Warnings for this chapter:
This chapter is rated T for language and implied violence.

Chapter 1

Christine's first impressions of Roland Daggett were far from flattering. She knew that she should not judge a person with whom she had never actually met, though it had been her experience that the man who thinks nobody is watching is much more truthful than the man who must put on a show for his peers.

Mr. Daggett, to put it kindly, was not the most technologically savvy man in the world. His security was laughable; his IP address easily revealed despite the cheap VPN that he used, his delicate files not stored on any sort of an external device, the passwords to his poorly encrypted hard drive cracked in hours. A simple spoofed email from a businessman by the name of Stryver and a quickly installed RAT later, Christine was able to access everything she needed. He was an underground hacker's wet dream, wealthy and exploitable, handing his most secret of information to all those who cared to look on a delicious silver platter.

In a matter of days, Christine had set up a full profile of Mr. Roland Daggett, one which included a full list of his online handles (passwords included), a printout of his full email history, and, of course, the full keylog records of his online and offline activities over the past week through which she had been monitoring him. She was quite proud of her work on this one. She'd even thrown in a little bit of information on his family, including basic profiles and email passwords of all of them as well.

All this aside, it is worth mentioning that this had been completed without time to spare. The time at which she was supposed to meet her anonymous employer was an hour away. Slipping the hard copies of the documents into a large file-folder and dropping a small USB drive with the backups of her work in after them, Christine shut down her laptop, sealing the file with careful hands and getting up from her wooden desk to grab a coat. A sense of dread was prominent within her body as she slipped on her shoes; she never did face-to-face meet-ups. Never. Her payments had always been over the internet, money flushed out through services found on online black markets and mailed back to a throwaway address in untraceable cash. A friend of hers who she had met on a private IRC, a middle-aged man who went by the name of "Experimental," was quite skilled at taking care of the financial sides of her hacking schemes.

Her benefactor for this job, however, had not contacted her online. It had been a stranger in the street, in fact, who had stopped her and insisted that they converse in the privacy of a small coffee shop. The man had informed her that his "employer" had a full profile of her, a profile which included her online endeavors.

A profile which could have her arrested.

Her heart, at this point, had stopped completely, her face as if she'd seen a ghost – she was certain that her apprehension was near. She had always been careful, of course, running the IP stolen from her neighbor's easily cracked wi-fi through secure shell tunnels and proxies and off-shore VPNs to the point of apparent anonymity. She was the closest to untraceable that any citizen could possibly be when online. Anybody with the capability to discover her true identity had to have access to government resources or something equivalent.

This is not to say that this ensured her anonymity, of course. She took real life precautions as well. Anything related to hacking or programming was shoved onto a two-terabyte external hard drive that fit smoothly into a brown leather bag that she kept in the back of her cramped closet. She never boasted about her prowess, neither telling her real life friends of her illegal activities nor bragging on internet forums. In fact, the only people with any sort of knowledge of her accomplishments were Experimental and another man by the name of "Pushkin". Pushkin sold illegal drugs over the internet, and made for incredible conversation, even providing her with a few clients who needed certain information about themselves erased. While she sometimes wished that she could enjoy the notoriety that would come with her achievements should she be a tad more open about them online, she preferred to stay out of the eye of law enforcement and the public. The fame would not be worth it.

Her most secret of files and programs, the ones that could warrant an arrest upon reveal, were kept on a 64-gigabyte USB drive that she kept around her neck by day and in a custom nook made in her desk by night. She was rather proud of its hiding spot, in fact. She'd made it herself.

As it had turned out, the man who had approached her was not in fact law enforcement, much to Christine's short-term relief. He was speaking with her on behalf of an anonymous client who wished to obtain a full profile of some man called Ronald Daggett.

"What would this employer be willing to pay for such services?" Christine asked, still impossibly shaken by the situation and fighting to keep the tremor out of her voice.

"You will be paid five thousand dollars in full. You will also be given permission by my employer to live."

At this point, she could feel her eyes moistening slightly in terror, her breathing accelerating. While she may have felt invincible through a computer screen and a Unix operating system, she was nothing more than a young university student in reality. At five foot four and possessing a frame so frail that it looked emaciated, Christine was nowhere near intimidating. Her only weapon was her technological ability – a weapon that was hardly useful in real life situations. At the hands of a criminal, she was painfully vulnerable to assail.

"When would you have me be finished?"

One week later, trembling violently and feeling out-of-control in every sense of the word, on coming out into the street she became acutely aware of her fears. She felt physically sick as she made her way towards an alleyway where she was to meet her escort, the weight of hundreds of papers inside of her backpack a reminder that she was not only about to make direct contact with someone who knew of her online presence, but also that she had just retrieved very personal information from an impossibly wealthy businessman.

Upon arrival, Christine took slow, small steps into the alleyway, eventually noticing a man leaning against a crumbling brick wall beside a dumpster.

"Hey there, Christine," the man said, sauntering over to her. "You're supposed to come with me."

She followed the man in silence, all the while speculating about who her employer might be. A rival businessman, perhaps? Maybe a bitter family member? It was hard to say, but either way, the threatening words spoken on his behalf struck terror into her heart, despite her fleeting attempts at strength. After walking for approximately fifteen minutes, Christine's escort had led her to a small manhole behind a bar, and had instructed her to climb in.

"What?" she asked, shocked. "We're supposed to meet him in a sewer?"

The man nodded, smirking as he opened up the manhole. He wasn't an intimidating man, below six feet and about her age. In fact, she noticed that even he looked rather uneasy. He sported long brown hair and the small kind of beard that was worn by a young man who could not yet grow a full one. He prompted Christine to follow behind him as he climbed into the hole. She did.

She was relieved to find that the scent of the sewers was not impossibly foul. She also noted that they looked fairly well travelled, the floors not coated in nearly as much lichen and moss as she would have expected. It was the infrastructure of an underground city. It was brilliant.

"Shouldn't we close that up?" she asked, motioning to the open manhole. The man nodded, apparently having forgotten.

"Fuck, thanks a lot. I'd have been murdered in cold blood if I had forgotten. Shit." He climbed up to shut the entrance.

She laughed, until she noticed that his face was one of somber fear. He was frightened of his employer, of this she was certain.

"Alright then, you're supposed to follow me," he said, walking through the tunnel in a direction that he seemed to know by heart. She followed closely behind, fighting the urge to run. Everything about the situation struck her as incredibly unsafe – what sort of a person is dangerous or wanted enough that he would need to hide inside a sewer?

"Hey, I don't mean any sort of disrespect, but if I were to ask you a question about all this, would you be allowed to answer?" Christine asked, not expecting much but deciding to try.

"Uh, I guess so," the man replied, his hands in his jean pockets. "Before you do, though, I sorta wanted you to tell me somethin'."

Christine was taken aback. "You do? Sure, you can ask me whatever you want. I mean, you guys clearly already know all about me, so why not?"

The man laughed at her condescending tone. "I was just wondering what exactly it was about you that made my boss hire you. I mean, when he said that he was going to hire a hacker, I sort of pictured some thirty-something man in all black, if you know what I mean. I mean, you don't exactly strike me as the type to do this shit."

"Yeah, I guess not," she replied.

"Well? What have you done?" he prompted. "I want details. It's a ten minute walk to where we have to get to, may as well chat."

Christine's gaze, once set steadily at the ground, now met the eyes of her escort. "Lots of stuff. I don't deface websites or anything stupid, that'd just be asking to get caught. Mostly getting passwords and personal information for people. A lot of people pay me for email logs, it's those kinds of things."

"Well, if it means you'll be in my boss' good books, I'd say your talents are pretty fucking useful in the real world."

"Who exactly is your boss?"

The man was silent for a few moments. His eyes looked glassy.

"Look, you seem nice and all, but you don't understand how fucking dead I'll be if I let the wrong thing slip to you. I can't tell you shit."

Christine gazed in horror at the panic-stricken face of the young man, and in blank terror felt the truth of the matter sink in. The man's employer clearly had no qualms with murder if his previous claims had not been hyperbolic. She was tempted to flee, but she knew that she would be worse off for it. Her family and friends would have no idea what had happened to her if she disappeared. She could not possibly tell anybody if she needed help due to the nature of her partnership with her nameless employer. She was at the mercy of a criminal.

"Hey, before we turn that corner, I've gotta tell you something. You have to listen, and you have to listen really fucking good. Do ya promise?"

"What is it?" she asked in a murmur.

"Whatever you do, don't give him any reasons to dislike you. Do you understand? Forget the fact that most men won't hit women. You've gotta be really fucking careful with my boss. That's all I can say."

Christine crimsoned and ceased speaking. She could not process any of the man's advice, or read into it any more than she already had. She was to meet her employer in a matter of seconds, and in the last minute of her walk, the feeling of impossible dread that seized her in its cruel grip had completely taken over. A cold sweat covered her body. She could think of nothing but the danger of her situation, of how painful the feeling of a bullet tearing through her vital organs would feel. How long would it take for her to perish, she wondered? For how long would she feel the hurt? What would her parents think when she never contacted them again? What would Experimental and Pushkin think when she disappeared from their daily internet relay chats?

There may be death today. How is it that I could possibly think of anything but death?