Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online Page A

black-and-white Anonymous decal: an image of a Guy Fawkes mask and the phrase Keep Calm and Expect Us .
    I glanced up from my screen and caught him staring at me. He didn’t look away when I made eye contact. Most boys would’ve looked away, but not Austin.
    “That’s clever,” he said.
    “Excuse me?”
    He pointed. “That sticker. I like it.”
    I shrugged.
    “Knowledge is free,” Austin said. “We are Anonymous. We are Legion.”
    He paused, raised an eyebrow and nodded once as if to say, Go on, your turn .
    “We do not forgive,” I continued. “We do not forget.”
    “Expect us,” we said together.
    It was the motto of Anonymous, a global collective of “hacktivists” who’d banded together to remind big governments and corporations that they served the people and not the other way around. Anonymous was controlled chaos at its finest, a crowd-sourced cyber lynch mob of sorts that made its home in the digital world.
    “Are you an Anon?” he asked.
    “Isn’t everyone?”
    “No.” There was an awkward moment filled only with the air conditioner’s hum. “Do you have a mask?”
    A mask. A handle.
    I tilted my head: maybe.
    “I hope it’s a good one. So many of them are ridiculously unoriginal.” A beat. “So what is it?”
    I just smiled.
    He dipped his head and went back to work on his computer. I was still watching him—wondering how old he was, why he was seeing Dr. Benton—when movement on my laptop screen caught my eye: the cursor was moving on its own. Someone was hacking me! My fingers flashed over the keyboard, telling the system to terminate all external connections and locate the source of the intrusion. Then the answer dawned on me.
    I looked up and there was Austin, smiling at me over his laptop monitor. He glanced at his screen, back at me. “Trinity,” he said, naming my handle. “Really?”
    Ten seconds. This guy was good. He’d gotten through my firewall like a Mr. Fatty at a buffet and found my handle in no-time flat. Granted, my guard was down and I’d disabled my best firewall to tap into the local Wi-Fi, but still . . .
    “Impressive,” I said.
    “I like it,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Trinity. Three in one, one in three. There’s a story behind that, I’m sure. Either that or you’re a fan of The Matrix and couldn’t come up with a better idea.”
    “Maybe I just like the sound of it.”
    “Or maybe you have multiple personalities.”
    “Possible. I am sitting in a brain doctor’s office, after all. For all you know, I’m crazy.”
    “Isn’t everyone?”
    “No,” I said with a wry smile.
    “Well, my advice, Trinity, is this: don’t wear your mask too long or you might start to forget who’s beneath it. Masks are funny that way.”
    “Too late.”
    “I’ll bet not.”
    We became friends that day. For the next few months, we’d see each other in Dr. Benton’s waiting room and talk like ladies at the beauty parlor until he had to go into the office or I had to leave. Our first date—my word; I don’t think he ever thought of us as dating—was to a gallery exhibit of computer art by the surrealist Christos Magganas, whom we both admired. After that, we went to movies, had picnics in Golden Gate Park, strolled through Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf. But mostly, we chatted online—never on the phone because he didn’t own one. He said the electromagnetic waves irradiate brain tissue, which was a problem considering he had a tumor.
    He had moved from Boston to California to be treated by Dr. Benton about the time my family had been smashed into early graves. Austin rarely talked about his medical condition, and when he did it was only in passing. His tumor was rare, I knew that much. He said that over time it had become inoperable and when he lived in Boston he’d had some kind of delusional episode that prompted his search for better treatment.
    He was two years older than I was—twenty-three months, actually—but intellectually he was on a