Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles

T
his book is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

C
opyright © 2014
Ted Dekker

D
igital edition published
by Outlaw Studios. Paperback edition available everywhere books are sold.

A
ll rights reserved
. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

C
over Image and Design
: Pixel Peach Studios

O
NE FRAGILE moment
—that’s all it takes for a life to be unmade, to shatter into a million pieces that will never fit together the same way. Hard as you try to change it, you’ll find—just as I did—that some things, once broken, can’t be fixed.

Some things have to be re-created
completely.

Some people too.

The ancient book says that it took God seven days to create the world. It took him only three to shatter my little life and remake it in a way that I would’ve never chosen for myself. It’s always like that—one story ends; another one begins.

This is my story, and I couldn’t have possibly known how hard it was going to be.

None of us could’ve known.

S
ilicon Valley
, California

E
VERYTHING CAN be hacked
. Everything—the cell phone in your pocket, the onboard computer of the 737 you’re flying on, the security system guarding your house while you sleep. Nothing is safe.

Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Most people don’t believe it, and that’s fine. I totally get it. Whoever said ignorance is bliss wasn’t so ignorant. Still, despite our unwillingness to accept it, deep down we all know the truth: safety is an illusion and nowadays the castles we all think will protect us are nothing more than little ones and zeroes, tiny bits of code no more substantial than the air we breathe. They’re castles built on clouds, nothing more.

I should know; it’s my job to demolish those castles. Some would call me a hacker, but I see myself as something more—a reality check for hire. I crack corporate servers to prove I can; then panicked companies pay me to fix their problems. I open their eyes to the cracks they fail to see.

I’m good at it. One of the best, actually.

Nyah Parks is my name and I’m seventeen. I suppose I’m not typical, whatever “typical” means. I aced high school by age twelve. Could’ve done it by eight, but my parents thought I should mature a bit before walking into the ivory halls of higher education. Maybe they were right, but it’s not like age would make me more normal. I was a freak at eight and time didn’t change that.

While other teen girls were fussing over boys and things like hair and makeup and how many Facebook friends they had, I was learning computer code—PHP, C, C#, AJAX, Java, JavaScript, Perl, and Python just for starters. Programming, I came to realize, is my native tongue. And I rock at it. Wrote my first stochastic stock-trading algorithm at thirteen and sold it to a Wall Street hedge fund for enough bank to pay for college. Stanford, in case you were wondering.

I never fit in at high school, and it was even worse at college. I got in and out as quickly as I could, graduating at fifteen with a double major in computer science and mathematics. No one was lining up to hire me, though. One recruiter told me I needed better social skills. I told him where he could put his opinion, which I guess proved his point. Like I said, a freak.

My childhood shrink diagnosed me with arithmomania, an obsessive compulsion to count, which I do constantly: the number of Cheerios floating in my cereal bowl, the percentage of drivers yapping on cell phones, the statistical probability of being run over by them as they change lanes, how often the letter
Q
appears in every magazine article and book I read. I don’t know why
Q
specifically, but there you have it. It’s a thing.

None of this has won me any friends. Despite what everyone says, being different is a curse. People don’t want different, not really. They want to be around people like themselves: safe, predictable . . . boring.

People don’t like surprises. Not the big kind, anyway. Not the kind that leave scars.

Lettie, my dad’s mom, says that the traumas that leave scars happen for a reason, and those things are among the most beautiful things on earth, like diamonds and sunsets.

I told her that was total garbage, that all she was doing was trying to make sense of the chaos all around us. She just smiled and said nothing.

If the universe made sense, then Harlan Schmitt, age twenty-three, would’ve never run a red light at 64th and Pine seven hundred sixteen days ago. He would have never broadsided a minivan—
my
family’s minivan—doing eighty-three miles per hour, according to the police investigation. He would have never killed my dad and little brother. And my mom wouldn’t be stuck in the nightmare that she is, alive but not living because of the brain damage.

If the universe made sense, and there was a God who knew what he was doing, none of that would’ve happened. I would be telling you a different story. Not this one, not one in which my life shattered for the second time, two weeks before my eighteenth birthday.

The first time started when a certain dimwit climbed into his crappy ten-year-old Corolla after too many beers at O’Shanahan’s Pub—celebrating, it turned out, a fifty-cent raise that brought his hourly wage to a whopping $10.74.

The second time began when I pulled into the parking lot of BlakBox Technologies on a bright Tuesday afternoon. It was July and the asphalt rippled with heat, so I found a shady spot near the front door and sat in Mom’s old blue Honda Civic, staring at the shiny building.

Being there was unreasonable and dangerous, especially if things went sideways on me, but I had no choice. I wasn’t there because I wanted to be. Not really. I was there to get my mom what she needed, and what she needed was $250,000. That was the price of her salvation if I could find a way to afford it.

The accident had left her with severe brain trauma. During the first days, doctors saw hopeful signs and thought she might make a full recovery. She could remember her name, who I was, and even some details about the accident. Encouraged with her progress, they moved her out of the hospital and into an assisted-care facility.

Two months ago, everything that made Mom who she was—her laugh, her smile, the memories we shared—began to disintegrate right in front of me. Her brain began to die.
She
began to die. Doctors said she had three months to live, best-case scenario.

Three months. That was the measure of her life, her expiration date.

My entire life became focused on helping her get better. Doctors said nothing could be done, but I couldn’t accept that. I was going to find a way. Every waking moment, every job I took, every dollar I made went to finding a cure. All the while, she spiraled down into a waking nightmare.

My persistence paid off when I came across a post on an obscure neurology online forum, an old-style message board still used by scientists. The conversation thread was about a privately funded, experimental—and apparently successful—program to help soldiers recover from brain injuries. PREMIND, as they called it, was being run out of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkley, not a half-hour drive from me.

That night I hunted down the program director and was waiting on her front doorstep the next morning. It took days of pleading and borderline stalking, but I convinced her to accept Mom into the program, as long as I covered the $250,000 required for the medical procedures, and paid it in full before the clinical trials began.

I had $101,243.12 scraped together from consulting jobs I’d done over the past year. If I couldn’t save Mom myself then I would use my skills to hire the people who could. Problem was, I needed a big job, one bigger than any I’d ever done before. I’d never made a hundred grand from a single job. If I had any chance, I would need to go big, and that’s where BlakBox came in.

I picked up my cell phone and tapped the screen to dial a number. It rang once and Pixel picked up.

“Hang on. Almost ready,” he said. His voice was tense. Jason Piksky had been my brother’s best friend. At fourteen, he was a better hacker than most people three times his age, and he was the only one I trusted to be my second set of hands on this job. It was too important, too complex to do on my own. I pictured him on his bicycle, a Mac Powerbook Pro strapped between the handlebars.

“Are you in the right place?” I asked him. “The Wi-Fi signal is strongest—”

“On the west side of the parking lot, behind the shrubs. I know. We’ve gone over this a million times.”

“This has to be spot on. No mistakes.”

I could hack nearly any company from my living-room couch while watching
Doctor Who
reruns in my pajamas. But sometimes
how
you get someone’s attention is everything. Landing the biggest job of my life required going radical. Some people won’t look you in the eye unless you first grab them by the throat. Easier said than done when it’s Goliath you’re gunning for, and that’s exactly what I was doing.

A long silence on the other end. “You sure about this?” Pixel said.

“No,” I said, staring through the dusty windshield.

“We’re going to ace this.”

I drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “Right.”

I climbed out of the car and angled toward the front door, wiping a sweaty palm on my pants.

“I’m going in,” I said into the phone. “Watch for my commands. Just like we practiced.”

“Got it.”

I ended the call and pocketed the phone. One way or another the outcome would be epic.

I climbed the marble steps to the front entrance. As corporate offices went in Silicon Valley, BlakBox was unremarkable: a steel-and-glass building the size of a football field, with windows tinted the sheen of volcanic glass. No sign or logo announced the company’s name; nothing indicated what went on behind its black walls. It was tucked in the back corner of a business park surrounded by distribution centers. It could have been just another warehouse shipping out tennis shoes, yoga mats, and baby food to online customers.

I knew better.

BlakBox dealt in information. It ran data centers all over the world, vast server farms that companies depended on to keep their files backed up and secure. Some of the largest dot-coms on the planet used its services. If the BlakBox network was a global wheel, this obscure building was the hub. It controlled everything.

The double doors parted with a hiss and a rush of chilled air caught my hair as I stepped in. The mahogany-floored lobby was morgue quiet as I made my way toward the reception desk, a massive, arching counter between the entrance and an alcove beyond it. Other than the emergency stairwells, a bank of four elevators was the only access point to the four floors above and the eight floors below: office space overhead; server rooms and the control center deep below my feet.

A pair of security guards sat behind the desk. A man, bald and NFL thick, stood as I approached, tablet computer in hand. The other guard was glaring at a big monitor.

“Good afternoon,” NFL said. A black name tag pinned to his lapel read M. Small.
His first name was Marion. Age thirty-four. Divorced with one child. It’s amazing what you can find online without much effort.

“Hi. I’m meeting someone for lunch,” I said. “He said I should wait for him in the lobby.”

The man’s eyes lingered on me. They were deep set and grey, like the ocean after a storm. “Your name, ma’am?” he said.

“Williams. Heather Williams.”

He swiped his finger down the tablet, stopped, then nodded. “I see you’re here for—”

“Brant Thompson,” I said, my voice cracking. “Yes, sir.”

“You okay?”

I shrugged and coughed into my hand. “Sorry. I’m just a little nervous. He’s interviewing me for an internship. You know, he and my dad are kind of friends and it’s a favor. I’m trying really hard not to screw this up.”

He chuckled and lifted a phone. “I’ll let Mr. Thompson know you’re here.”

“No!”

He glanced up, one eyebrow raised.

“That’s not necessary,” I said. “Really. He said not to bother him when I arrived because he’d be in a meeting. I’m supposed to just to wait down here.” I shifted on my feet.

The man stood silent.

“Okay if I wait over there?” I pointed to a sitting area—an L-shaped, white leather sofa and two white chairs surrounding a glass-and-metal coffee table.

“That’d be fine,” he said and set the phone down.

I glanced around. Midday light illuminated the glass sculpture that hung from the ceiling by wires. It was a beautiful abstract meant to look like links in a chain. “Wow, this place is
sweet
. Seriously. Way nicer than Bayside.”

NFL’s hard face softened. “You attend Bayside High School?”

“Yep. Senior year.”

“Mr. Palmer still principal?”

“Him and his bad toupee.”

He laughed quietly and shook his head. “Like a ferret perched up there.”

“That’s it.”

“I went there ages ago.”

Sixteen years, to be exact, Marion.

“No kidding,” I said. “Wow. Small world. You must’ve played football.”

He waved off my comment. “Too violent. Flag corps captain. Two-time state champ.” He was grinning now. “Good luck with your interview. Hope you make a big impression.”

I gave him a smile. “That’s the plan.” I walked to the seating area and sank into an oversized leather chair. I had a sweeping, unimpeded view of the lobby from entrance to elevators.

This is insane, Nyah. Absolutely certifiable.

I smeared my hands across my jeans and scanned the room, trying to ease the relentless itch that gnawed at the edge of my mind.

Eight magazines stacked on the coffee table. Two vases. Thirteen flowers in one, eleven in the other.

I diverted my attention down, tapped my foot twice—a ritual my counselor taught me to bring me back to the present.

Breathe . . . breathe . . .

I slipped my iPhone from my pocket and thumbed it awake. Swiped my finger across the screen and a digital dashboard appeared. Three days of sitting in the parking lot, just within range of the building’s Wi-Fi signal, had given me enough time to crack the building’s utilities network. That was the only chink in BlakBox’s armor; I hoped it would be enough.

I drew a deep breath and, after a last glance at the security guards, called up my texting app.

Time to give Goliath a sharp poke in the eye.