Hack

by Peter Wrenshall

  “It’s just someone from school.”

  “You have a new friend?”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if I was trying to play the video game, and she was disturbing me. Maybe she would leave it at that. We couldn’t talk about anything in the house, so there was no need to press it.

  “We could give him a lift, too.”

  “She lives on the other side of town.”

  “Are you seeing a girl?” Hannah said. Her surprise was evident.

  “I’m not seeing a girl. I am just going with her to Gameworld.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to pry, but you may as well let us give you a lift. We can pick up your friend on the way.”

  “Will you just drop it, please?”

  47

  Everything went quiet for a minute. Then Richard, who had apparently been listening from the kitchen. “I’m hungry. How about some Chinese food?”

  “It’ll save me cooking,” Hannah said.

  “What about you, David?”

  It wasn’t an offer I could decline. This time, Richard waited until we turned out of the subdivision and onto the main road before starting the inquisition.

  “So, Romeo, why didn’t you tell us about this girl?”

  I looked astonished. “What are you talking about?”

  “This time Richard is right,” Hannah said, almost angry for the first time.

  “We want to know who the girl is.”

  “She’s nobody. She’s just cover.”

  “Cover for what, exactly?” Richard said.

  “What do you think?”

  “How much do you know about this girl?” asked Hannah.

  I sighed. “It’s just some girl. She listens to pop music and wears trendy clothes. She never blew anything up. I overheard Zaqarwi’s friend talking about a big party this weekend. I figured it might be a good chance to bump into him, only I’m not invited, but this girl was going, and I got her to invite me. I told you I was going to a party.”

  “Did you meet Zaqarwi?” Richard said.

  “Of course I didn’t,” I snapped. “I would have told you. I went to see if he was there. But I heard that he hangs out at Gameworld, so that’s where I am gonna be tonight. Hence I need a girl. I gotta have someone to hang out with. If I keep socializing by myself, it's gonna look to Zaqarwi like I’m following him.”

  My speech over, I turned my head to look out of the window. The car pulled up at a Chinese restaurant, and nobody moved.

  “What’s her name?” Richard said. He was annoyed at being talked to like that.

  “Grace.”

  “Grace what?”

  I hadn’t got Grace’s surname, but Mack had been the name on the email of the eBay account.

  “I think it’s Mack,” I said. Richard took out his phone, and hit autodial. I didn’t see who he was ringing, but I suspected that it was Philips’s number or some other FBI number. A second later, he barked into the phone, “Run a check on a Grace Mack and her family.”

  For a minute, we all sat in silence. Then he announced, “All right, she checks out.”

  “Man,” I said. “You must think that there are terrorists on every corner.”

  He glared at me in the car’s rearview mirror. “Your girlfriend’s stepfather is known to the local police as a fence. He’s got a sheet for selling stolen car radios, and assault.”

  So, the guy with the ponytail was not Grace’s real father.

  “I’m not going with him,” I said. Hannah looked at Richard, and Richard looked at Hannah.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m playing the cards I’ve got. I’ll let you see them when I’m ready. I promise that I won’t keep anything from you. It’s just the way I work. I get things done, and then talk about them. The opposite from ninety-nine percent of everybody else on the planet. But it’s how I work.”

  That seemed to end the conversation. We ate Chinese food, and then left.

  Nobody said anything all the way to Grace’s house. I introduced Grace to my so-48

  called parents, but there was too much tension in the air for any relaxed conversation during the drive. It was almost 7:30 p.m. when we arrived at Gameworld, which described itself as “The New Frontier in Gaming.”

  After Richard and Hannah dropped us off, Grace and I walked into the establishment.

  “Nerd world,” Grace said, with mild amusement. We got a few feet in and looked around. Near to the entrance were some of the older “classic” arcade games.

  At first I had no idea why they put them there, instead of the newer games. But then I realized that they probably had placed the good stuff in the middle of the park, so as to discourage people from loitering near the entrance, and to encourage them to enter into the new frontier, to boldly go and play the newer games. Some systems are counterintuitive until you consider them from a money-making perspective.

  We walked past ads of immense virtual worlds, with kids standing half in and half out of them—like the phantom tollbooth—and into the classics section. The place was practically deserted, but there were a few nerdy guys enjoying the games. There were even a couple of girlfriends, too, waiting patiently, without a trace of boredom on their faces. As I understood it from my data on dating, girls like to do activities together. What those activities were apparently wasn’t as important as the sharing aspect. When I first read that, it sounded dumb, but the evidence seemed to support the idea.

  Gameworld was more my scene than last night’s party. I moved around the people at Gameworld a lot easier than the party-goers. With these people, I didn’t feel any awkwardness.

  “Where to first?” I asked Grace.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I’ll race you around Monaco.”

  We headed over to the classics section. Here were the golden oldies. Space Invaders, Galaga, Phoenix, the games that I had played in between cracking sessions, partly because my homebrew computer wouldn’t play anything else, and partly because I liked to spend time with my disassembler-monitor, de-engineering the game code, to see how it had been written, and changing it around to get infinite lives, or to make the characters go through walls—stuff like that. Whoever said I was a computer genius didn’t know me. Anything I did took hundreds of hours of sitting and learning instruction sets, and staring at printouts—certainly not genius.

  I sat Grace in a surround-screen racing car game, which had been mind-blowingly advanced back in the day, stuck several coins into the slot, and then got in beside her.

  “Select automatic transmission, so you don’t have to shift gears,” I said. We raced around the streets, hitting everything but the finishing line, Grace laughing whenever she drove off a Monaco cliff, or smashed into a shop window. Next up was a game of Phoenix, followed by Gorf. We went from machine to machine. I had to keep moving around, keeping my eye out for Zaqarwi. But Grace didn’t seem to mind. She seemed happy just to go with the flow.

  While we were playing a doubles game of pong (in black and white), my eye caught a guy in the corner, with his arms around his girlfriend, as he showed her how to shoot the marauding aliens. He kept pointing out what to shoot. I made a mental note of it, for future reference. After half an hour in the retro section, I followed the big signs and moved into the virtual-reality section. We tried a game of something called “Otherworld.” Its objective was to shoot at other players, and after the first 49

  minute, I heard a shout come over the headset, something that I might have once laughed at:

  “Frag the noob!” That would be me.

  After that, we lingered around the slot machine section for a minute, but there was nothing of interest—games or Zaqarwi—and we soon left. I looked at my watch.

  Of the three hours I was supposed to spend in the place, we had been there only ninety minutes.

  I spotted a coffee shop, and figured that we could waste half an hour inside.

  “Do you want something to drink?” I asked.

  Grace nodded, and we went in.

&nb
sp; “You’re the only person I know who drinks decaffeinated coffee,” Grace said.

  “Well, everybody else was drinking the real stuff, so I thought I’d switch to decaffeinated, just to be different.”

  “So, you’re a rebel?”

  “A rebel without a clue.”

  Grace smiled. I liked that she smiled at my feeble jokes.

  “You know, I don’t even know your full name.”

  “David Johnson.”

  “Middle name?”

  “None. What’s your full name?”

  “Grace Mack.”

  “So, how long have you lived in Elmwood, Miss Mack?”

  “Pretty much all my life. How come you moved here?”

  I shrugged.

  “Where do you live?” I told her my address.

  “It’s nice up there.”

  “It’s pretty boring. Nothing ever happens. The highlight of the day is when Mrs. Brown’s Alsatian goes after Mrs. White’s poodle.” That got another smile.

  We talked for the best part of an hour—just random stuff like that. I had no idea that girls like to talk about where you used to live, or where you had gone on holiday. Watching movies must have given me the idea that everything you said to girls had to be wisecracks and one-liners.

  “Do you want to get a last game in?”

  “Okay.”

  We went back to the retro section. I stuck a coin in a Defender game, and got wasted almost immediately. I lost three lives in less than a minute. I was out of practice, but Defender was always a killer. Its sole purpose in life was to take your money, and throw you off. I hit the joystick, in mild annoyance.

  “I must be out of touch,” I said. I turned to go, and almost collided with someone coming the other way.

  “Sorry,” I said, before I even realized who it was. It was Zaqarwi, with another guy I had never seen. Zaqarwi smiled.

  “That’s all right.” I waited for him to say something further. He was the recruiter, after all, not me.

  “I think my high score is safe,” he said, pointing a finger at the screen. I grinned.

  “I haven’t played Defender for years. It kicked me straight off.”

  “You’re David, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Abdul. This is Al.” He indicated his silent friend.

  50

  “Hi,” I said to Al, who quietly said hi in return.

  “This is Grace.” Grace said hi.

  “I saw your hack the other day,” continued Zaqarwi, referring to the whiteboard hack.

  I grinned. “I just got bored, and started poking around.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Simple,” I said, and gave Zaqarwi a hacker-to-hacker synopsis of how I had hijacked the whiteboard.

  “I checked the address of my machine, noticed the last number was the same as the asset tag on the side of the computer case.” Zaqarwi nodded.

  “Everybody was talking about it.”

  “I normally like to keep a low profile, but I couldn’t resist such an easy target.

  I got bored.”

  “Me, too. Maybe we should get a network game going sometime.”

  “That would make class a bit more interesting. I noticed that they arranged the computers so that the teacher can always see what is going on.”

  “We tried to talk Logan into letting us get a game together last Christmas, but he got too nervous. This year, we’ll set something up without him knowing. The Elmwood Christmas Frag.”

  I laughed. I was surprised by Zaqarwi. He had this deadpan way of delivering lines. And it’s always nice to meet a fellow computer nerd. If it wasn’t for the knowledge that he was a terrorist, I might have enjoyed the conversation.

  “Count me in,” I said. Then his face changed, becoming more serious.

  “We have a club you might be interested in.”

  “Sounds interesting. When do you meet?”

  “Sometime next week. I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay.”

  “I gotta go. I’ll see you in class.”

  “See you.”

  “What was that about?” said my escort. I explained about my whiteboard hack in less technical terms, and she was amused, but genuinely puzzled.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Just for, you know, the challenge.” She didn’t seem to understand. We taxied back to Grace’s house, and I had the taxi wait, while I went to the door.

  “I had a good time tonight,” Grace said.

  “I would have thought it would have bored you, all those computer games.”

  “I wasn’t bored.” Grace ran her fingers through her hair, which my dating tips had told me was a good sign. Grooming behavior, Olivia had called it. I waited for the sprinkler system to come on, leaving us giggling and running for cover, like in the movies, but nothing happened. I waited for the clouds to pull back, setting free a romantic moon, but nothing happened. The Macks had no sprinklers, the moon was hardly showing that night, and the stuff Hollywood makes up can be quite misleading.

  “Wait a minute,” Grace said suddenly. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “You’ve got something for me?”

  Grace disappeared into the house, and then came back a minute later, holding a cell phone.

  “You said that you wanted a phone. You can have my old one, if you want.

  It’s nothing special, but it works.” She held it out to me.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No, I was keeping it as a spare, but I don’t use it.”

  51

  “Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And thanks for showing me around again.”

  “No problem.”

  “See you in school.”

  “See you.” Grace went inside.

  I pocketed the phone, and went home.

  “Hi, David,” Hannah said, as I went into the house. “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes. I played some of the old games that I used to play.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “And I made a new friend.”

  I woke as usual at 6 a.m. the next day, Sunday. I didn’t go down for breakfast.

  I listened to music, and flicked through the radio stations. At ten o'clock, I was too hungry to stay upstairs any longer, and went down, hoping that Hannah and Richard would have gone out. But Hannah was in the kitchen, writing.

  “Good morning, David,” she said, with indefatigable cheeriness. I said hello, got some cereal, and went back to my room. An hour later, I heard a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I said, and looked up to see Hannah sticking her head around the door.

  “I’m going out. Richard’s gone to get something from the store. Will you be okay on your own?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Was there anything you wanted to do today?”

  “No, I’ll just take it easy. I could do with a bit of a rest.”

  She was about to back out of the room when she spotted the cereal bowl, sitting on the floor at the side of the bed.

  “Don’t forget to take your bowl back to the kitchen.”

  “Yes, Mom,” I agreed, with a wry grin, and she left. I got off the bed, picked up the bowl, and headed to the kitchen. Through the window, I could see she was now in front of the garage, putting on a helmet, ready to go cycling. I opened the door.

  “Are you going bike riding?” —a dumb question if ever I heard one.

  “Just a few miles,” she said. She didn’t sound too enthusiastic. I wondered what the FBI’s yearly fitness tests involved. “Do you want to come?”

  “Okay.”

  “I set a pretty hard pace,” she said, with a hint of a wicked smile. I smiled back.

  “I used to ride my bike all over the city. I’ll manage.”

  “Get changed and we’ll go.”

  I changed and followed Hannah out of the driveway. We rode to a nearby park, where I tested my suspension out on
a few natural jumps. Then we circled the dirt track twice, and after half an hour, Hannah was ready to ride back. We sprinted the last hundred yards, and I let Hannah win.

  “You haven’t even broken a sweat,” she said, looking at me, her hands on her thighs, breathing deeply.

  “I used to ride everywhere,” I said.

  Inside, I headed for the fridge, and got some juice.

  “Don’t eat too much,” Hannah said. “I’m going to be cooking.”

  “It’s just juice.”

  52

  I went upstairs and lay on the bed once again. I didn’t bother to shower or change. I just lazed on the bed, going over my plan for the next few days, as meticulously as an inspector checking for holes in a nuclear reactor. Apart from dinner, I stayed in my room, and it turned out that the bike ride was the highlight of the day.

  53

  Chapter 12

  At 9 a.m. the next morning, I arrived bright and cheery at school. By 9:10

  a.m., I was dull and bored. The only interesting thing that happened took place after my first class, as I was leaving the classroom. I was bumped into by some oversized guy wearing a sports shirt. Apparently, I was in his way. I stood aside to let him pass.

  It was like that in jail, too. Everybody is told what to do, and the only outlet for that grief is to tell other people what to do.

  At lunch time, I found Grace, and we sat talking again. I tried several times to bring up a topic that was on my mind, but didn’t know how to go about it. So far, everything had been going well. I had made good progress, considering the short time I had been working at it. But I hadn’t yet found somewhere quiet where I could begin hacking in private. Somewhere like Grace’s house. But I couldn’t figure out how to approach the subject.

  “Grace, do you mind if I use your room for some illegal computer hacking?”

  “No, go right ahead. When the cops turn up, I’ll tell them you were teaching me basic war-dialing, and MAC spoofing.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think that it would go like that. I looked at Grace, sitting across the table from me. She had finished her liquid lunch, and was toying with the empty can, talking about something that annoyed her. Putting my problems aside, and tuning back into what she was saying, I realized that she was talking about downloading music from the Internet, without paying for it. Stealing. She had heard about other people doing it, but when she had tried to do it, she had got nowhere. At last, my cue.