Skunk found himself in a dilemma he had never had to consider before.
The young hacker pulled his beanie further down over his coarse, black hair with the fat, white stripe down the middle that had given rise to his nickname and crossed the street in order to stay in the shadows.
Under normal circumstances, the thought of going to the police would never even have crossed his mind. Out of the question. It went without saying. In his world, helping the authorities was a mortal sin. But now? After the film he had seen last night? He did not see that he had any other choice.
Shit.
He pulled up his hood, lit a cigarette and chose a route different from the one he usually took, on the rare occasions he left his house. Skunk did not spend much time outdoors. He saw no reason for it. He had everything he needed in his basement in Tøyen. His very own bunker. Where no one could find him. But he needed to clear his head now.
That poor girl.
Why hadn’t he listened to his gut? Kept away from that server. He had a nose for these things, a kind of sixth sense about where to go and what to stay the hell away from when he was online; it had warned him again this time, but he had not listened. The temptation had been too great. What he had found, the film he had seen.
Christ.
Skunk took another drag on his cigarette, turned around quickly and started walking back the same way he had just come. He despaired at his own behaviour. Paranoid? It was not like him. In almost ten years as a hacker he had never been scared. Not once. He had always been in control. Never left behind any traces. He was no amateur. He muttered curses under his breath, chucked the cigarette, crossed the street again, and chose his route home at random, constantly looking over his shoulder.
Skunk could feel the anarchist inside him starting to resurface as he reached Tøyen Park. His conscience never troubled him about doing what he did. He saw it almost as his duty. He was no Robin Hood, he kept all the money for himself, but the people he stole from were so corrupt that they got exactly what they deserved. His business concept was as simple as it was brilliant. He would pick a company he did not like, discover a security weakness in its servers and collect information about dishonest transactions, which most businesses were involved in – corruption, bribery, breaches of environmental legislation, anything – and then make them pay.
Skunk shook his head. If the people of Norway knew what they were up to, these big, popular companies whose services they used, whose products were in every shop and whose owners were regarded as pillars of the community – if the public knew how these companies really made their money, how they had grown as rich as they had – then people might have rebelled.
It was never difficult. He never encountered problems. Every time he found something, and he pretty much always did, he would send an anonymous email with his discoveries and ask for money in order not to go public with it. Virtual blackmail. Of idiots who deserved it. And they were always willing to pay. They always had skeletons in their closets. Always. Skunk’s conscience was absolutely clear.
But this was different.
This film.
This was not just a company making an illegal payment to an old Soviet state to get the monopoly to sell its product to the communications market. Or a transfer to an African leader who had already squandered millions of development aid on his own personal consumption, or quid pro quos, permits to drill an oilfield, the sale of weapons, landmines or ammunition.
It was not one of those.
It was …
Shit.
Skunk lit another cigarette in an attempt to clear his head. There was always Gabriel Mørk.
They had started out together years ago and, at first, it had just been a bit of fun. In front of the computers in their bedrooms, Electron and Phoenix, from an age when there was hardly any Internet and computers had a storage capacity of only 10MB, with processors the size of calculators, and yet the two of them had hacked everything – NASA, CIA – but back then it had been just a game; they had got a kick out of it, he and Gabriel, every time they had managed to break into a system that was said to be impenetrable, until one day, Gabriel had switched camps.
That was why they had drifted apart. Gabriel thought they should use their skills for good, not to destroy, not to create chaos, and they had had a massive row the last time they saw each other, over a beer at Teddy’s Soft Bar. They had not spoken since. The last he had heard was that Gabriel had started working for the police.
Shit, shit, shit.
Skunk took a fresh drag on his cigarette and made up his mind.
It had to be.
Gabriel Mørk. There was no other way. Skunk tossed the cigarette, checked over his shoulder again and made his way home to his bunker.