Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles Read Free Page B

marked with the header United States Department of Homeland Security.
    Why did BlakBox have top-secret files? I didn’t know what I was looking at exactly, only that I’d stumbled onto something I shouldn’t have. This was way over my head. Panic gripped me and I felt the room constrict around me.
    Frantically, I cut off the file transfer and closed down the windows.
    My phone chimed. Text: it stopped.
    I dialed and pressed the phone to my ear.
    “Hey,” Pixel said, “the connection dropped—”
    “Get out of here.”
    “What? What’s wrong?”
    “Now. I’m serious. Something’s wrong. Go! Go now!”
    The pounding at the door had gotten thunderous. I glanced at it as another bulge popped out from the door’s surface and one of the hinges pulled free.
    “You’re scaring me,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
    “I don’t know. Just . . . go! Now! Get rid of that data.”
    I hung up and flipped through my contacts. C’mon, c’mon, where is it?
    I pushed the dial button and I looked up at the screen as a man appeared. He’d remotely launched the webcam. He was thin and twitchy, and glared at me from the screen. He wore John Lennon glasses and twin images of his computer monitor—with me on it—reflected back at me. My stomach tightened.
    He watched me without a word.
    Through the iPhone’s tiny speaker, I heard ringing.
    “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” I said.
    “You’ve reached Jill Corbis . . .” Voicemail. No .
    The man on-screen sneered, seemed ready to say something. I yanked the camera cord, killing his image.
    “Leave a message,” Jill’s voice said in my ear. Beep.
    “It’s Nyah. I think I’m in big trouble. I found something—”
    The door crashed open and three men dressed in SWAT gear burst into the room, shouting and leveling assault weapons at my head.
    “I’m at BlakBox,” I said in a rush and jumped to my feet.
    “Drop it!” one of the gunmen yelled. “On your knees!”
    “Help me!” I said. “Please—”
    “Show me your hands!”
    “They’re going to shoot me!” I screamed—anything to make Jill drop everything and come running. At the moment, she was the only person in the world who could help me.
    I let the phone slip from my hand. It hit the toe of my shoe and clattered on the floor as I placed my hands on my head.
    Well, guess I’d gotten what I wanted: Goliath’s attention.
    One of the men grabbed a fistful of my shirt and spun me around. In less time than it took to draw a breath he shoved me to the ground and drove his knee into my back, pinning me under his crushing weight.
    I gasped for breath, but none came. Face pressed against the cold floor, I felt dizzy and watched a pair of black shoes approach me. They stopped inches from my face.
    “Take her to the holding room,” a voice said. “I’ll deal with her myself.”

1.3
DAY 1 - 1:34 pm
    B lakBox , Level L-8

    T HE GIRL was a problem and problems had to be handled.
    Jon Stone studied her carefully from behind the holding room’s two-way observation window. She sat alone at the room’s one table. Other than her trembling hands, she hadn’t moved since being apprehended an hour earlier.
    Nyah Parks was her name according to her driver’s license, which he’d taken along with her phone. She was terrified despite her best efforts to conceal it. One thing was certain: the girl wasn’t nearly frightened enough, but that would change soon.
    The child was rail thin and short—five feet two inches—with shoulder-length, raven-black hair highlighted with faint purple streaks. Brown doe eyes. Her complexion was smooth and deep olive brown, perhaps a child of Asian or Middle Eastern descent, and the only sign of typical teenage rebellion was a simple gold ring piercing her right nostril.
    Her story was practically etched on her face: smart kid, a nearly friendless misfit who preferred computers to people and shunned the world because it had shunned her first. But she was more than just the garden-variety