The Silence of Six (10 page)

Max smiled. Her nails were decorated with the home row keys from a Dvorak keyboard, which had a different layout from the more common QWERTY keyboard. When she rested her fingers on the home row, her fingers would line up with their corresponding keys.

“And maybe I was taking advantage of people’s expectations,” she went on, “but you can never be too careful online. Also: It’s fun seeing people’s reactions when they find out. Not that it happens often. Only ever once, actually.” She sipped her coffee. “So shall we get to business, Maxwell? I don’t have all day.”

“It’s Max,” he said. “And you’re. . . ?”

“DoubleThink is fine.”

“It’s weird using your handle in real life.”

“Make it D.T. if you want.”

“How about Deety?” Max asked.

She shrugged.

“You won’t tell me your real name?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t be showing you my face if wearing a mask in public didn’t draw so much unwanted attention.”

“You could have sent someone in your place.”

“To pretend to be me?” Deety smiled. “Maybe I did. Maybe DoubleThink is really a guy after all, eh?”

Max glanced at the screenwriter.

“It’s
not
him, okay? Let it go. Jeez,” she said.

“I didn’t see you come in. I was watching the door this whole time.”

“Your eyes were closed a lot of the time,” she said.

“No they . . . . You were watching me? How?” He looked around as if he could tell where she’d been hiding.

Deety picked up the coffee pot and refilled her cup. “I’m a master of disguise and subterfuge.”

“Dressed like that?”

“I actually like pink. Is that too ‘feminine’ for you?”

He shook his head. “It just makes it hard to blend in, doesn’t it?”

“If you ran into me on the street, are you more likely to remember my face or my coat?”

He studied her, wondering if this was a trap. She was cute, but the bright parka did draw his eyes more.

“Your coat,” he admitted.

“You can’t tell much about me under all this.” She prodded the thick padding with her fingers. “And clothing is a lot easier to change than a face. But I can do that too.”

“Master of disguise.”

“Right. You’re a good listener.”

“I hear that a lot.” He smiled.

“Like!” she said. “Anyway, I slipped in through the back door so I could see you before you saw me. I had to make sure you weren’t a creeper, even if Evan vouched for you. And I wanted to be sure you weren’t followed.”

Said the girl who spied on
him
first.

“How do you know I’m really Max?” he said.

“I’ve seen your picture,” she said. “It was several years old, but you look about the same.”

“It doesn’t seem fair that you have all this information on me and I don’t even know your name.”

“Get used to it. At least I won’t use that information against you. Unless you try to screw me over.”

Deety flagged down Lorraine.

“I’ll have whatever that was,” Deety said. She pointed at one of Max’s empty plates.

“The Ultimate Omelette,” Max said.

“That,” Deety said.

“Sure thing, sweetie,” Lorraine said. “Anything else for you?” she asked Max.

“Nothing, thanks.”

“We going to be here a while?” Max asked after Lorraine was out of earshot.

“Not me. I didn’t sleep either.” She yawned.

He poured the last of the coffee for her. “Did you see the news?” he asked.

“Yeah. Now everyone knows about Evan, and of course they don’t understand.” She sighed. “But 0MN1 and the others trust you now. Your intel was good, and that’s the most important thing to them.”

“There’s something you should know.” Max folded then unfolded his hands. “I saw Evan die. I mean, I can’t be one hundred percent positive what I saw on the video was real. But I believe it.”

She lowered her eyes and stared intently into her mug. “Tell me,” she said.

He described how Evan had delivered his cryptic message then pulled a gun. Max described the gunshot, how it had been so loud it scrambled the audio for a second, and then the spray of red. How everything was red, red, red, and Max’s ears were ringing long after it was over.

The terrible memory turned Max’s stomach. He bent his head and swallowed hard, then sucked in deep breaths until the nausea passed.

“I’m sorry,” Deety said.

Max nodded. Deety’s eyes glistened behind her glasses. That’s when he decided he could trust her with everything.

“I still haven’t found the whole video online,” she said. “I can find pretty much anything on the internet, but it’s like it didn’t happen.”

“They must have it locked down tight. I know someone who had a copy, but the investigators probably wiped it.”

“If we can get it, Dramatis Personai will make sure everyone sees it,” Deety said.

“I know it might contain another clue, but it’s gruesome. I don’t even want to see it again.”

Lorraine delivered Deety’s omelette and a fresh pot of coffee, along with a second slice of cherry pie for Max. He picked up his fork, but the shiny, bright red filling made him queasy. He pushed the plate away.

He watched Deety shovel massive forkfuls of omelette into her mouth.“Deety, did Evan know that you’re—”

“A girl?”

“That you have such cool nail polish is what I was going to say.”

She eyed Max then unzipped the top of her parka and pulled a smartphone from an inner pocket. She thumbed in a lengthy passcode—Max counted at least twelve clicks of the keypad, which further won him over. She swiped at the screen and tilted it to face Max.

It was a picture of Evan next to a girl with shoulder-length blond hair with pink streaks, parted on the right and pinned back. She was several inches taller than him, which would make her around five-foot-eleven, the same height as Max.

It was summer, but Evan was wearing his signature black T-shirt and gray cargo pants, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets. His red hoodie was draped over Deety’s shoulders, like a superhero cape. She was wearing a green babydoll shirt with the chemical structure for caffeine on the front and faded denim shorts. Long legs with thigh-high black boots. Curvy figure. A tattoo of a red line wound down and around her right arm. She looked like a video game heroine, or a badass Little Red Riding Hood.

Max reached for the phone and she yanked it out of reach.

“No one touches my stuff,” she said.

“When was that taken?” Max asked.

“HGH.”

Hackers Gonna Hack, the hacker conference. So this picture had been taken in August.

Stupidly, Max was jealous that Evan had other friends he hadn’t known about—maybe even a girlfriend? He should be happy he’d been fine on his own. Knowing that alleviated some of the guilt Max had felt over spending time with the soccer team and Courtney instead of with Evan.

“I didn’t let anyone in DP know I was there, and only Evan knew I’m DoubleThink,” Deety said. “He was cool with it. He hated crowds as much as I do, so we hung out together a lot in Austin, whenever we weren’t coding.”

“I bet Evan thought it was a date.” Max laughed.

Deety looked at the picture somberly. “It does look like one.” She placed her phone on the table. “Tell me more about him.”

“You knew him,” Max said.

“We spent a few days together in meatspace. Evan didn’t talk much in person. But online, he was funny. What was he really like?”

Max shook his head. “That was the real Evan online. In person, he was always reserved. Thoughtful.” Max picked at the crust of the cherry pie. Part of it crumbled between his fingers. “He was unsure of himself, except when he was hacking. Then, he thought he was invincible.”

“Don’t we all feel that way?” she said.

“Not me. I’m not as good as Evan was.”

“Who is? Oh. But you don’t like being second best. Is that why you quit?”

Was that it?

“No. I wasn’t even second best. Hacking made me feel
more
vulnerable. I was taking chances I would never take in person, and honestly, it seemed dangerous. That’s why I stopped. I was scared it would end . . . badly.”

They fell silent again. But that felt okay, not like the awkward gaps in conversation that sometimes happened with Courtney. He would rack his brain for something to say, always trying to impress her and figure out who she wanted him to be.

“Look at us,” Deety said. “We’re a couple of sad sacks.”

Her eyes flicked around the restaurant and to the window.

“Might as well get to it.” She swept her arm across the table, pushing their plates aside. Deety reached inside her parka again and pulled out a slim, translucent plastic CD case. Pink. She weighed it in her hand, looking at it thoughtfully. She placed it on the table and slid it across to Max.

The disc inside was labeled “Music Mix” in black permanent ink in Evan’s handwriting. The titles of fifteen of his favorite songs were scribbled around it, spiraling toward the center from the outer edge of the disc.

Evan had made a bunch of those for Max a long while back, when they first started hanging out; collections of his favorite selections from all the albums he’d downloaded that week. Max had asked him once why he didn’t just share all the files with him online, and after that Evan had stopped making discs for him.

“He must have liked you. A lot,” Max said.

Deety turned her head away and stuck her chin up. “It’s camouflage, idiot.”

“This is what you were talking about?” Max asked.

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. A thumb drive. An SD card. A roll of microfiche.”

“Those are more conspicuous, and CDs are easy to destroy. Use a Sharpie, scratch the surface, break it into pieces.”

“Put it in your microwave,” Max said.

He and Evan once destroyed the Baxters’ microwave by nuking CDs in it and recording videos on their phones. It was powerful magic, making lightning in a box at home. They’d been mesmerized by the crackling blue sparks that danced across the discs’ surfaces. They burned up quickly, over in a literal flash, but it was so beautiful while it lasted.

“Exactly. Plus, it was a clever way to send me something in the mail without anyone getting suspicious. Chelsea Manning snuck all those files out of her army base on—”

“A Lady Gaga CD. Yeah.”

Max glanced over the list of songs and, sure enough, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” was number seven. Outside of the pages of comic books, Evan’s heroes had been brave people with conviction, who put their lives and freedom on the line, like Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsburg, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Aaron Swartz, and Michael Hastings.

“I’ll just copy the files off,” Max said.

“Take it. It’s yours,” she said. “That’s the only physical copy. I wanted you to see it to prove it came from Evan.”

“This is his handwriting,” Max said.

“And the tracks are the key to the encryption he used. He likes—liked puzzles.”

Max rotated the CD case to read the titles through the translucent front, reading the song titles: “Everything Has Changed” by Taylor Swift, “Team” by Lorde, “We Might As Well Be Strangers” by Keane, “All Kinds of Time” by Fountains of Wayne, “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic. He recognized many of them as Evan’s favorites.

Evan listened to everything. While lots of people downloaded hundreds of gigs of music, movies, or books that they would never even use, Evan consumed everything. He hoarded, but he didn’t keep anything he didn’t have a use for.

“What’s really on here?” Max asked.

“I found two files, but they’re hidden and encrypted. The first one is called ‘LinerNotes.txt.’”

“Let me guess: not liner notes?”

“Sort of. They’re liner notes about
you
.”

“Me? Evan doxxed me?”

“He couldn’t help it. When Evan loves something—”

“He has to know everything about it.”

Deety smiled wistfully. “He also left instructions to contact you if I didn’t hear from him after the debate.”

“All that’s in one text file?” Max asked.

“It isn’t a text file. Change the file extension to .odt once you copy it over. You have OpenOffice?”

“Not on my current machine, but I’ll get it,” Max said. “What’s the password?”

Deety smiled. “Don’t you want to figure it out for yourself?”

“Maybe when I’m not being chased by FBI agents,” Max said.

“I work better under pressure. Anyway, not that you need to see the contents of that file, since it’s all about you, but the password is pretty simple: the track number followed by the first word of each song title, working your way toward the center.”

“I would have figured that out,” Max said.

“That’s the idea.”

“It would have taken me a while though.”

“We’d talked about different ways of encrypting files before. I got it on my fifth try. And that passphrase doesn’t work for the second file.”

“Which is. . . ?”

“The one labeled ‘Discography.txt.’ Not a discography, I bet. It’s a huge file, but that’s all I know about it, because encryption. You’ll have to do a little cryptology of your own. Good luck with that.”

“I may already have the password,” he told her, referring to the text message Evan had sent him.

She shook her head. “He took a big chance.”

“He’s—he was always careful.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t work out something more secure with you beforehand, like with me.”

Max looked down. Evan had been trying to reach him for weeks and he’d kept putting him off. He might have been able to send this data to Max directly without involving Deety, if only he’d made himself available. He might have been able to do something to help Evan sooner, so he didn’t have to take his own life.

Max retrieved his laptop. “Well let’s see what’s on it,” he said.

Deety put her hands on top of the computer to prevent him from opening it.

“Not here,” she said. She snatched her hands back as if they’d been burned. “Sorry.”

“It isn’t mine,” Max said. “And I’m not that sensitive about my equipment.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And that’s my cue to get going.” She slid out of the booth.