And then he appears. Tommy.
He reeks of sweat and dope. Beneath a skull tattoo on his neck, a blue vein throbs.
“Got into my files, didn’t you? Clever boy. Dumped coffee on me. Jumped on my computer and used the old Wi-Fi. Smart boy. But were you smart enough to load it to the cloud? Or is it still trapped inside your computer?”
I don’t answer.
Tommy strides over to the desk where my laptop and my pad both lie. He drops into the chair and taps the pad. The four-digit-code screen pops up.
“What’s the password?”
“One, two, three, four,” I say. I’m pleased at how calm I sound.
Tommy’s skeptical, but he types it in, anyway. He scowls at me. “Cute. You have a separate security software installed.”
I shrug. “Too easy to break a four-digit numeric password. So I added a little something.”
“Give me the code.”
I shake my head.
“You know, bagel boy, it’s bad enough you left the Wi-Fi on,” Tommy says. “You also neglected to consider the fact that I have three separate micro surveillance cameras installed at my workstation.” He clucks his tongue. “Very sloppy.”
“What can I say? I’m an amateur.”
“Give me the code,” Tommy snaps. He casts a significant look at one of the security guards.
A split second later my head’s jolted by a full-palm slap.
It stings. But I box. I’ve taken a lot worse.
“Okay,” I say. “Don’t hurt me. The code is FG6H8D55lMSU1LQWVFOP7FD34MHUTDLK.”
Tommy types as I speak. “What is that, like, thirty characters?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Paranoid much?”
On the pad’s screen, a graphic of a middle finger appears.
Tommy curses. He knows what I’ve done.
The screen goes dark. All the data on the pad has just been erased and rewritten. A lab with the right equipment and trained personnel might still be able to salvage some of it, but it would take days, maybe weeks. Even then they’d just get fragments.
“Want the password for my laptop, too?” I ask.
Tommy leaps up out of the chair. He still has my pad in his hand. He smacks it against the side of my head, shattering the glass.
He brings it down again, this time on the top of my head, hard, with both hands and all the leverage he can get.
I’m not exactly home for a few seconds. Not all the way unconscious, but not functioning, either.
One of the guards, the younger one, pulls Tommy back before he can do me serious damage.
“Hey, hey, hey, Dr. Holyfield,” the guard says.
I’ve never seen Tommy this enraged. I’m not surprised. But it’s weirdly fascinating to see such an intelligent man so lost in fury. He’s spitting at me. He’s cursing. He’s straining against the guard until the tattoos on his arms are stretched and distorted.