Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (3 page)

I
WANTED to scream
, but I knew no one would hear me. Not in this concrete bunker deep underground.

The man across the table studied me. His eyes seemed like black pearls, impenetrable and cold. I knew I wouldn’t be leaving that room anytime soon, maybe never. Whatever I’d stumbled onto, it was dangerous enough for Bell to sic this lunatic on me. What were in those files I’d transferred to Pixel? Something big, obviously, and very dangerous.

I looked up at a video camera, and the man settled back in his chair. “They’ve been turned off,” he said. “We’re quite alone and these walls are very thick. I assure you.”

I swallowed, said nothing. I believed him. I also believed he was capable of much more than I was imagining, which was pretty awful. I sat up as straight as I could and tried to speak without coming completely undone. “There are people looking for me. I’ve been gone a long time.”

He glanced at his watch. “Really? Who would be looking for you? Your friend on the bike?” He shook his head and stretched his lips into a tight smile. “Not anymore.”

I felt like puking right then and there. “Where is he?” I asked again. “Please tell me you didn’t hurt him.”

“Pixel,” the man said slowly, as if he were chewing on the word. He shook his head.

“
What did you do?
” I felt the last seams of my resolve pulling apart. I had to get out of that room, out of that building, but there was no way I could overpower him. And I was deep underground. I could never escape before they reeled me back in. That’s exactly how it felt: like I was a fish on a hook.

“Your friend’s in very serious trouble, just like you. Apparently, he understands what’s at stake, and he is cooperating fully with authorities as we speak.”

“He’s with the police?”

“He’s told us everything. Like I said, if you lie to me we’ll know. Now, start at the beginning. I won’t ask again.”

The man’s face was hard as a statue’s, but I knew he was lying about the authorities being involved. If Pixel was in custody then why wasn’t I? Why was I being held in a concrete room? It made no sense. Chances were that Pixel sat in another room just like this one, maybe next door, and the only path out for both of us was to tell them everything. I had nothing to hide, after all. I only hoped he’d believe me.

“All of this is very simple,” I said. “The reason I came here was to help my—”

Before I could say
mother
, the man’s mobile phone rang, cutting me off.

“Yes?” he answered, irritation making the word sharp as a rock dropped on the table. His gaze flicked toward me and his mouth twisted into a frown. “How long ago?” He squeezed his eyes closed. “I see. No, no, keep them there. I’ll bring the girl up.”

Hope kindled inside of me as he holstered his phone.
Bring the girl up
. Was I leaving? Or was he just taking me somewhere else to question me? He seemed uncertain for the first time, and caught off guard.

He crinkled his nose at me. “Smart girl,” he said. “Apparently that call you made worked out, though I had my doubts it would. The FBI doesn’t come running for just anyone. Jill Corbis, was it? She’s waiting in the main lobby to take you into custody.”

Jill.
She’d gotten my call. She came to my rescue. “What—?” I started.

He held up a massive hand, stopping me. “The question is, why? Why would the FBI come for a teenage hacker like you? I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.” The man leaned close. “Though let me give you some advice. If I were you, I would consider carefully what I told the authorities. Your actions just might have far-reaching consequences.”

I knew he meant Pixel and my family. I had no doubt this man was capable of anything.

He pushed back from the table, stood, and turned toward the door. “Follow me,” he said.

F
BI Field Office
,
San Francisco, CA

“
N
YAH
, WHAT were you thinking?”

Jill Corbis glared at me from the end of the conference room where she stood with hands gripping the table’s edge. Thankfully, she’d gotten my message and taken it seriously enough to bring a pair of agents with her. She had made a spectacle of arresting me in BlakBox’s lobby. It was a show mostly for Bell’s sake, she’d said. They could have carried me out in a bag of trash for all I cared, as long as they got me out of that place.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I just . . . I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, that’s obvious. What you did was not only dangerous, but highly illegal.”

“I said I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“Not good enough this time. I just defended you to the deputy director, who, by the way, has already gotten a call from BlakBox’s legal counsel. I want to help you, but you need to give me more than just
I’m sorry
. Let’s go through this again, and this time I want you to tell me everything.”

“I did tell you everything.”

Jill narrowed her focus. “My gut tells me you’re not.”

I pushed my chair back from the table. “I already told you, I was just trying to land a consulting job. I need the money,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Everybody needs money.”

“Not
this
badly, they don’t, and not this much. I’m trying to get Mom into a clinical study, which is crazy expensive. Her doctor thinks she doesn’t have long to live. This research program could help. It’s the miracle I’ve been looking for and the money from BlakBox was going to pay for it. But now . . .”

I let my words trail off. It was all too much—getting caught, watching the money slip through my fingers, along with it my last chance to help Mom. Worse still, Pixel was missing, and it was my fault.

Jill’s face softened. “So you take a risk, swing for the fences with BlakBox, hoping they’ll hire you and pay the money you need.”

“Yes,” I said, not hiding the frustration in my voice. “We’ve already gone through this.”

“And we’ll go through it again, if need be. It’s important that I know everything.” She sighed. “You know, kid, every grey hair on my head is from you.”

That was probably true. We’d met a year earlier when her team scooped me up as part of a hacking sting. I’d been cleared of any crime, mostly because, while my snooping had crossed paths with malicious hackers, I had no affiliations with them and hadn’t vandalized anything. I’d simply been in the wrong digital place at the wrong digital time.

Where others in the Bureau saw a threat, Jill had seen a young girl trying to get her bearings after a tragedy had shattered her world. Incredibly, we’d become friends, and I’d started tipping her off when I caught whiff of something fishy on the cyber wind. She owed her last promotion to me after I uncovered a hacker’s plan to breach a global payment system and snatch a hundred million credit card numbers.

“Do you realize how connected and influential Walter Bell is?” Jill continued. “If BlakBox decides to come after you—”

“Let them! I don’t care!”

“Well, you need to start caring, because right now there’s no scenario that ends well for you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that matters right now is finding Pixel.” I softened my voice and sat back in the chair and hugged myself. “I have a really bad feeling.”

“We’ll find him,” Jill said. “He probably got scared, ran away, and now he’s laying low until things cool off.”

“Then why isn’t he answering his phone? He always answers. That creep at BlakBox said the authorities had him, but that’s a lie. What if they grabbed him? What if they’ve done something to him?”

Jill was silent, her mind grinding away. I knew in my heart the man in the black suit had Pixel. That’s why he’d mentioned him, to scare me. To pressure me and let me know that he held all the cards.

“What if they hurt him?” I said.

“At this moment we have no reason to believe anyone at BlakBox would harm either you or your friend. They’re a corporation, not the mafia. Walter Bell is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. Holding a kid is too risky.”

“Risky?” I threw up my hands. “They locked me in a concrete room in their basement and sent a man to interrogate me. Do you really think they were just going to call the police? If you hadn’t come for me there’s no telling what they would’ve done. They were just going to deal with it themselves and make me disappear quietly. And Pixel too.”

“That’s an assumption. We don’t know that.”

“Then where is he?” The words came out sharper than I’d meant, and more desperate.

“I don’t know.” She stopped. “But we’ll find him, I promise.”

“Not sitting here we won’t.”

My words hung in the air as Jill settled into the seat next to me and leaned close. “I know you’re upset. I would be too. I want to help you, but you’re not giving me much to go on.”

“These people are dangerous,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“You should be. Remember, you’re the one who crossed the line here, not Bell. I should be investigating you.”

“But the pictures, the things I saw on their server . . . I don’t know, it was like something straight out of a spy movie. Something isn’t right there. I mean, how many companies have an interrogation room?”

“More than you realize,” Jill said.

A thick, dark cloud descended on my mind. Every moment that passed without word from Pixel lowered the odds of finding him safe. Everyone knew that. Plus, time gave BlakBox the advantage of covering their tracks—masking whatever it was I’d seen on their servers and whatever they’d done with Pixel.

“You have to raid that place before they move everything off their servers,” I said. “It’s all right there; you just have to go get it.”

Jill shook her head. “I can’t do that, not on the word of a teenage girl.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I don’t know.” She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know.”

Her words stung. “Jill . . .”

“I trust you far more than I do Walter Bell, but that’s not enough. I need evidence.”

“Then find Pixel. Find his laptop. I transferred the files from BlakBox’s server to it.”

“Could he have sent the data somewhere?” she asked. “As a . . . I don’t know . . . a precaution? An e-mail account, a cloud backup service, anything?”

“Yeah, if he had time. The plan was for him to upload the files to an encrypted site on the Internet, which I’d then give BlakBox access to after they hired me.”

“And?”

“It’s not there. I checked the account using my phone. I was the last person to log into it, and that was last night.”

“What about e-mail? Could he have sent it to you?”

“I checked that too. I’ve gotten nothing from him.” I shook my head. “They have him, I know it. And the data too. If that’s the case it’s their word against mine.”

Jill reached out and put her hand on top of mine. “We’ll find Pixel and we’ll figure this out.”

I felt the tears welling, but I shoved them down. I didn’t say anything.

“I had your car towed to impound. It’s waiting for you downstairs. Now I want you to go home,” Jill said. “Get some rest. We’ll look at this with fresh eyes tomorrow. My people will keep looking for Pixel, all right?”

“You’re letting me go?”

“It took some work on my part, but yes, for now. You have to promise me you’ll keep your head down. And if the thought crosses your mind to go anywhere near BlakBox, don’t. Understand?”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“It’s going to be all right,” she said and squeezed my hand. “I promise.”

It wasn’t a promise she could make, though. We both knew that.

I left the conference room and headed out, feeling small in the FBI building’s wide, tiled halls. I tried Pixel’s number and wanted to scream when my call went directly to voicemail again.

Where are you, Pixel? Please be all right.

I don’t remember the ride to Mom’s apartment. My body was running on autopilot, which was good, since my mind felt like a fried circuit board. I pulled into Cedar Ridge, the assisted-care facility where she and my grandma lived, and sat in the stuffy car, watching the sun drop lower in the sky.

After a while, my nerves felt a little calmer. I climbed out of the car and headed for the front entrance. It was a campus of five buildings that housed over five hundred people. Most of them were retirees living out their twilight years in style. Others, like Mom, were there because the hospice care was the best in northern California.

When I entered Mom’s apartment my grandmother Lettie was standing at the kitchenette, sorting mail. It was a small, two-bedroom unit on the ground floor that reminded me of my own apartment—kitchenette on the right as you walked in, cramped living room ahead, and a narrow hall beyond the kitchen counter, leading to the bedrooms.

Lettie dropped the stack and attacked me with a hug. “There you are! Don’t you answer your phone anymore?” She said, squeezing me tight. “You had me worried.”

“Sorry. I got held up.” I tightened my arms around her. She felt so frail, like holding a bird.

“I saved you a plate,” she said, turning and heading for the refrigerator. “I’ll heat it up.”

“Maybe later. I grabbed a bite on my way home,” I lied. You have to understand, food was her love language. Lettie saw feeding me as a way of putting into action what she felt in her heart. She was taking care of me and rejecting her food offerings was like turning away from a hug. You just didn’t do it without good reason. Truth was, my stomach felt as though it’d been used as a punching bag.

She turned to face me, her hands fluttering in front of her, now that they had nothing to do. “Oh,” she said, disappointed.

Lettie was my dad’s mom. She was short and stocky with hair the color of cobwebs. Grandpa Rick had died three years earlier, one week after he sold his service garage and retired. They’d planned a trip around the world, but never made it. She’d gone back to work because sitting around the house was driving her “batty as a banana,” an image I didn’t quite get, but I understood. After the accident she’d dropped everything to take care of Mom, and had recently moved into Cedar Ridge to be with her around the clock.

“How was the job interview?” she asked. “I’ll bet they just loved you.”

“I didn’t get it. I wasn’t a ‘good fit for their corporate culture.’” I made quote marks in the air.

“They said that? To your face?”

“I think it
was
my face they were referring to.” I touched my nose ring.

“Psh!” she said, waving her hand. “People are too hung up on what they can see, when all that matters is what they can’t.” She tapped a finger against her chest, over her heart. “Well, their loss.” She shrugged and smiled. “Someday they’ll regret their decision.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

Lettie knew I was a computer consultant and that I was extremely good at it. Large companies hired me to fix problems and gave me monster paychecks to do it. But I couldn’t tell her how I acquired clients. She would never understand or approve.

“Wait and see.” She ran a finger along my temple, catching a stray strand of hair and tucking it behind my ear. “You’re brilliant and beautiful. Things are going to get better, you’ll see. If there’s anything I know in these old bones it’s that everything happens for a reason.”

“I was hoping this project would work out. The money would’ve taken care of us for a while and paid for that experimental trial.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

It was unfair is what it was. The trial was a miracle in waiting. PREMIND was short for
Post-traumatic Restorative Encoding Med-Integration Neural Device
. It was a neural implant that held the promise of reversing some of Mom’s brain damage and nudging her a bit toward
normal
again. But it didn’t matter now: BlakBox hadn’t taken the bait so there was no money to get Mom into the program.

Anger grew deep inside me, like the fitful heating of charcoal in a grill. Anger at the situation, at our life, at God. It felt as though we’d become a punch line to a cosmic joke, and that God took perverse pleasure in dangling hope in front of us only to snap it away when we reached for it.

“I have to find a way. I don’t know how yet, but I’ll get the money.”

“Honey, that’s impossible. Let it go.”

My mind was churning. Lettie looked at me with concern. There was something else in her eyes as well, something small but powerful. It was hope, and I knew it would turn into either disappointment or joy.

“How’s Mom?”

“It’s been a tough day,” she said with a fading smile. “She’s . . . I should check on her.”

I took Lettie’s hand. “It’s okay. I will. You sit down.”

She pecked me on the cheek. “She knows who you are, you know. She remembers, even if only deep inside.”

I smiled and nodded. “I know.”

Without another word I veered down the short hallway to her bedroom. Lettie had created a gallery of family photos—“The Hall of Memories,” she’d called it.

I walked slowly, my fingertips skimmed over the photographic bodies and faces, remembering each event: Mom nailing Dad with a Super Soaker as he came out of the sliding-glass door onto the back patio, her mouth open in a laughing grin, her eyes made into joyful crescents; Mom and my little brother Tommy, wearing big mustaches and hats, each with both hands on a cane and kicking up one leg during a homebrewed vaudeville act they’d put on three years ago in the living room; me, holding Mom in my arms in the surf on a beach in Pensacola, Florida, mom acting afraid of the water. Right after the picture had been taken, I tossed her into a big, breaking wave and she proceeded to drag me into the water, both of us stuffing sand down the other’s bathing suit and smearing it into each other’s hair. I’d never laughed so hard.

No one ever tells you that being a survivor is a kind of curse. Not the doctors who remind you that you’re lucky to be alive. Not the counselors who mean well, but have no more answers than you do. Not your friends who are afraid of saying something wrong so they say nothing at all.