Hacked (16 page)

The days till Extradition Day flew. It was the opposite of waiting for Christmas. On the days our exams coincided, I went to the café afterwards with Ruby, but she didn’t come back to mine. Her mum was on her case about revising every spare minute.

‘Single mums have a lot to prove,’ she said.

‘Single mums should be pleased their children aren’t single.’

She stuck out her tongue.

‘I’ll come over at the weekend,’ she promised. ‘And then we’ll have —’

I finished the sentence. ‘Seven exams left.’

She corrected me, ‘More time.’

I carried on revising with Ty. He was staggered that Ruby had taken me back.

‘What did you do to change her mind?’

‘Copied Mandela.’

‘What?’

‘Truth and reconciliation.’

Charlie Tate came by one evening to see how I was doing.

‘Not bad,’ I said.

‘I’ve been busy,’ he said, ‘lobbying. There are a lot of people angry about the unreciprocated arrangement we have with the US, particularly given the so-called
special relationship
. The Home Secretary is very aware of your case, and the fact that the British police aren’t pursuing you gives us leverage. We’re in a good place, Dan.’

Not good enough.

He had a beer with Dad in the kitchen and I disappeared back to my room where I carried on with my nightly quest – trawling around various sites, commenting on anything that might prompt a show-off hacker to admit his/her part in Dronejacker’s plot. I was losing faith in the idea but didn’t have any better ones.

Despite the hundreds of threads I’d started, I still hadn’t had a Hitler comment …

But Friday night, out of the blue, KP got a message from another name I recognised – Anaconda:

I have a cell now – a Blackberry please may I have some credit like I asked you before I like your name

I had a vague memory of an infant asking me that in the Pay As You Go days, but hadn’t registered the name. I had a clearer memory of Anaconda on IRC #angeldust handing over 5,000 bots. And a rock solid memory of me telling the police about it. I needed to be careful. What if it was a trick?

I looked at the post again, deciding what to do. And slapped my own forehead, really I did, when I realised she wasn’t called
Anaconda
. My brain had tried to read her nonsensical arrangement of letters, and the closest it could get was the snake. In fact, she was called Annacando, which, based on my knowledge of little girls, meant Anna Can Do. It wasn’t a trick – it was a variation on El’s friend’s YouTube channel WhatBetsyDoes. I’d found what I was looking for, another of Angel’s gullible online friends. (Or rather she’d found me.)

What to do …?

I quickly decided that the internet was too public to carry on any sort of conversation, given my status in the eyes of the law.

I’ll call you – send your number
   – that was me.

no credit I get $15 a month and I spent it all on apps
   – Annacando.

if I get you credit will you talk to me?
   – I typed before I registered the dollar sign,
and
before I realised that I sounded like a groomer.

1-078-669-4634
   – Annacando clearly hadn’t heard of Stranger Danger.

As the old hack no longer worked, I got out my debit card, ready and willing to invest my own money in safeguarding my future, and desperately hoping you could top up a US phone from the UK.

No, was the simple answer.

I re-routed myself to an American server. Better. And then, because there’s a funny system in America where the person receiving the call pays and I had no idea how much it might be, I bunged $50 on her
account. As soon as the screen confirmed it had gone through, I took a deep breath and … didn’t ring Anna.

I needed a script to follow. I got a pencil and made a few notes …

call me KP
   – she typed.

What the hell!

I rang the number.

‘Hi, this is Anna speaking,’ said a super-confident voice. ‘Is that KP?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Thank you so much for the credit.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said. It was surreal talking to a tot of a Yank. I was completely fazed about what to say. Luckily she wasn’t.

‘Why are you called KP?’

I explained about Club Penguin. She giggled.

‘You sound real funny!’

‘No, you sound funny,’ I said. ‘I sound English.’

‘Are you calling all the way from England?’

Duh!

‘No, the moon.’ Unhelpful of me. I decided to move it on.

‘Anna, did you collect some bots for someone called Angel?’

‘I sure did. I got seven thousand or so. Do you wanna know how I did it?’

‘OK.’

‘I put the virus in a link for a video called “My brother poked my eye out”. It was me with a patch
on, holding an eye from the joke shop.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

‘It’s had fifteen thousand, four hundred and
fifty-nine
hits as of today. Did you also give bots to Angel?’ she asked.

I was getting the idea that this little American girl didn’t have a clue about Angel.

‘No, I did something else for her. Do you know why she wanted the bots?’

‘It was a swap. five thousand bots for four thousand, two hundred Microsoft points,’ she said, missing the point.

‘Anna, I need your help, but it’s a bit complicated.’

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘I was fifth grade “Helper of the Week” before the vacation.’

My hope that finding Annacando was the answer to a prayer had pretty much disappeared. I considered ending the call but …

‘Are you still there, KP?’

I explained, slowly. Starting with the fact that my real name was Dan Langley, telling her what the bots had been used for (there was a squeak at that point) and ending with the fact that America – her country – wanted me to be taken away from my family.

‘You mean extradited?’ she said. How clever was this eleven-year-old who hadn’t wondered what the bots were for?

‘Yes, I didn’t say it that way because I didn’t know if you’d understand.’

‘I’m top in my class and I’m a Gifted Youth member of American Mensa and I’m going to MIT. My papa is a professor at Harvard and my mom is a psychotherapist.’

And you need a lesson in modesty, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. All of a sudden I had nothing to say. What did I expect her to do?

‘How can I help you, KP?’

‘I … I hadn’t really thought it through,’ I said, keen to end the stupid call with the spectacle-wearing-
cheesy-grin
-full-of-herself-cheerleading American (not that I could see her).

‘Do they want to extradite you because they think you knew what Angel was going to do?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But you didn’t know. Like I didn’t know that my bots were going to stop the subway?’

‘That’s right.’

There was a pause, longer than the lag that you get with long-distance calls, and then Anna said, ‘I get it … you want me to tell someone that I collected the bots in exchange for points, nothing to do with London, and you hacked the drone in exchange for … what did she give you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘That was mean,’ said Anna.

I had a vision of going to Westminster Magistrate’s Court with a laptop and getting Anna on Skype and having her tell the judge that she infected people’s
computers with her ‘My brother poked my eye out’ video to get points and I did it for nothing.

I heard some shouting in the distance – her end, not mine.

‘Catch you later, KP,’ she said. ‘Mom’s calling me for dinner.’

Saturday arrived, grey, wet and windy. It was sixteen days until E-Day. I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, a rare variation on the Weetabix routine, and went back to bed. Ty arrived, with what looked like English Lit to revise.

‘Come on, we’ve got work to do,’ he said to the slit allowing air to reach my duvet-covered head and body.

I didn’t answer so he tugged a corner, I resisted and there was a short wrestle.

‘What’s the point?’ I said.

‘The point is that I need good grades. You can go hang.’

‘Seriously.’ I sat up, cross-legged. ‘What if they agree to send me to the States?’

He shrugged. ‘You can’t think like that.’

I told him about my weird chat across the ocean and now-abandoned plan to rally together Angel’s army, and played him some of AnnaCanDo’s YouTube videos. The highlight was her doing the Cinnamon Challenge and retching. The lowlight, her solving some mathematical thing on an Etch A Sketch. The one with the poked-out
eye wasn’t there. We didn’t watch her explanation of Black Holes.

‘Kooky,’ he said.

‘She’s a cross between a pageant queen and Stephen Hawking.’

‘No, more like Barbie and Brian Cox.’

‘Seriously, Ty, if she’s anything to go by, the whole lot of us would be extradited as soon as the authorities found out about us.’

He opened his eyes wide, which made his thin pink scar crinkle.

‘You thick idiot,’ he said. ‘Are you sure I got the brain injury and not you?’

‘What are you on about?’

‘What would happen if the UK asked for your American kiddy to be extradited for her part in Dronejacker’s plan?’

I caught up. ‘The Americans would refuse. She’s only eleven, and her dad’s a Harvard professor.’

‘Getting better by the minute,’ he said. ‘And if they refuse to let her come here, no one’s going to insist you go there. You can’t have one rule for them and another for us. That would make the UK look pathetic.’

We talked some more – the logic was sound. If a Brit hacking a US system deserved extradition, a Yank hacking a British system deserved the same, especially as they were both part of the same plot.

Ty’s smile was wider than his face. I could feel mine wasn’t far off. I wanted to run round to Charlie Tate’s
office and tell him to do something lawyery, but it was Saturday. I tried his mobile. It was diverted.

‘Calm down,’ said Ty. ‘Monday’ll have to do.’

Ty opened a book and we somehow knuckled down to go through the play that we were going to be quizzed on in the exam on Monday. Gradually, I let the words of the Bard drown out the doubters in my head. Gradually, I started to believe that Anna could be my saviour. That the extradition papers were a step closer to being torn up and thrown away.

The doorbell rang.

‘It’s Ruby,’ I said.

‘I’ll get off,’ said Ty. ‘See you Monday?’

‘Bright and early.’

Saturday evening with Ruby and Sunday with the volunteers were the best days I’d had since the episode of Confessional Tourette’s that catapulted me into the limelight. You might not think it could get better than Forgiving Friday when Ruby finally let her heart rule her head, but it did, because this time I had Ruby
and
I had hope.

I rang Charlie Tate and arranged to go and meet him in a café after my Monday morning exam – 1.30 in the Boston Tea Party on Park Street. I didn’t tell Mum or Dad about the development but had, briefly, let myself picture Mum’s relief when she realised it was properly over.

Charlie was there first, sitting on a stool by the window with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and no tie. His trousers looked like they’d been under his pillow.

‘Dan!’ He stood up, smiling as usual, and shook my hand. He already had a coffee in front of him, and one for me. (My third ever.)

I launched straight into the Anaconda/Annacando story, totally confusing him.

‘Slow it down, Dan. Remember I’m a mortal, not a savant.’

It wasn’t much better the second time but he got the basics.

‘Anna is eleven, lives nears Boston, we assume, if her father teaches at Harvard, and has admitted to you, verbally, that she helped Angel build a botnet,
which may have been used to bring down the London Transport ticketing capability on the day of the threatened drone strike.’

‘Yes, but not
may, did
.’

He took a sip of coffee. Not quite the excited reaction I’d expected. I spelt it out for him.

‘The US will never agree to her extradition, and that means the UK can’t agree to mine or it’ll look pathetic.’ It sounded more convincing when Ty said it.

‘Dan, our task is to keep you from being extradited. Incriminating other parties is
not
our task.’ He was talking agonisingly slowly.

‘But if —’

‘Hear me out. I can see your thought process, but … where do I start?’ He rubbed his stubble. ‘OK. Anna is in all likelihood below the age of criminal responsibility, and certainly no country would ask to extradite a child of her age. Her verbal confession of guilt to you would be inadmissible. If by a miracle she agreed to admit her part in a court of law, her lack of malicious intent, like yours, is unsubstantiated, which could make your situation worse – perhaps you were working together? To even get to that stage would be impractical in the short, or even medium term. We’re talking two separate investigations, two jurisdictions, two distinctly different criminal acts and, as I’ve explained before, either no evidence or none that can be easily understood. The prospect of a quick and dirty tit for tat, which is I think what you were hoping for, is zero.’

I didn’t want to hear excuses. I’d given him evidence and he was giving me flannel.

I raised my voice. ‘I only have two weeks. That’s ten lawyer days.’

‘Dan, if … and I don’t expect this to be the case … but
if
the extradition order is approved, we appeal. You’re not going anywhere in two weeks, or two years. We stick to the plan.’

Charlie and I shook hands, and I went home. His words might have made sense to him but they didn’t to me. Gary McKinnon had deportation hanging over him for ten years. In ten years I’d be twenty-six, except I wouldn’t. I’d either be dead, or locked up in a mental institution. Anna was in on it, but clearly not a terrorist. There had to be some way that she could help. Hell, maybe she knew the other bot collectors … I hadn’t thought to ask her that. By the time I got back to our empty house I had a list of questions that I should have asked the first time. She was a Gifted Youth, between us there had to be a way.

I rang her from the house phone to save my credit.

‘Hi, this is Anna Rothenberg. We’re hiking and wild camping, so leave a message for me, and I’ll get back to you when we get home from our vacation, assuming we don’t meet any bears!’

Her jolly message, so at odds with my situation, threw me completely. I ended up pleading.

‘… I know if you admit to the botnet you’ll be in trouble, but you’re younger than me so nothing bad’ll
happen. And like I said, if you know anyone else who was involved, maybe we could all vouch for each other. I’m really scared, Anna, scared that I’ll be made to leave my family and my friends.’

And Ruby.

It was truly pathetic. I flopped onto my bed, face down, and stayed there.

Without Anna, who might be in Jellystone Park with Yogi until after the hearing for all I knew, my hopes were pinned on Charlie Tate again. That didn’t seem anything like as good as it had before.

My phone shuddered a few times but I stayed where I was. The pillow got wet so I turned it over.

‘Dan? Are you asleep?’

It was Mum. I moved an arm to indicate that I’d heard but kept my face buried.

She came and sat on the bed and stroked my hair.

‘It’s hard, harder than anything any of us have been through before, but we
will
make it. We’ll fight and fight. I won’t lose you, Dan.’