“Me, too,” said Chouchou. She sighed. “My own human wants to get rid of me—can you imagine a sadder thing?”
Chapter 13
“So what is it you wanted to do?” asked Scarlett. The two neighborhood watch members were watching how Scarlett’s grandnephew was tapping on his laptop, pulling up weird-looking data on the screen and generally doing all kinds of complicated things. They were in the living room of the Poole residence, Marge and Tex having gone to bed.
“Don’t you worry about what I want to do,” said Vesta. “As long as Kevin knows what I want to do, that’s what matters.”
“Do you know what she’s talking about, Kev?” asked Scarlett.
Kevin, a string bean of a kid who, at sixteen, was already a full head taller than his great-auntie Scarlett, grinned and nodded.“Oh, absolutely, I know what Vesta wants. I’m not so sure she will like what she gets, though.”
“I’ll like it,” said Vesta. “What I want to know is if you can get me what I want.”
“I can get it,” said Kevin with the cocky self-assurance of a teenage computer nerd.
“And you’re sure they can’t trace it back to you?”
“Absolutely. I’m masking my IP address. If they try to find it they’ll end up in Hong Kong or Tokyo, depending on when they look.”
Scarlett shook her head.“All this for a new kitchen.”
“Hey, kitchens are important!” said Vesta. “We spend a large portion of our lives in our kitchens.”
“I thought that was the bedroom?” said Scarlett, quirking a perfectly penciled eyebrow.
Kevin glanced up at his auntie with a grin.“Isn’t it possible that you spend half your life in the bedroom, Auntie Scarlett, and Vesta spends half her life in the kitchen?”
“Shut up and keep working, you,” Vesta snapped, and Kevin shut up and directed his fingers to nimbly dance across the keyboard again, doing whatever it was he was doing. “Look, I want this kitchen, and Marge wants this kitchen. Now we just need to find a way to make Tex pay for this kitchen. And I’m pretty sure with this price he’ll never agree to pull his wallet, so we need to bring what he’s willing to pay and what Fred Kramer of Kramer Kitchen Kreation is asking closer together. Is that so hard to understand?”
“Um,” said Scarlett, skeptical still, “you know when you told me you had a very important mission for the neighborhood watch planned, and you needed Kevin’s help, I never expected you were going to try to rip off the Kitchen King’s outfit.”
“Look, the Kitchen King is rich enough. He’s not going to miss a couple of bucks.”
“This is weird,” suddenly Kevin muttered.
“What is?” asked Scarlett, her heart rate suddenly spiking. Somehow whenever she and Vesta were out and about, the prospect of doing something entirely illegal always seemed to loom large on the horizon.
“I’m not the only one who’s trying to hack the Kitchen King. In fact it looks like there’s at least one other hacker trying to get into the company computer system.”
“So? Plenty of people are probably not willing to pay these ridiculously inflated prices,” said Vesta.
“They’re not trying to mess with the prices, though,” said Kevin as he stared intently at a bunch of weird code on his screen.
“So what do they want?” asked Vesta.
“I’m not sure, but it looks as if…”
“As if what?”
“Well, it looks as if they’re trying to lock down the entire company.”
“You mean… what do you mean, exactly?” asked Scarlett, who’d never understood a thing about computers and the more her nephew talked about what it was he did the more her eyes glazed over and the less she understood.
Kevin looked up, his own eyes glittering excitedly.“I think I just caught one of those ransomware hackers, Auntie Scarlett.”
“What’s a ransomware hacker?” asked Vesta, who was as computer illiterate as her friend, or even more so.
“You know. They put a bunch of viruses on your computer system, effectively locking the whole thing down, so you can’t do anything, and then they get in touch and tell you that they’ll unlock your systems in exchange for let’s say a million bucks, payable in bitcoin. If you don’t pay, youcan kiss your company goodbye, for you’ll have to reinstalleverything. And if you do pay, they’ll unlock everything and you can carry on like before.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked Scarlett.
Kevin gave her one of his looks that said: are you serious?“Yes, Auntie Scarlett, it’s completely illegal. These people are criminals, only instead of putting their hands in your pockets, they do it online.”
“Well, that’s not very nice,” said Scarlett, eliciting a guffaw from her geeky nephew.
“So what are you going to do about it?” asked Vesta.
“Do? I’m not going to do anything.”
“Can’t you stop them?” asked Scarlett.
“Um… I guess I can do that… if that’s what you want me to do.” He dragged his eyes away from the screen. “Is that what you want me to do?”
Vesta thought for a moment, then finally nodded in the affirmative.“Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s exactly what I want you to do.”
