SHE WORE THE KINLOCH ABBEY uniform of burgundy blazer and tartan skirt as she rode in Coach A, seat 22B on the train to Aisling. Her dark brown eyes and full, round cheeks perpetually looked like they were on the verge of a smile. Her chestnut hair was cropped just above the shoulders and swayed ever so slightly due to the motion of the train. And her horn-rimmed glasses managed to look hip, bookish, and nerdy all at once. She was the picture-perfect schoolgirl. No one would have guessed that unlike other passengers who killed time checking social media or playing mindless video games, she was busy hacking into the laptops and smartphones of everybody seated in first class.
You know, just for kicks.
Her name was Charlotte Sloane. That was it. There was a time when that was one of many aliases she had. But she no longer spied for MI6, so now one name was all she got. Of course, in some corners of the dark web, she was better known as UKFlamethrower1999 or DundeeDeathMonger707, but mostly she was just Char, as the girls in the boarding house called her.
In this instance, her hacking was more mischievous than malicious. She wasn’t stealing passwords or scamming bank records like she sometimes did. She was just keeping her skills sharp. “The greatest basketball players in the world are great because they practice shooting and dribbling so much it becomes as natural as breathing,” she once told Sydney. “This is my practice. This is my breathing.”
Coach A, seat 22B wasn’t just some random ticket assignment. She’d ridden the train often enough to identify it as the best location for this sort of practice. She even called it “the throne,” just as she called herself the “queen of hacks.”
There were three things about the throne that made it better than all the other seats on the ScotRail train. First, it was located just two rows behind the plastic barrier that marked first class. This meant it was a cheap ticket but still close enough to the router for her to steal the free Wi-Fi that came with expensive fares. Plastic barriers may stop passengers, but they do nothing to slow down radio waves.
Second, it came with a table and electrical outlet. This allowed her to spread out with her laptop while she charged her other devices. Finally, it had an unobstructed view of six of the nine seats in first class. This let her see most of the people she was hacking, which made it so much more fun.
For example, on this trip, she was able to see that the tall blonde with the movie-star sunglasses sitting in 3F was holding hands with her half-sleeping boyfriend in 4F at the exact same time she was sending flirty text messages to the man across the aisle in 1B. It also let her see that the car salesman in 8A looked nothing like the photo he’d just posted on a dating app.
Everybody lies, she told herself. Everybody’s running a scam.
“Ticket, please,” said the conductor.
“Here you go,” she said as she handed him the orange-and-white round-trip ticket. “I bet you enjoyed the Celtic game this week.”
His eyes lit up. “You bet I did. Two-nil over Rangers in the Old Firm derby.” He stopped for a moment. “How’d you know I was a supporter?”
“I take this train a lot,” she said. “I’ve heard you talk about it before.”
This was a total lie. She did recognize him from previous trips, but she only knew he liked Celtic because of an app on his phone. His had been the first one she hacked.
“We’re going to win the cup again this year,” he said proudly before he continued down the aisle. “Mark my words.”
Unlike the hackers in movies who always scurried about in the shadows, Charlotte liked to engage people in conversation. She wanted to be seen precisely because it made people less suspicious. The conductor would remember her fondly as the schoolgirl who talked football. There’s no way she could be up to any mischief.
The final hack was the hardest. It was a laptop belonging to an accountant from Edinburgh sitting in 4B who had the latest firewall installed. But Charlotte still managed to breach it just as the train reached the platform at Aisling.
She checked her watch. The trip had taken twenty-three minutes, and during that time she’d hacked nine passengers and the conductor. Solid if not spectacular. This is my practice. This is my breathing.
If there was any awkwardness about coming back to the FARM for the first time since she’d left, it was offset by the sense of familiarity that greeted her as she followed the footpath from the station. She knew every inch of it by heart: the curve of the stone fence that lined the road, the vibrant yellow of the rapeseed flowers blanketing the field next to the airstrip. This made it all the more startling when a total stranger answered the door.
“Who are you?”
“Brooklyn,” mumbled the girl through a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie. “You must be Charlotte.”
Charlotte couldn’t believe it. Was it possible that they’d already replaced her?
Brooklyn swallowed her cookie and smiled. “Come on in,” she said, like they were long-lost friends. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Ever since learning that Charlotte had a team going to the competition, Brooklyn had been carefully planning for this interaction. She needed to hack a hacker in order to make sure that Kinloch didn’t win the Stavros Challenge. To do that, she had three targets she needed to hit. If she missed any of them, her plan would implode.
The first was to take advantage of the fact Charlotte didn’t know she existed. That was why she’d wanted to greet her at the door. It put Charlotte on her heels from the very beginning. Brooklyn had watched as she approached the house and timed it down to the last second, taking a bite of cookie right before answering the door to make it seem like she was goofy and friendly rather than cool and calculating.
Before Charlotte could react, Monty stepped out from the kitchen. “I see you two have met. The kids are at school and Mother’s in Edinburgh, so it’s just us girls. I’m making lunch right now, so why don’t you get to work and I’ll bring it down when it’s done.”
“Sounds good,” Brooklyn said as she took another bite of cookie and headed for the basement.
Charlotte’s head was still spinning as she and Brooklyn went down the stairs toward the priest hole. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to piece it all together. “Who are you?”
“I’m the new you,” answered Brooklyn. Then, with as much New York City attitude as she could muster, she added, “They call me Charlotte 2.0.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“ ’Cause I’m the new-and-improved American,” she answered. “You know, like when they come out with a computer upgrade, they call it 2.0?” she said.
“Yes, I’m quite familiar with …”
“No offense to you,” said Brooklyn. “I mean, they say you’re really good at computers. Personally, I don’t know anything about them. That’s not my specialty.”
“No?” she said. “Then what is?”
“Breaking in and out of buildings,” said Brooklyn. “Stealing things.”
“Well, then, you’re quite an upgrade,” Charlotte replied snootily.
Charlotte’s reaction told Brooklyn that she’d hit a nerve. This was the second part of her plan. She was taking advantage of Charlotte’s one great weakness.
She thinks she’s better than us, Sydney told Brooklyn the night before. She’s never come out and said it, but I know she thinks she’s better than all of us.
This led to a discussion among the others, and even though none of them had ever talked about it before, they all agreed that it was true. Kat, Paris, Rio, and Sydney had all survived difficult childhoods filled with poverty and heartbreak. But that wasn’t true of Charlotte.
She wasn’t poor, Rio had said. She had a good family.
Charlotte had grown up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her parents were college professors. Her mother taught computer science and her dad mathematics. Everything about her life was perfect until she was ten years old and her parents were killed in an auto accident. Because of this, said the others, she acted like she was better than they were. They were born into their sadness, but hers was the result of an accident. It was almost as if they deserved it and she didn’t.
“So are you excited about going to Paris?” asked Brooklyn.
“It’s always exciting to see Paris,” Charlotte answered, like she’d been there a thousand times. “It’s my favorite city.”
“I can’t wait,” said Brooklyn. “I’ve never been. Of course, I’ve never been anywhere. Except New Jersey … and now Scotland.”
Charlotte gave her a superior look, and Brooklyn knew that the second step of her plan was complete. The third, and most crucial, was to conceal any hint that she was a hacker too. If Charlotte got even a whiff that Brooklyn knew her way around a computer, she’d be suspicious.
Once they got to the priest hole, Charlotte put her backpack on the table and pulled out her laptop.
“Wait a second. I thought you were going to use Beny,” said Brooklyn.
“I beg your pardon?” said Charlotte.
“Why do you have your laptop if you’re going to use Beny?”
“Who’s Beny?” asked Charlotte.
“The big computer,” Brooklyn answered, pointing at it.
“First of all, it’s not a big computer, it’s a supercomputer,” said Charlotte. “I’m going to access it with my laptop, which contains the data I need for my weather models. Also, his name is Ben.”
“I know,” Brooklyn said, taking a suddenly serious tone. “But it shouldn’t be. ‘Ben’ is short for Benjamin or Benedict. It’s an Anglo name. But this computer is named after Benito Viñes. That’s a Spanish name. And the nickname for Benito is Beny. Spelled with one n, not two.” She smiled and added, “I may not know anything about supercomputers. But I know a lot about Spanish.”
Brooklyn had Charlotte right where she wanted her, all distracted and discombobulated. She was not her normal, sharp self. And in the middle of all this, Brooklyn saw her opportunity.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the keylogger that she’d found in her desk the first day. The one that Charlotte had accidentally left behind. She hid it in the palm of her hand just like Rio had taught her and slipped it unnoticed into Charlotte’s backpack.
Charlotte was too good to hack head-on, so this was going to be Brooklyn’s backdoor. She was counting on Charlotte to find it in her backpack and assume that it had always been there, overlooked somehow. If she checked it, she would see that it was hers. She would see that it had her files on it. What she wouldn’t see, however, was the tiny program that Brooklyn installed.
How do you hack a hacker? You don’t. You let them hack themselves.