“Can I have some more of that stuff?” she asked as she took the papers from him.
“What stuff?” he asked.
“That… man, that stuff you make with the sugar and milk…”
“Coffee?” he asked, flabbergasted. “Agatha, you know what coffee is.”
“I know, for fuck’s sake. The word just slipped my mind while all this code is going through my brain processes. Like you don’t hit a glitch every now and then,” she snapped.
“Okay, okay. I’ll make you some of that stuff. What are you doing with Nina and Sam’s details, may I dare ask?” Purdue called from the cappuccino machine behind his bar.
“I’m unfreezing their bank accounts, David. I am hacking into the bank account of the Black Sun,” she smiled, chewing on a licorice whip.
Purdue almost had a fit. He raced toward his twin sister to see what she was doing on the screen.
“Are you out of your mind, Agatha? Do you have any idea what magnitude of security and technical alarm systems these people have globally?” he spat in panic, another reaction Dave Purdue would never exhibit until now.
Agatha looked at him with concern. “How to respond to your bitch fit… hmm,” she said calmly through the black candy between her teeth. “First off, their servers, if I’m not mistaken, were programmed and firewalled by… you… eh?”
Purdue nodded in contemplation, “Yes?”
“And only one person in this world knows how to hack your systems, because only one person knows how you code, which circuits and sub-servers you use,” she said.
“You,” he sighed with a small measure of relief, sitting attentively like a nervous backseat driver.
“That is correct. Ten points to Gryffindor,” she said snidely.
“No need for melodrama,” Purdue reprimanded her, but her lip curled into a smile as he went to finish her coffee.
“You would do well to take your own advice there, old boy,” Agatha teased.
“So they won’t detect you on the main servers. You should run a worm,” he suggested with a mischievous grin, the likes of the old Purdue.
“I should!” she laughed. “But first let’s get your friends back to their old statuses. That’s one recovery. Then we will hack back in when we come back from Russia, and rupture their funding accounts. While their leadership is on a rocky road, a blow to their finances should lend them a well-deserved prison fuck. Bend over, Black Sun! Aunty Agatha has a boner!” she sang playfully, licorice clenched between her teeth, as if she was playing Metal Gear Solid.
Purdue roared with laughter along with his naughty sister. She sure was a nerd with bite.
She completed her intrusion. “I left a scrambler to throw off their heat seekers.”
“Good.”
Dave Purdue last saw his sister in the summer of 1996, in the southern lake region of the Congo. He was still a bit more coy back then, and had not a tenth of the wealth he had now.
Agatha and David Purdue were accompanying a distant family member for a bit of what the family called “culture.” Unfortunately neither of them shared their paternal great uncle’s penchant for hunting, but much as they hated watching the old man slaughter elephants for his illegal ivory trade, they did not have the means to leave the perilous country without his guidance.
Dave enjoyed the adventure, a portend to his escapades in his thirties and forties. Like his uncle, his sister’s incessant nagging to stop the killing grew tedious and soon the two were not speaking. Much as she wanted to leave, she considered taking her uncle and brother on about the senseless poaching all in the name of money — a most unwelcome excuse to any of the Purdue men. When she saw that Uncle Wiggins and her brother would not be moved by her insistence, she told them that she would do everything in her power to oust her great uncle’s little enterprise to the authorities when she got home.
The old man just laughed and told David not to think anything of a woman’s intimidation, and that she was just upset.
Somehow Agatha’s appeals to leave ended up in a tiff, and without ceremony Uncle Wiggins promised Agatha that he would leave her right there in the jungle if he heard one more complaint from her. At the time it was not a threat he would have adhered to, but as time wore on and the young woman became more aggressive about his methods, Uncle Wiggins took David and his hunting party out early one morning, leaving Agatha behind at the camp with the local women.
After another day of hunting, and an unexpected night spent camping in the jungle, the Purdue party boarded a ferry boat the next morning. Dave Purdue inquired fervently while they were on the boat, crossing Lake Tanganyika. But his great uncle only assured him that Agatha was “well taken care of” and should soon be flown out to join them at the Zanzibar port by a charter plane he hired to collect her at the nearest airfield.
By the time they drove from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam, Dave Purdue knew that his sister was lost in Africa. In fact, he thought she was industrious enough to get herself home and did his best to push the matter out of his head. As the months went by Purdue did try to find Agatha, but his trail would grow cold at every end. His sources would report that she was seen, that she was alive and well, and that she was an activist in North Africa, Mauritius, and Egypt the last time they heard. And so he let it go eventually, figuring that his twin sister was following her passion for reform and conservation, and thus did not need saving anymore, if she ever had.
It was rather a shock to see her again after decades apart, but he enjoyed her company immensely. With a little pressing he was sure she would eventually reveal why she resurfaced now.
“So tell me why you wanted me to get Sam and Nina out of Russia,” Purdue insisted. He had been trying to get to the bottom of her mostly shrouded reasons for seeking his help, but Agatha hardly gave him the full picture and the way he knew her, that was all he would get, until she decided otherwise.
“You have always been about the money, David. I doubt you would be interested in anything you did not profit from,” she replied coolly, as she sipped her coffee. “I need Dr. Gould to help me find something I was hired to locate. As you know, my business is books. And hers is history. I don’t need much from you, other than summoning the lady so that I can use her expertise.”
“That’s all you need from me?” he asked, a smirk playing on his face.
“Yes, David,” she sighed.
“In the past few months Dr. Gould, and others involved like myself, have gone incognito to avoid being persecuted by the Black Sun organization and its affiliates. These people are not to be trifled with.”
“No doubt something you did that pissed them off,” she said plainly.
He could not refute that.
“In any event, I need you to find her for me. She would be invaluable to my investigation and well remunerated by my client,” Agatha said, shifting impatiently. “And I do not have an eternity to get to it, understand?”
“So, this is not a social call to catch up on all the things we have been up to?” he smiled sarcastically, playing on his sister’s well-known intolerance for tardiness.
“Oh, I am up to date on your doings, David, and well informed. You have not exactly been modest with your achievements and celebrity. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to dig up the things you have been involved in. Where do you think I heard of Nina Gould?” she asked, her tone much like that of a boasting child on a full playground.
“Well, I’m afraid we would have to go to Russia to get her. While she is in hiding I am sure she doesn’t have a phone and cannot just cross borders without acquiring some sort of forged identity,” he explained.
“Good. You go get her. I’ll wait in Edinburgh, at that nice house of yours,” she nodded derisively.