Lockout

EPILOGUE

Colorado Springs, Colorado (9:20 a.m. MST)

Are you sure you want to deactivate this account? the screen queried.

He glanced around his small home office, listening carefully to make sure he was alone, before returning his attention to the screen. The connection with an outside Wi-Fi signal he’d hacked into was tenuous but steady, and the server hundreds of miles away in Chicago had no clue it was responding to an unauthorized source.

He highlighted the “Yes” box and hesitated a few seconds over the enter button before pushing it with a smile he couldn’t quite suppress.

There was a small “click” as the screen shifted to black, and a white notification box popped up in the center:

Ironic, he thought to himself as he glanced at the box of personal belongings he’d brought home from the tiny office he’d occupied for years. The item he most prized was a paperweight, a personal gift from Moishe Lavi from many years back. He stared for a minute at the swirls of blue and six-pointed stars. No one ever noticed that the stars had six points instead of five. The fact that the paperweight had always been so blatantly obvious on his desktop, yet still invisible, had amused him throughout the years. Probably because it was just like him: There, but essentially invisible.

He could hear his wife moving around in the kitchen at a distance, and he thought about her worried reaction two days before when he’d announced he was quitting the job he never spoke about. She knew why, of course. It was demeaning for an ex-navy chief to end up pushing a broom. He never complained, but she had been embarrassed that they needed the cash, and he could tell by her worried expression, she was already calculating the impact.

“Did… something happen you’re not telling me about? Were you fired?” she’d asked.

He’d put his hands on her shoulders then. “No, baby! Nothing like that. I just… well, I caught myself cleaning the same hallway twice and realized I was so distracted thinking about how I’d much rather be here with you, I didn’t even realize it.”

“I’m glad, to tell the truth. You’ve been a trooper, but you’re not a janitor.”

“That didn’t matter,” he smiled, kissing her. “I can swab heads with the best of them. No shame in it.”

“How much have we got in the retirement accounts, then?” she’d asked.

“Enough,” he said, mentally toting up the ones he was willing to show her, and the offshore account he wasn’t. “We’ll be great, babe. We’re secure. We’re free!”

Richard Duncan’s attention returned to the laptop and what he had programmed as the last act. He pulled up the internal program he’d written and initiated it, watching with satisfaction as the laptop’s hard drive consumed itself, completely destroying every vestige of data.

An account erased, and a life rebooted, he thought.