Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,14

Daniel had achieved both the privacy and the notoriety he’d craved.

To earn the money they needed to support their spartan lifestyle and insatiable lust for the latest technology, they sold copies of Data Sucker, a program Daniel had written that infiltrated computers through the Windows operating system. Always the entrepreneur, Jake had then suggested that Daniel write another software that they called A-Sucker, which protected computers against Data Sucker. Turned out there was an even bigger market for that.

Diana remembered the day she’d had her epiphany. Daniel had been sitting at his computer, intent on a game he was into, his face aglow with colors radiating off the screen. With the sides of his scalp shaved bare like some shock troop commando, and his worktable mounded with coils of cable, jury-rigged circuit boards, hopped-up laptops, and surveillance equipment, he looked every inch his pseudonym, SOK0S. Sow Chaos.

“Daniel,” she’d said.

He was using a headset, but still Diana could hear the apocalyptic drumbeat and gunfire. She waved to snag his attention. When he looked over she mimed taking off the headset. He took it down, letting it rest around his neck.

“You see this headline?” she asked. “ ‘Death in a Medical Mix-up.’ Charles River Hospital.”

He rolled his eyes. “All we did was look around and bring down their database,” he said, his gaze returning to his computer screen.

“We didn’t just bring it down. Listen. ‘Hackers wreak mayhem resulting in the death of at least one patient—’ ”

“Bogus. That is so not our fault.” Daniel clicked the mouse. His screen lit up and Diana could hear the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire.

“We destroyed their databases,” Diana said. “They had to reconstruct medical orders from scratch. Apparently they got one of them wrong.”

“Not our fault,” Daniel said, his fingers dancing on the keyboard.

“But it was a foreseeable consequence of something we did.”

“A lightning strike could have had the same results.” He put the game on pause and turned to face her. “People like that deserve what they get. They stockpile a mountain of private information and then do a lousy job protecting it.”

“Then once again, mission accomplished,” she said, flashing him two thumbs up. “We’ll get you a banner saying so. And I’m sure the woman who died thanks you too. She was fifty-two years old.”

“All right already.” Daniel looked longingly back at his screen.

“Daniel, she wasn’t fragged in some combat sim. She had a name and a family, and they did everything that they thought they were supposed to do”—Diana heard her voice catch, surprised by the rogue emotion that sideswiped her—“but she died anyway, needlessly, meaninglessly, because we thought it would be a great idea to trash their system.”

He winced. She knew he hated raw emotion. Well, that was just too damned bad.

“Remember when my mother had cancer? She turned fifty-two between rounds of chemo. She could barely swallow a bite of chocolate cake. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like for us if an accidental overdose had killed her.”

Daniel groaned and got up from his chair. He put his arms around her from behind and started to read over her shoulder. “You know as well as I do,” he said after a minute, “these guys were an accident waiting to happen. Their backup systems were for shit and not secured. If not us, then something much more destructive would have bitten them. All we did was wipe out some data. The chaos that followed? All of their own making.”

She looked up at him. “Right. We expose weaknesses and then wash our hands of what happens next.”

“So what’s your point? You knew what you were getting into.”

She held his gaze. “I thought I knew. But this time we’ve gone too far. Even if you don’t, I feel responsible for this woman’s death. Daniel, I’m telling you just as clearly as I can, I can’t keep doing this.”

He stood there, towering over her. “What are you saying?”

“I’m done. And I can’t let you and Jake keep doing this either.”

“You think you’re letting us do this?”

Her heart pounded but for once she didn’t apologize her way out of it. “I’m saying I’ve had enough.”

Diana had been completely stunned when, a few weeks later, Daniel had been the one to suggest that they sell the farm, move back to the Boston area, and open a security consulting company as a trio of rehabilitated black hats.

They’d settled on the name Gamelan. It was sufficiently obscure and she liked the way it sounded. It even

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