Alien in the House

choose to give her plausible deniability or ask for backup.
    “Nah. Just checking on Olga and Mona.”
    Mom smiled. “That’s my girl.”
    She went back to the others; I used the slow hyperspeed and went up. Time to visit Hacker International and get at least one of the million answers we needed.



CHAPTER 32
    H ACKER INTERNATIONAL CONSISTED of the five best hackers worldwide. They all had other talents, too, and were pretty much Best in Show for anything scientific or similar they were interested in, including alien linguistics and reverse engineering.
    Chuckie had found these guys and become friends with them when we were in high school, so I’d known them since then, too.
    Stryker Dane, whose real name was Eddy Simms, was their sort of leader. He was kind of an underground celebrity and also ran a pretty popular website and an even more active blog. He was also a U.F.O. and extraterrestrial languages expert.
    In addition to his other talents, Stryker wrote the
Taken Away
series, where he claimed to have been abducted by aliens and shared his exploits and experiences. His sales had skyrocketed since Operation Destruction.
    For some this would mean they’d have bought a palatial estate, gotten a haircut, hired a personal trainer, visited Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, or Express and invested in a decent wardrobe, and given overall personal hygiene serious consideration.
    Stryker being Stryker, the only change had meant he had an even bigger set of what he, and admittedly I, would call collectibles and everyone else would call really expensive dolls or sculptures of Darth Maul. Otherwise, he was still overweight, undergroomed, and dressed in khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a vintage
Star Wars
T-shirt.
    Big George Lecroix was tall, skinny, and black, and he wasn’t an author, but otherwise, he was a whole lot like Stryker. He came from France and was Europe’s best hacker. He was also fluent in twenty languages.
    Ravi Gaekwad, also known as Ravi the Geek, particularly when we were mad at him, was India’s best hacker, because the best only associated with each other in the world Hacker International lived in. In addition to having a normal-person build, Ravi was also into both the software and hardware sides of the house and was the best reverse engineer around, which had been amply proved during Operation Destruction.
    Dr. Henry Wu was small, scrawny, and bald. He came from China, covered all the languages Big George didn’t, and was also a software expert, even better than Ravi, which was saying a lot. Needless to say, in order to be in the club, he was his country’s best hacker.
    Last but in no way least was Yuri Stanislav. Yuri was blind and had earned the nickname of Omega Red, mostly because he was Russian and therefore the others didn’t feel he could be called Daredevil. Omega Red was killer with audio cryptology as well as hacking and other pursuits, which included working out, making him the rarity of the group in more ways than one.
    They were all dressed like Stryker—shorts, flip-flops, and T-shirts—even though we were in the dead of winter. Hacker International preferred to stay indoors, and since they lived on this floor as well as worked on it, and had the Elves taking care of their every need, they hadn’t left the premises since pretty much they’d arrived. Hence why Jeff considered them squatters.
    The other four were in
Star Wars
shirts, too. I’d made a half-joking comment that they clearly wore a specific science fiction shirt for each day of the week and, instead of proving me wrong and tossing on a polo shirt once in a while, they created a Shirt of the Day chart. Today was
Star Wars
. Tomorrow would be
Star Trek
. Had to hand it to them—they were organized and efficient within their ranks.
    Of course, all the hackers had good money tucked away, some under their mattresses. Their skills were such that they were paid to do things, to stop doing things, and to stop other people from doing things. When we’d discovered them housed at Andrews Air Force Base they were working for the U.S. Government. Now they worked for American Centaurion.
    Because Andrews had been attacked and their underground bunker had been destroyed, we’d moved Hacker International and their government equipment into the Embassy. Jeff had handled them being in our ballroom for exactly a week and a half and had then insisted they get moved. They had nowhere to go and were working on things we needed done, so