Nobody Does It Better

Stirred, Not Shaken

He was definitely going to get fired.

If J'onn J'onzz was there, and he read Winn's mind, he was going to get fired.

If Kara was there, and she saw Lena with her x-ray vision, or heard her with her super hearing, he was going to get fired.

If Kara was there, and she was in her street clothes, then... well, then there was going to be an awkward pause. Then an inconvenient, but long overdue conversation. Then a massive fight. And then he was going to get fired.

Well, it was a good thing he had contacts in the private sector; among them, the woman standing next to him, in one of the relatively all-access areas of the DEO building, waiting, not-very-patiently, for him to complete his hack.

"Is it strange for you to be breaking into your own security?" Lena asked.

"There's no such thing as security," Winn said, automatically.

"That doesn't sound entirely correct," Lena said, skeptical.

"Nope. No such thing as security, only different levels of inconvenience," he said. Security was a useful catch-all term, sure, but it gave a false sense of... security. If it was possible for an authorised person to access whatever it was you were trying to keep hidden; then, with enough effort, it was possible for an unauthorised person to get at it as well. It was just inconvenient.

And the DEO system was veryinconvenient. Of course it was, he'd designed it to be so. Most of the DEO system break-ins over the last two years had been by him. He'd felt duty bound to give them an upgrade.

The physical break-ins had been harder to fix. The White Martians... okay, the White Martian thing, he hadn't figured out yet. Twelve-foot-tall genocidal psychic changelings could pretty much force their way through any countermeasures you might have put in place to stop them; and, although J'onn had originally been kind of adamant that they set up a fire trap at all entrances and exits, Winn had managed to convince him that open flames at the exits would be, if not more dangerous, then at least a more frequent threat than the White Martians would.

But other intruders were a different story. Winn had set up facial and species recognition on the DEO security cameras. If they saw you, and you weren't authorised, then the alarms would sound. There were 'guests', of course - prisoners or medical emergencies, mostly, plus the weird glitch where the system wouldn't recognise Kara when she had her glasses on - but guests would be tagged by security on the way in, and the Director's office notified immediately of their presence, for identification and approval.

So, no, Lena couldn't go in as a guest. She'd have to be on file. Any new profiles would have to go through both the Director's office and HR for approval before going on the system; but, once the profile was approved, it would actually get entered into the system by someone else. Namely, it'd be done by Winn. So, all he really had to do was break into the system from outside, and fake two permissions. This was something he'd have to safeguard against later, if he managed to pull it off at all.

It wasn't easy, but he could do it. After all, nobody does it better.

"The Spy Who Loved Me?" Lena asked, eyebrow raised.

"What? What are you talking about?" Winn replied. How did she know?

"You hum the music under your breath sometimes, when you're concentrating," Lena said, checking her watch.