Alias Read online

  maybe try the spy satellite network – I typed.

  All I thought about was whether my casual remark had spurred Dan into action. Every time we met online I was tempted to ask if he’d had a go, but made myself stick to the usual chat. He’d got my gender wrong, which I quite liked, because boys talk to boys in a different way. Equal.

  A few times we both stayed off school and spent all day gaming. It was a calculated risk – bad for my quest to appear like a law-abiding member of the Upper Sixth, good for building up the trust between us. I got to know all about his mum, his kid sister – who I wished was my kid sister – his mates, where he went in Bristol and much more.

  Although I was closest to Dan, I touched base with Annacando, Expendable and Omen 11 pretty much every day. They were mischief-makers, up for bringing down sites, hacking competitions, getting free stuff – but none of them were political. I worked hard to make sure I used the right language. They had to believe that I was like them.

  My other regular contact was an American I found on a home video group. When the time came, he was going to make me a video to convince the UAV pilot that the drone had crashed, not been kidnapped. I’d told him I was doing film studies.

  Guaranteed, they’d all have wet their pants if they’d had even an inkling of what I was really about.

  The breakthrough came on a Friday. Dan and I were playing GTA V when he typed, with no warning, no ‘guess what?’:

  infiltrated the US Military network

  what? – I replied, hands trembling.

  got in through a remote base station near Camp Bastion – found the satellite system

  He was so casual. I was ecstatic, but just wrote:

  great job

  I asked a few questions. Three-quarters of his answers were incomprehensible, but that didn’t matter. What I did understand was that he’d mapped the controls onto his iPhone to manipulate the live satellite feed.

  Amazing – I typed.

  I could see, at long last, that the theory could work. If you could hack the US Military satellite network, surely you could hack a drone – they weren’t much more than cameras that moved to order.

  Time to get serious.

  I spent the whole of the next day waiting for Dan to show up. I had no appetite but forced a wrap down at lunchtime so Mum didn’t fuss. The butterflies in my tummy were more like bats. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  Come on, Dan.

  When I eventually found him playing EVE, we had a bit of banter about his geography trip at a residential centre in Wales, and then I suggested we meet at IRC channel #angeldust.

  more private

  I could tell he liked the idea.

  Dan joined us on #angeldust to find we were planning a botnet. In fact, only two other members were real, the rest of the virtual gang were all me. It was a cute trick – being eight people at once. It meant I could guide the conversation.

  this is a closed group – you are a guest – I typed.

  OK – that was KP, aka Dan.

  unless you pass a test – me.

  we all had to do that – nearly got me arrested – me, as someone else.

  are the 5000 bots my test? – typed Annacando.

  I made it seem as though everyone had passed an initiation to become a bona fide member of #angeldust, but deliberately didn’t issue one to Dan, although it was clear he’d have to do one. He obliged by asking:

  Like what?

  we’ll have to come up with something – I typed.

  Grooming is a slow process, if you do it right. I couldn’t just chuck in the idea of a drone. It had to come out in its own time. His expectation was that he’d have to hack something – that was enough to be getting on with.

  18

  Dan got himself a girlfriend! Bad timing as far as I was concerned, because he was much more interested in seeing her than playing with me. He still popped up online most nights, but not till late and not for long. There was another annoying thing in his life called GCSEs. I tried not to stress too much. When the moment was right, I’d bring up the initiation. In the meantime, as I was meant to be a boy, I pretended to fancy girly girls with skinny legs. He said I should go out with a flamingo and that I was shallow. His girlfriend, Ruby, bit her nails and wore sloppy jumpers. She sounded hideous, but what did I know?

  ‘Do you want to come over later?’ Lucy asked in physics, a couple of weeks after I first introduced Dan to IRC #angeldust.

  ‘OK,’ I said, because it was better than waiting for Dan again. Not that I’d wasted the time. I’d found an American community college that had a drone-simulation programme and a pathetic firewall. Thanks to a lot of late nights, I was a fully fledged UAV pilot – or would have been if anyone had known about me.

  Lucy’s mum was pleased to see me.

  ‘Stay for supper, Samiya. The table’s far too empty these days with the boys gone.’

  I couldn’t see any reason not to.

  We talked universities.

  ‘You’ll be in your element at Cambridge,’ she said. ‘I remember meeting you when you were about eight and being astonished at how smart you were even then.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, wondering if my memory of how she’d quizzed me about my Yemeni roots wasn’t entirely accurate.

  ‘Lucy can’t decide where to go,’ she said.

  ‘That’s because they all sound the same.’ Lucy tucked her straight brown hair behind her ear – it fell straight back onto her face. Mine had grown back into the non-style I used to have before my mission to be the same as everyone else.

  ‘I still can’t believe you’re doing engineering, Lucy. You can’t reliably refill a stapler,’ I said. Her mum laughed.

  ‘Luckily they don’t ask for an A in use of stationery,’ said Lucy.

  ‘It’ll be all boys,’ I said.

  ‘I hope so. If I don’t get a good degree, at least I’ll find a man with one.’

  ‘Lucy!’ Her mum pretended to be shocked.

  They were more like friends. So different from Mum and me. Our house was like a B&B – all perfectly polite, but strictly business.

  I got home at about eight to find that Mum and Dad had gone to the pub, like most Fridays. Dan came online at nine, live messaging on IRC as usual. There were only six of us – me, Dan, and four other mes with different names – because being eight people was too complicated. He started going on about how he’d watched rush hour in Tokyo using the spy satellites. I was immediately on high alert, hoping for an opening. Using one of my other usernames I asked:

  what else have you spied on?

  Dan was only too happy to supply a list that included the Great Wall of China and people leaving the Kremlin.

  Various people commented – all me.

  do something with it – don’t just watch

  like what? – that was Dan.

  track a celebrity and sell the photo

  catch a royal having an affair

  spy on the US forces with their own cameras

  hack a drone and fly it

  could you do that KP? – I typed as Angel, praying he’d react.

  if I wanted to be blacklisted by the most powerful country on the planet I could – Dan replied.

  thats your challenge KP – hack a drone

  I was convinced he wouldn’t smell a rat. It sounded spontaneous, despite being anything but. Job done. Either he would. Or he wouldn’t.

  19

  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 mor
e. 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.

  20

  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.

  21

  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.