Rollo Baskies woke up in the darkness and knew immediately he was in trouble. He felt the cold concrete on his face. His shoulder ached from the floor’s unrelenting hardness. The faint glow coming from behind him, he realized was from a cigarette. He could smell the smoke now. He was afraid to turn over and look. What was the last thing he remembered?

“You awake, dipshit?”He didn’t recognize the voice, but the tone was clear enough. The man now exhaling second hand smoke wasn’t a friend. He turned slowly to face him and immediately felt a stabbing pain in his ribs, broken for sure, he thought. “Where am I?” he asked. His lower lip was swollen. It hurt when he spoke.  

The man laughed. “Hey, Mickey, he wants to know where he is.”

“Tell him man. He’s in a funeral home, his. He’s gonna tell us what we want to know and then he’s gonna to die,” Mickey said. Rollo pulled himself up to a sitting position. He remembered now. A motor home had pulled up behind his car as he walked the half-block to where he was parked. He thought it was odd, but he had other things on his mind.

He had just opened the door to his Mustang and was about to get in when two men approached him from behind. Not yet 35 and in excellent shape, Rollo was a man capable of handling himself. Yet the two man had no trouble dragging him from his car and tossing him into the Winnebago. He remembered they asked a question, one he was taught not to answer. “I have no idea,” he said.

“We don’t have time for this,” one of the men said. He grabbed Rollo by his longish black hair and slapped him hard across the face twice. “Ready to tell me now, Baskies?”

“Your fly is open,” Rollo said. That’s when the bigger man of the two went to work on him, beating him senseless. He never even got to throw a punch. The speed of the attack rendered him helpless. The two men must have driven him here to what he assumed was a basement.

He had been in his office, late on Friday night. His co-worker, Eve was still in the office, putting the finishing touch on an IT security project. They had started dating only recently. Eve, an independent woman, had approached him and asked him out. They had dinner and she insisted on paying for it. When he protested she said, “You’ll have to do something special to buy me dinner.”  He really liked her. 

Rollo’s eyes began to focus on his surroundings. As far as he could tell, there were only two folding chairs in the room. “Not for nothing, guys, but what am I supposed to know?” His head was clearing quickly now. He was eager to buy a little time to devise a plan. 

The guy with the cigarette lit a flashlight and turned it on Rollo’s face, the glare blinding him. “That fat lip you got? It wouldn’t have been necessary if you told us what we wanted in the first place. Right Mick?” The smaller man was doing most of the talking.

For some reason he thought of a movie he saw only last week where the hostage points out that if the bad guy kills him, he’ll never get the information he needs. “Whatever it is you want to know I’ll tell you.” 

Mickey stood and stretched his legs. “So now you’re ready to talk to us, huh?”

“Can I have some water, please?” Rollo’s eyes adjusted to the light now. He could see both men, although one eye was partially shut, no doubt from a punch he didn’t recall. The guy with the flashlight was indeed slight in stature. The other guy, the one called Mickey, was a tall, heavyset man, the one who administered the beating. Rollo could make out the words printed on his T-shirt. It said, Size Matters.

Mickey grabbed the flashlight and said, “Stu, go get him some water.” Stu got up to go. Rollo watched him, trying to get an idea of where they were. But Mickey anticipated that. He shined the flashlight’s beam directly into Rollo’s eyes. “I don’t want to hit you again man, not yet at least, but you get nosy, you’re gonna get more broken ribs.”

“Sorry,” Rollo said. “Can you tell me what it is you think I know?”

“I don’t think you know something. I know you do. You’re gonna tell me how to hack into your company’s system. We need to transfer some funds and make some records disappear.”

Stu came in with a warm bottle of water, half filled. Rollo hesitated, but he was so thirsty he couldn’t resist. He had to be careful not to spill it. His lower lip especially, was a mess and it hurt when he touched the bottle’s rim.

“Guys, there’s no way I can just tell you how to do that. I’d have to show you, or give you access to my passwords so you can find what you want.”

“Hear that Stu? He’s calling you a dumb ass. Doesn’t think you got the smarts to be a hacker.”“Gimmie that flashlight, I’ll show him a little something.”

“Not just yet,” Mickey said, holding Stu back. He turned to Rollo. “You had your water. Now, computer geek, expert in all kinds of computer software and stuff, we know you designed that system for them Wall Street types.  You want something to write with?”

“I’m sorry Mickey. It isn’t that simple. If it was, you wouldn’t need me.”

Mickey stood up and handed the flashlight to Stu. He pulled a garrote made of rope from his pocket and showed it to Rollo. “Last chance.”

Rollo thought again about the movie scene cliché. “If you kill me you’ll never get what you need.” Both men laughed. Stu let out a guffaw. “Who’s the dumb ass now?” he said.

“I hate to shatter your Mustang driving ego, brother, but you are only one of at least three people we can get this from,” Mickey said.

The system the men wanted to hack had very sensitive information about the finances of some of the world’s biggest conglomerates which facilitated sophisticated financial transactions. As he came to his senses, it occurred to Rollo that these were the men who had tried unsuccessfully to hack into the system a few days ago. Now they were resorting to threats, violence and even murder to get what they wanted. Then it dawned on him that the two men in front of him were way out of their depth, that somehow they had stumbled onto something well beyond their customary crimes.

He realized they had to be working for someone else, someone smarter, but who? Given the nature of what these two men were after, he doubted that their leader was very sophisticated either. They had no idea of how difficult it would be to gain access to such sensitive information. Certainly it could be done, but as one of the designers of the security system, Rollo knew how difficult it would be for even the most advanced hackers to achieve.

He was pretty sure that the men standing in front of him were thugs, not hackers. He decided to test his theory. “You guys are asking me to reveal secrets about string theory and bitmap. You want gigaflop data with hard drive file extensions. On top of that you want me to reveal our communications link cyber-triads firewall. You realize what you’re asking for?”

The two men looked at each other. He could see a flicker of doubt in their eyes. “That’s right,” Stu said. “Write it down and maybe we’ll let you go out easy. Unless you want us to go after the lady who’s next on the list.”

“What lady?”

Mickey gave Rollo a malevolent stare, deliberately pausing before he spoke. “Eve Mucho, we know all your people’s names, dipshit. No sense her dying too.”

Just as Rollo suspected, these men had no idea of how computer systems worked, or what they were. But somebody did their homework. After all, they knew the key players in his organization. “All right, all right. I’ll give you what you need,” he said. “But I need more water and that pen and paper. And I’m going to need more light so I can see what I’m writing.”

Stu looked at the plastic bottle on the floor next to where Rollo was sitting. “If you want some water pick that up and hand it to me, nice and slow.” Rollo pretended to miss the bottle and pushed it so he would have to get up to retrieve it. “Sorry, Stu. Please fill it to the top this time.” He got up and gave himself a few seconds to get his sea legs. Luckily for him, aside from his injuries, he was in good shape. He was in pain, but he hoped adrenalin would kick in when he needed it. Stu returned with the full bottle of water, the pad and a pen. An idea was forming in Rollo’s mind. “Any chance I can have a little something to eat? Might be my last supper.” He offered an apologetic gesture. 

“Damn it, why didn’t you say something before?” Stu asked looking at Mickey to see if they should give Rollo something to eat. 

“Give him a Hershey bar,” Mickey said. Stu stalked off to get one. “Start writing,” Mickey said. Rollo took a swig of water. “This will take a while.” Stu returned with the candy. Rollo forced himself not to devour it. He was pretty sure he would need his energy for what he was planning. He started to write, but stopped and looked at Mickey.  “I need more light.” Mickey walked over to the wall and flipped the light switch.

Rollo wrote down a long sequence of items, the first five actual related to preliminary steps one might use to hack into a private system, though not the one he created. Then he began to add some things that were technically correct but did not apply in any way to the task at hand. He drew a few diagrams too, wanting to make sure he could buy as much time as possible.

“If I give you what you want, why do you have to kill me?” he asked.

“We’re going to let your people think you sold out and took off, dummy. A bit of what guys like you call misdirection.” Mickey said. That worried Rollo. This guy may not know a thing about computers, but he wasn’t stupid. Ten minutes later he handed what he’d written to Mickey, hoping he would take the material to whoever was behind the scheme, leaving him with Stu. He noticed that both men had handguns tucked into their waistbands. Mickey glanced at the two and a half pages of notes. Satisfied, he handed them to Stu. “Give this to Alvarez and let me know what he says. He turned to Rollo and said, “If you’re bullshitting us, I’m going to make sure you die slow.”

Rollo was standing just over two feet from where Mickey stood. He waited for Stu to leave the room, listening hard for any sound that might confirm that he’d left the building. He couldn’t tell. He took another swig and then, taking as deep a breath as his painful ribs would allow, he threw the bottle hard in Mickey’s face. Wasting no time, he lunged forward, thrusting the point of the pen into Mickey’s stomach. The big man let out a grunt, but fought back until Rollo plunged the pen into the man’s stomach again. He started to fall and Rollo grabbed the gun and yanked it from Mickey’s waist. He didn’t want to shoot Mickey unless he had to. If Stu and other men were in the building, they hadn’t heard anything. The last thing he wanted was to fire a shot.

He looked at Mickey. He was moaning on the concrete floor, but still struggling to get up. He had no choice. He took the pen out of the man’s stomach and shoved it under his ribcage puncturing his lung. Mickey wasn’t dead, but he stopped moving then. Rollo wasn’t sure what to do next. At least he had Mickey’s gun, he thought. If he was about to die, he was going to take some people with him.

He opened the door and saw a large open space. It finally dawned on him that he was in the basement of a house. He had the flashlight on, but he could see a bit of daylight through a tiny window now. There were steps leading up to the house. His best hope was the element of surprise. If he waited for Stu to return, he might not be alone, especially if the boss realized his notes were nonsense. He didn’t know much about gunfights, but he was pretty sure if he was cornered in the basement and had to exchange gunfire with two or three other men, he was probably going to be shot.   

Better to climb the stairs and take advantage of the element of surprise. He took his shoes off and carefully climbed. Trying to go as quickly as he could. Luckily, the steps offered only very minor, quiet squeaks. He reached the top and put his head against the door. What he heard sent a shiver through his entire body. Stu was coming toward the door, talking to someone. “That prick! I’m going to take his eyes out one at a time and then go to work on pushing firecrackers into his ears. He’s gonna tell us Mr. Alvarez, you can be sure of that.”     

Rollo turned and stood with his back against the wall. When Stu opened the door, he grabbed the slightly built man’s shirt with his left hand and yanked him over the landing and down the steps.  With his right hand, he fired his pistol into Alvarez’s midsection, knocking him back and down. He glanced back at Stu. The man was out cold, probably dead.

He stepped into the kitchen and quickly looked around for anyone else. He relaxed for a second which almost cost him his life. Just then, bursting through the back door was the biggest man he had ever seen, bigger than Mickey. The man fired at him and hit him in his left shoulder. Rollo fired back. He actually closed his eyes when he did it. When he opened them he saw a man with a look of disbelief on his face and a hole in the center of his forehead. The man dropped to the floor. 

Rollo was bleeding and his arm hurt even more than his ribs. The adrenalin rush he had hoped for had obviously given him the strength to do what he did, but now, the pain was almost unbearable. He looked for a phone but didn’t see one. He shut the basement door and barricaded it. The big man on the floor had a cell phone. Rollo called 911 and asked for help. He slumped down next to the dead guy and waited.

When the EMT team got there, he was so weak he could barely talk, but he managed to get the heart of the story out. As they were wheeling him to the ambulance, he had a thought. Maybe now Eve would let him buy dinner.