Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

  ‘I don’t know.’ The Asker sighs. ‘And I hate how much I’m saying that. It’s possible, I suppose, but who? I vetted everyone so carefully. I just…’ He stops. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeats, running a frustrated hand through his already ragged hair. No one says anything for a moment.

  However they got there, what they really need is to work out what to do next. Mallory’s plan for when they had made it past rescuing The Asker had been to find out what the CoD really wanted and bargain it back to them on her own terms – keeping everyone else safe. She has what they want now, right there in her backpack, and The Asker is out of their reach, so this is the time to act, to do it… But now it comes to it…

  ‘I think we should call the police,’ says Warden. Mallory’s nerves flutter, but she stays silent as he pulls out his phone. Maybe that’s best now. Maybe they should.

  ‘No,’ says The Asker, though, ‘you can’t.’ Warden pauses.

  ‘Why not?’ He frowns. ‘You’re safe now, but we need help. You need help – ’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’ The Asker’s voice is insistent. ‘You can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But they still have Scarlet and the others, and we have no leads. They have Echo’s picture – ’

  ‘And they have mine too,’ The Asker says, stopping him. ‘Those being a few of the reasons why we can’t call for help.’ He holds Warden’s confused gaze, his bruised face set. ‘The police can’t help us with this,’ he continues. ‘Warden, Echo, you’ve been trusting me for a long time, I need you to trust me now. What’s going on is bigger than you could possibly know and there just isn’t time.’ Warden looks at Mallory, unsure. She nods. He lowers his hand, tucking the phone back into his pocket.

  ‘Okay, then,’ he says to The Asker. ‘What do we do?’

  The House of Ms Angeline Garcia

  The taxi pulls into a quiet residential street in the South Jamaica neighborhood of Queens. Mallory glances at her watch. Hailing a cab had taken several minutes – they probably didn’t look like very savory customers – and the ride out to the borough has been a further thirty-three. It’s nearly six thirty now, the sun almost completely disappeared behind the tiled roofs of clapboard houses, oak trees and yard fences casting long shadows across the road below. A group of kids are chucking a football around a few houses up. It makes Mallory think of Jed, him and Roger stuck in a motel somewhere, not knowing why, because of what she’s got herself into. She clenches her hands; tight, then loose, tight, then loose.

  She’s fixing it.

  They’re fixing it.

  She had checked the webcam feed from her house right after they’d got into the cab, but no one had turned up there yet. If that was where the three other kidnappers had been headed, then they should have made it by now… unless they’d ID’d her wrongly from that blurry picture. Or maybe they hadn’t been going there at all. There are still so many questions. The main thing, though, is that Roger and Jed had done what she’d said and hadn’t gone back there either. She’s had no more message notifications on her phone from the Forum, which means that either no one’s found the injured guard and the otherwise empty room, or they have and the CoD just haven’t decided how to respond. At least that gives them a little time to make a plan themselves. They haven’t been able to talk openly during the ride, what with the driver right there too. Mallory has spent most of it trying to not touch anyone – squished in the back with The Asker and Warden – and noticing it so very much every time she does…

  ‘Just over there,’ The Asker says now. The driver pulls up in front of a pale blue house with a neatly manicured lawn. Mallory gets out quickly, stepping away from the car and taking long, slow breath.

  The first thing they’d needed to do was get off of the streets and out of Port Morris. They couldn’t exactly go back to Mallory’s and they didn’t completely trust anywhere with CCTV. The Asker had said he knew a place where they would be safe, though he hadn’t been there in a while.

  ‘Is this it then?’ Warden asks, looking up at the blue house and reapplying antibacterial gel to his hands as the cab pulls away – he’d already given them a good covering on the ride. The Asker shakes his head.

  ‘Still a few blocks away,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t hurt to be cautious.’ He sets off down the sidewalk. He seems calmer now, more alert. More like his voice from the Forum. Three minutes and five streets later, he stops in front of another clapboard house, this one a greying white. It’s a narrow detached, separated from the street by a half height wire fence. The place looks like it’s been well kept, apart from the lawn is a little overgrown. The Asker seems to hesitate a moment, his expression unreadable, before stepping forward and pushing open the gate.

  ‘This,’ he says softly, ‘is it.’

  Mallory follows, glancing at the name on the mailbox: Ms Angeline Garcia. She doesn’t recognize it, but that’s not exactly surprising. Beside her, Warden is frowning.

  ‘You okay?’ she asks. The redness across his nose is already turning to a dark bruise. She can smell the gel from his hands.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, brow softening as he looks up at her. ‘Headache, that’s all. You?’ Mallory’s shoulder is sore and the throb in her jaw is kind of making her want to punch something.

  ‘Fine,’ she answers. Warden smiles this little reassuring smile, and something inside of her seems to relax, to ease off.

  The Asker crouches on the porch and lifts up a large cactus pot to the right of the yellow front door. There’s a small hole in the boarding beneath. He hooks his finger inside and lifts the panel.

  ‘Some things never change,’ he murmurs, reaching through the gap and pulling out a brass key. He unlocks the door and steps inside. The living room beyond is painted yellow like the door, little pink flowers decorating the border beneath the coving. A few family photos are hung here and there, but all the furniture is covered in white sheets.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ Mallory asks.

  ‘My aunt’s,’ says The Asker.

  His aunt’s? It’s odd thinking of him having a family, though it shouldn’t be. Every hacker identity has an actual someone behind it.

  Warden asks the question out loud.

  ‘I had to grow up somewhere,’ The Asker replies. Mallory wonders if his surname is Garcia too. They haven’t done real name introductions and she thinks they probably won’t. It’s maybe safer that way. ‘Stayed here sometimes when things weren’t so good at home.’ He pauses in front of one of the photographs. He looks so normal. It’s all so normal.

  Of course he was going to be normal, Mallory thinks. He’s just a person, like you’re a person, like Warden’s a person… But he’s also The Asker, right there in front of her, and she doesn’t know what to say or how to interact with him like this.

  ‘So, I’m guessing she’s not here right now?’ says Warden.

  ‘Died a few months back,’ The Asker tells him.

  ‘Oh man, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Life happens, right?’ The Asker replies. ‘My cousin hasn’t cleared the place out yet. We should be safe here.’ He crosses the room, hand trailing absently along one of the dusty sheets, and exits through a door at the back. Mallory and Warden follow him through, emerging into a large kitchen with white walls and windows hung with lace curtains. The room is L-shaped, with the stove, sink and cupboards in front of them, a sheet-covered table off to the right. A door behind it leads out to a utility room, then the yard. The Asker pulls the covers off, revealing a dining table and four mismatched wooden chairs with plump, flowery cushions tied on to make them more comfortable. They each take a seat, Mallory taking the cushion off hers – she doesn’t like the way they slide about. Warden is next to her, The Asker sat across.

  It’s surreal.

  A wave of exhaustion hits her. Running on adrenaline seems to burn you out way faster than actual running and this whole week has been a kind of whirlwind. They can’t stop yet, though. She loops her bag off of her shoulders and takes out both l
aptops, leaving the gun inside. She opens her own computer, turning it on to check the feed from her house again – the other, she pushes to the middle of the table. Everyone’s eyes fix on it, a single silver rectangle on the varnished wood. There are so many things they don’t know, so many things that Mallory doesn’t understand, but a lot of it seems to be pointing back to that one laptop.

  ‘Asker,’ she says, finally speaking, ‘what’s on it?’

  ‘The Reckoning,’ he replies. ‘Daedalus’s last virus, the super virus he claimed could change the world.’ Mallory’s heart skips. Warden’s jaw visibly drops. They’d known the disappearances had to do with people looking into it, but the virus itself? Her mind buzzes, trying to make sense of it. The Asker’s face is deadly serious.

  ‘But it’s not real,’ she says, though that’s a fairly pointless statement right now. ‘I mean,’ she goes on, ‘you said so yourself. Thousands of hackers tried to follow that trail.’

  ‘I was wrong,’ The Asker replies. ‘Well, I was right in one respect – it was never hidden anywhere on the web, and that’s why no one ever found it – but it does exist. It exists on one, single hard drive.’ He reaches out and opens up the laptop’s lid, revealing the code Mallory had glimpsed before. ‘It exists here, hidden behind an encryption no one can break.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Warden says. ‘In Daedalus’s final video, he said he’d hidden it in pieces across the internet. Did someone find them all? I thought no one could find any?’

  ‘Daedalus lied,’ The Asker responds. ‘He wanted to be a legend, to be immortal, wanted everyone to keep looking for it so he wouldn’t be forgotten. But that wasn’t where he actually hid it.’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know how the CoD, specifically, got the laptop, only that they said he’d sent it to one of his followers before he killed himself and that – and I quote – only someone Daedalus deemed worthy enough would be able to crack the code and release the virus.’

  Mallory feels a chill.

  ‘That’s why they wanted elites,’ she says. The Asker nods.

  ‘And why,’ he adds, ‘they were initially targeting those already looking into the virus.’

  ‘Daedalus has been dead almost two years,’ Warden says. ‘Why now? Why only start all this, going after other hackers, now?’

  ‘Because they’re running out of time,’ The Asker responds. ‘Daedalus set certain conditions on the encryption, rules which, if broken, would lead to the deletion of The Reckoning by those unworthy of it. Things like, you try to copy the code from that laptop, it deletes. Try to transfer it, it deletes. Then, just over a month ago, they said a new clock started ticking on the screen – a new rule – counting down to October fifteenth, five thirty in the morning; the second anniversary of Daedalus’s suicide. Apparently, he had planned when he was going to kill himself. Along with the clock, there was a video message from him saying they were taking too long and he was only going to give them a Biblical forty days more to complete their trial. They’ve got’ – he glances at the clock on the wall – ‘just under fifty-nine hours left, or they’ve failed. After that…’

  ‘It deletes,’ Warden finishes.

  ‘That’s why the CoD started getting more reckless,’ The Asker explains, ‘more dangerous.’ Mallory swallows.

  ‘You said you don’t know how many of them there are?’ she says.

  ‘I only ever saw four after I was caught,’ he answers. ‘Elsewhere, I don’t know, but someone must be holding the other hackers.’

  ‘If they’re still alive,’ Warden says quietly.

  ‘I don’t think they’d kill them,’ he responds, ‘not before the deadline. Even if they’d failed at first, those are some of the top coders out there – they could still need them. And Scarlet,’ he says, more firmly, ‘Scarlet was definitely alive when they caught me. That’s what they told me.’ He blinks too many times in a row.

  He really cares about her, Mallory thinks. Even after what’s happened to him, he’s thinking about her.

  ‘She’s alive,’ he repeats. ‘They must just be holding her somewhere else – someone else in the CoD. I know there are more than four because there were others at Labyrinth the night they took me, and someone at the club was either paid off or in on it because they had the room and access to the CCTV. That’s why we can’t go to the police. They can’t protect us from an enemy with unknown numbers and unknown faces, and it would risk retribution against Scarlet’ – his voice falters – ‘maybe the others too.’ The weight of it comes down on Mallory again, then. It’s all on them. ‘The only way to tell a member is by a triangular tattoo that they have on their left hands,’ he goes on.

  ‘A Greek delta,’ she nods. ‘D for Daedalus. We saw a few of them at the club, too, though we don’t know which or how many were actually involved. No one else went near you…’ She stops, remembering the pincushion’s hand. ‘Something strange, though, the guy who was guarding you,’ she says, ‘the symbol on his hand wasn’t a tattoo. It was only drawn on.’

  ‘What?’ says Warden. The Asker’s brow creases.

  ‘His hands must have been sweaty or something because it smudged onto my gloves – it was just normal black ink. I didn’t say anything at the time because, well…’

  ‘There was so much other crap going on,’ Warden ventures. The Asker is still frowning.

  ‘Maybe he just wasn’t a full member yet?’ he suggests. ‘Some kind of initiation still to come?’

  ‘Or what if he wasn’t really CoD at all?’ says Warden. ‘These guys seemed pretty serious about their tats. Lifetime ostracism if it was done wrongly, remember.’

  ‘You think the name in the ransom note was false?’ Mallory asks.

  ‘Well, it didn’t really fit with anything else we knew about them at the time.’ He pauses, then shakes his head. ‘Just a theory,’ he adds. ‘Could be bollocks.’

  Mallory looks at The Asker, questioning.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, shrugging. ‘I knew about the tats, but the kidnappers themselves never told me any names, group or individual.’

  ‘So,’ Warden says, ‘added to the list of things we don’t know.’ Mallory bites her lip. ‘What do we do now, then?’ he continues. He looks at The Asker. ‘You said before that we couldn’t call the police. I’m guessing that means you have another, preferably brilliant plan?’

  The Asker runs a nervous hand through his hair.

  ‘I have a plan,’ he says, ‘but nothing about this is going to be brilliant or easy. The Children of Daedalus – or whoever they are – know our faces. That is a problem. Even if they didn’t have Scarlet – and, we assume, the others – we still couldn’t disappear. Like I said, the police can’t keep us safe if we don’t know who they are, or even how many. This new doubt over their affiliation only makes that worse.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ Mallory asks.

  ‘Well, the ones I encountered,’ he replies, ‘they are dangerous, but hurting people isn’t their actual goal, just a means to an end. What they want is this laptop, unencrypted.’ The Asker’s eyes fall on Mallory. ‘We offer that,’ he says, a fire behind them now, ‘and we have something to bargain with – we become the ones with the power. We give them that and we might just save Scarlet, Cyber Sneak, Weevil and Tower – and ourselves along with them.’

  ‘But you said you couldn’t break it,’ says Warden.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he agrees, ‘but I think maybe Echo can.’ A spark trickles down Mallory’s spine, a kind of heaviness coming to rest with it. ‘I don’t know how the CoD got your name,’ The Asker says to her, ‘but I think they were finally looking for the right person. I couldn’t do it’ – he taps the laptop – ‘but you’re better than me.’ The words shock her, but he holds her gaze, like he’s trying to make them sink in. ‘Maybe you don’t see that, but I’ve known it for a while; the way you look at things, see the angles other people don’t, and so lightning fast… you don’t think like any other hacker I’ve ever known, and I’v
e known a lot. You read up on Daedalus, that’s exactly what everyone says about him too. If anyone can do this, Echo, it’s you.’

  All in a Laptop

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Warden asks. He’s whispering, leaning so close to Mallory that it makes her skin tingle. The Asker is a few feet away, round the corner of the L-shape, rooting through the kitchen cupboards for any remaining food. Warden had complained quite loudly – and, apparently, fraudulently – about being hungry.

  ‘He’s sure,’ Mallory replies softly.

  ‘That’s not an answer. What do you think?’

  She shifts awkwardly. It is what she’d originally intended to do when she’d told Warden she was going after The Asker – find out what it was the CoD wanted, find it and then use it to force a way out of this for all of them. It feels different now, though, just like it had back in the alley, now that she’s sitting here actually about to do it. So much is different in person, even to how you imagine it’ll be – more immediate and loud and pressurized. The Asker’s bruises are real. He was really tortured. The thing is, the more Mallory finds out about the people who took him, the more they frighten her – and the more she doubts whether giving them what they want could ever be a good idea. They don’t even know what The Reckoning does. If the CoD do, they never revealed it to The Asker while they had him. Still…

  ‘I think,’ she says, trying to keep a handle on it all in her head, ‘that this will put us in control.’ That’s what she had wanted, what she had thought could fix this, and maybe it can. Whatever her doubts, it is all they have, and the first part of that growing control has already felt damn good – a message she just sent to The Asker’s account via the Forum; Now I’m the one with something you want. Fortunate. Back the hell off or I’ll smash it.

  Control.

  ‘If you can do it,’ Warden shoots back, ‘and if you then give them The Reckoning. Otherwise it will just right royally piss them off.’

  ‘It’s just a computer virus.’ The words feel hollow.