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He idly stared at the walls, rolling his thumbs deep into the palms of his hand. Over and over, staring at the walls. It was lights out, so the entire prison was dark. It was quiet, as quiet as a prison ever got, which wasn’t very. He continued to stare at the walls. The walls were stark, depressing, and entirely uncreative. There were cracks, he had memorized them all, counted them all. He considered naming them, but perhaps that was going to far.
As morose as the walls were, it was still better to look at them rather than the bars. Prison bars. How had it come to this? How did he ever get caught? He still didn’t know where he went wrong. His execution was flawless, there was no way they traced him. He had even scripted the attack, so he wasn’t even in the servers when the attack was orchestrated, a pure piece of genius that was. Yet still the FBI had raided his home.
There’s something about the FBI ramming a tank through the middle of your house at 2am in the morning that really puts life into perspective. They could have simply knocked on the door. But that apparently didn’t work out for the notoriety of the criminal that had leveled an entire government’s economic prowess. It’s a good thing the feds never found out about that piece of mischief; he wasn’t exactly sure that it didn’t constitute a war crime given what happened after. Although, how could he have predicted the coup that would happen following the economic collapse? It turned out better than he had hoped though, Africa now had a fledgling democracy that was largely free of corruption and forced to build its brand-new economy was doing remarkably well.
He doubted the authorities would see it that way. Not with the three thousand people that died in the ensuring riots, and bloodshed that swept the country. Best to make that little piece of history never saw the light of day. That was when he had decided though, that he would never dabble in national affairs again. He had enough stones weighing him down, the horror of more deaths was not another brick he needed to build upon his back.
He glanced at the prison bars again. Grimacing he truly did wonder how it had come to this. He was two years into an eight-year stretch. Two years, one month, twenty-three days. His legal friends in the joint thought he would get out with some good behavior in five, but that still left three more years. He returned to staring at the wall, kneading his thumbs into his hands.
What had brought him down? An easter egg he wrote a decade before, dropped into a little piece of software that would give him root access into the backend of some bank software. He had used those privileges to drain the accounts of two well known drug smugglers and shutdown their operations. But the FBI didn’t care about that piece of the evidence, in a shrewd maneuver the prosecution had actually got it omitted into the allowed trial evidence. That alone might have knocked down the charge or given him probation, he might be doing five instead of eight if it wasn’t for that underhanded move by the prosecution. He’d even give all the money to charity, also inadmissible. Well, he gave most of it to charity, he did have expensive tastes, and a guy had to live off his work.
In fairness, the FBI knew about some of his other exploits, they just couldn’t make any of those cases stick. They also incorrectly thought he was behind several other major cross-national jobs which he didn’t get anywhere near. If he wasn’t behind them, he probably knew who was, or so the FBI had sworn he must know who the culprits were. He did know who had brought down several terrorist organizations in the Middle East, they were Israeli brothers living in Australia, but he’d go to prison for life before giving them up. The FBI was enraged that he wouldn’t give them any heads-on-platters, and because of that they did everything in their power to put him away for as long as they could.
So, he stared at the walls, every night, for hours. And he read. He read everything. It was surprising how much technology stuff he could get delivered. They hadn’t let him anywhere near a computer in two years, but he had learned some very interesting new tricks he was anxiously awaiting to try once he got out. Although he wondered how his skills would even work when the world had changed so much in five years. Five years in technology was several lifetimes. He would be so far behind knowing what he could exploit and what he couldn’t.
The FBI tried to seize all his assets as well, claiming they were all from illegal acquisitions. But he learned early to keep at least half of his money offshore, well outside the United States jurisdiction. It was nice to know that he would never have to work again if he didn’t want to. His savings wouldn’t keep up with his exotic tastes, he’d have to really par it back if he didn’t want to earn any more. But if he never pulled another job, ever, he still could live in relative comfort for the rest of his days. Those drug smugglers really had been loaded.
He groaned annoyingly at another day, stuck in this place. He finally gave up the fight though and laid down. He rapidly fell to sleep, having already kept his minding spinning for hours. Morning would start the whole annoying process all over again.
“Get up Gibson,” a guard, a particularly annoying one, said as he banged his baton on the bars.
“You know my name is Smith. And it should be Mr. Smith to you.”
“You’re always thinking your better than everyone. Well, Gibson, you aren’t. Clearly you couldn’t successfully hack the Gibson, because here you are. Yet, you still be thinking your better than everyone.”
“What do you want, Mack? Isn’t it too early, even for your pleasantries?”
“Lock up man, I don’t have all day.”
Smith walked over to the portal and put his hands behind his back. He learned early on that it was smart to only push the guards so far. They would generally tolerate the lip as long as he did what they told him to do. But the minute an inmate didn’t walk the line of obedience, they found themselves in solitary. “You say that, Mack, but really, you do have entirely all day. Is that not, entirely, the nature of the job?”
He probably went too far with that one, and he got the faint feeling he did as Mack made the shackles significantly tighter than was strictly necessary. His mouth was always getting him in trouble. He might learn to check it into place before he died, but he wasn’t confident that would be the case.
“You mind telling me what this is about now?”
“Don’t know Gibson, some suits here, kind of all hush hush. And they are here to see you.”
“Suits? Like lawyers? I don’t have any lawyers coming anymore for me man.”
Mack was pushing him along, apparently whoever it was he wasn’t wasting any time. They might actually be someone important if Mack was moving him along. Mack wasn’t the laziest of the guards, but he wasn’t a punctual one to say the least.
Mack deposited him an interrogation room that rarely got used. Mr. Smith didn’t know if it had ever gotten used, actually. That might not bode well. He sat there waiting for twenty minutes. For all the rush, it was still prison. Then the three suits walked in. Two men and one woman, all dressed in what appeared to be standard issue government attire. He had thought of about five rather choice wisecracks to unleash on them but thought better of it. Perhaps he could yet train his wayward tongue.
“You Smith?” asked the first man.
“Around here I’m referred to as The Gibson, I believe it is used as an honorific for my exploits.” Swooshed right over the head of the two thugs, he wouldn’t be putting too much stock in whatever they wanted. But the woman giggled, apparently one of them was cultured a bit.
“Well, Mr. Smith,” thug two emphasized the word quite intentionally, “we are here to talk about your future. You do want a future, don’t you?”
He couldn’t resist, he even tried. “You boys are about five years early, aren’t you?”
Thug one looked at the other two and sighed, “They said he would be… hmm… uncooperative. But clearly this is a waste of time. We haven’t even gotten to the reason we are here or what we want from him and he’s already jacking off.”
“I would never, not in front of the lady.”
She giggled again. It was almost like a high school girl’s giggle. Quite endearing. Once again, it whooshed right over the heads of her colleagues.
She finally spoke, “Mr. Smith, as my astute coworkers have pointed out, we are here to discuss your future. We have a particularly interesting criminal we need assistance locating, and your particular skills, will be of particular usefulness in completing this task.” She smirked and then jibed, “Particularly.”
He didn’t have a retort this time so he simply waiting, biding his time for additional information.
“Let me be even more blunt if I may. There’s a hacker running amuck in Europe that needs taken down, we are pretty sure we have tracked him down to Germany, but that’s not entirely solid yet.”
“I hate to interrupt you my dear, but have you read my file? Clearly your team here must know I’m serving three times the sentence I should be because I wouldn’t roll over. You think I’m going to crack now and assist you in bringing down other people like me?”
“Yes, I do. I’m quite certain of it actually. You see I know just about everything about you Mr. Smith. I’ve read and studied all your work. I even suspect you of quite a few other, let’s say, incidents that you weren’t charged for.” She walked up to the table and sat directly across from him. Then she looked directly into his eyes. “Of significant interest is some events that happened in Africa. You wouldn’t know anything about Africa would you Mr. Smith?”
Apparently, he had underestimated her and the thugs, they might know what they were doing and that put him in a dangerous situation. He didn’t dare speak, there was no quick quip that was going to get him out of this one. He just sat there, calmly matching her eye for eye.
“Like I said, Mr. Smith. I’ve read everything you’ve done, or what I’ve suspected you’ve done. You aren’t the loose canon the press portrayed you as, ‘a lone vigilante slaying drug giants’, isn’t that what they said? No Mr. Smith, you live by a rather strict code, and every hacker you protected lived by that same code. You should know the two brothers are doing excellent work, they bankrupted another terrorist cell a couple months ago.” He couldn’t keep the shocked expression out of his face. “Of course we know about them. We have some specific contacts that fund most of their work, strictly back-channels of course. Best deniability we can have is foreign nationals, in a foreign nation, wreaking havoc in the Middle East.”
“Where were we? Oh, yes. Moral code. You, Mr. Smith, have a moral code. The man, or men, we are chasing don’t have that moral code. They are going after nuclear codes, and we fully expect them to try to use them on the United States. And you are going to help us catch them.”
About the Creator
Daryl Benson
Just trying to write a little on the side to see if anything can come of it.
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