Page 117 of Parting Shot

“Just dumb it down for me.”

“I would never have to do that with anything.”

“Yes, that’s very nice.” I placated him. “Just talk.”

“Fine. It works sort of like a virus,” he began. “We had a couple of really great hackers try to get in to Sutter about three years ago. They were good, but our firewall held, and we were able to track them down to this tiny little ass crack of a town in Brazil—Caetés, Pernambuco.”

“And?”

“And I hired them, of course, and they made me Você, which we market a scaled-down version of called Bloodhound to the masses.”

“So, you have Você at Sutter, and you sell Bloodhound.”

“Right.”

“Okay, so Bloodhound is what Wells has?”

“No. Like I said, he has what we used to use five years ago when I took over Sutter.”

“And it does what?”

“It only does surveillance, not the web. It’s all internal, nothing external.”

“Okay.”

“But the one thing they all have in common is the program lets you monitor everything from one centralized interface.”

“Which is how you’re messing with it.”

“Yes.”

I made a noise and then just listened to him type for a while until he gently shook me.

“Head hurt?”

I made a noise of agreement.

“Maybe you should drink some water?”

“Yeah, okay.”

I drank half of the twenty-ounce bottle and then put my head back down.

“If you have to pee, I’ll get you another bottle.”

“I’m okay,” I whispered.

“Okay. Rest some more. I’m transferring different chunks into one file. If I could just get to my phone, we could have internet.”

“And, ya know, backup,” I teased.

“Well, yes, there would be that.”

“So, you found Wells and Polley together already?”

“I did.” He didn’t sound happy.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, rolling my head to look at him.