Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

‘What’s wrong?’ Warden asks.

  ‘An alarm,’ she responds. ‘There’s an alarm built in to warn the operators if anyone tries to hack the system. It’s not like I haven’t seen that sort of thing before, but it’s not where I would have expected it to be hidden. Crap, that was clever.’

  ‘Can you bypass it?’

  ‘I think so,’ she responds – now she’s seen it. It takes several more minutes, going cautiously – there are a few more pitfalls and snags built in – but she makes it through. And she doesn’t trigger the alarm.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ breathes Warden, ‘remind me never to piss you off.’

  Mallory clicks through menus until several different CCTV feeds are displayed. She scans them quickly.

  ‘There,’ points Warden.

  Her eyes follow his finger to the feed from what looks like the club’s security office, where a woman in a black staff shirt is fixated on a bank of screens. The woman doesn’t seem to have noticed the invasion of the system, but Mallory can’t see her left hand from this camera angle, can’t tell if it’s marked with Daedalus’s symbol. She taps out the pattern once, her own left-hand middle finger against her thumb, watching for a further few seconds, just to be sure…

  Nothing. They’re in clean.

  She searches the different feeds until she finds the room the server is in. It’s thankfully empty, and she starts recording the footage from it, ready to be looped. Technically, Warden doesn’t need access to the server itself to place the bug, just a connected cable, but the server room seemed the quickest way of finding that without knowing the wiring layout.

  ‘You’re up,’ she tells him.

  ‘Right, yes.’ He glances anxiously at the air duct again, then starts rummaging around in his satchel, taking out a pair of latex gloves. His fingers fumble against the plastic as he tries to pull them on. He swears and yanks off the beanie hat, claiming he’s too hot and it’s making his hands clammy. He shoves it in his satchel, hair now completely sticking up at all angles. Mallory bites her lip, sympathy eating at her.

  ‘You don’t have to do this.’ She says it before she really thinks it. He stops, looking back at her. ‘You don’t have to,’ she repeats, though part of her wishes she’d stayed silent. Maybe it’s just because he gave her a get-out too. ‘I can download the footage from here…’ She trails off. Warden hesitates, just for a moment, then he shakes his head.

  ‘Safer this way,’ he says, ‘off site before we download anything, and we’ll have more time so the bleed can be slower and they’ll be less likely to notice.’ It’s what he’d said before. He nods at her, once, a little more sure.

  ‘We need to hurry, then,’ Mallory says. She glances at the clock on her laptop.

  Crap.

  Too long already. Her own nerves flutter. There’s only so much time they can stay in a club bathroom before someone else will want to use it. Warden nods again, and finally manages to pull on the gloves. He turns to the sink and begins attempting to climb it in what appears to be the most uncoordinated way possible. After several failed attempts and a series of panicky grunting noises, he’s standing with one leg balanced precariously on the basin, the other on a hand rail. He does not look stable.

  ‘Looping the feed now,’ Mallory says. She sets the recorded footage playing back, overwriting what the camera will be seeing live. A quick check tells her the security woman didn’t notice a glitch as it switched. ‘We’re good,’ she says.

  Warden mumbles something that may or may not have been ‘brilliant’, and unclips the access panel on the side of the duct.

  ‘Is now a bad time to tell you I’m afraid of heights?’ he says.

  ‘You’re three foot up.’ Mallory glances at the clock again.

  ‘And germs, I don’t like those either.’

  ‘Just do it already!’ Adrenaline makes her voice come out harsher than she’d intended and she feels a flush of guilt. They’re taking too long, though. ‘If you’re going to go,’ she adds, more evenly. ‘Just, we can’t stay in here forever.’

  ‘Right,’ he gulps. ‘Yes, absolutely.’ He reaches upwards, hooking both arms into the opening and trying to pull himself up.

  Trying.

  Oh hell…

  Mallory rises, pushing her laptop aside. She reaches up, trying to help balance him, her hands buzzing where they touch.

  ‘Don’t kick me!’ she yells, as a flailing sneaker almost catches her in the face. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he calls down, voice muffled from the duct. ‘This is harder than it looks in movies.’ Eventually, he makes it in and brightness flares beyond him as he sets his phone to flashlight. ‘Oh, good grief,’ he gasps, ‘you would not believe how dirty it is in here.’

  ‘Warden.’

  ‘I’m just saying, do not be encouraged about the air you’re breathing right now.’

  She hears scuffling then, though, as he starts making his way along the duct, following the path she’d shown him on the blueprints back in the diner. She returns to check the laptop. The loop is still running, the woman in the security office still unaware. Sixty seconds pass. Ninety. One-twenty. The room where the server is stored is only fifty-three feet away; he can do this, they can…

  Someone bangs on the door. She jumps.

  ‘Speed it up,’ they demand.

  Crap.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mallory answers.

  Come on, Warden, come on…

  Her finger starts tapping as she looks back at the screen. She has both feeds of the server room displayed – the looped one that will be playing on the security office’s monitor, and the real, live one. Finally, Warden appears in the second, clambering out of the vent. He dangles there for at least ten seconds.

  Come on. Come on!

  He drops to the floor, collapsing in a dusty heap of awkward landing.

  ‘Look, lady, hurry up!’ the door shouts again.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mallory snaps. Warden is now crouched down behind a desk, fumbling with something…

  The guy outside keeps yelling, gradually becoming more irate, his language more colorful. Warden slips his laptop out of the satchel. It’s connected to the internet via a portable Wi-Fi dongle he’d brought with him – something Mallory doesn’t entirely like, but it’s way more secure than using the club’s. He’ll be checking the connection to the bug, checking it’s all linked in… He turns and looks up at the camera, giving a thumbs up. She feels a rush of relief, but at the same time, fricking come on!

  ‘That’s it,’ states the door, ‘you don’t come out, I’m calling security!’

  Oh crap, crap, crap…

  Mallory unleashes a venomous stream of profanity at whoever’s out there, hoping to scare them off. They stop talking, at least. Warden is standing on the desk now, trying to pull himself back into the vent, but it looks like he’s struggling, legs dangling wildly into the open air…

  No, no, no…

  Two painful minutes later, he finally makes it up. There’s a bang on the door.

  ‘This is security,’ a new voice says. ‘Everything all right in there?’

  Shit.

  ‘Yes,’ Mallory yells, her already racing pulse jumping further, ‘yeah, just coming!’ With Warden out the server room and the vent that end shut, she types quickly, shutting down the loop, hoping he’s moving his ass real fast down that duct…

  ‘We operate a strict no drugs policy,’ the voice continues, ‘and I got a guy here saying you been in there near on twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘I’m not doing drugs!’ she answers, which is probably exactly what someone doing drugs would say. ‘I’m just…’ Her mind goes helpfully blank for once. ‘I’m just coming.’

  Come on, Warden. Come on!

  She stands beneath the opening, laptop stashed away back in her bag, willing him to get there faster. She can hear him clunking closer…

  ‘Ma’am, let me be clear. You don’t come out, I’m going to have to open that door.’<
br />
  Warden’s face appears in the vent, flushed and covered in dust.

  ‘I think I burst a blood vessel doing that,’ he gasps.

  ‘Get the hell down here,’ she hisses.

  ‘Ma’am!’

  Warden’s head snaps towards the door.

  ‘Oh bollocks.’ He slides his way out of the duct, in what is the fastest, but definitely most ungainly maneuver so far, Mallory having to grab his arm to stop him falling after he closes the vent and drops down from the sink. ‘So… dirty…’ he breathes, quickly peeling off the now black-tipped latex gloves, before trying to brush the grime off his clothes.

  ‘Ma’am, I’m coming in!’ shouts the man outside.

  ‘What do we do?’ Warden asks, paling.

  Mallory’s mind flicks back to the man with the blue jacket who first saw them go in, to what he had thought… She looks back at Warden, hesitates just a second, then clears the distance between them and grabs his hand. Her skin beneath her gloves tingles at the touch, but she makes herself interlace the fingers.

  ‘What – ?’ he begins. There’s the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  ‘Just follow,’ she says. ‘Glasses back on.’

  He obeys and she yanks the door open herself, just as someone else pushes it in from the other side. A thickset bouncer stands in the doorway, arm still raised. He looks momentarily taken aback. Behind him peers a red-faced squirt of a man with badly-dyed black hair.

  You’re Echo Six, Mallory thinks.

  She smiles at the bouncer – smiles in the way Jeanie always smiled at guys when she wanted something – and exits the room, pulling the still-breathless Warden after her.

  ‘All done,’ she says, running her free hand through his hair with a wicked grin.

  You are damn well okay.

  Warden helpfully smiles like an idiot, though she’s not quite sure it was intentional. She walks past the stunned bouncer and the little squirt man, not waiting for a response, then she pushes open the door back into main club, bracing herself against the assault of sound. She steps out, her hand gripped like a vice onto Warden’s, a shadow of Echo pumping in her veins.

  Trust

  ‘I can’t believe we just did that,’ Warden mutters. They’re three blocks away from Labyrinth and he’s been repeating it solidly for almost two minutes whilst lathering his hands in antibacterial gel, as promised. ‘I can’t believe we bloody did that.’ His eyes are wide, but he’s sort of smiling, like he’s just been given a present he doesn’t quite trust is real. It is surreal. All of Mallory’s senses are still buzzing, this bizarre and twitchy combination of feeling like she’s escaping from something, alongside coming off the high of a hack. ‘I mean, bloody hell,’ he goes on. ‘We just bugged a New York nightclub. I actually went into a nightclub, for starters… And then we bugged it. We bloody bugged it!’

  ‘And now you’re telling everyone,’ Mallory says. Warden glances behind him, startled, but the street they’re on is fairly empty and no one’s looking at them.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says anyway. ‘It’s just, we did it. And it was way cooler than hacking from my bedroom with my mother coming in every half hour and asking me where she left her foot massager.’ He smiles at Mallory then, a full smile, and some of his relief seems to seep into her – though it almost hadn’t been a clean out. When he’d gone to pick up his suitcase, it had looked as if a drink had been spilt down it. Even in a club they were trying to leave quickly and without notice, he’d almost had a fit. ‘It’s bad enough,’ he had said, ‘that I had my things manhandled by that giant on the door, but this? My granny gave me this suitcase!’ At which point Mallory had given him the adrenaline-fueled glare of a lifetime and told the cloakroom lady he’d had too much to drink, dragging him away before they could become reacquainted with security. He’d calmed down a bit once they’d got outside, once they’d put a block between them and the club and he wasn’t quite so jumped up. He’d moved quickly from anger, to disbelief, to wonderment. Hence, why he’s now grinning at her like a total dumbass. In spite of everything, in spite of how simultaneously wired and exhausted she is, Mallory smiles back at him. She shakes her head, not quite believing it either, especially after how it had started out. She smiles because they did it – and she smiles because the things that make him angry or excited, and the way he talks about them… it’s all just so familiar, even though in one way they’ve only just met.

  ‘Who do you think they were,’ Warden asks, ‘the people with the tattoos?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her mood drops a notch.

  ‘Do you think that was the hack The Asker wanted you to help with? Maybe he thought Scarlet had been there. Maybe’ – he pauses to hold his breath as they walk past a steaming manhole cover – ‘that hidden alarm could have caught him.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mallory repeats. It was tricky, certainly, and, if she’s honest, the alarm had almost caught her… but it was a one person hack – breaking into the system itself required only one laptop and one hacker. Why would The Asker have needed her help? Unless he’d been after footage specifically as well, and had wanted to do a similar thing to what she and Warden had just done to avoid detection. Did he know hardwire bugs too? Maybe without Mallory, he’d had to download the large video files quickly, on site, and someone had noticed the data spike and…

  Not helpful, she tells herself, shutting off that train of thought. It’s all ifs and maybes and a whole shedload of unsubstantiated assumptions until they can actually watch the footage from Monday night.

  ‘Or maybe,’ Warden says, ‘The Asker had found out about the delta people, just from looking into Daedalus and that was why he was there – nothing specifically to do with Scarlet – and the hack he wanted your help for was some other completely different lead?’ He looks at Mallory expectantly, then hesitates, seeing her downcast expression. ‘Or maybe you don’t know that too,’ he adds, ‘and I don’t know it either and I should just stop making suggestions until we do.’ He takes out his phone – the universal gesture for I feel awkward. Gaps in conversation are much easier when you can minimize a chat box. Mallory focuses on the paving stones, suddenly self-conscious. They walk in silence for a while.

  ‘Hey, check this out,’ Warden says, a few blocks later, ‘I did a web search for delta tattoos on the left hand and guess what it came up with?’ Mallory glances up. ‘Children of Daedalus.’ His eyebrows rise meaningfully.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cod people,’ he elaborates.

  ‘I know who you mean.’ She takes the phone from him, acutely aware of their fingers touching. It’s open on a Daedalus forum, this one entitled Save The Minotaur.

  How many of these things are there?

  In the selected thread, someone’s asking about the exact same tattoo they saw in the club.

  ‘The capital delta tattoo,’ Warden recites, even as Mallory reads the first response, ‘drawn on the left hand, with the point facing the fingers, signifies membership of the cyber gang Children of Daedalus. An official tattoo can only be applied by an existing member and incorrect application results in complete ostracism.’ She scrolls down, but the discussion then diverts into the generic merits and hindrances of membership tats. She hands the phone back to Warden, frowning.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she says. ‘CoD looked harmless. I mean, really harmless. It took me less than five minutes to crack their message boards and, aside from the fact there was no mention of missing hackers, it was mainly just some seriously disturbing Daedalus role-play and gushing discussions of anything from his video editing skills to his hacks.’ Warden looks questioning at that, so she adds, ‘But not in a way that made me think they really knew what they were talking about.’

  ‘Maybe that was a front,’ he suggests. She hesitates. She doesn’t think so – she should have been able to tell if there was something hidden in the architecture, even if she couldn’t access it right away – but she’ll check it again tomorrow. They finally reach
the twenty-four hour parking garage where she left the Chevy. She stops. It’s not raining any more, but the ground is still damp.

  ‘This is you?’ Warden asks.

  ‘Yes.’ He already looks cold again, though they’ve only been outside twenty minutes. He glances at his watch, then nervously around the street – and she realizes something. ‘You don’t have anywhere to stay, do you?’ she says.

  ‘Not technically,’ he mumbles, freckled cheeks flushing a little redder. ‘Everything was a bit of a rush making it here at all; getting the bug back from school and the flight booked, then packing and getting to LAX in time for check in. I mean, I guess I was thinking I’d just try and find a hotel…’ He sort of shrugs, looking distinctly unnerved as he takes in the dark, empty street. ‘Do you know any? You know, preferably nice, definitely cheap.’ She can just imagine him wandering round the Bronx looking for one at this time of night, with that damn wheelie suitcase and his laptop slung over his shoulder in a bright green satchel…

  He’ll get mugged.

  He’ll damn well get mugged.

  All because he flew right across the country to help me, she thinks. She bites her lip.

  ‘Echo?’

  She makes a decision.

  ‘I live just under a couple of hours away,’ she says, ‘a place called Watertown. We need to go through the footage together anyway, and we don’t know where that’ll lead and I can’t keep driving back up here.’ Her hand taps furiously against her leg, part of her wondering just what in the hell she is doing. ‘You can stay with us, if you want to.’ The words come out anyway. She watches him carefully, notes that he hesitates, and feels her own cheeks redden. It obviously wasn’t what he was expecting.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

  Maybe she shouldn’t be. Her doubts get louder. She has crossed all kinds of boundaries she said she never would tonight, but spending two hours alone in a car with a hacker from the internet – no matter how familiar he feels – taking him back to her house, back to where her dad and her brother are sleeping?

  Still…

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you back there…’ If it hadn’t been for him, she’d have probably passed out right in the middle of that dance floor and she doesn’t know where she’d be right now. She certainly wouldn’t have made the hack. He came through for her; him, in person. For a moment, they watch each other, both wondering, both assessing.