Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

  ‘I’ll get the door,’ says Warden. He leans down to pick up his tools and the balaclava slips a little. His nose is bleeding and she gets it again, that strange impulse to reach for him, but…

  No, no, fricking no! Her body seizes up.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ she asks, holding her arms in against her stomach. They don’t exactly have time to stop. Warden nods, still studying the lock. Mallory shifts her jaw, feeling the pain there, her shoulder still aching from where she hit the wall. No time for that either… Her gaze falls back down to the guard. He isn’t moving and his face is a mess where she pulled out the nose ring. It makes her skin crawl, but even as Warden scrabbles against the door, she finds can’t tear her eyes away from it.

  She did that.

  He deserved it, she thinks. At the very least he’s in on a kidnapping… but still. She shivers, unnerved. She backs a little way down the corridor, past the now-dented metal bin, and picks his gun up. She doesn’t like the feel of it, cold and hard even through the plastic gloves. Her eyes flick back to the man’s wrecked face.

  I did that. The thought comes again, and she feels an odd spark of exhilaration, similar to the kick she gets hacking, like she’s strong and powerful and… and at the same time it makes her want to throw up. She flexes her free hand nervously in front of her – then stops, catching sight of something. Two of her fingers are marked with black ink. She frowns, and glances back down at the guard, wondering where it came from. The edge of his left hand is smeared with it too. She bends down and lifts it, using only the very tips of her fingers. The delta symbol on the back is smudged. It was drawn on, never a tattoo at all.

  What the…?

  The door to the room clicks open, snapping her attention away.

  The Asker.

  Warden glances back at her and she drops the hand.

  Later. She can think about what the hell that means later. She comes to stand beside him and raises the gun because, really, they have no idea what they’re going to find inside. Roger taught her how to shoot when they were living in North Carolina, back when seeing a gun didn’t scare the crap out of him. They’d practiced on cans in the yard… but that was a long time ago, and he’d given her headphones to wear then so she couldn’t hear it so bad. She shuffles her hands against the metal – not liking it, not liking it at all – trying to even out her breathing.

  What are they going to find inside? What the hell are they going to find?

  ‘On three,’ Warden whispers. She nods. ‘One,’ he mouths.

  Please let The Asker be all right, she thinks.

  ‘Two…’

  She tries to hold her hands steady, but…

  Please…

  ‘Three.’

  Warden turns the handle.

  The Man Who Asks

  The door swings open. The room beyond is dark, pokey and windowless, illuminated only by the light now spilling in from the corridor and the familiar dim glow of a singular computer screen, faced away from them towards the back. Mallory squints to try and see further, but the place is a mess, a mismatch of dusty boxes and piled cleaning equipment. It doesn’t smell good either. She steps inside holding the gun in front of her, but no one jumps out – no one says anything at all. Her heart is thumping wildly and… part of her doesn’t want to do this, she just wants to run, she wants to…

  You’re okay, she tells herself firmly, blocking out the impulse. She steps further into the room, her shadow breaking up the light.

  Someone groans.

  Warden jumps and Mallory’s eyes flick to the back of the room, still cloaked in darkness. The screen she saw belongs to a laptop. She can see its outline now. It’s open on a table and, beyond that, as her eyes gradually adjust to the lack of light… beyond that, she sees him. He’s tied to a chair, with a gag in his mouth; the room’s only occupant – the same man they saw being taken in the club’s video footage.

  The man who is The Asker.

  Mallory falters at the sight, suddenly overwhelmed by it all. He looks different, now, to the recording, the shirt and suit pants he came in ruffled and grimy, a dark bruise surrounding one of his eyes, another on his cheek just above new grown stubble. He looks exhausted. Something wrenches inside of her.

  ‘No…’ she breathes. He groans again, this time more desperate, more like he’s trying to say something, and she doesn’t wait another moment. She runs to him, tucking the gun into her waist band. Warden is beside her, both of them moving at the same time.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she hears him say, his own voice shaking, but the man in the chair seems to shrink as they approach.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mallory finds herself saying. ‘It’s all right. We’re going to get you out.’ She reaches for the gag in his mouth, her emotions crushing any hesitation, while Warden starts on the duct tape binding his right arm. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Who are you?’ The Asker stammers. ‘Are you with them? I told them I can’t do it. I tried, but I can’t…’ His voice breaks and it pulls at Mallory. She follows his gaze to the laptop, sat on the desk across from him – apparently set up for him to watch. There’s some kind of code trailing across the screen. Whatever it is, it’s incredibly complex… but there’s no time for that now. No time.

  ‘We’re from the Forum,’ Warden says. ‘We’re here to help you.’ Mallory turns back to them, but the man shakes his head like he doesn’t really hear it.

  ‘I tried,’ he gasps, and there are tears in his eyes. ‘I tried. I tried, but I couldn’t. I – ’

  ‘Asker,’ Mallory says firmly, her own eyes glassing up as she watches him, even as her hands start work on freeing his other wrist. He looks up at her, finally seeming to find a little focus.

  ‘How do you know that name?’ he whispers.

  ‘From the Forum,’ Warden repeats. This time it seems to register. ‘I’m Warden.’

  ‘Warden?’ It’s barely audible. And then The Asker is crying for real, for a whole different reason. ‘Warden… You came for me? I don’t understand,’ he gasps. ‘How did you find me? How did you – ’

  ‘I’m Echo,’ Mallory says. ‘We found you together.’ For a moment, The Asker just stares at her.

  ‘Echo Six?’

  Mallory nods, biting her lip so damn hard, even though it makes her jaw hurt. She needs to keep a grip.

  ‘I hacked your account,’ she says, ‘traced you here.’ His eyes are glistening.

  ‘Echo,’ he repeats, letting out a sharp breath and watching her with a kind of wonder. Then, his face drops, and, ‘No,’ he says, eyes widening with fear.

  ‘What?’ Mallory asks. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You can’t be here,’ he stammers. ‘You have to go, Echo. They want you. I don’t know how they knew your name, but they did and they kept asking and asking about you.’ He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t tell them anything,’ he says, sounding more certain, ‘but they went looking for you. They told me they’d find you anyway. They said they had your picture.’ Mallory swallows, ignoring the chill that brings, ignoring the sharp glance she gets from Warden.

  ‘We know,’ she says, looking back down at the bindings, her fingers working with renewed vigor. She frees his arm, moves on to his leg…

  ‘No,’ The Asker repeats, more insistent. He grabs her wrist with his now free hand. Mallory flinches, but he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘You have to listen to me. You have to go now.’

  ‘Not without you,’ she says, loosening his grip with her own gloved hand. She reaches down, fingers scrabbling to get the duct tape off his leg.

  ‘But you have to – ’

  ‘No,’ Warden interrupts. ‘We came for you and we’re leaving with you. No argument.’ He cuts The Asker’s right leg free, using one of the lock picking tools to saw through the tape. Mallory lets him take over on the left, glancing back towards the open door.

  They’re taking too long.

  ‘Scarlet,’ she asks, ‘do they have her as well? And the others who
went missing, do you have any idea where they are?’

  The Asker shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t know where, but I believe they have them all,’ he says, voice ragged. ‘I know they have Scarlet. I came here trying to find her. I couldn’t get anything off her Forum account, but she’d mentioned Children of Daedalus to me before and I found some intel saying some of them hung out at the club. So I came, but then…’ He trails off. They all know what then. ‘They told me they had her, that my helping them would help her. When I couldn’t… they wouldn’t tell me anything else.’

  Damn it, Mallory thinks. She’d hoped for something, at least. Scarlet’s a bitch, but… Could she have been the one who told the kidnappers about me?

  Warden finally snaps the other leg free.

  No time to think now.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘I think so,’ The Asker nods. He stands, shakily though, and Warden has to steady him. He’s tall on his feet, almost a half foot above Warden. Mallory crosses to the door, pulling out the gun again. A quick glance outside tells her the corridor is still clear apart from the pincushion guard. He’s starting to stir and she considers gagging him – but she doesn’t trust how well he could breathe through his nose now. Together, she and Warden manage to drag him inside the room.

  ‘We need to bring that,’ says The Asker, pointing at the laptop.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks.

  ‘What they want,’ he says and, for a moment, his tone is clear and solid. Mallory goes back for it, closing the screen on the scrawling code. ‘There’s a tracker next to the front left foot,’ he adds. ‘Found it when they had me working on it. Might want to leave that here.’ She flips it and finds a small black disk attached just as he’d said. Peeling it off with her nail, she sticks it to the table, then tucks the laptop into her backpack on top of her own.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replies.

  They exit into the corridor, Warden re-locking the guard inside. Mallory leads them back the way she came, hurried walking soon developing into a full on run. Her adrenaline swells at every intersection or turn, but the halls are empty, silent apart from their pounding feet. They reach the side door and exit into the alleyway, stopping only when they’re out of camera range.

  ‘Must do more exercise,’ pants Warden, bending over, hands on his knees. ‘I mean, I walk my mom’s dog every day, but it’s a shih-tzu so it doesn’t go very far.’ He groans. Next to him, The Asker is breathing heavily, dark brown eyes blinking furiously in the daylight, bruises standing out against olive skin, looking so much worse outside. Fear and pity well up in Mallory.

  What did they do to him?

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ she says, trying to stop herself staring. The other three kidnappers could come back at any time, right down this alley…

  ‘Looking like this?’ Warden questions. He’s right.

  ‘Clean up best you can,’ she says. She flicks on the gun’s safety and places it into her backpack with the two laptops. The balaclava and latex gloves follow – swiftly exchanged for her regular cut-off black ones. She notes, again, the ink smears on the white glove’s fingers…

  Later, she tells herself. No time now.

  Warden follows her lead, his hair sticking up with static as he yanks off the balaclava. His nose and chin are smeared with drying blood. Mallory’s breath catches at the sight and she crosses to him almost without thinking. He’s already wiping it off with a handkerchief, but she helps him with the last of it, her hands moving gently so as not to hurt him, fingertips feeling it everywhere they touch his skin…

  You’re okay. You’re okay…

  But her heart is beating way too fast. Way too fast…

  Four, three, four, two, she thinks.

  Four, three, four, two…

  He holds stock still as she works, watching her in a way that she can’t quite meet. His nose is red and swollen, but it doesn’t look to be broken. At least it’s stopped bleeding.

  ‘I thought you’d be older,’ says The Asker. Mallory turns back to him. ‘Both of you.’ Of course, he hadn’t seen their faces before. Mallory bites her lip, thinking the same of him again, definitely no more than thirty, and…

  It’s just so strange looking at him, right there… The person behind the name that saved her, who she’s spent so long following, and the magnitude of it rises up again. He’s tried to brush his tousled hair down across his face. There’s no blood, but he looks as if he’s been in a serious bar fight. They probably all do. Her own jaw is throbbing.

  ‘Everyone just,’ she says, trying to steady her voice, ‘just keep your heads down.’ They can’t stay any longer. She starts towards the end of the alley, turning right at the street and then heading north, at a right angle to the direction of Stevie’s Space Age Diner and away from where most people will be. She moves quickly, eyes scanning the sidewalks ahead, but no one takes much notice of them. The Asker is flagging within minutes, though, and they have to stop in another alley six blocks over.

  They need a plan.

  Warden pulls out his laptop.

  Checking the feeds, Mallory thinks. That’s good. That’s a start.

  ‘Anything?’ she asks.

  ‘Corridor’s still empty,’ Warden replies. The tension in her chest eases a little.

  ‘You bugged them?’ says The Asker.

  ‘Yeah,’ Warden begins. It seems like he’s going to say more – and then he hesitates. He glances at Mallory, and then says to The Asker, ‘Sorry, but we have to be sure before this goes any further. Before I joined the Forum,’ he says, ‘what was my hacker name?’ He’s testing him, Mallory realizes, just like they had tested each other when they first met. After everything that’s happened, it does make sense. ‘These people seem to know a lot about Echo Six,’ he continues, ‘but no one’s interested in me. Only the real Asker would know this.’ For a moment, there’s silence. Mallory watches the man they just rescued, heart pounding, though she’s sure it’s him. She’s sure…

  ‘The Runt,’ he says, and there’s a shadow of a smile. Warden nods, echoing it, wider and fuller.

  ‘Correct,’ he says. Mallory feels a sharp relief. ‘Nickname from my brothers,’ he tells her. ‘I was using it ironically, obviously.’

  ‘My turn, then,’ says The Asker – the real, definite Asker. ‘Echo, what was your name before the Forum? I know it, and Echo Six knows it, but I’m near certain she won’t have told anyone else.’

  ‘Sandman,’ she says. Warden’s eyebrows rise. ‘My dad’s a metal fan.’

  ‘Good to know, and also correct.’ The Asker sighs, and his shoulders sag back against the wall. ‘Thank you,’ he says softly. ‘Echo, Warden, thank you.’

  Damn, this is weird…

  ‘Yes, I bugged them,’ Warden tells him, finally answering his earlier question, ‘a little mite in the server room.’ The Asker looks impressed – something Warden seems embarrassingly pleased about – and Mallory wonders for the hundredth time if that was the location hack he had asked for her help with, the one she’d turned down. Her face burns and she bites back the question. She doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to know if all those bruises were partly her fault.

  It doesn’t matter now, she tells herself. He’s safe. That’s what matters.

  ‘Cutting the loops,’ says Warden. A few more clicks, then, ‘Cutting the connection.’ He lets out a slow breath, folding away the laptop. ‘When they find the guard,’ he goes on, ‘they’ll know we must have looped the feeds – can’t avoid that – but at least they still shouldn’t know how. I don’t think I should connect again, though.’

  Mallory nods. The first thing they’ll do is look for a tap.

  ‘What happened with The Forum,’ The Asker says, ‘after I left?’ Mallory stiffens, though the question was always going to come at some point. ‘No one else disappeared, did they?’ He trails off. Mallory feels Warden look at her.

&n
bsp; Four, three, four, two.

  ‘No one else,’ she tells The Asker, and his relief is obvious.

  Four, three, four, two.

  ‘I shut it down,’ she says. She makes herself look at him, even as her muscles squirm. ‘I had to.’ She explains what happened then – everything she and Warden did, why they did it – as clear and fast as she can. She doesn’t quite know how she expected The Asker to react – anger, maybe, disbelief – but she sees none of that.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ is all he says afterwards. ‘The Forum was compromised.’

  ‘But it’s gone.’ This time her voice comes out shaky. He holds her gaze. He looks sad.

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘but we are not, and the other members are not, wherever they are. I asked you to keep them safe, Echo, and that’s what you did. I’m grateful.’

  Mallory manages only another nod in response, feeling both like a weight has lifted, but also remembering the loss all over again.

  You’re okay, she tells herself. You’re –

  ‘Do you have any idea how they used your account?’ Warden asks. ‘How they sent the ransom message?’

  The Asker shakes his head.

  ‘They must have hacked it from outside the Forum,’ he replies, ‘though I don’t know how, and it’s alarming to think who would even be able to do that. I’ve never told anyone how to log in as me. Some of these bruises are because they demanded I do just that, and I wouldn’t. I still can’t figure out how they even knew about the site in the first place.’

  ‘What about Scarlet?’ says Mallory, finding her voice again. ‘Could she have told them?’

  He hesitates.

  ‘She could have, but I don’t think so. Scarlet has a way about her, but the Forum meant almost as much to her as it did to me. She wouldn’t have given it up.’

  ‘Even if they hurt her?’ says Warden. The Asker licks his lips like they’re too dry.

  ‘But you said they logged in through my account,’ he replies, ‘not hers. And there would have been no reason to ask her about the Forum at all if they didn’t already know it existed.’

  ‘Could there have been another mole, then?’ asks Mallory.