Alias Read online

  not sure a like-for-like attack will get the most sympathy – I typed.

  If you could hear a sigh over Wi-Fi, I heard one.

  you don’t want sympathy – you want the damage drones do to be top of the agenda

  but what if top of the agenda are the lives I end up taking? – I replied.

  that’s what will catapult drone strikes into the news – he typed.

  what if I kill a child?

  I waited to see if Sayge would outline an argument I’d heard before.

  in war there are casualties – no one suggests world war 2 was bad because children died

  but the right and wrong was clear – Hitler was a maniac

  exactly – think of the greater good – this is not about individuals

  it is – my grandma was an individual

  detach yourself from the personal

  what? – I knew what he meant, but I needed to see it in black and white.

  think of it like vaccination – to protect the masses everyone has the measles jab – if the odd kid dies that doesn’t mean the practice is wrong

  the parents wouldn’t agree

  some deaths are justifiable

  There was the proof. He even used the same words as he had way back in Year 11 when some of the girls had been stressing about the HPV injections.

  I replied straight away so he didn’t realise he’d messed up, even though what I wanted to do was never, ever have anything to do with him ever again. I signed off a few minutes later –

  sorry – not ready – still thinking it through

  – convinced he still believed he was anonymous.

  I sat back in my chair, closed my eyes and double-checked my memory of Hugo holding court in registration. He’d decided to summarise the history of vaccination – repeating that it was for the ‘greater good’, even if healthy children died along the way.

  ‘We have a societal responsibility,’ he’d said, which went over most people’s heads.

  Someone drippy had said, ‘Does that mean we could die because of a jab?’

  ‘Of course. Some deaths are justifiable.’

  Hugo’s statement had caused a girly panic, which, I quite enjoyed at the time. The memory of how I fawned over him brought on an attack of self-loathing, heightening my rage. Tears fell, wetting my face and then my T-shirt. Only the most enormous self-control stopped me getting a taxi to his house so I could pour petrol through the letterbox, having made sure he was inside. It was excruciating to imagine his (and Juliette’s?) reaction when I’d shared my idea for the drone strike. I was so earnest – he must have died laughing. The humiliation was complete and utter.

  As the shock receded, I felt like I’d been dreaming. How could a seventeen-year-old girl expect to steal a drone, fly it and unleash a missile on a major city? It was madness. Which meant I was mad. Or maybe I was bipolar. Invincible one minute, and despairing the next.

  I knew all along I wouldn’t confront him. Unmasked, Hugo would turn it into a huge joke. He’d work his magical spin on the story, making me the half-Arab weirdo, plotting to murder innocent Americans, and him the hero, uncovering my plans. Better that I carried on pretending, which meant getting in contact.

  It took a few days for me to overcome my revulsion, but then self-preservation got the better of me.

  I was never going to go through with it – you knew that – I typed.

  No I didn’t – had you down as the real thing

  I think you just wanted to see how far I’d go

  Hugo was smart. He’d soon see there was no point in pushing it.

  I think you have a legitimate reason to take direct action – he typed, clearly keen to reel me back in. I wasn’t biting. I changed tack.

  who are you anyway? – I bet you’re a kid

  doesn’t matter who I am

  whatever – listen it was fun but I’ve got exams – I typed.

  how about we blow up the houses of parliament on Nov 5? – he asked.

  how about we don’t – I replied.

  It was all good. The tone was jokey. We were, on the face of it, still friends.

  I’d keep his secret, because that meant he’d keep mine.

  14

  It was six months since the drone strike, and all my efforts – legitimate and otherwise – had come to nothing. I went to school, played mindless games on my laptop and tortured myself by constantly trawling through the latest reports of drone strikes. The mainstream news sites rarely referred to civilian casualties, concentrating on the militant targets. Anti-drone bloggers from the States, and the handful of local sources, provided the best information.

  Time drifted by, but, despite what people say, it didn’t heal. A car accident, leukaemia, taking a tablet from a bad batch of Es even – those deaths might be the sort you get over, but positioning the cross hairs over the image of an old lady’s head, watching her stoop to pick some tomatoes and firing …

  Every single day I woke up angry.

  ‘Have you revised for the physics test?’ Lucy asked one day at lunch. It was April – the month of my grandma’s birthday. She would have been sixty-two.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘How about I come round? Do it together.’

  No one had been to my house in months.

  ‘OK.’

  Mum was delighted. She cooked sausages, with mashed potato, beetroot and beans.

  ‘How’s the family?’ she asked.

  ‘Getting smaller,’ said Lucy. Her two older brothers were already at universities up north.

  ‘I bet your mum misses the boys.’

  ‘She does a Tesco shop for them every two weeks,’ said Lucy. ‘All ready-meals and biscuits. They’ll never learn to cook!’

  We all laughed.

  After demolishing strawberries and cream, we went back to my room on a mission to nail electrons, waves and photons.

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ said Lucy. ‘You only have to look at something once and you’ve got it.’

  ‘You mean like flu?’ I said. ‘Or an STD?’

  Her brain did one of those leaps that you can see from the outside.

  ‘What happened with Hugo?’

  ‘You know – there was that thing in the common room.’

  ‘He told me he’d apologised.’

  ‘Big deal.’

  ‘You know he never comes out any more. I haven’t seen him at a party since Halloween.’

  Too busy being someone else.

  ‘Juliette says he’s constantly on the computer in his room. She thinks he’s depressed.’

  ‘Lucy, I really don’t care.’

  And I didn’t. But I wondered if she did …

  ‘Has something happened between you and Jake?’

  Jake had messed up big time – Instagrammed with his tongue in the wrong mouth. Lucy claimed she wasn’t bothered.

  ‘Do you want to go to Milton Keynes on Saturday?’ she asked as she was leaving. ‘I need Birkenstocks.’

  ‘Nobody needs Birkenstocks,’ I said.

  Joint eye-roll.

  Dad came home to find me watching 24 Hours in A&E, with Mum ironing by my side. He sensed the change in atmosphere and offered to make us both a cup of tea – Dad in the kitchen, a rare thing.

  ‘Yes, please,’ we both said.

  ‘And a biscuit, love,’ added Mum.

  It was a kind of turning point, at least on the surface.

  I threw myself into studying, went to Prezzo with Lucy and a load of others to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, spent a weekend with Aunty Helen in Chester, got glandular fever, but still did well in my exams. Lucy and I went to three open days in June – Cambridge, Leeds and Exeter. In August we had a family holiday in Norfolk, and I went to the Edinburgh Festival for three days, again with Lucy. I wrote my personal statement and read the list of suggested books for applicants studying law, although I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.

  Why study law – or anything else, in fact – in a world th
at was so flawed that you could get up every day, go to work, kill the wrong people, go home with your pay cheque, get up the next day and do the same thing, without ever being blamed?

  The agonising was all rather pointless, because it wasn’t meant to be.

  Fate stepped in and showed me the way.

  15

  As the anniversary of the drone strike drew near I felt like a black cloud was weighing me down. On the day itself, I stayed in bed, reliving that terrible, terrible day –

  Going to school in my M&S suit for the first time – a sixth-former at last. Being eager to see Hugo. The kiss after school. My cheerful walk home. Dad crying on the sofa …

  I got scared of the emotion that was building, so I got up, unplugged my laptop and took it back to bed. One of the anti-drone bloggers I followed had posted a link to a YouTube video. I clicked. It was a boy from a remote village in Pakistan. He told the story of what had happened to him and his sister when they were picking okra in their fields with their grandmother the day before the festival of Eid.

  He said a drone appeared out of the bright-blue sky, making the dum-dum noise, but he wasn’t worried because only the three of them were there. Then the drone fired, making the ground shake and black poisonous smoke and dust fill the air. He ran, but the drone fired again.

  ‘They always do,’ he said, ‘to kill the relatives who come to help.’

  The second missile broke both his legs.

  His sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, a midwife, was killed. He was taken to hospital, together with seven other members of his family, all injured by the shrapnel.

  He held up an X-ray of his legs, showing the rods that had been put in to mend his shattered limbs.

  His final, trembling words were: ‘She was the heart of our village. My friends, they say we all lost a grandmother that day.’

  The video swapped to show his sister. She gave her version, which was similar but more distressing, because I knew what was coming. Her big brown eyes, not dissimilar from my own, stared at me from the screen of my laptop. They were asking me to do something.

  16

  I made a pseudonym – a deliberately common one. And Angel (ANG3L for fun) was born. There was something nice about my alias having wings, given what I was up against.

  It’s crazy the way having a different identity frees you. I was everywhere, making friends with unsuspecting users on all sorts of forums, gathering information and building a network of contacts that might be useful. I got a second phone, because a guy from a protest group said he wanted to check I wasn’t an informer but in fact wanted to say rude things to me. I took it all in my stride. My goal was clear. The drone wars needed to stop.

  No matter what I came up with, nothing was as perfect as the plan Sayge and I had put together. And the more I thought about going ahead with it, the more certain I was that it was meant to be.

  Fate had thrown Hugo and I together.

  Fate had made me overhear the conversation in the café.

  Fate had given me Sayge to help me devise the plan.

  Fate had shown me when I no longer needed him.

  Fate had sent me the faces of the little brother and sister.

  (For fate, read Allah, luck, God, the zodiac, tarot, The Force – whatever suits.)

  Obviously Hugo would realise it was me – what were the chances of another activist stumbling on the same idea? But if he told anyone, he’d be implicated big time. Knowing Hugo as I did, he was the last person to martyr himself for the greater good. And anyway, he wanted me to do it – like those weirdos on the web who goad people into committing suicide.

  Deciding to go for it brought relief. It brought fear too, but fear meant adrenalin. And adrenalin was way better than procrastination.

  Although my hacking was strictly script-kiddie level, I’d learnt enough jargon along the way to blend in with the elites. I’d always been good at adapting – immersing myself in the dark web was no different. I knew it would be a slow burn, but I’d waited a year. Time didn’t matter. Success was what mattered.

  Hackers turned out to be unexpectedly generous people. My first gift was a few simple mods of code to use when playing Starcraft, which meant no other players stood a chance. Soon after, someone magicked up a subscription to Netflix for me. Proof that I was making the right kind of friends.

  I had a lesson in bots and how to use them to launch a DDoS attack, which basically paralyses a website, and saw a way to make the impact of my plan even greater. If, just as a drone flew over, the ticketing site for the subway happened to go down, there’d be the maximum number of people panicking on the street. Good job.

  Angel quickly became a popular member of the online community. Making friends you couldn’t actually eyeball was just as easy as making face-to-face friends – basic things like reflecting back their own opinions made people think I was like-minded. Being witty helped too.

  As I roamed around, I was constantly on the lookout for the hacker who might have the capability to hijack a drone, and considering how best to coax him into helping when I eventually did.

  I spent hours online, but still went to school, did my homework, talked to Mum and Dad, went out with Lucy (occasionally), ignored Hugo and Juliette and put in my UCAS application just before the October deadline for Oxbridge. If I was serious, which I was, I needed to blend in like everyone else – loners who withdrew from society got noticed.

  Mum came with me to parents’ evening, wearing a spotty dress and nice make-up. Dad was at football training, desperate to keep a place in the reserves despite hitting forty.

  ‘As you know I’ve predicted you an A* – hard to come by in this subject,’ said the head of English. Everyone else said more or less the same.

  The last appointment was with my maths teacher, Mrs Abrahms, who’d written me a brilliant reference for Cambridge.

  ‘The interview can be unpredictable, but I doubt Samiya will have a problem. Once she decides on a thing, I find there’s no stopping her.’

  Mum was bursting with pride, imagining me in legal robes and a wig, but I felt nothing. My future was to be a game-changer … a political activist … a rebel with a cause …

  17

  The plan got better as time went on, but it was still just a plan. My web of contacts got wider, but it was still just a pool of potential. The armed drones continued to invade from the skies with no comeback. It was agonising to watch the numbers of dead and injured grow, like Scrabble scores but with only one possible winner. But I had to wait, and keep the faith.

  Often, when I was walking to school and back, I’d imagine a drone appearing from nowhere – a dark silhouette, flying low. It was my way of trying to feel the fear of the Pakistani children in the video, my way of staying connected. They said that they didn’t go out in the sun any more because they were too frightened. Only when it was cloudy and the drones couldn’t see would they go to school. They were by my side, together with every other family who had lost someone because of a grainy image on a screen.

  Christmas came and went. I got offers to study law from all the universities I’d applied to, including Cambridge – despite a surreal interview about the alleged theft of a cat. Mum and Dad were over the moon, but I had a premonition that I wouldn’t actually be going. January drizzled past, and suddenly it was my eighteenth birthday. Mum and Dad bought me twelve driving lessons. I pretended to be thrilled, but all I could think about was the fact that it was a whole year since I’d sat in that café in Milton Keynes, eavesdropping on the table next door. It felt as though the second anniversary of the deaths of Jaddah and Lamyah might slide by and I’d still be in limbo.

  And then someone called KP – like the peanuts – came on the scene.

  I met him playing EVE, and we got on immediately. So much so that a couple of battles later, he offered me free credit for my phone – he’d put together a neat bit of code and wanted to show me how cool it was. I sent him the number of my second phone and, hey presto, fifty qui
d.

  He clearly wasn’t bothered about stranger danger, letting slip his real name – Dan – and the fact that he was only sixteen.

  He came online one evening in a bit of a state. His mate had been knocked off his bike by a white van, and Dan had just been to see him in hospital. It sounded quite bad. The driver didn’t stop, which made the whole thing much worse. My destiny changed because of a random suggestion I made to help him get even.

  hack the council security cameras – get the reg of the van – I typed

  might just do that – he replied.

  We carried on playing EVE and I didn’t think any more about it. I was constantly dropping things into conversation, in the hope they’d lead somewhere, and being disappointed.

  Two days later, Dan came to find me.

  got the camera but not the crash

  shame – me.

  good idea tho – got a present for you to say thanks

  Dan sent me the incredibly useful series of indecipherable commands that, like magic, turned into pounds of mobile credit. I was very grateful, and immediately started to sell it online at half-price, which turned into a nice little income stream via a PayPal account. One particularly busy day, I made two thousand quid thanks to word of mouth. Insane. I was so going to be the richest kid at university.

  I decided Dan was a definite possibility – if that made sense. He knew his stuff, wasn’t bothered about breaking the law and, bottom line, I had a good feeling about him. Of all my hacker friends, he was the one I had most fun with.

  was it a long job? – I asked.

  took 2 episodes QI – Dan measured life in episodes, not time. Quirky.

  My instinct about him made me take the next step. He wanted to find the guilty driver who’d ploughed into his friend. I wanted to get inside the military. I saw an opportunity and went for it.