Read The Silence of Six Online

Authors: E. C. Myers

Tags: #Conspiracy fiction

The Silence of Six (6 page)

BOOK: The Silence of Six
8.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Max ran.

He cut over to One Tree Way and ran along it, passing the parking lot. When he turned onto Deer Valley Road at full speed he actually laughed from the joy of wind against his face and pavement under his soles. He was running, and he was fast, even if he didn’t know where he was going yet.

The only things Max had ever stolen before were records from clueless companies’ servers, passwords, some e-mails. But digital files couldn’t be missed, since he had only copied them, and no one had ever suffered anything worse than embarrassment, because he hadn’t ever done anything with what he took. In fact, he and Evan had always alerted the companies to their security holes, without even bothering to claim credit or the financial rewards some of them offered.

Whatever those guys wanted him for, he was now definitely a criminal. He’d just taken some innocent guy’s laptop.

And his pen.

6

Max pushed through the revolving
doorsinto the Gateway Suites.

He stood just inside for a couple of minutes, pretending to check the time on his new burner phone, until he was certain that the gentleman behind the concierge desk had seen him waiting. He pretended to dial a number then held the phone to his ear. Max paced slowly back and forth in front of the doors.

“Hey. Yeah, I’m here,” he said into the phone. His voice carried well in the marble-floored lobby. “Just a few minutes. I’m downstairs . . . . Really? Okay. Sure. I can come back if—No. No, that’s fine. Yeah, I’ll wait.”

Max made eye contact with the concierge and mouthed the word
sorry
. The man looked at him sympathetically.

“Sure, I’ll stay right here,” Max said. He shrugged and pointed over to the lounge area and raised his eyebrows. The concierge nodded.

“Take your time. I’ll sit tight,” Max said as he made a beeline for the seat in the farthest corner, near a mahogany baby grand piano. He sat in one of the lush armchairs facing the desk, where he could see the concierge and everyone who walked in, but where visitors would not be able to spot him immediately because of a marble pillar in the center of the room. He noted the emergency exits to his left, as well as the open space leading to them.

He’d nearly been cornered back in the coffee shop. He had narrowly escaped, but he wanted to have plenty of notice before he was caught off guard again.

Max settled back in the wide chair and put his new backpack on his lap. After successfully evading capture at Bean Up, he’d made a quick stop at Staples at the Granville Square Shopping Center for some vital supplies. He needed a bag because he would have been more conspicuous walking around with a naked MacBook. Along with the prepaid, disposable smartphone that offered him anonymity, he had also picked up a universal AC adapter for the stolen computer, a pack of two 32GB USB sticks, a microSD card and adapter, a bottle of Goo Gone, a roll of black electrical tape, and earbuds with a built-in microphone.

He couldn’t keep using his bank cards, so he’d risked a one-time withdrawal at an ATM near the Amtrak station, taking out the daily maximum of eight hundred dollars—most of his savings from caddying at the Old Mill Golf Club over the summer. After this morning’s shopping trip, he was down to $637.66 in cash—all the money he would have until this blew over.

Max pulled out the MacBook and got to work. He applied Goo Gone to the “Los Medanos Mustangs” and “Small World Amusement Park” stickers on the cover. After a couple of minutes, the liquid had loosened the glue enough for the stickers to slide right off. He rubbed it dry with the sleeve of his jacket.

Next he peeled off a strip of electrical tape and stuck it over the web camera lens inside the MacBook’s lid, then powered on the computer.

It didn’t even require a login password when it woke from sleep mode. This guy had just been asking for it.

Max rebooted the machine, thinking through what he had to do next. His skills might be a little rusty, but hacking had been his life once; it had been second nature to look for flaws everywhere, from systems to people to places.

He and Evan had talked about how they would go on the run if they were caught for their cybercrimes, but they’d just been fooling around. Now that he was suddenly an actual fugitive, Max had instinctively begun following their imagined escape plan, and improvising with tactics he’d seen in thrillers over the years.

When he heard the computer’s startup chime, Max quickly held down the Command and S keys. He glanced up and caught an annoyed look from the concierge. He initiated the commands to delete the computer’s setup file and rebooted it.

Max plugged his earbuds into the headphone jack and stuck one in his left ear. If he’d done this correctly, he had just tricked the computer into thinking it was brand new.

He logged in to the hotel’s guest Wi-Fi network—he’d chosen Gateway Suites specifically because they advertised complimentary wireless internet in the lobby.

It worked. He created a new administrator account with the username “Maskelyne” and a ten-character passphrase, using his usual system to scramble the phrase “this machine was stolen” with numbers and other punctuation marks. Then he enabled firmware password protection to prevent anyone else from doing what he had just done, and deleted the computer’s tracking software so it couldn’t be used to find him.

He scouted the lobby. Not much traffic on a Thursday afternoon. He picked up his burner phone and tested one of the ringtones. He faked answering it and carried on another one-sided conversation for the benefit of the concierge: Yes, he’d be happy to keep waiting, he had a lot of work to catch up on anyway, and the concierge was nice enough to let him hang out in the lobby.

Then he went fishing through the true owner’s files.

Hi, Jeremy Schaal. Thanks for loaning me your laptop
, Max thought.

He looked up information on Jeremy on both his computer and the internet. He was a second-year English major at LMC. E-mails from his advisor (his browser was set to remember his passwords, another no-no) indicated Jeremy was not a particularly good student, and e-mails from three women he was dating at the same time suggested why. One of the women was a teaching assistant for one of his classes, so at least Jeremy was doing something to try to improve his grades.

Max zipped up all of the academic documents and sent them to Jeremy from his own e-mail address. In the e-mail, Max promised to ship the computer back or send money to replace it when he could, because of course he knew Jeremy’s home address now too. He signed his message “Anonymous.” He smiled, thinking that Jeremy would assume he’d been hacked by someone from the infamous group.

That was fun. He’d missed doing stuff like this.

Now to get down to his real business.

First, he launched a secure web browser and ran a search for the latest information on the debate. It looked like Courtney was still sitting on her blog post, but media was now buzzing about the suicide. Max knew it was inevitable the story would come out eventually—how long could they keep an auditorium full of teenagers from sharing information online? Yet there was still no public video footage of those final seconds of Evan’s video.

Agent Kwon was quoted as saying, “We’re following up on some promising leads. Right now, we’re focused on finding out who STOP was.”

But since Max was clearly one of their promising leads—perhaps their only one—they had to know that Evan was STOP. Had they found his body yet?

Kwon hadn’t said anything about investigating the meaning behind STOP’s message, which left it to Max.

He launched a new tab and opened Panjea, while running more searches in other tabs for “silence of six,” “Clancy Tooms,” and “Angela Lovett.” He switched between them all, soaking in whatever information he could.

The only hits on “silence of six” were articles about the debate, which all showed the same short clip of Evan’s question, “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

Commenters on the blogs were wondering if the phrase literally referred to six people who had been silenced, whatever that meant, or if there was someone or something named “Six,” or some organization with a similar-sounding acronym that was “silent,” as in secret. Someone pointed out that STOP was a hacker, and “SICS” was internet slang for “Sitting in Chair Snickering”—suggesting he had posted the video “4 the lulz.”

If they had seen the video’s dark and graphic finale, no one would think it was a joke.

The debate had ended prematurely, but it had been nearly over anyway; most pundits declared it a win for Lovett, mirroring overwhelming online sentiment in her favor. Senator Tooms’s team tried to spin STOP’s interruption as another attack against Tooms by Dramatis Personai.

Governor Lovett had opted to issue a simple, personal apology for the debate being disrupted. She invited anyone with questions or concerns to participate in her Ask Me Anything beginning at five o’clock Pacific time in the Panjea forum, promising that she would answer as much as she could in an hour.

Max collapsed the other tabs and returned to Panjea. To find out what “the silence of six” was, he had to get into Evan’s head—which was all stored online. His friend was brilliant when it came to computers, and he referred to off-line storage and the cloud to host his brain. His hard drives and online backups were now all that was left of Evan.

And those were just as inaccessible as he was. Of course his accounts were too secure for Max to guess the passphrases, and he struck out with the characters from Evan’s text message as well.

He browsed Evan’s public Panjea pages, but Evan hadn’t made any notes since May, or he had purged them. There could be a clue buried deep in his pages of notes, but Max didn’t have the time to go chasing ghosts right now.

Ghosts.

There was one last place Max could check online to see if anyone knew anything about Evan’s plan—if he could find his way back there. As far as most people knew, it didn’t exist.

Max typed in an IP address he hadn’t visited in over a year. For a while, this site had been his whole world, but now it just seemed like a tiny part of it.

He was in. The address for the hidden hacker chat group was still alive in the so-called “Deep Web,” the intricate network of unpublished IP addresses on the internet. No search engine crawled through the Deep Web indexing webpages. Like the most exclusive clubs, you had to know it existed before you could go there, and you had to have an invitation. The question was, had his invitation expired after a year away?

Max clicked his cursor into the first of two unmarked text fields on the screen and typed “503-ERROR”. The box disappeared and he entered his passphrase. That box disappeared too, leaving a blank white screen.

After ten seconds, he thought the slow Wi-Fi was to blame. After thirty, he wondered if the page had timed out, or if the chat rooms were no longer active. After fifty seconds, he started to get worried.

Loud high heels clacked on the marble floor and echoed throughout the lobby. Max watched a woman in a short red mini dress cross the lobby from the elevator bank and push through the revolving door. Outside, she opened the back door of a waiting taxi.

His computer screen faded to black. He started to panic, but a flashing green user prompt appeared in the top left corner, mimicking an old style computer terminal. Green type scrolled in a retro font:
Welcome back, 503-ERROR. Long time no see.

A shiver ran down his spine.

The cursor flashed. Anyone who just stumbled across this and somehow gained access would probably start typing commands, but those in the know understood that there was one more passphrase needed to get past this screen. Max typed:
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

The old lines from
Zork
, the first text adventure game, came back to him easily. He’d never even played the original game, but he appreciated the analogy: Every target was a puzzle to be solved, a place to be explored. And it took the right strings of characters to get you deeper. Every hack was a text adventure.

The screen displayed the next line from the game:
There is a small mailbox here.

Open mailbox
, Max typed.

A familiar robotic sound bite played “You’ve got mail.” Max had never used America Online, but the early days of computing had been immortalized in pop culture.

The screen stuttered and suddenly Max was looking at a list of comment threads. The most recent thread, created just seconds before, was titled “back from the dead.” It was about 503-ERROR’s return after his long absence and whether they should give him access to the room or not.

Max wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans then flexed his fingers. The thread directly below the one about him, with thousands of page views and a few hundred comments, was labeled “Who was STOP?”

A new thread appeared: “503-ERROR.” He debated ignoring it, but he was in a tenuous position. He hadn’t logged in for a long time, had disappeared without warning, and there were bound to be questions. If he didn’t respond, or didn’t give the right answers, he could be booted at any time and locked out.

Max clicked on the “503-ERROR” thread to expand it. There was only one post, which said:
come inside
.

He opened a chat window, clicked Join, and typed
503-ERROR
. He was logged in to a private chat room that already had nine users signed in. He recognized only a couple of the names from his old days hanging out here with Evan: 0MN1, Edifice, and Kill_Screen. The rest were strangers, or might have been people he’d dealt with before under different handles: ZeroKal, print*is*dead, GroundSloth, Plan(et)9, DoubleThink, PHYREWALL.

Hackers changed their identities all the time, or maintained multiple identities: Anonymity was one of the last freedoms available on the internet, though even that was harder to come by now, unless you were on the Deep Web. And when you decided to give it up, as Max had, you could just disappear, without anyone ever knowing who you really were or what had happened to you.

BOOK: The Silence of Six
8.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

King of New York by Diamond R. James
About a Girl by Sarah McCarry
A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer
UNDER A CHRISTMAS SPELL by BARBARA MONAJEM,
Fallen by Erin McCarthy
Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen
JJ08 - Blood Money by Michael Lister