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

higher plane altogether. He was a genius in every sense of the word. Something had happened to him when he was younger that made him that way, but he couldn’t remember what. In fact, he couldn’t remember anything before age thirteen.
    I just think he was a freak of nature in the right sense.
    Sometimes he’d tell me about his latest projects. If you haven’t already guessed it, he was a hacker too, but if I was Pikes Peak, he was Everest. While I was cracking server firewalls, he was developing data-mining algorithms for the NSA and CIA. Those were his weekend projects, side money so he could work on other, more important, things. Passion projects, he called them.
    One of those was an application he’d worked on for years. He called it MetacogNet, an artificial intelligence program that attempted to replicate the complex “left” and “right” brain capabilities of the human mind. It had the potential to revolutionize the way data becomes usable information.
    Austin’s findings drew the attention of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who bankrolled the program’s development. But immediately after launching the company, Austin cashed out. A larger tech company had given him ten million reasons to walk away, so he had. He’d never wanted to run a company; he had other things in mind.
    That was almost a year ago. Soon after that he’d faded from my life: there one day, gone the next. The jerk. He’d stopped answering my e-mails, stopped logging into the online chat services we used, stopped showing up at the doctor’s office. I’d gone by his apartment once to find out what I’d done wrong, but he’d never come to the door. I’d spent most of my life being ignored and had gotten used to it, but this . . . this hurt.
    Soon I stopped trying. If he didn’t want to see me anymore, that was his loss. I hadn’t realized how much I thought of him until he wasn’t there. If that sounds lame and pathetic, you’ve never been in love, or even in a close friendship.
    Just wait, it’ll happen.
    The morning after BlakBox, I rode my motorcycle, a beat-up Yamaha I’d bought online, over to Austin’s apartment. It was in a warehouse by the Bay that a real estate developer had converted to an upscale apartment complex. I was the only person who knew where he lived. He’d always wanted to stay anonymous to the rest of the world, which I understood.
    Looking at the building from where I parked on the street out front brought back painful memories of the last time I’d spoken to him, how he’d said he had important things to do—things I wouldn’t understand. He was throwing away our relationship.
    That was the only time I’d ever yelled at him. It was the only way I could handle the pain and betrayal I’d felt. Anger is so much more manageable than grief. I hadn’t known it would be the last time I’d see him.
    But now I was there for Mom. I needed money and Austin was the only person I knew who could help. A hundred fifty grand was pocket change to him.
    I followed a cobblestone walkway to a set of black double doors. A steel callbox with the word Sentex etched into it was bolted to the brick wall. It had a keypad and digital touchscreen that normally would’ve had a long list of the building’s tenants and their unit numbers. But here, there was only one.
    K. Os—Unit 500.
    K-OS. Austin’s handle. Chaos.
    I dialed his unit on the keypad and waited. The call system rang a dozen times then automatically disconnected after no answer. Maybe he wasn’t home. More likely, he just never answered the buzzer.
    Guess I’d just let myself in. I’d brought along a decryption application I’d coded to bypass the door’s security protocol. Using a pocket tool, I worked the metal box’s back panel free, spliced a cable with an adaptor I’d brought, and plugged the other end into my iPhone. In less than twenty seconds, the door latch disengaged with a click, and I went in.
    The building was all but abandoned.