I could see the city, all of its lights
moving beneath me. The avenues looked like serpents, wiggling about in all
directions. And people were undistinguishable in the darkness of the night.
Street lamps illuminated some of the areas but not all of them, so it was
pretty obvious that there were patches of greater darkness within the city. In
one of those, I had been caught and brought to that place, to the highest point
of a tower that overlooked everything, like the mighty lair of some comic book
villain.
But the person that had brought me there was
not exactly that. He was actually one of the people you might call “a good
guy”. It was me who was being thought of as a villain. According to him, and to
the organization he worked for, what I did could be understood as an act of
treason against my own country, for which I could be detained and processed,
ultimately landing in some awful prison where my fortune would be sealed. I had
already gone through it in my mind, again and again.
However, I hadn’t predicted him to bring me to
that place. True, the building held several offices for his government entity,
but ordinary criminals would never go there, least of all to be incarcerated
there temporarily. It was obvious that something else was going on and I had no
idea what that was about. So I had to pretend I was very certain of everything
and the best way to do that was avoiding answering questions that could let
them know how much I didn’t know. It was some sort of cat and mouse game.
Him and his partner, a younger woman, tried to
interrogate me for what seemed like hours but I was too good for them. They
couldn’t get anything from me, nothing more than what they already knew. I
couldn’t pretend I hadn’t been the one to hack into many of their offices, but
I wasn’t going to tell them anymore than that. After all, I lived in the
shadows; I knew how to move among the scum of the Earth. They just thought they
knew how, but they had barely seen a glimpse of what the world hides beneath
the surface.
They left me alone after a couple of hours.
They held me in a room that overlooked the city. It must have looked like a
normal office from the outside but from the inside it was pretty much like any
other cell. It had bars and a bunk bed and somewhere to piss if I wanted to. It
even had that kind of door that has the little window in order to pass food
through. That reminded me I was very hungry, but I didn’t ask for anything
because that could be used by them to try to pull things from me. So I decided
to take a nap instead, trying to take advantage of the lack of sound around the
cell.
It was the next day when his companion came
and brought me something to eat. She was very nice, very cute, obviously with
no experience whatsoever in her field. Maybe she had passed the tests and all
of the training, but it was obvious she wasn’t exactly the top agent around. As
I grabbed the tray with food, she sat on the other side of the bars and told me
that some others had been captured. I just ate, pretending I hadn’t heard her.
But I did and I wanted to know everything. It was important to know.
She told me about the raid on the warehouses
we operated from and how many of our computers had been seized. Yet, she knew
very well no one would get one document from all of those. Of course, we always
knew when they were close and our systems would erase themselves in an instant
if that were the case. But it was intriguing that she knew so much, for such a
rookie agent. I kept on eating; it was toast and scrambled eggs with a small
yogurt and a glass of orange juice. Much like a plane meal.
I drank a bit of juice as she stood up and got
closer to the bars, just looking at me. I looked back at her, defiant. I didn’t
trust her at all and it was obvious she was posing as this silly little woman,
when in reality she could be even more dangerous than the guy that had actually
caught up with me. So I finished my meal as soon as I could and then just put
the tray on the place in front of the little window. She looked at me for a bit
longer and then grabbed the empty tray and left. I could hear her heels walking
away.
Lying on my back, I wondered what she could be
up to. Maybe she had been set by her partner to intimidate me in some way, but
it didn’t make any sense. He was the one with the experience to do so. Even if
he wanted to throw me off, I believe he was the kind of man that wants
recognition for getting things done. Besides, it was obvious he had a certain
obsession with the whole case. There were men and women killing and raping all
over town and he was obsessed with a few hackers trying to make things a bit
better.
When I began hacking computers, I did it for
fun of course. In order to help friends get better grades in school or maybe
just blackmail someone in order to give me some money. Yes, it was illegal and
wrong and stupid. And I will never say those were my best moments. However, I
discovered another layer to the whole thing when this chick in college
introduce me to several of her friends and got into the real hacking world. Big
bank accounts and the most private and so-called safe websites in the world.
And we could just enter and take whatever we wanted. Just like that.
At the start, they only wanted to go in for
the money. And yeah, as a kid that had no money to pay for a decent school, I
wanted to have my pockets filled with bills and coins. But then, I realized I
could do so much more with all my skills. My first move was to get rid of my
money problem, and I did that in a semi-legal way. I hacked into several stock
market systems and found out the best way to make money in there. So I invested
some money and saw it flourish in a few days. I can say I’m rich now, but I
don’t.
Because my next step was the one that got me
where I am now. It was the step that made me run away from home and live with a
bunch of strangers in filthy storage warehouses. I decided it was time to give
something back to the community that I had use in my advantage. So I grabbed my
keyboard and started going around the dark web, taking jobs as a hacker for
hire. I would only do things that I thought were “good” or that they will make
things fair and make justice prevail above all.
I guess you could call it my Batman phase or
something. The point is, I did that for at least two years. I helped parents
get the men and women that had assaulted their children, I helped children find
their parents in the midst of war and I even helped people get out of very
difficult situations. I couldn’t be with them the whole time but it was my job
as a hacker that saved their lives. I cannot shy away from the truth: I did
save lives and made the world a better place. And yet, I end up in a cell.
Maybe my earlier mistakes are too serious or
maybe they just don’t like people being better than them. However, none of that
explained why I was in that building or why was it taking them so long to send
me to an actual jail. I was getting impatient and that’s not good for a person
that expends his days sitting down in front of a computer, playing superhero on
the information superhighway. When I heard the heels again, I stood up in a
second and waited to see her face, her voice taunting me again.
But she didn’t. She opened the door and asked
me to step outside. Then, she asked that I follow her. I could have overpowered
her but there were so many agents around, it would have been impossible to
escape. I was free from shackles or handcuffs, but I was still a prisoner
walking who knows where.
She brought me in front of a bunch of people,
mostly men, lead by the agent that had caught me. He was looking very pissed.
It was the woman who talked. She said they were offering me work, in exchange
for not putting me in jail. My reaction surprised more than one person there: I
laughed out loud, proud.
