“The girl in the picture wasn’t being hunted. But you took care of that.”
He doesn’t seem offended by the accusation. “If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.”
“So why was it you?”
Malcolm smiles, one corner of his mouth pulling to the side. “You ever hear of the Porch Pirate Punisher?”
“Should I have?”
He shrugs. “I guess it’s mostly a Pennsylvania story.” I’m beginning to think that Malcolm has a flair for the dramatic, because he makes me prompt him before he’ll continue. “My dad was a hacker too. He’s the one who taught me…a lot of things. Like not to trust banks, once he showed me how vulnerable they were. When I was younger, I thought he was kind of like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, you know? Except the rich were mostly regular people and the poor was always him—even once he had plenty of money.” Malcolm shifts in his seat. “He went to prison for the first time for creating a software program that stole thousands of credit card numbers. He served two years, then was arrested again a few years later. See, he improved his program, made a few friends, and went from stealing and selling thousands of numbers to millions. He died from pancreatic cancer before being released, and I’ve been with my gran ever since.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s an instinctual response to hearing about someone’s loss, but I’m surprised to find I actually mean it.
“After he died, I decided I wanted to go the other way, use what I knew to help other people, not just myself. I rounded up a bunch of security footage from people who’d been robbed by porch pirates throughout the state of Pennsylvania, then I created a modified algorithm specifically to find their faces and ran it through every social media platform I could to identify them.”
I can’t help but smile. “That’s cool.”
“The FBI didn’t think so. Though that was probably because I also coded a program based off the one my dad originally wrote to steal credit card numbers and then I posted the pirates’ numbers online.”
I gape at him. “You’re lying. You’d be in jail.”
A big self-satisfied grin stretches across his face. “Can’t send a fifteen-year-old to jail. You can, however, scare the crap out of him by sending a bunch of feds to his school and yanking him out of homeroom.”
“Wait, wait. That’s not even possible. You said you identified porch pirates just from images you lifted off security cameras? At fifteen years old? I don’t think so.”
“Scary, isn’t it? Granted my algorithm was in a league of its own, but there are programs, like Social Mapper and FindFace, that can search through a billion photos from a normal computer in less than a second. Those two programs are much more basic and limited than what I created, but they do exist.”
Something cold and painful lodges in my throat, like I’d just swallowed an ice cube. “That’s why you were hired to find my mom, because of that program.”
He nods. “I did gain a certain level of notoriety after that, but part of the deal I made with the FBI involved turning over my algorithm and everything else I had, with the understanding that I wouldn’t get a second chance if I put on a black hat ever again.”
“But you did.”
He lifts one shoulder. “I had interest from a bunch of tech security companies when I graduated from high school, but my gran wanted me to go to college. And I wanted to prove to her that she could raise a good man. I ended up at Penn State in order to be close to her when she got sick. And when she got sicker, I took an offer that would pay me enough to take care of her.”
We’re both quiet after that.
After a few minutes, I open my door and throw my makeshift knife as far as I can into the tree line.
“Is that your way of telling me you want to be friends now?”
“No.” I pull my door shut. “It just means I don’t believe you’re the bad guy anymore.”
I don’t sleep, but Malcolm dozes on and off while we wait for dawn. When he’s awake, we talk. Hearing his story and deciding to relinquish my weapon caused a shift between us. Despite my frequent attempts to get him to break down exactly what we’ll be doing in order to get to my grandfather undetected, he keeps redirecting the conversation. He has no problem telling me things about him, though, and slowly I find myself opening up in return. I tell him about Mom’s paranoia and strict parenting, along with the mostly successful ways I’ve gotten around her rules.
I even tell him about Aiden.
“You can’t call him. You get that, right?”
I nod, but it doesn’t make the thought of him hating me for disappearing on him any easier. I’d been telling myself to end it with Aiden for weeks, but I kept finding reasons—excuses, really—to hold off. Maybe he liked me more than I liked him, but it wouldn’t have been hard to let myself go there.
And now…
“Maybe when this is all over, you can…” Malcolm doesn’t finish. He needs my mom to be guilty, and either way, it’s what he believes. If she’s innocent, then he gets nothing. Worse than nothing, since he’s already lost so much.
And if she’s guilty and he can somehow convince me of that, then I’m supposed to…what, have a hand in sending her to jail?
Whatever happens, I’ll never go back to our home in Bridgeton. But I hope I’ll get to say goodbye to my friends and Aiden. To tell him…that he made me happy.
