Yeti squinted his eyes slightly and cocked his head up a bit. "Summer," he said. "Can't say I do. What, do they come by here often?"
That wasn't a good sign. I would've figured this would've been a more straightforward meetup, but apparently nothing is that way. "I'm not sure," I said.
"Well, I'm still pretty new here. It's been, like, two months since I started here?" Yeti said.
"Not like Merlin here would know. Beautiful irony, isn't that?" Harry chimed in, patting me on the shoulder. "Merlin. You never told me that was your nickname around here. Checks out, though."
From the corner of my eye, I saw the front door creak open. A guy in a white tank top and a black durag walked inside. He had what looked to be a smartphone in his hand, his arm drooping below him. He stood by the front door for a few seconds and I observed him while Harry and Yeti chatted. He looked around the bar, but it was suspicious. It was as if he was pretending to be aimless, and failing miserably at looking unsuspicious, which of course, made me suspicious. He put his phone up to his face, but it didn't seem like he was taking a photo. It looked almost like he received a text. I thought of Summer—who they could be, what they wanted to discuss with me. Could that be Summer? That wouldn't make sense if they were trying to look that aimless. I became transfixed on the blue vapor surrounding him.
Suddenly a wave of vertigo washed over me. Images flooded my mind. Computer terminals, security tool interfaces, thousands of lines of code. A younger version of Harry giving me a hit of shaka in a park. An older man who scared me. It washed all through my head at once, but it was so fast I couldn't make sense of it. But there was this deep impulse inside of me, something so cosmic and unmistakable that I had no choice but to act. I turned away from Harry and Yeti and rushed over to the guy with the phone and snatched it from his hands.
"Yo, what the fuck?!" he exclaimed. But as quickly as I moved, Harry and Yeti darted over to me and gave me cover as I inspected his phone. His screen didn't have a text messaging interface; it was a packet analyzer. He was trying to intercept network traffic. These packet analyzers give out every bit of information all the machines in a given network transfer to each other. He had access to everything from IP addresses to open ports. These kinds of tools are commonly used to initiate man-in-the-middle attacks, a type of cyberattack where a threat actor intercepts data being transferred between devices. They use this information usually to figure out which machines in a network they need to attack. This guy—whoever he is—was planning some kind of attack, probably some kind of credential theft.
Thankfully Yeti's large and imposing frame kept the guy from taking any swings. Harry looked at me bewildered. "What the hell are you doing, man?" he half-whispered to me.
I looked over to the guy in the durag. "Whose IP were you trying to grab?" I interrogated. I felt sharp, fierce.
His look softened a bit. He put up his palms and cocked his head. "Hey man, I wasn't lookin' for nobody specific, alright?"
Yeti held his right hand out toward me and kept his eyes on the durag guy. "Give me the phone," he said flatly.
I had no idea how I even intuited his intentions like that. It was as if there was a greater force working within me, like it was something that has been guiding me for a long time, but just now recalled how to access. If we just gave him his phone back, there was no telling what he could do. He was in just long enough to grab anybody's IP address. As scuzzy as this place looked, I knew it had computers. He had everything he needed to further stage an attack. If he got that phone back, it wouldn't be the last of him. We had to do something, fast.
So I grabbed his phone with both hands and snapped it in half.
Bitcoin address: bc1qtgqvj6qjxnaxkns20x5rcwnxvv3jqzhduvvxfc