Chapter 17 : THE IT GIRL
Queen Consolidated's lobby was a cathedral of glass and marble designed to make visitors feel small and employees feel grateful. The ceiling soared four stories, the reception desk stretched thirty feet of polished stone, and the security presence consisted of two uniformed guards whose primary function appeared to be looking impressive next to the metal detectors.
I walked through the front door at 9:47 AM wearing the only suit the Goodwill on 6th Street had in my size — charcoal, slightly too broad in the shoulders, paired with a blue tie Danny's wife had ironed for me when I'd told Danny I had a "job interview." The business card in my wallet read C. Weston, Pinnacle Data Solutions, IT Consulting — printed at the library for twelve cents on card stock that almost passed for professional.
The System had generated the mission three days ago:
[MISSION — STANDARD: ACCESS QC SERVER ARCHIVES. COPY SUBSIDIARY FINANCIAL RECORDS. REWARD: 35 CP. TIME LIMIT: 5 DAYS.]
Queen Consolidated's server architecture was, from what I remembered of the show, a fortress at the executive level and a sieve everywhere else. Oliver's secret lair in the basement relied on Felicity's ability to route around the building's own security — which meant the IT infrastructure had the kind of legacy vulnerabilities that a determined consultant with a fake business card could exploit, provided he didn't aim too high.
The lobby desk was manned by a woman in her forties whose name tag read MARGARET and whose expression read prove you belong here.
"Hi — Charles Weston, Pinnacle Data Solutions. I have a 10 AM with your IT department regarding the server consolidation audit."
Margaret checked her screen. There was no appointment because Pinnacle Data Solutions didn't exist and the server consolidation audit was a fiction I'd constructed from a QC press release about upgrading their data infrastructure.
"I'm not seeing that in the system."
"It was scheduled through Donna in procurement. She mentioned there might be a booking error — she said to ask for the IT floor and they'd sort it."
There was no Donna in procurement. But Queen Consolidated employed over three thousand people, and the odds of a lobby receptionist knowing every procurement coordinator by name were roughly the same as the odds of me arm-wrestling Oliver Queen.
Margaret frowned. Made a call. The call went to voicemail — procurement departments at 10 AM on a Tuesday were reliably busy. She looked at the business card, looked at the suit, looked at the face that had been designed by genetics and circumstance to be thoroughly forgettable.
"Twelfth floor. Take the east elevator bank. Ask for IT reception when you get up there."
"Thank you, Margaret."
The badge she printed was a visitor pass — limited access, time-stamped, good for three hours. The metal detector didn't care about the USB drive in my pocket because USB drives weren't weapons, even when they contained data extraction scripts purchased from a dark web vendor for forty dollars in bitcoin converted from the host body's debit card.
The twelfth floor was exactly what I'd expected from the show's brief glimpses: fluorescent lighting, cubicle farms, the hum of server racks behind locked doors, and the particular energy of an IT department that existed in a perpetual state of being underfunded and overworked by an executive suite that considered technology a necessary evil.
The server room was at the end of the corridor, marked with a keycard reader and a sign that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I didn't try the door. The plan wasn't the server room — it was the network closet two doors down, an unmarked utility space that housed the floor's patch panels and network switches. In buildings this age, network closets were rarely locked because the janitorial staff needed access for the wiring, and janitorial access meant a door that responded to a firm push and a prayer.
The door was locked. The prayer failed.
I stood in the corridor for eight seconds — which was four seconds too long — before PER 11 flagged an alternative. The ceiling tiles above the corridor were the standard drop-ceiling variety, removable, with the network cabling running through the plenum space above. The utility closet's ceiling was part of the same grid. All I needed was a ladder.
The supply closet at the end of the hall had a stepladder. I carried it down the corridor with the confidence of a man performing maintenance, set it up beneath a ceiling tile outside the server room, climbed up, pushed the tile aside, and reached into the plenum space until my hand found the first network switch.
The USB drive plugged into an open port. The extraction script would run for forty-eight hours, pulling subsidiary financial records from the accessible segments of QC's internal network and storing them on the drive's internal memory. I'd return in two days, retrieve the drive, and walk out.
I replaced the ceiling tile. Returned the ladder. Straightened the tie.
The east elevator bank was thirty feet down the corridor. I was fifteen feet from it when the door at the far end opened and a woman walked through, blonde ponytail swinging, tablet clutched against her chest, mouth already moving.
"—and if they can't be bothered to index their own relational databases then I don't see why I should have to — oh."
Felicity Smoak stopped mid-stride and mid-sentence simultaneously, which was impressive given that both activities appeared to operate on separate motors. She was shorter than the show had suggested — five-four, maybe five-five — and the glasses were bigger in person, oversized frames that somehow worked because everything about Felicity was slightly too much and precisely right.
Our eyes met. Two seconds. She was carrying the tablet and a stack of folders and a coffee that was dangerously close to the edge of the folder stack, and her expression was the universal look of someone interrupted in the middle of an internal monologue they hadn't realized was external.
"Wrong floor," I said, and smiled, and kept walking.
"Happens all the time. The elevator buttons are — I mean, they're labeled, but the labeling is counterintuitive because whoever designed the numbering system apparently never actually rode an elevator, so..."
She was still talking when I turned the corner. The voice trailed off behind me, replaced by the sound of heels on linoleum as she continued toward whatever database emergency had generated the monologue.
The printed envelope was already on the IT department mail tray — deposited two minutes earlier during the stepladder operation, when the corridor had been empty and PER 11 had confirmed no observers. Inside: a curated data packet on a man called the Dodger — real name, known aliases, art theft methodology, fence network, and his anticipated arrival in Starling City based on a pattern of heists that moved west across the Eastern Seaboard.
The Dodger was a Season 1 villain who would cross Oliver's path within weeks. Felicity had been instrumental in tracking him down in the show. The intel packet would land on her desk as an anonymous gift — the kind of information that a curious, brilliant, chronically underutilized IT specialist would investigate compulsively, which would put her in a position to help Oliver when the Dodger arrived and establish her value to Team Arrow before the canon timeline demanded it.
A seed. Planted carefully, in soil I knew would be fertile.
The elevator carried me back to the lobby. I returned the visitor badge to Margaret, walked through the metal detectors without triggering anything, and stepped into December air that tasted like freedom and operational adrenaline.
The USB drive sat in my jacket pocket like a small bomb. In forty-eight hours, it would contain the financial records of every QC subsidiary that the extraction script could reach, and somewhere in that data might be the exact location of the machine Malcolm Merlyn intended to use to kill five hundred people.
The suit was going back to Goodwill tomorrow. But the twelve-cent business cards had earned their investment a hundred times over.
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