Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontierDreyfus, Suelette
Science
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
Dreyfus, Suelette
Computer crimes -- Australia; Computer hackers -- Australia -- Biography; Computer security -- Australia
Par opened the door all the way and slipped down the hallway. As he
crept downstairs, the pre-dawn chill sent a shiver down his spine.
Glancing quickly from side to side, he hurried toward the waiting car,
pulled the back door open and dove onto the seat. Keeping his head
down, he twisted around, rolled onto the floor and closed the door
with little more than a soft click.
As the car began to move. Par reached for a blanket which had been
tossed on the floor and pulled it over himself. After a while, when
John told him they were safely out of the town, Par slipped the
blanket off his face and he looked up at the early morning sky. He
tried to get comfortable on the floor. It was going to be a long ride.
At Asheville, John dropped Par off at an agreed location. Par thanked
him and hopped into a waiting car. Someone else from his extensive
network of friends and acquaintances took him to Charlotte.
This time Par rode in the front passenger seat. For the first time, he
saw the true extent of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Hugo. The small
town where he had been staying had been slashed by rain and high
winds, but on the way to the Charlotte airport, where he would pick up
a flight to New York, Par watched the devastation with amazement. He
stared out the car window, unable to take his eyes off the storm's
trail of havoc.
The hurricane had swept up anything loose or fragile and turned it
into a missile on a suicide mission. Whatever mangled, broken
fragments remained after the turbulent winds had passed would have
been almost unrecognisable to those who had seen them before.
Theorem worried about Par as he staggered from corner to corner of the
continent. In fact, she had often asked him to consider giving himself
up. Moving from town to town was taking its toll on Par, and it wasn't
that much easier on Theorem. She hadn't thought going on the lam was
such a great idea in the first place, and she offered to pay for his
lawyer so he could stop running. Par declined. How could he hand
himself in when he believed elimination was a real possibility?
Theorem sent him money, since he had no way of earning a living and he
needed to eat. The worst parts, though, were the dark thoughts that
kept crossing her mind. Anything could happen to Par between phone
calls. Was he alive? In prison? Had he been raided, even accidentally
shot during a raid?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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