Don't Turn Around

by Michelle Gagnon

  She started by zeroing in on the warehouse complex where she’d been held. Hacking into the city records department was more complicated than getting on a wireless router, but only slightly. It was laughable how easy it was to dig around most government sites. Corporations tended to be trickier, since they went to the trouble of hiring people like her to test their networks. Most local and state governments simply didn’t have the cash flow to protect themselves.

  The boatyard and warehouses were registered to the same corporation: ANG Import/Export. Which sounded innocuous enough. Noa started to dig through corporate records, trying to find out more about the company.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that ANG Import/Export was owned by another company based in the Bahamas, which in turn was owned by another company that didn’t seem to exist outside of filing for S-Corp status....

  Twelve companies later, Noa sat back, frustrated. So far none of them seemed to exist as anything but a hiding place for more companies. It was like one of those Russian nesting dolls, where you pulled the two halves apart only to find another smaller doll inside, then another inside that one … only she was starting to get the sense that these dolls might go on forever. The clock at the top of her monitor read one a.m. Noa rubbed her eyes. She felt physically exhausted, but oddly not tired. The thin curtains over the windows were barely going to block the morning light, so she’d probably awaken at dawn, anyway. She might as well try to get some rest.

  Noa wished she’d grabbed some toiletries at a drugstore. She had a terrible taste in her mouth, metallic and strange, and she’d love to wash the grime off her face. Luckily she still didn’t feel hungry, because this definitely wasn’t the type of hotel that boasted a vending machine. She’d be lucky to find a half-used bar of soap in the bathroom.

  She used two fingers to peel the bedspread off the bed—even though she was freezing, it didn’t seem like something she’d want any part of her body to come in contact with. Noa scooted between the sheets and stared up at the ceiling. She finally allowed herself to stop and process what had happened to her—Or what might have been done, she thought with a shudder.

  Hesitantly, Noa reached under her sweatshirt and grabbed a corner of the bandage, carefully peeling it away. She ran her fingers over the incision on her chest contemplatively. It was a diagonal slice that started in the center of her rib cage and ran right at a slight downward angle for three inches. The skin surrounding it felt colder than the rest, the scab itself just a narrow line. The weird thing was that it barely hurt anymore. Earlier it had felt like her ribs were cracked and broken, the cut itself sharp and painful. But now the wound barely throbbed. And her foot already felt better, too. She unpeeled the gauze and checked; the cut must not have been as deep as she thought; it was barely even visible. Strange.

  And even though she felt exhausted, Noa couldn’t sleep. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how. Not that that was unusual. She’d suffered bouts of insomnia her entire life—especially at The Center, where sleep made you vulnerable. But after Noa got her own apartment, that had changed. For the first time in her life, she’d slept eight, nine, sometimes even ten hours a night. It was amazing what a difference feeling safe made.

  Now, apparently, that was gone again. Noa lay there examining the various water stains covering the ceiling, and other, darker marks that looked suspiciously like blood spatter. Her mind drifted over to Vallas, and she frowned. Meeting him in person kind of changed her whole view of /ALLIANCE/. It wasn’t that he was just a kid, like her; most people her age were useless, but she’d met enough exceptions to know better than to underestimate them.

  It was more that Vallas was clearly a rich kid. That bugged her. Plus he’d practically accused Noa of stealing from him, which really ticked her off. Here she was trying to figure out who had kidnapped her, and she had to waste time researching something that was probably ridiculous. It’s important, he’d claimed. She could just imagine what a kid like that thought was important: whether or not he’d gotten early acceptance to Harvard, probably, or if they were testing shampoo on bunnies in a lab.

  Not that she supported that sort of thing, but Noa hadn’t gotten involved with /ALLIANCE/ because of their animal-cruelty efforts. They’d drawn her attention with other raids, against the type of people that she’d once fallen prey to.

  And World of Warcraft? Really?

  The whole thing irked her. As soon as she got access to her money again, she’d send Vallas a check. The last thing she wanted was to feel indebted to a punk who probably lived in some Brookline mansion.

  But then, her own research seemed to have hit a dead end.

  Even though it was late, Noa sensed she wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep yet. Sighing, she went back to her laptop and tapped a key, bringing it out of sleep mode. A Google search for Project Persephone spit out a bunch of links to Greek mythology sites and books, but nothing that seemed to be an actual “project.” She went into her email and found a new message from Vallas. He’d sent the link, along with a single word: Thanks.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Noa muttered to herself. She wondered what was up with that story about a bunch of commandos breaking into his house. It seemed ridiculously implausible, but she decided to take some precautions just in case. There were entire international proxy servers devoted to helping you cover your tracks. Set up mainly to protect financial schemers and pornography-sharing creeps, they also functioned as a sort of superhighway for hackers. Noa covered her tracks by hopping from a server in Colorado to one in Virginia, then to the UK, Russia, China, India, Texas, Brazil, Mexico, Japan … leaping from one to the next until she could be relatively certain that her true location would be untraceable. It was like creating a vast and complicated spiderweb. By the time she finished, even if investigators managed to follow half the threads, they’d never make it back to the beginning before she’d finished the hack, signing off and leaving behind a dead end. Because if Vallas hadn’t just been lying to impress her, the last thing she needed to deal with tonight was more armed men. By the end, Noa had gone through a few dozen servers, ending with one based in Hungary, a country with few Internet laws. Then she finally accessed the corporate mainframe.

  She was immediately confronted by a firewall. No surprise there; any company worth their salt had a decent one in place these days. Legend had it that the only one hackers had never managed to infiltrate was Coca-Cola; supposedly that corporation spent a fortune keeping their secret formula secret.

  Noa started with the standard protocols. She compared it to trying to stick a pin into a balloon without popping it—you had to probe carefully so that it didn’t just blow up in your face; a lot of sites went into automatic lockdown if they detected an infiltrator. She should know—her work for Rocket Science mainly consisted of setting up those sorts of protections. Or if the walls had already been breached, it was her job to try and mitigate the damage, and ensure that it didn’t happen again.

  The trick was to act as if you were someone who belonged, but were stumbling around, like a drunk guy having trouble fitting a key into his front door. At every company there were plenty of employees with legitimate access to the server who had trouble remembering passwords and entered the wrong one a few times. The truly great hackers breached the wall that way, waiting for the server to spit out hints.

  This one was sophisticated, though—clearly established by people who knew what they were doing. Noa found herself intrigued in spite of her doubts about Vallas. Whatever they were hiding, it probably wasn’t college admissions information.

  She kept at it. Hours passed. The sun came up and daylight seeped through the thin curtains, but Noa was so absorbed she didn’t even notice. It was well after eight a.m. when she finally had a breakthrough and her screen suddenly flooded with information. Noa sat back as stacks of folders populated her screen: way too many to fit on a flash drive, she immediately realized. There were thousands related to Project Persephone, amid other projects with similarly ob
tuse names.

  Noa felt a surge of annoyance. Vallas should have been more specific about what he was looking for; she couldn’t send him this much data. She decided to assemble a sampling—hopefully that would suffice. After all, it wasn’t like he’d actually be paying for this. She didn’t mind helping out fellow hackers for free on occasion, even when they turned out to be spoiled rich kids. And he had done a lot of good via /ALLIANCE/.

  She started clicking on folders at random, moving them onto the flash drive. Twenty seemed like a good number. And if what he was looking for wasn’t among them, that was just too bad. She needed to get her own house in order.

  Twelve folders in, she froze on one titled, “TEST SUBJECTS: BOSTON.”

  That wasn’t what had caught her eye, though. The third file down was named “Noa Torson.”

  Peter’s heel beat a steady rhythm against the floor. It wasn’t something he could help, just a nervous habit he’d developed as a kid. Still, he could tell it was getting on Bob’s nerves.

  For once, his father didn’t lay into him about it. “Tell me again exactly what Mason said.” Bob was leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped.

  “I told you,” Peter said impatiently. “He said to give you and Mom his best, and then he said someone would come by to fix the door, and that you should call him.”

  “Call him right away?” Bob pressed.

  “At your earliest convenience.” Peter slouched in his chair, but his leg kept moving. “That’s exactly what he said.”

  His parents exchanged a glance. They’d pulled into the driveway minutes after him, a little after eleven, and immediately hustled him into his father’s office.

  Peter’s focus kept drifting to the imprint of a large bootheel on the carpet by the armchair. The front door had already been repaired by the time he got home, so this mark was the only real proof that he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

  Not that he’d had any trouble convincing his parents. And yet they were treating Peter as if he’d done something wrong.

  His mother nervously fingered a string of pearls as she leaned against his father’s desk. Priscilla was wearing her official “casual” outfit, a thousand-dollar Gucci sweat suit. Her makeup had gathered in the creases around her eyes and mouth, and her hair was mussed, like she’d been running her hands through it.

  Peter hadn’t seen either of them this anxious in a long time. Stressed, sure, but it had been years since they’d looked this tense and fearful. Like something very bad was happening and they were helpless to prevent it. It was unnerving.

  “And he didn’t say why they broke in?” Bob asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Nope.” Peter’s eyes shifted away to the fireplace.

  “What were you doing, Peter?” his mother asked worriedly.

  “Nothing. Just hanging out.”

  “You must have been doing something,” his dad said, a disapproving note in his voice.

  “I wasn’t. Man, I can’t believe some jerks broke into our house, and you’re trying to blame me for it.”

  “We’re not blaming you, Peter,” his mother said soothingly. “It’s just—” Another glance at his father. “Well, Mr. Mason doesn’t do things without a reason.”

  “Mr. Mason? Who the hell is this guy? How do you know him?”

  “That’s not important,” Bob said.

  “Well, it seems pretty important based on how you’re giving me the third degree.”

  They fell silent.

  “I’m going upstairs to crash,” Peter announced, getting to his feet. “Getting beat up really took it out of me.”

  “We’re not done talking yet, young—”

  “Let him go, Bob,” his mother said. “It’s past midnight.”

  His father looked peeved, but pointed a stubby index finger at Peter and said, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Great,” Peter grumbled. “I can’t wait.”

  “Good night, sweetheart,” his mother said, but her focus remained on Bob. They were doing that thing he hated, where it was like they were communicating telepathically, leaving him out of the conversation. Typical, he thought, stalking out of the office. They never really told him anything, still treating him like he was eight years old.

  Peter trotted up the flight of stairs and down the hall to his bedroom, which overlooked the pool behind their house. Inside his room, he automatically headed over to his desk, then remembered that his laptop had been stolen. He made an exasperated noise and flopped down on his bed, digging out his cell phone to text Amanda.

  Still up?

  He waited a few minutes, but she didn’t respond. Which meant she was either already asleep, or still working on her paper and didn’t want to be bothered. That seemed to be happening more and more lately. The fact that she was already living away from home made him keenly aware of their age difference. Funny how it hadn’t seemed like a big deal when she was a senior in high school and he was a junior. Now it was like she’d leaped ahead of him and joined the league of adults, and he was left behind at the kids’ table.

  He opened the picture he’d taken of Amanda the weekend before, when they’d met for lunch at a diner near campus. Peter had caught her unawares when she was looking out the window. Just wondering how long it’ll rain, she’d claimed when he asked. But she had that familiar look in her eye. Amanda was a private person—it was one of the things he liked about her; she wasn’t one of those girls who talked your ear off about silly, inconsequential things. It was what had first attracted him to her, the fact that she was so serious about everything. And when she gave you her undivided attention, focusing all that intense energy on you, there was nothing better.

  In the photo, though, she was clearly a million miles away. Worse yet, her expression indicated she’d rather be somewhere else. Peter hadn’t noticed it at the time, but now whenever he looked, that was all he saw.

  He turned off the phone and sighed. He’d already applied to Harvard for early acceptance, figuring that way he and Amanda could still see a lot of each other. And he was pretty much guaranteed to get in. He was a third-generation legacy, and Bob had given the university a ridiculous amount of money over the years to make up for Peter’s mediocre grades.

  Now he wondered if he might not be better off applying somewhere else instead. Stanford, maybe. After all, Silicon Valley was the tech capital of the world, and he’d be working in that field when he graduated. Sunny California, far, far away from here.

  It was sounding better and better, Peter thought as he rolled over and shut off the light.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Noa stared at the screen, the mouse hovering over the file labeled with her name. Even though it was Sunday, there was a chance that shortly the server would be flooded with users. Which greatly increased the likelihood that her presence would be discovered. She flashed back on what Vallas had said, about the guys breaking into his house. Maybe he wasn’t being melodramatic.

  She clicked open the file and skimmed a few of the documents. There were slides, diagrams, pages and pages of medical notes. Noa couldn’t decipher most of them; they were a muddle of unintelligible scientific jargon. All she could tell for certain was that they involved some sort of experiment.

  Her hand unconsciously went to her chest again. Was that what they’d done? Treated her like a guinea pig, maybe even removed an organ or something? If so, it didn’t seem to be anything she could live without—all things considered, she felt all right. Still, the thought of some stranger undressing her, cutting her open, and poking around inside her … it made her blood run cold. Noa forced it from her mind. With effort she dissociated, trying to treat this like it was just an assignment, a problem to solve that had nothing to do with her.

  Okay, then, Noa thought, running a hand through her hair and forcing herself to draw a deep breath. It was obvious that whoever had access to these files was supposed to know the backstory; these were just test results.

  She stopped de
ad on one photo: a shot taken of her lying on the metal table. The camera was positioned above and slightly to the right. The IV was there, and the other trays were wheeled closer, hovering around the table like casual observers. There were no other people visible. She was even paler than usual, almost blue. It looked like one of those morgue shots they showed on TV cop shows.

  Noa shuddered and closed the file, then double-checked to make sure it wasn’t on the flash drive she was giving Vallas. She hesitated, then sent a copy to her personal email file, along with everything else in that folder.

  She signed off the server and went back to the bed to lie down. Part of her felt like she’d never been so tired in her life, yet at the same time Noa was certain she wouldn’t be able to sleep. It was almost nine a.m.; she’d have to be out of the hotel room in two hours, anyway. She’d considered paying for two nights up front, but figured it was smarter to keep moving. Maybe she could find something moderately better, or at least cleaner.

  And she needed to get a phone, too. She debated whether or not to contact Vallas right away. Knowing now that the project was linked to what had happened to her, she wasn’t gung ho to hand the flash drive over. Who knew what he planned on doing with the information? Was this going to be another of /ALLIANCE/’s exposés? Were they planning on pranking the people who had cut her open?

  For her at least, that wouldn’t suffice. Noa decided to put him off for a day. She’d just tell him she hadn’t gotten around to it.

  She logged on to her account. The email backup of the files was there, along with another email from Vallas. He sounded impatient, asking if she’d found anything yet.

  She was about to compose a reply when another email popped into her inbox. She didn’t recognize the sender, A6M0, but it was rare for spam to make it through her filter. And the subject heading read: Warehouse Fire.

  She hesitated, then opened it. There was a jpeg photo in the body of the email. Based on the angle, it was taken from the security gate as she passed by on top of the fire truck. So one of the cameras had been positioned high enough.