After his divorce, he’d moved into a low-rent high-rise. His living room consisted of a used IKEA table and a wooden chair. No TV, no upholstered furniture, nothing. His bedroom was equally Spartan. Spartan but spotless—eight years in the Marines didn’t rub off. A box spring and mattress sat on the floor beside a reading lamp on a squat end table. An unvarnished chest of drawers with a broken leg that he’d repaired. No other furniture. Interior design courtesy of Franz Kafka.

It was hard to believe that at sixteen this guy had been the most wanted hacker in America. The infamous BrnChr0m—a forerunner to the modern, politically motivated hacktivist movement. The teenager responsible for nearly taking down the then senator Benjamin Lombard. Who stole a decade’s worth of the senator’s e-mails and financial records and turned it all over to the Washington Post. Anonymously, or so BrnChr0m had thought—the FBI arrested Gibson Vaughn at his high school and led him from chemistry class in handcuffs. Jenn had taped his mug shot to one of the monitors, and she paused to study his frightened yet defiant face. Twenty-eight now, he’d led an eventful life.

The FBI’s swift apprehension of a sixteen-year-old hacker made for a pretty good story. The documents that Vaughn had leaked, on the other hand, made a great one. They detailed a cynical and criminal diversion of campaign funds to banks in the Cayman Islands. They also pointed the finger squarely at Benjamin Lombard. For a time, the revelations looked to signal the end of the senator’s political career, and the media went crazy for the idea that a teenager had toppled a US senator. Everyone loved a good David versus Goliath story, even if David had broken a score of federal and state laws in the process.

Jenn had been in college at the time of his arrest and remembered infuriating debates about whether the ends justified the means. Abstracted, high-minded crap that chafed her practical nature. Offended by how many of her classmates saw Vaughn as a digital Robin Hood, she’d felt more than a little vindicated when it broke that BrnChr0m had gotten it absolutely wrong.

In the end, many of the most damning documents were either doctored or outright forgeries. A crime had indeed been committed, but the FBI concluded that the culprit was not Benjamin Lombard but his former chief of staff, Duke Vaughn, who had recently taken his own life. Duke Vaughn had not only embezzled millions of dollars but covered his tracks by implicating Benjamin Lombard. It was a Shakespearean act of betrayal, and when the anonymous hacker turned out to be none other than Duke Vaughn’s son . . . well, the story became a sensation and BrnChr0m became a legend.

But Gibson Vaughn hadn’t gone by that alias in a long time and was a long way from legendary now.