‘Right, don’t miss anything,’ Warden says lightly. ‘Don’t miss a needle of unknown size and shape in a whole barn full of hay… On it.’
‘What happened to, ‘We’ll find him, Echo?’’ Mallory asks, quoting from last night.
‘I don’t know.’ He flushes a little. ‘I was still jumped up on the high of success?’ he suggests. Then, ‘Sorry, I am on it.’ He looks purposefully at the laptop. ‘We should mark up any images we find of the people with the tattoos, too, could be another way to go.’
‘Good idea.’
It is slow going. Even starting with just the footage from eight forty onwards, there’s still masses to trawl through. Plus, the club’s lighting is a frustrating mix of dingy and sporadically bright – which does not go well with the cameras’ fuzzy night vision. They start off working in silence, but silence never did sit well with Warden. Mallory can hear him fidgeting for a good few minutes before he speaks. Then he starts talking, going on about random things he likes, like he does when they’re online. He talks about TV shows and movies, and his favorite methods of breaking into dial locks, stopping only to answer another buzzing text on his phone. It actually makes Mallory feel better, helps her focus more. There are certain rhythms to his speech that are just so familiar to her from his words in text. She lets it all sink into the background as she watches the slo-mo dancing, as she marks anyone using a device, or anyone with a Greek delta on their hand. There are a few… not many, and they’re mainly just clubbers – only two members of staff with it so far.
Mallory’s so intent on the task that she actually jumps when her own phone beeps, breaking through the temporary calm. She frowns. The only person who usually texts her is Jed, and he’s in his room playing his DS. Maybe it’s Heidi saying her mom got pissed and she needs to go to the store. She pulls the phone out of her bag. It’s not a text, it’s an email notification from the Forum. Her pulse lifts a notch as she clicks on it, though it’s probably nothing more than a mistyped password…
Her heart slams inside her chest.
It’s a message alert. Only messages from two specific accounts will send her notifications this way. This one is from The Asker.
‘Warden,’ she stammers, already closing the footage and heading online. ‘Warden.’
‘What is it?’
‘He’s messaged me,’ she says, hope sparking as she begins logging in.
‘Who has?’
‘The Asker.’
‘What the – ’ He stumbles over. He sees her completing the last stage of the back door log in, but she doesn’t care. The Forum’s welcome pop up appears on the screen. She closes it and the chat box is there, waiting for her. The Asker’s icon is in grey, so he’s not online any more, but he’s left her a message.
He’s left…
She starts to read and her body seems to go cold, the hope she felt turning to an icy shiver that runs right from the base of her spine to the very tips of her fingers.
‘Oh no,’ says Warden.
Hello, Echo Six, it begins.
We have The Asker and we have heard he is important to you. This is fortunate as we would very much like to talk with you. You see, we need your assistance on a matter of great importance. We shall be honest with you, we don’t know where you are in the world. You are too good for that – which, ironically, makes us want your help all the more. As such, we are giving you twenty-four hours; twenty-four hours in which to reach New York City, USA, and contact us via this Forum so we can arrange to meet.
Be assured, should you comply with this request, you will not be harmed in any way. We are great admirers of your work and simply need your help. If, however, you do not meet this deadline, you will never see or hear from The Asker again. Any attempt on your part to engage the authorities will not end well for him. We have eyes and ears everywhere.
Yours,
Children of Daedalus
Ransom
‘What the hell?’ whispers Warden. ‘This is a ransom note. It’s a bloody ransom note. The Asker’s been kidnapped?’
Mallory stares at the screen, her mind bombarded with so many different thoughts that she can’t seem to grasp hold of any one of them. Of course, they’d known, technically, that it was an option someone had been after him… but the sudden confirmation of it among several possibilities… actual kidnapping? Everything has got a whole shitload worse. Noise is rushing through her ears, even though all she can really hear is the whirr of the laptops and Warden’s increasingly fast breathing.
‘And they want you?’ he goes on. ‘Echo, why would they want you? I mean, how do they even know you exist? Unless they forced The Asker…’ His voice falters. ‘I mean they got onto his account and he would never willingly let anyone near the Forum.’
No, he wouldn’t, Mallory thinks. What has happened to him over the past five days? She feels sick. And the CoD… who the hell are these people? What did she miss?
‘Bloody hell,’ Warden says. ‘Oh bloody, bloody…’ He keeps on cursing, wondering out loud what the hell is going on, but Mallory can’t speak, can’t take her eyes off the screen, rereading the words, over and over, her insides coiling up and tying themselves into suffocating knots. Part of her doesn’t want to fight it. Part of her wants to collapse in on herself, close the laptop, lock all the doors and never leave her room. Never think about…
Words are streaming out of Warden’s mouth in a panicked flow. He’s talking about the Children of Daedalus now, talking about the tattoos, wondering who at the club knew what, and how it doesn’t all quite make sense to him.
‘Echo?’ he says, seeming to notice, then, that she hasn’t said anything yet. ‘Echo, you can’t just sit there like a sodding prune, we have to do something!’
She doesn’t know what, though. She wants to shut it all away and hide, but The Asker, the man who once saved her…
The Asker.
Oh no… she thinks, no, her eyes blurring with unshed tears that won’t help anything. Get a grip, Mallory.
Warden starts pacing, repeating the short walk from one wall to the other, seeming to give up on her.
‘Maybe we should go to the police,’ he says. ‘Maybe we should tell someone…’
Mallory finally looks at him, dragging her eyes away from the screen. She can tell from the way he stops that those words have them both remembering their conversation in the car last night about how pretty much everything they’ve been doing – that The Asker’s been doing – is seriously illegal. The weight of it, the reality of it suddenly comes crashing down on Mallory then in a way it never fully has before, because how can they go to anyone for help? And it’s not just her stupid personal hang-ups about the police because of Jeanie any more. For starters, what would they tell them? How would they show them the ransom message? They still don’t have any idea where The Asker actually is and the only way to communicate with the CoD is through the Forum – and the Forum could land twenty-two different people in jail, especially The Asker and…
And…
Any attempt on your part to engage the authorities will not end well for him.
And that’s the crux of it. Mallory chest’s tightens so much it hurts.
‘We can’t,’ she answers, voice cracking. They’re alone.
‘No, Echo, this is bigger than us,’ Warden says. ‘It’s got so much bloody bigger than us, it’s ridiculous.’ His voice is rising in pitch, freckle-dusted cheeks blotching red. ‘It isn’t going to a club, looking for where someone we know has just gone off to, or disappeared to, or even been scared off to; it’s a full, bloody kidnapping!’
‘I know, Warden! But you saw what they said.’
He shakes his head.
‘They can’t be watching everywhere,’ he says.
‘But we don’t know what they are watching.’
‘The FBI will have back channels, protocols for anonymous tip offs.’
‘These are hackers!’ Mallory replies. ‘Just like us. Fucking brilliant elites, in f
act, given the people they’ve already managed to locate.’
‘But – ’
‘If we do this wrong, The Asker could end up dead!’
Warden stops. His face is pale and he looks so damn scared…
‘That’s what it means,’ she goes on, willing herself to just keep it together. ‘What they said, that’s what it means. If we don’t do what they want, they’re gonna kill him.’ She swallows. ‘And we’ve got no idea where Scarlet is,’ she adds, ‘though they could have her too, probably do. And Cyber Sneak, or Weevil, or Tower. Real people’ – her eyes lock to his – ‘just like you said.’
Warden’s shaking a little. She can see it as he rubs his eyes with rough, angry hands as if he can make it all go away by closing them. And it’s like something moves inside her at the sight and she almost steps towards him…
‘You’re not thinking of going, are you?’ he asks suddenly. ‘Doing what they want?’
Mallory hesitates, just the briefest second where she thinks, What if it’s my fault? What if it is my fault The Asker got caught, because I didn’t help… And the sick feeling inside grows and she wishes, she wishes so badly she could change what she did, so badly that for a second, she considers…
Then, ‘No,’ she says, but Warden saw it, saw the pause.
‘’Cause that’d be bloody stupid,’ he tells her.
‘I’m not going.’ She holds his gaze and he looks away, down at the floor, wringing his hands out in front of him.
‘What do we do?’ he says. ‘If we can’t go to the police and we can’t go ourselves, then what?’
Mallory looks back at her laptop, rereads the message for the umpteenth time, her skin prickling as if she’s surrounded by people, though there’s only Warden and he’s sat back down on the bed, away from her.
‘It takes around two hours to get to the city,’ she says carefully, ‘three max, if traffic’s bad. They don’t know how close I am already. That gives us time. It gives us twenty-one hours to figure out something else. We need to think. We just need to think.’
And be really damn careful.
She saves the CoD’s message so it won’t be wiped clean like chat box conversations usually are when you close them, then shuts it.
‘Check the live feed from the security cameras again,’ she tells Warden. ‘Check no one’s picked up the bug.’
‘I would know if they had – ’
‘Check,’ Mallory repeats. ‘We can’t take anything for granted now. Anything.’ She hears him begin typing. ‘Then we keep doing what we were doing, looking through feeds from around the time The Asker logged off. If we can find out exactly what happened, maybe we can work out where they took him and…’ She trails off.
And then… I don’t know, I don’t know!
She needs to calm down. She needs to think rationally. She clenches her fists, hard, nails digging deep into her palms like she’s trying to pour all of the tension out into them. Then she releases. She does it twice in a row, breathing deep and slow.
She looks back at her screen.
Careful. Think.
Regardless of whether Children of Daedalus had looked harmless earlier, it seems they are anything but. There must be other members behind the operation, other members a lot smarter than those on its boards – or maybe the boards are no more than a front, as Warden had suggested.
And they logged in to The Asker’s account.
That thought is so unnerving that Mallory has to lock her fists again because she is certain The Asker would not have given up how to log in willingly. She’s not even sure he’d have given it up if he thought his life depended on it. The Forum is everything to him. The most likely thing is that, if they have Scarlet too, she was the one who told the CoD about its existence… but if that was the case, then why didn’t they log in on her account instead?
No, she thinks. Whoever did this was sending a message greater than the literal one. They used The Asker’s account for a reason. Either it was as proof they had him and they did manage to force him to log in for them… or they hacked his account, and if they did that, then – hell – who are they dealing with? And what do they want with elite hackers when they’re obviously more than proficient themselves? They said they needed Echo Six’s help.
Just work it through, Mallory tells herself. Go over everything again, step by step.
Technically, it’s still guesswork that the CoD have Scarlet at all – and they didn’t mention her in the ransom message – but it does seem likely. It also seems likely they were behind the disappearances of Cyber Sneak, Weevil and Tower – and now they want help from Echo Six, who had just started looking into Daedalus too. She starts tapping on the desk as her mind turns it over.
Four, three, four, two.
Four, three, four, two.
None of that can be chance. Those hackers are specific, talented. Either the CoD are a bunch of psychopaths who just don’t like anyone else good looking into Daedalus and the ‘help’ request is just in the message to lure her in, or – way more likely – there is something specific they need an elite hacker to do, something that they haven’t been able to do themselves, something no one’s been able to do yet. The obvious answer is find The Reckoning. Mallory can’t think of anything else, but it doesn’t make sense. The quest trail doesn’t lead anywhere and if the missing hackers had suddenly figured out something everyone else had missed, why wouldn’t they have released it themselves?
And how would the CoD have known about it anyway?
And why would they think Echo Six could help? What do they think she can do that the others couldn’t?
And what if she can’t?
And, and, and?!
Fear ripples through her. She feels tangled up, caught in a web that’s so much bigger than she thought, that she still can’t see the edges of.
‘It’s fine,’ Warden says, breaking into her thoughts. ‘The connection wasn’t traced.’
Mallory nods, frustrated with herself, with the situation.
‘We go back to checking the feeds then,’ she says. Warden doesn’t argue. Maybe he can’t think of a better option. She goes into the admin panel, a few other things to make sure of before joining him. The Forum site is secure as far as she can tell – The Asker and Scarlet’s accounts are still blocked from the boards and only able to message her – but she checks everything she can think of regarding its defense. Nothing is wrong, nothing is compromised. However the CoD logged in, it appears that was all they did. She minimizes the Forum window and goes back to searching the feeds like she’d told Warden. They have to find something. They need to know more. They have to… She looks through video after video, studies a thousand different faces, and finds nothing. All the while, the minutes tick by.
What if you don’t find anything in time? a growing voice asks. What if you miss it, or you’re wrong and there’s nothing there to find at all? If all they want is for her to hack or code something, then maybe… No!
Warden’s right, this is too big, and she suddenly feels very small; very human and very vulnerable. She can’t go to New York like they want. Their only option if they run out of time would be the police, some back channel like he’d suggested… but then The Asker…
No, no, no, The Asker…
Tears prick infuriatingly at her eyes again and, for a moment, her breath catches as she thinks of what might have happened to him and what it would be like to really lose him, what it would be like to know he was never coming back. He’s a good man, a good man who does good things, who tries to help people and show up what’s rotten – and now someone is threatening to hurt him. She tenses up, fighting against the emotion threatening to overwhelm her, because he doesn’t deserve it, and because she can’t… she can’t lose him.
And it’s my fault. If I’d just gone with him…
‘Echo,’ Warden says.
She can’t…
‘Echo,’ he repeats and she finally turns, blinking too fast. His eyes are fixed on h
is laptop. ‘I’ve found something.’ He looks up sharply and Mallory crosses to him. His screen is paused on the footage of a camera in one of the booths. He pushes play. Mallory glances at the time stamp.
Eight thirteen; thirty-eight minutes before The Asker disappeared.
No, she thinks, not disappeared; before he was taken.
A man enters the booth alone. He’s dressed in a plain shirt and suit pants, and his hair is dark and shaggy. He seems wary, careful to keep his head angled downwards, as if he knows there will be cameras and he doesn’t want them to get a good look. He sits, and takes out a phone. It’s hard to see in the grainy image, but it looks like his fingers start moving across the screen. Warden scrolls the footage forwards then, to eight forty-four. The man is still in the booth, still on his phone.
Is that him? Mallory thinks, adrenaline spiking a little.
As it plays, the man looks up as if he was startled by something, tilting his head and giving the camera a better view, though it’s still an angled one. Best Mallory can make out, he looks about thirty. His face is smooth and clean shaven, his eyebrows dark over hooded eyes. Three new people walk into the shot then – two men, one woman – and position themselves around him, remaining standing, as if to block any exit. They talk to the man with the phone for a minute or so, then he starts typing. One of the new guys – big and bald, with a shedload of tattoos – dives for the device. He punches the shaggy-haired man right in the face and Mallory flinches, even just watching it. A few moments later, the phone is surrendered, its owner apparently having succeeded in whatever he was trying to do. Mallory looks at the time again.
Eight fifty-one.
The exact moment that The Asker had gone offline.
‘Echo,’ Warden says, ‘the time.’
‘I know,’ she answers, blood pulsing.
It’s him, she thinks. It’s really The Asker. It must be. And it’s the strangest thing, seeing him there, the real him. He’s somehow younger that she expected – though she’d never really thought of him in person – younger even than Roger. He just seemed older, maybe, from the things he said, the conviction and authority he had. She stares down at his stoic face. Even in the grainy, poorly-lit image, she can see his nose is bleeding. He’d taken that punch without trying to defend himself, taken it in order to try and finish whatever he’d been doing on that phone…
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