Two hours later I had regained my cool and had most of the information that I had been tasked to provide. Because the building that event was to take place was Whistler property, I was able to use the back door into Whistler’s closed network that I had made while investigating the company. That gave me the details of the current building security already in place and the protocols that they were going to put into effect for the mock event. Whistler was going all out on these mock scenarios and treating them like real events that needed top security. Now we can work with the existing security and make our jobs ten times easier.
I was also able to gain access to the live video feed within the building. I didn’t know the overall plan for next Saturday yet, but I guessed that one of us, most likely Oliver, would monitor these feeds for any attacks directed towards us and the man we were assigned to protect.
Finding the blueprints for the building was a little more challenging because that isn’t something that Whistler keeps on their network. However, the City of Helena didn’t have much in the way of firewalls. It took more time to decipher their almost nonexistent organizational system to find the particular building in question than it did to hack into their system. I figured we were lucky that there was a digital copy of the blueprints at all. I doubted we would be allowed to break into a government building to get the hard copies.
When it was about time for dinner, I returned to the Whistler compound armed with my laptop. Once I entered the dining hall I took a quick glance around to gauge the overall tone and then joined Jon and Victor sitting at a table after grabbing some food. Oliver and Amir joined us after a few minutes with Oliver talking before he had properly taken a seat.
“Esli Vasquez is a diplomat from Honduras. He was born in Juticalpa in 1959 and is one of eight children. He was educated and graduated from the Universidad Metropolitana de Honduras in Tegucigalpa in 1980. He worked his way up within government jobs to his position as attache to the United States that he took over twelve years ago.” Oliver paused in his briefing to take a bite of food and then continued with his mouth full, “He has been married to Emely Vasquez for thirty-six years and has four children. He has a house outside of Washington DC that he lives in with his family, but he takes frequent trips back to Honduras.”
As he paused to take another bite of food Jon interrupted him, “Oliver that is really good work. But please slow down and chew your food. I would hate to have to perform the heimlich maneuver on you.” Oliver nodded and quickly ate the rest of his food. I noticed that Amir was already done eating. He must have eaten really quickly because we hadn’t been at the table very long. Amir noticed me looking at his plate and met m eyes, once again daring me to question him. When I didn’t press him, he decided to take up the story where Oliver had left off in his lilting middle eastern accent.
“Esli is a corrupt politician. He is using his sanctioned trips from Honduras to traffic drugs in this country. He is also using his power to crack down on land border controls, thus stopping his competitors from getting their product into the U.S.” Amir gave me a look illustrated that he was not happy to be protecting someone he thought was a bad guy. And while I understood where he was coming from, I also knew there were far worse people out there than Esli. Not to mention that Esli Vasquez wasn’t even a real person, just a dossier that Whistler put together for this training exercise.
I thought that Amir would be a great asset to our team, but he looked at the world in clearly defined black and white, good and bad. If he decided that Esli was part of the black he might not work as hard to keep him safe. I pointed out the good parts of him in the hope to convince Amir to put his full effort into this exercise. “Let’s just think of him as a loving husband and a father of four.”
“How far did you get on the building security Payton?” Jon asked. At this, I pushed my half-empty plate away and opened my laptop to show them the live security camera footage and blueprints of the building. Once he got a glimpse of what I had uncovered, Oliver grabbed my computer and started clicking through the windows.
“Holy-crap Payton, you got it all,” Oliver exclaimed as he continued looking through my computer. “We have live camera feeds inside and outside the building, controls over the elevators and automatic locking doors, not to mention the engineering building schematics with enough detail they must have been used in construction. How did you get all of this?”
I gently pulled my computer back from his hands and shut the lid, cutting off his link to the proof that I had dug way deeper into Whistler than I should have. “You don’t see me asking you how you figured out Vasquez was a drug mule. I just assumed that you were competent enough to do the job assigned to you. Please give me the same consideration. Women can be computer savvy too, Oliver.” I delivered this last statement with venom in my voice that I didn’t really feel. But needed to hide the extent of my skill in breaking into secure systems and networks. I hadn’t learned those skills lawfully.
Oliver looked completely taken aback and stammered out, “That’s not what I meant. I am just impressed that you were able to get all of that in a couple of hours.”
At this Victor started laughing and started to tease Oliver, “Awe is the computer nerd bent out of shape because he just got shown up by a girl?”
I didn’t want this conversation to degrade any further, so I shared my idea of having one member of the team monitor all the live camera feeds and alert them from where the attack is coming from. This pulled the conversation back on track and the following hour was spent in discussions about the best way to secure not only the building but the transportation to and from the event.
As the rest of the team was leaving for the night I grabbed Oliver’s arm and pulled him out towards the Green Monster. His body language was stiff, and he was clearly still upset about the comments I had made at dinner. I ignored this and my discomfort about touching him and pulled him out towards the obstacle course. Oliver was my only ally here, I needed to make things right with him before he decided I wasn’t worth his time.
“What are we doing here, Payton?” he demanded in a terse tone that clearly demonstrated that he wasn’t in the forgiving mood right now.
“We are going to take a look at what the Green Monster has to offer us and then we are going to come up with a training schedule so that both of us can defeat said monster in six weeks.” I said this in an even tone as I looked over the obstacle course but when Oliver failed to respond to my statement, I turned towards him. What I saw hit me like a kick to the chest. He looked like he was about to cry. What had I done to make him cry? Maybe Oliver was against training with me, or he was offended that I thought he needed help. Maybe I had been wrong about having Oliver as an ally. Maybe I already screwed things up too much to fix with that thing at dinner. One thing was for sure, making Oliver cry did not sit well with me. I had to fix this. What could I do to fix this?
“Hey, I’m,” I had to pause to swallow down the hard knot that had formed in my throat, “I’m sorry Oliver. I overstepped. It was just a thought. Please forget I said anything.” I started to back away from Oliver when he surged forward and enveloped me in a bear hug. I had to fight my first instinct to use a judo throw to break his hold on me as I processed what was happening. I had never been hugged like this before and I had no fucking clue what to do. What did normal people do when their personal space was invaded so completely like this? I remained tense in his arms and after a few moments, Oliver stepped back away from me.
Oliver cleared his throat and spoke in a voice filled with emotion. “Thank you, Payton.”
I merely nodded like I knew what the fuck had just happened because I was still too stunned by the sensations being hugged had caused to do anything else. One moment Oliver was about to cry and the next he was hugging me, and I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I wanted to avoid another hug, so I moved to inspect the first obstacle. It was a rope ladder that was not anchored to the ground, so it would swing as you tried to climb it. It brought to mind the ladders people throw from helicopters. At the top of the ladder was a small platform and then a series of dangling ropes that ended in metal circles. It looked like you had to swing from rope to rope using the circles as handholds.
I decided to ignore everything that just happened and took a deep breath before looking back towards Oliver. I pointed up at the hanging circles and said, “Aerial moving monkey bars. Looks like if you miss one or lose grip strength you drop about six feet. When we fall in training, remember to roll when you fall to avoid injury.”
We went through the entire course like that. Looking over the obstacle, naming it, and stating any initial thoughts we had about it. After the aerial moving monkey bars, there was the classic mud elbow crawl under barbed wire, a seven-foot smooth wall to climb, then a series of mounds that were slick with mud to traverse, followed by a twenty-foot rope climb, and ending with a huge bright green warped wall.
Oliver and I stood shoulder to shoulder looking at the warped wall when Oliver stated the obvious, “Guess we know why it is called the Green Monster.”
“To make it worse, we are still going to be covered in mud at this stage and our foot traction is going to suck. This is a lot harder than it looks.”
“It looks pretty hard,” Oliver grumbled.
“It is, but most of it is based on upper body strength and stamina. I think we should practice every morning with one obstacle and then run through some strengthening drills. Six weeks is long enough to build the muscle necessary to complete this.”
“If you say so.” Oliver turned to look at me before saying, “So, I really wasn’t trying to offend you earlier. I was just curious about how you accessed the Whistler secure network so easily.”
I took a moment to consider my response. I could continue to deflect and lie to Oliver or I could just tell him this one small truth. I remembered the ache in my chest when I thought I had lost Oliver as a friend and decided to experiment with the truth.
“It was not easy to hack into Whistler’s network. It took me over a week to break in. I just did it a while ago, when I was first accepted into the training program.” I was going to stop there when the feeling of being embraced for the first time flooded my memory, I owed Oliver more than this. “And I wasn’t really offended tonight, I just didn’t want to advertise that I had hacked into our potential employer’s system to gain access to the personnel files and left a backdoor for easy access. Snapping at you was just a deflection method.”
Oliver looked a little shocked at this and took a few moments to reply. “You hacked Whistler’s system just to read the personnel files? Why?” Well if he was this shocked about this minor transgression, Oliver would probably turn his back on me if he ever found out the kind of things that I have done that keep me up at night.
“I wanted to know who I would be working for.” I paused considering each of my next words before I said them aloud. “I don’t have much trust in authority figures. I had to be sure that I would be working for the good guys.”
“So, being one of the good guys is important to you?”
“Very.” That was a gross understatement. I believed that the only way I could redeem my soul was to help as many people as I had hurt. I had real concerns that my soul might be too damaged for redemption and didn’t think I deserved the fresh start that was handed to me. But now that I have it, I was going to be very careful not to fall into the same traps that I had before. And knowing exactly what my possible future employer was up to, was a big part of that.
I felt that I had exposed enough of myself for one night and told Oliver that I was tired and needed to return to the hotel. Then I turned on my heel and walked away from him.
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