Alias (7 page)

I had to be ready, just in case Dan came up with the goods.

The process of persuading my other online friends to provide the parts that would make the whole was already in motion, but I pressed the accelerator. Each one believed something different – a matrix reminded me what I’d told to who and when and why. I got in touch with them all.

As Friday night turned into Saturday morning, I heard Mum and Dad come back from the pub and their bedroom light go off. But America was still awake.

I’d been amassing bots for a while, but I needed more. Luckily, Annacando announced from her bedroom in Boston that she had 7,000 – not even bothering to ask why I wanted them. My other bot suppliers thought I was planning a DDoS on Amazon as a protest at their domination of all things bookish.

Next job was to approach my buddy with the video skills. He was only too happy to make me some FPV (first-person view – I used all the right jargon) video of a drone crashing. All he needed to know was what I wanted the terrain to look like. I said I’d get back to him.

Most of the other elements I needed were hidden away, virtually, like the code to take down the NBC TV website and replace the content with my own personal message to the American people, warning them that a drone was overhead. What I couldn’t prepare in advance was the route for the drone to fly, because I didn’t know where it would be starting from. However, I had an aviation geek ready to do that for me. I didn’t know if my mapper was a man or a woman but, judging by the language, definitely a weirdo.

At five in the morning, I ran through the blueprint for my seek-and-destroy attack on Washington. There was nothing more I could do. It all rested on Dan. If he didn’t take up the challenge, I was back to square one. I turned off my lamp, but that thought kept me awake.

On Saturday afternoon I started goading one of my other hacker friends to see where we went. We exchanged messages about famous hacks and then I jumped right in:

how hard is it to hack the national grid?

Why would you want to?
– typed Omen 11.

only asking out of intellectual curiosity – don’t stress

stick to gaming Angel – your out of your depth

(Omen 11 never could spell ‘you’re’ correctly.)

thought you were a hacktivist
– I typed.

Your body language gives away what you’re really
thinking and, unbelievably, messaging can too. My attempt to steer the chat wasn’t as subtle as I’d hoped.

stay away from me angel – your trouble

I left the game, cross with myself. I’d played a slow hand and then impatience had made me take a risk. I didn’t need the word to go round that I was someone to avoid.

I worried on and off for the rest of the day.

On Sunday morning I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. The chances of being able to help the Pakistani children whose faces haunted me were tiny. A drone would have so much more security surrounding it than a satellite camera. Dan was sixteen! It was all make-believe. If I really wanted to help I needed to do something like send a bomb to Obama …

Mum poked her head in when I didn’t surface.

‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Your dad and I are off out for a walk.’

‘OK.’

I sat up and took a huge glug of tea, then reached down and picked my laptop off the floor. Dan had been trying to find me in the worldwide wilderness.

meet me
– he messaged.

I knew where to go.

He sent me some code that he said would put me in control of an American surveillance drone. He was totally matter-of-fact, not even hanging around to gloat.

challenge complete – got to go

It had to be a joke. I’d run the code and a birthday card would appear, or a message from EuroMillions saying I’d got the jackpot with no ticket. But I checked my already-shut bedroom door and closed my curtains anyway.

I executed the code.

After a few flashes of ASCII, my computer threw up a list. I cycled through a few of them, clicked one at random. My screen paused, then became a heads-up display, like when you’re playing Xbox – an image overlaid with acronyms, numbers and lines. It was terrifying. I made myself study the data on the grid, jotting down the GPS co-ordinates, the speed and the altitude, before hitting Escape and snatching my fingers away from the keyboard as though they were burning.

Was it real?

I Googled everything I’d seen, cross-referencing. It all matched. The drone was in Djibouti, spying on Somalia presumably.

Dan had done it. He’d actually done it.

I resisted the urge to celebrate. There was one more hurdle.

I went back in and scanned the list, trying to understand how the drones were classified – I needed one with payload.

Sweat was pooling in my armpits. So close …

Or maybe not. They were
all
surveillance drones.

Use logic, Samiya.

I went back to the code. It was a series of commands – there had to be a clue. I scrolled through, slowly. Did it again. My eyes fixed on some adjacent letters that I’d seen before. I went back to the list of surveillance drones to check, and saw the same pattern. It was relatively easy, compared to the hard work Dan had done, to work out what to replace them with.

Holding my breath, I ran the code again. The new list was in red. I clicked. And took control of a Predator.

Fantasy finally became reality.

It was eighteen months and eighteen days since Brad or Hank, a bit bored by the four walls of his operations centre in the Nevada desert, had randomly pressed Fire, shattering my life and many others – some literally.

Time to settle the score.

I’d assumed the drone would be in America – which was dim of me, as they don’t bomb themselves – but the co-ordinates from the Predator I’d temporarily hijacked showed it was in Germany, on ‘operations’. So the first thing I had to do was rethink the plan. Crossing the Atlantic wasn’t feasible, but Germany was only a hop away from England. Although their drone activity was kept low-profile, the British were guilty too. Quite cute to turn America’s weapons on the country that claimed they shared a ‘special relationship’.

London was every bit as newsworthy as Washington. It was a no-brainer. The botnet could disable London Transport’s ticketing service, the code to take down NBC could do the same to the BBC, and the target for the missile strike, well … there were plenty of deserving locations in the capital.

Convinced it could work, I took the next logical step, which was to disappear – not literally, virtually. I abandoned IRC #angeldust and opened a new channel that Dan would never find – IRC #paperchase. He’d served his purpose, and any questions he might have for me – like whether handing a drone over to a
complete stranger was a good idea – were definitely staying unanswered.

The adrenalin flooding my body combined with a lack of food put me off tackling the timing plan. I gave up and went to make a toasted sandwich and a cup of tea, which I took outside. Sitting on the patio in the sunshine, still wearing my pyjamas, I finally faced the inevitable.

The minute there was even a sniff of a drone being hacked or missing, Dan would know it was Angel and Hugo would know it was me. For all I knew, GCHQ were also on my tail – I’d certainly made enough noise to get on a watch list. Angel had been careful, but Samiya had left footprints belonging to yetis. Therefore, one way or another, I’d be caught.

So, assuming I didn’t fancy life in prison, I had to leave home. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, but it had always been in the future …

I sat, staring at the sandwich, which was suddenly too hard to swallow. My brain wouldn’t compute the pain I’d cause to Mum and Dad if I disappeared …

Or what it really meant …

Hiding in squats? Always moving on?

There was no point getting emotional – no one ever claimed that being an activist was easy. Either I took my A levels and went to Cambridge, or, I took a stand and spent the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.

I pretended to think it through, but there was only one answer.

When it first happened, Mum had said the murder of
Jaddah
and Lamyah was a mistake. If that had been the case, maybe I could have grieved and then slowly got over it. But that ‘mistake’ had been repeated again and again. It couldn’t be allowed to go on. If I did nothing, nothing would change. That reminded me of another quote Sayge liked:

‘All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’

He might have been fake, but he was a good teacher.

The sun started to dip and a chill crept over the garden. I threw my sandwich in the wheelie bin and went back up to my room.

The only way I could steel myself to thrash out the timing plan that would take me one step closer was to think of it as homework. I made a list of tasks, put them in order of priority and then selected the ones that needed to happen at specific times before working backwards to determine how quickly I could put the plan into action. Even building in a couple of days of slack, two weeks was all I needed. I closed the file, terrified by how easy it all looked.

Mum and Dad came back and soon the smell of roast lamb started spiralling up the stairs.

I put the drone’s GPS co-ordinates – taken from the HUD – into Google Maps and had a good look around, then emailed my video guy. I described the ‘terrain’, which was mostly German woodland – attaching some screen shots, and begged him to hurry
so I didn’t miss the deadline for my project. He promised to get me a video within the week.

Mum called me down before I could get started on the next job, which was a bit of a relief, because it was all moving way too fast.

For the next few days, I went to school, took my laptop, used a VPN tunnel to get past the firewall so I could do what I liked, came home and shut myself in my room.

Running away was a huge job. I had to think about the short term – laying low until after the missile strike – and the long term – a new identity.

According to the internet, there were two basic ways to reincarnate. Adopting the details of someone who’d died – undercover police liked to use dead babies – or being someone’s double. Either way, the consensus was that with one good piece of ID, the rest, with patience, would fall into place.

I
didn’t use either method. Because someone else did it for me. I was too frightened of leaving a trace. Once Samiya had left Buckingham, the trail needed to be ice cold. As Angel, I bought a name, a copy of a birth certificate and a National Insurance number from an anonymous creature that inhabited the dark web. And then, because I couldn’t imagine being called Georgia, I bought a second one. It was pricey, but I’d made thousands selling phone credit using Dan’s hack – which
sadly didn’t work any more. Some cyber detective must have found the glitch.

The idea of hiding out in the holiday cottage we’d stayed at in Norfolk popped into my head with no warning – it was the perfect place. The lady who’d let us in when we arrived was a chatterbox, so I knew
all
about the ‘foreign’ owners. They’d bought it, done it up, and then decided it was too quiet and a nightmare to get to. That’s Norfolk for you – stuck on the side. The property was advertised on Luxury Holiday Cottages Direct, so all I had to do was check the bookings page. Empty until May half-term. Couldn’t be better.

Everything was falling into place. All that was left for me to decide was
when
I was leaving Buckingham. But that was the hardest thing of all. I was scared – something I found it hard to admit. So far, all I’d done was plot. If I took the next step, there’d be no going back.

Did I really want to be a fugitive for the rest of my life?

No, I didn’t. But maybe it wouldn’t turn out that way. Nelson Mandela, ‘the black terrorist’, ended up President of South Africa. Gerry Adams, who denied being an IRA operative, was photographed shaking hands with Tony Blair on the steps of Downing Street. Menachem Begin, aka Israel’s former Prime Minister, blew up a hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people.

The path to political leadership wasn’t necessarily Eton, then Oxford. The bomb-making route seemed just as effective.

Nothing to stop me being head of Liberty, having proved my dedication to human rights …

Fate decided me, like it did everything else.

I was in the library last period, four days after Dan sent me the code, when Hugo and Lucy turned up. Only she came over.

‘You look busy,’ she said.

I wanted to ask her why she was with Hugo, but I already knew the answer.

‘English,’ I said, with my arm over the book – the American civil rights movement wasn’t on the syllabus.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

The two of them sat a few tables away and talked quietly.

I went back to staring at Malcolm X quotes.

‘Usually when someone is sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.’

Critics of the black human rights activist said that the discriminatory laws would have been overturned without violence, but they didn’t say when. And that’s the critical bit – violent protest accelerates change. Throughout history, it’s there again and again. You either wait for reformers to slowly change opinion,
like the crawl towards women bishops, or you demand it.

The librarian didn’t seem to be annoyed by Hugo and Lucy’s whispering, but I was. It hurt to see their heads so close together, my only friend and my arch-enemy.

I turned the page.

‘By any means necessary,’
was Malcolm X’s mantra. When white Americans accused him of condoning violence, he reminded them that his ancestors were brought to America in chains, kept in line by whipping, beaten to death for disobedience and torn apart by dogs for fun …

The side with the power can terrorise all they like, but only those who rise up against that power are called terrorists. White state troopers terrorised the black people who marched in Alabama asking for the vote. Drone pilots terrorise whole communities —

‘Hi, Samiya.’

What the hell!

Hugo was standing right in front of me in his sharp suit. Lucy had disappeared.

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

He pulled out a chair and sat opposite me. Still beautiful.

‘Lucy’s idea,’ he said. ‘She thinks it’s time we made up.’

I closed the book, collected my stuff together and stood up.

‘I’ve said I’m sorry. You know me, like to play to the audience.’

He followed me along the corridor, speaking to my back.

‘So did you ever get anywhere with all those letters to your MP?’

He was still trying to play with me, like a cat with a half-dead mouse.

‘It’s a shame,’ he said, louder now, as I was further away. ‘Someone should have done something.’

I galloped down the stairs, went into the girls’ loos and sat on the seat with the door bolted – like a bullied teenager. A victim.

How sad was it that the only person who’d appeared to understand me was Sayge? And he wasn’t real.

The tears ran down my face – I didn’t bother to wipe them away.

Too much wallowing in self-pity makes you despise yourself. I had a wee, splashed water on my face in case Hugo was lurking and set off home.

Dad was at football. Mum was off out. As soon as she left, I went up into the loft to get the rucksack I used for my Duke of Edinburgh Award. When I’d packed the bare essentials, I left it in the lean-to out the back. I wrote an overly dramatic note saying I was going to stay with a girl I’d met at the Cambridge interviews because I needed ‘some space’. I put it under my pillow,
ready for the morning. Last of all, I committed social-media suicide, deleting all my accounts on everything.

There’d been altogether too much thinking.

First thing Friday, I was off.