Chapter 9

I was starting to think about starting my own company and offering my services on a consulting basis instead of trying to find work when I checked my email and found a note from Linda’s friend, Eve. I’d heard from her a few times since Linda’s visit. The first contact had been her congratulations on making it hard to track me. I thanked her and told her that if I’d known I was in a game of hide and go seek, I’d have made it even harder. After that, there’d been a bit of a flirty conversation and then nothing for a while.

The second time I heard from her, she sent me a listing for a job with a company that was working in Kandahar. The money looked good, but I was leery of any job where I had to wear body armor and bombings were a way of life.

After that, she sent me a few gag jobs, one for a high school computer science teacher. I told her that I’d take another look at the Kandahar job. The kind of bombs that you found in high schools blew up over nine months and amputated your paycheck. That got me some laughter and a picture of an extremely innocent looking girl in a slutty schoolgirl costume. She was fully clothed and there was nothing overtly sexual about it, but the innocent expression on her face and the big, trusting eyes, combined with the plaid skirt and white blouse was arousing. I asked if that was a self-portrait and she stopped messaging me back. I’d figured I’d offended her and that was the end of it. I’d thought about apologizing a few times, but I hadn’t really done anything wrong. We were bantering back and forth and suddenly she stopped.

Today’s email though was interesting. She suggested that I attend a conference in LA later in the month for cyber-security. That wasn’t really my specialty, but she knew that. It WAS her specialty though. I sent her off a quick email asking her for information on the dates, fees, contact for registration and what hotels they were using for the conference.

I figured I’d hear from her sometime overnight, but I didn’t even have my laptop closed when she was sending a reply back. I looked over the details and thought that while it was out of my wheelhouse, I might want to branch out and start shifting my focus. I messaged the conference organizers and explained that I’d been asked to attend by a colleague and that I was interested in registration. I was sent a set of forms to fill out and return. I paid the registration cost, booked a hotel and a flight and got my plans for the conference settled. I sent Eve back a message that I was registered and I’d see her there.

I went about my business and told everyone about my plans. Mike and Mary were both supportive. Rosa was interested and Linda said that she’d talk to Eve about the week-long conference.

I was still working around the house and around the basement in particular, so I wasn’t moping around, getting in the way. Mary drove me to the airport that morning and I was nervous and excited. I wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of the conference and I wasn’t sure how I’d fit with Eve, but I was looking forward to both.

I was a day early for the conference, but most people were here already. My trouble started when I got to the hotel.

“What do you mean, you don’t have a booking for me?” I asked. “I paid for the room weeks ago.” I pulled out the receipt and passed it to him. He looked it up in the computer and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Sir, there appears to be some sort of a mistake. That reservation is listed as canceled.”

“Well, I didn’t cancel it and didn’t give anyone authorization to cancel it,” I told him.

“I apologize, Sir. I’m not certain how this happened,” he said, frowning at the screen.

I took out my phone and accessed my banking app, checking my account and no, the money hadn’t been returned to my account. I told him that and he looked sheepishly at me.

“The room was originally booked for a no refund rate,” he informed me.

I was directed to a manager and the whole thing turned into a nightmare. I was stood there in the lobby for a couple of hours while they tried to convince me that I was simply out the $1200 I’d paid for my hotel for the conference. In the end, I called the conference organizers and told them what was going on and that it looked like I wouldn’t be able to attend because of the problem.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” came the reply through the phone. I stood fuming, humiliated and angry. I was starting to feel like my head was going to explode. Just as I was about to say fuck it and walk away, an older man approached the desk and asked for his reservation. He was processed though with disgusting ease and I was infuriated all over again.

When he got his room card, instead of heading for the elevators, he came and handed me the key. “Mr. Hamilton,” he said. “My name’s Greg Martin. We spoke on the phone. If you’ll let me show you to your room, I’ll explain what happened.”

I looked at him warily, but took the card from him. The hotel staff were watching with some interest, so I let him lead me to the elevators. The room he brought me to was better than the one that I’d originally booked, I noticed.

“I apologize profusely,” he said as soon as we were in the room. “It’s something of a tradition for us to do this every year. It’s an exercise in showing how easy it is for security breaches to affect every day life. If you hadn’t been a first-time attendee, you’d have known about it. Usually, the attendee calls us right away and we get them to their new booking right away. I’m embarrassed that this happened. When we hadn’t heard, we assumed that you’d discovered our joke and had decided to straighten it out yourself. We didn’t realize that you’d been fighting to get your booking reinstated all this time. You have my sincerest apologies.”

I nodded. I was at a conference about cyber-security. I’d just learned a valuable lesson in how much faith we put in the system. “I appreciate your candor, Mr. Martin,” I told him. “To be honest, cyber-security hasn’t been my focus, but I was encouraged to attend and the job market in my own field has convinced me that I might want to shift my focus.”

He asked me some questions about my training and experience and seemed to like what he heard. “Some people just use the conference to network and make contacts,” he admitted. “There’s a lot of white-hat hackers here this week. They’re never a bad group to make friends with. You need to be prepared for them to know everything about your online life though. They’ll figure out who you email, what porn you watch, how often you check Facebook, everything. You might also want to put a piece of tape over your webcam. Some of them really will go that far.”

I nodded. “So the hotel doesn’t give you grief about crawling into their booking system every year?” I asked, interested.

“It’s great for them,” he said. “We test their security for them and provide them with a detailed report of how we breached their security and in exchange, we get to book a suite for one conference attendee and their money is refunded. Your account will be refunded before you leave the conference. A normal consulting for something like this costs more than double what they lose on the rooms.”

I nodded. “That’s interesting,” I admitted. “I’d probably be a little more jovial about it if I’d been in on the joke about three hours ago, but it’s an eloquent way to show how important security is.”

He looked relieved to hear me say that. “That’s why we do it,” he confirmed to me. “Thanks for being a good sport about it. In years past, some of the attendees have been irate for days. Sometimes it sparks follow-up pranks from the other people. One year, they reprogrammed a laptop to scream obscenities whenever the owner typed a letter. They’d recorded his voice all week and his own voice would scream insults at him no matter what he did.”

I laughed about that. “Sounds like it’s better to laugh it off than scream it out.”

He nodded and promised me that the rest of the conference should go smoothly for me. He told me that I’d be mentioned in the opening lecture because of the exercise, but that it wouldn’t revolve around me.

He was right in one sense. I didn’t have any problems. I attended lectures and workshops and seminars and thought I learned more this week that I did in my last semester at college. I made contacts and even a couple of friends, but Eve never showed up. I expected her to find me the first day. When she didn’t, I went to dinner with a group of people to keep talking shop. The second day, I was so wrapped up that I barely noticed until dinner. I ate alone in a restaurant close to the hotel and wondered when she was going to pounce.

It was the fourth day of the conference when I decided that she wasn’t going to introduce herself. She knew who I was, had access to whatever materials Linda had, like high school yearbooks and the pictures my mother had strewn about the house. She knew what I looked like. I had no idea who she was or what she looked like other than her first name. I decided that there was really nothing that I could do about it, so I focused on the conference and soaked up what I could. I spent time in groups talking about the latest word, asked questions about the best way for me to get from where I was to the point where I could work in security instead of network administration and got names of schools, suggestions of books and promises for help along the way.

The last day of the conference, I managed to say goodbye to most of the people that I’d met here. They’d accepted me as one of their own, or more to the point, like a little brother that they were teaching about life. I think they liked the idea of converting a sysadmin to their way of thinking.

That night, I had a hundred emails from people I’d met here to offer more advice or just to touch base. Eve had been silent all week. I decided to leave it alone. If she didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t forcing the issue. I did ask to be added to the mailing list for next year’s conference and made plans to catch my flight the next day.

I checked out and caught a shuttle to the airport, riding with a few people from the conference. We were still talking about hacking when we had to split up to get to our respective gates. We shook hands and promised to see each other next year.

The flight home gave me a lot of time to think. I alternated between thinking about the conference, Eve, my job search, Mike and Mary, the kids and a dozen other things. It was a long day, spent on planes. We flew to Dallas where I changed planes for the last leg of the trip, caught a quick bite while waiting for my boarding call and turned on my phone briefly to check for missed calls.

I called Mary back and told her not to pick me up. I’d get a cab from the airport since I was getting in late. I hadn’t had any other messages that couldn’t wait. My email was still lighting up from the conference and I was getting a lot of leads on jobs now.

I landed in Birmingham just after midnight and after a stop at baggage claim, I was in a cab just before 1AM. I went home and checked on the kids briefly before I went to bed myself.

I didn’t hear from Eve that week, but I spent a lot of time following up on job offers. I finally decided on a network administration job for a company that did security consulting. I thought security was an increasingly interesting field. The only hitch was that the job was in LA. I’d be leaving the family again and this time it was going to be long-term.

I talked to Mike and Mary about my concerns and they were supportive. “It’s not necessarily forever,” Mike told me. “Go out there, do the job for a couple of years and then you’ll have enough experience to find something closer to home,” he said. “Or you could find that LA is home after a few years out there.”

I nodded reluctantly. “Are you guys gonna be alright if I go?” I asked, expressing my other concern.

“We’re good,” Mary told me. “The house is nearly done and Mike can handle the rest himself. I don’t want you to hold back because of us.”

I frowned at that. “I don’t want you to keep me in the dark if things aren’t okay,” I countered.

“I think Mike has learned his lesson,” she said primly, patting his hand. With her back to work, the stress in their relationship had eased and they were back to the loving couple that they’d been before.

I finally agreed and the next day, I accepted the job. I talked to Rosa about it and she was ecstatic that I was going to be working. LA was much farther away, so she wasn’t thrilled about that, but she hoped that I’d be able to move somewhere closer once I’d been with the company for a while.

I finally called Linda and told her that I was taking a job in LA. She was supportive, but then she brought up the subject that I’d known was coming.

“Eve said you haven’t talked to her since the conference,” she said gently. “What’s going on? She says that nothing happened, but I don’t think she’s telling me the whole story.”

“She stood me up,” I told her. “I went to the conference on her invitation. It was a conference for cyber-security, which is her specialty. I went there to see her. She never showed. I’d thought about what you said about her and I having a lot in common and decided to give it a chance. I don’t know what happened on her end, but I was waiting for her to find me. I know fuck-all about her. She’s been tracking me for years. I figured that she’d find me at the conference and we’d see if we hit it off. Instead, I attended alone and she hasn’t messaged me since to tell me what happened.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. “She probably got cold feet,” she said, trying to put the best face on it.

“That’s what I figured,” I said. “It would have been nice to have a guide for the thing, but it’s no big deal. I managed.”

“If I can get her head on straight, would you talk to her?” she asked.

“I never stopped talking to her,” I said. “After the conference, I figured she wasn’t interested and I left it alone. I don’t think it matters though. I’m moving to LA. I’m not gonna be much closer to Denver than I am right now.”

She sighed. “Just let me talk to her and see what she says?”

“Not a problem,” I told her. “I don’t see us getting together though. She seems to like to play games and I’m not interested in getting jerked around.”

That seemed to upset her. “Damn it!” she swore softly. “I’ll straighten her out, Ham,” she promised and we said goodbye.

I was scheduled to start in three weeks, so I got myself ready and said goodbye to everyone before I got in my truck. I was driving so I could take a side-trip to Austin on the way through. I hadn’t told Rosa I was doing that. I wanted it to be a surprise.

I drove straight through to Waco that first night. I could have made it to Rosa’s driveway, but I wasn’t dropping in on her that late and unannounced. The next morning, I checked out of the motel and drove down the road to Austin, pulling into her driveway just in time for breakfast. I rang the doorbell and a pretty young girl answered. I’d guess she was about nineteen at a glance, but I didn’t more than glance.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Sanchez,” I told her.

“Sorry, she doesn’t rent to guys,” she told me and started to close the door.

I put my hand on the door to keep it open. “Wait,” I said. “I know she doesn’t rent to guys. I’m a friend. I’m passing through the area and wanted to see her.”

She looked worried when I put my hand on the door, but calmed down when I explained. “Oh,” she said. “Okay, come on in. She’s in the kitchen.”

I took off my shoes when she let me in and she led the way inside. “Mrs. S.” she said, disappearing into the kitchen. “There’s a guy here to see you. Says he’s a friend.”

They had a brief conversation as I set my shoes aside and started toward the kitchen. She came out into the hall, looking concerned about who would be calling so early and her face lit up when she saw me. “HAM!” she screamed and wrapped her arms around me, hugging me like she hadn’t seen me in years instead of the few months that it had been.

When she was done with the hug, she pulled my face down and kissed me very thoroughly before hugging me again. By this point, we’d attracted a bit of an audience and a couple of giggles alerted us that we were being watched.

I was introduced all around to the three girls she had rooming with her. They seemed like nice girls and I was glad that Rosa was sticking to her rule about only accepting girls.

“What are you doing here?!” she asked when she had me seated at the breakfast table. I noticed that the girls were helping out with breakfast a lot and I was brought coffee and juice and toast while the rest of breakfast was prepared. It was nice, if a little overwhelming.