She had him test his keycard on the lab and the breakroom, and then she was off to tend to colonel business. Pretty sure she didn’t learn that strut in basic training, Ben thought as he watched her walk away.
Ben fixed himself some coffee and settled into the chair at his work station. He noted the time: 8:45. He logged into the network and started running diagnostics on all Witter Biotech equipment, looking for any devices not talking to the network.
By noon he completed the testing cycles. He took a short break for lunch and then started pouring over the results. It only took him a moment to find the pre-programmed glitches in the reports — some minor compatibility issues between a recent DoD security update and Witter Biotech hardware peripherals. He knew he could get his equipment updated and back online by five p.m., but if he did that, the government would likely have him off the premises and back in Vegas before dark. That would defeat the purpose of the intentional incompatible coding that had been his ticket into Area 51.
Ben decided his first step was to test the security of the base’s servers. A frontal attack would likely have him applying for asylum in Russia, so, under the guise of fixing his equipment, he assumed remote access to one of his hardware processors and began crawling the network.
Too quickly, Ben had accessed areas of the Pentagon that nobody with fewer than five stars or a Presidential seal on their jacket has clearance to view. As a U.S. citizen, the ease and freedom with which he was able to invisibly move through the DoD’s network, like a ghost roaming the halls of an old hotel, made him dry in the mouth and wet in the palms. After minimal site-seeing, he dropped down a level and resumed his electronic exploration of Area 51.
The Witter family was a tragic three-ring circus. Momma Darla left their south Dallas home every day smelling like cigarettes and Enjoli perfume, and she came home smelling like diner grease and Old Spice. Daddy Jim was a paper mill layoff cliché with a liver that was melting like wet toilet paper. Neither of them were parent material, so Ben was left to care for his intellectually disabled sister, Hannah.
In normal families, a dearth of cash would be the flame that ignited the smoldering powder-keg of frustration, but Ben’s family lived just across the state line from normal. In the Witter world, it was the exact opposite: Darla brought in more money than any double-shifting waitress in the history of food service.
Ben was fifteen and Hannah was six on the night his dad got whiskey-bent on a Hank Williams level and drove his pickled ass up to the diner to see his wife in action. He stumbled into the restaurant and looked around for her, his head swinging side-to-side like a busted barn door. When he couldn’t find her, he told Pastor Arnold’s wife to stop gawking or else he’d shove her hamburger up her cooter, then stormed through the kitchen and out the back door where he found Darla in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler with a Yankee truck driver’s progeny dripping off her chin.
Jim pulled a squared-off little .38 from the back of his britches and popped a neat hole in the truckers chest, then he used the little six-shooter to pistol-whip the teeth right out of Darla’s pouty little money maker. He grabbed the wad of cum-stained twenties from his wife’s purse and jumped in the car. He tore out of the gravel parking lot, flicking his tongue between the V in his fingers at Mrs. Arnold, who was staring out through the plate glass window. He made it six miles up the road before he wrapped himself around an oak tree.
Drama like that doesn’t go unnoticed, and the next day Child Protective Services started nosing around. Darla was arrested for prostitution, and the kids were sent to live with good ol’ Uncle Texas. Six-year-old Hannah was adopted quickly, but being a fifteen-year-old male, Ben had no such luck. He bounced around a few foster homes until he was eighteen. His off-the-charts test scores, and the shitty end of the stick life had handed him, opened college doors and the scholarship coffers.
With a PhD in bioengineering from Stanford, he was heavily recruited into the private sector, but after a couple of years he walked away from six-figures and launched Witter Biotech. He dedicated his personal life to finding Hannah and replacing the last image he had of his sister: her screaming “No, NO! Help me Bonk-Bonk!” as she was carried kicking and clawing from the courtroom by a squinty-eyed mole-man with a CPS badge.
Witter Biotech’s medical patent portfolio made its founder and sole proprietor a rich man on paper by age 30, and when Ben took the company public and sold a slice of the pie, he became one of the youngest billionaires in the world. He took pride in contributing to the human race, not just developing a new tech to keep people digitally sedated while you get Bill-Gates-rich selling off every scrap of their personal data you can mine. He viewed today’s social media entrepreneurs as modern-day forty-niners, but instead of risking their lives for gold nuggets, the current breed of prospectors were little more than geeky vampires with ethics that made the tobacco industry look like Mother Theresa.
Ben’s knife pierced the seared crust and slid into the hot, pink meat on his plate. “I’ve always heard the military feeds soldiers well, but this steak is amazing. And a glass of merlot, too?”
“Dining — it’s one of the few luxuries we have here at the Ranch.” Maldek said.
“Luxury is certainly the right word. A good steak is a rare treat these days.” Mortar shells of flavor burst in his mouth. His business dealings had taken him to the far corners of the world where, despite the prolonged Global Livestock Famine, he’d tasted the finest steaks — the lean, ruby-red Fassone beef of Italy; tender Kobe steak, swirled pink with intramuscular fat, from the Tajima cattle of Japan — but the cherry-colored filet on his plate rivaled any cut from any region.
“So? You like?” she said.
“Very much.” He made no effort to be discreet as his eyes caressed Maldek’s feminine features like a blind man’s fingers. Her beauty brought to mind the flavors of exotic flesh with Venus dimples and luxurious manes. “So is there a Mr. Maldek?”
“No, there’s not,” Maldek said from across the table, the claret juices of her steak glistening on her plump lower lip, her eyes studying his.
Ben hid the happiness that played at the corners of his mouth behind his wine glass. He was pleased she was warming to him, lowering her guard. He pulled the chalice from his lips and asked, “Is there a missus Maldek?”
“I am currently between relationships. Can we leave it at that?”
“Of course,” Ben said. He felt a mild, reflexive shock of electricity in the tip of his manhood as he considered the many scenarios that her response begged him to consider.
“Business, Mr. Witter,” she said, pushing the heavy haze of lust from between them. “How was your progress today? I should hope your diagnostics turned up some answers as to why much of your equipment is offline.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was able to identify a coding conflict with one area of the DoD’s recent update to its security program. DoD security takes priority and overrides the coding of the equipment. That way security is maintained, but at the expense of functionality of the device. I should have everything back online by end of day tomorrow.”
Ben knew exactly the opposite to be true. By the end of tomorrow, the United States military’s most guarded and secretive installation would be in utter chaos. If that wasn’t the case, it would mean he had much bigger problems than his company’s medical equipment being offline.