There were cassette tape players and stereos, old computers and laptops, radios and even a huge ceiling fan sitting on its side. Anything mechanical, Azar could fix it—or so he claimed, anyway. Based on the amount of stuff piled up in various stages of decay, I had a feeling Azar wasn’t as proficient as he claimed.
Which didn’t matter. The whole place was a front.
I leaned forward on the counter while Fiona wandered around, looking at the junk. Several tower computers were lined up on the floor, each of them plugged in, their fans whirring.
Azar came out from the back, a scowl on his lips. He was an older man in his early forties, thinning black hair, dark brown skin, sunken eyes, skinny frame. He dressed like an accountant and wore wire-rimmed glasses with the right arm taped in the back to keep it from slipping off his ears. He looked up and met my gaze, and his scowl disappeared.
“Mack,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Hey, Azar.” I nodded at the computers. “What’s with those things?”
He frowned down at them. “Bitcoin miners.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s not going good. Too much power.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Fiona joined me. “He means, he’s using too much electricity to mine the coins. So he’s spending more money on power than he is on making coins.”
“Exactly,” Azar said, glaring down at the computers again. “Can’t figure it out. Don’t know how they do it.”
I gave Fiona an appreciative look. “How the hell did you know that?”
“Watched a documentary about it.” She shrugged and drummed her fingers on the glass. “I think those things are too old. Are you using the GPU?”
“Obviously, I am. But I guess you’re right, the GPUs aren’t great.” He sighed and messed up his hair. “All right, well, what brings you in here, Mack?”
“I’ve got something for you.” I took the phone from my pocket and put it down on the counter in front of me. “I need you to unlock this.”
Azar stared at the stolen phone. “This is yours, right? Forgot the pin?”
“Yep.”
Fiona smiled, but said nothing.
He picked it up gingerly like he was trying not to leave fingerprints anywhere.
“Okay so, here’s the problem. Apple is really into security and privacy, yeah? So when you lock a phone, the whole thing encrypts itself, and you can’t just pull crap off it without the pin.”
“Are you saying it can’t be done?” Fiona asked.
Azar held up a hand. “It can be done. But it’s expensive.”
“Don’t worry about the cost,” I said.
“Ten grand.”
I barked a laugh. “Ten grand? Are you serious?”
“And it’ll take me a month.”
“Okay, no way,” I said, reaching out for the phone. “I’ll find someone else.”
Azar pulled it away. “I can do faster, but I’ll need to devote more resources. Which means you need to pay more money.”
“This feels like extortion,” I said, glaring at him. “And trust me, I’d know.”
“Here’s the problem. Apple isn’t easy to crack. Not even the Feds can do it without issues, right? They usually don’t go through all this crap and get a warrant for Apple to unlock it for them. But I can’t get a warrant, so I’ve got to brute force the password.”
“Brute force? You mean like smash it open?”
Fiona patted my shoulder. “He means he’s going to try every single passcode combination possible really, really fast until one of them works.”
“Oh,” I said. “With computers, right?”
“No, I was going to type them in by hand.” Azar rolled his eyes. “You’re good at beating people up, Mack, but you sure don’t know shit about computers.”
Fiona laughed and leaned over the counter to stare down at the Bitcoin miners while I flipped them off and walked a few feet away. They chatted about computers or whatever and I tuned them out, not interested in feeling like a moron any more than I already did. I flicked at a broken doorbell lying on its side with its wires sticking out of its guts until they were finished.
“We got it all worked out,” Fiona said, leaning against my arm. “You owe him fifteen grand and he’ll do it in a week at the most.”
“Extortion,” I said over my shoulder.
Azar only waved like he was finished with the conversation and had nothing more to say.
The bastard.
“Come on,” Fiona said. She looked happy, like she’d solved a particularly hard puzzle, and some of my annoyance softened and faded away. I liked when she looked like that—which was a new sensation for me. Caring about another human’s happiness had never really been a priority before, and yet now suddenly I wanted to make her the centerpiece of my world.
For so long, I did nothing but obey orders, go on kills, and hover around the Pakhan and the rest of the Morozov family.
But now I had a new sun to orbit.