The Recluse

by D A Rice

  The prediction told him now that she wasn’t as broken as she thought she was. He knew nothing about her beyond the fact that she was like him. There was a connection that had solidified between them, and Eli was determined to find her inside her head. She had been lied to. He would help her find the truth, just as he’d once had to do.

  Arachnid thought they’d gotten rid of him. Eli had seen their records of the event. He’d returned two years later, hacking his way back into the cyber world he’d so infamously left behind. They didn’t know who he was, not yet, and he liked it that way. Eli was a fly on the cyber wall of Arachnid. For the last five years, he’d watched and tested them. He’d moved from place to place across the country, testing their connections in each city.

  Eli had posed as the entry-level hacker, confident in his mediocre skills. Inside their programming, however, they didn’t even know he was there. Eli had seen a lot, learning as much as he could about what they’d done in his absence. He’d seen them stealing technology they found useful and destroying anything else. Their goal was complete anarchy.

  The world was so dependent on technology that a complete technological takedown was not an impossibility. Arachnid had a ridiculous amount of funding, both received and stolen. With these resources, it was only a matter of time. A cyber attack to the degree they were planning could only be stopped from the inside. So Eli had planned. He couldn’t just go in without knowing what he was in for. Coding was an intricate language. If he went in blind, there was no way he could stop them in time. He was short on that as it was.

  Arachnid had started with the right intentions, but they had fallen so far from their original goals. Eli often wondered if they even knew what they wanted anymore.

  Symbolically, Arachnid had eight members. The hidden backer of the group, known simply as the Wolf, financed them almost as much as they financed themselves. No one knew his real-life identity, but Eli was determined to find out. The Wolf had been the one to change the group from being a greyhat organization into a team of cyber destruction. A greyhat was the hacker equivalent of an antihero, someone who hacked illegally, but usually for a good reason. Eli was one of those hackers, but the Wolf was someone who was worse than the Arachnid group as a whole.

  Eli had seen very quickly that the Wolf was a viable threat, cunning and cruel. He had seen the Wolf play kind when the man thought it’d get him somewhere, but he was a faceless tyrant within the organization. The Wolf pulled Arachnid’s strings from behind a deformed, bronze wolf mask. Eli knew that finding him, taking him out, would bring the rest down. The Wolf was their foundation. If Eli could rock their confidence in him, they would destroy themselves.

  Eli had a backdoor into their network, a rootkit program he’d installed himself into their systems. It was a way to access all the information he could want from them, including any backdoors they’d established themselves. As far as he could tell, they had no more information on the Wolf than he did.

  Before he’d known what they would do to him, back when he’d simply been B3oW0lf, Eli had uploaded his program, testing it out on the best hackers in the world. It had proven to be something no one on the team had been able to detect, just as he’d designed it. Originally, Eli planned to pull the program out. After Arachnid’s betrayal, however, Eli found the backdoors the rootkit continuously provided him to be invaluable.

  Eli’s hacking style had changed from seven years ago. He had grown, and so had his coding. He had perfected his spiders so completely that they could locate any information he needed within minutes. It was what a spider program was for, information retrieval. He rarely needed to use a network of remotely accessed computers for the things he did. However, he had used one this time. It had been necessary for the size of the virus he’d delivered.

  Taking over the computers around him had been easy, even from a public terminal. No one had known their computer had been hijacked, just as it should be. It had been a risky move out where he could be seen as the Recluse, but he had only needed it for a few minutes. It was especially risky with Arachnid siccing the NYPD on him every time he pushed on their firewalls.

  Every time he sent out a program, he knew it would be traced. It was intentional. This virus, however, needed to go off immediately. He should have done it remotely, diverting the proxy to the café's location, but he’d wanted Arachnid to see him physically do it.

  Eli wanted them to know they’d underestimated him. He wanted them to question everything they thought they knew. However, Eli knew that he was in for it from law enforcement now. This last cyber escapade had surely upped his threat level to FBI or CIA status. He would need to be very careful how he hacked from now on. He wanted Arachnid to know what he was doing, but he didn’t want them to know who he was.

  The group was getting predictable, though. They believed in their abilities so much that they seemed to forget that someone had existed once who was far better than any of them. The Wolf had been the only one who saw Eli’s capability to destroy Arachnid, without anyone knowing until it was too late. Eli was the wild card within the eight, and The Wolf decided this risk was much greater than the reward. It hadn’t taken Eli long during those two years after the incident to figure all of this out.

  Eli knew he needed to find out who the Wolf was in real life. He also knew the Wolf would come looking for him once he found out Eli was alive. When that happened, Eli would let him. His skills had come back to haunt them. Arachnid just didn’t know it yet.

  At this moment, Eli had more important things to do. His eyes found the girl in his arms as he carried her up the last of the stairs. The Wolf could wait. Once he opened that box, Eli knew there was no closing it back up.

  He smiled as he moved into a room on the second floor of the church. This was a room none of the homeless below him knew about. He had restricted it from the others. Even if he had come to know them personally over the year he had been in New York, he needed his space.

  Being among the homeless was a great place to hide in plain sight. This room was one of two places Eli went when the need for seclusion became overwhelming. He laid Rei on the twin mattress by the wall, brushing back a strand of sweaty blonde hair from her face. She was incredibly warm, and if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought it was dangerous.

  The predictive side of him said it was something else entirely. Her eyes glowed, he thought. His fingers brushed the watch on his wrist unconsciously, that nervous habit surfacing. He hadn’t told her, but her eyes had been steaming at the edges while closed. When she opened them to look at him, they had glowed like they were on fire. Her eyes were the sun, he thought.

  He bent over her and, listening to his predictive instinct, kissed her closed eyes gently, one after the other. He put his weight on his forearms to balance himself as he did.

  His lips burned with the second brush of his lips over her eyes, and he jerked back from her, trying hard to breathe with the pain of it. How can she take all of this and still stay sane? He thought as he began to see how she saw. Demons covered the walls of his room. Some were almost dragon-like as they scurried across and out the window, fangs dripping with mucus-thick saliva from their mouths. A hissing noise sounded from wherever the saliva landed. Other demons looked like spindly, deformed bugs.

  He could see them. Rei’s power was explosive. Eli took in the voices next, speaking in a language he might never understand, then he laughed. What Eli saw was only part of what she was going through right now, of that he had no doubt. He slid down the wall next to the bed and collapsed on the floor beside Rei. As he took one last look around in amazement, he endured for her some of the weight she carried alone. Eli had taken part of her sight for himself and, he hoped, relieved some of the pressure and pain Rei was feeling.

  Then his world went dark.

  4

  “The Recluse is leaving love notes, Jackson.” Denbrook, one of the NYPD’s forensic scientists, tapped the tower from the café sitting on one of the lab tables. The ad
miration was clear in Denbrook’s voice, and Jackson had to bite his tongue to keep from rebuking the scientist as he continued.

  “The coding is consistent with every other computer we’ve processed. I have no doubt he’s doing it on purpose. The hard drive we scoured from the Graduate Center proves this. He basically left a big old ‘hello! Come find me,’ welcome message inside.” Denbrook paused thoughtfully glancing at the tower again. “It’s almost like he’s challenging us.”

  Jackson knew why Denbrook was impressed, but it didn’t help them now. The Recluse was leaving messages in the computers for Jackson to find, but he had no idea what they meant. It was just another piece of the puzzle left for the detective to put together. But why? Why had the Recluse deviated from his normal MO? It appeared to the detective that the Recluse was testing his hacking limits on much bigger fish and pulling the NYPD along for the ride.

  This last hack had been into a government research facility. It had been done so fast, Jackson did not doubt that whoever the Recluse was, he had somehow managed to find a backdoor. The lab itself was in a secluded area in the mountains. An onsite takeover would not have been necessary if a hacker was patient or determined enough. Jackson had to wonder if the security protocols for the lab were up-to-date. It was the only way the Recluse could have gotten a program through a network that was supposed to be unhackable. It was a very big problem if the engineers at the Alpine Research Center couldn’t find the program the Recluse had used. They had a huge breach in their network security, not to mention the physical lab.

  It was a problem for Jackson too, in that the FBI was likely about to come knocking on his door. He didn’t want to be kicked off the case entirely, especially knowing how right he had been. The Recluse was far more than he had seemed and he was making his move. Jackson had a real hope of finding the Recluse, of possibly recruiting him. Everything Jackson had found on him made the detective believe that the Recluse was trying to do the right thing in the wrong way. This new stunt, however, didn’t give Jackson high hopes of recruitment. No one would want a hacker they couldn’t control.

  The NYPD had its own counter-terrorism units, and Jackson had experience in them. It was one of the many reasons the commissioner had given this case to him. He was hoping it would be enough to convince the FBI to at least let him help when they came, but he knew it depended on the agent. He hoped it was his protegé.

  Denbrook tapped his hand gently on the counter beside the computer. Jackson looked up at him, returning from his thoughts. Denbrook was looking at his data as if it was a great puzzle. Jackson knew the feeling as the forensic scientist spoke again, “he deviated from his MO in a big way this time, Detective.” Denbrook looked up, meeting Jackson’s gaze.

  Jackson braced himself, eyes narrowing as he asked: “what did he do, Denbrook?”

  Denbrook’s hand massaged his chin in thought. “He got the plans for the Genesis Project, Detective. But he didn’t just take them. He obliterated them from every computer, every hard-drive, that was linked in with the project. He had to have rewritten it into nothing. As long as it’s connected to the network, it doesn’t exist anymore. That had to be a massive payload. The program he delivered will keep re-writing the Genesis Project each time they try to recover it. It’s the only way to erase something like that.”

  Jackson leaned against the counter in disbelief. To program something so extensive, to launch it into a facility that was supposed to be unhackable from such a public place; Jackson was floored. Alpine was supposed to be so secure and secluded that they didn’t need to seal off the lab. How had he done it? Jackson was both mortified, and a little bit impressed. Alpine was likely about to re-think everything they thought they knew about security. If they had gotten lazy, that was about to change, and fast.

  Whatever, or whoever the Recluse was, his mind rivaled the collaborative genius of Arachnid. The FBI had vastly underestimated this hacker, and they would not stop hunting him until they found him. He’d left his mark, but what would it cost him? What was worth the risk of exposing his identity?

  The Recluse was finally launching his next phase and had hooked Jackson into following him wherever it led.

  …

  Rei blinked as her surroundings came into focus. Her hand came up to her face and rubbed her still-aching eyes. Where was she? Momentarily stunned as the sleep left her in confusion, she took in her environment. Oh right, the church. She supposed she should be feeling more panicked than she was, but all she felt was peace.

  Rei surveyed the room. Shelves lined two of the walls, old books nestled within them. There was a musty smell in the air, but Rei felt oddly at easy in the comfort of the secluded room. She lay on a small bed on the floor and could see only one window with the sun pouring gently into the small room. The place had a thin layer of dust coating it which tickled her nose. She pushed herself up on her elbows, but when she looked down, she jerked in surprise.

  He lay there, head in his arms on the bed with the rest of him curled up on the floor beside her. He wasn’t facing her, but she could see the movement under his dark blue hoodie as his back rose and fell. Resisting the urge to touch him, to make sure he was real, Rei stroked her hands along the quilt instead.

  She could tell it was old, that the quilt had been loved and almost as lovingly placed around her was also obvious. She could see it was cared for by how the quilt looked: stitches loose in places, but not torn with holes all through it. She ran her fingers over the roughly-stitched flowers one more time before pulling her hands into her lap. Was this how the man before her took care of his things?

  Rei slid herself up into a full sitting position, careful not to jostle Eli’s sleeping form. She remembered him telling her his name. He had to have carried her to this room from downstairs. How else could she have gotten here? If he had not been real, she reasoned, she would be waking up in the room where he had found her.

  She remembered the pain; then she remembered that pain lifting from her. It was as if someone had taken it. Rei touched her fingers to the bottom lids of her eyes before looking down at Eli again. He’d been so careful with her, so calm in the midst of chaos. Why? She wondered, knowing how she must have appeared to him. He had not only taken care of her; he’d asked no questions. Eli had simply taken over where he was needed by getting her somewhere safe. Could he be the Recluse? She glanced around as her next thought was, if he lives here, maybe not.

  There was no technology to be seen in this old, forgotten room. There was no elaborate setup. Rei would expect to see a wall full of computer monitors with a large desk and a roll around chair. Then again, she only had the movies to go by. Rei doubted it was anything like that. She smiled. She needed to stop her imagination from running away with her all the time. Her distracted mind was part of the reason she had gotten lost in the first place.

  If this guy was the hacker the police were looking for, he lacked the resources to do much with that ability. Eli had to be just another homeless person, like everyone else who sought shelter here. Rei shook her head; she must have been wrong. “There’s no way you’re the Recluse,” she said softly, her hand reaching out to lightly touch his hair before falling into her lap. Dark brown and messy, it was unusually soft as it tickled her palm. She hadn’t been able to resist that last bit of proof that he was real.

  She felt him flinch before he raised his head slowly. Eli looked at her with those stunningly golden eyes of his, an eyebrow raised. “Pardon?”

  She blushed furiously, “oh my gosh, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.” She couldn’t believe he’d heard her. How long had he been awake? Had he felt her hand caress the tip of his hair? If he had, he made no mention of it.

  Eli grinned mischievously, his eyes taking her in as if deciding something. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked her. She nodded as she watched him, her curiosity piqued. Eli leaned on his forearms across the bed. “The Recluse is a made-up story,” he whispered. He shifted positions so he could face her more comfort
ably, bringing his legs in front of him in a kneeling position. His black jeans rustled lightly with the movement. Eli seemed so confident and so relaxed compared to her own restless nerves. Would he say anything about the weirdness of last night at all?

  She blinked away the thought, clenching her hands together in her lap, “what do you mean?”

  “I mean the press made up a story and a name to go with it. They have none of the facts.” His eyes shifted from the wall in front of him to the bed on which his forearms rested as he spoke.

  There’s that sadness again, Rei thought as he continued.

  “They don’t talk about a boy who lost his only family. In fact, they don’t even know the boy underneath the Recluse exists.

  “To them, the hacker he was is dead. Stripped from memory by Arachnid, the Recluse is what rose from the grave.” He looked at her again, a twinkle livening his eyes. “They don’t have all the facts, so they made up a story to fit their selfish means. I wouldn’t believe everything you read, Rei.”

  Rei didn’t know what to say to that. All she could do was watch as Eli stretched his hands over his back. He moved his head from side to side next, likely working out the kinks in his body from sleeping on the floor. She could hear his spine cracking with his impromptu readjustments. “You lost your family?” she finally asked, quietly putting the pieces together from what he had told her.

  He paused as he glanced at her, “yes.”

  “And you’re not going to ask me about what happened last night?”

  “Nope.”

  “And what you just said- You really are…”

  He held a hand up, interrupting her. “Do you have your phone on you?” Eli asked as he suddenly smiled, his eyes knowing. Oh yeah, she thought, she did have that. Rei had forgotten she had it on her. She wondered briefly how many times Damion had called her this morning. He was probably freaking out. Rei would have to call him as soon as she could. Then she would have to explain why she hadn’t used it to find her way home, she didn’t have an answer for that.