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Chapter 8
Sarah, 13 years old
San Diego, California
When I look back on my childhood, there are two decisions I deeply regret and wish I could redo.
The first one was on the night my parents died. I wished I made a scene and kept them from going out that evening instead of being a good girl.
If I had, they would still be alive today. We would be a family, and I wouldn’t be separated from my baby sister.
The second was when I hacked into Winthrop Financials servers.
To this day, I wished I could go back and warn my younger self to stay away from those assholes.
But I hadn’t known then that my stupid decision would follow me throughout the rest of my life. All I could think about was cracking my very first grade A security system.
Getting into Winthrop Financials’ mainframe hadn’t been easy.
The firm was extremely paranoid and justifiably so. The mission had required several months of preparation and research beforehand. I also practiced on smaller targets until I was assured my program would hold against a system that complex.
The first step had been accessing the company’s server through proper credentials without being locked out.
Finding the login of the employees had been a piece of cake. I surfed the company’s directory and discovered they all had identical logins of firstname.lastname.
I then used a single password against every user on the system to find one employee with a weak password.
This wasn’t as difficult as you’d think.
People were creatures of habit. They stuck to what they knew and followed a pattern that almost never deviated. For companies like Winthrop Financials, their predictability was a liability.
I randomly chose an employee and dropped a keylogger onto the person’s machine. When Susan Lewis from the Tallahassee office logged onto her computer the next day, she unknowingly gave me control over the company’s mainframe.
Finding and accessing William Winthrop’s personal files had been more of a challenge.
Unlike Susan Lewis, he had additional layers of protection that required I jump through a couple of hoops before I could crack it wide open.
But crack them, I did.
The man had thousands of files he kept in a neat fashion that screamed of OCD. I didn’t bother checking what was in them and downloaded everything sight unseen onto a USB key.
This should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t, because everything I touched turns into shit.
While the downloads were running, I got bored and happened upon a folder named Mekong.
I don’t remember why it caught my attention out of the thousands of other files there. But I do remember my little inner voice screaming at me to run away.
I should have turned back, but didn’t. Instead, I debated with myself for five minutes on what to do and ended up clicking on it.
When I discovered Winthrop had added a fourth level of encryption to the file, I was done for. Instead of getting the hell out of there, I broke the encryption, and wished for the next twenty years I hadn’t.
The first document I pulled from the Mekong folder made my stomach knot in dread.
It took me a while to understand what I was reading because I was just a kid, albeit a very precocious one.
The document used scientific words and annotations I’d never heard of before and was mainly focused on a lab experimentation that went horribly wrong.
To: Commander Karl Moore
