Louder Than Words (26 page)

Lara was by my side, her fingers linked with mine. She squeezed gently and I smiled for no reason at all other than she was there and I was with her.

‘Spot hits next,’ I replied. ‘We proved how extensive we can be. Now let’s focus on serious damage.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Denial of Service is one thing and it gets attention, sure. But it doesn’t disrupt for long enough. What I’d like to do is get into one area and make a serious mess in there. Something that gives them a real headache to unpick.’

Katrin shrugged. ‘I don’t really understand what you mean, but if it makes our point then fine.’

‘I want to cause enough trouble that they have to throw money at it to fix it. Hit them in the pocket! That’s all they recognise, right, Dillon?’

‘Right.’

‘But isn’t that going to take more money from the pockets of the very people we want to help? Because the cash they throw at it to fix it doesn’t come from nowhere,’ Jez said.

‘How is that any different to how much it costs them when you guys start a riot?’ I replied.

Jez shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess. But some of this is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Is it what we’re really about? It’s beginning to feel like glory seeking to me.’ His eyes shifted slightly off me when he said that, but they didn’t quite rest on anyone else. He got up and walked softly from the kitchen.

‘Is he with us or not?’ Dillon snapped at Katrin. ‘I can’t afford any liabilities now.’

‘He’d like to see some result from our campaigning.’

‘We got a result! Everyone knows about us now. What more does he want?’

‘Fewer children dying. More access to clean water. Little things like that,’ Katrin said with an acid edge.

‘Oh, come on! He expects that overnight?’

‘He’s been with us a long time. I think he expects to see something positive. And also I don’t think he approves of the means to your end either.’

I swear Dillon coloured up as Katrin got up and followed her boyfriend.

‘What? He doesn’t want us to use cyber-attack?’ I asked.

‘Dunno,’ Tyler said. ‘Jez is a quiet one. You never know what’s going on in his head. So this thing you’ve got planned . . . tell me more now the non-techies have gone.’

Lara stood with me later in the backyard of the house and we looked up into the night sky together.

‘You can’t see many stars in a city,’ she said. ‘I could see more where I lived when I was a child.’

‘You don’t call it home.’

‘It was never home.’

‘Why not?’

She switched her gaze from the sky to me in surprise. ‘Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that? Because I never fitted. I wasn’t the daughter they wanted. My sisters were, but not me.’

‘You have sisters?’

‘Yes. I was the middle one.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘Supposed to be difficult in other words, so I guess I was predictable.’

‘You
were
the middle one?’

‘Yeah. They’re not dead or anything. It’s just so long since I felt part of all that.’

‘But now you’re part of this and that’s enough?’

She pulled my head down to kiss me, her lips against mine as addictive as ever. And I was in that space again where there are only the two of us.

‘This is kind of corny,’ she said when we eventually parted. ‘Kissing under the stars.’

‘I can live with that,’ I said, my lips chasing hers again and finding them.

‘Will you come away with me to Africa?’ she said as we walked back to the train station later.

I nearly said something very embarrassing like I’d go anywhere for her. She would have hated that so I settled on a simple, ‘Yes,’ and it pleased her. She told me I was special, more than any guy she’d ever met.

Dad, I wish you were here. I wish if I asked Mum for your address, she’d give it to me. But that isn’t going to happen.

I miss you,

Silas

CHAPTER 51

I called it fate when Andrea cancelled our next appointment because she’d come down with flu. Josie called it an opportunity to practise more. I still hadn’t tried again since Failure Night a few days ago. Josie spent half an hour trying to convince me to have a go, but I wasn’t ready yet. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, I had other things to worry about. Silas was still not hanging out with his friends, despite Josie’s tongue-lashing, and the last two days he’d skipped school too. He said he had work to catch up on, but I wasn’t convinced. He was holed up in his bedroom all the time. He didn’t even go out to see Lara – she came round to him and they hid upstairs together in his room.

That wasn’t all of it though. I’d picked up my mother’s newspaper yesterday and read an article on ‘the extraordinary cyber-crime of the year’. ‘Previously no more than a raggle-taggle group of anarchist protesters, not necessarily given to violence, but not entirely averse to it either’ was how one paper described them, but now apparently they were in the Security Services’ most-wanted sights. And not just in this country either. The FBI considered them a potential threat.

It wasn’t going away. That’s what all this added up to and I couldn’t keep hoping it’d all just fizzle out.

What had Silas got into? And how could we get him out of it?

‘You mean what has that girl got him into?’ Josie said with a sour twist to her mouth when I’d finally managed to explain all this to her through a combination of text and scribbling on a pad. She read through the article again. ‘They’re saying this is an incredibly sophisticated attack. If he did do this, did he do it alone? I know Silas is good, but is he really
this
good?’

I didn’t know, but if he was it didn’t surprise me.

‘What do you want to do? Ask him?’

There was a time when if I’d asked, he would have told me the truth. Now I wasn’t sure he would.

CHAPTER 52

Silas left the house at 3 p.m. rubbing his eyes. He’d slept at some point a few hours ago, but before that not for a long while. Day and night were all mixed up now, his body clock hopelessly awry. This was a good thing for us as he was too spaced out to notice us slipping through the streets after him.

‘It’ll be harder once he meets up with her,’ Josie whispered. ‘We’ll have to be really careful then.’

Whatever. I wasn’t letting him out of my sight.

As we expected, he met up with Lara near the bus station. Josie and I managed to stay out of sight fairly easily as he and Lara walked hand in hand through town. The streets were long and straight so we could follow from a distance and they were too busy gazing at each other to notice us.

‘She seems a lot keener on him than she used to be,’ Josie said.

Was that because he was into all this stupid anarchy stuff now?

When they turned into the train station, Josie grimaced. ‘This could be awkward. Hold back – I think we can see from here.’

But we couldn’t see where they were getting a ticket to so we had to watch until they went down to the platform. Josie had a flash of inspiration. She dragged me up to the ticket booth that Silas had just been at.

‘Hi!’ She gave the ticket man a big, beaming, utterly innocent grin. ‘My friends texted me to say meet them now on platform 2. We’re going somewhere for my birthday surprise, but they forgot I won’t know what tickets to buy – doh!’

‘London train, departing in six minutes?’ the ticket seller replied.

‘Yes, that’ll be it! They knew I wanted to go and see
Les Miserbles
. I bet we’re going there. Oh, thank you, you’re a star!’

She bought us tickets and then we scurried down to lurk on the platform near the toilets where they wouldn’t see us.

‘We can hide in there if they come this way,’ Josie said.

When the train arrived there were only three carriages and we waited until Lara and Silas got into the far one. Josie managed to get a window seat near the door. ‘We’ll have to jump off quickly when we see them get off.’

But they got off before we reached the terminus in the centre of London, so Josie and I had to scramble out quickly and hurry after them as Lara set off out of the station with a much more purposeful march than she’d used before.

It was raining here. It’s easier to follow someone in the rain, I discovered. They keep their heads tucked down and don’t look round. We tracked them to a mid-terraced house on a nondescript street and watched them go in.

‘Is this where she lives?’ Josie said. ‘Because it’s not where she said she did.’

I made a motion with my hand, mimicking Lara pressing the bell. She’d have a key if she lived there.

‘Oh yes,’ Josie said.

We stood helplessly for a while, not knowing what to do next. Then a man hurried past us, knocking into us with a mumbled sorry as he tried to avoid a deep puddle beside us on the pavement. I caught a flash of fairish hair and goatee beard beneath his soaked hoody, and then he too went into the house.

‘Now he did have a key,’ Josie said. She sneaked closer to the house. ‘Number 33. Come on, let’s get the street name. And then we’ll do some digging. We can’t stand here all night getting wet, but there are other ways of finding out what we need to know.’

We found our way back to the station with some difficulty because neither of us had had the sense to notice where we were going once we got off the train, other than that we were following Lara and Silas. Josie had to stop someone for directions a couple of times. We were sopping wet by the time we got on the train, clutching giant paper cups of coffee with shaking hands.

‘Nothing we’ve seen tells us if Silas is involved in that stuff or not,’ Josie said with a groan, her teeth chattering on the plastic sippy lid as she gulped some coffee. ‘We need to find out who lives at that house. I’m going to have to get tricky with Dad. But I’ll need your help.’

When we finally got home, the most sensible thing to do was run hot baths and get changed. ‘Meet me at mine in an hour,’ Josie said as she left me at the gate. ‘I’ll cook something.’

We hadn’t eaten dinner yet so I was in a hurry to get back to her place. I threw my clothes in the laundry basket and soaked myself in a hot bath until I could feel my toes and fingers again, then I got out and put some warm, comfy gear on and dried my hair. Going out in the rain again wasn’t the nicest thing, but I jogged so I was there in a couple of minutes.

‘Hi,’ said Josie, flinging the door open and pulling me in out of the bad weather. ‘Dad’s here,’ she continued under her breath, ‘so keep up with me. I’m going to put the plan into action.’

Her dad had eaten earlier, but he was definitely up for a helping of the chicken fajitas wafting a delicious scent through the kitchen. He sat with us at the big table when Josie served up.

‘Dad,’ she said when he was happily tucking into a chicken wrap loaded with salsa, sour cream and guacamole, ‘how do you find out who lives at an address?’

‘How do the police find out?’ he asked after swallowing his mouthful.

‘No, the public. Like me. How would I find out who lived somewhere?’

A slow frown developed. ‘Now why would you be wanting to know that?’

Josie hesitated, just enough to make it look like this wasn’t planned. ‘It’s Rafi’s brother. She’s worried about him.’

I nearly shot off my chair. What was she going to say? He was a policeman – I didn’t want Silas getting in trouble.

‘He’s got this girlfriend. And honestly, Dad, she’s dodgy as anything. We think she’s cheating on him so we . . . we, er . . . followed her today. Oh, don’t look at me like that! Really, she is messing him around. She went to a house where another guy lives and she stayed there. Silas thinks she’s round at a girlfriend’s and she so isn’t. We just wondered if we could find out. He’s so into her that he won’t believe us unless we present him with the facts. Please, Dad. Rafi’s really worried about him, aren’t you?’

I tried to look worried and pleading as I nodded in response to the question. This was one time I was thankful I couldn’t speak because I wouldn’t want to have to lie to him. I didn’t know how Josie was managing it.

‘And say you’re right, what if you give Rafi’s brother this boy’s details and he goes round there and thumps him? He could get himself into trouble!’

Josie shook her head and I quickly copied. ‘Silas isn’t like that. We’re only doing it so he believes us. He won’t make trouble.’

Her dad stared hard at her for a moment. ‘OK, Baby D, we’ll do a trade-off. I tell you that, but only public-access stuff, mind – don’t you be asking me for classified because you know you won’t get it!’

‘Of course, Dad,’ Josie protested.

‘So I tell you then, right after you tell me just why it is that your other friends don’t come round here any more, why you never talk about them, and what that useless waste-of-space boyfriend you were trying to hide from me has got to do with it.’

I have never seen anyone looked as shocked as Josie did then.

‘You know about Lloyd?’

Her dad took another bite of his fajita and chewed on it frustratingly slowly before he answered. ‘Yes, I know you were seeing him for a while. And that you stopped, just as I knew you would.’

‘And you weren’t mad at me?’

‘Mad? I was furious. But then I thought to myself, what kind of father am I if my daughter has to hide things from me like that? And maybe it was time to trust that my daughter is the girl I thought she was and let her see for herself what that boy is. It looks like I trust you more than you trust me, Baby D.’

Josie’s eyes filled up. ‘Daddy?’

‘But know this, sweetheart. If he’s hurt you, I’m going to . . .’ He stopped and smiled at her. ‘Well, you don’t need to know that part. So what happened?’