Salute!

63.

“I am a touch handicapped sitting here chained to the fucking floor like a rabid dog,” she says after a short deliberation. 

I take a lungful of the room’s think stale air and ask,

“What would you need? Cognizant of the reality that getting you temporarily released into my custody for travel is about as likely as a snowstorm in hell today.”

“I can access my backup computer from just about anywhere,” she says, looking around the barren room and rolling her eyes, “maybe even here.” 

I am intrigued by her attitude. She simultaneously displays several of the characteristics vital in a successful cop/snitch quid pro quo relationship; trust, talent, fearlessness and gumption chief among them. 

“We built a central backup server for this very situation, a way of covering our behinds should the shoe hit the pan. But I will need cloud integration and a remote access VPN for complete access, for anything other than encrypted pdfs. Dropbox in a worse case scenario.” She announces matter of factly. “Or you could get my phone from personal property, assuming your hackers have already determined that the security firewall is impenetrable by anyone other than myself.” 

“Suppose I agree to all of this, what would I see, how fast will I see it and who is the target of this potential viral hit?”

“How about Mr Big?” 

“Double indemnity, we already have him.”

“Seriously, I saw you put a nine in his head from twenty feet. You said earlier that he survived. I surmise he is recovering, compromised and you are waiting to see if he might A) remember and B) talk. That could be tomorrow or never. Probably not the odds that will enthuse your boss.” 

Her point taken, I ask what she has on him, what hard evidence we could use to take the express up elevator towards the penthouse. 

“Enough to satisfy your sample requirements, and probably enough to take down the entire origination as well. One nine — two birds.” Satisfied, she pauses and takes a sip of water as if it was Dom Perignon. I see her looking at me over the rim of the plastic bottle. 

“I’ll be right back,” I say trying to look serious yet nonchalant, but I am thinking how much I hate to be played, especially by a teenager. 

“PC is fine, the wifi needs to be secure, T1 land is better. Ask the IT dude if we can get OC-192. That we get us early dinner.” She raises her empty water bottle in a toasting gesture. 

“Salute.” I say and call for the guard.