The Insider

‘Nice house you live in,’ he said, without looking at her.

Harry raised her eyebrows. ‘I suppose. We’ve only been here a year.’ She looked at the frothy white curtains and the lacy bed linen. It was a princess’s room. Absurd that she should still miss the poky converted attic she’d shared with Amaranta, with its narrow divans and the skipping rope her sister had stretched along the floor to demarcate her territory. But her dad had got this new job. Her mother harped on about how badly the Schrodinger job had ended, but her dad said this time everything would be different. He was right about that.

She turned back to Dillon to find him watching her. His gaze flicked over her school uniform and came to rest on the shoes that made her look like she had club feet. She closed her eyes in mortification.

‘Did you move schools too?’ he said, turning his attention back to her files.

Something gnawed at her insides the minute she thought about school. She shrugged, and made the kind of face that said it was no big deal.

‘Yeah, but I can handle it. Except all they talk about are skiing holidays and designer clothes.’ She lowered her voice and nodded towards the door. ‘Mum thinks I should be making more friends.’

‘Mums are hard to please.’

She darted a quick look at him. There was no hint of mockery in his dark eyes.

He indicated the package on her lap. ‘Christmas present?’

She shoved the parcel to one side. ‘It’s for my dad. Haven’t given it to him yet.’

‘He’s away?’

‘He played poker on Christmas Eve. He’ll probably turn up in a day or two.’

Dillon stopped what he was doing. ‘He missed Christmas?’

Harry shrugged. ‘He misses most Christmases.’

Dillon was silent for a moment. She shoved the parcel on to the bed, the contents rattling. She’d bought her father a full poker set: six hundred plastic chips, two decks of cards and a thick rule book, all stored in their own shiny black case. She’d saved up for it for months.

Dillon turned his attention back to the screen. His eyes narrowed as he worked through one of her files, and Harry peered at the screen to see what had caught his interest. It was the code for one of the hacker tools she had designed herself.

With a staccato flick of the keys, Dillon snapped the file shut and opened up another one. He scrolled down through it, and then stopped to examine it line by line. He gave a low whistle, his eyes riveted to the screen.

He pointed to a line in the code. ‘What’s this bit doing?’

Harry read through it and then started to explain her design, the words tumbling over each other in her impatience to communicate her ideas. She had to lean across him to reach the keyboard, and she became aware of the warmth of his body and the light spicy soap that he used.

When she finished, he looked at her for a long moment, his eyes searching her face. ‘Did you do all this yourself?’

‘Yes.’ Harry took a deep breath. ‘Can I ask you a question now?’

‘Sure.’ His eyes never left hers.

‘How did you find me?’

‘That was easy. You posted too many details of your exploit on the bulletin boards. Security guys monitor those things all the time, you know. Stay online long enough and we can track you down, too.’

Harry felt like an idiot. So simple. She’d been careless. But then, she wasn’t used to hiding.

Dillon tapped a few keys and closed down her files. Then he spun the chair so that he was facing her. He picked up the screwdriver again and began turning it end over end on the desk.

‘You interfered with trading records belonging to the Dublin Stock Exchange,’ he said. ‘Do you know what happened when they found the error?’

‘No.’

‘The database administrator almost lost his job.’ Dillon leaned forward, his face stern. ‘He’s only twenty-four and his wife is pregnant.’

Harry hung her head. Her skin crawled as though she had a nasty rash. ‘I didn’t think. It seemed such a small thing to do.’

Dillon shook his head. ‘You’re not just messing with computers here, you’re screwing up people’s lives.’

She couldn’t look at him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So tell me about the other systems you’ve damaged.’

She jerked her head up. ‘But I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t damage things, I just look around.’

He watched her for a moment. She couldn’t tell if he believed her. Then he tossed the screwdriver on to the desk with a clatter and folded his arms, as though he’d made up his mind.

‘Okay, I’ve seen how you hack,’ he said. ‘Now I want to know why.’

‘But I’ve told you why.’

‘No, you haven’t. Your answer was a cop-out. Tell me again. Why do you want to hack?’

Harry’s mind went blank. What kind of answer was he looking for? She felt as if she was back at school, with the teacher asking a series of questions designed to lead her to a single answer. But what was it?

She tried to analyse how she felt when she started an exploit. ‘Okay, well, maybe I love to break into things and be somewhere I shouldn’t.’

‘So you like taking risks. Why? Does it make you feel powerful?’

Harry thought of the way the hairs stood to attention on the back of her neck whenever she felt close to cracking a system. She thought of the exhilaration that pumped into her bloodstream like a drug as she unlocked the final door into someone’s network. He was right. Hacking made her feel powerful in a way no other part of her life ever could. But there was something else.

She shook her head. ‘That’s part of it, I suppose. But mostly I just don’t believe people when they tell me I can’t break into a system. Just because it says it in the manual doesn’t make it true.’ She rubbed her nose, as if that would unscramble her thoughts. ‘I know there’s always a way in, if I stick at it long enough.’

‘So it’s about the technology? You want to find out what makes it tick?’

‘Yeah, in a way. It’s like … I dunno.’ She looked into his face. ‘It’s like finding the truth.’

Dillon’s eyes glowed and he sat very still. ‘That’s exactly what hacking is all about. The search for truth.’

Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him. His face was inches from hers.

‘People think hacking is all about destruction, but nothing could be wider of the mark. It’s about exploring the technology, about pushing it to its limits and sharing the knowledge. A true hacker expands his mind beyond what’s in the books or what he’s been taught. He finds a way to do things when conventional thinking fails.’ Dillon locked eyes with hers. ‘Hacking is good. It’s people that are bad.’

He grasped her hands in his. A flash of heat shot through her and something jolted inside her chest.

‘Think of hacking as an attitude,’ he said. ‘We don’t just hack computers, we hack our whole lives.’ He squeezed her hands, pumping them for emphasis, and his eyes burned into hers. ‘Never let yourself be limited by what other people tell you. Never accept their version of how things have to be.’