Hacked (Warriors of Light Book 5)

E
VERNIGHT PUBLISHING ®

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2016 April Zyon

ISBN: 978-1-77339-011-6

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Jessica Ruth

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HACKED

Warriors of Light, 5

April Zyon

Copyright © 2016

Prologue

Holly had always been one of those people who had been different, who had been more than a little … insane. At least that was what her parents had tried to tell her when they’d dropped her off at the county children’s home. She knew differently, though. She knew she wasn’t crazy. She was actually very intelligent.

They hadn’t sent her away because she was a bad child or a hell-raiser. Overall, she had been very quiet and good, but they hadn’t understood her constant need for mental stimulation, so they shook their heads, then wiped their hands of her.

So, she hadn’t fought her parents’ decision. She hadn’t grumbled or complained. Instead, she’d embraced the solitude and done with it as she pleased. She’d actually
lived
, and her mind had flourished. Inside of the facility, Holly had found herself in a niche that had longed to be filled. And fill it, she had.

For a number of years, Holly had pretended to fit in with the status quo—she did the studies that she was supposed to do and interacted where she should interact. She had even found herself making friends.

However, she soon discovered that she did better with computers than she did with people. By the time she was a teenager, she’d programmed the computers at the home. She had earned her keep by making sure each and every single thing that was technological was running at the highest peak possible. And if she sometimes got a little lonely, well, she could deal. But that was then and this was now. Now Holly had her own home. She had her own apartment, job, and stability that she hadn’t had before.

She attributed much of her success to the way she had grown up—curious and ready to take on the world. She’d also found that she loved the challenge of breaking into systems, which had led her to one so heavily encrypted she wasn’t sure what was right and what was wrong, or even what it really was.

Giddy glee—that’s what flowed through her as she bypassed system after system. It made her all kinds of happy to
finally
have a challenge that was worth her time. She all but rubbed her hands together and danced in her seat while pushing the wire-rimmed glasses back on her nose and clipping the long fall of raven’s-wing-black hair back up behind her head.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll get it cut
. The same lie she always told herself.

Tonight, however, oh tonight is a very, very good night
. She snickered as she played cat and mouse with the security features built into the firewall of the business she was hacking and chewed her lip while moving through files. She read at a lightning-fast pace, taking in the information in the data banks faster than a Borg assimilated humans in Star Trek.
Oh yes, this is some very good stuff indeed.

She stopped at a file that had been one of the two hardest to open and gulped. “What the heck?” she muttered, moving her mouse off the information to make the print larger.
I have to be reading it wrong, because there’s no way the dates are correct.

Printing off the data, she leaned back in her chair, kicked her booted feet up onto the metal desk, and frowned. “Methinks I have perhaps fallen into someone’s manuscript.” She had a mile-wide grin on her face. She loved science fiction and paranormal novels.
And this one looks like it’s going to be a hell of a read
.

Holly scanned through the outlines for each of the heroes of the manuscript, getting sucked in deeper with every turn of the page. “The author did a lot of research on Gaius and Alexander the Great. This is seriously awesome. Too bad they didn’t turn it into a romance, because that’s the best-selling genre out there.” She flipped more, then frowned. “Huh. Wonder who in the world this Mercury character is supposed to be. Maybe he’s going to be the missing link or something like that? It will be interesting to learn just how the author spins this one.”

Quickly pivoting in her chair, she pulled up the Internet space and tossed together a website for “Unknown Author” and the series he or she was writing about,
The Guardians
, also known as
The Guardians of the Light
, and became the writer’s number one fan. “Oh, wonder if they have a social media presence?” she asked herself and began to look for any trace of the author via Facebook, Twitter, and even the new site, Tsu. “Huh. Weird. Oh well, likely they want to wait until the first book comes out before they burst onto the scene. I can’t wait.”

****

Muttering under his breath, James gently pressed a button on the keyboard. When nothing exploded, he let out a relieved breath. Taking a chance, he pushed another one, then another. “I was born in the wrong time for this crap, Mercury,” he said over his shoulder.

“Quit bitching, cowboy, and keep looking. I’m older than you are and seem to have a better handle on this than you do.”

A glance over to the other man showed him to be using all his fingers to type on the keyboard before him. “Then why the fuck am I in here? One wrong push of a button, and I could kill this bloody nightmare of technology.”

“Because you have your task and I have mine. And until one of the ladies born of this time frame awakens with the power over computers, and has a clue what we should do, we continue to fucking hunt and peck our way through this.”

James stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, and shook his head at the other man. He got a middle finger in response. Oddly, it made him feel a lot better. “I get not waking them up at the crack of dawn when you figured out what was setting off the alarms. But why the hell haven’t you gone to get one of them now?”

“If I send you, you’ll never come back. If I go, the chances are good you’ll do something even I, with my mediocre skills, can’t fix. And don’t say go let Helen out to fix this. She could very well cripple us. The fact she didn’t while she had the opportunity still confuses me.”

“Especially since she was more than fine with selling our locations to the highest evil bidder,” James muttered.

“Precisely. So, she stays where she is, and we figure this out ourselves. Hopefully before whatever
this
is cripples us instead.” Mercury threw his arms up. “Yes! Finally.”

“What? You figured out what the beeping is all about?”

“Hell no, but I finally got into the right directory to see if there’s a problem with one of the systems.”

James could only blink at the other man. “Is that good?”

“Very. According to what I’ve learned leaning over Helen’s shoulder all this time is that she made the backside of the system very simple in case of an event like this. She gave me a tour of it all. She also told me that while the coding side is beyond complicated, the face of it is a simple point and click. That there would be flags of varying colors dependent on the threat level, or problem, which would appear on each of the directories that get you into various portions of this mess.”

Scratching at his jaw, James nodded slowly. “Hate to tell you this, but that there sounds like a load of shit.”

Mercury shot him a smug look and waved a hand at his screen. “Directories, folders, and nifty little flags to indicate problems. Take that, you old-fashioned, should-be corpse. Green means everything is good. Yellow means there may be an issue that’s easily resolved. Pink is for updates requiring a look-over prior to installation. Red means there’s a problem that requires immediate attention. Purple means a problem requiring attention but of a programmer level. And then there’s black, which is very bad. Catastrophic bad, most likely, from what she said.”

Sliding his chair closer to Mercury’s, James squinted at the screen. “Okay, so what does the little pirate flag mean?”

“What? Where?”

“There.” James pointed.

“She never told me,” Mercury said. He grabbed a binder off one of the shelves and flipped through it. “Hacker.”

“That would be bad, right?”

“Very. This is from an outside source.”

“Really? Well, isn’t that a complete shock?” James said sarcastically. Given everyone in the mountain was lucky to figure out a cell phone’s basic features, like calls, it wasn’t a surprise that they had outside trouble. “Why don’t you see if one of those Marines has some computer expertise? They all are used to top secret and shit like that. It would be better than one of us poking around in something that could screw us up.”

Mercury frowned, then nodded slowly. “They did all sign confidentiality clauses. And they know we aren’t kidding when we said we’d kill them for breaking it. First, though, we need to know what’s in this directory.”

Clicking on the folder, they then had to search for the little pirate flag again. It appeared that there were more file folders in the original.

“There,” James said, pointing at another one.

Mercury got them into it and discovered only two files. Both of which had the little pirate flags over them. Opening one, the big man began to curse in his native tongue. “We need someone with a lot of expertise, I think.” Pushing up from his chair, he moved for the door. He stalled there and turned to look at James. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Sir, yes sir.” He snapped a lazy salute, grinning when Mercury glowered at him before departing. James looked back to the screen. Figuring he’d better satisfy his curiosity before Mercury returned, he eased closer to the computer. His eyes went wide as he read. “Holy mother of God.”