Work Text:
Not every job they take needs a hacker, or even a fake fed-ex guy willing to expose his family jewels in an elevator. Sometimes, the job is little more than a name and a location, along with the ever-present reminder that if things go south they're on their own. The team quickly learns that leaving Jensen with nothing to do but monitor communications is a recipe for disaster. If he's not singing 80s power ballads over the comms or narrating imaginary telenovellas to his 'adoring public', he's hacking into and fiddling with things he shouldn't: email accounts, bank accounts, school records, military records, magazine subscriptions... Privacy is a theoretical concept to Jensen, even on a good day.
It's Cougar who eventually comes up with a solution. Jensen isn't so sure.
"You want me to be your spotter?" Cougar shrugs an affirmative but Jensen is still dubious. "You want me to sit on deserted rooftops with you and help calculate windspeed and direction and air pressure, angles and trajectories and- Oh!" Jensen interrupts himself. "Is someone pressuring you into this? Did Clay threaten to shoot me for real this time? Was the OKCupid profile thing a step too far? Because I really think it could work. I tweaked the algorithms to rule out at least ninety percent of the crazies he usually attracts, and I have email filters set up to weed out most of the rest. Keywords, man, it's all about the keywords."
Jensen flails a couple of steps backwards when Cougar tosses something at him, underhand, but recovers quickly enough to snatch it out of the air. It's roughly the size of his third favorite military-issued cellphone, and in a similar shade of dirty green, but with less buttons and a slightly larger, though still relatively tiny, screen. The tag says it's a weather meter, which means... Ah, hell, Jensen has no clue what it means, but that doesn't prevent him from poking buttons and investigating menus, eyes scanning the provided data as it flows across the small screen.
"Man, you don't need me up there with you. Hell, with this thing, you barely need you! It measures windspeed, air pressure, humidity, and a dozen other things I only half understand. You can tell it what gun and ammo you're using... It does everything but pull the trigger, Cougs, and there's no way you'd let me touch your baby on the job, so I just don't get it."
Cougar rolls one shoulder. "You are right, it tells me everything I need to know... for where I am. But not for the target. You know my range; that toy don't know shit at that distance. I want you to take apart the math, everything that goes into making the calculation for this end, and find me a way to get as much of that data as you can for the other end. Picture Clay's face when he gets to collect on all those bets he thinks I don't know about."
Jensen pokes at the gadget a few more times while he thinks about Clay winning bets, and about extending Cougar's range with maths and tech and-
"Wait. Is this about that Australian thing again? Dude, you need to let it go. It's an unconfirmed kill, so it doesn't count as breaking your buddy's record. Don't let it... Ah, hell, don't look at me like that, I can't- Okay! Okay, already, I'll see what I can do. There's gotta be a way to rig one of these beasts for remote control, maybe mount it on something with a motor, wheels, a little-"
The muttering fades out as Jensen wanders away, already prying the back off the electronic unit. Cougar sits back and smirks, absently petting his baby. Clay's not the only one who's going to be winning some bets.