The Silence of Six (4 page)

“You don’t know that. Evan planned everything, right? He didn’t do things spontaneously. He must have worked on this plan for a long time, and if he didn’t reach out to you, of all people, I don’t think anyone could have changed his mind.”

Evan
had
reached out to him though. He’d sent a few chat messages to Max earlier in the week, at odd hours in the middle of the night. But Max had been offline, and he hadn’t had a chance to get back to him. He hadn’t bothered to. Evan had even resorted to leaving a voicemail, but all he’d said was “Call me.”

That should have told Max something was up. Evan only used his phone as a phone when he really needed to talk or didn’t want to put anything in writing over e-mail. But he was also paranoid about leaving voice records that could be used to identify him. Max had been too busy with school and family and soccer practice and . . . Courtney.

He and Evan had been inseparable once, but he hadn’t even had time to return a phone call. Max had figured he’d see him tonight at the debate, where he could find out what he wanted in person.

“Max?” Courtney said.

“Huh?” She had just asked him a question but he hadn’t heard it.

“I said, what was the last contact you had with Evan?”

“A text,” he said automatically, then realized he’d said too much.

“What did it say?” she asked.

“Just some nonsense,” he said.

Max started the car. They were only a couple of blocks away from Courtney’s house. He looked over his left shoulder and pulled back onto the road.

“You’re hiding something,” she said.

“I’m upset that my best friend is gone.”

“Is that all it is? How many times have you even seen Evan since we got together? I spend all my free time with you, so when do you talk to him? And if he is such a good friend, why wouldn’t you want to help the Feds figure out what he was trying to tell us? This was more than just a suicide.”

“I don’t want to end up in one of your goddamn articles!”

The silence between them stretched on for a long time.

“Can’t you turn the reporter off for a minute?” Max asked.

“No, I can’t. That’s the definition of a reporter,” Courtney said.

“Then I have nothing else to say.”

He pulled into Courtney’s driveway, behind her mom’s Prius. He left the car running.

They sat there and looked at each other with uncertainty. This was more awkward than when they’d said good night after their first date—then they had both known what they wanted, and that they were going to get it. The future was far less certain here.

“Thanks for the ride,” Courtney said.

“Thanks for the interview,” Max said.

He regretted it as soon as he said it, but the damage was already done, and Courtney didn’t need a reporter’s instincts to know the truth when she heard it.

She blinked rapidly and turned away. She drew in a shaky breath.

“Good night, Max.” She opened the passenger door. “Be careful.”

“Hold on,” he said.

She turned around. “Yes?”

“My computer,” he said.

She put his laptop down on the empty passenger seat. She opened it and pulled a USB drive from her purse. “Can I at least grab what I wrote?”

Max snatched his computer back before she could plug it in. “I don’t know where that’s been. I’ll send your post to you.”

She straightened, slammed the door, then stalked up the walkway to her house.

Max waited until she made it safely inside before he drove away.

4

Max opened the front door
and found his dad waiting for him in the foyer, balancing his open ThinkPad on one arm.

“Thank God,” Bradley Stein said. “Are you okay?”

After one look at Max’s face, Bradley put down his computer and pulled him into a hug.

His dad’s hugs were legendary. They had miraculously taken away the pain of scrapes and bumps and life’s assorted disappointments since Max was little. Being home, warm and surrounded by the comforting smell of musty old books and Chinese takeout, made Max feel like everything was going to be all right.

For a few seconds, Max forgot that things were seriously screwed up and that his world would never be the same again. But only for a few seconds.

“Tell me what happened.” Bradley picked up his laptop and led Max into the living room. The TV was tuned to CNN, still covering the aftermath of Evan’s video, but what Courtney said was true—the news still had no mention of the video’s gruesome ending.

Bradley pushed aside some stacks of paper on the coffee table to make room for his computer. Most of the time, this was his office. He was a web developer for WriteOn!, a nonprofit organization that provided a range of services for human rights initiatives. Max’s dad worked from home all day, right there on the couch, and often late into the night.

Max sat on the sagging end of the couch and sank deep into the cushions. Bradley picked up the TV remote.

“No, leave it,” Max said. “I want to hear what’s happening.”

A CNN reporter was saying, “
Both Senator Tooms and Governor Lovett have issued official statements regarding the question posed to them tonight by the hacker identified only as STOP. They both claim to know nothing about the so-called ‘silence of six’ and dismissed the message as a stunt to disrupt. . .
”

Bradley muted the television.

“What did you see in there?” Bradley prompted.

“Did that hacker in the mask seem familiar?” Max asked.

“Should he have?”

Max put his hands on his knees and squeezed until his knuckles were white. “That was Evan.”

“Holy shit,” Bradley said. He dropped the remote on the coffee table with a hollow thud. “Holy shit. Are you sure?”

“Evan goes by the handle STOP. He dropped the voice filter near the end when he lifted his mask. It was definitely him.”

Revealing his real voice could have been a calculated move. Or maybe he was just too distraught, or had stopped caring, because he was about to shoot himself.

“I didn’t see that part. Where is he now?” Bradley asked.

Max leaned forward. He felt like he was going to throw up. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn’t prevent hot tears from leaking through. His body shook as he sobbed.

He felt his dad’s hand on his back.

Max heaved a ragged breath. He swiped the back of his arm over his eyes and nodded.

“Evan’s dead,” Max whispered hoarsely.

His dad stiffened beside him. “How?”

“He shot himself. Courtney said they cut the live feed before everyone watching saw it.”

Bradley held Max tight. Max turned and pressed his face against his father’s polo shirt.

“Max . . .” His dad’s voice broke up. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Just as Allie Baxter had been like a mother to Max, Bradley Stein had treated Evan like a second son. He’d been a big part of why Evan and Max had gotten so interested in computers in the first place.

Max described what had happened.

“So Evan’s parents have no idea?” Bradley asked. He handed Max a bottle of water.

Max drained it and rolled the empty bottle between his hands. The thin plastic crinkled as it went back and forth.

“I couldn’t tell them,” Max said. “I can’t even be sure he’s really dead.”

“That would be some hoax. Why would he pretend to kill himself?”

“Why would he do any of it?” Max asked.

“He sure got people’s attention.”

“The government can’t keep this quiet. Especially if Courtney publishes her blog post,” Max said.

“The smart thing to do is stay out of it, as much as we can. Courtney’s right: As soon as they establish a link to you, they’ll come knocking. Especially if they learn he sent you something just before he died. I assume you memorized his text. Have you tried to figure it out?”

“I haven’t been able to think straight. I need to write it down, work with it a bit to see if it’s a code or a passphrase . . . .”

“Maybe I can help.” Bradley handed Max a yellow legal pad and a pen.

Max wrote out Evan’s message and the string of forty-two characters, counting spaces:

a9 %_!;e3 Z_j*g29@X; aso] dr23\\8i #qWd|0?

He handed it to his dad.

Bradley studied the message. “Evan asks you for help, but he’s awfully vague.”

“That video was vague too.”

“Is there any chance those agents will find this on either of your phones?”

“Evan would have zero filled his phone’s memory.” Writing over his phone’s contents with junk data should make the data irrecoverable. “That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t know it was important until it was too late. If they break the encryption on my phone, they’ll see it. They’ll know who it’s from, but that’s all. Hell, maybe they’ll have better luck figuring it out.”

Max’s dad scribbled on the edges of the page, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

“Evan obviously didn’t want them to have this,” Bradley said. “It has to be something that either means something to you, or will mean something later.”

He tore the first few pages off the pad and crumpled them up. He stuffed the ball of paper into a coffee mug.

“Max, are you still hacking?” Bradley asked. “It’s okay if you are. But we need to know what we’re in for here.”

“No!” Max said. “Not since I started playing soccer last year.”

Bradley nodded.

“I think Evan might have gotten deeper into it. Like, maybe he was mixed up with Dramatis Personai.”

“The hacktivist group? Because of his mask?”

“That, and they’ve been targeting this election a lot.”

Some people claimed Dramatis Personai was a spinoff of the larger hacker group, Anonymous. It wasn’t trying to make a name for itself, and it didn’t follow a clear moral code. No one ever knew why it attacked a certain company or individual, leading many to assume it was just a bunch of troublemakers.

Anonymous operated as a collective, with an ominous, drone-like mentality: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” But Dramatis Personai acted as though it actually
was
a single entity, posting notes on Panjea like:

Hello, I’m Dramatis Personai. Life is theater. Watch. Laugh. Weep. The curtain is rising.

I decided it was finally time to teach the cable news networks a lesson in objectivity. They’re too weak to break free from their corporate puppet masters—so what happens? They force-feed us with their one-sided agendas until our craniums are fat with propaganda.

I strongly object to their existence, so for ten minutes this morning, they didn’t exist. Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and all the other acronyms were off the air.

If they insult our intelligence one more time, I’ll do it again.

You’re welcome.

No one was safe from their wrath or whimsy, not even Panjea.

It was only a matter of time before a social media giant like Panjea would take over. Information that we create, our data, is now theirs to sell to—guess who?—the corporate world. We do the heavy lifting, Panjea sits back and collects the cash.

Sure, we don’t have to go on the site in the first place, but don’t lie to us and say you offer your service for free. All of us are paying with a new currency: our privacy. We pay a price for living. And soon, we’re all gonna go broke.

The social media companies know way too much about us; we can’t escape them. So for the last two hours, I turned every post on Panjea into useless strings of the pig snout emoji. Google, you’re next.

You’re welcome.

Dramatis Personai passed itself off as a machine mind, an artificial intelligence with a snarky teenage personality, but it was definitely a group of talented geeks. Geeks just like Evan.

“The government’s been making examples of the high profile hackers they catch more than they ever have before.” Bradley said. “If Evan was involved, they’ll investigate him in the hopes it will lead to his co-conspirators. It’s possible this will all lead back to your old alter ego. I think I’d better phone my lawyer in the morning.”

“Okay,” Max said. “But I didn’t do anything wrong, Dad.”

“Even so, that doesn’t mean you can’t be charged with anything. Believe me, I know.”

The reason Bradley had a lawyer was because he’d been a political activist—until Max’s mom, Lianna, had abandoned them and left him solely responsible for Max. He still did web work pro bono for human rights organizations and had expressed his approval of how hacktivism groups kept the government in check.

“Why don’t you get some rest? It’s been a rough day. In the morning things will look different and we’ll figure out what to do next,” Bradley said.

“Aside from lawyering up?” Max asked.

“Evan was counting on you. At the very least, his parents deserve to know what their son gave up his life for.”

“I thought you said the smart thing was to leave it alone.”

Bradley smiled. “Your mother used to say I was far too clever to be smart. She also said you take after me.”

“Like that’s a bad thing,” Max said.

“We’ll see. Whatever you decide to do about all this, I’ll support it.”

“Thanks, Dad.” He grabbed the edge of the couch and pulled himself to his feet. “Good night.”

Max didn’t sleep. He couldn’t have if he’d tried.

He huddled in front of his desktop computer in the dark. He hadn’t done this kind of thing in a while, but he still had all the tools he needed.

He used Tor, a web browser which masked his computer’s location, but unfortunately was the equivalent of waving a big red flag and shouting, “Hey, I’m doing something interesting over here!”

In this case, Max wanted to search for information about STOP and Evan, to know what the FBI would be able to discover once they had a name. He also looked for information on 503-ERROR, his old hacker handle.

He didn’t come up with anything. They’d thoroughly covered their tracks over the years, thanks to Evan’s skills and caution. The only connection between Evan and Max existed in real life.

An hour after Max heard his dad finally go to bed at two a.m. he slipped out to the garage and wheeled his bike to the street. The squeaking rear tire made him grit his teeth. He didn’t want to risk waking his dad by starting the car, and it would only take thirty minutes to bike to the Baxters’ house. There was no traffic at this time of night.

He hid his bike behind some shrubs and walked the last block, in case the house was already being watched. The cop cars were gone, the driveway was empty, and the windows were dark. They must have gone to a hotel after all, which made this easier.

If the house was under surveillance, it was well hidden. Hopefully he wouldn’t be mistaken for another burglar; he just wanted to take a quick look around Evan’s room, and it wasn’t breaking and entering if he had a key.

He went around the back and unlocked the kitchen door. Somehow it always smelled delicious in there. Max’s stomach gurgled loudly. He pressed his hand to his belly. He hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.

He helped himself to a cookie from the jar on the counter. He cupped a hand under it as he bit in and walked into the living room.

He was worried about dropping crumbs, but the room was already a mess: chairs knocked over, table upended, the couch cushions were in a pile on the floor and ripped open. He stood and stared at the carnage. It didn’t look like a burglary at all—it looked more like someone had been looking for something in particular.

The expensive things in the room were untouched: the television and entertainment center, the paintings and knickknacks on the mantle, even Mr. Baxter’s Rolex, which he always forgot in a bowl by the front door. So if those things were still there, what had been taken?

The rest of the first floor had been similarly tossed, but he didn’t see anything specifically missing. Finally, he crept slowly up the stairs. The master bedroom was open and empty. He went past it and took the narrow, winding staircase into Evan’s attic.

It was in chaos. Books had been pulled from shelves. His desk drawers had been dumped.

And his computers were gone.

Evan had several laptops and a few desktops, all of them in active use for various tasks such as file sharing and gaming. He had probably needed his workhorse laptop to stream the video, but he wouldn’t have taken all of them. Even his stacks of external hard drives and bins of memory cards were missing.

Max sat in Evan’s desk chair. He swiveled slowly, taking in the whole room. He suspected the rest of the house had been ransacked to disguise the real target.

There was another possibility: Maybe Evan had seen all this before his parents did. It had spooked him, sent him on the run. And ultimately, it had convinced him that the only way out was to kill himself.