The Asker is gone and the Forum is compromised. Be careful and check you haven’t been traced. Delete your accounts. Do not log in again.
If someone knows her hacker name – however they found it out – then they might already know others too. No one else needs to become involved in this.
‘I’m closing the Forum,’ Mallory says out loud. She looks across at Warden. For a moment, his face breaks and she feels it… but then he nods, agreeing.
Goodbye, she writes under the message.
She clicks to post. Eleven people are currently online. Within a minute of the message going live, that number is down to six. And they’re not just going from white to grey – the online list to the offline one – they’re vanishing completely. It’s over. It was never going to be saved, from the moment The Asker disappeared. She just hadn’t let herself think it consciously. That was a mistake.
As an administrator, Mallory could delete the Forum completely, but she needs to give the other members time to see the warning – and she needs to keep the channel open to The Asker’s captors. She hasn’t replied to their message and she doesn’t know if she will yet, but she doesn’t want them to have any idea of what she’s doing. Neither The Asker’s or Scarlet’s accounts can do anything but send messages to hers, so unless they have someone else from the Forum, they won’t know what’s happening. If they do have… well, then there’s nothing she can do about that. Shutting it down is still the right thing. There are eighteen other people on there.
As the number of names in white steadily continues to drop, Mallory goes through the message boards, permanently erasing every section, every thread, every hack… everything that made it somewhere important – everything except her last post. Then she goes into the administration panel. She deletes the accounts of everyone not currently online – apart from The Asker and Scarlet – and sets up the same warning message to show when they next try to log in. At each name wiped, the anger in her grows, but her hand shakes as she reaches Warden’s, a deep sadness welling up as she clears away every trace that he had ever existed there. When she’s done, she glances at the right of the screen again. There are no names left online, apart from her own. They have all read what they needed to, so she deletes the message boards entirely. After that, she wipes clean every remaining trace of every piece of data or code that isn’t essential, until all that’s left is the back door entrance and a chat box system that runs between the three remaining accounts. She feels both hollow and utterly, seethingly furious.
‘It was the right thing,’ says Warden. Mallory turns to see him looking across at her and, even though there are eighteen names she will never see again, there is a relief because, account deleted or not, she hasn’t lost him. And she is not going to lose The Asker either.
‘Are you done?’ Warden asks. ‘Need to show you something.’
‘Are they all still in the corridor?’ she says, crossing to the bed.
‘No, just the one guard now, the skinny one who looks like a cross between a rat and a porcupine.’ He turns the laptop to give her a better view. The corridor is empty apart from the pincushion, the door to The Asker’s room shut again.
‘The others are inside?’ she asks.
‘No,’ Warden replies, and he seems to hesitate, ‘the others just left.’
‘Left the club? As in, all three of them?’
Warden nods. That’s different; there has never been less than two people left behind before – one guarding, at least one inside the room with The Asker. Warden is already skipping back in the feed to show her, stopping at a point when all four of them are still in the corridor, with that copy of Mallory’s picture. She starts tapping steadily against her leg, holding on to her anger. The blonde woman seems agitated. In fact, they all do. The pincushion is gesturing angrily, yelling back through the open door of The Asker’s room until the blonde physically pulls him back. Mallory’s tapping gets faster. They talk for a while longer – Warden scrolling through it – then everyone nods, some kind of decision apparently made. The pincushion hands Mallory’s picture to the bald guy, who folds it and puts it into his back pocket. Both the women enter the room, then re-emerge a few minutes later holding laptop bags. They lock the door behind them, then they head out of the corridor completely, along with the bald man, leaving just the pincushion behind. And that’s it; he stays that way until Warden fast forwards the footage to catch up with the live feed.
‘Did they leave the club?’ Mallory asks, apprehension stirring. ‘Did they actually all leave?’
He rewinds again, then starts clicking between different feeds, following the three of them until they do exit the club, out of the side alley entrance. They’ve never left the room with just one guard before, not once, in five days. And they left with Mallory’s picture. Panic threatens then, but she shuts it down firmly.
‘Do you think they ID’d you?’ Warden asks.
‘It’s a possibility,’ Mallory says, clinging to her anger, not panic, clinging to that cold determination she’d felt. ‘I don’t use social media and it’s a crappy picture, but it depends what access they have to facial recognition software. If they did ID me, they could have this address. They could be coming.’ She balls her fists. At least Jed and Roger aren’t there. At least she was right about doing that.
‘They told you to go to New York, though,’ Warden says.
‘And I didn’t reply,’ she answers. ‘However they found out I’d been there, however they found my picture, it looks as if they only just did – they wouldn’t have sent the ransom note if they’d had it before – but they still don’t know what I’m doing now.’ Her voice is clinical. ‘I could be disappearing. I could be giving up on The Asker.’ Mallory taps out the pattern once more, then stills her finger. ‘They want Echo Six more than they want to keep him,’ she realizes. She glances at the clock; twenty hours, three minutes until their deadline – plenty long enough for them to check out a possible lead in nearby Connecticut and still make it back to New York in time for her to arrive if any ID they’d made proved incorrect. Wherever they’ve gone, it doesn’t really matter just at that moment, because an idea is finally forming in Mallory’s mind. What matters is who they left behind.
‘What do you think we should do?’ asks Warden. His face is earnest, and she sees in it that he’ll do whatever she suggests. He really will. That thought focuses the drive inside of her, grinding it down into a diamond point, sharp and deadly…
We will not lose The Asker, it says. We are going to save him.
And none of their current options are acceptable.
She is not going to sit and wait while a clock ticks down. She is not going to give herself up like some idiot on a plate, losing the one bargaining chip they might have. She is not going to risk a tip-off that could end everything for The Asker before anyone has a chance to act. No, she is not going to do any of those things.
She is going to find a loophole.
Online or in real life, everything is a piece of a puzzle, every action has consequences and repercussions, the results of which can still be predicted and analyzed, just like something you type into a computer. Those results may be more erratic in real life, but Mallory is smart – she is really fucking smart – and they have no idea who they are dealing with.
They wanted Echo Six; they will get Echo Six.
And Echo would not be told what moves she can and can’t make. She would create her own option, do the thing that no one else would expect because they look at the problem the wrong way. She would take back control. Other people muddy things, screw them up, complicate them…
Control.
Her thoughts race. It changes things, them having her picture, makes it about far more than her original goal to find The Asker and somehow keep the Forum running the same way it always had. She doesn’t know who’s seen it, how many people are involved or even who they are, other than the name Children of Daedalus. Her new option needs to be bigger than all of that, bigger t
han what they don’t know; it needs to be able to keep The Asker, her friends, her family, herself safe. All of them, despite the photo.
What she needs is leverage.
Just like the cell phone gave her power over Bobby, she needs something to give her power over the CoD. And there is definitely something they want. The missing hackers are not an end game – she is sure of that – they are a means to something else…
And The Asker, she thinks, The Asker will know what that is.
Control.
‘Echo? What do we do?’ Warden repeats. She looks at him, her gaze certain.
‘We go and get The Asker,’ she says.
Return
Mallory and Warden turn into the alley that runs along the left side of Labyrinth. They stop and Warden takes out his laptop. Mallory glances down at the watch she’d put on back at the house, shifting her wrist beneath the strap, not liking the feel. It’s five-oh-three. They’d got a taxi into the city – majorly expensive, but the train would have taken too long. Warden had kept the live feed from the club open the whole way, using his portable Wi-Fi to stay connected. None of the other three captors had returned. Mallory tries not to think about where they might be headed. Before they left, she and Warden had set up a webcam to watch the front door of her house, so at least they’ll know if something does happen. Roger and Jed aren’t there. That’s what important for now. When they have The Asker, everything else will change. They won’t be on the back foot any more.
When, not if.
Warden hadn’t argued when she’d told him what she wanted to do. He’d looked for the briefest moment like he might – a range of expressions from confused to frightened to angry shooting across his face – and then he’d just said, ‘Okay.’
Still here, she tells herself. The Forum’s gone, but you haven’t lost him.
She hasn’t told him her back-up plan, though, the last resort she has tucked away in the back of her mind and maybe the real reason she doesn’t want anyone else like the police involved – if all goes south and any one of them or The Asker is in danger, she can reveal who she is. She can complete the offered deal and try and do whatever it is they want Echo Six to do. She doesn’t like it, but contingency is necessary and not having it is stupid, forcing you into on the spot decisions.
‘Still clear,’ Warden says, laptop balanced on his forearm. ‘Looping the feeds now.’ He’s been recording footage from the cameras on the side entrance and in every corridor they’re going to have to go down, ready to run in place of the live streams that will soon include the two of them. The security office is currently empty, though; the club doesn’t open for another couple of hours and no one’s monitoring it yet. There are a small number of employees already in the building – cleaners, techies, bar staff doing prep – but they’re all in the main club itself. Just like for the past week, none of them are anywhere near the corridor where The Asker is being kept. ‘We’re up,’ says Warden.
Mallory nods and they start down the alley, pulling on latex gloves, and balaclavas bought from the same stall where they’d got Warden’s beanie yesterday. Loops or no loops, their faces are not going on camera this time. Mallory’s skin chafes as the fabric comes over her head, but once it’s on she finds it actually makes her feel safer. She feels focused. It had rained on the drive there and the floor of the alley is wet and glistening. Despite the recent wash, it smells of beer and urine and, even in daylight, looks like the kind of place you’d go to get mugged. Mallory keeps glancing backwards, expecting someone to rush in on them from the street beyond, but no one does. It’s empty and quiet, nothing like last night.
They reach the club’s side door, grey and rusted, and locked shut. Warden slips the laptop into the plain navy backpack Mallory lent him – less conspicuous than his green satchel – and studies the lock before taking out a small leather wallet. He removes a large needle with a hooked end, and a small L-shaped piece of metal. Earlier, when she’d raised the question of the locked doors, he’d replied, ‘You didn’t think I’d started with safes, did you?’ She feels the briefest hint of a smile.
He has the door swinging open in about twenty seconds. It creaks loudly on the hinge and they both freeze – but no sound comes from beyond. Mallory steps through into a narrow corridor. The floor is smoothed concrete and the walls so smeared with grime that she can’t tell what color they were originally supposed to be. They creep along the passage, store rooms dotting either side, until they reach a T-junction. Mallory pauses, checking each branch before looking back at Warden.
This is where they part.
He unzips the bag again and takes out the replica BB hand gun that Roger’s parents had given Jed a couple of Christmases back – and Mallory had promptly confiscated. Roger won’t keep real guns in the house any more, but at least this looks like one. Warden pales a little as he grips the handle. Everything feels more real and fragile now they’re here, but Mallory gives him a nod; they can do this. She turns away to the right and starts walking, drumming the pattern on her leg. The plan is to take two different routes to the corridor The Asker’s room is on, so they can come at its pincushion guard from both sides. The door to the room is positioned closest to the end Mallory will come out of, hence why Warden has the BB.
She carefully navigates the maze of derelict storage rooms, the building’s blueprint clear inside her mind. She encounters no one and, a minute or so later, is standing next to a small metal trash can at the turning onto the target corridor. She’s barely moving, but her heart is pumping so loud she’s sure the guard beyond must be able to hear it. She can hear him. He’s breathing noisily, sniffling away through his silver-ringed nose and shuffling about every few seconds like he’s got ADHD. Mallory glances at her watch.
Almost time.
She crouches down beside the bin, and waits.
Four, three, four, two…
Four, three, four, two…
She looks at her watch again; it’s time.
Warden is five seconds late…
Ten seconds…
‘Freeze!’ she hears him yell.
Seriously? He went with freeze?
She darts her head around the corner. The pincushion guard is only a five feet away, his back to her, facing Warden and the BB – and he’s pulling out a gun, a real gun, and…
‘Who the – ’
Mallory leaps forward and whacks him round the head with the metal bin. He collapses, the weapon clattering to the floor. How did they miss that in the footage? She crouches down and picks it up, pulse racing as Warden runs towards her.
‘Shit,’ he gasps. ‘That’s a sodding – ’
‘The door,’ she snaps, taking a cable tie out of her pocket with her free hand. There is no time for them to panic.
‘Right,’ Warden answers, nodding more than he needs to. ‘Right.’ He turns away, slipping the BB gun into his backpack and taking out the lock picking tools.
‘How long do you – ’ Mallory begins.
A hand grabs her leg. She cries out as it is jerked from beneath her. She falls and her shoulder slams into the wall. Pain flares and she drops the gun, hears it skittering away across the floor… Then the pincushion man is on top of her, pierced face angry and red, the metal in his skin so much more disturbing close up. Alarm floods through her, but before it can even really register, his fist connects with her jaw. She bites her tongue, stunned, as the taste of iron fills her mouth…
No, no…
‘No!’ That shout wasn’t her.
The man’s snarling face disappears as Warden drags him off her, toppling backwards under the weight of him. The pincushion turns – so fast again – and punches him right in the stomach. Warden lets out this horrible, strangled gasp, but the man grabs him, and hits him again, this time in the head…
Mallory’s vision goes red.
Rage surges up within her, stronger than the pain in her shoulder, in her jaw. She doesn’t think. All she sees is the man raising his fist a third time
, and how he is not going to hit Warden again…
She launches herself at him, colliding with his back so he smacks into the wall, just like she had. As he lurches, she reaches for his face, grabbing whatever piece of metal she can find – then she pulls, right damn hard. The man screams as his nose ring is torn loose, but Mallory doesn’t stop. She punches him in the face, putting her weight behind it and using her front two knuckles, just like Roger had showed her. The pincushion crumples to the ground. He looks out cold this time, but she isn’t going to take the chance. She picks up the cable tie she’d dropped and, straining audibly, rolls him over to tie his hands behind his back.
‘Echo?’ Warden gasps, breaking into her concentration as she moves to do the same with the man’s feet. She looks up and sees him lifting himself slowly off the ground. He’s blinking a lot. ‘Echo, are you…’ His voice is high and wavery and muffled through the balaclava, but his eyes seem to finally focus on her. Her chest tightens.
‘I’m all right,’ she says, though the words shake and her jaw throbs as her mouth forms them. ‘Are you – ’
He half steps forwards, arms lifting, and, for the briefest moment, it looks as if he’s going to hug her. Mallory freezes, a new rush of adrenaline flickering through her… but he stops. He’s still only inches from her, though, and their eyes are locked together in a way she can’t quite work out how to break.
‘Echo,’ he repeats, and it’s more like a sob of relief than anything else, and she feels it too as he says it and, in that moment, she has the strangest urge to reach out for him too, because she remembers him getting hit, remembers the sound he made and how it felt to see it happen and…
‘I’m sorry,’ he stammers, pulling away, seeming to remember himself, to remember who she is, what she’s like. ‘Sorry. I just… I’m glad you’re okay.’
Mallory manages to a nod, her veins buzzing. She pulls the cable tie tight on the pincushion’s legs, trying to focus on that instead.
Echoes (US Edition) Page 20
