Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (2 page)

M
Y THUMBS skimmed
over the virtual keys, typing a single word:
READY?

The response came six seconds later from Pixel’s MacBook—
rock n roll.
The plan was simple: all he had to do was execute the programs on my command. Normally, I hacked alone and never from inside the building I was targeting. To pull this one off, though, I needed on-site access and a wingman.

I inhaled then texted the first cue.

INFERNO
.

After a delay of 876 milliseconds—the time it took for him to click the track pad—the lobby’s airspace was ripped in two by a screaming fire alarm. White strobe lights flashed at both ends of the lobby and near the exits.

Startled, the second guard grabbed his computer monitor and leaned in close.

“What floor?” NFL asked.

“Looking.” The man shook his head. “Can’t tell.”

“C’mon, Jack!”

By now, the information panel must have been lit up like a psychedelic Christmas tree.

“It’s going crazy,” Jack said. “L-4! Lower-level four! No, wait. The system says it’s on L-3 now.”

Hacking into the corporate security network had proven impossible, but I’d found a thin crack to slip through using the building’s alarm system.

“Well, which is it? Three or four?” NFL’s voice had taken on the qualities of a whiny little girl.

“I don’t know! The whole thing’s glitching out. Now it’s saying the alarm’s coming from
all
floors.” Then the color drained from his face as he bolted upright, sending his chair skidding back behind him. “Sprinklers! They’re deploying in the executive wing.”

“What? Get up there now!” NFL ordered and snatched up a walkie-talkie. “Start evacuation procedures. Go!”

Both men scrambled around the security desk and sprinted in opposite directions—one to the east stairwell and the other to the west.

As NFL ran past me, he waved and yelled, “You need to move! Get outside!” He slammed through the stairwell door on the far end of the lobby, raising the walkie-talkie to his mouth as he did.

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” I said, heading nervously toward the elevators. “Just need to make one stop first.”

My heart was hammering and my entire body buzzed with adrenaline. All four elevator doors yawned open by the time I’d reached them. The cars had returned to the lobby level and shut down—an automatic protocol triggered by the fire alarm.

I stepped into a car. This was the point of no return. The control-panel buttons flashed on and off. I pressed L4 and was rewarded with an irritating buzzer sound. Having researched Walter Bell, BlakBox’s founder and CEO, it would not have surprised me if the button had also jolted me with a high-voltage shock. He was known as a ruthless dictator who accepted nothing less than perfection from his employees. Performance earned you staggering bonuses; failure brought ridicule and, often, a boot out the door.

My phone trembled in my hand. Text:
DOWN
.

I glanced up at the buttons. “C’mon, Pixel. C’mon . . .”

After five seconds, the buttons dimmed off, the L4 button came on and the doors shut.

L4: the company’s mission control center. The pulsing, beating heart of BlakBox’s corporate infrastructure.

The building was one of three informational “meta-hubs” scattered around the globe—because naturally a monster the size of BlakBox needed three hearts, and they all needed to be in different places in case one stopped. From here, technicians constantly monitored forty-two data centers, housing a total of 80,411 servers, running nonstop diagnostics on the servers’ temperature, energy usage, streaming speeds, data storage—every possible measure to ensure peak performance and predict problems.

They likely never predicted a teenage girl hacking them from right inside their own building.

The elevator hummed as it descended, five hundred feet per minute according to the manufacturer’s specifications. It would take a mere nine seconds to reach sublevel four. An additional twenty seconds of fast walking would bring me to the data center, and sixty-two more to finish my task. Hopefully.

The plan was risky, but simple: get into the mainframe room, transfer a couple data packets to Pixel’s computer in the parking lot, and then turn myself in. If this job played out like the others I’d done in the past, BlakBox would be sufficiently impressed with my capabilities and hire me on the spot as a security consultant.

And I’d get the money I needed for Mom.

I stared at my reflection in the polished steel doors. The girl gazing back looked terrified. This was insane . . . and insanely illegal, too. BlakBox
better
be majorly impressed.

The doors opened and I stepped into a sterile hallway. Strobe lights flashed on the walls, making the corridor itself appear to vibrate. Half a dozen people brushed past me, rushing for the stairwell without a second glance at me. Pushing against the flow of traffic, I made my way toward the far end of the corridor and a black steel door that marked my destination.

As I approached, my gaze flicked to a keypad beside the door. A light shined green: Unlocked. Pixel was ahead of schedule and had already tripped the lock for me.

I reached for the door handle, but it swung open and a man stepped into my path, nearly knocking me over.

“Who are you?” he asked, scrunching his eyebrows.

“IT intern from L-6,” I yelled over the din. “Binkman told me to check the floor, make sure everyone’s out.”

His face softened into an expression of bafflement. “It’s not a drill?”

“No.”

“No need to check.” He jerked his head, indicating the dark room behind him. “I’m the last one out. Everyone else is gone already.”

“Gotta check anyway. Binkman’s orders. If he finds out I didn’t do what he said—”

“There’s no need—”

“What’s your name?” I said. “He’s gonna ask me why I didn’t check and when he does, I want to be sure I pronounce your name right.”

He thought about it, eyes flicking around, unsure if he should let me into the unguarded room. But Joseph Binkman was the head of data management—this man’s boss.

“Fine,” he said, “But hurry. And don’t touch anything.” Then he ran—I mean a full-on sprint—toward the stairs.

I shoved through the door and stepped into the cool darkness of the room. The heavy door slammed closed behind me. I punched a code into another keypad on the wall. Simultaneously, a green light turned red and the door’s locks
thunked
into place. I turned to face the control center.

The room was large, with rows of tall computer banks arcing from one side of the room to the other. Like congregants at a church of robotic giants, they all faced a floor-to-ceiling wall of seamless plasma screens streaming real-time data from around the globe. A world map indicated the location of each data center. Multicolored lights and numbers flashed, seemingly at random, all over the glowing wall. Workstations filled a large space between the wall and the computer banks. It looked like something NASA had designed.

I wove my way through the workstations until I came to the one that was still logged in, its screen glowing with the image of a star field. There, I plopped down in the chair and wiggled back into it. I lifted my phone, and sent another text:
BREAKDOWN
.

“Who are you?” a gravelly voice boomed over the alarms and my thumping heart.

I jumped and snapped my eyes up. A chill shot through me.

A video feed of a balding man with a mustache filled the screen. He scowled. “What are you doing? Who are you?”

Frantically, I palmed the mouse, moving the cursor to an icon of a video camera and closed the webcam application. Whoever had been sitting here before had left the chat window open. The man’s face disappeared.

Pounding erupted from the metal door off to my right. Angry shouts penetrated from the other side. Pixel had disabled the keypad and lock system so they’d have to knock the door down if they wanted me. It sounded as though they did.

Keep calm.

I had to move fast on phase two, snagging a few packets of data then streaming them to Pixel outside. I navigated to a file manager and a window expanded on the screen.

I grabbed my phone and texted Pixel.
Sending now. Be ready.

Getting into the building was one thing, but tapping into BlakBox’s servers—right into their encrypted data—was altogether more serious. A chill of excitement mixed with unchecked terror shot through me. When they realized I could snatch their data like coins from a fountain, I was a shoo-in for a job. I just needed a few files to prove I could do it.

I established a connection between the workstation and Pixel’s Mac and navigated through a directory of folders labeled only with numbers. With the transfer protocol initiated, I typed furiously as the banging at the door grew louder. The data streamed through the link to Pixel’s laptop.

Text from Pixel:
i see it
.

A louder slam against the door startled me. The steel entry bulged inward. They were almost inside.

I watched the screen as a bar graph showed file after file being exporting. It was the digital equivalent of walking out the front door with the folders under my arm.

As the data streamed, preview images of each document rapidly flickered across the screen. I clicked on one as it crossed the screen and it expanded—bank statements with transactions in the tens of millions of dollars, all transfers from other international banks to this one account.

“What is this?” I said and clicked through the document’s pages. My eyes skimmed the data on the screen: Tripoli, Damascus, Tehran, Shanghai . . .

I clicked on the next file. I sucked in my breath and leaned closer, not believing my eyes. Close-up photographs of dead bodies and charred buildings and smoldering cars cycled on and off the screen, interspersed with multipage documents. Then: a photograph of a man stepping out of a car. I recognized him from the news: a congressman who had died in an embassy bombing.

My stomach twisted in knots.

I clicked on another file and it filled the screen. More images then a list of names and addresses, and beside the names were acronyms: MOS, MI6, CIA, ASIS, MAD. Some had black
X
’s beside the name. Page after page of documents, all stamped TOP SECRET UMBRA and all marked with the header
United States Department of Homeland Security.

Why did BlakBox have top-secret files? I didn’t know what I was looking at exactly, only that I’d stumbled onto something I shouldn’t have. This was way over my head. Panic gripped me and I felt the room constrict around me.

Frantically, I cut off the file transfer and closed down the windows.

My phone chimed. Text:
it stopped.

I dialed and pressed the phone to my ear.

“Hey,” Pixel said, “the connection dropped—”

“Get out of here.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Now. I’m serious. Something’s wrong. Go! Go now!”

The pounding at the door had gotten thunderous. I glanced at it as another bulge popped out from the door’s surface and one of the hinges pulled free.

“You’re scaring me,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Just . . . go! Now! Get rid of that data.”

I hung up and flipped through my contacts.
C’mon, c’mon, where is it?

I pushed the dial button and I looked up at the screen as a man appeared. He’d remotely launched the webcam. He was thin and twitchy, and glared at me from the screen. He wore John Lennon glasses and twin images of his computer monitor—with me on it—reflected back at me. My stomach tightened.

He watched me without a word.

Through the iPhone’s tiny speaker, I heard ringing.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up,” I said.

“You’ve reached Jill Corbis . . .” Voicemail.
No
.

The man on-screen sneered, seemed ready to say something. I yanked the camera cord, killing his image.

“Leave a message,” Jill’s voice said in my ear.
Beep.

“It’s Nyah. I think I’m in big trouble. I found something—”

The door crashed open and three men dressed in SWAT gear burst into the room, shouting and leveling assault weapons at my head.

“I’m at BlakBox,” I said in a rush and jumped to my feet.

“Drop it!” one of the gunmen yelled. “On your knees!”

“Help me!” I said. “Please—”

“Show me your hands!”

“They’re going to shoot me!” I screamed—anything to make Jill drop everything and come running. At the moment, she was the only person in the world who
could
help me.

I let the phone slip from my hand. It hit the toe of my shoe and clattered on the floor as I placed my hands on my head.

Well, guess I’d gotten what I wanted: Goliath’s attention.

One of the men grabbed a fistful of my shirt and spun me around. In less time than it took to draw a breath he shoved me to the ground and drove his knee into my back, pinning me under his crushing weight.

I gasped for breath, but none came. Face pressed against the cold floor, I felt dizzy and watched a pair of black shoes approach me. They stopped inches from my face.

“Take her to the holding room,” a voice said. “I’ll deal with her myself.”

B
lakBox
, Level L-8

T
HE GIRL was
a problem and problems had to be handled.

Jon Stone studied her carefully from behind the holding room’s two-way observation window. She sat alone at the room’s one table. Other than her trembling hands, she hadn’t moved since being apprehended an hour earlier.

Nyah Parks was her name according to her driver’s license, which he’d taken along with her phone. She was terrified despite her best efforts to conceal it. One thing was certain: the girl wasn’t nearly frightened enough, but that would change soon.

The child was rail thin and short—five feet two inches—with shoulder-length, raven-black hair highlighted with faint purple streaks. Brown doe eyes. Her complexion was smooth and deep olive brown, perhaps a child of Asian or Middle Eastern descent, and the only sign of typical teenage rebellion was a simple gold ring piercing her right nostril.

Her story was practically etched on her face: smart kid, a nearly friendless misfit who preferred computers to people and shunned the world because it had shunned her first. But she was more than just the garden-variety honors student. The quick background check he’d done had proven that. She was exceptional, dangerously so if her little stunt was any indication of her abilities.

The real question was, why was she here?

Stone watched one of the three cameras mounted high on the wall of the holding cell and he knew at least one person was watching the live video feeds.
Holding cell
—few private companies had them, but he’d insisted on its installation when Walter Bell brought him on as a security contractor, an innocuous term better suited for human resource files than for describing the reality of his responsibilities. At first, Bell hadn’t seen the necessity of having the room, but with time he had come to appreciate its utility.

Near the ceiling, the camera rotated a few inches, confirming Mr. Bell’s presence on the other end, twelve stories above in his executive suite.

The cell phone on Stone’s belt rang. He pulled the phone out of its sheath and answered it. “Sir,” he said.

“Where do we stand?” Bell’s voice was taut, the words measured and sharp. Always sharp. Mr. Bell did everything with calculated efficiency, ruthlessly cutting to the bone of every situation.

“The boy outside has been contained,” he said calmly. “We recovered a laptop and a cell phone. Both are being scanned as we speak.”

Stone imagined Bell pacing like a lion, his upper lip curled in that perpetual sneer of his. Some underestimated the firm’s sixty-three-year-old chief executive, but such people were fools. He’d witnessed firsthand Bell’s unchecked ambition to grow his empire at all costs. Boundless desire always led to ethical compromises, and Bell’s unscrupulous ways had been handsomely rewarded by the firm’s less reputable clients. He was a master at cyber sleight of hand, and had the uncanny ability to bury secrets for those who needed them to disappear and uncover others’ secrets when the price was right. His loyalty always sided with the fattest wallet.

“And our exposure?” Bell said.

“I’m still assessing the situation,” Stone said. “However, it seems minimal.”

“Seems? I want certainties, not guesses. How long?”

“Give me an hour.”

“Don’t mess this up, Stone. Find out what she knows and who sent her. I want this thing sealed tight.”

“Of course.” Stone’s gaze lowered to the girl. She could not possibly understand the death and destruction contained in the box she’d opened. “I’ll take care of it.”

“I know you will.” With that, Bell ended the call and Stone returned the phone to its sheath. He licked his lips.

The girl looked toward him, but he was hidden behind the glass. She was in deep, with a crushing mile of water over her head and no way to the surface. She seemed too naïve to be a hired gun. If someone had wanted to hack BlakBox, they wouldn’t have done it from inside the building. Too risky. Then why was she here?

He straightened his suit jacket and entered the holding room. Without a word he drew the chair out and sat opposite the girl, who watched him with desperate eyes while the overhead fluorescents hummed. The concrete-walled room was cold; he kept it at fifty-eight degrees, the temperature of the grave—and gooseflesh covered the girl’s bare arms. It was a tactic he’d learned in his time overseas. Depriving the body of comfort was the easiest way into the mind.

She tried not to break his gaze, but fear had taken over and her attention flicked between him and the door. “I was beginning to think no one was coming for me.”

“Not to worry,” he said. “We always follow through here at BlakBox.”

Her eyes lowered to the table. There was deep-seated fear behind them.

Stone pulled the girl’s driver’s license from his breast pocket and glanced down at it. “Nyah Parks.” He looked up at her. “Seventeen years old.” Stone’s attention lingered on her face. “You’re an old seventeen. An old soul, I can see that.”

She shifted in the chair, uneasy. “The nose ring adds a few years.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

She forced a nervous smile.

“You’ve had quite a day,” he said. “No one’s ever visited our offices in quite the way you did. Care to tell me why all the theatrics?”

She hesitated. He could practically see her mind stuttering.

“No need to be shy,” he said. “We’re just talking. You help me; I’ll help you.”

“I’m here to do Mr. Bell a favor.”

“I see.” He nodded once. How many times had she practiced that in the mirror? “As you can imagine, my employer doesn’t see it that way.”

“Maybe he needs a little convincing,” she said and lifted her gaze to the video camera perched high in the corner. She was scraping together bits and shreds of courage. “That’s why I did all of this. To get his attention.”

“Well you certainly did that.” He laced his fingers together on the table. “So you caught the tiger by the tail. Now what?”

The girl fidgeted. “I’m . . . I’m here to offer Mr. Bell and BlakBox an opportunity.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Me,” she said. “Actually, a chance to hire me.”

Stone liked the girl’s backbone, even if she was too naïve for her own good. “Why would he do that?”

“Because I have a very valuable skill set that’s lacking here.”

His eyebrow arched. “Lacking?”

“Your corporate security is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said with uncertainty. “It is.”

“Yet, here you are.” His gaze flicked around the room—the
cell
.

Realization settled onto her face. Whatever she thought the outcome of her little stunt would be, it certainly wasn’t this.

“Maybe you’re not as smart as you think you are,” he said.

“Or maybe I’m much smarter than you realize, which is why BlakBox should hire me. I came here to make an impression, to prove how easy it is to get to you.”

He dipped his head, conceding that she’d accomplished at least that much. “Your point?”

“If I can hack you, others—not-so-nice ones—can too. I can stop them before they do. BlakBox provides secure data archiving for millions of users. Most of them are everyday people backing up term papers and photos of their friends dancing on tables.” She paused and he could read the uncertainty in her eyes. “But then you’ve got the important ones—intelligence agencies, the military, foreign governments . . .”

She stopped, her confidence faltering. She was obviously unsure how far to reach.

“We’re nothing more than a data storehouse,” Stone said with a shrug. “A parking garage for computer files. What our clients do isn’t my concern. People like you are.”

“Right.” She swallowed, nervous. “Because I breached your secure data center and accessed your mainframe in under ten minutes. That’s a problem I can fix for you.”

His jaw flexed.

“I’ll show you how I did it,” she continued, “and how to make sure it can’t happen again.” She assessed him for a moment. “Look, we’re on the same side. If I’d wanted to do real harm, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Instead, you’d be scrambling to stop your clients’ secrets from bleeding out all over the Internet.”

“And that’s what you’re trying to convince me of?”

“I think I already have.”

It was true. The girl was a genius, no doubt about it. BlakBox had hired plenty of hackers to attempt breaking through its firewalls and other digital security, but no one had ever succeeded. Until now.

She said, “I’m here to make you a business proposition. I’ve shown you what I can do. I’m here because I want to work for you.” She looked at the camera. “I exploited one weakness: a missing software patch in your alarm system. No one else had thought of it, not even you, and I was able to get into your control center. Think about what a sophisticated, coordinated attack would do. Everything would come to a grinding halt. What I did was just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Thank you for pointing it out, but I think we’re done with you now.”

She shook her head. “It’s not the only vulnerability BlakBox has. There are other, more serious ones. If you hire me, I’ll show you how to close the gaps for good. No one will be able to do what I did. Ever.”

“What’s in it for you?” Stone asked.

“A job, obviously. My consulting fee includes implementation of the necessary repairs to your firewalls.”

“Consulting fee . . .”

“Yes. One hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

He paused, considering the girl. “That’s a lot of money.”

“It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue you’ll lose if someone hacks your system for real. When that happens, you’re looking at hundreds of millions in red ink. One major incident and your clients will bolt from BlakBox faster than they would from a burning house. You know I’m right. What if they found out about this?”

“That sounds like a thinly veiled threat to me.”

“It’s not. I’m just . . . I’m offering you a chance to fix your security gaps.” She took a deep breath. “Look, someone
will
hack your servers; probably very soon.” She was flustered now, grasping because she’d lost all traction.

“Oh? What makes you so sure?”

“I—”

“You know what I think?” he interrupted, leaning toward her. “I think you’re planning it yourself and this little stunt was merely a test run gone wrong.” He grinned “How close am I?”

“No,
no!
It’s not like that.”

“Tell the truth. Things will go better if you just come clean. Who sent you?”

She began to speak then fell silent as tears gathered in her eyes. After a few moments she caught her breath. “No one. It’s just me. I’m not working for anyone.”

“We both know that’s a lie, don’t we?”

“It’s not.”

“You’ve hacked your way into BlakBox. Granted. You caught our security team off guard. I’ll also grant that you’re exceptionally intelligent and resourceful, but look at me when I tell you this.” He paused, narrowing his gaze at her. “You’re dealing with an organization with tens of billions of dollars and a global reputation at stake. It’s my job to ensure that nothing jeopardizes either of those things.
Nothing.
”

The words hung in the air, thick and heavy. The girl sat there, stunned. Any attempt to hold together her threadbare courage had failed. There was nowhere to run, no one to call for help, and she knew it.

He continued, his voice forceful, but calm. “You need to understand that we possess a depth of resources that your tender young mind can’t possibly fathom. More than that, we possess the will to use them to protect our interests. You’ve made a grave error in coming here. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

She nodded weakly.

“Good. Now, I don’t know what your true intentions are, but I promise you this: I will find out no matter how long it takes. And whatever data you transferred to your friend in the parking lot is already back in our hands.” It wasn’t true, but she didn’t know that.

Her eyes went wide. “Where’s Pixel? What’d you do to him?”

“There’s only one unanswered question here, and that is what to do with
you
.”

“Listen,” she said, fear practically strangling her now, putting tiny beads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She was looking for a sliver of hope to dig her nails into. “I’m really sorry . . . I didn’t mean for any of this to . . . I just thought . . .”

“You didn’t think. That’s where you went wrong.”

“Please, we can work something out.”

“There’s nothing to work out. This isn’t a negotiation, and there will be no leaving, no attorneys, no phone calls until I say so. Now, you’re going to tell me everything—why you’re really here, who sent you—”

“Nobody sent me,” she said, staring absently at the wall.

“Tell me what you accessed on our servers and why.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she said. “I swear. I was just—”

“Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”

She lowered her face into her hands, beginning to cry now.

“Don’t disappoint me, Nyah. I’ll know if you’re lying. And, trust me, I’m not the kind of man you want to lie to.”