Nige stared at me from the doorway, reminding me that I stood in the middle of his ‘living room’.
“You come here just to text girls and play with yourself, or do you have a good reason for taking up my valuable time?” Wow… he was pissy. I guess I’d been pushing my luck with everyone.
“Sorry, Nige. I appreciate that you have better things to do. It’s just that we have a potential problem for the Bennetts. I wanted to talk it over with you first.”
He blinked, looking vaguely surprised. “Okay, go on.”
I glanced at the chair. “Mind if I sit?” He shrugged, stepping into the room, to sit opposite me.
“So, I’ve just come back from seeing Jeff Clarke. As instructed.”
He nodded, leaning back in the chair, his hands on the arms.
“And?”
I sighed. “And he advised me that the loss of his phone, during a mugging, was no big deal, because he backs up everything to the fucking cloud.”
Nige groaned. “Fuck me. Who teaches these older generations this shit? Has he got a new phone yet?”
I shrugged. “He was on his way to do that when I left there. Do you have his phone here?”
He nodded. “Trouble is, he might beat us to it, in retrieving from the cloud. Let’s go see what we can do.”
He stood up, and left the room, then he peered back into the room. “You coming?”
Wow. Hell yes, I want to see his fucking setup.
I followed him down a hall, to another door he opened with a code and a thumbprint.
“Your security measures are fucking epic.” I said as he led me into a room straight out of the fucking movies.
There were so many screens. He sat at a chair directly in the middle of the area, with the screens curving around his seat in a semi-circle. He started tapping away at the keyboard, and then he grabbed a phone from the desk drawer.
“That’s Jeff’s?” He nodded. I hadn’t really taken note of the phone itself when he showed me the picture originally.
“Can we delete it now?”
Nige nodded. “Trouble is the copy on the cloud. If I can’t get to it through the phone, I’m going to have to hack it. Now I’m good, but sometimes they outwit me. It would be easier to get the new phone from him, because this one will go dark. I’m surprised it hasn’t already. Chances are that he’s not as tech savvy as he thinks he is. You know… if we mention it to the Bennetts…”
“They’ll have Marco kill him; I know. But I don’t think he necessarily deserves that. He’s not his son.”
Nige turned in his seat to look at me. “Just because there’s no record of it, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have that in him too.”
I glanced at the many screens, then looked back at Nige. “Well, it’s not like we can trick him into being a pervert, just so we can justify having him killed. It’s bad enough that my actions got him beaten and mugged. I thought I requested a pickpocket.”
Nige shrugged. “Some of the boys are a bit… energetic. Things escalate quite quickly. I don’t believe our man set out to rough him up, it’s just how it went.”
I watched as he tapped away at the phone, and then started tapping away at his keyboard. A soft groan, before he sat back, told me it didn’t go well.
“What is it?”
“Phone is now locked out, so he must have his new one. And his cloud is password protected, and is going to take me time. You know… if we send someone persuasive, we may be able to encourage him to delete it from the cloud himself.”
“Please tell me you’re not their ideas guy.” I said, frowning at him. I mean, that was a monumentally stupid idea.
“Or you could take your gun, and go encourage him.” He said, smirking at me.
“Okay… I didn’t think your ideas could get any worse. I don’t have the gun anymore. I dropped it in at an amnesty collection.”