Prelude.

Steven Diaz was a well known hacker that went by the alias Ace. At a young age, he was interested in computers; by age 10, he could take apart a computer and put it back together blindfolded. His father left his family at age 7, so his mother struggled to take care of him. It was obvious that he had a lot of potential but he never took advantage of it by excelling in school. Rather, he preferred to sit at home on his laptop. For the past five years, he had been taking jobs from random crooks to get money. That is where our story begins…

Chapter One, Contract.

The phone rang. It was an early Monday morning. Steven picked it up. “Who would be calling at 2 in the morning?” he thought.

“Hello?” he asked.

A voice answered, “I hear you are good at what you do and you like to keep things confidential.”

“Yeah, but try calling in the afternoon next time; normal people still sleep at this hour, you know.”

The voice replied, “No matter. There is a briefcase on the floor outside your door.  If you take the briefcase you agree to the job. Inside, there is a million dollars. That’s your down payment.”

Then the phone went dead.

Steven quickly walked over to the door, opened it slowly, and there sat the briefcase, tempting him to take it. He carefully brought it inside and peeked inside; there was the million dollars… and a paper with instructions. The paper read “Phase 1: Get into the server on this address and copy any files under the name Project Blackside. Phase 2: Copy the files into a CD and leave them in your mailbox; we will pick it up tomorrow night.”

Steven began to hack into the database. Leaving a virus for anyone who attempted to find the source of the compromised system, he successfully found the data and copied it onto a CD. Steven was always one for curiosity; although he asked no questions, he always looked at the data, just in case it was something of value. On those files were evidence of killings the government did in Nigeria to test some sort of new bioweapon.

This was bad, and Steven had no idea it was about to get worse.