He peered through the peek hole and was surprised by who he saw on the other side. He quickly opened the door. “Alex Langley, how’s it going, mon?”
“Not great, Rasta. I need your help.”
“Shit, what happened to you?” As Langley stepped hurriedly into the light of Rasta Man’s basement apartment, his bedraggled state became apparent. His normally immaculate clothes were torn and smeared with dirt and soot, his face was covered with flecks of ash that had landed on him and a number of cuts and bruises were evident on his features. The hair on the right side of his head had been singed and now felt like a matted mass of hard nylon and his face still stung from the blistering heat, but he’d been lucky. Far luckier than Mrs Braun.
Following the explosion at her house, he’d spent several minutes clambering through the wreckage, shouting her name, but as there was little left of the house, he quickly forced himself to acknowledge that there would be even less left of her.
He’d quickly scrambled into his SUV, struggling to control the shock and the adrenaline, and then raced away from the burning wreckage. The sounds of emergency sirens had howled through the air but he knew he couldn’t remain on the scene. Someone was trying to keep Phoenix a secret; they’d silenced the Brauns and, having escaped, he’d be next on their list.
He’d driven fast back towards New York City, taking a circuitous route, always looking in his rear view mirror expecting to see someone come back to finish the job. Once in the city he’d dumped the vehicle, taking his laptop, phone and gun with him, then descended into the subway system, doubling back on himself numerous times. Twice he’d surfaced, hailed a cab, driven to a different location, switched to a different cab and then a bus before descending back to the subway.
He hadn’t become as stale in the years since he left the CIA as he’d thought, he’d realised. All his training, all his experience had kicked back in.
Confident that he had lost any tail he might have had, he finally made his way to the home of the only man who could help him, hidden in a dingy, windowless basement flat in Queens.
“I don’t have time to explain,” he said, pushing his way into Rasta Man’s main room, ignoring the crop of marihuana.
“It’s for medicinal purposes,” Rasta Man defended himself. “My back’s been giving me—”
“I need you to access an encrypted file for me.”
Rasta Man was the best at what he did, and what he did was hack.
Nathan Raine had been the first to ‘recruit’ the gangly boy years ago on a previous mission. Back then, Rasta Man had gone by his real name of Elliot Basingstoke, the son of a Queens Café owner. Bullied at school for his nerdish tendencies, he had come to the attention of MIT who had offered him a scholarship. But, always weary of authority, following the daylight robbing of his parents’ café and their murders, he’d retreated underground — literally. He lived now on that narrow line between villainy and normality, surviving by hacking rich peoples’ bank accounts and sieving off small amounts of money — enough to buy the high grade computer equipment he needed but not enough to get noticed. And he hacked. He hacked into banks and private corporations. He hacked into politicians’ files and government databases. And he even hacked into the military database. But he knew the limits. He knew that the government allowed him and the other world class hackers of modern society to get away with minor infringements which were posted online in conspiracy theorist websites. All they did was deny the theories, label Rasta Man and his ilk as ‘whackos’ and ‘nutters’. But if he ever tried to break through the military’s inner firewall, they would be down on him in no time and he’d never see the light of day again.
Langley was about to ask him to do just that.
He opened his laptop, already powered up, and spun it around on Rasta Man’s desk which was cluttered with computer towers, monitors, hard-drives and card readers. Rasta Man crashed into his plush swivel-chair-on-wheels as though it was the command chair of the Starship Enterprise and began tapping at Langley’s keyboard.
“Phoenix,” he read, his hands flying over the machine in a blur. Screen after screen appeared until all of a sudden a loud tone erupted from the speakers and a warning screen shot up. Rasta Man jumped back as though he’d just been bitten by a Rattle Snake.
“No way, mon,” he said in a panic.
“Rasta, it’s important,” Langley said. “Can you do it?”
The young man looked even paler than usual. “Sure I can do it, but there is no way I’m gonna. That file is protected by half a dozen firewalls, it’s encrypted up to its teeth. I’m guessing there are only a handful of people in the world that can access it.”
“Which is why I need your help,” Langley said smoothly. “Think about it, what this file contains could be the scoop of the century — it’s a conspiracy theorist’s wet-dream.”
“And worst nightmare,” Rasta added. “Al, listen to me, mon. I can hack it, but Uncle Sam’ll know what I’m doing the instant I start. They’ll be here in less than ten minutes — NYPD to begin with, just following orders, locking me down. Then the Fed’s will show up in their suits, then I’ll find myself in a torture chamber under the Pentagon somewhere while they water-board-out-of-me what I saw. Then, if I’m lucky, I get to spend the rest of my life in a high security military prison, probably shacked up in a cell with some six-foot-seven beast who takes a liking to my tooshy.”
“Elliot,” Langley said, his tone serious, no-nonsense. “If you don’t do this, thousands, even millions of people could die.” The young hacker looked as though he was about to be sick. “I’ll protect you. You’ve hacked my record, I’m sure.” He didn’t deny it. “You know my history — I was the commander of the most elite Special Forces team in the world. I can make you vanish, like a ghost.”
Rasta Man gestured at his array of computers. “I don’t want to vanish. This is my world—”
Langley fished into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He threw it at Rasta who instinctively caught it. “It’s yours,” he said. On the hacker’s puzzled expression, he explained. “All the money I have in the world, which is a lot, Elliot, a lot — it’s yours. I’m not going to need it where this path is going to take me.” He looked the young man in the eyes, catching his gaze and not letting it go. “From the moment you start hacking the file, we’ll have, I estimate, about seven minutes before NYPD arrive, directed by the DOD’s cyber-terrorist unit. How long will it take you to download the file onto a disk drive?”
Rasta’s mind was racing as he calculated the time he’d need. “If I have all the programs I need open and ready before I start the hack, I can get into the file in under a minute.” He glanced uncertainly at the screen. “But it’s a big file. Even with the speed of my computers it’ll take about four minutes to save onto a portable disk.”
“Then you make the hack,” Langley explained, “you download the file. That still leaves us two minutes to get as far away from here as possible before—”
“Two minutes isn’t enough—”
“Two minutes is an eternity,” Langley snapped, “if you know what you’re doing. And trust me, I know what I’m doing. We can be out of the city in under an hour, then you can go buy yourself a penthouse suite in Miami full of computers and a harem of whores to cater to your every geeky desire. What do you say… mon?” he added with a smile.