Hacking Timbuktu by Stephen Davies

Author:Stephen Davies [Davies, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

NINETEEN

Standing by the luggage racks, Danny pressed his nose to the window and watched Platform 13 slide out of sight. The adrenaline drained away and left him feeling miserable and empty.

"I told you the switch would work," said Omar.

"We got lucky."

"Luck had nothing to do with it," said Omar. "Misdirection, that's the key, like with all the best magic tricks. If you wave the hat around enough, no one notices the rabbit."

"All right then, Mr. Wizard," said Danny. "Why don't you do something really useful and magic us some plane tickets?"

"What?"

"Air France's night flight from London to Bamako costs over five hundred quid a seat. We don't have that kind of money."

"What about your freelance earnings?"

"I've got it all with me in cash. A hundred and fifty quid."

Omar curled his lip. "Is that all?"

Danny nodded and looked away. He was too proud to moan to Omar about his financial difficulties, but the truth was inescapable: However good a programmer he might be, his IT business was going nowhere fast.

"What about you?" asked Danny. "Got any savings stashed away?"

"No," said Omar. "And if I'd known you didn't either, I wouldn't have agreed to this Africa thing."

The silence that followed was long and awkward. Both boys gazed out the window at the city lights rushing past in a blur.

"There is one possibility," said Danny at last. "I could hack the Air France website and reserve a couple of tickets in our names."

Omar frowned. "That's a black-hat hack," he said. "I thought you didn't do black-hat."

"First time for everything," said Danny. "Problem is, my laptop's back at the flat."

"That's that, then," said Omar.

Danny turned and looked through the glass sliding door into the next car. "Have you ever noticed," he said slowly, "what a lot of train passengers carry laptops?"

Omar stared at him, horrified. "Oh, so you want to boost a laptop now, do you? We're not criminals, Danny!"

"We'll give it back when we're done with it," said Danny. "Come on, Grimps! Look into that car there. How many laptops do you see?"

"I'm not looking," said Omar.

"There's a kid just down there with a brand-new one," said Danny. "He's about fourteen years old, he's watching manga, and he's eating the biggest bag of crisps you've ever seen."

"I'm not listening."

"He's dropping crisp crumbs all over the keyboard. You've got to ask yourself, Grimps, does a kid like that deserve a computer like that?"

"La de daa," sang Omar with his fingers in his ears.

"Think of it as liberation. Mr. Toshi Ba is longing to be freed from a tedious life of manga and pickled onion crisps. He's longing to be put to nobler use, something worthy of his gigantic Centrino processor. I'm telling you, Grimps, hacking the Air France reservations system would bless that computer's heart."

Danny made his way into the next car and sat down opposite the crisp-eating boy. "Hello," he said. "My name's Kevin. Where are you going?"

"Brighton," said the boy, not looking up.

"Me, too," said Danny. "Give us a crisp."

The boy turned up the volume on his headphones and pretended not to have heard.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.