Title: Echoes
Author: Laura Tisdall
Genre: Thriller, YA
Release Date: 8th September 2015
BLURB supplied by the Author
Volatile mathematical
genius Mallory Park is living two lives. In one, she is
balancing senior year with looking after her little brother and troubled
ex-Marine father; in the other, she spends her nights glued to her laptop,
breaking into some of the world’s most secure systems as the hacker Echo Six.
As part of a
corruption-exposing cyber network called the Forum, Mallory is far more at ease
among the codes and hidden identities of her online world than she has ever
been in the real one, but when other hackers start to go missing, she finds
herself caught up in a web of secrets that could have repercussions far beyond
both. When anyone can be a name on a screen, how do you know who to trust?
PURCHASE LINKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura grew up in Woking, England, and graduated from the University of Surrey with a degree in music. Before starting Echoes, she worked mainly in theatre and wrote two musicals, The In-Between and Faerytale.
AUTHOR LINKS
Twitter
EXCERPT
EXCERPT
Loopholes
Mallory Park hunches forward over the desk, icy blue eyes
glued to the screen of the laptop, a single glow in the otherwise darkened
room. Numbers and letters filter through her mind, faster than most people
could read, let alone make sense of. The digits on the screen appear jumbled,
random, but there is always a pattern, always a solution – and she always finds
it in the end. She watches as the code expands, letting herself sink into it,
becoming immersed in it, sorting and searching…
Searching for…
Loophole.
She spots it. Her pulse lifts a notch as everything
clicks into place; a beautiful, crystalline stillness inside her mind. She
checks it again, breaths coming a little faster.
Yes, she
thinks. There it is, hidden within the programming; a way in, a weakness everyone
had claimed didn’t exist. Adrenaline ripples through her, elation coupled with
the underlying urgency she always feels this close to the end of a hack. Her
thin, black-gloved fingers stir to life and race across the keys, the tips just
poking out of the cut-off ends and clicking softly against the plastic. With
each stroke, she starts to edit the code, starts to mould it, to persuade it…
and she begins to ease her way through. Her pulse is racing now; she is alive
and surging and powerful…
The minutes tick by.
A strand of dark hair falls down across her face. She
flicks it back with a jerk of her shoulder, barely lifting her hands from the
keys. Everything is slotting into place, fitting deliciously into a pattern
with design and logic and cohesion…
Finding the password had only been the first step. Now,
after layers and layers of security, after bypassing hidden traps and
authentication checks, she is almost there. She can almost feel it…
Almost…
She types the last few strokes, blood pumping in her
ears…
And she slips through.
The screen changes, the code disappearing to reveal the
flying bird logo of Harrison Copeland Pharmaceuticals – the final layer of
security bypassed with no alarms triggered. That’s the key; soft and silent,
not loud and damaging.
A needle, not a knife.
Something inside of Mallory releases – both a rush and a
kind of relief – and it’s as if in that moment everything around her feels
clear, where usually there is so much noise. Her lips quirk upwards at the
corners. Even Warden had warned her off this hack when she’d told him she’d
accepted it. Too many layers, he had said, too many things that could go wrong.
He’d kind of sounded worried for her. Her smile widens a touch.
There is always a loophole. You just have to look at
things the right way.
She stretches out her fingers, flexing each joint with a
sharp, controlled energy, then uploads the program she built to locate the
content The Asker had requested. She watches as it starts sifting through the
network, searching for the relevant files. He had given this hack specifically
to her, specifically to Echo Six. He had said it was important, and Mallory
doesn’t screw things up.
Echo Six doesn’t make mistakes.
She taps the middle finger of her left hand on the desk while
she waits – four taps, three taps, four taps, two – watching as the status bar
slowly fills, empty black to shimmering green. She rechecks for any signs that
she might be being traced…
Careful, careful,
careful…
But there is nothing untoward. No one even knows she’s
there.
The minutes tick by, then finally; Search Complete. Two hundred and
forty-six files have been identified as mentioning the initial round of testing
for the newly approved cancer drug Estalan, eighty-seven of which are marked
with the highest security clearance; files that someone tried to bury. She
copies them all. The transfer window counts down from one minute, fifty-four
seconds as the status bar refills.
Mallory starts tapping again.
She checks for traces.
When all the files have copied, she opens one, a high
security one. A quick skim confirms it is what The Asker was after; results
Harrison Copeland didn’t want anyone to see, evidence of mistakes, fixes and
side effects. Results they had tried very hard – and, from the looks of it,
paid a lot of money – to hide.
It was a waste, she
thinks, feeling the slightest rush again. They couldn’t hide them from her.
She closes the file and wipes her search algorithm from
the HC network. Then she rewrites the system logs to remove all memory of her
actions, before hacking her way back out, closing all the loopholes behind her.
In a few days, when the files turn up leaked on the net, the techs at HC won’t
have any idea how they got out. There will be no recorded log off or log on,
and no recorded search; no evidence she was ever there at all.
Just silence.
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