Hard Love (Hacker #5)(21)
Author: Meredith Wild

The asshole was persistent, but I was willing to bet only one person in the room had a genius IQ. “Get to the point.”

“Interestingly enough, there is shared code between certain types of banking software and the software that’s used to run voting machines.”

“I’m well aware of that.” Any programmer worth his salt knew that. Evans was clearly enjoying this foray into technical jargon, but I was quickly becoming bored with it and hoped he’d get to the fucking point.

He smirked. “I’m sure you are.”

I willed my fists not to clench under the table.

“Blake, we’ve been looking at the binaries that were installed onto the voting machines, and we found something interesting. The encryption routine used is the same one you designed ten years ago . . . for Banksoft.”

That would certainly explain why I was here.

“Show me the rest of it,” I said in a controlled tone.

He drummed his fingers on the envelope, glancing down at it. “It’s being carefully reviewed by our team.”

I ground my teeth down and registered the twitch in my jaw as I did. Something about the past few minutes had become all too familiar. Assumptions made, accusations thrown, and a bunch of men in suits trying their damnedest to back me into a corner. Fear knotted in my stomach. But I wasn’t a kid anymore, and I wasn’t going to be intimidated into a bad situation, especially for something I had no part in.

Evans spun the folder methodically and waited, as if he was expecting me to crack.

I leaned in, increasingly pissed now that he was withholding information that would clear this up for me. “Listen to me. It’s a small miracle your team was able to identify the encryption and match it to my code. Let me see the rest of it, and I’ll show you what you’re not finding.”

Evans bared his teeth with a sneer. “Wouldn’t that be convenient?”

“For both of us, it would seem.” I stifled a growl. I wanted to wring this guy’s neck.

“How about you tell me who rigged the machines?”

I sat back and let out a short laugh.

“Did you have help?”

“I have no fucking idea what you’re even asking right now.”

Evans’s expression grew less mocking and more serious. “It’s pretty simple. If you didn’t do this, who did?”

I had a few ideas. Someone who did sloppy work and had retribution on the mind. Someone who’d love to know I was sitting here, getting grilled by the FBI. But still, I couldn’t be sure.

I couldn’t take credit for the skewed election results, but I hadn’t always been so innocent. And Evans wasn’t the only one who knew it.

I’d been a troubled adolescent—aimless, angry, and too intellectual for my own good. When I’d joined the hacker group M89, the few members in its ranks had been wreaking havoc on small websites with minimal impact. Brian Cooper was the group’s leader, and together we came up with a plan that I had the expertise to put into action. A group of Wall Street executives were trying to ruin the whistle-blowers threatening to expose their Ponzi scheme. It was a small story in the news, buried under hundreds of other stories of injustice in the world, and together we’d decided to do something about it . . . something big.

The code I’d ultimately write would deplete the bank accounts of those executives and fund our group to do more, to punish the people who deserved to lose everything they’d stolen. Except weeks before we were ready to act, the plan changed. Brian wanted to broaden the net and use the code to skim small amounts from other accounts, accounts held by people who hadn’t done anything wrong other than trust those execs with their retirement money.

I was young and bent on a misguided kind of justice, but what Brian wanted wasn’t justice. I refused to go through with it, so we parted ways. When Brian released the code, the feds caught us both. Scared as I’d been, I’d told the truth, and when they turned to Brian for answers, he didn’t last long. He’d taken his own life days after we were taken into custody, an outcome that I’d spent too many hours since wondering if I could have prevented.

Trevor was Brian’s younger brother. Not unlike Brian, he’d turned into an amateur miscreant, fueled more by vengeance than skill. He’d dedicated his life to ruining me because of Brian’s death. His stunts aimed at fucking with my businesses, or Erica’s, had grown in scope over time, but this might be beyond even him.

“Show me the code, Evans, and I can probably figure it out for you.”

He was still a moment and finally stood, his chair screaming along the concrete floor. “We’ve got you on this, Blake. One way or the other, you’re going down. You should figure out now how you want to play it. Let me know when you want to talk.”