Hack (18 page)

I realized that my mouth was dry, and I would’ve loved to slip into a nearby break room to get some water. But there was no time to worry about that. We had to get out of there as soon as possible. At any moment, we could run right into—

“Donald!”

A plump lady in a nearby cubicle spotted the guy walking toward us, and called out to him.

He stopped, looked at her, glanced back at us, and then returned his attention to her.

She continued. “I can’t log into the system. Can you help?”

By this time, we were passing right by him, and he gave us a suspicious look.

The plump lady interrupted his thoughts. “Donald, I need to get this report out ASAP!”

Peripherally, I saw him reluctantly walk toward her cubicle.

Grace looked even more pale than before.

“Grace, you are doing great. We’re going out now.”

Grace said nothing. She was too spooked. I knew I had made a mistake in bringing her along.

“Look, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to drag you into this. It’s just that, other hackers I hang around with think this is good fun. I guess I didn’t think.”

Grace remained silent.

“Do you want some water?”

“No, I don’t want any water. I want to know what happens if we get caught on the way out.”

I had neglected to mention that, for a good reason. I knew one hacker from a rival crew (it was a friendly rivalry), who called himself Joker, because he was always playing jokes. But one day Joker had got caught engineering his way into an office network. He just walked into some office, and charmed them out of their server details. After they had arrested him, we had jokingly sent him five dollars toward his ten-thousand-dollar bail. We weren’t joking when we saw him next. They had put him into a juvenile detention center. A whole year off school might sound like fun to most students who hate school, but he was a changed person when he got out. As far as I knew, he never touched a computer again. We heard from a guy at his school that he said nothing at school, and just kept to himself. He was a changed man.

Come to think of it, so was I, after my spell in the prison system. It is the most insane life you can imagine. Everybody hates everybody else—especially some kid who thinks he knows it all. I, too, had planned to give up hacking forever. At least, I would quit once I had finished what I had started.

“We won’t get caught,” I said. “We're leaving. Let’s go.”

I speeded up the pace, even though Grace was doing little steps beside me, in her impractical but nice-looking shoes. When it comes down to it, things are either useful or good-looking.

“Come on,” I urged her. “We’ve go to get back to the train station.”

Suddenly, I noticed a large security guard standing down the corridor from me, close to the locked doors that we needed to use to get to the elevator. He seemed to be glaring at me.

78

I slowed us down, and came alongside a fire exit door, which had on it the picture of a stick figure walking down some emergency stairs.

I could have got away. All I would have to do would be to push open the fire door, and run out of the building. The guy was heavier than me and Grace. We’d have out-nimbled him any day. But the alarm over the doorway would have sounded, the police would have been called, and the game would be up. They’d find out what I had been doing in the building, and then they would go to the trouble of changing all of the server details and passwords, so that the information I had obtained would be worthless.

I couldn’t do that, after all of the hard work I had put in. Also, they might have stationed another guard along the stairs somewhere.

I’d bluff it out. I stopped and knocked on the nearest door. It was marked

“Human Resources.” I pushed Grace inside.

“Hi,” I said, to the woman who was sitting nearest the door. She had a photo of two children in a frame on her desk.

“Hello.”

“I’m looking for Belinda. Is she here today?”

The woman gave me a blank look.

“Or am I in the wrong room? Belinda Shepley?”

“I’m sorry,” she answered. “There’s no Belinda Shepley in here, not that I know of.”

She asked all of the other women in the office if anybody knew the imaginary Belinda Shepley. Nobody did. I stalled a bit by describing the imaginary person, hoping to buy some time for the security guard to wander off.

But then I realized that if Donald noticed anything wrong (had I turned everything off?), every moment's delay could be a mistake.

So I quickly conceded defeat with a humble, “Sorry.”

“I could try to look her up in the company phone book,” she offered.

“No, thanks. I’ll phone her myself,” I said, getting out my cell phone, and simultaneously opening the door, smiling my way through it, and taking Grace with me.

Thankfully, the guard was gone. Orion was smiling on me.

“Come on, Alison, you’re doing great, we are nearly there.”

We walked down the corridor, through the doors, and into an elevator whose doors were just closing.

After a very tense ride down to the ground floor, we got out and made our way through the exit, all along talking about some imaginary report that we needed to hand deliver to the nearest copy center.

The guard in the foyer never looked at us.

We walked out the front doors and through the parking lot, as dignified as we could muster.

We headed toward the main road, which seemed much further away from us this time, no matter how fast we walked.

79

We got to a quiet little diner on the main road, and I put Grace into a booth and then phoned a taxi.

When I got back, Grace was glaring at me.

“Do you want a coffee?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything.

“Grace? Are you okay?”

“I can’t believe you did that!” she exploded.

“What?” I looked around nervously, and added, “Please keep your voice down.”

“We could have got arrested!” she hissed angrily. “We could have been put in jail.”

“No, we couldn’t.”

She didn’t seem convinced. I knew that I had done a dumb thing. I had wrecked my relationship with Grace.

“You didn’t tell me what we were doing. I trusted you, and you used me.”

“I told you . . .” My voice trailed off with what was probably a guilty look on my face.

“I want to go home.”

I slumped down in the booth, and tried to think it out. Of course, it had been a stupid thing to do. Some of the happiest days of my life had been with my old crew, pulling stupid tricks on people who ought to know better. But it was kid’s stuff. It wasn’t fun to everybody. Grace was straight. She wasn’t involved in her stepfather’s tricks, and she wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—be involved in mine. I had to tell her something to try to calm her down.

“Look, I know this sounds unbelievable, but I’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card, that I can play when—I mean, if I get into trouble. The . . . authorities . . . owe me.”

Grace, still glaring out the window, said nothing.

“I can’t explain it, but even if we had got caught, I could have gotten out of it.

. . .”

“
You
? What about me?!”

“I mean, both of us. I’m sorry. I’m just not thinking right now.”

“That’s for sure. You can’t explain anything, like what you were doing in there anyway. I should have known. You’re the only guy I know who wants to get into a girl’s bedroom so you can use her computer. I thought you were different. But guess what—you’re a criminal.”

“Would you just trust me? I wouldn’t have got you into trouble.”

It wasn’t actually lying to her. When I said I could have got out of it, I was thinking about Philips. If we had got caught back there, I could have explained it away to him, told him that I was working on Malik. Anyway, he wouldn’t have wanted to jeopardize his operation by having his star performer in jail. He’d have got me out of it. Otherwise, I would never have taken Grace along.

“Why don’t you tell me what you are really doing?”

“Because I have trouble trusting people, OK? People let me down. Whenever I trust someone, they hurt me. My parents. My friends.”

“But I’m not them. I’m not your parents. I’m not one of your hacker friends.”

80

“I got put in jail for hacking. The guy who put me in jail is going to get what he deserves. That’s what I was doing. I am trusting you because I need your help. I am sorry I lied to you.”

“Is that what this is about—you wanted to use my house, my computer, me?”

“No. I mean, at first I did. But not now.”

How could I explain it to her?

“You were in jail?” she said.

“Yes. I don't ever want to go back.”

“My dad's in jail. My real dad.”

I didn't know what I could say to that.

“But he didn't do it. He was framed. They sold him out. The police made things up, because they weren’t good enough to get the right person. And now my dad is in jail.”

“Do you want a coffee?” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

After a minute, Grace said, “If I drink coffee now, I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“Two decafs to go, please,” I said to the waitress.

I sat looking at Grace, waiting for her to return to normal.

“Seriously, I wouldn’t have done it if I thought it would get you in real trouble.”

Grace let out a breath. Somehow, her anger seemed to have subsided.

“I was scared.”

“Yeah, me, too. I’d have been stuck if you hadn’t been there.”

I heard a horn blaring outside, and looked out of the window to see a taxi waiting.

“That’s our ride,” I said.

We got in, but not before I had picked up the coffees.

We were soon back at the train station, sitting on a bench in the autumn sunshine, waiting for the next train, sipping coffee, and reminiscing about the good old days.

I caught myself:
What
good old days? So much had happened recently that it seemed a long time ago I first met Grace.

Glancing at Grace, who was sitting next to me, I decided that she wasn’t exactly lighthearted about our morning’s work; but now that we were out of danger, she had relaxed a bit, and was starting to talk normally again.

The commuters had all gone now, leaving only a few stragglers, including a homeless man. He was drinking from a bottle in a brown paper sack, even though it was not far past breakfast. I wondered,
where did he go wrong?

For some reason, I don’t remember what Grace and I talked about, but I looked up at one point in our conversation and caught one of the station attendants, a woman in her fifties, looking at us. She was smiling, as if we weren’t two truant larcenists, but just a nice well-dressed young couple enjoying coffee and being together. Maybe we were. It doesn’t take much. Some girl likes a guy, some guy likes a girl. All you have to do is leave them alone and then one day you have a nice young couple.

I should have been happy. But now I had made it past one of the biggest hurdles, it wasn’t enough. For seven months, I had longed to see Knight get justice.

Knight had ruined my entire career: from now until retirement, I would never be able 81

to get a secure job, and never be able to work in the government, or the military, or any areas of interest.

Even worse, Knight wasn’t even a decent hacker. He was about one step above a script kiddy.

Similarly, the town where he had located his business, Oaksburge, was just one rail stop further along the line.

I knew I had to tell Grace the truth.

“Look, Grace, if you want, I’ll go home with you now. But there is one last thing I have to do before we go back home. It's only ten minutes away. I promise, it’s nothing that could get us in trouble. I promise you.”

She agreed, but without much enthusiasm. I bought two tickets. When we got off the train in Oaksburge, I bought a packet of cigarettes. Then we got into a cab, and I gave the driver the address.

82

Although Knight’s office was fairly modest in size, it was so new that it looked like it had been built the week before. The parking lot at the front of the building was full of expensive cars.

I stood at the front of the building, directly across the road, with a lighted cigarette in my hands. In those days, the smokers used to congregate at the entrances of buildings, and I wanted to look like one of them, so that Knight wouldn’t see me.

Being spotted near to his office was the last thing I wanted. Next to me was Grace, but she wasn’t saying anything.

For five minutes, we stared at the building, and it dawned on me that I had done a dumb thing. We couldn’t stand there all day. It was nearly noon on Friday, and I had somehow thought that Knight would leave his building for lunch. I wanted to see him—the man I had been thinking about for seven months—but my desire must have got the best of my good sense.

I didn’t know if he was even in the building. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I spotted an empty bench in the middle of a grassy area, where in summer the office clerks would have congregated. Now it was cold, and there were only a few people coming out of their offices. I set off toward the bench, and then realized that I had left Grace.

“Grace?”

“What are we doing here?”

“I told you already. Let’s go to the bench.”

I didn’t talk to Grace. I waited and watched, watched and waited. I heard Grace draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I was just about to say something like, “Let’s get out of here,” when a man came out of the opposite building holding a bag. He was a tall man with a strut that had earned him a nickname. It was Knight.

He was dressed in a stylish suit and had grown his spiky blond hair a bit longer. The resale value of the car he unlocked would have beaten an FBI agent’s yearly salary. In just six months, he had gone from being a spoiled teenager to a CEO.

Grace’s voice broke my reverie. “That’s him?”

“Yeah.”

“He looks older than you.”

“He’s almost twenty.”

Knight popped open the trunk of his car, and put the bag into it. Then he went back into the office. He looked calm and cheerful, like he was getting ready to go on vacation.