The Silence of Six

by E. C. Myers

  “When you put it that way, it sounds kind of exciting,” Penny said.

  “It is!”

  “It’s also deadly, and you aren’t taking it seriously. This isn’t a game. Max and I might have disappeared today. We were lucky. We aren’t cut out for this spy stuff.”

  “She’s right.” Max hated himself for saying it. “You’ve done enough already. I’ve got to handle this on my own from here. You guys have been amazing.”

  Risse started crying. “What did I do?”

  “Oh, honey.” Penny put her hand on Risse’s shoulder. Risse jerked away.

  “We can’t give up. We’re so close,” Risse said.

  “You’re not giving up. You’re my security. If something happens to me, you’ll still have the information and you can release it. It’s stupid for all of us to risk ourselves like this. We’re the only ones who know the truth,” Max said.

  “It’s time to go home,” Penny said again.

  “Penny, I know you’re scared, but I’m not,” Risse said.

  “That’s fine. I’m afraid enough for both of us.”

  “If I could go home too, I would,” Max said.

  Risse folded her arms and lowered her head. “This is wrong. We have a responsibility. This is way bigger than us.”

  “You’re my responsibility,” Penny said. “You’re the only thing I care about. All of this. . . . It’s too big for us. It’ll sort itself out.”

  Max didn’t believe that any more than Penny did, but he supported her lie.

  “I couldn’t have come this far without you,” Max said.

  Risse’s lower lip jutted forward. It was easy to forget she was still a kid, because she was so smart and capable. But this was the right thing to do.

  She grabbed Max in a hug. Then she leaned up on her toes.

  “I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep working on this. You stay in touch and let me know if you need me,” she whispered in his ear.

  Max smiled. “You’ll know.”

  Penny walked up to Max. “I’m glad we met,” she said.

  “Me too. I wish we’d met sooner, under better circumstances.”

  “I wish we’ll meet again. Under better circumstances.” She offered Max her hand. He shook it. He held on a moment longer than he needed to.

  She rolled her eyes then leaned in. She kissed him on the cheek. She pressed her face against his shoulder.

  Risse honked the horn in the car.

  Penny stepped back. “Suddenly she’s in a hurry to get out of here.”

  “Watch yourself,” Max said.

  “Good luck, Max.”

  Penny got into the car and drove off.

  Max looked around the garage.

  “Now what?” he said.

  26

  Max sat in the dark at his motel room desk,trying to decide what to do now that he was on his own. In front of him were his open laptop, the keycard Evan had left Max, Ariel’s 3–D puzzle piece, and the USB drive containing SH1FT.

  He had spent the night researching 0MN1. Now that Max knew 0MN1 was Vic Ignacio, there was a lot more information to be found on him. It didn’t seem possible that 0MN1 could have kept his secret from Evan, but apparently Evan had missed a number of things in his investigation.

  Most of the information Max found was about Vic’s old company, Synthwerks, which he had talked about in such idealistic terms at Haxx0rade. It wasn’t often that you heard a visionary express sentimentality for their old failures at the height of success, but to Max it had sounded like Vic missed those days, or hadn’t completely given up on his original dream.

  In a way, he hadn’t: Synthwerks was literally and figuratively the foundation for Panjea. The small internet café had been converted into a server farm that supported Panjea’s services. It was about an hour away from the Wherehouse, back in San Jose, close to where Ariel had lived.

  Max stared at the dot representing Synthwerks on the map. Could it be? Penny had said it looked like the production servers weren’t on-site in San Francisco. Ariel had had an authentication device that would give her remote access to a server.

  Max turned the keycard over and over in his hand. If the card hadn’t been configured for Panjea’s main headquarters, maybe it could get him into the satellite office.

  Well, it was worth a look.

  Max got up and stretched the kinks out of his neck. He had been sitting in that chair all night, barely moving. He leaned over his computer and checked his e-mail again, hoping to hear from Penny or Risse. They should have gotten home hours ago. Maybe Penny had been serious about distancing herself, but Risse would have let Max know they’d gotten back to Roseburg safely.

  The only new message was from his dad. It must be important if he’d tried to reach out to Max with a full-blown manhunt going on.

  Max decrypted it with his private key and opened the e-mail. There was no message, just an attached file. Max clicked on it and a scanned page appeared. The upper right quadrant bore the blue word “Telegram”. It had been sent priority to Max’s home address.

  Who still sent telegrams?

  The only text in the body of the telegram was “38.504778, 122.973956.”

  Latitude and longitude.

  “Okay, I’ll bite.” Max sat back down and copied the strings of numbers into an online map. He held his breath while the image re-centered around a forest, the thick leaves obscuring the satellite view. The coordinates matched a campground in Guerneville, California.

  So that’s where the middle of nowhere is.

  Max would have ignored it and headed straight for the Synthwerks data center, but for the word “STOP” at the end of the line. It looked like a signature or part of the message, rather than its traditional telegram usage, to indicate punctuation.

  Evan? Could he be alive after all?

  The campsite was only ninety minutes away from his motel.

  What the hell. It wasn’t like he was going to be able to get any sleep tonight. If there was even the slightest possibility that this was Evan trying to reach him, he had to see it through.

  Those ninety minutes by car didn’t take into account the hour-long hike, in moonlight, to reach the precise location according to his phone’s GPS.

  As he neared the coordinates, Max moved more slowly, taking light, careful steps and pausing frequently to listen for other footsteps in the woods around him. Over the course of his walk there, he had convinced himself that everything about this situation screamed trap. This could be Vic or his people trying to lure Max out alone, using his feelings about Evan against him.

  Stupid, Max, he thought.

  He had come this far already, and he didn’t want to turn back without at least checking things out. Maybe if he was quiet enough he could get a look at the person waiting for him before he was noticed.

  Max almost missed the tent, but when he stepped into a clearing, it suddenly appeared on an outcropping just above him. It glowed with a soft yellow light from within. His host was awake, at least.

  Max crept toward the tent softly—and tripped a string tied with cans that made a terrible racket. The light inside the tent was instantly extinguished.

  Max froze and pressed his lips together. The slightest movement would disturb the cans wrapped around his ankles.

  The silence stretched out, making him more and more uncomfortable. He felt like eyes were watching all around him. His skin crawled.

  He couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Um. Hello? I got your telegram,” Max called.

  “Yo,” a voice said behind Max. He jumped then tried to take a step backward. His feet got even more tangled, and he fell on his ass.

  “Is that a phone?” The figure was cast in shadows. Max squinted up at him.

  Max glanced at the phone in his hand stupidly. “Yeah.”

/>   “You can’t bring that here, man. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I needed the GPS to find you,” Max said.

  The man sighed. “Turn it off now. Take the battery out. Bury it under that rock.”

  “You want me to bury my phone?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  Max switched his phone off and pulled out the battery. He dug a loose grave for his phone, nestled it in the earth, then pushed soil back over it. He crawled over to a rock and rolled it over his phone so he could hopefully find it later. “Okay. Will you help me up now?”

  The man crouched and cut the string binding Max’s feet with a scary-looking hunting knife Max hadn’t noticed him holding. He suppressed a shudder. The man walked toward his tent and went around the back. A moment later, the light switched back on and the zipper came down. A flap fell open, revealing the man sitting cross-legged inside, backlit by an electric lantern.

  “Can I come in?” Max asked.

  The man opened his arms wide.

  Max ducked down and entered the tent. He leaned down to zip it up behind him, then turned around.

  “Whoa,” Max said.

  There were stacks of computer printouts on every square inch of the tiny tent’s floor. There was an actual bed made out of reams of paper, with a blanket and pillow on top of it. The pages were printed on those old, continuous feed pages.

  Max coughed. The tent reeked of pot.

  “You must be Max.” The guy was about Max’s age, dressed in a wrinkled, white linen shirt, the underarms stained yellow, and hemp pants. He hadn’t shaved in months or brushed his bird’s nest of hair, so he looked like a castaway on a desert island.

  “Jeremy Seer? L0NELYB0Y?” Max asked.

  “Correctamundo. Call me Jem.”

  “You’re Infiltraitor too, aren’t you?”

  Jem frowned. “Want some tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Max looked around for someplace to sit and decided to settle on one of the piles of paper. He picked up the ream on top of the stack in front of him and paged through it. He’d seen it before. It was a printout of e-mails from Evan’s BitTorrent file.

  “Thanks for contacting me.” Max didn’t see anything electronic in the small tent. Just paper, and Jem, and more paper.

  “I got the message DoubleThink sent. I only replied because you’re a friend of Baxter’s. What do you want?”

  Where to begin?

  “You faked your death,” Max said. “What happened?”

  “I saw an opportunity and I took it. By the time I found out they were coming after me, after Ty, it was too late. I’m sorry about that.”

  “So you decided to take off,” Max said.

  “I was ashamed. I had to leave. I wanted to find the people responsible.” He looked around helplessly at the towers of paper surrounding him.

  “Must be hard without a computer,” Max said.

  “It’s easier for them to find you with your computer than for you to find them,” Jem said.

  “Evan thought you—L0NELYB0Y, I mean—was dead too.”

  “That couldn’t be helped. That identity was next on the hit list. I thought it was better to disappear myself completely before someone else did.”

  “Is there an actual list?” Max asked.

  “You bet. I have a scan of Sharpe’s directive, with his signature. It’s my insurance policy: If anything happens to me, it’ll be e-mailed to every major newspaper, TV station, and blog. That’s the only reason I saw your attempts to contact me; I have to go online once a week to reset it.”

  Max felt a jolt of excitement. It was the same feeling he had when he broke through a difficult encryption, or kicked the ball and knew it would go in the goal. A kill order was the evidence they had been looking for.

  “Why haven’t you released it already?” Max asked. “They wouldn’t be able to touch you once it’s out there.”

  “I thought about it. But I want to do more than just save myself. I know you agree. If you know about Sharpe, you also know about SH1FT.”

  Max nodded. “How did you get involved in all this?” he asked.

  “I was in charge of designing Panjea’s CDN. A content delivery network is supposed to be a fail-safe system; if something brings down the main site, it would automatically switch to a backup server.”

  “Is that at Synthwerks?”

  “Bingo, buddy! You’ve got all the answers.”

  “Let’s see if I do.” Max brought Jem up to speed on everything he had learned so far about Panjea and SH1FT.

  “You’re only half right,” Jem said. “SH1FT is a two-phase operation. Phase One is proliferation, spreading to computer systems around the world via Panjea. Phase Two involves using the back door to infect SCADA systems with malware.”

  “SCADA?” Max asked.

  “Supervisory control and data acquisition,” Jem said. “Sensitive systems that manage national infrastructure.”

  “How does the government contract a private company to do that?” Max asked.

  Jem laughed. “Panjea doesn’t work for the government. It is the government. They bought Synthwerks and Vic Ignacio built Panjea for them.”

  It took a moment for all the terrifying implications to sink in.

  “So Panjea’s claim that it won’t sell private data to anyone, even the government, is true. The government technically owns all the data on the site.” Max massaged his forehead. “The government’s new surveillance program is a social media service. Holy shit. We aren’t going to let them get away with this.”

  “Evan was working on reprogramming SH1FT to take them down,” Jem said.

  “He did it. The only problem is, we can’t get it onto Panjea’s servers,” Max said.

  “That’s very tricky. The worm has to be placed in a certain area of the CDN. Then the entire network has to be restarted so it can run during a maintenance cycle.” Jem faltered.

  Suddenly it all fell into place. “That was your job, wasn’t it? Before you disappeared,” Max said.

  Jem didn’t say anything.

  Max’s voice rose. “When Evan thought you were gone, he thought he couldn’t deliver the worm.”

  With his family threatened and Jem supposedly dead, Evan had been alone and unable to complete his mission on his own. He hadn’t just crumbled under the pressure—he had turned his death into a second chance. By killing himself publicly, he had hoped to highlight what Panjea had done, stop the killing, and give Max and Penny the resources they needed to hold the corporation accountable.

  Max had caught up to Evan and now found himself in the same situation. He was alone, with no idea how to get the modified worm into distribution on a wide scale. Maybe he could give Jem a second chance too.

  “Will you come back with me and install it on their server?” Max asked.

  “No can do, man.”

  Jem’s dismissive tone sparked Max’s temper. “How could you sit back and do nothing? You’re only alive right now because someone else died in your place!”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. Look, I can code a script for you that will place it in the right area of the CDN, if you can plug it directly into a production server. Provided they haven’t altered the architecture. And you’ll have to force a restart for the changes to take effect, before they discover it on one of their routine security checks. Running a maintenance cycle ought to do it.”

  “I’ll take it.” Max said.

  “Listen, I’m sorry it went down this way. I feel partially responsible.”

  Max bit back his reply. “There’s enough blame for all of us. We all let Evan down. But we can still make it right.”

  When Max turned his phone back on outside of Jem’s tent, the sun was rising, filtering through the trees. He hurried back toward the main road. As soon as his phone
picked up a signal, it beeped: He had missed four calls from Risse.

  He rang her back.

  “Max! Penny’s gone!” Risse said.

  “What?” Max walked faster.

  “We got back home last night and the Feds were waiting for us.”

  Risse told him how they’d ditched their stolen car and walked home from Denny’s. As soon as they’d reached their driveway they were surrounded by armed agents. Their front door had been kicked in and their house raided. Their mom was freaking out.

  “I’m sorry. This is my fault,” Max said. Vic had warned him. Now he was going after Penny and Risse.

  “No, it isn’t. They found her through the mail. They had a photo of the package Evan sent her with that CD. They were just following up, but because of our escape at the mall, all on security video, they have something to charge her with. At least they didn’t find anything in our house—we cleaned it out pretty well. But they took our computers too.”

  Risse choked back a sob.

  “Can you get access to another computer?” Max asked.

  “Of course. I’ll steal one if I have to.”

  “Get it, then get somewhere safe where you can work. You’ll need to be online.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “Text me when you’re set up.” By then, he hoped he would have figured it out. “Make sure you aren’t followed. They still might be watching your house. Vic has probably figured out who Penny is by now, but they still don’t know about you, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  Penny would never forgive Max if he let anything happen to her sister. He wouldn’t forgive himself.

  And he would not let Penny become another one of the silenced. Someone was going to live through this, damn it. And Sharpe and Panjea were going to pay.

  27

  From behind his mask, Max stared into the bright light above his laptop screen. He looked at the webcam and watched his mirror image in the tiny window. This was the last thing Evan had seen: his own reflection on a monitor. And now Max was filming his own video for the same reasons, before potentially committing suicide.