Note – I made up words for this update. What do you want? I'm not a computer expert.

Hack | 55

"Oh, shit. Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit."

"What do we do?" Spinelli was so worried that he'd actually started flapping his arms a little in some sort of mini-flail. "What do we do? Stone Cold and Mister Corinthos Sir are incommunicado – what do we do?"

"Can we get a hold of them?" Elizabeth wanted to know. "Wait! No! I don't know what I'm saying – if we call them in C-"

"Shhh!" Spinelli leapt out of his seat so fast that the chair toppled over. Elizabeth thought he was coming at her and ducked out of the way, then turned and stared at him as he went straight to the stereo and started pushing buttons. In a few seconds, one of Sonny's mixed CDs of old Puerto Rican songs was blaring over the surround-sound speakers.

"If the Feds are already this close, they might have been able to bug the place," Spinelli told her quietly now that he knew he couldn't be overheard. "We need background music – foreground music, really."

"Good call," Elizabeth replied, walking with him back to the computer. "Can you find out if they're in the area? If they're close physically, too, or just stealing information online?"

"I'll log into the secure server so they can't retrace my steps or see me," he said, clicking away on the keys. "Cloaking devices – they're not just for superheroes."

"We can't call them in Costa Rica, either," she murmured, racking her brain for some semblance of a plan as he worked. "We better not chance it. If it turns out that they're close, they might have bugged the penthouses and bugged our lines. It's not hard to do, especially with the Patriot Act."

"I'm going to find that bug you put in Stone Cold's penthouse one day," he told her absently. "Mark my words…"

"Oh, keep working, nerd," Elizabeth ordered. "Okay, okay, so we can't risk calling them. Max and Milo and Francis and them are all down there with them. Ritchie – oh, shit, Ritchie's on recon. We can't get a hold of him, either."

"Is the Sentinel even trained to deal with such crises?"

"He would have had some ideas," Elizabeth retorted. "It's better than just the two of us on this."

"But the Sentinel is unavailable," Spinelli repeated, the corner of his tongue sticking out of his mouth as he hacked. "So it's just us. What are we going to do?"

"I'm trying to think," she said, kicking at the leg of his chair. "Just shut up and stop being a nerd and let me think. Okay, this is what I'm good at, right? Big picture, big picture. Oh, my God, I hate this stupid song. Okay, big picture."

She was pacing now by the balcony and once she realized this, sat down next to Spinelli and yanked her pizza toward her so that if they were being watched from the window, they wouldn't look overtly suspicious.

"All right. The Feds are investigating and taking information from the accounts. They've only got the main ones now, and they won't find out much from that, especially if they're trying to play the tax evasion game that they got Capone on."

She raked her fingers through her curls and continued to think. "Sonny and Jason pay all their income and property taxes on all property in the States, so they're fine. It'll keep the Feds busy for a little while, though, but not for too long. Next, they'll move on to…the Cayman accounts."

"I've got coordinates!" Spinelli yelped, grabbing her hand and pointing to the screen. "Look, look. I've got a lock on them. They're set up at the Metrocourt. Field agents, not the big guns. But still, if they're just across town-"

"Then they've had this planned for some time," she finished. "They were literally waiting for them to leave home so they could start snooping. Meaning they've probably got our place staked out, too."

"Which means the phones are off limits, and our cell phones are risky, too." He bit his lip nervously. "I have those chips that I worked with the Night Ninja on, the ones that make it impossible to lock coordinates on the phone or trace calls or tap them, and so on, but I'm not that confident in them. They were prototypes – me and the Night Ninja intended them to be stop-gaps as we worked on the real chips, but then the contest between me and you came up and things fell to the wayside."

"It's okay," she assured him. "We just won't use our phones unless we really need them."

"Do you think the Night Ninja could help on this?" Spinelli asked hopefully. "Three cabesas are better than two, right?"

"I think it would be safe to call him, right? I'll just be careful." She bit her lip and punched in his speed dial number, frowning when it rang six times before going to his machine. "Uh, hey, Stan! This is Elizabeth. Listen, me and the nerd are home alone and we thought we'd take advantage of it. You know, playing really loud music and ordering way too much pizza. We'd love it if you came and helped us finish it. We ordered way too much food. Way. Too. Much. Food. See you soon. Bye."

"Fingers crossed."

"Agreed," she murmured, shooting him a look. "See if you can track Stan down. Find out where he is."

"On it."

"Okay, okay, think, think. Sonny and Jason are out, Stan might be out, the guys are out. Meanwhile, the agents are practically next door and we have very limited access to our resources if we want to keep from looking suspicious. There's no way to warn Sonny and Jason…wait. Wait! Jason used the email address you set up for him – he used it today! We can get in touch with him through that, finally. I'm going to go get Mister Perkins."

She darted out of the penthouse to hers and when she got back a few minutes later, Spinelli was scowling at Princess Peach. "I got a lock on his phone. It's at his apartment."

"Yeah? Great." Elizabeth set her laptop down on the table next to him and pulled up her email so that she could let Sonny and Jason know what was happening. "At least we know he's around."

"Problem."

"Being?"

He turned his screen around. "The advanced version of Google Earth I use shows that…Stan's not in his apartment. Look. Lights off. Rooms empty."

She made a face at the satellite images. (God, technology was awesome. This was the same stuff the CIA used to spy on other countries.) "So he left his phone at home."

"Looks like it."

"Try to find his car. We've got a tracking device on it."

"It's in the lot. Wherever he went, he didn't take his car."

Elizabeth snapped her fingers. "Shit, was he supposed to go with Ritchie on the assignment? Do you remember? Shoot, I think he was…"

Spinelli threw his hands up in the air. "Then he's of no use to us and we just wasted ten minutes trying to track him down. And since there's no way to lock the information for the organization without immediately tipping off the authorities that we're on to them, we can't even-"

"We don't have time to worry about that now," Elizabeth reasoned. "They're still most likely checking the financial statements, right? That doesn't matter. They're not going to learn anything more than that Sonny and Jason know how to add. That means we move on to the important stuff. They don't keep a lot of business files about business dealings and shootouts and assignments and all that online, but I do know they have some of it backed up. We have to seal that off."

"We can use a simple encryption wall," he suggested. "Block off the sensitive information without deleting it, just keep it up but close it off."

"It'll be too obvious," she disagreed. "We'll have to do better than that. If we set up a wall, it will be obvious that we're trying to keep something hidden. And this is the government – they've got hackers like us on retainer by the hundreds, I bet. No, we have to make a decoy loop."

"I've never done one of those," Spinelli admitted. "I can make airtight encryption walls, but my decoy loops always have cracks that I can't spot."

"You find the information on our servers and close it off, I'll make the decoy loop and transfer it," Elizabeth instructed, opening up her coding application. "We'll set it up simultaneously – poof. No more incriminating evidence."

He nodded and got to work. "Did you email Stone Cold?"

"Not yet," she said. "I figure we'll just scare them. You know how they get with computer stuff. If they hear the government's tracking down their files, they'll fly back and have closed-door meetings with Alexis and move money around and they might as well just put up a big neon arrow that says "I'm With Felon" or something. No, I figure we'll do what we can and then let them in on it. At least that way, we can kind of maintain some control over the situation."

They worked frantically and in silence for the next fifteen minutes with Sonny's Puerto Rican music blaring over the speakers. When Elizabeth was done, she waited for Spinelli to set it all up together and execute it, and the files were safely hidden.

He let out a huge sigh of relief and slumped back in his seat. "Okay, one down…God knows how many left to go."

"Big picture, big picture," Elizabeth was muttering to herself. "Okay, so we hid incriminating files. That's part of it, right? We know they're watching us, we're not being suspicious, and we hid incriminating files. What's next…Oh! Cayman island accounts."

"We'll have to do something with that money," Spinelli agreed. "That's simple, we can handle that. The hard part will be doing it and making the money disappear without them finding out. It's not like just doing a surveillance check under the radar – that's individual work. To withdraw all that money – hundreds of millions of dollars per account – man, it's going to be much harder."

"Not only getting the money out, but doing something with it," Elizabeth added. "It's not like we can stuff it in the pockets of our trench coats and walk on out with it. We're going to have to do something with it – donate it, hide it, spend it, invest it – immediately so that it gets burned up. Keeping all that money hidden even for a little bit, with what we're looking at right now…"

"But that's all that's left," he pointed out. "That's the last hurdle we have to jump. …Right?"

"Not even," she grimaced. "What do you think is going to happen when they find out that all the money's gone? Obviously, they know that there are offshore accounts. And that those accounts will be pretty easy to find after they're done making sure that all the basics are solid. When they look for those accounts and it turns out that all the money Sonny and Jason make, they report and pay taxes on, what do you think the Feds are going to do? Come after us."

"Us?" Spinelli squeaked. "But we don't know anything."

Elizabeth spared him a bland look. "If we don't know anything, why are we playing really loud music and staying off our cell phones and setting up encryption walls? We know everything! We might even know more than Sonny and Jason, especially about where things are."

"We picked the wrong presidency to get involved in this," Spinelli muttered, turning back to his computer. "I don't want the next time I log onto the internets to be from Guantanamo Bay, all right?"

"We'll figure it out," Elizabeth muttered, clicking away on her own computer. "Baby steps, right? Baby steps until we've worked out the big picture. First…we get rid of the money. Somehow. Then…we get the hell on out of here."