To Be Or Not To Be
A/N: Thanks to everyone so much for reading, reviewing, and favoriting my other Leverage fic: Aelan010, Gaben, amy1oM, Arlothia,&moonmagik. This dovetails off that fic – Luxuries & Loss; it's Hardison's view on life. An idea I got while reading Kevin Mitnick's biography/auto-biography (he had a ghost writer) Ghost In The Wire. I see Hardison as a much cooler (and less dickish) version of Kevin Mitnick. Sorry, geeks everywhere – I know that he's an incredibly smart accomplished person; but, Kevin Mitnick is not someone I'd want to have a beer with. Ohhh, and thanks to Voetsek007 (my glorious and often put-upon husband) for suggesting the book. And again to Gaben for being my fearless beta; who is never afraid to tell me something sounds stupid. And is willing to read something multiple times!
Ghost Leverage Ghost Leverage
To be or not to be; that was what Hardison felt like when that first lawyer had told him to stop hacking. Well, phreaking to be exact. At the time he'd been accessing the phone company so that he could get free internet access. No playing online; no talking with his friends; no nuthin… It would be like not breathing. And then his foster family at that particular time, before Nana, had taken away his computer. They were religious do-gooders who thought that removing the source of temptation would make it all better. Needless to say, he hadn't lasted too long with that particular placement. His tall geeky self, a garbage bag of clothes, and his precious computer had all ended up at Nana's.
Nana had understood his need for knowledge. She might not have understood why he needed to find it and she really didn't agree with his methods, which had ended up with his ass getting beat more than once; but she understood. It was a quest; kind of like World of Warcraft, but way cooler. Way, way cooler!
Hardison huddled over his keyboard, phone at his elbow, as he attempted to work another quick-fix miracle for Nate and the team. "Grrr…" The hacker growled to himself, didn't the man realize these things took time. Hacking a target wasn't a five minute thing. There was no 'Boom, and I'm in.' There were security protocols to figure out, accesses to gain, passwords to discover. It wasn't just a little bit of typing on a keyboard. He hadn't gotten access to GenGrow in ten minutes; even though it had kind of looked like that. No, there'd been a couple days with no sleep searching out information and winding his way around a maze kind of like a mouse in one of those weird psychology experiments.
Hardison picked up the phone and called one of the secretaries at the firm they were targeting. That was one thing he'd learned from the Jehovah's Witness'; how to work a phone! And that was one thing he was going to need to need right now, because he didn't have two weeks to get in. He really didn't have two days either. It would be really nice to have this done today, and be able to go to the gym and meet with his personal trainer. Alec looked down at the clock on the screen; they were having a team meeting this evening and… 'Oh crap! Two hours! That's when I'm supposed to meet Bob.' He'd started going to the gym when Sophie had started working out with Eliot and she'd told him that he needed to learn self-defense. And there wasn't no way on this green earth that he was letting Eliot near him. It would give the guy an even bigger head! Yep, he really needed to speed this thing up; it was the only way he was going to be able to go the gym and have system access prior to the meeting.
Finally, after three rings someone finally picked up. "Hi, Renee? Yes, this is Abdul down in IT. How you doing today?" They bantered for a minute about the crappy weather that she was having up in Chicago. After a couple of minutes of small talk, which always irritated Alec; that he could talk up people on the phone like there was no tomorrow; but, a women in the flesh, that caused him to sweat and freeze up. "Renee, I need to run a script so we can add the newest security patches onto your computer; because we're having problems with hackers attacking our machines."
"Oooh, that's bad!"
Alec could almost hear her eyes get wide, and she was like putty in his hands, and after a few more minutes of chitchat and carefully placed directions, Alec had access to her computer. He also learned that one of the interns was a royal pain-in-the-ass and had come running into Mr Berkowitz's office twice in the last month because people were being mean to her. And that Jamese, the PA for Ms Waters, just found out that she was having a little girl and they were going to throw her a baby shower next week. Oh yes, these were exciting days! Exciting days indeed!
Hanging up the phone Alec slugged a couple shots of orange soda, and a big grin split his face. Not only had Renee helped him put a crack into their server system which he could exploit, she'd opened a frigging super highway! He had access to everything: their password files, the storage servers, everything! It was like Christmas all over again. It was almost as good as the Bering Industries job!