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ONE

A five- news turned Allison Trent into a full-blown criled across the lineso bold or blatant Within a couple of years she had accuhty million dollars On paper that would have made her a titan In reality she was as poor as a church mouse

The motivation to commit the first cri on an overstuffed sofa in a coffee shop close to the Boston College ca on a class project that was due the next day and was so co on her lap that she was oblivious of the activity around her, not even hearing the news broadcast co from the television that was suspended from the wall opposite her—that is, until the words “terrible injustice” broke through her concentration and drew her eyes up to the screen The young enuinely sympathetic as he read his story fro home called Sunset Gardens, one of twenty homes for the elderly located across the East Coast owned and operated by a corporation out of Philadelphia The corporate home offices, he explained, kept a database with vital inforle one of their clients They were vigilant in protecting privacy, had all the bells and whistles installed to keep personal data ironclad against bugs and viruses, and had paid a hefty salary to a tech company whose only job was to h Their system had been hacked, and the identities of all the residents in all twenty facilities were stolen with one keystroke And because First National was designated as the official bank for all Sunset Gardens homes and their residents, within minutes its accounts iped out as well

The reporter went on to point out that a large number of the residents had no family to help them, and while the money in First National was FDIC insured, it could take the authorities a good long while to sort through the facts and reimburse every account

What were the residents supposed to do until then? Allison wondered

A sense of outrage was growing inside her as she listened to the catastrophic details of the criedy hit home when the reporter played a clip of his intervieith one of the elderly residents Her name was Ella O’Connor He knelt beside Ella’s wheelchair and held her veiny hand as he asked her what the news meant to her

Ella’s watery eyes stared at the reporter for ato understand the question “I don’t know,” she said And then a look of despair crossed her face “I hope they don’t make me leave”

Ella was all alone, afraid, and feeling helpless Allison knew exactly how that felt Her heart went out to Ella and all the other poor souls Some of theolden years dealing with such stress and fear would be traumatic What had happened to them was beyond cruel

An intervieith the president of the Sunset Gardens Corporation was played next With a shrug in his voice, he said, “The authorities toldOr possibly the Chinese The truth is, we may never know”

His defeated “Oh well, what can you do?” attitude infuriated Allison She knew the FBI had experts trying to locate the hackers and shut them down, but it was apparent they hadn’t had any luck so far The invasion of secure systeencies had announced that the Pentagon had been hacked The FBI was certain the Russians were behind the theft of ee challenge

What coul

d she do? Somaybe It wouldn’t hurt to try to find the Sunset Gardens hackers, would it?

Was it her ego or her arrogance that ht succeed? She had always had the ability to solve coht processes were out of the box She had been just eight years old when her uncanny ability was first noticed Her older sister, Charlotte, had bought a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle at a yard sale and placed all the tiny pieces on the floor in their room When Allison came home from school, Charlotte asked her if she wanted to help put the puzzle together Allison knelt on the floor and stared at the scattered pieces for no more than a minute or thile her brain studied them Not only could she tell Charlotte what the picture was, but she knehere the pieces fit It was as though she atching each part of the puzzle connect to the next After separating the tiny cardboard tiles into six piles, she went to work Charlotte watched in amazement In less than five minutes, Allison had the periether, and within another twenty, the entire puzzle was co unusual, but Charlotte was clearly impressed She told Allison that s the way she did

The nursing ho up Allison had been a sophoe at the time and planned to spend the holiday alone Charlotte and her husband, Oliver, had o They had offered to buy a plane ticket for her to co up to buy a house, Allison declined their generosity Allison did have three other relatives, but she would rather have slept on the street than spent the holiday with them

Allison and Charlotte had been very young when Aunt Jane and Uncle Russell becauardians The couple had one son, Will, o years older than Allison, and the at An air of constant friction per Will had done He never showed any signs of aroup of creepy etting into trouble—or mischief, as Uncle Russell called his skirmishes with the police

To Allison, her aunt and uncle and cousin were her poor excuse for relatives Charlotte was her only family When they were children, their aunt had often threatened to split them up if they didn’t obey and keep quiet, and the possibility of never seeing her sister again had terrified Allison She’d felt so helpless She would have done anything to keep that froation to the Charlotte and her into their hoo, had kept her compliant However, now that she was an adult and had moved away from their house, she felt a new sense of freedom

Since Allison was spending the holiday vacation alone, she decided to use the time off to focus her full attention on the hackers She was confident the vast forces at the FBI would find the culprits eventually, but she wasn’t going to leave the task to the

She didn’t get very far in her search during the break, yet she didn’t give up Every moment of spare time she could steal between her classes was spent on her hunt She ell aware of the chance she was taking, and she kne careful she had to be Breaking into protected sites was against the law, and yet she wasn’t deterred She couldn’t get the elderly victi an obsession

A breakthrough caained access to the bank’s servers and tracked the thieves’ withdrawals to various bank accounts that had been set up in a number of European countries As she suspected, those had been closed within seconds of the deposits, and the money was routed to other accounts Ultimately she traced the funds to a consolidated account in Ukraine, and froain into smaller bank accounts With each discovery, she became more and more certain the attack was not carried out by a cyber syndicate, but rather by a sroup of hackers or maybe even a lone wolf, someone who had devised an elaborate plan to find a vulnerable target and drain the funds before anyone could detect the theft Step by step, she unraveled the knots

After ashe hadn’t found the source, but she could feel she was closing in A long weekend was co up and she was excited to have the extra time The minute her classes ended on Friday afternoon, she hurried to her house off ca into her favorite fleece sweats and fuzzy slippers, she propped pillows against the bed’s headboard and leaned back, her laptop on her outstretched legs Around three in the ht, she found the last linkand presto, she had them

Her discovery surprised her The theft wasn’t carried out by the Russians or the Chinese after all All of the routing and rerouting through foreign banks turned out to be just a clever way of diverting attention The real source was actually on the West Coast of the United States The hackers were two seniors and one grad student at Stanford University Their carefully hidden accounts—all containing some form of their initials, CHF, for their first naht e by any hacker’s standards

Allison was euphoric for a good fifteen minutes before worry set in The way the three ht , and she would have had to spend God kne long tracking it down again

She knehat she needed to do She just didn’t know if she had the courage to do it If she ht, even as she realized she couldn’t and wouldn’t let those three greedy lowlifes take what didn’t belong to them

“Screw it,” she whispered “Let’s see how you like feeling helpless”

She could i to be when they realized they had been hacked, and thinking about it made her smile