Hack (12 page)

“That’s okay.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

I lay on my bed, looking up out of the window. The night sky was clear, and the stars were out. There was Orion.

I thought over the events of the evening. Nothing much had happened, and I had hardly made any progress toward my goals. But it had been better than sitting in my room. At least I had a feeling of moving forwards. I wondered idly how much Hannah had really known about Grace and the party. I figured that I might have been followed, observed, and assessed. There was probably somebody always watching me. Maybe there always would be. But I thought that Philips surely couldn’t mind me having a girlfriend. It was cover. I was doing things my own way. Like the crew of the
USS Enterprise
, my partners in crime prevention had a no-interference clause in their contract.

That was a thought to go to sleep on: Philips and Garman and Richard and Hannah dressed in Star Trek uniforms, beaming down to the dark planet Malik. I was the anonymous security guard in red—the one who beams down just to get zapped, or driven insane, or torn apart by intergalactic terrorists.

46

Saturday morning. Normally, not having to go to school meant that I could get on with my education. But I was working for the man. I played with my official notebook computer for an hour, and re-familiarized myself with a few hacker tools, getting them ready for the main event, assuming it ever happened. But I was far more interested in working on my own machine, the one that was still stuck in my rented locker at school. So far, I hadn’t even touched it.

For another few hours, I sat around, supposedly watching TV, but with my brain going through my next moves. At about ten o'clock, I went into town and bought a poster for the back of the bedroom door, and some music. The rest of the afternoon was spent listening to music, and playing games on the machine that the FBI had got for the purpose of making their house look like a home. I had been playing for almost four hours when I heard the folks pull into the driveway. Richard came in, followed by Hannah, carrying half a dozen bags.

“Hi, David.”

“Hi.”

“Are you still playing video games?”

That was one of those rhetorical questions.

“Your dad and I are going out tonight to see a movie; will you be okay on your own?”

Hannah’s tone was casual and conversational. If she was digging for information, you wouldn’t have known from her voice.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Won’t you get bored?”

“Not me.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“I found a place across town, Gameworld. I’ll go there and play some video games. It beats staring at a screen all night.”

“Gameworld?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s nice. We’ll drop you off there when we go out.”

“No, thanks. I’ll get a taxi.”

“We’re going into town anyway.”

“I gotta pick up someone on the way,” I said, matching Hannah’s casual tone.

“Oh. A friend?” She made it sound like an innocent question that any mother might ask.

“It’s just someone from school.”

“You have a new friend?”

“Yeah,” I said, as if I was trying to play the video game, and she was disturbing me. Maybe she would leave it at that. We couldn’t talk about anything in the house, so there was no need to press it.

“We could give him a lift, too.”

“
She
lives on the other side of town.”

“Are you seeing a girl?” Hannah said. Her surprise was evident.

“I’m not seeing a girl. I am just going with her to Gameworld.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to pry, but you may as well let us give you a lift. We can pick up your friend on the way.”

“Will you just drop it, please?”

47

Everything went quiet for a minute. Then Richard, who had apparently been listening from the kitchen. “I’m hungry. How about some Chinese food?”

“It’ll save me cooking,” Hannah said.

“What about you, David?”

It wasn’t an offer I could decline. This time, Richard waited until we turned out of the subdivision and onto the main road before starting the inquisition.

“So, Romeo, why didn’t you tell us about this girl?”

I looked astonished. “What are you talking about?”

“This time Richard is right,” Hannah said, almost angry for the first time.

“We want to know who the girl is.”

“She’s nobody. She’s just cover.”

“Cover for what, exactly?” Richard said.

“What do you think?”

“How much do you know about this girl?” asked Hannah.

I sighed. “It’s just some girl. She listens to pop music and wears trendy clothes. She never blew anything up. I overheard Zaqarwi’s friend talking about a big party this weekend. I figured it might be a good chance to bump into him, only I’m not invited, but this girl was going, and I got her to invite me. I told you I was going to a party.”

“Did you meet Zaqarwi?” Richard said.

“Of course I didn’t,” I snapped. “I would have told you. I went to see if he was there. But I heard that he hangs out at Gameworld, so that’s where I am gonna be tonight. Hence I need a girl. I gotta have someone to hang out with. If I keep socializing by myself, it's gonna look to Zaqarwi like I’m following him.”

My speech over, I turned my head to look out of the window. The car pulled up at a Chinese restaurant, and nobody moved.

“What’s her name?” Richard said. He was annoyed at being talked to like that.

“Grace.”

“Grace what?”

I hadn’t got Grace’s surname, but Mack had been the name on the email of the eBay account.

“I think it’s Mack,” I said. Richard took out his phone, and hit autodial. I didn’t see who he was ringing, but I suspected that it was Philips’s number or some other FBI number. A second later, he barked into the phone, “Run a check on a Grace Mack and her family.”

For a minute, we all sat in silence. Then he announced, “All right, she checks out.”

“Man,” I said. “You must think that there are terrorists on every corner.”

He glared at me in the car’s rearview mirror. “Your girlfriend’s stepfather is known to the local police as a fence. He’s got a sheet for selling stolen car radios, and assault.”

So, the guy with the ponytail was not Grace’s real father.

“I’m not going with him,” I said. Hannah looked at Richard, and Richard looked at Hannah.

“Look,” I said, “I’m playing the cards I’ve got. I’ll let you see them when I’m ready. I promise that I won’t keep anything from you. It’s just the way I work. I get things done, and then talk about them. The opposite from ninety-nine percent of everybody else on the planet. But it’s how I work.”

That seemed to end the conversation. We ate Chinese food, and then left.

Nobody said anything all the way to Grace’s house. I introduced Grace to my so-48

called parents, but there was too much tension in the air for any relaxed conversation during the drive. It was almost 7:30 p.m. when we arrived at Gameworld, which described itself as “The New Frontier in Gaming.”

After Richard and Hannah dropped us off, Grace and I walked into the establishment.

“Nerd world,” Grace said, with mild amusement. We got a few feet in and looked around. Near to the entrance were some of the older “classic” arcade games.

At first I had no idea why they put them there, instead of the newer games. But then I realized that they probably had placed the good stuff in the middle of the park, so as to discourage people from loitering near the entrance, and to encourage them to enter into the new frontier, to boldly go and play the newer games. Some systems are counterintuitive until you consider them from a money-making perspective.

We walked past ads of immense virtual worlds, with kids standing half in and half out of them—like the phantom tollbooth—and into the classics section. The place was practically deserted, but there were a few nerdy guys enjoying the games. There were even a couple of girlfriends, too, waiting patiently, without a trace of boredom on their faces. As I understood it from my data on dating, girls like to do activities together. What those activities were apparently wasn’t as important as the sharing aspect. When I first read that, it sounded dumb, but the evidence seemed to support the idea.

Gameworld was more my scene than last night’s party. I moved around the people at Gameworld a lot easier than the party-goers. With these people, I didn’t feel any awkwardness.

“Where to first?” I asked Grace.

“I don’t mind.”

“I’ll race you around Monaco.”

We headed over to the classics section. Here were the golden oldies. Space Invaders, Galaga, Phoenix, the games that I had played in between cracking sessions, partly because my homebrew computer wouldn’t play anything else, and partly because I liked to spend time with my disassembler-monitor, de-engineering the game code, to see how it had been written, and changing it around to get infinite lives, or to make the characters go through walls—stuff like that. Whoever said I was a computer genius didn’t know me. Anything I did took hundreds of hours of sitting and learning instruction sets, and staring at printouts—certainly not genius.

I sat Grace in a surround-screen racing car game, which had been mind-blowingly advanced back in the day, stuck several coins into the slot, and then got in beside her.

“Select automatic transmission, so you don’t have to shift gears,” I said. We raced around the streets, hitting everything but the finishing line, Grace laughing whenever she drove off a Monaco cliff, or smashed into a shop window. Next up was a game of Phoenix, followed by Gorf. We went from machine to machine. I had to keep moving around, keeping my eye out for Zaqarwi. But Grace didn’t seem to mind. She seemed happy just to go with the flow.

While we were playing a doubles game of pong (in black and white), my eye caught a guy in the corner, with his arms around his girlfriend, as he showed her how to shoot the marauding aliens. He kept pointing out what to shoot. I made a mental note of it, for future reference. After half an hour in the retro section, I followed the big signs and moved into the virtual-reality section. We tried a game of something called “Otherworld.” Its objective was to shoot at other players, and after the first 49

minute, I heard a shout come over the headset, something that I might have once laughed at:

“Frag the noob!” That would be me.

After that, we lingered around the slot machine section for a minute, but there was nothing of interest—games or Zaqarwi—and we soon left. I looked at my watch.

Of the three hours I was supposed to spend in the place, we had been there only ninety minutes.

I spotted a coffee shop, and figured that we could waste half an hour inside.

“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.

Grace nodded, and we went in.

“You’re the only person I know who drinks decaffeinated coffee,” Grace said.

“Well, everybody else was drinking the real stuff, so I thought I’d switch to decaffeinated, just to be different.”

“So, you’re a rebel?”

“A rebel without a clue.”

Grace smiled. I liked that she smiled at my feeble jokes.

“You know, I don’t even know your full name.”

“David Johnson.”

“Middle name?”

“None. What’s your full name?”

“Grace Mack.”

“So, how long have you lived in Elmwood, Miss Mack?”

“Pretty much all my life. How come you moved here?”

I shrugged.

“Where do you live?” I told her my address.

“It’s nice up there.”

“It’s pretty boring. Nothing ever happens. The highlight of the day is when Mrs. Brown’s Alsatian goes after Mrs. White’s poodle.” That got another smile.

We talked for the best part of an hour—just random stuff like that. I had no idea that girls like to talk about where you used to live, or where you had gone on holiday. Watching movies must have given me the idea that everything you said to girls had to be wisecracks and one-liners.

“Do you want to get a last game in?”

“Okay.”

We went back to the retro section. I stuck a coin in a Defender game, and got wasted almost immediately. I lost three lives in less than a minute. I was out of practice, but Defender was always a killer. Its sole purpose in life was to take your money, and throw you off. I hit the joystick, in mild annoyance.

“I must be out of touch,” I said. I turned to go, and almost collided with someone coming the other way.

“Sorry,” I said, before I even realized who it was. It was Zaqarwi, with another guy I had never seen. Zaqarwi smiled.

“That’s all right.” I waited for him to say something further. He was the recruiter, after all, not me.

“I think my high score is safe,” he said, pointing a finger at the screen. I grinned.

“I haven’t played Defender for years. It kicked me straight off.”

“You’re David, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Abdul. This is Al.” He indicated his silent friend.

50

“Hi,” I said to Al, who quietly said hi in return.

“This is Grace.” Grace said hi.

“I saw your hack the other day,” continued Zaqarwi, referring to the whiteboard hack.

I grinned. “I just got bored, and started poking around.”

“How did you do it?”

“Simple,” I said, and gave Zaqarwi a hacker-to-hacker synopsis of how I had hijacked the whiteboard.

“I checked the address of my machine, noticed the last number was the same as the asset tag on the side of the computer case.” Zaqarwi nodded.

“Everybody was talking about it.”

“I normally like to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t resist such an easy target.

I got bored.”

“Me, too. Maybe we should get a network game going sometime.”

“That would make class a bit more interesting. I noticed that they arranged the computers so that the teacher can always see what is going on.”

“We tried to talk Logan into letting us get a game together last Christmas, but he got too nervous. This year, we’ll set something up without him knowing. The Elmwood Christmas Frag.”

I laughed. I was surprised by Zaqarwi. He had this deadpan way of delivering lines. And it’s always nice to meet a fellow computer nerd. If it wasn’t for the knowledge that he was a terrorist, I might have enjoyed the conversation.