Glitch

by Olivia Linden

  GLITCH

  CORPORATE HITMAN VOL.1

  Copyright © 2014 by Olivia Linden & LeTeisha Newton. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2014

  ISBN-13:978-0-9890192-1-7

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  PREVIEW SCRATCH (CORPORATE HITMAN VOL.2)

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Prologue

  April 5th, 2011

  Location: Federal Correctional Institution, Allenwood Low

  Inmate: Liam Nelson Gallagher

  Conviction: Two counts of computer trespass and one count of computer conspiracy

  Sentence: 48 months

  Status: Conviction vacated

  The buzz of a rapidly flickering fluorescent light, of the low-quality standard attributed to prisons, was all Liam could make out in his current circumstance. His last waking memory had been of his least favorite guard taunting him about his pending release. If you could call forty months left on a four-year sentence pending. He’d found it even more difficult to achieve the basic level of comfort he required to fall asleep on the quarter-inch thin bunk that had been his home for the last eight months.

  He awoke, not in his cell but being escorted, or more like dragged, towards an unknown destination. As his grogginess wore off, and he became more awake and alert, he was struck by the ear piercing quiet. Allenwood was a low-security facility¸ pretty laid back as far as prisons are concerned, but the level of noise was constant. There was no getting a population of over fourteen hundred criminals to sync their sleeping habits. So the quiet was a bad sign.

  Liam wracked his brain, trying to determine what infraction he had committed to warrant this punishment. He was quiet, kept to himself, had been the model inmate since the start of his sentence. The only conclusion he could surmise was that they had finally uncovered his previously unknown and unsolved hacks.

  Suddenly, his body was slammed into a sitting position. A plastic chair with metal legs scraped across the tacky linoleum flooring as he tried to prevent his body from sliding off the damn thing without using his bound hands. Was it mandatory that you be treated like an international prisoner of war once it was determined by a jury of your peers that you were a criminal?

  Shrouded in darkness by whatever the scratchy material was that covered his head and face, he could only listen for what would happen next. Other than the nagging buzz, he heard the shuffling of feet, another similar chair scraping, and then another. Without warning, the covering was snatched from his head, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted to the glare of unnatural light. The room resembled the interrogation room he’d been confined to for hours as the feds tried to determine just how much of their precious, top-level clearance project he had uncovered.

  Across a long narrow table sat two other men, both similarly detained. He watched as both men had the sacks covering their heads removed, and they each gradually adjusted to their current surroundings. In both cases, the brief bout of confusion was replaced with a heavy glare of suspicion and accusation as they were each met with unfamiliar gazes. Liam tried to use his brief knowledge of inmate profiling, figuring the pretty boy with the tough guy demeanor to be less dangerous than the quiet and calm dude with tattoos of dragons and sacred Asian markings out the wazoo. It still didn’t help him to determine what the hell he was doing there.

  “Gentleman,” said a slightly British-accented voice. Another man entered the room, early fifties, nice suit, and obviously of the authority to dismiss the six guards that had done his bidding.

  “Not that any of you are the ask questions type, but I’m going to cut to the proverbial chase and inform you of what your life is going to be from here on.”

  The room was dead silent with no visible or audible reaction from either of the inmates.

  “They say we all have choices in life, but your choices were taken away from you when you stepped foot behind these lovely federal bars. You are, however, not without one last option. You can use your talents working for me, or live out the rest of your sentences in this hellhole. That is barring any accidents, or incidents that may prolong your stay.”

  That last option raised a few eyebrows. For Liam, the choice was a given. He wasn’t a violent offender and hacking for a living beat living in a prison cell.

  What did he have to lose?

  Chapter One

  glitch /glɪtʃ/noun

  1. a defect or malfunction in a machine or plan.

  2. Computers. any error, malfunction, or problem.

  “Think I’m some script kibble or some other such nonsense, you have another thing coming,”

  “Glitch, my man, you know that no one understands you when you get like that, right?”

  “Not my fault,” Glitch said. And when the hell had he started thinking of himself as Glitch? For years he had been Zero-D00m, known for finding, creating, and exploiting any backdoor, a way of getting access to a computer through unauthorized methods, or flaw in the program. He was a master at it. That is who he had been, just out of his adolescence, with an IQ that made most of the people around him look as if they were moving in slow motion. And then it all changed, two years ago when Eagle sprung him and two other men from jail and created an elite group of men who took corporate espionage to whole new level. Then Liam Gallagher, also known as Zero-D00m, had become simply, Glitch.

  “Glitch, whatever shit’s in your head get out of it. In the game,” Scratch said. Glitch ignored him; he was always in the game.

  “I’m in and funneling now. I’m taking ten thousandth of a penny from every dollar Amsterix owns. We are a go,” Glitch finished.

  “Glitch, what the fuck is funneling?”

  “Two years and you don’t remember this? It’s pulling the information, in our case money, from their system into mine and flipping over to you for distribution.”

  “I didn’t really care about the answer Glitch. Get your panties out of a bunch,” Scratch said, sitting at another computer in Glitch’s apartment. Glitch had always worked well with Scratch, a man who was once known as Inzio Vikhrov, a certified public accountant, convicted under the RICO law for extortion, and now the Treasurer of International Accounts at Hawk Global. He was a bit of a hot head at times, but he was solid, and for the three of them, that meant a lot. Scratch did not ask too many questions and knew enough about how Glitch worked that they didn't have to tell the other when to start their part. As the money man, Scratch would make sure that the funds that Glitch was now removing from Amsterix would be rolled into untraceable accounts and go through so many loopholes that when it appeared in Eagle’s accounts it would look like it had always been there.

  “System is holding fast. I can let it go,” Glitch said, his
fingers leaving the keyboard. Now it was just about watching the program and making sure there were no hitches. The job should be done in a matter of hours. He leaned back in his chair, resting his head a second on the back while Scratch worked. His apartment, a state of the art masterpiece of technological equipment, including multi-screen set-ups, CPU towers strewn about, and wiring, was his happy place. Sure, home for him was more like a space exhibit for the others, but he liked it that way. Clean, sterile, safe. He understood that world. Disorder, not so much. Maybe, though, he’d grab a beer out of the kitchen to relax after successfully completing his part of the mission.

  “Serious question, though, what does script kibble mean?” Scratch asked absently, as Glitch moved to get up.

  “A hacker poser, a newbie wannabe,” Glitch answered, knowing that Scratch merely asked to fill the quiet space. Two years. Two years he’d been working for Eagle, taking down companies, or stealing money to make sure that Hawk Global was always the best in the world. Before, when he did his work, it had been for the edge, the rush of creating his programs. Glitch had wanted to escape in his computer skills, into a world of binary. Computers knew his language and didn’t need the emotional outpouring that Glitch was just incapable of giving. He just didn’t know how to.

  Emotions were like a cesspool, a tangled that he had yet to decipher. And because he could not understand them, it royally pissed him off; which in turn made him shut down. For a genius, it was hard not to understand something. Okay, he understood the Pavlov’s basics. He knew when he was hungry, when he was angry or when he was disgruntled. However, when he looked at Scratch, or their usually absent partner, Jack, he understood the idea of caring, to a point, for another person. They had no reason to go showing emotion between the three of them. None of them needed hugs or kumbaya moments to make them feel better. They woke up, ate, shit, showered, and shaved like any other normal guy, and then worked. The next day they did the same thing again, all to make sure they never went back to the pen.

  That was the point of everything.

  “Shit,” Scratch cursed, bringing Glitch out of his musings and staring blankly at the computer screen. Glitch blinked a few times and studied his program. Nothing wrong there. His worm was pushing through Amsterix’s accounts quickly, duplicating and expanding until Glitch had a network of eaters pulling over several dollars a second. Glitch shot a glance over to Scratch’s screen and saw the money amounts were slowing.

  “What the—?” Glitch pushed closer to his screen, fingers flying over his keys again. It wasn’t his doing. He checked the systems, firewalls, and numbers. Everything was a go. Intrigued, he sent out a phishing code to track the information and also make sure there was no malware interference. The phishing code was nothing more than code that acted like a net to read what was going on around his program, didn’t really pick up on anything.

  “Glitch?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Work faster,” Scratch returned.

  “Ass,” Glitch tossed.

  “Baby, you say the sweetest things,” was the quick reply. Glitch felt himself smiling and shook his head before a glitch caught his eye. Funny, it was his job to do that, and somehow he missed it. Going slow, almost too small to trace, bytes of code were disappearing. Someone had remapped his strokes; changing numbers slowly until a fraction of the funds he was pulling were going elsewhere.

  “I’ve been pwned,” Glitch said with a laugh. How the hell was that possible?

  “Pwned? Did you just say that...for real?” Scratch asked, staring at him incredulously. “Don’t play with me Glitch. This isn’t the time for this shit to be happening.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Glitch tracked the code, quickly duplicating and then slightly altering his program on the fly. The worm followed, attached, apparently, to the basic mechanism of his design. Smart. Really smart.

  A memory was triggered. Another hacker, in another time. Hex mAn1Ac. That’s who this reminded him of. No one, in his entire life, had been quite like her and he couldn’t stop the memories from coming back.

  “You know I’m going to destroy you, right? Utterly and completely.”

  “Not possible, Hex, you can’t keep up.”

  “Watch me.” She was large on one of his screens, her curly black hair fanning around her heart-shaped face in wild disarray. She had lips that had made his knees weak, so full and soft looking. Her pert little nose was elegant, below wide, dark eyes with thick lashes and arched brows. She was breath taking and enigmatic, the one person who could give him a run for his money. He always beat her, of course, but she made him work for it.

  He couldn’t see far into her safe house. All he could see was her multi-screen set-up, much like his own, the microphone wrapped around her ear so she could hear him as she worked. He was testing her, creating an old-school virus. He’d done it that way so that she had the choice to accept or reject his challenge. She could click on the file, or not, and see who really was the best. Of course, she may not realize that the program made her computer his botnet, a zombie computer that he could control remotely if he wanted to. He also didn’t tell her he had no intention to do so. Something about her made him not want to. He just couldn’t put his finger on it, but it made him more interested in her.

  But she knew the stakes. If she lost against his program then Hex mAn1Ac would be doxed—a process by which a hacker gathered everything possible about another hacker that they could get their hands on. He made sure that she thought he would then dump her too, sharing her information with the hacker world; something that no Black Hat, a hacker on the wrong side of the law, worth their salt wanted to happen. Besides the ensuing jail time that could come, they would no longer be anonymous. That was what made their interaction so precious. So different. Hackers learned about each other, and even made friendships, but they rarely actually saw each other, or allowed others into their world, especially if they hadn’t grown up in the same circles.

  Stupid as this was, he felt alive.

  “I’m better than you,” Hex said, her voice low and sultry. He was man enough to say it turned him on. He wouldn’t tell her that, and he fought not to shift in his seat, feeling his cock harden.

  “Never,” he replied quickly, hiding his reaction. He was cool, calm. Zero-D00m. That’s who she knew him as. Nothing more, nothing less. He held on to that as he pushed through his desire and worked his program. Slowly, piece by invisible piece, information was being gathered about her. She seemed content, just watching as the program worked. Unmoving, just staring at the screen with a little smile.

  That Mona Lisa smile. God, she was beautiful. Perfect in all of her imperfections. Because she had to be messed up, right? Just like him. Had to have lost some connection with the outside world until the larger world of the computer became more appealing, simpler.

  She still wasn’t moving.

  “Hex?” he asked.

  “Go ahead. I’m going to get you, Zero, I promise.”

  “Too late. The program is in, noob.” Her gaze swung to him at the slur.

  “I’m no noob. Don’t call me that.”

  “It was a joke, Hex.”

  “Yes, but you are about to get very upset. I promise you some new hacker wouldn’t be able to do this,” she said sweetly, and then her fingers flew. Nothing happened, but something was...off.

  “Come on, Zero. You are about to lose.”

  “You’re not doing anything, Hex.”

  “Really? Look harder.” He did, some of his cockiness leaving him. There, on the edge, right on the edge, bits of code were deleting.

  “Mirror,” she whispered. He laughed, surprised, as he realized what she had done.

  “Good one, Hex,” he said, unable to do much more. She’d duplicated his program and then changed the coding. That quick. She watched what he did and then used it against him. He didn’t know who was more dangerous. Him, the one that could create the program and adapt, or her, who could use what he’d created
against him and warp it. Either way...he’d never met a woman quite like her. He thought that he was, just a little, in—

  “Glitch!” Scratch roared.

  “I’m here,” Glitch said, shaking his head, trying to clear his thoughts. He was already keying, changing the program on the fly, and switching the mirror. He hadn’t thought of Hex in years. Had let go of her, and what she made him feel. Let her wash away when they’d taken him away from his life, and put him in a cell.

  “We’re clear,” he said roughly, hoping that Scratch didn’t ask. Hoping he could let it all go. And hoping that what he’d seen didn’t mean that his past was going to come back and haunt him.

  Chapter Two

  Two days later and he was still fighting with the programming for their latest caper. What should have been a basic snatch and grab assignment had turned into a complete pain in his ass. Either Amsterix had the firewall of the gods or something was seriously wrong. Glitch had never met a firewall that he couldn’t crack, so the something else scenario was a problem.