Virtual Fire by Mendy Sobol

Author:Mendy Sobol [Sobol, Mendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781733704403
Publisher: FictionFire
Published: 2019-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Melora

Allston isn’t a city. It’s a Boston neighborhood like Brighton, Southie, and Jamaica Plain. Part residential, part student slum, part plain old slum, it was the kind of place I would have lived if it weren’t for my high-paying job at IPI.

Ringer Park is a scary little corner of Allston. I came by first in daylight, checking it out before my midnight rendezvous. Just off Cambridge Street, the main bus route from parts west through Brighton, Allston, and over the Charles River to Harvard, Ringer’s bordered to the west by Gordon Street’s brick row-house apartments, to the east by Allston Street, a fast-moving two-lane road, and to the south by Commonwealth Avenue, one of Boston’s main streets. Sandwiched between Cambridge Street and Ringer’s east side there’s a crooked, mysterious little Avenue—High Rock Way. Once fine, but now peeling homes straddle a big rock formation overlooking the park, like a small mountain in the middle of a flat city. It was pretty obvious where my hacker would be watching for me.

The park is a mess—every one of its globe lights shattered, tennis court nets shredded, benches cracked and graffiti-covered, trash everywhere. It looks like the world of Clockwork Orange. In daylight, students walk their dogs next to gangsters out flashing their colors, marking their turf. By midnight, it’s empty.

Not wanting to disappoint my new friend, I stood near the dusty baseball diamond’s chain link backstop in plain view of anyone watching up on High Rock Way.

And that must be him, I thought, or a really big mugger. Strolling down the glass-littered cement path like an absent-minded college professor out for his evening constitutional. He really is big. And my God, he’s fucking smiling!

That’s when I recognized the face.

All along I’d ruled out the possibility of an IPI programmer, figuring on some unknown whiz kid at the Pentagon. There weren’t any other options. Except one. I knew the face, though it was older, shaved clean, better looking, altered. I knew it because it was the face on the cover of the only Time Magazine I’d ever read. The biggest difference in real life was the way his eyes caught the light, almost sparkled. I’d read the article fifty times—May 7, 1996—The Hacker Who Changed History: Toby Jessup 25 Years Later. Filled with bullshit about his murder, suicide, and recent sightings at U2 concerts and 7-Elevens, the story might as well have been about Elvis. Six paragraphs in an offset box explained his quarter-century-old raid on the Pentagon, and every time I read it, his genius and daring blew me away. And every time I remember thinking, What a waste.

“Uh, hi,” he said.

“Hi?”

“Uh, yeah. Hello. How are ya?” Extending his hand. I kept mine in my pockets.

“Look,” I said, “I know who you are and what you want, so why don’t we get this over with.”

“Huh?”

“You’re Toby Jessup, and you figured out some way of hacking into IPI—probably on the microwave relays we use for networking. Then you noticed me screwing around with my work.

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.