Chapter 6: THE HACKER
[Brooklyn, New York — Three Days Later]
DeShawn Moore lived on the fifth floor of a walkup in Bed-Stuy that smelled like frying plantains and someone's attempt at soundproofing a drum kit. The building's front door lock had been broken so long that someone had taped a handwritten sign over the buzzer panel: JUST COME IN.
I didn't just come in. I waited.
Finding DeShawn had taken two days of methodical work. The underground tech community in New York operated through layers of referral and reputation — you didn't Google "black hat hacker Brooklyn" and expect results. What you did was start at the edges: encrypted forums accessed through the laptop I'd stolen from the storage unit (the laptop itself was locked, but the browser cache on Keller's burner had bookmarks to forums Keller had used), anonymous message boards where handles substituted for names, whisper networks where a request for "hardware consultation" meant something very different than its civilian definition.
DeShawn's handle was DSMX. His reputation was specific: corporate penetration testing gone rogue, government database access, encryption-breaking for clients who paid in cash and didn't ask for receipts. He'd done eighteen months at Rikers for a wire fraud conviction in 2006, which meant the federal agencies had his prints and his face, which meant he was paranoid about new clients and justified in that paranoia.
I'd made contact through a forum intermediary — a fixer named Little Paul who vouched for Keller's name, which apparently still carried weight in certain circles. The meeting was set for seven PM outside DeShawn's building.
I arrived at six-thirty with two coffees and the stolen laptop.
DeShawn came out at seven-fifteen. He was younger than I'd expected — late twenties, wiry, with the posture of someone who spent fourteen hours a day in a desk chair and the eyes of someone who spent those hours staring at things most people never saw. His jacket was unzipped despite the evening chill, and he kept one hand near his waistband in a way that could mean a weapon or a habit or both.
"You're Keller." He didn't take the offered coffee.
"I'm Keller. That's for you."
"I don't take drinks from strangers."
"It's from the bodega on the corner. Watched them pour it. You can hold it until it gets cold if it makes you feel better."
He took the coffee. Didn't drink it. "Little Paul says you need decryption work."
"Military-grade encryption on a government-adjacent laptop." I held up the silver machine. "I need everything on this drive accessible within forty-eight hours."
DeShawn's eyes moved to the laptop with the involuntary focus of a guitarist noticing a vintage instrument. Professional interest, buried under professional suspicion.
"Government-adjacent meaning what?"
"Meaning the files inside were compiled by an FBI agent running an unauthorized internal investigation. The encryption is federal standard — probably AES-256, possibly with a custom implementation layer."
The professional interest won. DeShawn took a step closer, examined the laptop's casing without touching it. "AES-256 with custom implementation isn't a forty-eight-hour job. That's a week minimum if he used proper key management."
"Then it's a week."
"Twenty thousand."
"Fifteen. Plus a full copy of whatever's on the drive. You sell it separately — your profit, your risk, your channels."
He did the math. FBI internal documents on the open market — to journalists, to activists, to rival agencies, to anyone with a grudge against federal overreach — were worth more than twenty thousand. The copy was worth the discount.
"I work in my own space," he said. "You don't get to look over my shoulder."
That was a problem. The second ability — Talent Copy — required direct observation of the skill being performed. Watching DeShawn work was the entire secondary objective of this meeting. His fingers on the keyboard, his decision trees, the way he navigated code architecture — I needed to see all of it to have any chance of absorbing even a fraction of his capability.
"I'd prefer to be present," I said. "Not looking over your shoulder. Just... in the room. I have trust issues with hardware leaving my sight."
DeShawn's jaw worked. His eyes went from the laptop to my face and back. The calculation was visible — was this a reasonable request from a paranoid client, or something more suspicious?
"Fine. You sit. You don't touch anything. You don't talk while I'm working. You want to use the bathroom, you ask."
"Fair."
He turned and walked into the building. I followed, carrying the laptop and both coffees.
---
[DeShawn's Apartment — Fifth Floor]
The apartment was smaller than my hotel room but packed with more computing power than most small businesses. Three monitors formed a curved wall on a desk that dominated the living space. Cables ran along the baseboards like exposed veins. A server rack hummed in what had once been a coat closet, its blue LEDs pulsing in irregular patterns. The air was warm — too warm, heated by processors working overtime.
DeShawn cleared a folding chair, set it three feet behind his desk chair, and pointed. "There."
I sat. He placed the laptop on a diagnostic station to the left of his main setup — a separate machine connected by a shielded cable, isolated from his primary network. Smart. Whatever was on the laptop, he wasn't letting it touch his personal systems until he understood it.
The work began.
For the first hour, I understood almost nothing. DeShawn's fingers moved across keyboards with a fluency that made typing look like a performance art — rapid bursts followed by long pauses where he'd stare at scrolling text, chin in hand, eyes tracking patterns invisible to anyone without his training. He muttered to himself in a language that was half technical jargon, half personal shorthand: "No, that's... okay, they rotated the IV. Course they did. Standard federal paranoia. But the header — yeah, there it is. Predictable."
I watched his hands. His posture. The way his head tilted when he found something interesting versus when he hit a wall. The rhythm of his keystrokes — not just speed but cadence, the pauses between bursts that indicated thought processes, decision branches, the moment when analysis shifted from deductive to intuitive.
The second ability — the antenna, the absorptive architecture I'd first registered in the Nice bathroom — stirred. The heightened perception that the Power Bible described as the analysis phase kicked in like a lens clicking into focus. DeShawn's movements began to decelerate in my perception. Not literally — my eyes weren't faster — but my attention was narrowing, sharpening, dissecting each gesture into component motions with an intensity that made the rest of the room dim.
By the second hour, I could predict which key he'd press before his finger landed. Not always. Maybe forty percent of the time. But the patterns were emerging — not as conscious knowledge but as recognition, the way you learn to read a word without sounding out each letter.
"You're staring." DeShawn didn't turn around.
"Watching you work."
"There's a difference?"
"Watching is professional curiosity. Staring is creepy. I'm doing the first one."
He grunted. Kept working.
Hour three. The encryption gave way in layers — DeShawn peeled them back like sediment, each one revealing a new obstacle beneath. Federal encryption wasn't a single lock; it was a series of nested doors, each with its own key, each key hidden in the previous layer's architecture. DeShawn navigated them with a patience I hadn't expected from someone his age — no frustration at dead ends, no shortcuts that might corrupt the data. Just methodical, relentless progression.
My mind was full. The absorption process was pulling in more than I could comfortably hold — not just the technical patterns but the philosophy of how DeShawn thought about systems. He didn't see code as text. He saw it as architecture, as physical space, as rooms and corridors and hidden passages. When he encountered a wall, he didn't try to break through — he looked for the door that the builder had needed to use during construction.
The familiar pressure built behind my eyes. The same presence I'd strained against in Nice, trying to manifest the clone. But this was the second thread, the copying architecture, and it was pulling rather than pushing — drawing in information rather than projecting outward. The strain was different: not physical exhaustion but a cognitive heat, like a processor running at capacity.
Hour four. Something shifted.
It wasn't dramatic. No flash, no sound, no system notification. Just a settling — like a puzzle piece dropping into place after you've been turning it the wrong way for an hour. The patterns DeShawn was executing stopped being foreign and became readable. Not mastered. Not even competent. But I could trace the logic of his decisions, could see the shape of his expertise the way you see the shape of a landscape from a hilltop — broad strokes, major features, the general terrain.
Talent Copy. First successful integration.
The confirmation came as a quiet certainty: I knew things I hadn't known four hours ago. Not everything DeShawn knew — maybe sixty percent of his capability, filtered through my limited experience, degraded by the gap between his years of practice and my hours of observation. But real. Functional. The foundation of a skill I could build on.
My head throbbed. A dull ache, centered behind my right eye, spreading toward my temple. Integration fatigue — the Power Bible's warning about cognitive cost. I pressed my thumb against the bridge of my nose and breathed through it.
"You good back there?" DeShawn had turned, one eyebrow raised. "You look like you've got a migraine."
"Long day."
He opened a mini-fridge under the desk and tossed me a Red Bull. "Caffeine helps."
I cracked it open. The sweet chemical burn cut through the headache just enough to think clearly. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it." He turned back to the screen. "Literally. I have a reputation."
We sat in silence — him working, me drinking carbonated battery acid, two criminals in a Brooklyn apartment at two AM with nothing in common except the mutual understanding that questions were for people who wanted uncomfortable answers.
The progress bars crept forward. Fifty percent. Sixty. The nested encryption layers continued to fall, one after another, DeShawn's patience outlasting their complexity. The warm air from the server rack made my eyelids heavy. The Red Bull fought it. The Red Bull was losing.
At 4:38 AM, DeShawn pushed back from the desk.
"I'm through the outer layers. The interior files are decrypting now — another two hours for the batch process to finish, maybe three. You don't need to be here for that part."
I stood. My knees cracked from five hours in a folding chair. The headache had settled into a persistent low-grade pulse, manageable but present — a reminder that what I'd just done to my mind wasn't free.
"Payment." I counted fifteen thousand from the diminishing stack in Keller's wallet. The bills looked thinner every time I peeled them off. Sixty days ago, this body had woken up on a Monaco floor. Two weeks in this city and I was bleeding cash faster than I could replace it.
DeShawn counted the money with the practiced speed of someone who'd been doing hand-to-hand transactions since before his first arrest. Satisfied, he tucked it into a lockbox under the desk.
"I'll have the full contents on an encrypted drive by morning. You pick it up, you walk out, we don't know each other." He paused. "And Keller? Whatever's on this laptop — if it tracks back to me, I've got insurance. Everything gets copied. Everything goes somewhere safe. You understand?"
"I'd expect nothing less."
"Good." He turned back to his monitors. Conversation over.
I let myself out. The stairwell was dark, the building quiet except for the baseline hum of Brooklyn at five AM — distant trucks, a dog barking, the subway rumbling under the concrete like a heartbeat two layers down. I pushed through the broken front door and stood on the sidewalk.
The air was cooler than inside. Pre-dawn grey was seeping into the eastern sky, turning the rooftops from black to charcoal. My mind buzzed — not from the Red Bull, which had peaked and was fading. From the new patterns occupying space in my head that had been empty twelve hours ago. Code structures. Encryption logic. The instinctive lateral thinking that made DeShawn effective — not just what he did but how he decided what to do.
Sixty percent of his capability. Rough, unpolished, full of gaps I'd need practice to fill. But I could sit down at a terminal and navigate systems I couldn't have recognized yesterday. I could look at encrypted data and see the shape of the lock instead of just the wall.
The Talent Copy worked.
I was still wearing Matthew Keller's face. Still carrying his debts. Still sleeping in a cash-only hotel with an Interpol description circulating through European databases. But as of tonight, I wasn't just running on Keller's borrowed instincts and a television viewer's memory of six seasons.
I was building something new. Something Keller never had.
The walk back to Hell's Kitchen took forty minutes. My legs were stiff, my head ached, and the early morning light turned the East River into hammered copper as I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. A jogger passed me without a glance. A delivery truck honked at a cyclist. The city was waking up, indifferent to the man walking through it with stolen skills humming behind his eyes.
My burner phone vibrated at 6:04 AM. DeShawn's number. A text, three lines:
Done. You need to see this. Bring cash and a gun.
I stopped on the sidewalk. Read it twice. A request for cash was professional. A request for a gun meant the contents had scared him — and DeShawn Moore did not scare easily.
I changed direction toward Brooklyn.
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