Hack.A.I. (The Hack. series Book 1), page 13
“I think this is just for show. There’s nothing on here.”
“Are we at the right address?”
“Definitely.”
“So, there’s another computer here?”
“Or they have it with them.”
Nate paused in thought for a moment.
“I wonder.” He said aloud, aimlessly.
Following a brief search, he located the previous listing page from 2020 for the address.
“Modern and updated… four bedroom Georgian town… safe room!”
“There is a safe room here?”
“It appears so. Look, the photo shows the entrance is through the bedroom on the first floor, just above us.”
“Ha! I told you so. How do we get access to it?”
“There will be some code mechanism I’d imagine.”
“Can you reset it?”
“I hope so. Most run off a separate battery, so we will see. Gotta find it first.”
Taking care, Nate closed the MacBook to the same state it was left in, and they both returned to the floor above.
As they reached the top step on the first floor, they heard the front door being slammed shut below them.
twenty-four
Nate, followed by Cassie, scarpered on their tiptoes into the main bedroom. He opened his phone and activated the dormant mini drone still hovering near the alarm.
Twirling the drone around to see the cleaner struggling with her equipment towards the alarm, her eyes firmly on the hoover she was dragging behind her.
He slid the drone up high, and pulled it away into the hallway’s corner, where the spiders would sling their webs, out of sound range, he hoped.
Unaware, the cleaner placed what she was carrying either on the floor or the glass half-moon table directly below the alarm and reached up to press the alarm buttons.
Confused by the screen showing that the alarm system had been disabled, she shrugged her shoulders and grasped all the items she was carrying before and moseyed up the stairs.
"We must quickly find that safe room keypad," Nate whispered with a sense of urgency.
They both glanced around, hoping to spot an obvious hiding place for a keypad next to the entrance.
Cassie pulled books, and Nate searched for buttons.
“Nate, look!” Cassie whispered, holding a wire that came directly out of the wall at ankle height.
She followed the wire up to what Nate thought was a decorative red rotary phone sitting on a bookcase shelf.
“What’s the code, what’s the code…” Nate frantically said aloud, trying to figure out its possibilities in his head.
The cleaner dropped her ringing phone out of her hand as she tried to answer, causing Cassie to jump, and she placed everything down midway up the stairs and dropped a few to pick the stumbling phone up.
They were all within a car's length of each other. Once she turned the corner, she would definitely spot them.
“What’s the code?” Nate asked Cassie.
“I don’t know. Try one, two, three, four…” she shrugged.
“That’s not gonna be it.” Nate replied, but thought of trying it, anyway.
The cleaner had gathered her phone and cleaning supplies and tottered up another few steps.
Nate wound the code into the phone, waiting for it to roll slowly counter-clockwise to a stop so he could enter the next number.
The cleaner reached the top step as the retro phone’s dial spun to a last stop and the door popped open.
Nate tiptoed in first, and Cassie followed suit. He closed the door slowly behind them until it was slightly ajar and waited, hoping they weren’t spotted.
They heard the cleaner mumble something to herself and give Nate the opportunity to close it shut.
The lock made a clunk sound, and the cleaner glanced inside. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, assumed the noise came from the noisy gardens opposite, shrugged her shoulders before continuing the ascent up the stairs.
“I think we are okay.”
Nate turned to Cassie, who anxiously stood away from the door.
“Is it always this close run with you?”
Nate furrowed his brow, deep in thought, before finally nodding in agreement.
“Well, this is the last time I will come with you!” Her words carry a weight of authority.
“I said I prefer to work alone.”
“No, you didn’t, at any point!”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot.” A smirk played on Nate's lips, his joy clear as he saw the familiar smirk mirrored on her face.
Hitting him almost at once, the cigar-smoke filled room jarred with the fresh scent from the rest of the house.
Well-lit, the rectangle room contained a long polished steel desk running along a wall filled with blank TV monitors and a heavily used sofa bed directly opposite, resting up against the empty concrete wall.
“The laptop.”
Sat on the desk, directly in front of a racing chair, was a brand new MacBook.
Nate sat down, and Cassie stood over him. He opened the MacBook and all the blank screens above them came alive.
Spread out across each monitor were various programs. The London stock exchange charts, emails, confidential documents, new government bills.
“Emails!” Cassie pointed to the top left monitor.
“Who’s the sign off?”
Cassie got up so close to the monitor that she fogged up the screen.
“Sorry, my eyes are terrible. I need to get up close. Oh, my god…”
She paused, and her squinting eyes opened wide.
“Heather Stanton.”
“Who’s that?” Nate asked.
“That—is the energy secretary.”
“Wait, what? The person who regulates the energy companies is all pally with them and telling them to increase their prices. That energy secretary?”
“One and the same. I’m sure she…” Cassie tailed off and pulled out her phone, gazing at the screen intently and typing frantically.
“You are sure of what?”
“Yep, there it is.”
“Her husband is on the board of two of the companies listed.”
“What?” Nate yelled. “Of course he is, because it’s a fucking fiddle. All of it. They don’t give a shit about the poor people at the bottom who struggle to make ends meet. As long as they can sit on their yachts with prawn sandwiches.”
“We can’t let them get away with this. We need to release this to the world and show them we are not to be messed with.”
Nate nodded. “I’ll clone the hard drive to this USB. I bet there's loads of evidence on here. We can sieve through it all and send it to all the papers and maybe make our own Leakpedia.”
“Yeah. Let’s make sure they know it’s from us.”
Nate took out his own laptop, poked in a blank USB and plugged it into the MacBook attachment and set it to the task.
“Estimated time is five minutes. It’s normally quicker than that, but there’s a lot of shit on here.”
“Well, I bet I know what you are thinking.” Cassie said, a smile playing on her lips.
Nate shook his head.
“A lot could be done in five minutes.”
The remark caused Nate to blush a little and a smile spread wickedly across his face. “I wasn’t, but I am now. A game of blitz chess, is it?”
Cassie chuckled.
“You are funny, I have to say. Tell me about you then, man of mystery, Nate—whatever your surname is?”
“It’s Rook.”
“Nathan Rook. That’s why you are called Rookie?
“Yeah.”
“Cool, I like that name. Am I okay to call you Nathan?”
Normally, he preferred to be called Nate, but the way she says his name with a slow emphasis on the t h, and the poking out of her tongue as she said it, he would allow her to call him anything she wanted.
“Sure,” he said, trying to imitate someone more suave.
“So come on then, tell me more?”
“There’s not much to say.”
“There has to be something?” Cassie’s smile faded as she watched Nate lean back in his chair, both arms resting across his stomach.
“No, not really.”
"If you don't want to talk to me," she said, her voice tinged with disappointment, "that's fine."
“Okay?” Nate furrowed his brows, his face contorting with confusion.
Like a seasoned wife, her tone shifted from playful to stern. “When are you going to trust me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you don’t like me watching you work, which is weird. But everyone has their ways, and I accepted it when you sent me away. But now you won’t even talk to me.”
The sudden shift in her mood surprised Nate.
“Uh… I.. It’s not that I don’t trust you specifically, I-I just ah…don’t really trust anyone.” Nate's voice took on a defensive tone as he spoke
“Okay, that’s fine. I just want to know where I stand.”
“It’s not that I’ll never trust you…”
“It’s fine.” Cassie shrugged, her tone unemotional.
Tension flooded the room so fast it left Nate taken aback.
It felt like a submarine taking on water.
“I just don’t understand how you can ask me to trust you when you don’t even trust me! Ugh, whatever. This is why I don’t date boys. None of you understand your own feelings, so how do we stand a chance? Just don’t talk to me!”
Both sat quietly for exactly three minutes. Nate knew because his eyes didn’t leave the clock. Which made it feel like it had taken ten times that long until finally a quiet bing cut the silence, declaring that the cloning was complete.
“I.. uh, think we better go.”
Nate tried to catch her eyes, but Cassie looked anywhere but back at him.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Okay, I guess…follow me.”
He opened the safe room door and heard the cleaner hoovering above.
Putting a finger to his mouth in a shh gesture which earned him a scowl in return, but he ignored it and stepped out.
He checked the landing was clear and waved towards himself to tell Cassie, who had shut the safe room door, without a sound, tight behind her, that it’s safe to leave.
Tiptoeing down the stairs, he got to the last step, reached up and grabbed the mini dragonfly drone, which had spluttered in its flight and lost a little height because of its low battery.
Nate turned it off, put it in his pocket, and unlocked the door latch cautiously, avoiding any noise. He glanced nervously at the stairs, fearing the cleaner's sudden appearance.
He cracked the door ajar, trying to remember if it squeaked or not.
Gambling correctly that it didn’t, opened it up enough for them to slip out and back onto the street. As they turned the corner to leave, out of nowhere, a hand violently grabbed Nate’s arm and forced him to turn.
twenty-five
“Are you kids okay?”
Nate felt a wave of relief wash over him as he saw Bic's concerned face standing behind them, Sketch faithfully by his side.
“Jesus, you just scared the shit out of me,” Nate said, holding his chest.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to call you kids out in the street. Ya’ know—just in case.”
“Bic, what are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you, Cass. Sketch told me what happened on the train, so I got the first train up here. Are you okay?”
“We are fine!” Cassie answered for both of them. “Let’s get out of here.”
They marched further into London until they reached the Thames.
Bic bought fish and chips for them all and they walked along the river bank and talked.
“Eh, man, what the hell is this shit?”
Holding up the battered fish, Sketch observed as the grease dripped from it, creating small puddles on the carton.
“Fish and chips, try it with the lemon!”
“No, gracias!” He closed the carton lid and went to throw it in the bin before Bic stopped and took it off him.
“Don’t waste wonderful fish, man!”
Bic offered it to Nate and Cassie first, but when they declined, he piled it up in his carton.
“So, how did it go? Did you find out who our mystery mailer is?” Bic asked, stuffing a wooden fork of thick chips into his mouth.
“We did, and a lot more.”
“O’ ye?” He mumbled.
“Get this,” Cassie started. “It’s Heather Stanton.”
“The energy secretary?”
Cassie nodded, eyes wide.
“You are joking? Their inside man or woman is the same bloody person in control of setting the energy cap.”
Bics’ chip-filled mouth opened, aghast.
“It’s a literal transfer of wealth.”
“I know, not only that, her husband is on the board of both British Gas and EDF. So she indirectly profits from the ‘discreet’ raise.”
“Absolute scum of the earth. We need to expose this.”
“We said the same. Leakpedia style.” Nate interjected.
“Well, kids, maybe groups like Anonymous will give us the cred we deserve after this.”
“Cred?”
“Yeah, street cred, isn’t that what you kids say these days?”
“No, sweetheart, that’s just what grandpa’s like you think we say.” Cassie slapped him lightly on his cheeks as she walked over to the bench and took a seat, ignoring Bic’s scowl.
“So, my lovelies, how are we going to get back to the bunker? I’m guessing trains are not an option.”
“That’s—an excellent point.” Bic rested his finger on his lips.
“I got a secure Uber account. We’ll be fine.” Nate replied.
Sketch scoffed.
“With what money, Niño?”
“I got money, don’t worry.”
“Oh yeah, how?” Cassie struggled to keep the incredulity out of her tone.
Bic swivelled his head like an owl to glare at her.
“Cass!”
“No, it’s fine. I-ah did well outta crypto.”
Cass rolled her eyes.
“Cryptic more like.”
“Jesus, Cass, what’s got into you?”
“It’s fine, Bic. She can say what she wants. Let’s just get back to Bristol, shall we? If we go across the other side, we can get an Uber quicker.”
Cassie stormed off in front of them. Sketch followed on behind her, but not before eyeing Nate like a murder suspect.
“That’s so strange. I’ve never seen her act like that before.”
Bic walked side by side with Nate.
“She’s probably just stirred up after everything that happened today.”
“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe something else is stirring her up.”
“What do you mean?”
Nate watched as Sketch caught up to Cassie and tried to reach his arm over her shoulders, which she rebuffed and took off at a quicker pace.
“She’s just not been herself lately. It’s odd because she was much more like herself the other night when we introduced you to the group, but she’s back to being moody again. I will try to talk to her. We have more important matters.”
They walked together, discussing how best to embarrass the energy secretary until they caught up to Cassie, who was hugging herself, and Sketch, who was leaning up against a bus shelter.
“The Uber is going to be here in ten minutes.”
Nate said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Can you give me a minute to chat with Cass, Nate?”
“Sure, I’ll go wait down at the end of the street to see if I can see the Uber coming.”
Nate walked down the street a little further, looking out for the larger version of the Mercedes minivan displayed on his mobile.
A notification appeared, announcing that SQAI had completed the search and found a match.
A quick glance to see if anyone was watching him and when he saw them all thirty yards further down the road in their own worlds. He opened it.
A profile popped up on his screen of an agent, John Carreton. MI6.
“MI6 again, what the fuck do they want with me?”
He doubted they were Worsley’s boys. They wouldn’t want his cover blown.
Nate stood at the bottom of a quiet square — for London — pondering when he heard intense screeching tires.
In his mind, he scoffed at the idea that it was his unusually keen Uber.
Without warning, a van suddenly arrived and its side door slid open before he could react. Out the door, two masked men threw Nate into a van and quickly drove away, catching the remaining three’s attention.
“Nate!” Cassie ran after the speeding van, hopelessly reaching her arm out.
“What the fuck just happened?” Bic asked, running after Cassie.
“They took Nate!”
“I know. We will sort it. Just stay calm.”
“Why did they take him?”
“They came and took him, man.” Sketch interjected in his usual Spanish twang, catching up to the other two.
“I know. Did anyone see them?”
“No, man, they wear mask. All of them.”
“Was that the police? Coming after us for breaking into the MP’s house?”
“No, they wouldn’t have grabbed him like that. It’s too soon, anyway. I doubt she has even got home.”
“It’s probably her second home, anyway. Paid by the taxpayer. Given that she was renting it. No, whoever did this was criminal, and given how quickly they did it, it seems they have done it before.”
“So we need to find a gang known for kidnapping?”
“Yeah and then try to cross reference them with people that Nate has had issues with before.”
“What about that gang that he brought down before?”
“Most of them are dead or in prison and from what I read, they never found out who set them up.”
“How did you know?”
Bic tapped the side of his nose twice with his index finger.
Cassie thought it suspicious at first, but in her panic let it slide.
He turned to face Sketch.
“Sketch, I want you to get in touch with your boy on the scene and see what they know about Nate and any enemies he may have. And see if we can find the plates to that van.”
