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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DeeDee Nelson didn’t usually read her boss’s mail, and she hadn’t intended to that morning either.

The corporate jet’s faint thrum vibrated her seat with a deep mechanical growl heard more by her elbow on the armrest than her ears. Her travel supplies had grown, not shrunk, with the frequent trips to East Africa.

The security assessment team rated the local subsidiaries and political dignitaries they’d be meeting with as “high favorable” and corporate espionage on this trip “unlikely.” None of which meant entities like Shen Kong or even less scrupulous companies wouldn’t be present and posing as people they weren’t. DeeDee really wished polite society would catch up with modern times and do retinal scans and fingerprint checks instead of handshakes or bows before beginning a business meeting.

The luggage jammed between her admittedly luxurious seat, and the interior wall of the corporate jet transmitted the thrum, but she wasn’t letting them out of her sight. There were comms and backups in those bags. And she did have a few devices that might be able to remotely check biometrics of the non-TCG individuals they’d be meeting with. Chummy didn’t need to know what she was doing and as long as it didn’t interfere with his scrupulously polite meeting etiquette requirements, he probably wouldn’t even mind. He had a lot to think about, so she’d been stepping in more and more.

Chummy, pacing the back of the aircraft on a call with Mr. Aanderson, hadn’t gotten to his own messages in a while. With all the support efforts directed at Ethan’s space elevator, he might not even look at them again for days.

Samson’s device chimed at her. She’d been in the midst of a chat with Mr. Jeffy’s night shift executive assistant, Wilbur, but that could wait. Stupid chitchat practice from her assigned career development plan: annoying at the best of times and pure agony at times like these when every minute wasted would cost her sleep instead of merely shortening her lunch.

“Oh, I’ll let you go.” Wilbur Fischer head-bobbed a seated bow at his desktop camera. “Have a good trip and let me know if I can help, DeeDee.” He logged off before DeeDee had to reply. She was probably on Wilbur’s career development plan too.

Sometimes their mutual bosses’ arrangements weren’t as stealthy as they thought they were. The man had let slip that he was sometimes chided for spending too much time on non-work-related chitchat. DeeDee could have helped him with that, if only she hadn’t been required to do the opposite. She shook her head at her development plan one more time, and then banished the annoying thing from her mind to focus on problems she could solve.

The chat icon with Wilbur Fischer’s corporate ID photo gained a light green available ring for only a fraction of a second before graying out again as he found someone else on the vast company network to talk with. No one needed to tell him to chat with people, so then again, maybe she wasn’t on his daily work list at all.

She fished Samson’s comm out of her bag and read the alert on the screen. It told her that usually Samson did a review of their boss’s unopened messages every twelve hours or so with key word searches for important items and flags for important senders, and that the action hadn’t been marked complete in thirty-six hours. Or more accurately, hadn’t been done since he’d left the comm with her for his trip to China.

“Hey DeeDee,” an unknown contact sent text scrolling across Samson’s comm, “been busy and forgot I couldn’t do my work without the accesses…” There was more there, but she’d have to tap to open the message or do a more involved workaround that made sure any malicious code that might be attached couldn’t auto-start. Her fingers automatically began the workaround.

It was probably Samson, but DeeDee rubbed the back of her neck with nervous fingers. Everyone wanted a piece of the elevator, and she was not going to be the one that fell victim to a social engineering phishing attempt. And if it were Samson, she wanted to mess with him, just a little bit. He had been the one to say in her hearing, “I can’t go yet, boss, you need a senior assistant.” DeeDee glared at the comm as if it were Samson himself.

DeeDee muted Samson’s comm. Her fellow assistant was off on a career development trip and hadn’t checked in with her remotely in a couple days. After he finished patching up the deal for the rock—which it sounded like Cory Aanderson already had patched up on his own without anyone else’s assistance needed—Samson was supposed to be assessing Shen Kong for a cultural fit to see if he’d be happy as TCG’s management facilitator there for his next position. DeeDee didn’t think he’d like them. He’d laughed off her hacking warnings, but he had at least left his super-connected comm and had taken a low-access one for the trip.

DeeDee tapped in a response she could use to test the sender’s intent: “This number is not receiving messages from non-address book senders. Please check your contact and send again.” It was a good automated-sounding response. But she didn’t send it. Chummy would hate for her to be using call-screening code and would be even less approving if she were to pretend to be using call screening on Samson’s comm.

She didn’t have to answer the unknown number to reach to Samson. She checked the time difference on her own comm. If he’d followed his planned schedule, he should have been asleep for a while.

DeeDee steeled herself not to respond despite the temptation to demand more details from the sender. She turned his screen back on and read the rest of the message. The word choice sounded exactly like Samson. And the time stamp in the corner showed that the message had been written and given a delayed send instruction so it would arrive during her morning rather than in the night. It ended with a mention that he’d left his comm unlocked and would be using a cheap comm picked up at a Berlin airport kiosk if she needed him.

When she pressed her thumb over the scan button for his comm, all the accesses flared wide open. DeeDee sighed. That was such a Samson thing to do. How Chummy had gotten by when he was junior assistant, she had no idea. Maybe they’d played some elaborate Hansel and Gretel game with corporate data making a trail of sugary breadcrumbs while Chummy took notes on who collected what and how it got reported to their competitors. She doubted it. Probably the person in the senior assistant slot back when Samson was junior assistant had done what she did now and fixed his lapses.

Why couldn’t he have set up a guest profile for her alone and used data on file for her fingerprints, face scan, and voice recognition like a normal person?

“Everything alright?” Chummy asked. She must have made a noise while grumbling to herself.

DeeDee went to cue her favorite avatar to send an all-clear message, but Samson’s comm thought she was Samson, and her profile, which had reasonable security enabled, refused to allow her in. She hadn’t built in a login method that allowed for her working under someone else’s profile simultaneously. Her usual comm, which she’d set down to focus on Samson’s, turned flat gray.

Her security settings had locked in. And she’d upped that response level after her Shen Kong visit. It wouldn’t let her unlock it until she had the device plugged in at her desk in Germany.

“DeeDee?” Chummy said, looking more than a little concerned.

“Comms. Stupid comms,” she said actually out loud. Then DeeDee remembered the rules of polite corporate communication, so she also looked up and made eye contact with her boss. “Samson better take that job with Shen Kong, or I’m going to have to kill him.”

Chummy laughed. “Okay, then.” He returned to his conference call.

She’d have to rebuild all her shortcuts and subroutines to do the things she’d planned to work on during this trip. DeeDee considered smashing Samson’s comm on general principle. It wouldn’t help anything. Instead she started doing his tasks. So now she held in her hand a comm logged in as Samson which had just told her the boss’s messages were overdue for a review. Samson had built in a shortcut to mirror Chummy’s messages, and he’d set up his device to give her full access just in case she needed one of his files.

DeeDee tapped OKAY and watched Chummy’s whole backlog unfold. Keyword searches ran and a progress bar began a slow crawl across the bottom with a count of potentially important items ticking more slowly upward.

A new message popped in that should never have made it through the filters. Sender ID: Pascaline, no last name, no photo.

“Thanks Uncle,” the last message read.

DeeDee fought herself to keep her eyes from bugging out. The filters should have screened out a chatbot. What kind of business contact didn’t fill in a last name and at least use a placeholder logo if there wasn’t a formal corporate identification photo? A spambot of course, or one of those social engineering hackers. For someone else it might be a new lover. But that name registered as 99.5% female, and a woman wasn’t the boss’s type.

DeeDee tapped on the comm and pulled up past communication threads with the Pascaline contact. Her hands shook as she read.

No. No. No. She would not allow this. Not Chummy. The rules were clear about what happened to someone if they fell for social engineering. Termination. Immediately.

Though, a hope-filled thought came flying up through her mass of fears: Chummy had pointed out on other occasions that bosses had wide latitude on following or not following corporate rules. HR always monitored to protect the company from lawsuits, but a strong boss could…

DeeDee’s fingers found the chat connection for Wilbur Fischer. She needed Samson for this, but she didn’t have him. She’d have to do her very best alone and try to imagine how Samson would sell it. How do you sell out your all-time favorite boss so completely that it saves him? Only someone who worked for Chummy would dare try, but then maybe also only someone who had worked for Chummy would have a chance at succeeding.

Wilbur Fischer’s availability light remained gray and unavailable. She had to wait and had to think. Her fingers twitched, longing for a way to turn this problem into code and run test cases to find a non-awful solution.


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