He had managed to partially rip her clothes off, and as he prepared to enter her he relaxed his grip over her lips. Michelle opened her mouth wide, but instead of screaming, she bit down hard with all the strength she had in her. Her young teeth cut through flesh and bone as if she was biting into a slab of butter, severing his pinky finger clean off. She spat it back into his face while he screamed in agony, blood cascading down his hand and arm. Before running out of the house and into the night, she grabbed a baseball bat and swung it right between his opened legs so hard and with such precision that it made him vomit. She never went back.

Three days later, after hitching four different rides, Michelle arrived in Los Angeles. She lived on the streets for several days, eating out of trashcans, sleeping under cardboard boxes and using the shower and facilities at Santa Monica Beach.

It was at that same beach that she met Trixxy and her boyfriend, two heavily tattooed surfers who told her that she could crash at their house if she wanted to. ‘A lot of people do,’ they explained.

It was true. Their house was always full of people coming and going.

Michelle soon found out that Trixxy and her boyfriend weren’t only surf lovers. They were part of one of the first generations of Internet hackers. Back then the Internet was still taking its initial baby steps into the commercial world. Everything was new, and security was flawed.

It didn’t take Trixxy and her boyfriend long to find out that Michelle was a natural with computers. No, ‘natural’ wasn’t really the right word. Michelle was an absolute genius. She was able, in minutes, to work out and write the correct code procedures to overcome problems that would take Trixxy and her boyfriend hours to do, if not days. In no time she was hacking into all sorts of web servers and online databases – universities, hospitals, public and private organizations, financial institutions, federal agencies, international enterprises . . . Nothing was off limits. The more secure they were supposed to be, the bigger the challenge, and the better Michelle became. She even broke into the FBI and the NSA databanks twice in the same week.

Like every hacker in cyberspace, Michelle gave herself an alias – Thrasos, the Greek mythological spirit of boldness. Very becoming, she thought.

In cyberspace the possibilities were endless, and Michelle was just starting to have fun. That was when she found out that her mother had passed away after ingesting half a box of sleeping pills and washing them down with a bottle of bourbon.

Michelle cried for three whole days, a combination of sadness and anger. She soon learned that only a few months before, her stepfather had convinced her mother to make a will, leaving the house that they lived in, which had been bought by her real father, and everything of any value she still had to him. With that, Michelle’s anger mutated. Her stepfather had transformed her mother into a drunken junkie, and then stolen everything she had. When Michelle checked, she found out that he had already put the house up for sale. That was when the angry monster inside her started screaming – REVENGE.

Within a week her stepfather’s life had taken a turn for the very worst. Through the Internet, Michelle started wrecking his life. All the money in his bank account went mysteriously missing, seemingly due to some internal computer error that no one could track down. She ran up absurd gambling debts in his name, maxed out his credit cards, suspended his driver’s license, and modified his internal revenue tax declaration in such a way that it would be only a matter of time before the IRS came asking questions. She left him broke, unemployed, homeless and alone.

Three months later he stepped in front of a train.

Michelle never lost a second of sleep over what she did.

It was an ex-boyfriend, after being arrested for possession of drugs with intent to distribute, who, in exchange for a deal, tipped the cops about Michelle. The cops, in turn, escalated the tip to the FBI Cybercrime Division, who’d already been looking for Thrasos for some time. With the information the ex-boyfriend had given them, it took the FBI less than a week to set up a monitoring operation. The arrest came a few days later. Four agents blasted through her front door, just as Michelle had broken into the WSCC database – the interconnected power grid that distributes electric energy to the entire west coast of the United States. She had just restructured their rates system, giving everyone, from Montana down to New Mexico and across to California, electric energy at dirt-cheap prices.

By then, cybercrime and cyber terrorism had already become a major threat to America and its way of life. The government of the United States understood that someone with the kind of expertise Michelle Kelly possessed had the potential to become a tremendous asset and an ally in their new fight, rather than an enemy. With that in mind, the FBI offered her a deal – carry on hacking, but on this side of the law, or a very, very long stint in prison.

Michelle took the deal.

She soon realized that she didn’t really miss her old life. She wasn’t a hacker because she liked to break the law, or for monetary gain. She was a hacker because she enjoyed the challenge and the thrill, and she was brilliant at it. The deal she was offered took none of that away; it just made it all legal.

Not surprisingly, the FBI played its cards perfectly. Knowing that the reason why Michelle had run away from home had been her abusive stepfather, they acclimatized her to her new role by making sure that every case she dealt with throughout her first year with the Bureau involved a cyber-sex crime – more precisely, pedophilia. Michelle’s anger and disgust toward such offenders were so intense, she buried herself in work, making every case a personal issue.

She was so good at what she did that within four years she was heading the Los Angeles FBI Cybercrime Division.

Michelle shook the memory out of her head now before turning her attention back to the footage of the woman locked inside the glass coffin again. She watched the recording one more time from the beginning, her eyes searching for any sort of missed detail, but once again she failed to pick up anything.

‘What the hell are you looking for, Michelle? There’s nothing here,’ she said to herself, while rubbing the palm of her hand against her forehead.

She took a bathroom break, refilled her coffee cup and returned to her desk. She wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

Her next step was to slow the footage down 2.5 times, and, with the help of a ‘color and contrast’ application, to enhance the images using a color saturation method. The over-saturation tended to heighten small details, things people wouldn’t pick up on otherwise.

Michelle sat forward on her chair, placed her elbows on her desk, rested her chin on her knuckles and started from the top again.

The reduced speed made watching the footage almost mind numbing. The color and contrast saturation tired the eyes faster, straining the ocular globes. Michelle found herself taking short breaks every three to four minutes. To relax her eyes, she would refocus them on something at the opposite end of the room for a moment, while massaging her temples, but she could already feel a headache gaining momentum right behind her eyeballs.

‘Maybe I should’ve accepted Harry’s help,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Or better yet, maybe I should’ve just gone with them, because right about now I sure as hell could do with a drink.’

She had another sip of her coffee before letting the footage play again, and checked the time counter in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. She had just over a minute to go.

As her eyes returned to the screen, Michelle swore she saw something flash past.