An American At Hogwarts: Book Three

Chapter Forty-Five

A/N: Disclaimer, I know almost nothing about coding and did very minimal research lol. Just suspend your disbelief that this is how Marvel hacking works 😂❤️

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"This is a very bad idea," I muttered, sitting poised and ready in front of my laptop anyway as I watched Jackson. He just grinned back at me and raised the phone in his hand.

I couldn't call Maria and keep her talking to hack SHIELD again. She'd see through me in a second. But Jackson, the son of Monica Rappuccini when SHIELD was in the middle of a manhunt for both of them?

He'd be able to hold her attention.

"Alright, just remember, you have to keep her on the line until I give you the thumbs up," I said.

"Yeah, I known, you've only told me fifteen times."

"We're only gonna get one shot at this Jackson, so-"

He cut me off by pushing the dial button, holding it up on speaker as it rang. We'd cast a silencing charm around ourselves to make sure no identifiable noises could be heard, and the magic around this place acted as its own unbeatable location scrambler, so there was no way she could trace the call.

"Who's this?" came Maria's harsh voice after a few seconds. I immediately sprang into action, working through Ana and the phone in Jackson's hand to find my way into a hiding spot in SHIELD's systems. "How did you get this number?"

"...This is Jackson Rappuccini."

Maria's end of the line went silent, and I knew she'd be frantically trying to have her agents put a trace on the line.

"How can we be sure it's really you?" she said after a few beats of silence.

"Who else would even know I exist, besides a bunch of high-level SHIELD agents with no reason to fake the call? I know my mother's been looking for me, and that you've been looking for both of us."

"Alright, say you are Jackson. Why are you calling?"

I tuned out their conversation as he gave some bullshit, vague answer, which led to Maria asking more questions. As long as she and SHIELD thought there was a chance of tracing the call, they'd be working to keep the call going as hard as we were.

I completely zoned out of everything but the screens and lines of code around me. I needed somewhere to bury into SHIELD's systems, a little hiding place where my hack would go unnoticed. I had no shot at getting through the insane cybersecurity that protected this organization in the duration of one phone call, no matter how good an actor and bullshitter Jackson might be. I needed to find a way to mask my program as it slowly worked its way through the walls without being detected. I'd managed to find a spot two years ago, the last time I did this, but as expected they'd upped their security since then.

I vaguely heard Jackson saying something about California, when I finally found my in. Any minute now, Maria would start to realize SHIELD didn't have a way to trace this call, and she'd run out of patience with Jackson. I needed to be quick.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, Ana doing her best to help me as I worked like a maniac. Finally, I managed to nestle my own program into a blind spot in their security, and to give myself a back door to return to it when I needed to. I sighed and leaned back in my chair as soon as it was finished. Relief flooded me as the tension eased out of my shoulders, and I felt like I'd just finished a training course.

"Of course, I could also be in Morocco-"

I shook my head as I at last tuned back in to what Jackson was saying. He didn't get very far into his sentence before Maria's voiced interrupted.