Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

authorities. Your actions just might have far-reaching consequences.”
    I knew he meant Pixel and my family. I had no doubt this man was capable of anything.
    He pushed back from the table, stood, and turned toward the door. “Follow me,” he said.

1.5
DAY 1 - 3:46 pm
    F BI Field Office , San Francisco, CA

    “ N YAH , WHAT were you thinking?”
    Jill Corbis glared at me from the end of the conference room where she stood with hands gripping the table’s edge. Thankfully, she’d gotten my message and taken it seriously enough to bring a pair of agents with her. She had made a spectacle of arresting me in BlakBox’s lobby. It was a show mostly for Bell’s sake, she’d said. They could have carried me out in a bag of trash for all I cared, as long as they got me out of that place.
    “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I just . . . I wasn’t thinking.”
    “Well, that’s obvious. What you did was not only dangerous, but highly illegal.”
    “I said I’m sorry,” I repeated.
    “Not good enough this time. I just defended you to the deputy director, who, by the way, has already gotten a call from BlakBox’s legal counsel. I want to help you, but you need to give me more than just I’m sorry . Let’s go through this again, and this time I want you to tell me everything.”
    “I did tell you everything.”
    Jill narrowed her focus. “My gut tells me you’re not.”
    I pushed my chair back from the table. “I already told you, I was just trying to land a consulting job. I need the money,” I said. “That’s it.”
    “Everybody needs money.”
    “Not this badly, they don’t, and not this much. I’m trying to get Mom into a clinical study, which is crazy expensive. Her doctor thinks she doesn’t have long to live. This research program could help. It’s the miracle I’ve been looking for and the money from BlakBox was going to pay for it. But now . . .”
    I let my words trail off. It was all too much—getting caught, watching the money slip through my fingers, along with it my last chance to help Mom. Worse still, Pixel was missing, and it was my fault.
    Jill’s face softened. “So you take a risk, swing for the fences with BlakBox, hoping they’ll hire you and pay the money you need.”
    “Yes,” I said, not hiding the frustration in my voice. “We’ve already gone through this.”
    “And we’ll go through it again, if need be. It’s important that I know everything.” She sighed. “You know, kid, every grey hair on my head is from you.”
    That was probably true. We’d met a year earlier when her team scooped me up as part of a hacking sting. I’d been cleared of any crime, mostly because, while my snooping had crossed paths with malicious hackers, I had no affiliations with them and hadn’t vandalized anything. I’d simply been in the wrong digital place at the wrong digital time.
    Where others in the Bureau saw a threat, Jill had seen a young girl trying to get her bearings after a tragedy had shattered her world. Incredibly, we’d become friends, and I’d started tipping her off when I caught whiff of something fishy on the cyber wind. She owed her last promotion to me after I uncovered a hacker’s plan to breach a global payment system and snatch a hundred million credit card numbers.
    “Do you realize how connected and influential Walter Bell is?” Jill continued. “If BlakBox decides to come after you—”
    “Let them! I don’t care!”
    “Well, you need to start caring, because right now there’s no scenario that ends well for you.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that matters right now is finding Pixel.” I softened my voice and sat back in the chair and hugged myself. “I have a really bad feeling.”
    “We’ll find him,” Jill said. “He probably got scared, ran away, and now he’s laying low until things cool off.”
    “Then why isn’t he answering his phone? He always answers. That creep at BlakBox said the authorities had him, but that’s