Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2) (2 page)

Ted sat anxiously
at the conference table with a couple dozen other twenty-somethings. He wanted
to get this over with. He was still trying to figure out how he fit in. After
only two weeks at his new job, he wanted to make a good impression.

The entire staff
was called in for an eight o’clock meeting on a Friday night. It was supposed
to be a big surprise.

Ted glanced around
the large conference room. Four guys played Foosball at one end of the room. A
heavy guy in thick glasses tossed a wadded-up napkin at the Nerf basketball
hoop on the back of the door. The walls were covered in white boards. Schematic
diagrams and computer code that he didn’t understand yet filled the walls from
floor to ceiling. The wall-mounted giant TV played a familiar theme song.

“Hey, you guys,
pipe down.” Justin McCormack, wearing his trademark shorts, sandals and tank
top, stood and raised his hands. “It’s about to start.” His long brown hair,
pulled back in a ponytail, dipped halfway down his back. His bulging muscles
didn’t impress Ted. After four years of major college football, he was used to
guys whose muscles had muscles. It was Justin’s intense brown eyes that
commanded Ted’s attention.

“Good evening.” On
the TV a smooth-faced, fortyish blonde smiled to the camera. “I’m Janet Petersen,
welcome to the season premiere of
News Front
.” The theme song crescendoed
and the camera panned out to show Janet Petersen sitting behind an ebony anchor
desk. “Our stories tonight: ‘Dave Garcia walks the streets of Baghdad.’” The
monitor over her shoulder showed a Hispanic man in a flak jacket and helmet
walking through a bazaar with armed troops at his side.

“Christopher Wilson
brings you ‘The Housing Bubble: Will it Burst?’” Graphics on the monitor showed
a picture of a house and a line graph representing housing prices going sky
high overlaid with a giant question mark.

“But first,” The
monitor over Janet’s shoulder changed to a picture of the cover of
Time
M
agazine
. “I interview the man
Time Magazine
has called ‘The most
dangerous man in America’ – Justin McCormack, CEO of YTS Digital Security.” The
camera pulled back enough for the viewers to see Justin, wearing an immaculate
business suit for the interview, sitting next to Janet.

Justin cleaned up
pretty good, Ted had to admit. With his broad shoulders and powerful chest, he
reminded Ted of a tiger, about to pounce.

“Yo, dude,” one of
the group around the table shouted. General applause, cheers and whistles rose
from the crowd. Irena, her T-shirt pulled tight enough to reveal her nipple
piercings, high-fived Justin.

“Hey, Hero,” Irena
shouted across the table at Ted in her slight Russian accent. “How it feels for
someone else to be hogging all TV time?”

In his mind’s eye,
Ted saw the missile launch. His blood ran cold. He and his friends had stopped
the terrorist attack on the cruise ship. They saved over six thousand lives. But
at what cost? Only he and Chris had survived. He had spent the last month under
a spot light.

“Justin can have
it.” Ted flicked his hand at Irena, he was sick of it. “I’m done with the limelight.”
He wiped the sweat from his brow. “I don’t know why the TV guys are so
interested in a Mexican kid from East LA anyway.” He turned from Irena and
reached for a paper plate.

Pizza boxes from
Northlake Tavern covered the white, Formica-topped table and a fifty-gallon
galvanized tub filled with ice and imported beers and micro-brew sat on the
floor. The beer flowed freely as a party mood rocked the room. All eyes were now
on the
News Front
broadcast on the big-screen TV.

“
News Front’s
going to put YTS on the map,” the tiny Asian woman sitting next to Ted said
softly. “The IPO will make them all rich.” She sipped at her beer. “Too bad we
won’t get in on it.”

“No te preocupes,
chica.”
Then Ted remembered where he was. “Don’t worry. My mama used to say
a rising tide floats all boats. We may not have stock, but if the company does
well, we will too.”

Nan Pok went
through new employee orientation with Ted. Tonight she clung to him like he was
her only friend in the world. He wasn’t particularly attracted to the small
woman with Coke-bottle glasses, but he put his arm around her shoulders and
pulled her close. “We’re gonna do okay here.”

“Thanks, Teddy.”

Ted froze. Meagan
had always called him “Teddy.” He tried to shake off the sudden sense of
melancholy. He was just coming out of the funk he had been in since returning
from Canada.

For two weeks after
their Canadian adventure he practically lived in the hospital room while his
best friend, Chris Hardwick, fought for his life. Ted had just re-joined the
real world as a junior security analyst at YTS.

Coming back to
work protecting some corporation’s databases just didn’t feel like enough. He
felt like he'd been given a second chance at life. He had to give back, to make
a difference somehow. Whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing, this
wasn’t it.

“Mr. McCormack, there
have been rumors.” Ted’s attention turned back to the big screen TV. “Can you
set the record straight once and for all?” Ted knew that Janet Petersen’s
million-dollar smile had melted more than one hard case on national television.
“What does the name of your company, ‘YTS,’ really mean?”

On the big TV, Justin
laughed. “I’ve heard all of those rumors too, Janet.” His smirk seemed to say,
“I know something that you don’t know.”

After a brief
pause, Justin said, “It really doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ve heard that
you and a couple of buddies thought up the name one night over cheap pizza and
way too much beer.”

There was that
smirk again. “Really, it’s just an acronym. It sounded important to us.”

“Did you hear
that?” Nan laughed, putting down her beer bottle.

“What
does
it mean?” Ted asked.

“You’re Too
Stupid,” she responded.

Ted was taken
aback. “Say what?”

“No, really.
That’s what it means. YTS means ‘You’re Too Stupid.’ As in ‘You’re too stupid
to understand what I’m talking about, so I’ll have to put it in one-syllable
words.’ My supervisor told me that Justin and his friends made it up because
their customers didn’t understand anything they were saying. They were pitching
their products to a bunch of idiotic Luddites that happened to be CEO’s of
Fortune 500 companies.”

“Oooh!” Bear raised
his fists over his head and twirled his hips. “The most dangerous man in Aaameeeeriiic-ka.”
He threw his head back and kicked one leg up on the last syllable.

“Dangerous enough
to sign your paycheck,” Justin cracked.

Bear’s face
immediately turned red. “Just remember who got you here, big shot.” He sat down
and shut up.

Ted watched the
picture on the TV change to a still photo of a geeky-looking twelve-year-old
boy. Janet Petersen went into a brief biography of Justin McCormack. Growing up
on Seattle’s Eastside, going to Lakeside Academy, graduating from the
University of Washington at eighteen. Justin wasn’t the average American boy.

Well
, Ted
thought,
maybe the average American boy who had all the advantages.

“Is it true, Mr.
McCormack,” Janet asked on the TV, “that you hacked into the New York Stock
Exchange at age sixteen?”

“Justin, please.”
Justin flashed an embarrassed smile. “When the FBI came knocking on my parents’
door, my dad wasn’t too happy.”

“What happened?”

The camera closed
in on him.

“I was just a kid.
A group of my friends were into hacking. They’d break into the Department of
Defense networks and leave messages or graphics, kind of like gangbangers
tagging a wall, just to show that they could do it. I wanted to step it up a
notch. I set up an account for myself with the McMillan-Smith brokerage house,
then manipulated stock prices to make it grow.”

“How much money
did you accumulate?”

“I really can’t
talk about it, Janet.” Justin flashed her an ‘aw-shucks’ grin. “As part of the
plea bargain agreement, I can’t give out any details. Let’s just say it was
north of seven figures.”

“And did you go to
prison?”

“No.” Justin
laughed. “My dad’s a lawyer. I was a minor. He worked out an agreement with the
DOJ. I got five years’ probation and wasn’t allowed to touch a computer for
seven years.”

“So, if you
couldn’t touch a computer for seven years, how did you become one of the
nation’s top digital security experts?”

Ted looked across
the room at his boss. Justin was really enjoying this. Well, so what? Who
wouldn’t?

“Let’s just say,”
Justin was talking on the TV again. “That the people who were supposed to be
monitoring me weren’t too bright.”

Let’s just say
that you aren’t too bound by other people’s rules.
Ted sipped at his beer. Why
did his boss’ superior attitude bother him so much?

“By the time the
ban was lifted, you were one of the nation’s most promising young digital
security experts.” The camera zoomed in for a close up on Janet. “You founded
YTS at age twenty-three and had nowhere to go but up.”

Janet turned to
face the camera and spoke directly to her audience. “Tonight, we go along with
Justin on one of his digital adventures. We asked him to hack into the most
secure computer network in the world: the Millennium Systems network.
Millennium Systems is one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world.
Of course, this is with the permission of Millennium Systems. We talked to
their Chief Security Officer, Richard Freeman.”

The TV screen cut
to a taped interview with a severe looking middle aged man. Richard Freeman was
a tall, muscular man with salt and pepper hair cut in a military style. The smirk
on his face seemed to say “Me smart. You dumb.”

“We welcome Mr.
McCormick’s attempt.” He smiled. “No one has ever hacked into Millennium
systems.” He seemed too smug. “We have one of the most secure systems in the
world. My staff works around the clock, three-hundred and sixty-five days a
year, three-hundred and sixty-six when we can get them, to protect our
company’s data. Let him bang away at it. It’s a good test for us.”

****

Donna Harrison
pushed her cart down the long, carpeted hallway of the Millennium Tower,
headquarters of Millennium Systems. She had followed exactly the same routine
since she took the job a week ago. She stopped her cart outside of an office
door. Removing a step stool from the cart, she climbed up a couple of steps and
dusted the security camera pointed down the hallway.

Stepping down from
her stool, she removed a key chain from the pocket of her baggy gray uniform
dress. As she pulled the keys from her pocket, a plastic name tag fell to the
floor.

“Damn.” Donna bent
over to pick up the name tag. She was always forgetting to pin it on her
uniform. The name tag said “Betty.”

Her heart beat
accelerated as she unlocked the door and entered a large office. She removed
the step stool from her cart and placed it under the office’s security camera. Climbing
two steps, she dusted the camera, then lifted the ceiling tile above the camera
with her feather duster.

A mini digital
video recorder was attached to the security camera wires by alligator clips.
She pushed a button on the device, removed a flash drive and dropped it in her
pocket. She took a second flash drive from her pocket, inserted it in the
device and pushed the button again. The light changed from red to green.

Back on the floor,
she stopped, took a deep breath and opened the blinds. The countless lights of
downtown Seattle and Elliot Bay sparkled below her. Out on the water she saw
brightly lit ferry boats making their way back and forth across Puget Sound.

“What a waste,”
she muttered. Not for the first time she pondered on the man who occupied the
office. “How can he work here all day with the blinds shut? A billion-dollar
view and he wants to live in a cave.”

A remote control
called to her from the credenza. She picked it up and turned on the
wall-mounted TV. It was Friday night, she never missed
News Front.

The host, Janet Petersen,
introduced her guest for the night.
Shit
. It was that SOB McCormack.
What a publicity hound. How could the rest of the industry do their job when he
was always giving away the tricks of the trade?

Donna went back to
work dusting the dark mahogany furniture. She stopped in front of the
half-sized book case. There were unusual wear patterns in the carpet.
Patience.
Intensely aware of the surveillance camera over her shoulder, she didn’t
stop to investigate.

The desk, roughly
the size of an aircraft carrier, was empty except for an expensive laptop
computer. The computer sat precisely parallel to the edge of the desk in a
locked docking station, in front of the padded leather swivel chair.
This is
where it all happens
, she thought. There was no question in her mind,
he
was the one
.

The occupant of
the office demanded precise compliance with his instructions. No dust anywhere,
no paper in the trash can, not a pencil out of place. The small refrigerator
stocked with exactly two dozen bottles of Evian water. Not twenty-three, not
twenty-five. Exactly twenty-four. The bottles to be rotated each day so that
the oldest was on the left of the outside row, labels facing outward.

Her supervisor
told Donna that she liked her meticulous attention to detail. Like that was
supposed to make Donna feel better about doing this crummy dead-end job.

If only she
knew.
Donna wasn’t doing this for money. The adrenaline high was better
than sex.