That too far for you or should I send a car?

“Well, If Bern says we’re clean, we’re clean,” I put my phone back in my pocket. “So, I say go for it. Tell him we’ll get his 8k by tonight. Can you package that up for me? I’ll start shopping it tomorrow. And it’s not the jawline. My face is a train wreck.”

“Chicks dig scars and jacked up noses, bro,” she turned back to her workstation and began pecking at her keyboard. “And bro, if I like dudes at all, it would absolutely be the jawline that would do it.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I stood up to leave. “You know, there are women out there who are the ‘best of both worlds,’ if you know what I mean.”

“First, I hate dick,” she turned to face me as I walked out, “and second, you know how I feel about fetishizing someone’s sexual identity.”

“Alright, alright, I know,” I said. Writing this is making me realize I say that a lot, it seems. “Just sayin’.” It is also occurring to me that I “just say” a lot of things, as well. But I’m digressing. “I’m sending a car for Grace in a bit if she agrees, so you might want to get, um, cleaned up in case I can convince her to let you join us.”

“Alright,” she replied without looking away from her screens.

***

            “So, what’s it like being a ‘hacker’” Grace made a big wave with her free hand.

            “Well, I’m not actually the ‘hacker,’ my housemate is,” I replied as I finished making my drink and flopped down on the plump leather couch next to her in the living room. “I’m her agent.”

            “Agent?” She took a long pull off her gin and tonic. “What, is she like a movie star or something?” she was sitting side-saddle, her powder-blue pencil skirt hiked just above her knees.

            “Oh, no,” I took a long draw of a Manhattan and set it down so I could gesticulate. Chicks love watching your hands wave around when you talk. “Ever since hacking went above-board, there’s a whole system of checks and balances around who gets rights to what for bounty credit and such, so the really big hackers get agents to manage all the red tape for them.”

            “Wait, so you don’t actually sell them the exploit?” She cupped her glass with both hands, took another long drink, and fluttered her big green doe-eyes innocently. I could tell she couldn’t care less, but she was very good at playing the game.

            “No,” I took another drink myself. “I sell them the patent rights. Once we publish an exploit to the Bounty Office, the method gets sent to the code owner right away. We auction off the publication rights. Technically, if no one buys them, they have to pay us royalties for the duration of the patent.”

            “Huh,” she took another drink. It was getting empty so I stood up and started preparing her a refill. “So, why was Mr. Hardeck willing to pay so much for that exploit today?”

            “Well, there are a lot of people out there who collect exploit patents for the royalties,” I grabbed an expensive bottle I had refilled with cheap gin, a stainless steel tonic dispenser and a couple of chopped limes and set them on the coffee table before flopping back down. “Hell, ‘Mr. Hardeck’ has a whole stable of them himself that he chops up into securities and sells to investors.”

            “Mmm, this is really good gin, by the way,” she took another long draught, finishing the glass. “I’m used to drinking the cheap stuff. Could I get another?”

            “Of course,” I replied with a wink. “Nothing but the best, you know. Let me refill you.” I sighed internally as I mixed her up another.

            “Are those the ‘independents’ I heard him mention?” She took another long drink. “Mh, so good. You make such a good drink.”

            “It’s all in the tonic,” I winked again. I wink a lot. It puts people at ease. They know that they don’t have to take me too seriously. “But yes, those are some of the independents. Not all, though,” I paused to sip my Manhattan. I try to use only high quality ingredients for my drinks. “Sip to savor” and all that. “Some of the independents are actually black-market reps. It takes a while to implement fixes for some of the exploits, so the criminal underworld will try to snatch up really complicated ones via shell companies and will actually use them for nefarious means before reselling it after it’s fixed.”

            “Oh wow, that’s scary, kmhff,” she snorted into her drink as she took a sip. She held her hand under her mouth to keep it from getting on her shirt, but some was dribbling down her chin and neck. She put the drink down and unbuttoned the top of her blouse. It was a billowy, reasonably modest white-silk number. “Sorry! Could you hand me a napkin so I can clean up?”

            I pulled the folded linen pocket square out of waistcoat, made eye contact, and then gently dabbed up the streaming liquid from her chest before it made it to her cleavage. I then handed her the square. “It can be,” I continued, not breaking eye contact and smirking coyly before turning away to take a sip of my Manhattan, eyes straight ahead until she handed me back my pocket square between two fingers, blouse left unbuttoned. Oh, she was good. “My housemate actually just showed me an article of a friend who got picked up in Liberia. Allegedly, one of his independents turned out to be linked to terrorists.” I took a longer sip and savored it for a second before glancing back at her.

            Her blouse was unbuttoned far enough to reveal the lace top of a fancy ivory bra, and the bountiful expanse of pale décolletage above it, a small gold cross on a thin gold chain nestled just between her bosom. Instead of holding the drink to her face as previous, she now had it held just in front of her chest. At my glance, her pinky began toying with the lip of the glass before bringing it to her ruby-red lips to lick a bit of moisture from the tip. “My,” her tone was sultry, not surprised, “such a dangerous life you lead.” She kicked her legs off the edge of the sofa and scooted close to me, her face inches in front of mine as she ran the index finger of her free hand along the length of the raised white scar that went across my eye, nose, and cheek. “Is that how you got this scar?”

            “No,” the voice said from the hallway, behind the couch. “He got that from a bar fight defending me.”

            Right on cue. We both popped our heads over the back of the couch. “Oh, Grace, this is my housemate, ‘the Hacker.’” I stood up and sashayed around the couch, pulling the bewildered Grace by the hand behind me.

            “Oh?” Grace commented, a bit too dumbstruck to say anything else.

            “Yeah,” she crossed her arms under her chest, almost pushing he cleavage out of her low-cut gown. “Some guy at a bar was hitting on me, and when I told him I didn’t swing his way, he tried to have a go at me anyway.” She was laying her accent on really thick.

            “Oh my,” Grace held her hand to her chest, face in either authentic, or extremely-well-rehearsed, polite shock.

            “When I saw what was going on, I decked the guy clean in the jaw,” I picked up. I made a shy face and looked at my shoes for a second. Humble always scores points.         

            “He pulled me by the small of my back and as he was guiding me away, the guy yelled something,” she looked up at me with those big doe eyes again, then focused the high beams at Grace.

            “Awww,” she made a cute sympathetic face at me and then at her, hand still over her heart.

            “I turned to see what he said he slashed my face with his boot knife,” I smirked and half-shrugged again. “I was really broke back then so I couldn’t afford the expensive surgery prevent my hideousness. I know it makes my face ugly, but I know I did the right thing so it was worth it.”

            “We’ve been best buddies ever since,” we locked eyes with each other and then both gave Grace the look.

            Grace reached out and caressed my cheek. “You absolute gentleman,” she said. “And you poor darling,” she said as she reached out to caress her cheek as well. “Do you want to join us? We were just about to watch ‘My Heart But Not My Soul.’ It’s about a guy and a girl, so you might, uh, not be in to that, but…”

            “Oh, no,” she cut her off, “if it means watching it with you, I’d love to.”

            “Oh you,” She flopped a wrist at her. “Look at you,” she said playfully as she rested her elbow on the forearm of her drink-hand, turning her hand back toward her chest, just under her chin.  Then, she gave her an obvious up-and-down. “Actually, look at you,” her eyes widened hungrily at her perked-up chest.  She clicked her tongue, “This is going to be a fun night. Come on, let’s watch the movie.” She turned and slowly sauntered to the couch, hips waggling despite the lack of heels.

            I reached out a low-five, and got one, followed by a hip bump before we both hurried to the couch and turned on the projector screen.

***