29
Aiden
Afew of Jude’s emails came through while I was looking through the last ghost file in the folder I was working on today.
After my encounter with him the other night I’m working overtime. My eyes are also more open than they were following the discovery that Persephone Falcione is one of his big investors.
I called her house again the following morning and was told she’s still in Italy, so I have to wait. I hate waiting nearly as much as I hate being forced to be patient.
I tried to find out if there were any more details on her in relation to Jude, but I couldn’t find anything so I stopped looking. I didn’t want to waste time.
As I click back on the inbox another email one comes in. This time from an undisclosed recipient.
Those kinds of emails are sent from people who want to hide their location. Normally on the high-tech ones you can’t track who sent the email, and for the cyber minded who know what they’re doing they can move around the net or anywhere really without being seen.
Because of the system I’ve set up I can be in here at the same time as Jude and he’ll be none the wiser, like I am now. He opens it and my eyes narrow when I see a zipped file with a password protected lock on it. That’s the only thing in the body of the message.
He clicks on it, but nothing happens on my end. Something’s blocking me. A stronger firewall than what I’ve hacked into preventing me from seeing what shit’s inside the file.
When Jude clicks out, I try to go in and the bar to put the password in pops on the screen. Usually, I can hack something like this easy so my lack of having a password doesn’t bother me. I click on to my hacking software which should enable me to get into anything, but nothing happens.
I try again and the same thing happens.
“I can’t get in,” I say to myself.
I reach for my phone and call Dominic. He answers on the first ring.
“Hey man, what’s up?” he asks.
“Are you by a computer?”
“Gimme a sec,” he says, and I hear him walking around. “I am now. What’s going on?”
“Think I need your M.I.T. skills,” I say with light humor in my voice.
He chuckles. “Hit me.”
“Go into Jude’s work inbox. An email just came through with a password protected folder. It’s not a ghost file but it’s encrypted as fuck.”
“I’m looking at it now.”
“Cool.”
A hacker like Dominic should be able to get into a file like that effortlessly, but when there’s a long pause on the line, I take a measured breath.
“Aiden…”
“Yes.”
“I can’t get in. That’s weird. I… I can’t remember that ever happening to me.”
What the fuck? I would bet my life and every man I know that there’s not a damn system this man can’t hack and there’s few things he can’t find. To hear him say that though knocks me off kilter.
“You sure you can’t?”
“I can’t, but leave it with me. I’m gonna try a few things.”
“All right.”