The Silence of Six (13 page)

12

The fallen tree behind the
cabin had knocked out a chunk of the wall. The girls wriggled inside the small opening easily, and Max passed their bags through to them. His larger frame made it more difficult for him to squeeze between the scratchy bark and the crumbling stone, but he made it. He pulled his backpack inside after him then stood up and brushed dirt from his knees.

He took in the one-room living space. The only furniture was a rickety wooden table in the corner and an overturned chair with only three legs. The floor was littered with dry leaves, dirt, and twigs. It looked like an animal had assembled a nest out of mud and branches in the fireplace, which was also abandoned.

Cozy.

Penny set up her computer on the table. It was sleek and ultraportable, the kind that transformed into a tablet. Light, compact, and the latest model—nothing like the duct-taped one she’d had at school.

“Wages go up at Denny’s?” Max asked.

“I get decent money from freelancing. The job at Denny’s is just how I keep Mom from getting suspicious.”

Max considered Risse’s frayed purple Chucks and her worn jeans with their rolled-up cuffs. Hand-me-downs. He’d seen their rundown house, too. He didn’t think their family had much cash to spare. “Freelancing? As a hacker?” he asked.

“Nothing illegal. Well, it isn’t entirely legal when I start, but lots of companies pay bounties to reward hackers for finding security flaws,” she said. “With your skills you could be making big money too.”

“I never saw it that way.” Max slid his laptop from his backpack.

“I didn’t figure you for a Mac user,” she said.

“This isn’t mine,” he said. “I borrowed it when my laptop was middle-manned.”

Penny raised her eyebrows.

“They caught me by surprise. It won’t happen again.” Max opened the computer and looked around. “I guess there’s no electricity out here either.”

Penny fished out a battery the size and shape of a brick and set it on the table. The table creaked under its weight. “This should have enough power to run it.”

Max plugged in and booted his computer up.

“Keep that computer offline permanently, which you should have been doing anyway since it’s stolen,” Penny said.

“I’ve been careful.”

“Still. We should only look at Evan’s files on air-gapped computers, isolated from the internet. You don’t know who could be watching. That’s why I wanted to meet here—no internet access for miles around,” Penny said.

“I didn’t think of that,” Max said.

He logged in to his encrypted hard drive. He clicked on the file named X_Miller.odt. “Here we are. The first of the silenced six was Ariel Mil—”

“Hold on, I want to see his file on DoubleThink first,” Penny said.

“Okay,” Max said. He opened the DoubleThink.odt file and nudged his computer toward her. “I don’t need to see it. Delete it when you’re done.”

“Evan sent it to you, so it’s okay if you read it. You already know about us anyway. But thanks,” Penny said.

Penny paged through the contents of the file while Max and Risse looked over her shoulder. There was astonishingly little information.

A Panjea page showed a picture of Penny, in which her blond hair had pink streaks. Her profile indicated she was a year older than Max, a senior at Roseburg High. It also listed her full name.

“Penny Polonsky?” He smirked. “What, are you a superhero or something?”

“That depends on who you ask,” she said.

Underneath the profile, Evan had included Penny’s contact information, right down to her phone number and the GPS coordinates for what he assumed was her house.

Yet there were no chat logs, article clippings, or any other personal details about her, like the ones Max had found in the other files on members of Dramatis Personai. But there was a special note on the last page:

“Penny is one of the most trustworthy people in the world.”

When she got to the end, Penny pressed a hand against her mouth and her eyes teared up.

“Evan was the least trusting person in the world, so that’s quite an endorsement,” Max said.

Risse scrolled back through the file. “Is that all? There isn’t anything about me!”

“That’s good, right?” Max asked.

“I guess,” Risse said.

“You didn’t tell Evan about Risse?” Max asked Penny.

“I wanted to, but it wasn’t my secret alone to tell,” she said. “He didn’t even know I have a sister.”

Evan would have been shocked that Penny had withheld a secret this big from even him. He had prided himself on his ability to dig up the truth, obsessed with knowing everything that could be known. It felt like an honor to have learned something that had escaped his notice.

“I felt bad ignoring him when he tried to chat with DoubleThink when it was me logged in. Talk about mixed signals,” Risse said. “At least it never got . . . weird.” She blushed.

“It’s possible he found out about you and decided not to put it in the report,” Max said. “Evan had his own sense of honor.”

Max dragged the file to the Trash then deleted it permanently. He called up a program to zero fill the space it had been in with garbage files. There was no way anyone could recover the file, not even the FBI with all their resources.

“You could have used that to blackmail me into helping you,” Penny said. “That’s actually why I agreed to meet. To talk you into destroying the report.” She didn’t sound remotely ashamed of her ulterior motives.

“That was the only copy.” Max showed them the mix CD Evan had sent him and showed Penny that he had carefully colored in the data side with a black Sharpie.

“Now the only way we’ll be in any danger is if we do something truly stupid. Like help you,” Penny said.

“Why would you do that?” Max asked.

“Because Evan clearly wanted us to work together. It was practically his dying wish. He wouldn’t have given you my digits otherwise, or told me how to reach you.”

Max leaned against the rough stone wall and took a deep breath.

“I’m beginning to see why he thought so highly of you,” Penny said. “We’ll figure this out together.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“It might be a good idea to stay away from home for a little while anyway.” Penny leaned over his computer. “What else have you got on Dramatis Personai and the six people?”

He pointed out the files marked with an
X
. Risse gasped and pointed to one of the files. “Powers. Geordie Powers?”

“That’s right. Did you know him?” Max asked.

“I’ve talked to him.” Risse started typing on her laptop. Max noticed she never used her laptop’s touchpad—only keyboard shortcuts—and windows flew open and closed on her screen at an impressive speed. She was looking for something.

Penny clicked on Powers’s file. “It says here that Powers was mugged, but only his laptop was taken. Maybe he was a hacker too?”

“Hold on, I’m checking my old chat logs from Dramatis Personai . . . ” Risse said.

“Does everyone store chats when they’re not supposed to?” Max asked.

“Of course,” Penny said.

Max started to reply, but stopped when he heard a rustling sound from outside. He held up a hand in warning. Penny and Risse froze, lips pressed together and eyes wide.

Max slowly moved to the front of the cabin and wiped some of the grime off the window with his thumb, letting more light into the dark room.

It took him a moment to pick out the road they had followed there. It looked clear. He tilted his head to listen again.

“What is it?” Risse whispered.

“There’s someone out there,” Max said.

“I think that’s
nature
,” Penny said. “Hear those birds?”

Max nodded.

“If someone were outside, you wouldn’t hear anything,” she said.

“This place doesn’t make you nervous?” he asked.

“We’re all a little on edge,” Penny said.

Risse nodded.

“Let’s just make this quick. If someone finds us here, there’s only one way out of the cabin,” Max said. Even he would have a hard time fleeing on foot through the forest surrounding them.

He kept an eye on the window while the girls continued to work.

“Here it is,” Risse said. “I found a request from Evan from earlier this year for help accessing a government e-mail server. I helped him get a login and password by social engineering some poor intern in a Washington field office.”

“Geordie,” Max said.

“Yup. All I gave Evan was his account information. I don’t know what he did with it.”

“And now Geordie's dead,” Penny said.

Risse’s triumphant expression turned to horror.

“It’s not your fault,” Max said. “Maybe he was up to something and that’s why Evan wanted to check his e-mail.”

“I remember him now. He sounded so young.” Risse brushed her fingertips lightly over the laptop keys, staring at the screen. “I told him there was a serious computer virus infecting the servers that he had spread by forwarding a chain letter.”

“And you needed to log in to his account in order to quarantine the virus,” Max said.

Risse smiled.

“Classic,” Max said.

“He was scared that he was going to get into trouble,” Risse said. “Do you really think he was killed because of me?”

“Not because of you, sis.” Penny leaned over and wrapped her arms around Risse. “Because of what Evan did. He must have used Geordie’s login to get something from the government e-mail system. And it was tracked back to him, not Evan.”

“That wouldn’t have made Evan feel too good about this either.”
That’s two deaths he would have blamed himself for.
Max was beginning to see what could have driven Evan to the brink, then pushed him over it. “But what did he find? Whatever it was must have led to everything else.”

Penny clicked through the rest of the files. Risse was clearly crushed to find out she’d played a small role in a chain of events that left someone dead, but Penny’s face remained impassive. She didn’t say a word as she skimmed the dossiers for five minutes. Finally she pushed the computer away.

“Evan had a hunch something bad had happened to those hackers, but the rest of Dramatis Personai figured they’d been arrested or were laying low.” Penny ran her hands through her hair. “No one wanted to believe anything like this was possible. Amazing that he pieced together what happened to them, just from research.”

“All this must have taken a lot of work,” Max said.

“He didn’t mind hard work when he was properly motivated. When Infiltraitor—Ty Andrews—disappeared, it hit him really hard. They worked together.”

“
Where
did he work?” Max asked.

“Panjea,” Penny said.

Panjea?
Max was stunned.

He’d thought it was a big deal that Evan was in Dramatis Personai, but he also had been employed by one of the most powerful tech companies in the country, if not the world.

“I can’t believe he worked for Panjea,” Max said.

“They employ a lot of Dramatis Personai members. They have some kind of elite hacking group. Evan was supposed to put in a good word for me, but he changed his mind and brought Infiltraitor on instead.” Her mouth tightened. “I was furious. He knew how much I needed the job, but I guess it was lucky for me. You really didn’t know?”

“When did Evan start there?” Max asked.

“Last October. No, late September.”

Max had already distanced himself from hacking and Evan by then. But now that he thought back, Evan hadn’t put up any resistance. In fact, he had subtly encouraged Max’s decision, saying that it wouldn’t change anything between them. Max now wondered whose idea it had been in the first place. He’d been moving in that direction for a while, but had Evan nudged him the rest of the way?

The thing about social engineering was that you used people’s own inclinations to get them to do what you wanted. You couldn’t force them to do anything. They always have a choice.

Max leaned back and stretched his arms forward. A sore joint popped softly. “Evan never mentioned a job. He probably wanted to avoid paying back the thirty bucks he owed me. What did he do for the greatest social media service in the world?”

“He didn’t talk about it much. He said he couldn’t. But it had to be one of their biggest projects if he was on it. He’s a brilliant programmer.” She flinched. “He
was
the best.”

Evan had been working for Panjea for over a year, and Max hadn’t known about it at all. Had they been that out of touch? It wasn’t like he had forgotten to update him on the news in passing; Evan had actively kept this from him, along with his activities with Dramatis Personai—and Penny.

“That reporter, Kyle Marks, had a tech vlog, right?” Risse said. “He did a lot of stories about Panjea.”

“So you think Evan found something out about Panjea, and the government killed people to cover it up?” Risse said. “They would have been investigating it too.”

“Maybe they were. Evan’s question implied someone knew what he was talking about,” Max said. “If he hadn’t killed himself, I bet he would have been targeted next.”

“We don’t even know that their deaths
are
murders. We just have Evan’s suspicions.” Penny spread her hands, palms up. “Just playing devil’s advocate.”