The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Sam beams. Parlabane knows Lansing doesn’t need to sell this.

  ‘That would be amazing,’ she says, with the same fangirling enthusiasm he first heard when she was scoping out Lansing’s mini-museum.

  Yeah, these two are definitely family.

  ‘I have one condition,’ Lansing says.

  Sam looks up expectantly. Parlabane reckons there’s little she wouldn’t agree to.

  ‘No more hacking,’ he tells her. ‘No more illegal hacking anyway. If you work for me, you’re a whitehat from now on.’

  Sam takes a moment to reflect upon this, longer than Parlabane is comfortable with. He’s just had so much peace of mind dangled tantalisingly in front of him, the prospect of a renewed trust in his information and communications devices.

  ‘Okay,’ she replies. ‘It’s a deal. But at the risk of sounding like an addict, I do need one last hit.’

  REKT

  ‘Here you are, gentlemen,’ the girl says with a smile, placing down their coffees. The order is one double espresso for him and cappuccinos for the other two amateurs. Unlike this pair, Lush has actually been to Italy. They’d scoff at them there. Cappuccino is a morning drink, and it’s half past two in the afternoon. To be fair, none of them has been up for more than an hour, but still.

  He takes a look at what Ango and Griff have been presented with. The new waitress still ain’t got the hang of the frother, but in that spray-on T-shirt and skinny jeans, it’s not like it matters. She’ll keep the customers coming. The Japanese say, ‘First dine with your eyes’, and she’s offering a great menu.

  ‘That’s lovely, sweetheart,’ he tells her with a smile and a winning twinkle in his eye. ‘You enjoying the gig?’

  She takes a second to work out that he means working here. She’s not so bright. Again, like it matters.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all right.’

  ‘Well, I’m planning on opening up a bar real soon. You play it smart, I’ll soon have you pouring cocktails instead.’

  The bar is looking six months off, according to the architect, so this is merely to remind her that he owns the place, and an invitation for her to show a bit of ambition, if she knows the right way to go about it.

  He’s building an empire here. Got two coffee shops now, two barbers and a ladies salon too. It’s all about the cash: unquantified transactions, putting more through the tills than comes over the counter.

  Ango and Griff pull out their iPads, which is a relief. He’s not in the mood for their attempts at banter right now. Usually takes something stronger than coffee to manage that.

  Lush has a sip of his espresso as he waits for his laptop to reboot. It’s taking its time, but that’s a relief. It’s been acting sluggish, which always makes him worry he’s got a virus, but it usually turns out that it’s been downloading a ton of updates which install themselves when he restarts.

  He keeps track of everything from this machine: from, but crucially not on this machine. It’s all on the cloud, held by a file-storage company based fuck knows where. He is schooled up on the law for this. It would take the cops literally months to get the court orders necessary to compel an overseas firm to hand over what he’s got stored with them. By that time he’d have long since cleaned it out.

  He has to laugh at these thick actresses and pop stars crying because their sex tapes got stolen from the cloud. What were they using as a password: qwerty? Nah, ain’t nobody guessing his. Never leaves it on automatic login neither, in case it gets stolen. He logs in fresh every time, username too.

  The cops ever seize this thing, all they’re getting is some top tunes to listen to while they apply for that useless court order. They ain’t even getting his videos. Those are on the cloud too, his mementoes of special nights: hidden-camera keepsakes that the girls who shared those nights don’t know about.

  The laptop finally finishes rebooting, and he goes to his music, planning to compile a new playlist.

  He gapes.

  It’s almost empty. There should be thousands of files there, but there’s only one, and it isn’t even a track he recognises: Nerf Herder – ‘The Backpack Song’.

  WTF?

  Griff splutters, dribbling coffee down his chin. He ain’t laughing, though.

  ‘The fuck is this?’ Griff asks Ango, pointing to his iPad.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your Facebook status, mate: “Last day here among the kuffar. Shipping out tomorrow to join my brothers in jihad. Every day we bring the worldwide caliphate closer.”‘

  ‘I never wrote that,’ Ango protests.

  Ango checks his Facebook. Apparently he did.

  ‘Fucking hell. The feds are gonna be all over me. How did this shit get up there?’

  Ango scrolls the screen then his eyes bulge at something else he has read further up. His shock is turning to laughter.

  ‘Looks like we all got secrets, bruv,’ he tells Griff.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your status from two hours ago: “In the struggle against the Islamification of Britain, I have joined the English Defence League and will be raising money for them every night on Hampstead Heath. Support our cause: stand up for white values while I give you some Anglo-Saxon head.”‘

  Ango is pissing himself at the horror on Griff’s face, but Lush isn’t laughing. He’s contemplating how long his laptop took to reboot, and thinking about how he received a package in the mail a few days ago. It was a single sheet bearing one line of text:

  ‘I want ten grand or the world sees this.’

  Also inside the envelope was a flash drive. When he plugged it in, there was a single mpeg file, which to his relief turned out to be a pop video. Some skinny eighties dude singing about how he was never gonna give you up.

  He assumed it was a prank, and was expecting the sender to reveal themselves. Nobody had yet, so he’d forgotten about it.

  He’s getting a nasty feeling about it now, though.

  Lush double-clicks on the single music file that’s still on the laptop. He hears thrashy guitar and some American bloke singing, over and over, ‘I’m gonna get revenge on you.’

  Hurriedly he goes straight to iTunes to check on his music, all of which he’ll have to download again. It’ll take days.

  He gets a login screen, maybe because of the updates and the restart, but he’s thinking maybe not. He puts in his username and password.

  It tells him his login details are wrong.

  He clicks to retrieve a lost password, filling in his email address.

  It tells him no account exists for that email address.

  Online and off, it’s all been deleted.

  Starting to panic, he logs into his cloud storage to check on his docs. It’s not just the money-laundering stuff that’s on there. Every last drug deal is logged: who bought what, how much they paid, which dealer holds what, how much cash they all owe. His whole empire.

  It’s all gone.

  There is a single document listed where there should be dozens. It is entitled: Readme.txt.

  He opens it. It says only: ‘#lushwank’.

  WTF, he thinks. Then it hits him: a hashtag.

  His heart thumping, he fires up Twitter. He gets a login screen. He’s locked out of his account.

  Lush grabs Ango’s iPad off him and stabs at it with sweaty fingers as he launches the app. He searches for his username and sees that a tweet has been posted from his account while he was asleep. It contains a link to a video, the preview image telling him someone has had complete control of his computer in a way that is far worse than he could have possibly imagined.

  Check this awesome webcam selfie vid of me jacking it to porn on my laptop. #lushwank

  As sickness rises in his gut, his eye is drawn to the same word listed in the top left of the window.

  #lushwank is trending.

  FINAL SHOWDOWN

  It’s my last ever shift in Urban Picnic, and I’m feeling an unexpected pang of regret. I’ve actually kind of enjoyed it here since al
l the pressure came off me.

  I’m back at my sixth form college, but I decided to stay on at the sandwich place to bring in a bit more money until Mum gets regular shifts. She’s working with a new nursing agency. It’s on a trial basis right now but it’s looking good.

  Wherever possible she insists on being at the Loxford to pick up Lilly from school, which allows me to pull a few hours at Urban Picnic after college. At first I missed seeing Lilly’s face when she first comes out of the building each afternoon, but I’ve learned she looks just as pleased to see me when I come in the door after work.

  I’m finishing at Urban Picnic today because I’ll be working part-time for Gary soon as Christmas is out the way. I was keen to start straight away but he’s insisting I use the holidays to catch up on the school work I missed.

  That’s another reason I’ve come to think again about working here. Studying for maths and physics sure makes you appreciate the calm simplicity of slapping a few sandwiches together.

  Somebody’s asked for a Double Meat Picnic. I recall how stressy I used to get about those, whereas now I can rattle them out with my eyes shut. I expertly wrap the DMP into a tight package and hand it over the counter, which is when I look towards the door and see Keisha walking in.

  I had forgotten how much I once dreaded this, but at least I don’t feel scared of her any more. My heart sinks but I can’t begrudge her it after what I did. She’s due this.

  I glance across and notice that Snotworm is free too. I could keep my head down with some prep, let him deal, pretend I haven’t seen her. But I decide no, I need to suck this up, take it on the chin.

  She might not say anything with other people here, but she won’t need to either. The triumphant look on her face will be enough for both of us.

  She reaches the counter and I stand up straight, presenting myself for her to do her worst. It doesn’t happen, though. Instead she seems kind of sheepish.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, or more like mumble.

  ‘Hi,’ she says back.

  She doesn’t look anything like as sure of herself as she used to, and as she stands there I wonder if she’s forgotten who I am, as well as what she came in for.

  I feel like I’ve got to say something.

  ‘You feeling better? I heard you were ill, in hospital.’

  She looks surprised, properly taken aback. Her usual scowling and suspicious expression is absent. I can tell she’s asking herself how I could possibly not know all about this.

  I see the relief on her face as it strikes her that maybe not everybody was party to her humiliation. After all, she thinks I’m a complete square, totally disconnected from her social networks.

  ‘I’m much better, yeah. Thanks for asking.’

  She actually says this. It sounds like it wasn’t easy, but she did it all the same.

  ‘I heard about you on the news,’ she tells me. ‘Ain’t you off to uni or something? What you doing working here?’

  ‘Have to get my exams first. And I need the money if I’m going off to be a student.’

  ‘I heard that. I’m wanting to go off too. Not uni, obviously.’

  She smiles as she says this, the first self-deprecatory thing I’ve ever seen her do.

  ‘I want to be a nurse. When I was in hospital the nurses were brilliant.’

  ‘Is that always what you’ve wanted to do?’ I ask, realising I know almost nothing about her.

  ‘Nah. Never knew I wanted to do anything, to be honest. But that’s changed. I really want to find out all about nursing, how to get a training place or whatever.’

  This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say, and somehow also the easiest.

  ‘My mum’s a nurse. If you like you could come round some time, ask her a few questions. She knows lots of people who could probably help.’

  It takes her a second to accept this.

  ‘Could I? For real?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll give you my number.’

  This is probably the most adult moment in both our lives. It’s like we both understand we’re drawing a line under who we were before – stupid kids who didn’t know any better and didn’t understand the harm we were doing.

  A little while later I check my phone and see that Keisha has sent me a friend request on Facebook. I’ve got a proper account that’s genuinely me, the only account I’m using right now.

  I click to accept, and can’t help but smile.

  I’m totally owning at this Real Life game.