Invasion of Privacy

Chapter 4

Brody slowed to a stop in the middle of Upper Street and indicated right. He was adjacent to an empty residents-only parking space outside his apartment block. Cars backed up behind him as he waited for a gap to appear in the oncoming traffic. He recalled how drunk his flatmate had been last night, and it dawned on Brody that Leroy would be up by now, grumpy and belligerent. He glanced over to his left and noticed a small gap between parked cars outside Bruno’s Coffee House, located directly across the road from his flat. It was as if fate was telling him something. 

After all, having completed the Atlas Brands job that morning, it wasn’t like he had a load of other jobs lined up. Especially as the message he’d read earlier had announced that Crooner42 had awarded the pentest job to someone else. Brody had to admit to himself that he’d only wanted to win the job in order to further reinforce his elite status in the global hacker community. He didn’t actually need a week’s worth of anyone’s coding services. The real prize would have been to make sure that Crooner42 let everyone on the forums know that he had selected Brody for the job. It was the online equivalent of word-of-mouth, one of the few forms of publicity available within the hacker community. Brody had taken years to be recognised as elite and little wins like this reinforced his status in the minds of his fellow hackers. Not being a malicious ‘black hat’ hacker, Brody didn’t have access to the other main form of publicity available to the most notorious in that field, which was to see their codenames on the front page of the news after breaking into a famous website, an approach that certainly achieved infamy but ran the risk of being hunted down vigorously by law enforcement agencies. 

The message he’d received from Crooner42 had only told him he’d been unsuccessful, without announcing to whom he’d awarded the work instead. Although Brody’s ego was a little bruised, he felt compelled to add insult to injury by trying to find out the identity of the chosen hacker. He would log on from Bruno’s.

Brody swapped the indicator to point left and drove directly into the space outside Bruno’s, parking his Smart car with the front bumper facing towards the kerb in the way only a Smart car can park. From behind, Brody heard the screeching of rubber on wet tarmac as the car behind impatiently accelerated away. 

At the very least the coffee would be good; better than having turned right and ending up facing Leroy in the throes of the morning after. Earlier, Brody had been woken by Leroy and Danny returning from their first night out as a couple in over a fortnight. He had listened to Danny slur loudly that he needed to be up early for a business meeting and then heard his footsteps rebound off the parquet flooring as he made his way to the guest bedroom. Leroy called out that he’d make them both a nightcap and then proceeded to bash his way around the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors while swearing profusely at the kettle boiling noisily, before eventually settling himself in front of the television, volume on maximum, playing his beloved Xbox, Danny apparently forgotten.

When the snoring began a few minutes later, Brody forced himself out of bed to find Leroy sprawled asleep on the sofa, an untouched mug of steaming tea on the glass coffee table. Brody half-cajoled, half-carried Leroy to his room and dumped him unceremoniously on his bed, next to his neatly tucked-in partner, who failed to stir at the commotion. Brody turned off the Xbox and returned to his own room, now completely awake. It had taken at least twenty pages on his Kindle before Brody’s eyelids became heavy enough to drop off again … only for his alarm to go off a couple of hours later for the drive up to Atlas Brands in Birmingham. As he left, he heard another alarm sound in Leroy’s room and placed a silent bet with himself against Danny making it to his business meeting on time. 

Brody entered Bruno’s, shaking the rain from his leather jacket. He loved that the independent cosmopolitan coffee lounge wasn’t one of the coffee chains that had taken over every busy street in London where baristas operated in little more than factory lines, giving minimal thought to the quality or style of their craft. He particularly loved that, in Bruno’s, they waited the tables European style, bringing the coffee to you. But most of all he loved it for being located opposite his home.