Jonas ruffles my hair, his enormous hand wrapping most of my cranium and applying enough pressure for it to be painful. I can’t help my head from being jerked from side to side in the process, due to his rough movements.

“Don’t worry I’ll take care of him.” Jonas is a huge monster of a man, who shaves his head bald, wears sunglasses in the middle of the night and thinks his striped shaven beard makes him some kind of cool badass.

It does not. It looks stupid and try-hard.

Jonas finally releases my head, with one final sharp motion, like he is throwing it away, jerking it to the side painfully.

He laughs out loud and the rest of the men in the van laugh with him, some more strained than others. Jonas may not be as cool as he thinks, but he is every bit as imposing as he believes himself to be though. Even I laugh out loud.

Fake of course, but what can you do? None of these assholes actually believe that Jonas is looking out for me, but no one is going to speak out of turn. In fact, believe me, it’s quite the opposite.

So that just leaves me with a headache and pretending like I’m in on the joke, when in fact I know I’m smarter than everyone in this bloody van combined and yet somehow, I AM the joke.

Nice.

The world is filled with idiots and dangerous people. Worse yet, dangerous idiots. Worse still, dangerous idiots with guns and dreams.

I caught the look out the corner of my eye. Just one glance, from our esteemed leader and it made my spine chill. I could feel it, something was wrong. Did he know?

“Alright boys, time to focus. We’re here.” Miche, our quote, unquote, leader, always talked in clipped tones with an air of superiority. At least in the presence of others. He never broke character, ever. Honestly, I can’t help but find it creepy. I know for a fact, that he can talk normally, I’ve hacked all his devices enough to see pictures of him acting aloof, or camera footage of him talking normally to his cat.

“I was born ready boss-man.” Salamander replied in his usual fake cowboy accent, while waving around two loaded pistols. I instinctively ducked out the way whenever they pointed in my direction. The man had no clue about gun safety.

Why was everyone in this group so desperately pretending to be something they are not. How the hell did I even end up with these idiots.

I say that, but I’ve been working with them for two years now, God knows how I and they have survived this long. I wish I could go back to my previous group, they at least pretended to give a shit about me, even if they didn’t in reality. But at least they pretended! This lot couldn’t even be bothered to drum up that bit of effort into faking it.

Of course I couldn’t go back. You know, because they were all dead. This lot somehow managed to kill them all. I barely survived being killed myself. The leader, Miche, has at least a few functioning brain cells and saw potential in me.

When I say potential, I mean he realized I could help him get shit that he wants. Which is, as it happens, precisely why we are here, at the offices of Briar, Hendriks and Tufele. I don’t know exactly what we are here to steal, but given it’s a lawyers office building, I would assume something related to documents and for someone else who is paying.

“Let’s go. Just like we rehearsed.” Miche spoke and everyone jumped into action.

A grabbed my laptop bag and followed the rest of my six man group out the van. We were parked in a side alley, with poor illumination. Miche pulled out a set of keys and used it to unlock a fire escape door.

I panicked for a moment at the rash action, but when no alarm went off, I studied Miche’s expression and noted how certain he seemed. The access to the key and the lack of worry that opening a fire escape door would set off an alarm… this must be an inside job.

We followed Miche through the corridor, into a kitchen and then out into the main lobby of the building. There was no one here, but there was a subtle lighting illumination, not enough to keep people happy while working or visiting here, but enough to make the place look pretty from outside.

I have to admit all the glass around the lobby was making me feel rather exposed. Glancing around at my partners in crime I got the feeling they were having the same thoughts.

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Miche pushed the button for the elevator, but it made a boop sound and the button flashed red. He frowned and tried it again, but to the same result. I’m guessing that this was not a part of the plan.

While Miche tried the door to the stairwell, I couldn’t help but notice the lighting in the lobby had changed. It was subtle but several of the lights closer to the elevators had brightened up a bit.

Cool system. This place was really fancy, lawyers must make really good bank.

“What’s the holdup?” Carl asked nervously.

“The lift was supposed to be unlocked”, Miche replied. He then looked around and saw the terminal by the security station.

“Ash, get us in”, Miche commanded as he nodded to the terminal.

Seriously? What does he think this is, a movie? The hacker kid must just magic us into the FBI’s database? Maybe enhance the photo of the perp and clear it up, even though there wasn’t any resolution in it to begin with?

Regardless, I would rather not be labeled useless with these guys, I never found out what happened to Carmella after all.

I sat down at the terminal and smashed the space bar.

A login screen. I recognized the OS, their stuff was a really modern system, this was not looking good. I doubt any of my software could hack this in a reasonable amount of time or without being completely shut out.

Shit.

I looked up at the camera on top of the screen. “Hey Miche, your inside guy, who was he? Was he one of the security gaurd’s by any chance?”

Miche eyed me suspiciously, “Yes he was.” Wait, what is with that look? Now I was really starting to get worried.

I pressed on regardless, “Do you know his full name?”

“Why do you need to know?”

I sighed, we didn’t have time for this. “Do you want to get into that elevator or not?”

Miche gave me a dirty look, but complied regardless, “Andre Hammleton”.

I cracked open my laptop and started entering details. “And his email address?”

“I don’t know it”

“Okay, what about phone number?”

Miche at least knew that and I entered the number he gave me. I plugged the info into one of my programs I had written specifically for this kind of scenario. It would run custom queries against a number of different social media platforms and other less reputable sites to try and find someone based on any info you could provide. It was not possible on all sites, as they obviously protected such information against malicious actors, such as myself. But for a lot of sites it only took minor query manipulations or easily hacked poorly protected servers in some cases.

What I did have access to, was enough to find me Andre Hammelton’s public ‘ILife’ account. I quickly sent his profile page to my phone and opened up his profile picture. I chose the biometric login option and held up the picture of his face to the webcam. The terminal unlocked.

Too easy.

Most people thought that fingerprint reader or facial recognition were these amazing advanced systems, but honestly, they pretty much sucked.

Now that I was in the security system I tried to unlock the lift. No dice. While the security guards did have access to such things, the after hours lockout seemed to be controlled by another system. I snooped around and eventually found it. I needed some of my software installed to proceed, but the security on this thing was pretty tight, I wouldn’t be able to run just anything.

Still, it was nothing for me. I used a combination registry and reboot exploit to reboot the terminal in safe mode. From here I was able to install some telnet software and some port scanners. I also copied over some of my own tooling from a usb stick to run so long.

Before long I had realized that there were no easily exploitable weaknesses on the security server. At least nothing I could do in any reasonable amount of time. Shit.

I leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling, wondering if there was anything that I missed.

“What’s taking so long?” Frederick called out in an annoying voice. But I was in the zone, I just ignored him.

The lighting. That may be it!

I searched the security terminal for contacts and found a technician for the lighting system. The company was AmTech and the system C-bus. I knew it was some kind of ‘smart lighting’ system. A quick scan revealed that this was yet another thing that security had only limited access to.

I sprang out of my chair and pulled a screwdriver out of my bag. I quickly prounced over to one of the light switches. It was a fancy touch screen thing. I unceremoniously lifted it off the wall with my screw driver, it clicked out easily enough.

“What are you doing?”

It was connected with a standard RJ45 connector and the cable was cat5e, standard networking, with the only exception being that they seemed to be running power across the cable as well.

Either way, that might damage my laptop. I quickly took out my tools, cut off the connector and re-crimped it with my own RJ45, using only the four ‘data’ wires.

Plugging this into my laptop, it wasn’t long before I had found the lighting control on the network. A quick google showed that the system could be forcibly factory reset with specific packets, allowing me access to the main control unit.

I downloaded the C-bus configuration software and logged into the control unit for the lighting. It had a lot of functions, a pretty fancy system. But I found what I was looking for. A bridge between the lighting and the lift in the configuration. It was enough to get me a port on the main building’s server. It wasn’t long before I got root and was able to access the lift’s configuration and unlock it.

“We’re in!”, I announced rather proudly.

“Let’s go!” Miche commanded.

What no thanks? No, ‘great job Ash, you are really a valuable member of this team’?

Everyone except me entered the lift, I was supposed to be the lookout. Or at least, that was supposed to be the plan, but I caught the knowing glance that Miche gave Frederik and Frederik also stayed behind with me.

Something was up. I could feel it. I had been feeling it ever since we got in that damn van. No, even the last few days already.