Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

  In order to finish logging off.

  He was stopping whoever those people are from gaining access to the Forum. He was protecting everyone else on there – protecting her, protecting Warden. Mallory’s insides twist. The bald man puts an unsubtle hand on The Asker’s arm, pulling him to his feet. There’s a tattoo on the back of it; the black outline of a triangle. Then they exit that camera’s field of vision.

  It takes Mallory and Warden a while to find the right places on each of the proceeding cameras’ recordings, but they finally manage to follow The Asker’s journey from the booth, across the club floor and on through a small warren of corridors and storage rooms out back. It ends at one near the far left side of the warehouse complex.

  A room without a camera inside.

  They spend another half hour fast forwarding through the footage of the feed from the corridor outside of it, covering the time now lapsed between Monday night and earlier this morning when Warden had cut off the link. As far as they can see, The Asker never leaves the room. They check the club’s blueprints, but there isn’t another way out.

  Does that mean he’s still in there?

  Throughout the week, only four people ever go in and out of that room. It’s never left unguarded and there are never less than two people present, even overnight. There are the original three who took The Asker – the bald guy who threw the punch, a scrawny man with so many piercings his face looks like a pincushion, and a woman with dark skin and spiky hair. Then there’s also another woman, blonde with glasses. All four of them have Daedalus’s symbol marked on their left hands. The blonde had arrived that first evening, carrying two bags, both the right size for laptops – further supporting the theory Mallory now voices to Warden, that the CoD were after elites to complete a specific task, possibly to do with finding The Reckoning – though what that could entail, she has no idea.

  ‘And now they want you,’ he says slowly, ‘Echo Six. If you’re right, that means none of the others have succeeded yet, even The Asker, even the people good enough to catch The Asker.’ Mallory nods, feeling a weight of expectation that is frightening, feeling that smallness again, like she’s one tiny, blind piece in a much larger game she doesn’t know the rules of yet. ‘It would also explain why they didn’t send a ransom note right away,’ Warden adds, ‘to give him time to attempt whatever it was.’ Mallory nods again, trying not to wonder what might have happened to the other hackers who failed. They haven’t seen any sign of them on the feeds.

  We still don’t know for sure they took them too, she tells herself, though it feels a hollow reassurance.

  ‘I could be wrong,’ she says. ‘It’s just a theory.’

  ‘It is,’ Warden replies, but neither of them voices an alternative.

  She looks back at the screen. Apart from various apparent laptops, all The Asker’s captors have brought in and out throughout the week has been food and drink. And a bucket. Those are good signs, though, Mallory tells herself, good signs – signs that reinforce the assertion that he is still in there and currently unharmed. If that’s true… Her nerves flutter at how close they were to him last night – and how close to his captors. If they had slipped up…

  Focus, she tells herself, stopping any panic at that thought before it can start. They didn’t. The ransom note admitted that the CoD had no idea who or where she was – and there would have been no point sending it if they had. It would have actually been a risk; a risk they didn’t need to take. No, she and Warden were in and out clean at Labyrinth.

  The strange thing is that none of the club’s uniformed staff ever go near the room where they’re keeping The Asker, though she and Warden have now seen three with the tattoo. In fact, the four kidnappers have interacted with no one else all week – not the CoD on staff, nor any tattooed clubbers. They go in and out through an alley side door that no one else uses, and the whole back section of the complex seems otherwise abandoned. Only the main warehouse space and a few adjacent rooms have been converted for the club.

  Mallory shows Warden the few recent photos she had found of the owner, Seable, but he’s wearing leather gloves in all of them, so they can’t tell if he’s marked. In fact, he’s wearing a lot of leather in them, period. The photos before his techno goth reinvention have him in a suit with no tattoo on his hand. Mallory’s seen him in the club’s footage a few times but, like the staff, he never goes near where The Asker is being held. She can’t quite work it out. Maybe he just doesn’t know what’s going on. Maybe only some of the CoD’s members are part of what’s happening, not all. Whoever’s involved, someone at the club must be helping the kidnappers, though, because they’re there on the security monitors and no one has questioned it. Mallory wonders, briefly, about trying to run facial recognition on them, but she doesn’t have access to a database herself and trying to ‘borrow’ a federal one quickly, and with no prep, would be like asking to get traced and arrested. Truth be told, she’s not even sure the images are good enough quality to get a match. They’re blurry and, like The Asker, it seems everyone is careful to keep their heads down, so there are no direct shots.

  ‘We should reconnect to the bug,’ Mallory tells Warden, her voice coming out a little hoarse. ‘We need to see what’s happening now, what’s happened since the footage ran out.’ He nods and begins typing, the live video feed soon appearing on the screen. The pincushion is stationed outside the room, the others likely inside.

  ‘I’ll start downloading – ’ Warden begins.

  There’s a knock on the bedroom door. He starts, the laptop teetering precariously on his lap until Mallory’s hand shoots out to grab it.

  ‘Mal?’ It’s Jed. Hearing his voice then hits her, jarring with everything that’s just been going on. The two things shouldn’t be in the same place. She slams Warden’s laptop lid closed and darts back across to her desk to do the same to hers.

  ‘Come in,’ she calls, trying to keep her voice even. Her brother enters, giving Warden a slightly dirty look.

  ‘I just wondered about lunch,’ he says. It’s so normal. It jars again. Mallory glances at the clock. It’s a half hour past meal time. Here they are trying to save The Asker’s life and Jed needs a sandwich.

  Of course he needs a sandwich, she tells herself. Of course that’s all still real and still matters like it always has. They’re in her room, in her house. That stuff doesn’t just stop because of all the crap that’s coming down from that other thing she does in her life, the thing Jed doesn’t know about and shouldn’t know about, and shouldn’t even be near – now, more than ever…

  He seems to sense he’s interrupting something.

  ‘…I could do it by myself, Mal,’ he suggests. ‘I can see what’s on the chart.’

  In spite of everything, she hesitates. She knows it’s stupid, because of course he can do it by himself, use a knife by himself. She knows he’ll be fine. She knows it. But she still gets this irrational fear with him, because if anything ever happened to him… Guilt bubbles up from somewhere deep inside of her. She has to protect him. She is all he has to look out for him, and whoever’s fault that it is, it certainly isn’t his. The laptop hums, warm beneath her fingers.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. Jed wavers, like he isn’t sure he heard her right. ‘Just be careful.’

  ‘Course, Mal, course,’ he nods, a smile breaking out. ‘Do you want one too… you guys?’ he adds, glancing at Warden.

  ‘That would be great,’ Mallory says.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Warden agrees, though he looks confused. He’s still looking oddly at Mallory when Jed leaves.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Eleven. Looks younger, I know.’

  ‘Why did he ask if he could make a sandwich, can’t he just do it?’

  She shifts uncomfortably.

  ‘I don’t want him to cut himself,’ she answers.

  ‘He’s eleven.’

  She swallows. Maybe her approach doesn’t quite make se
nse from the outside, and maybe it isn’t perfect, but it’s the way she knows how to do it and it’s worked so far.

  ‘I got to look after him the best I can,’ she says quietly. ‘He’s my responsibility and if anything bad happens to him it’s on me. So you can stop about things you don’t understand.’ She crosses to the bed and sits back down, pulling open his laptop screen without looking at him. ‘We got things to do, okay,’ she says.

  They spend the next hour or so sifting through the footage of The Asker in detail on Warden’s laptop. Jed comes in after about ten minutes with the sandwiches, perfectly made, breaking an initial awkward silence. He tells Mallory he’s going out in the yard to practice on the punch bag with Roger.

  It’s good, she thinks, as he goes, it’s safe, and that’s a thought she shouldn’t even have because none of this involves Jed and it shouldn’t. But they want me, and I’m his sister. She tries to shut it all out, tries to focus only on the footage. That’s what will help.

  There is no sound with the video, so they try to lip read what was said before The Asker was punched, but the image distorts too much when they zoom in. When the most recent footage from the corridor downloads, they check that too, but it doesn’t tell them much else, other than that at one point the blonde woman with glasses came out the room looking angry and started talking hurriedly with the spiky-haired woman who was guarding outside at that point. Then she’d gone back in with her, and the pincushion guy had taken her place in the corridor. According to the time stamp, it was about a half hour before the ransom message was sent.

  ‘What do you think that was about?’ asks Warden, but Mallory just shakes her head, unsure.

  She glances at her clock; one fifty-five now. It’s twenty hours, thirty-four minutes until the CoD’s deadline – sixteen hours and thirty-four minutes until they’d have to leave to make it back to New York in time. If she was going to go, which she isn’t, which she can’t…

  Damn it.

  She gets up from the bed, stretches out her legs. They do know a lot more – know what The Asker looks like, where he’s likely being held – but no miraculous plan is presenting itself in her head yet. If it reaches that sixteen hours, thirty-four minutes, when she’d have to leave, or not, and she still has no other option…

  She wonders, again, about telling the police. She keeps going back and forth on the idea – thinking they have to, then thinking they can’t. Now they know where The Asker is, surely there’s at least a chance of getting him out safely that way… but then she thinks of the warning in the ransom message and changes her mind all over again.

  None of the options are good.

  Plus, they’ve never seen the feed without a guard in that corridor, and the blonde and at least one other usually inside the room with The Asker on top of that. Even if they did somehow manage to tip off the police and the CoD didn’t get wind of it in advance – and the police took it seriously and sent in some kind of SWAT team – there’s still no guarantee The Asker would be alive by the time the officers reached him.

  And he can’t die. He can’t…

  She can’t let that happen. She rocks back and forth on her feet, trying to release some of the taut energy rattling within her.

  Come on, think, she tells herself. You always find a way past, always find a loophole. That’s what you do, what you’re good at. Just fricking think!

  ‘Hey, Echo,’ says Warden. ‘We’ve got movement on the live feed again and…’ He stops talking.

  Mallory turns to him.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘Shit,’ he says, his voice disturbingly quiet.

  ‘What, Warden?’ she snaps. She looks down at the screen of his laptop – and her heart feels like it stops, like someone’s shocked it with one of those defibrillator pads and it’s just shut off. She blinks like she can’t be seeing it right…

  All four of the captors are stood back in the corridor now, talking. The door to the room where they’re keeping The Asker is left open but there isn’t enough of an angle for the camera to see inside. That’s not what really matters, though, it’s not… because the pincushion man is now holding a piece of paper, a printed picture.

  He’s holding a photo of Mallory.

  A Thousand Words

  It’s me, Mallory thinks dumbly. The image is dark and grainy, taken from the club’s CCTV, but it’s definitely her; her face looking upwards beneath the hood of Jeanie’s jacket. They know what I look like.

  She half sits, half drops down onto the bed. First the message, now this. After years of hiding, there she is in a stranger’s hands, just Mallory Park, all the Echo Six stripped away.

  She feels naked, violated.

  ‘How?’ she gasps. Everything is moving too fast. The rules and problems are changing and developing, all of it too fast.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Warden’s eyes are wide, his mouth open. Mallory’s mind starts to race with the question, like it’s burning, searing her…

  ‘How did they know I was even there?’ she says. ‘Did they trace your connection?’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘You can check it yourself.’ He offers his laptop, but she doesn’t move.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she mutters, her heart racing now. This doesn’t feel real. It feels like everything’s warped, like it’s a nightmare she should be able to wake up from. ‘Even if they were looking for Echo Six, how did they know that I’m Echo Six?’ They evidently do, from the photo – and it frightens her in a way she’s not really felt before. There is no backing out now, no way she could just walk away any more, even if she wanted to. ‘How did they even know to look for me at the club?’ she goes on. ‘No one knew we were going to be there!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Warden repeats. ‘I don’t… I mean, if they found out about your connection to The Asker, maybe they thought you might try and trace him, and so they were looking out for someone?’

  ‘But they’d still have had no idea when I would go,’ Mallory says, thoughts piling up inside her head, fingers flexing jerkily, ‘or what I would look like if I did.’ She gets up again and starts pacing, a hideous energy firing through her veins. ‘There must be thousands of people in and out of that place every night and they can’t have any specifics on me – they can’t even know how old I am. They can’t know. They can’t know any of it, unless…’ She hesitates. ‘Unless…’

  She stops.

  Her eyes flick back to Warden and it’s like a physical pain tears open in her chest. The strength of it shocks her and she steps backwards knocking into the book case. She remembers his texting. Everything points to one answer, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts, because he couldn’t… He couldn’t…

  Not Warden…

  And in that moment, she suddenly realizes how much he means to her, how much she relies on him – has done for a long time – and…

  ‘No,’ he says, seeming to realize what she’s thinking. ‘No.’

  ‘You knew,’ Mallory says simply, her hand gripping hold of the bookcase. A mole in the Forum…?

  Please, oh please, no…

  ‘You were the only one who knew,’ she says.

  ‘But I didn’t tell anyone,’ he replies, eyes wide circles. ‘Echo, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Because you know me.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t, not really.’

  And still, not Warden, she begs. Please not Warden… Oh please, PLEASE!

  ‘Yes, you do.’ He stands, putting the laptop aside, but she backs further away from him, along the bookcase. He stops, looking helpless.

  ‘Have you been lying to me?’ she asks, the question biting at her. ‘How long has it been a lie?’

  ‘Never,’ he says, but she feels so stupid. ‘I’ve never lied to you. My name’s Gilbert Ward and I’m from Sun City and we’ve spoken almost every day for the past two and a half year
s – ’

  ‘Then why is it they only have my picture and not yours? We went there together. Why aren’t they holding up your face too?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe… maybe, well, they’re looking for Echo Six,’ he seizes. ‘They’re looking for a woman, not a guy and – ’

  ‘Why did you come here?’ Mallory demands, cutting across him.

  ‘What?’ he stammers. Then, ‘You know why.’

  ‘You didn’t want me to go looking for The Asker at first,’ she says, thinking back. ‘You told me to wait, and I did, but then you still didn’t want me to do it, did you? So you can’t have come because you cared about him that much – ’

  ‘I care about The Asker,’ Warden responds, a hardness entering his voice. ‘I told you to wait because it sounded dangerous and I was worried about you, and as it turns out – ’

  ‘So you flew right across the country to meet someone you’d never met, to go and bug a nightclub where we thought someone else had disappeared, even though you thought it would be dangerous. I mean, who does that?’

  ‘Echo – ’

  ‘No, it’s crazy! And now you’re in my house, because I trusted you, because I brought you here and now they know what I look like and maybe they’re even coming here. Here!

  ‘Echo, listen to me, I didn’t – ’

  ‘Then explain it!’ she shouts. ‘Because it doesn’t make sense.’ Her voice cracks and there are tears falling down her cheeks now – and they won’t stop though she tells them to – because she doesn’t want it to be him, she doesn’t, but… ‘I should have seen that before,’ she says. ‘You haven’t got a tattoo, so did they pay you?’

  ‘Pay me? No,’ he protests.

  ‘So you didn’t rat me out?’

  ‘No, Echo!’ he says, and he looks angry now, hurt himself. ‘Come on, if I was going to do that, surely I’d have done it at the club before crawling through that sodding vent and exposing myself to goodness knows how many bacteria!’