A sound reaches her ears. Hank freezes on the steps, trying to process the strangled sound at odds with the neat surroundings.
It’s a distinct sound of pain. The sound an animal might make right before it dies. A wounded, broken animal. An animal hit by a car and left to die on the side of the road.
Tristan prods her in the back, urging her down the stairs. Unease pricks the back of her neck. She is suddenly very aware that she is locked in this place with two men who are much bigger and stronger than she is.
Her steps falter. Tristan pokes her in the back a second time. Drawing in a breath to steady her nerves, Hank forces herself down the last few steps.
Logan folds his arms over his chest, stepping aside to let Hank enter the room at the bottom of the stairs. The burned smell is strongest here. She hears the the mewling sound again.
Her heart skips in her chest. Hank swallows, stumbling into the room at a last prod from Tristan.
The sight that greets her brings a cry of alarm to her lips. She steps backwards and runs smack into Logan. Spinning, she leaps away from him.
He regards her, taking in her alarm with a cold calmness. Hank retreats from Logan and Tristan until she bumps against a wall.
Logan addresses her. “Before you take the next step into my inner circle, there are a few things you need to know. The first is, I place a high value on loyalty and trust. The second is, my employees are just that: mine.”
The way he says the word mine makes her skin crawl. She feels like a cage has just been lowered over her head. Her heart pounds so hard against her ribcage that she struggles to draw a steady breath.
Logan strolls forward to the four people in the center of the room. The first is a woman in her mid-thirties. She is bound to a chair and gagged. The second and third are teenage boys, brothers from the looks of them. They are also gagged and bound to chairs.
Other than their captivity, they don’t appear to be hurt in any way. The same can’t be said of the forth person, a man she recognizes despite his ruined face.
Mr. Thames looks at her through a single eye; the other has been gouged out, the gory socket weeping blood. The burned smell fully registers; someone has taken a torch to different parts of his body, leaving his skin black, charred, and blistered.
“Loyalty, Hank.” Logan stops beside the family, regarding her with a steady gaze. “When my trust is broken, I get angry.”
Hank’s lips part. She nods her head to show she understands. Her throat is so tight, her breath so panicked, that she is unable to voice words.
“Possession is also of utmost importance. It is important for those that belong to me to have a clear understanding of this. Is this clear to you, Hank?”
Again she nods, eyes darting to Tristan. He has stationed himself in front of the stairs, blocking the exit. When she looks at him, she sees the barest flicker of emotion in his eyes. Is it sympathy? Regret?
She doesn’t have time to dwell on it, turning her attention back to Logan and Mr. Thames.
“Mr. Thames clearly did not understand these terms,” Logan says. “He now pays the price, as does his family. Hence the reason for your promotion. From this day forward, you are taking over Mr. Thames’ role as Chief Data Enforcer.” He nods his chin at Tristan.
The other man produces a tablet. She hadn’t even noticed it tucked into the back waistband of his pants. He holds it out to her.
She stares at it, too frightened to move. He takes a few steps forward, stretching his arm out so that she can reach the tablet without moving.
“I suggest you take the tablet,” Logan says. “These are the terms of my employment. If you refuse, I will have no choice but to ask you to join Mr. Thames and his family.”
“Jasper never said anything about this.” The words sound stupid as soon as they leave her mouth. She wishes she could stuff them back in.
“Jasper was never part of my inner circle,” Logan replies.
Swallowing, Hank plucks the tablet from Tristan’s hand. She presses it against her stomach, as if the flimsy piece of plastic can protect her from the horror in front of her.
“Do you understand my terms?” Logan asks.
Hanks nods.
“Repeat them back to me, please.”
She peels her dry tongue from the roof of her mouth, forcing out words. They are brittle and faint, filling the chamber with broken sound. “Loyalty. Trust. Possession.”
“If you ever allow yourself to forget these terms, what will happen?”
She swallows. Her stomach knots. She curls herself a little more tightly around the tablet. “I will be in Mr. Thames’ place.”
“And your family? Little Timmy? Your sweet but uneducated junkyard parents?”
“They—” She chokes as a sob threatens to burst forth. She shoves it back, determined not to cry. “They will end up like Mr. Thames’ family.” The thought of Timmy gagged and bound to a chair is almost enough to undo her.
“I also understand that you had intentions to apply to Virtual High.” The stress he puts on the word had is not lost on her. “No employee of mine works for anyone else. Ever.”
“I didn’t send in the application,” Hank says, words tumbling out in a rush. “I started the application, but I never—”
“Good. Make sure it never gets sent.”
Hank nods.
Logan smiles at her, pulling out a gun. “I am pleased that we have an understanding.”
First he shoots the boys. Hank screams, shrinking back against the wall.
Logan continues with cold precision, shooting the wife next. Mr. Thames howls through his gag, tears flowing from his remaining eye.
Scenes flash through Hank’s mind. Mr. Thames showing her how to hack a website. Smiling when she accomplished her first successful money laundering. His kind eyes telling her she was a talented hacker.
Logan shoots Mr. Thames in the forehead.
Silence presses down on Hank. She squeezes her eyes shut, breath coming in short gasps. As much as she doesn’t want to cry, she can’t help it. A strangled sound comes out of her, followed by a gush of hot tears.
Footsteps click against the cement floor, stopping in front of her. Hank stares up at Logan, terror racing through her bloodstream. Until now she had never in her life known true fear.
“Hank Simmons, I predict we will have a long, mutually beneficial relationship. Welcome aboard.” He turns to Tristan. “Don’t bring her back up until she’s calmed down. Then you can explain the business to her. Get this mess taken care of, too.”
Hank waits until Logan climbs the stairs and exits, then turns terrified eyes to Tristan.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he says. “I was only a little older than you when I was brought in to Logan’s inner circle. Take as much time as you need.”
All she wants to do is curl into a ball and blot out the world. But that would mean staying down here with the bodies of Mr. Thames and his family. It’s too hard not to imagine Timmy and her parents in their place. She latches onto the importance of protecting their lives, of making sure they never, ever know who she really works for.
Hank wipes her cheeks on a shirt sleeve and forces herself to face Tristan with dry eyes. After a long minute, he nods and leads her upstairs, taking her back into a completely different world.
4
Erase
––––––––
She stands in Vex with Tristan. His avatar is a bearded Greek god, complete with a leather loincloth and bulging muscles.
He touches one of the screens—the one Mr. Thames always used. Text materializes under his fingertips. Hank reads the screen in silence.
Name: Lydia Allen
Age: 19
Residence: 2147 18th St, Apartment 3B, Oakland, California
Employment: Payroll Manager, Orphew & Sons
The girl’s picture appears below the text. She has a narrow face, cute nose, and dark hair. Pretty.
“Your job is to make her disappear.”
Tristan’s words feel like ice picks in her stomach.
She turns to him, mouth sagging open. “What do you mean make her disappear?” Is she supposed to find all her social Vex sites and erase her accounts? Or erase the girl’s bank accounts?
“This girl” —Tristan stabs a finger at the photograph— “never existed. To the few who know her, she will simply disappear. Anyone who tries to prove her existence will find no electronic or video record of her. Do you understand?”
Hank understands all too well. The implication is like a punch in the gut. “Why?” she whispers. She’s terrified to know the answer, but asks anyway. She wants the whole truth, not the half-truth she’s been operating under for the past three years.
Tristan studies her through the eyes of his stupidly tall Greek god avatar. “Ignorance is bliss, Hank.”
She grits her teeth. “Not when ignorance gets my friend and his entire family killed.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she wishes she could stuff them back in. But it’s too late.
Tristan’s response surprises her. “We’re all going to miss Mr. Thames. Logan included.” His face hardens. “But a traitor can’t be tolerated. It’s the single rule that keeps us all safe.”
Safe? Hank bites back a hysterical laugh. The dead bodies of Mr. Thames and his family flash through her mind. She has never felt so unsafe in her entire life.
“I want to know,” Hank says.
“The target has a rare blood type,” Tristan replies. “There’s a high demand for it on the black market. A customer of ours in Chicago needs a heart transplant.”
The world crumbles beneath Hank’s feet. Her eyes lock on the face of the dark-haired girl.
Disappear.
Disappear?
This was murder. She was going to cover up the murder of an innocent girl.
Lydia’s face stares back from the computer screen.
What if Hanks just walked out? Just flipped Logan the bird and marched out of the office? How far would she make it before he sent one of his goons after her? Or even worse, her family?
This is the deal you made, she reminds herself. You’re doing this for Timmy and Mom and Dad. They’re worth it.
Alone, she could risk her life for morals. But she can’t make the same choice for her parents and little brother. She can’t let them end up like Mr. Thames and his family.
Swallowing against the lump in her throat, Hank steps up to the other screen suspended in the air. Resting her hands against it, she gets to work.
*
Mr. Thames taught her well. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to overlay money laundering techniques on this new assignment. In some ways, it’s even easier. Hitting delete is much easier than moving something around to make it look like it disappeared.
She starts with Lydia’s birth records. One of three children, she’s on her own now. Both siblings died during their formative years, lost to the flu. Both parents are also gone, one to cancer and the other to an unnamed sickness. Lydia is all alone in the world.
Hank hacks into the county system. One of the firewalls still has a default password set and the underlying database hasn’t been patched in some time. So many exploits, it’s almost laughable. She chooses a rudimentary SQL injection attack and deletes all of Lydia’s records.
Next, she tracks down the birth records of Lydia’s siblings and parents. Delete, delete, delete, delete. Hank traverses the network. It’s a flat network and easy to navigate. Has no one here ever heard of network segmentation? She finds the location of the backups and those are dealt with just as deftly. She then does a secure erase of the free space.
All records of immediate family eliminated, Hank then runs scans on all local clinics and hospitals. Lydia is apparently a healthy young woman; Hank finds only two instances of her visiting a local clinic in the past few years. Before that, nothing.
She deletes all medical files pertaining to Lydia again securely erasing the free space, then goes into a facial recognition software Tristan shows her. Mr. Thames built it. Hank tries to imagine the kind man erasing people, aiding in the murder of innocents. She can’t see it. And yet, he must have done it. Is that why he ultimately betrayed Logan? Because his conscious got the better of him? Had he been trapped and blackmailed like Hank, an unwilling accomplice?
Hank can only guess at the truth. Mr. Thames isn’t here to answer her questions.
She uploads Lydia’s face into the facial recognition software, then does a search going back five years. That’s as far back as public surveillance is archived. Every surveillance camera in the public database for a one-hundred-mile radius is checked. Every time a match comes up, Hank deletes it.
Lydia has lived in the East Bay her entire life. Finding her whereabouts and erasing them is easy. Too easy. No life should be that easy to erase.
Hank camouflages her work, making it look like part of a malware attack. She erases other images at random to make sure no one ties the attack to a certain person. Most likely, whoever is on the other end won’t even bother to see what was deleted. Public security doesn’t pay enough to warrant any form of thoroughness.
After Hank finishes with the public files, she delves into the private ones. She targets the accounting firm where Lydia works. This is a private server and security will be tighter. She does quick reconnaissance on a popular business social media site. The firm has just hired a new front desk person and he’s bragging about it . . .cush jobs are hard to come by. Time to send him a spear phishing email appearing to come from the IT department.
She waits with impatience. Come on. She smirks as her makeshift login page is accessed by the new hire. In trying to “reset his password” he inadvertently gives Hank his username and password.
She logs into their server with the newly acquired credentials. Luckily, there’s no second-factor authentication set. She then launches a DDOS attack against their servers in order to distract any onsite IT people. While they’re dealing with that she’ll do her thing. She erases the files of all employees to make it look like a non-targeted attack and then crashes the server.
Next, she delves into the banks. When she finds Lydia’s bank accounts, she transfers the funds anonymously to a local food charity. At least something positive will come out of the girl’s death.
Her landlord proves to be the most difficult. He works in cash, never taking other forms of payment. Hank scrolls through his online files, hunting and pecking for Lydia. Nothing.
“I think the landlord is old school,” she says. “No computer files.”
“I’ll let Logan know. He’ll need to send someone to the landlord’s house,” Tristan says. At the look on her face, he adds, “Not to kill him. Just to burn his files. Our guys will make it look like an accident.”
Of course they will.
She works for several hours, combing and double-checking her work to make sure she finds every trace. To make sure she doesn’t do anything to endanger her family.
Once finished, she rips off her Vex set. Back in the real-world, she leans over her knees. Her fingers are cold, her stomach aching.
If there is a hell, surely she is going there.
Beside her, Tristan removes the other Vex set. “Finished?” he asks.
“Yeah.” She rubs her eyes, pretending to be tired. In truth, she wipes away tears cluttering the edge of her lashes.
She just killed someone. Someone innocent. So that bastard Logan could make a buck by selling her heart. All the money she’s laundered suddenly makes sense. He uses his courier company to cover up his illegal sale of human organs.
Tears come a little faster. Hank leans her elbows on the desk and makes a show of massaging her temples.
Tristan sits beside her in silence. He sits there for such a long time that she can only deduce he’s either taking note of her reactions so that he can report back to Logan, or attempting to convey comfort. Whatever the case, she wishes he would leave.
“You can go home now,” Tristan say
s at last. “You did good work. Logan will be pleased.” He rises, looking down at her before he leaves. “I know this is a rough adjustment. I know what you’re going through. Just keep your head down and work hard. Everything will be okay.”
It is, by far, the most twisted and repulsive pep talk she’s ever received.
*
Hank strides down the hall, hoping a confident walk will hide the fear and despair simmer within her. She avoids eye contact with the couriers messing around in the package room. She wants to shout at them, or at the very least pick a fight, but what would that accomplish? They have no idea who they work for. She was just like them a few hours ago.
As she steps out into the hall with her bike, she spots Jacob. He high-fives a guy, then joins Ace. The two have changed into black formfitting clothes.
“It’s my Copper Top,” Jacob calls out as she heads toward them.
No way to get to the stairs without going by the jerk. She is so not in the mood for this.
“Why are you still here?” she asks. “Didn’t your shift end hours ago?”
Jacob puffs up his chest. “Pulling a double. Logan needs my help bringing in a pretty kitty.” He pauses, waiting for her reaction. Clearly expecting her to be impressed.
Hank is too strung out to consider her reaction. “How nice for you. Have fun.”
She wheels her bike past him and Ace without another word. She bumps it down the stairwell, ignoring Jacob’s catcalls after her.
It’s not until she’s five minutes down the road on her bike, with the pre-dawn chill clearing her mind, that pieces click together in her mind.
Logan needs my help bringing in a pretty kitty.
Hank slows, her brain on high speed. She’d heard Jacob refer to girls as “kitty” before. He usually reserves it for girls he finds cute. He’s even called Hank that a few times.
She assumed Jacob had been referring to Logan’s next girl-of-the-month. But if that was the case, why had he and Ace been wearing all black? She’d noticed those in Logan’s inner circle dressing like that on occasion, but purposely never gave it much thought.
Hacker Page 3
