Hack Read Free

Chocodiles and jelly beans to the list of pizza toppings. That was the sort of thing that teens went in for.
    5

    One of my own crew, Blizzard, claimed to have worked for money, but he never produced any evidence of it. Also, we had all heard that criminal gangs were paying for college students to get educated, in the same way the military sponsored them. But again, that was people at the college level, not high school.

    “Although none of these kids has had any major success,” continued Philips,
    “we believe it’s only a matter of time before one of them manages to get his hands on serious classified material. You see, unlike you and your group of merry Robin Hoods, looking to score some ego points, these kids are hacking for money—lots of money. You can imagine our alarm when we found a stash of over ten thousand dollars inside one computer.”

    You can imagine my alarm, too. I never stole anything.

    “What do you think? Are you interested in helping us?”

    “It sounds interesting. But I’m sorry I can’t help you. My lawyer has advised against such action. He thinks that I may incriminate myself.”
    Philips smiled again. The public defender had been less than computer savvy, and I made an enemy of him by doing my own plea bargaining at the pretrial. At least I had saved my own neck. I had no doubt that Philips had read the negotiation transcripts and knew this.
    “The way I heard it, you were your own lawyer.”
    “As I said, my lawyer has advised me against talking to anybody.”
    “At least hear us out?”
    I read the time from the upside-down numbers on Garman’s watch—9:47 a.m.
    I hadn’t been allowed to have a wristwatch, or any electronic or mechanical gadget, since my arrest. That meant no TV, no radio, no computers, and no telling the time. I forget the official reason for this, but it had to do with me starting World War III, just like in the movies. Anyway, I hoped that I would be back for exercise time, at 10:00
    a.m. It was the only time I got out into the fresh air. The other twenty-three and a half hours of the day I spent inside, behind a thick steel door. Without waiting for an answer, Philips produced another photograph.
    “This man is Malik,” he said, turning the picture so I could see it.
    “We know that he’s one of the main players recruiting and coordinating young hackers out of high schools.”

    “A terrorist?” I said.
    “Exactly.”
    I looked again at the picture. If the man was a killer, it didn’t show. The sharp corners of the table looked more dangerous. He was a nondescript Middle Eastern man in his early forties, who looked a little like Mr. Jarman, a science teacher I once had. Jarman used to liven up his boring classes by sticking too much metallic sodium in a glass of water, and making a good explosion. Rather than terrorizing the class, these mini bombs got a round of applause, and Jarman was considered one of the school’s coolest teachers.
    I shrugged. “He looks like a federal informer.”
    I had been introduced to federal informers and their role in crime prevention during my arrest. The FBI admitted that this was how they had ‘taken me down.’ I hadn’t got caught because I had been careless, or complacent. On the contrary, I had always been careful. They had found me through Knight, the self-appointed leader of my own hacking crew. The FBI had recruited Knight. I went to jail, while the FBI set Knight up in his own business, as part of their deal. From what little information I had managed to get, I knew that Knight was getting paid to hack into computer networks—in other words, a white-hat hacker.
    6

    “Sadly, he’s not an informant,” continued Philips. “Malik is a charismatic and well-financed fanatic who knows how to connect with lonely young computer-obsessed kids. And that’s where you come in. We want you to get recruited by Malik.”
    “Recruited?”
    “Yes. We’ll put you in a house with two agents as your parents, and