.5 To Have and To Code (4 page)

There were still traces of it today—and a certain mama witch intended to meddle.  She sat down in the end chair of the table that had always anchored the Sullivan family.  “So, how was taste-testing all the food for Sammy’s reception?” 

The grumpy corner of her daughter’s mind flared.  Bull’s-eye.  “I managed not to eat snails.”

Her brothers looked distinctly worried.  Jamie eyed his sister.  “They’re feeding us snails at the wedding?”

“Not anymore.”   Nell snagged the box of double pepperoni from Devin’s too-slow hands, and then looked up and grinned.  “Some kind of tofu thing.  Crispy and kind of yellow.”

“Eww.  Sounds disgusting.”

Just like old times.  Retha smiled down the table at her husband.  One evening a week, she got to pretend that her children hadn’t all grown up and left home.  And as a favor to her, the children did a beautiful job of imitating their younger selves.

Some day, maturity would threaten—but hopefully by then someone would have kicked off the next generation.  The Sullivan dinner table would be awfully dull otherwise.  She reached for the only unopened pizza box—a slice or two for herself, and the rest she’d stash for Matt.  “How’s Sammy doing with all the planning?”

Nell looked aggrieved.  “She says I have to help her with the seating plan.  I don’t even know most of these people.”

That told Retha as much as she needed to know.  “She just wants to spend time with you, sweetie.”

“I know.”  Her daughter took a savage bite of pepperoni.  “I’m sneaking cookies in to the wedding.”

Pride swelled in Retha’s heart, along with a sigh.  Not everything was an obstacle to be charged headlong, including Sammy’s often-misguided parents.  But what her daughter lacked in subtlety, she more than made up for in loyalty and an unerring sense of justice.

Especially when cookies were involved.  “When you see our Sammy next, you might ask her to resupply us.”  Retha raised an eyebrow at her two sons.  “Someone has been raiding the freezers again.”

You’re going to have to live without her cookies really soon, Mom.
 

Her daughter’s mindvoice sounded like a petulant teenager, but now wasn’t the time to bring that up. 
I know, sweetheart.  But I intend to enjoy every bite until the day she leaves.

She saw the sidelong advice land in her daughter’s heart, and hoped the words eased the pain living under the feisty exterior.  Sammy was Nell’s sister in all but name.

You couldn’t always fix your adult children with Band-Aids and chocolate ice cream.  So Retha reached for the next best thing.  Family ritual.  She turned to Devin first—he was usually funny and never lacking for an answer—and asked the same question she’d asked at every dinner table since before the triplets were born.  “Tell me about the best part of your day.”

He grinned.  “I got to see Matt’s hottie when I dropped him off at the hospital.”

Retha just shook her head—and then tried not to laugh as Devin shimmered into a bikini-clad blonde with vacant eyes.  She eyed her only daughter, who was suddenly looking far less morose.  “Apparently your illusion spells haven’t suffered from lack of practice.”  They’d always been one of Nell’s favorite ways to tweak her brothers.

And it had always worked—mostly because they couldn’t fight back.  Only a handful of witches could pull off an illusion spell without the help of a full circle.  Nell had managed her first on her twelfth birthday, powered by pure fury at the four-year-old brothers who had licked the icing off every single one of her birthday cupcakes.

Turning herself into the shark from
Jaws
had probably been overkill.  Jamie and Devin had recovered with nothing worse than wet pants, but Matt hadn’t slept for a week.

One day, if there was any justice, her daughter would have a child with magic and a hair-trigger temper.

Be careful what you wish for there, Mom.
  Jamie reached for the last slice of mystery-meat pizza, amused. 
Don’t forget, you’ll be the Gramma.

Retha pushed down hard on the memories of a face with bright little-boy eyes and curls.  At the rate Nell was going, it didn’t seem all that likely.  Unless you believed in fate.

Chapter 3

Done.

Daniel hit send on his final work email of the day and glanced at the time.

Independent contracting rocked.  A year ago, he’d been working a salaried gig making the same money as all the guys he programmed circles around.  And there’d been meetings.  Mind-eating, butt-numbing meetings.

Now he worked fast, finished early, and raked in really nice bonuses solving the coding emergencies caused by too many meetings and not enough actual work.

It was still insanely dull stuff—but at least it only got to chew up a few hours of his day.

He flexed his fingers and debated.  Lunch, a swim, or a quick dip into BankTel’s website.

Hacking won—it usually did.  He snagged an apple off the end of his desk, calling up code one-handed as he chomped.  His auto-scripts would get him through the first couple of layers. 

He grinned at the grainy picture of BankTel’s CFO, taped to his wall.  “You’re going down, dude.”

Sometimes his targets were fairly random—picked for their bad graphics or sleepy commercials.  Ethan Fitzgerald, however, had painted a target right smack in the middle of BankTel’s servers.  He’d claimed they were invulnerable.

And he owned some really bad ties.

Daniel watched his precoded routines working their way through the outer layers of BankTel’s security.  Initial destination—company intranet.  First rule of hacking—it didn’t matter where you found the hole, so long as you got in.

Sometimes he crashed in the front door just for kicks, but that lost its luster after a while.  Intranets weren’t sexy, which meant they usually weren’t secure.

A script beeped, meaning it had run into a roadblock—or found a vulnerability.  Daniel pulled up the report and grinned.  Companies thought they were so damn smart.

Tossing the apple core in the direction of the garbage can, he got serious with his keyboard.  There weren’t usually points for hacking speed, either, but it was just plain fun to go fast.

Second rule of hacking—find the holes where things came out of computer systems.  A door that swung one way could usually be convinced to head the other.  And his little script was particularly good at sniffing out swingable doors.  In this case, Ethan Fitzgerald not only wore ugly brown ties, but he used an insecure connection to post copies of company financial reports for internal review.

The guy probably thought he was all forward thinking and tech savvy.

Daniel felt his way along the code stream that pushed report copies onto employee computers.  Ethan wasn’t totally stupid—the server did try to verify that you were an employee.

It didn’t, however, object to Donald Duck, ostensibly located in the CEO’s office, hitching a ride back to the secure server on a random error message.

A couple more dekes around security measures that were about as nimble as Truck, and Daniel was in.  He took a left turn into Human Resources and had Donald Duck apply for a couple of jobs.   Added a zero to everyone’s next paycheck—if payroll didn’t catch that, heads needed to roll.  And shook his head at the number of executive computers downloading porn.

They should try learning something instead.  Porn sites usually had awesome security.

A quick feel around, and he found the door he was looking for.  Three feet of virtual steel around the customer data—except for the feed to the marketing department.  Banks lived and died on data analysis, and underpaid geeks in marketing were supposed to turn the mountains of data into gold.

Daniel headed halfway down the tunnel and paused, pouring the virtual equivalent of chewing gum into the feed.

He backed out, careful not to touch the chewing gum.  And then set a message to trigger on every computer in the company the next time some idiot exec tried to get his porn fix. 
If I could get this far, so could any thief with a keyboard and half a brain.  Vulnerability assessment: 7/10.  Yours truly, Donald Duck.

He backed out, plugging holes as he went.  No point leaving some poor granny’s money vulnerable just because Ethan Fitzgerald was a liar.

And then with a sigh, he reached across the desk for another apple, pulled up the baseball scores, and scowled at Fitzgerald’s picture on the wall.  Too easy.  He’d hoped for a more interesting afternoon.

He needed one.  Life didn’t have enough… oomph lately.

-o0o-

Nell grabbed hold of one end of a monster flour bag.  “How come these things don’t come in smaller sizes?”

“They do.”  Sammy grunted and heaved her end over the edge of the industrial-sized mixer.  “But they cost twice as much, and we get a tricep workout this way.”  She grinned.  “Bend from the knees and you’ll get a sexy butt, too.”

Nell was pretty sure an unlimited supply of chocolate chips pretty much offset any of the exercise benefits of cookie assisting.  “What’s on today’s list?”

Sammy consulted the whiteboard on the wall.  “Snickerdoodles, a big batch of the triple chocolate ones, some bunny-shaped sugar cookies for a school fundraiser, and test number three for the Nutella cookie recipe.”

Exactly none of those words were visible on the whiteboard.  Nell knew better than to ask—Sammy’s organizational methods were often opaque and never failed.  “Tell me I don’t have to cut out bunnies.”

“Nope.”  Her best friend grinned.  “You can pour on the pink sprinkles instead.”

Nell groaned.  “I already wore a dress for you this week.”

“Maxed out your girly quota already?”  Sammy laughed and started cracking eggs four at a time.  “We can make baseball cookies too if you want.”

“No, but why is it always pink and glitter and stuff for the girls?”  Nell was smart enough not to try the egg trick.  “Or baseballs for the boys?  I swear, if I ever have kids, there will be no pink in my house.”

“Uh, huh.  My mom tried that.”

Nell looked over at Sammy’s cookie-baking attire—jean capris, ancient t-shirt, and a hot-pink Kiss the Chef apron.  “That worked well.”

Sammy’s parents had tried all kinds of weird things to raise a child who didn’t conform to society’s norms.  They’d succeeded, probably beyond their wildest dreams.  And then they’d gotten rich, joined the country club, and tried, mystified, to undo the Frankenstein daughter they’d created.

Fortunately, teenagers were pretty hard to reprogram.

The bowl of chocolate chips moved mysteriously closer to Nell’s hand.  “Mom said to tell you there are lots of Sullivans on call if you need any more help with the wedding prep.”

“Your mom’s a doll, but I think things are pretty much under control.”  The goddess of cookies counted out the last cups of sugar and then side-eyed Nell and rescued the chocolate chips.  “And one Sullivan is more than enough for me to supervise.”

Nell looked around at all the flour and sugar and heavy equipment that would be making the trek to Texas.  “When are you closing up shop here?”

Sammy stirred vehemently.  “At the last possible minute—this place is keeping me sane.  Momma’s going nuts about the wedding, Shane’s missing his cows, and every time I do anything, I wonder if it’s the last time I’ll ever do it.”

The last part kicked Nell in the guts.  So she picked something else to talk about.  “How can you miss a cow?”

“They’re kind of cute.”  Her friend took the bait gratefully—humor had been keeping them both from going crazy.  “But mostly I think he misses the hills and wide-open spaces and the routine of his life there, you know?”

Sammy’s fiancé had come out to California for the last month before the wedding, ostensibly to provide moral support and try on his tux. 

It had taken Nell five seconds in Shane’s presence, his mind practically drowning in love for his future wife, to know the truth.  Shane Cowan, tough cattle rancher, just couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.  He’d have followed Sammy to the ends of the earth.

She was moving to Texas instead.

“It takes time to get used to somewhere strange.”  Nell knew it was a lie—Shane had Texas imprinted on his heart, just as Berkeley beat in hers.

“It’s the right choice,” said Sammy, her hand closing over Nell’s.  “I’m one of those people who can live anywhere.”

Yeah, and while Shane would try—he wasn’t.  And there were good reasons for putting some distance between the country club and her best friend’s effervescent love for life.  “How come you had to fall in love with a cowboy, huh?”  That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially on a last-minute, spontaneous girl vacation to Cancun.

“Could have been worse.”  More flour tumbled into the bowl—Sammy’s creations were art, not science.  “That New York stockbroker guy was pretty sexy.”

And slimy, but Nell had kept that tidbit to herself.  Even on the sunny Mexican beach, he’d been totally ignored in favor of one quiet cowboy.  “Texas isn’t that much closer than New York.”

“True.”  Sammy flashed a grin.  “But this way, you’ll get to learn to ride a cow.”

Nell was pretty sure nobody actually rode cows.  “I think that’s one of those urban legends they tell to dumb city people.”  Which she was, wholeheartedly and completely.  Trees and hills were cool.  Cows were furry and a little scary.