LEVERAGE AU - volume one

Chapter Five

The five all went back to Pidge’s loft, when they entered she went right to her computer, “Alright, 4 first class plane tickets to anywhere but here, comin up.”
Boomer, however, wasn’t listening, “I’m gonna beat Dubenich so bad that even the people who look like him are gonna bleed.”
Alice snorted, “You won’t get within 100 yards. He knows your face. He knows all our faces.”
“He tried to kill us!”
“Im more worried about the fact that I left that job without any pay.”
“How is that more important?”
“I take that personally.”
“Theres something seriously wrong with you.”
Pidge wove them over, “Heads up, heads up look. Dubenich’s story is 90 percent true. He is the head of Bering Aerospace big rival to Pierson, but, check out what my little web crawlers coughed up.”
She then started a video on her screen with the Pierson Aviation Representative speaking: “We’ve lost research that we’ve been working on for over five years. Our servers have been sabotaged, now we’re going to pursue these perpetrators to the full extent of the law and with all the resources we have at our disposal.”
Jack snorted, “Cover story for sure.”
“Here’s a log of last night’s rip. Internal timestamps on the project –2003, 2004, they’re way, way down in the code. There’s no reason to fake those man.”
“So we didn’t steal the plans back?” Alice asked.
“Nope, we just stole them. I just wanna know why he would lie…”
Jack answered after a moment of thought, “Cause you’re thieves. If he hired you for a straight up crime, you’d know he was a bad guy like you, you’d be suspicious. This way you just saw another citizen in over his head and that’s why you didn’t see the double cross coming.”
“Well why didn’t you see it coming then?”
“Not a thief.”
Boomer frowned, “You know what, maybe that was the problem. If you—“
Pidge cut him off, “I bought tickets to London, Rome, Paris and Sao Paulo all matching the IDs that you gave me.”
Jack walked over to Pidge’s screen, eyes squinting in thought, “He’s hiding… . Now that was a high-risk play. You got your balls tied to the stock price like a cinder block, shareholder meeting coming up. We can’t let this guy have any time to cool down.”
Boomer raised an eyebrow, “You wanna run a game on this guy? You?”
“Yeah. I mean, how do you think I got most of my stolen merchandise back? I mean, this guy he’s greedy, he thinks he’s smart, he’s the best kind of mark.”
Alice shrugged, “He does think he got rid of us…”
Pidge nodded, “Element of surprise.”
Boomer crossed his arms, “Whats in it for me?”
Jack responded instantly, “Payback… and if it goes well, lots and lotsa money.”
Alice looked at Jack, “And for me?”
Jack shrugged “A lot of money, and if it goes right, payback. Pidge?”
Pidge slowly nodded, “I was just gonna send a thousand porno magazines to his office, but, hell yeah man, let’s kick him up.”
Jack stood, “Great. Lets go get Spike.” And with that, he left.
“…Wait whats a Spike?”