by Tiffany Snow
But the man following me had been very real, and now I saw his body lying facedown in the hallway. He wasn’t moving.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Devon murmured, his lips brushing my brow. I nodded, clinging to him like a vine.
Reggie was waiting for us downstairs, and if possible, he looked even paler than before. He didn’t speak as we hurried by, but followed close on Devon’s heels.
Outside was as eerie as before, only now even more menacing. I gazed into the shadows, wondering if more men were waiting to ambush us. But we met no one on the way back to the car.
I was still shaking like a leaf as Devon stashed me in the front passenger seat before getting behind the wheel. Reggie climbed in behind us and in moments, we were speeding down the street.
“Who were those men?” I asked Devon, once I felt I could speak without my voice quavering. I wasn’t wholly successful.
“They were competitors, right, Reggie?”
I heard Reggie’s gulp all the way from the front seat. “Y-yeah. I guess.”
“It’s not a guess!” Devon’s voice was loud in the car and I jumped, startled. “You couldn’t keep quiet, could you, Reggie? You had to brag.”
Reggie said nothing to his accusation.
After a moment, I felt brave enough to venture another question. “Brag about what?”
“It’s something I—”
“Do not say it,” Devon sternly interrupted. “Have you learned nothing? The more people who know, the worse it is for you, Reggie. And dangerous for them. So keep your mouth shut.”
That wasn’t insulting or anything. “It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone,” I muttered.
Devon shot me a quick glance. “It’s not about you,” he said. “And there’s no need for you to know.”
After that, no one said anything all the way back to the hotel.
I was curious, but wasn’t going to push my luck with Devon. He was angrier and tenser than I’d ever seen him.
With his hand on my elbow, Devon led us back to the rooms.
“You’ll stay in there,” Devon said to Reggie, pointing through the connecting door. “We’ll be in here. Do not leave the room. Understood?”
Reggie nodded, looking ever so much like a chastised child rather than a grown man. He went through the door and Devon closed it behind him, but didn’t lock it.
“We are not going to be in here,” I said. “You can stay with Reggie. I’m not staying in the same room with you.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Devon said, discarding his gun onto the table.
“There isn’t a couch!” I followed him, watching in dismay as he lay down on the bed with a sigh.
“I’ve killed two men tonight, plus the five last night,” he said, “and slept a total of three hours in the last twenty-four. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a nap.” He cracked open an eye. “Your virtue is safe with me.”
His deadpan delivery, not to mention the facts he’d just reeled off about the last two days, made a blush stain my cheeks. I felt ridiculous. He was already breathing deeply and steadily, perhaps asleep, and here I was thinking he was going to want to rip my clothes off and make love to me.
I guess he really did get tired like normal people sometimes.
Well, I wasn’t tired. I’d slept enough that even though it was nearly midnight, I was wide awake. Curious about Reggie, I hesitantly tapped on the connecting door. No one answered, but I went ahead and opened it anyway.
Closing the door softly behind me, I glanced around the room and saw Reggie sitting in front of the television with headphones covering his ears. He looked up and saw me, quickly snatching off the headphones.
“Hey,” he said, and I could tell he was nervous.
“Devon didn’t introduce us,” I said, walking over to him. I held out my hand. “I’m Ivy.”
Reggie shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, Ivy,” he said. His palm was very soft, which told me he probably didn’t do a lot of hard labor.
“So what are you doing?” I asked, sitting next to him on the bed. I gestured to the TV. “Is that a game?”
“Yeah,” he said. “World of Warcraft. It’s an RPG.”
“RPG?”
“Role-playing game,” he clarified. “You wanna play?”
I glanced at the screen. “Um, no thanks. Maybe later.”
We were both quiet for a moment in awkward silence. “So,” I said with false cheer. “You know Devon.”
He nodded, his eyes shifting away from mine. “Yeah, but I probably shouldn’t talk about it. He always tells me I talk too much.”
“So you see Devon often,” I said.
“Um, yeah,” Reggie said, fiddling with the game controller in his hands. “I mean, since like, last summer.”
“That seems . . . odd,” I said. “I mean, you and he aren’t in the same business, right? What happened last summer?”
Reggie seemed uncomfortable with my fishing for information. “I should probably get back to this,” he hedged. His gaze shifted to mine, then dropped to my breasts. I saw him swallow and quickly look away. His ears turned red.
“You know what,” I said, “I changed my mind. Can you teach me how to play?”
“Sure, yeah, if you want,” he said, sounding much more eager than I felt. He dug into his backpack and pulled out another game controller. Soon, he’d set me up and was teaching me what all the different buttons did.
I tried to follow, but it was a lot of information, and I wasn’t really that interested anyway. But it was working. Reggie was a lot more relaxed after about a half hour of going through the game and showing me what to do.
“So you must spend a lot of time playing this,” I said, wondering what in the world the British government wanted with a gamer like Reggie.
“Yeah, when I’m not working,” he said, his eyes glued to the screen.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, keeping my tone carefully nonchalant.
“I write code,” he said. “Operating systems, mainly.”
“Operating systems?”
“Yeah. You know, it’s the software that runs your computer, your iPad, your smartphone.”
“And you write that?” I asked. “Don’t, you know, corporations do that?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, rapidly manipulating the buttons on his controller. “But they farm it out, too, ya know. Especially if they’re under a time crunch. Investors and the market have deadlines and it’s a competitive world. There’s always someone else out there waiting to take a bigger slice of the pie.”
“So you write code for computers?”
“Mainly smartphones,” he said, reaching for the Red Bull on the table and taking a swig. “I wrote eighty percent of the software currently running on the world’s most well-known smartphone.” I could hear the pride in his voice. “Hey, watch it. That guy’s about to take you out.”
I looked back at the screen, but Reggie was already shooting over my avatar’s head.
“Got him,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
We played—or he did, I just pretended to—for a few more minutes as I thought this over. I wanted him to tell me what this was about without asking outright, which would probably make him clam up. Out of fear of Devon, if nothing else.
“That sounds really hard,” I said. “You must be really good at it.”
He shrugged. “It’s one of those things, ya know? Some people are just born knowing how to do something. I was born knowing how to write code. It just made sense to me.”
“It probably pays really well,” I said.
“Yeah, but I don’t handle the money. It gets sent to my bank and my bills are on auto pay. I don’t like messing with money and accounting and shit like that.” He immediately turned my way. “Oh, hey, sorry about that.”
I smiled at his apology for cursing. “It’s okay.”
“And I heard you screaming,” he said, “in my house
. You were in the Psycho room, weren’t you?”
“The Psycho room?”
“Yeah. Old lady in the chair, curtains, she had a knife.”
Oh. “Yes, that sounds like the one.”
Reggie cleared his throat. “Sorry you were in there,” he said. “That room’s kinda tripped out.”
“So I noticed.” My tone was dry, but I smiled and he smiled back. “You could make it up to me by telling me how you know Devon,” I suggested.
He hesitated, glancing over my shoulder at the closed connecting door, then back to me. “Okay, but you have to swear to me you won’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t,” I promised, scooting closer to him like two teenagers trading secrets. “Tell me.”
“Okay, well, you see last summer, I was working on this OS,” he began, his voice low like he was telling me a state secret. At my look, he clarified, “Operating system. Anyway, the company had very strict instructions about their biodetection software, which I thought was kind of strange. But I was being paid to do a job, so I did it. I coded my modules and sent them off. I asked them about it, but they told me it wasn’t my area and thanks-but-get-lost, basically. Well, that pissed me off, so I decided to hack into their system and see what the code did when hooked into the other modules.” He paused.
“What did it do?” I asked.
Reggie looked around again, as though afraid we were being overheard, then hissed in a low whisper, “It stole biomed data.”
I stared at him, confused. “It did what?”
“You know those phones where you use your fingerprint?” he said. At my nod, he continued, “Well, it’s supposed to just use that to unlock the phone and that’s all. This phone took fingerprints and uploaded them in the background to the company’s servers, creating an entire database of users, complete with their fingerprints. And that’s not the worst. The front-facing camera was so good, it could take a retinal scan, too.”
“That doesn’t sound so awful,” I said. “The police take your fingerprints—”
“That’s the police and you have to be arrested for them to get your prints,” he interrupted, and I could tell he’d forgotten all about Devon in his need for me to understand. “This is a private company. And you gotta realize where security is going—biomed. Think of it. One database, with millions and millions of users’ data, including their biometric signature. It would be worth a fortune. And it could hold anyone’s signature. CEO of some big corporation. The head of the IMF. Hell, even the president. What do you think someone would pay to get their hands on the president of the United States’ fingerprints? Or his retinal scan?”
Okay, when he put it that way, I could see this could be very bad indeed. “But why are you here?” I asked. “What can you do about it? Shouldn’t the authorities be notified?”
“The company is based in the Netherlands, which is notorious for its lack of privacy laws. It allows them to do this all legally.”
“But just let people know,” I persisted. “Social media will take care of it and no one will buy their phones.”
“I haven’t told you the worst part,” he said.
“There’s more?”
Reggie nodded glumly. “The code contains a provision that fuses the phone’s components and, theoretically, turns it into an incendiary device.”
I stared at him. “You mean a bomb.”
“Yep.”
“So people are walking around with smartphones that not only steal their privacy, but could kill them?”
“Yep.”
It was hard to wrap my head around. “But why would anyone do that?” I asked.
“Theoretically, it was something tossed around a while back in black hat circles, but it was just considered vaporware.” At my confused look, he elaborated. “Black hat—bad guys. In this case, black hat hackers. Vaporware is software that is supposedly in development, but never actually is released. So in theory, it was like this cool thing, but no one ever expected it to really happen.”
“But someone did,” I said, thinking Reggie’s definition of “cool” and mine were vastly different.
He nodded. “It’s an incredible feat, actually, and a perfect terrorist plan. You don’t even have to deliver the bomb because everyone already has one. See, watch.” He grabbed his tablet from his backpack and swiped a few times until a video began playing.
I watched as someone filmed a well-known smartphone sitting on a table. Nothing happened for about thirty seconds, then it suddenly blew up, with no warning whatsoever. Though the blast wasn’t huge, if it had been in someone’s pocket or God forbid at their ear, it would have killed them or at the very least, seriously injured them.
“I’d just discovered this and was trying to figure out what to do when Devon turned up,” Reggie said. “He told me they knew about the code and that I had to find a way to disable it.”
“How could you possibly do that?” I asked.
Reggie grinned. “The only thing easier than writing code,” he said, “is breaking it. I wrote a hack that’ll brick every one of those phones.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed.
Reggie’s grin faded. “Yeah, the only bad part is that I can’t do it through their servers. I need to get on-site to upload the hack so it gets pushed out to every phone as an automatic update.”
“How will you do that?”
“That’s where Devon comes in,” Reggie said.
“So what were you ‘bragging’ about that got him so mad?” I asked.
Reggie’s ears turned red again. “That I had stolen the rest of the retinal and fingerprint stealth scan software. Those guys who came . . . well, let’s just say a lot of people would want to get their hands on that.”
“Can’t they just write their own?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that simple to write a stealth program that’ll do what you want without other code junkies figuring out what you’re doing. It’d be just like you said, all over social media, the news, everywhere. The company would tank and then what’s the point of having the software?”
“I see.”
Reggie fiddled with the game controller, then turned back to the television and resumed his game.
“You didn’t really want to learn how to play, did you?” he said.
I hesitated, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “I don’t think I’m cut out for gaming,” I hedged.
He glanced at me, a small grin playing at his lips. “If you’re with Devon, I doubt he cares.” Reggie gave me a quick once-over again. “You’re beautiful,” he blurted. “Devon’s a lucky guy.”
I forced a smile because it was a kind thing for him to say, though I wished it wasn’t the first thing people saw about me, or the reason why he thought Devon was a “lucky guy.” “Thank you.”
Sitting back against the headboard, I watched Reggie play the game for a while, though I couldn’t hear anything. He’d put his headphones back on and I thought about all he’d told me.
Devon really was working on a mission that could save millions of lives. Even after the virus Heinrich had tried to weaponize and had infected me with, it still seemed incredible to me.
“You know you can’t trust them, right?” Reggie asked out of the blue.
I frowned, watching as he blew something up on the screen. “What do you mean? You trust him.”
“Devon, yes, but not the people he works for,” he clarified. “The stakes are too high for any one person to mean anything to them. So I have an insurance policy.”
The idea of an “insurance policy” against the Shadow reminded me of my own—the pages of the diary I’d hidden.
“What is it?” I asked.
From in his pocket, he produced a tiny, silver flash drive and showed it to me. “The code I stole.”
“The code that documents the biodata?”
He grinned. “Yep.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’d just take it from you?” I asked.
“It’s encrypt
ed,” he explained. “If they try to crack the password, the data erases itself after three failed attempts.” Reggie pushed the drive back into his pocket. “I figure, if it comes down to it and Devon isn’t around or is unable to take my side, I at least have a bargaining chip.”
“It’s a smart idea,” I said. He just shrugged modestly and continued playing his game.
“How old are you?” I asked after a few minutes. Reggie seemed barely out of his teens.
“Twenty-three,” he said. “But I’ve been writing code since I was nine.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That’s really young.”
“Yeah, I guess. I got bored with the kiddie stuff and started consulting when I was twelve. People said stuff like kid genius and prodigy. Shit like that. But I don’t feel like a prodigy. I just do what comes natural to me.”
“That’s really cool,” I said. “I don’t really have anything that comes naturally to me. At least, nothing I could make a living from.”
He glanced at me. “You’re really nice,” he blurted. “Most girls who look like you, they don’t give me the time of day.”
I felt my cheeks heat and I didn’t really know what to say. “Thanks. I’m sorry that people treat you badly. That’s not right.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. People aren’t always what they seem, I guess. You look at the outside and people judge, whether they think I’m some kind of socially inept loser or that you’re a cold bitch.” He seemed to catch himself at that. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “Yes, a lot of people assume I’m not a very nice person based on how I look. I don’t have a lot of friends.”
“Me neither,” he said.
“I’m your friend,” I said, smiling. “Will you be my friend, too?”
He grinned. “Absolutely.”
A sudden noise made me sit up in bed. I listened intently, then heard it again. A loud voice, almost like a cry, coming from my room.
I vaulted out of the bed and ran to the door. Flinging it open, I peered in confusion at my room. No one was there but Devon, asleep on the bed.
Okay, that was weird, I thought as I waved a goodnight to Reggie, who just shook his head at my antics and returned his attention to the flickering screen. Closing the door, I glanced back at the bed—
