5.
"Mom."
Andy could feel her heart speed up as she heard the clear hope in the girl's voice. She took a deep breath to try to calm her nerves.
"No, My name is Andy. I'm a friend," Andy hedged.
That last part wasn't exactly true but then again maybe she was the only friend Miranda still had left.
"Is my mom dead?" the girl asked in a shaky voice.
"No, sweetheart. Your mom is just fine," Andy said wondering why the girl believed her mother was dead.
"Then why are you answering her phone?" the girl asked.
"Smart girl," Andy thought to herself as she tried to come up with a good explanation.
"Your mom is sleeping," Andy said.
She could tell that it had been the wrong thing to say as the girl let out a wail. Her next words were unintelligible as she tried to regain her breath.
She heard a shuffling before another voice came on the line.
"Who the fuck is this and what did you say to my sister."
Andy could tell that she was now talking to the girl's twin. She could also tell that despite the harsh words the other girl was also scared out of her mind.
She wanted to calm things down a little so she asked a question she hoped would blunt the girl's fear-driven anger, "Are you, Caroline or Cassidy?"
"I'm Cassidy, now who th are you?"
"Well she's consistent at least," Andy thought.
"My name is Andrea but everyone just calls me Andy."
"Your sister called your mom's phone but I answered because your mom is sleeping."
Now, Andy knew she had the girls full attention.
"That's bullshit, our dad told us that our Mom died. Caroline just didn't believe him," Cassidy said. Andy thought that from her tone that Cassidy wasn't exactly sold on the idea either.
"Mom's not dead!" Caroline wailed in the background.
Andy did her best to calm her nerves as she tried to figure out how to keep this situation from going further off the rails.
"Your sister's right," Andy finally said in what she hoped was in a reassuring tone.
"Prove it, go wake our mom up so we talk to her," Cassidy said.
Andy gave that some thought then she disconnected the call. Before they could call back Andy selected the last call then chose the Facetime option hoping the girls were using an iPhone. The video call was connected allowing Andy to see the faces of Miranda's twelve-year-old twin daughters.
"What the fuck," Cassidy said angrily
"You wanted proof," Andy pointed out. Before either girl could comment further, Andy turned the phone and moved close to the bed. She brought the phone close enough that the girls could hear the sound of the monitor as it mimicked the rhythm of Miranda's steady heartbeat. She pushed in even tighter hoping the girls would be able to see the rise and fall of Miranda's chest as she took in slow even breaths. Finally, she turned the phone's camera back onto herself.
Andy's heart broke as she looked at the two girls holding each other tightly as tears streamed down both girls' faces.
"Listen up both you," Andy said now back in control of the conversation.
"As you can see your mom is very much alive. You can also see that she is not awake. What I did not tell you before is that your mom had a minor accident and has been resting since. I promise you that she will be fine and that I will make sure that she calls you as soon as she's awake."
Andy watched as both girls nodded their heads. She could also see the relief clear on their faces.
"Now girls I want you to tell me exactly what your dad told you to make you think your mom was dead."
Andy listened as Cassidy, described the conversation in great detail.
When the tale was done, Andy still had more question than answers. She was sure that something was off here and she was more afraid than ever that the girls' father was somehow mixed up in all of this.
"Listen closely, I know that I am a stranger to you but I going to ask you to trust me anyway."
Both girls nodded their heads which was obviously a good sign.
"I don't want you to tell anyone, including your dad about your mom being alive."
"Why?" Caroline asked.
"She doesn't trust Dad," Cassidy pointed out.
Andy agreed with Cassidy's comment but she wasn't ready to condemn their father without proof.
Instead, she said, "I was not lying when I said that I was a friend and as a friend, it is my job to look after your mom and she would want me to protect the both of you too. So I don't want anyone to know your mom is alive until I can figure out what's going on. Do you understand?"
Andy watched as the girls conducted a rather extensive if wordless conversation. Cassidy, having been elected spokesman, said, " If you promise to have our mom call us the second she wakes up then we will keep quiet."
Andy held up her hand as she made her solemn vow. She could tell that the girls were doing their best to hide grins. It wasn't hard to imagine how the girls felt. The first year after her parent's death, a call telling her that it was all a big mistake had been her fondest wish.
She gave the girls her number and told them to call her if they needed anything. She reiterated her promise to have their mom call as soon as she could before saying goodbye to both girls. She ended the video call then looked toward her silent companion hoping that for the sake of her girls that she would wake soon.
She grabbed her laptop then logged into the anonymous email client that Sam had set up for her some time ago. She composed a message updating Sam on the phone call along with her misgivings about the girls' father supposed foreknowledge of Miranda's death.
Sam strolled into one of her favorite coffee shops and ordered a latte with an extra shot. This was going to take a while so the hit of caffeine was a must. She took her beverage over to a table in the back corner of the cafe. She'd chosen this particular table for two reasons. First, it was situated in a location that meant no security camera could get a good look at her and second was because the little mom and pop coffee shop shared a wall with one of Google's many data centers.
She sat and pulled out the new Alienware laptop. She dived back into her messenger bag and came out with a small tool kit. She undid a panel on the bottom of the machine and removed the hard drive. She slid in a replacement drive that she had already formatted with her own specialized version of the Linux operating system. She booted the machine and smiled as her owl logo appeared on the screen. She moved her face in front of the webcam then typed a 35 character passcode from memory. As network security went, she knew that this particular style of two-factor verification was next to impossible to crack. She even had a backup plan if someone forced her to enter the code. The dummy passcode would boot the machine into an entirely separate operating system while all data from the primary OS was wiped away permanently.
The owl disappeared and was replaced by a view of the desktop along with several programs of her own design. The first program that she launched let her slip into a backdoor she'd already created inside of Google's system. That gave her anonymous access to the companies fast as shit next-gen wifi. After a quick check to make sure that no one at the tech giant had discovered her little back door she was ready to go.
She started with a rather simple hack into the servers for the cities family court. Once inside she quickly found the files related to Miranda's latest custody hearing. A quick review of the transcript and she felt quite certain that the fix was in. There was just no evidence of Miranda being a bad mother. On the contrary, all signs pointed to Miranda as a devoted mother who made more than a few sacrifices for the sake of her children. She saw that the ruling had been appealed but that since Miranda no longer had an attorney the case had stalled.
Sam quickly fixed that situation by assigning Lily as Miranda new attorney. Next, she re-assigned the case to a judge who had a reputation for doing the right thing and put the hearing near the top of the queue. With that accomplished, she generated an email from the judge's clerk requiring Miranda's former law firm to turn over all case files to Lily before the end of the day tomorrow. Since that was all she could do to help with the custody issue at the moment, she logged out of that system. She sent a quick note to Lily letting her know that she would be getting everything she needed to start working the case by tomorrow.
Her next hack was hardly a hack at all.
"They may as well not even have security," she thought as she broke into the website for the supposedly super-secret all-boy club at Yale. A review of the membership included a who's who in New York power politics. More importantly, it included a list of names that she had previously identified could be part of the conspiracy. She made note of the names including; Stephen (douchebag ex or DBE), William Edgerton (managing partner at DBE's law firm), Aaron Beck (crooked divorce judge), Robert Lang (crooked custody judge), Lester Martin (Miranda's former attorney aka the rat).
Sam valued loyalty and she would take immense personal pleasure in making the rat pay if it turned out he was working against his own client.
"Follow the money," she whispered the old adage as she turned her sights onto the financial accounts of both judges.
After some digging, it was clear to Sam that both judges lived well above the means afforded them through their government salaries. Unfortunately, the source of the money did not show up in the form of major deposits to their bank accounts. Robert Lang (crooked custody judge), was born wealthy but the family money dried up not long after he took the bench. Despite that setback, Robert and his wife Stephanie managed to more than rebuild that wealth over the past twenty years mostly due to Stephanie's highly profitable work as an art dealer. Sam, who had more than just a little experience dealing with people who skirted the law, knew that dealing art was a good way to clean dirty money.
The buyer and the seller just had to agree on a price and no one could argue because art was about individual taste. She found several high dollar purchases made shortly before and after the custody hearing. The problem was that each purchase was conducted through a shell company based in the Cayman Islands. Using shell companies to make this type of purchase was not unusual but it was problematic. She knew that almost all of the companies based in the Caymans were nothing more than a series of numbers with no traceable connection to a real person. She wasn't quite ready to give up on this thread, so she launched a script that would cross-reference purchases with major rulings made by the judge.
"Shit," she breathed out as she stood to stretch. It appeared that the Lang's were given some good advice as all the suspicious transaction she found were also conducted through masked accounts.
She looked down to confirm her computer locked as soon as the camera could no longer detect her face. She went to the counter and ordered coffee and a pastry and was not surprised that the pretty blonde barista had already left for the day. She took a bite of the flaky danish and a sip of coffee then waited a moment to allow the caffeine and sugar to replenish her reserves. She was going to have to get some serious sleep or get laid.
"Maybe both, she thought before cooling her jets. Mia was a ten-hour flight away at the best of times. Now she was in Austria for trade negotiations and would be tied up all week. She thanked the goddess for vibrators as she refocused on the task at hand.
She decided to take a deeper dive into crooked divorce judge's life. In many ways, it was a similar story. The Beck's were a wealthy couple with most of the money coming from the wife's business. In this case, Chelsea Beck sold antiques. In reality, selling antiques was a business that made it even easier to launder money. Normally the way people got caught dealing in bullshit antiques was when the buyer tried to insure the bogus item. A check in a separate database that cataloged insurance fraud cases came up with no bogus claims involving the Becks. That wasn't exactly a surprise because if the buyer was in on the scam and not greedy the insurance company would not be brought into play. She did the same cross-check to connect high profile cases seen by the husband to major sales by the wife. There were a number of suspicious purchases and even a few of the same buyers but she was met with the same dead end when she tried to make a connection to a real person.
She closed her eyes and willed her body not to give into to the desire to go home, come, then crash. A ping in her headphones pulled her mind back to the surface. She focused on the incoming message from Andy by way of her Aphrodite account. She read the message and was heartbroken by the ordeal Miranda's girls were being put through. She was also super proud of how Andy had kept her head and dealt with a really tough situation.
Sam's mind cleared as she realized she now had sed on a new line of inquiry.
"Why did Miranda's ex tell their kids that she was dead?"
She rolled that thought around in her head for a few minutes but was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.
"If he was guessing there was no way he would tell his kids that without proof?"
"On the other hand how could he have known that Miranda might or would take her own life?"
Sam decided to put those questions to the side for know. She had a new target, so she refocused on her laptop and turned her full attention on Greg Brant. The Brant Company was an investment firm with a solid reputation but a look into the books told a different story. After stunning initial success, the company had fallen on hard times. He was close to losing it all until.
"Motherfucker," she breathed as she discovered just how Greg had saved his company.
It turned out that a few years ago Greg made a massive bet that stock in the Elias Clark Company would go down. The bet had paid off big mostly because of Miranda's dismissal from Runway. Sam did not believe in coincidence and was soon proven correct as she hacked into the brokerage accounts for all the men in this conspiracy. They had all profited from the same bet but no one had profited as much as Greg Brant, Stephen Tomlinson, and Irving Ravitz. The wheels were turning in Sam's mind as she considered the implications.
"Huh," she thought as she discovered that those three alongside a few others were now quietly acquiring the floundering EC stock.
"What the fuck are you slimeballs up to," Sam wondered as she continued digging.
An hour later she downloaded all of the incriminating information then transferred it to her own untouchable cloud server. She composed an email to Andy with her findings making it clear that this thing was not over. Her immediate desire was to go on the attack but she was tired plus it wasn't a good idea to continue using this particular machine. She used her phone to order three machines just like this one. She paid in coin and had them shipped to a P.O. box linked to her own anonymous shell company. By the time they arrived, she would have a clearer understanding of her next steps.
She flipped the machine over and used her little toolkit to swap the hard drives again. She stored everything back into her bag and made her way out of the little cafe. She looked around and let her eyes adjust to the dark before she strolled in the direction of the Hudson. A few minutes later she watched as $3,500 worth of computer equipment sank into the dark water. When she got back to her bike she decided there was one more thing she wanted to do before going home for her well deserved orgasm and sleep.
Andy heard the chime signaling and incoming mail from Sam. She opened it and began to read. She had to take several breaks to calm her roiling emotions as she began to understand that these men had ruined someone's life for their own financial gain. It felt so much like what her uncle had done to her parents. What he had done to her. She swallowed the anger knowing that it would cloud her judgment. There was more happening here than met the eye. As she contemplated her next steps, she felt a distinct feeling that she was being been watched. She looked up.
"Oh," she thought as a pair of intense blue eyes stared back at her.
AN: Ok, folks no update last week, it could not be helped but I'm back this week with a new chapter. Andy met the girls and it went about how you'd expect. I initially envisioned both girls being crushed and sad about the news that their mother was dead, but then it occurred to me that no two people handle grief the same way. So I decided to have Caroline be in denial where Cass had bypassed denial and went straight to Anger. I wanted to show that Andy was more than capable of handling both girls state of mind and to show how she gained their trust because she is the only one right now telling them the truth. Meanwhile, Sam is using her well-honed hacker skills to unravel why these things are happening. Finally, Miranda has returned. How will Andy win Miranda's trust? Is that all Andy wants (hint fuck no)? What is Sam up to, and why did she change to colors of her avatar and who the hell is Mia. Tune in to see the answers to those questions and many other questions you didn't want the answers too. I am very gratified by the feedback I've gotten so far. Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to read my "stuff" and a special thanks to those who took the time to review. Let me know what you think.