Hack

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Hack Page 17

by Peter Wrenshall


  98

  It was a huge double con, and I was the mark. I sat there, holding my head, knowing what I had lost. I got back into the taxi, and asked the driver to stop at Grace’s house. I looked through the windows, but there was no one there, either.

  I gave the driver Knight’s address, and he dropped me off at Knight’s office.

  But was no Knight Securities, Inc.—not even any furniture in the office.

  I looked up into the night sky, and screamed “No!”—even though I knew they were watching. Actually, because they were watching. Orion looked down. Orion. He didn’t care. He had been watching for countless millions of years, and he would carry on watching for millions more.

  I sat on the curb in the empty parking lot, looking at Orion.

  99

  Chapter 22

  It must have been a convincing act, because Knight bought it. And once he was convinced that he had hacked me, he got to work. With the user account details he had gotten from my stash, he was able to log on to a well-known bank’s server, and transfer a large amount of money. Altogether, he and another gang siphoned off over a hundred million dollars. The details of the Pentagon’s network he sold to a buyer, and got another small fortune. Only he didn’t.

  The FBI arrested them as they were heading to a remote country, where the bank accounts come with numbers but no names. There was a big trail, at the end of which Knight and his friends—Philips, Garman, Hannah, Richard, Malik, Zaqarwi, and the rest—all got heavy sentences. I heard that Knight is now in solitary confinement, like I had been.

  But I can’t take any credit for Knight’s downfall, since it was all the idea of Agent Bartels, of the Cyber Crime Squad of the FBI. The real FBI. He had come to me a week after I landed in jail, and said that Knight would be looking to run a hack on me. He said that Knight was a criminal, and that he would probably be looking to steal my stash, which he knew was worth millions.

  Bartels had guessed that Knight would be sending people to me, pretending to be the police or the FBI. And it was Bartels who hid that stash of fake user accounts and server details at my old house. The truth is I never kept a stash. Any details I had were kept in my head. Like I said, whenever I hacked a site, I took only memories.

  I went to college not long after Knight’s arrest, and with my hacking days behind me, I now live the quiet life. The real world is just as boring as I always imagined. Studying, assignments, and project work. Sometimes it’s hard not to wish for the good old days.

  But life has its compensations. Sometimes on the weekend, I like to take a break from school to travel around. Just last month, I found myself on the train, sitting across from an attractive blonde, dressed in a business suit and wearing dark glasses. I got talking to her, and bought her lunch. With her dark eyes and her habit of frowning, she reminded me of Grace, but of course there never was any Grace. And when we went to the beach last week, and I noticed two scars running up her back, I knew that it still wasn’t Grace.

  This woman’s name is Jennifer, and we get on very well. She has this annoying habit of asking too many questions, and getting me to talk about things I don’t really want to talk about. But it could be worse. It could be the feds asking the questions.

  I never went back to my life of criminal hacking, and I’m pretty sure that I never will. Except one time, when I was at the FBI’s local headquarters, talking to Agent Bartels, filling in the details of our own sting, I managed to sneak a look at their personnel database. Imagine my surprise when I came across Agent North’s username and password.

  I’d let you have them, hacker to hacker, but I need to keep hold of them for a while. You never know what you might need one rainy day.

  Besides, you don’t think I’d do anything criminal, do you?

  The End

  100

  This book is provide free of charge. If you enjoyed it, please feel free to donate $1 to [email protected] at www.paypal.com

 

 

 


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