Don't Turn Around (6 page)

“It’s an online multiplayer role-playing game,” Peter said defensively. Lots of the chat threads on wikis and imageboards were devoted to WoW discussions; he’d deliberately chosen the name /ALLIANCE/ for the site because he knew people would recognize the reference and rally to it. Pretty much every hacker he knew spent hours every day enmeshed in the ongoing battle between the Alliance and their evil counterparts, the Horde. Every hacker but one, Peter realized with consternation, judging by her reaction. “I’m a Night Elf,” he finished lamely.

“Interesting,” Rain said, looking bored. “You brought the money, right?”

“Yeah, it’s here.” He glanced around before pulling out his wallet. The few people there didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them. He quickly handed her the cash, and she tucked it in the front pouch of her sweatshirt. “Brought you this, too,” he said, handing her a flash drive. “In case you didn’t have an extra one.”

“Thanks.” She tucked it in the same pouch, then abruptly turned and started walking away.

“I’m not some huge WoW geek,” he explained, falling in step beside her. “It just seemed to fit.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So what’s AMRF?”

“I’m not sure. But I hacked into their database tonight, and a half hour later a bunch of guys broke into my house.”

That stopped her. She turned and examined him curiously. “Were they dressed like security guards?”

“Nope. All in black, like commandos or something.”

“Oh.” She abruptly lost interest. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a link. They’re working on something called Project Persephone. If you want, I can text it to you.”

“I don’t have a phone,” she said.

“Seriously?” Peter was flabbergasted. He didn’t know anyone their age who didn’t have a cell phone.

“I prefer email.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll email it to you, then.”

“Whatever,” Rain said.

They were standing in front of the station now, facing the parking lot. Peter couldn’t shake the feeling that she was trying to get rid of him as quickly as possible, and he suddenly got nervous. How could he be sure she wouldn’t screw him over, just take the cash and go? Suddenly, he felt like an idiot for giving it all up front.

“You’re really going to do this for me, right?” he asked.

Rain’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Well, five hundred dollars is a lot of money, and I don’t even know you.”

“If I say I’m going to do something, I do it,” she said. “That’s all you need to know.”

She started walking away.

“Hey, wait. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … can I give you a ride somewhere?” Peter called after her.

Rain didn’t answer; she just kept going without looking back.

Peter watched until she turned the corner and disappeared. He walked back to his Prius feeling annoyed. There were other /ALLIANCE/ members he could have gotten to do this—probably for free, too. He’d gotten too swept up in the moment, and should have stopped to reconsider the minute she asked for money. Now he just had to hope that she came through and didn’t cheat him.

He didn’t know why she’d gotten him so flustered, either. He had a girlfriend, and Amanda was arguably even better looking. Peter glanced at his watch—he’d have to hurry to get home before Bob and Priscilla. He shoved the strange girl out of his mind and broke into a jog as he headed back toward his car.

CHAPTER FOUR

N
oa closed the door behind her and fell back against it with a sigh. She was in a dumpy hotel room ten blocks from Back Bay Station. It was a total dive, but it was cheap, they took cash, and didn’t ask for ID. At the moment, that was all she needed. And considering what she’d been through over the past several hours, it looked as good as a penthouse suite.

Still, she had to admit it was pretty grim. The bedspread was mottled with stains, there were bars over the windows, and the chair’s wicker seat was unraveling. Noa was almost afraid to see the state of the bathroom. But for forty bucks and no questions asked, it was probably the best she could expect.

At least there was a table set up beside a functioning outlet. Noa took a pillow from the bed and covered the hole in the chair with it, then carefully sat down. Her laptop needed more charging—she got it set up. All the nearby wireless networks were password-protected, but that was child’s play. Within a few minutes she’d accessed the one with the strongest signal and was off and running.

She started by zeroing in on the warehouse complex where she’d been held. Hacking into the city records department was more complicated than getting on a wireless router, but only slightly. It was laughable how easy it was to dig around most government sites. Corporations tended to be trickier, since they went to the trouble of hiring people like her to test their networks. Most local and state governments simply didn’t have the cash flow to protect themselves.

The boatyard and warehouses were registered to the same corporation: ANG Import/Export. Which sounded innocuous enough. Noa started to dig through corporate records, trying to find out more about the company.

Unfortunately, it turned out that ANG Import/Export was owned by another company based in the Bahamas, which in turn was owned by another company that didn’t seem to exist outside of filing for S-Corp status....

Twelve companies later, Noa sat back, frustrated. So far none of them seemed to exist as anything but a hiding place for more companies. It was like one of those Russian nesting dolls, where you pulled the two halves apart only to find another smaller doll inside, then another inside that one … only she was starting to get the sense that these dolls might go on forever. The clock at the top of her monitor read one a.m. Noa rubbed her eyes. She felt physically exhausted, but oddly not tired. The thin curtains over the windows were barely going to block the morning light, so she’d probably awaken at dawn, anyway. She might as well try to get some rest.

Noa wished she’d grabbed some toiletries at a drugstore. She had a terrible taste in her mouth, metallic and strange, and she’d love to wash the grime off her face. Luckily she still didn’t feel hungry, because this definitely wasn’t the type of hotel that boasted a vending machine. She’d be lucky to find a half-used bar of soap in the bathroom.

She used two fingers to peel the bedspread off the bed—even though she was freezing, it didn’t seem like something she’d want any part of her body to come in contact with. Noa scooted between the sheets and stared up at the ceiling. She finally allowed herself to stop and process what had happened to her—
Or what might have been done,
she thought with a shudder.

Hesitantly, Noa reached under her sweatshirt and grabbed a corner of the bandage, carefully peeling it away. She ran her fingers over the incision on her chest contemplatively. It was a diagonal slice that started in the center of her rib cage and ran right at a slight downward angle for three inches. The skin surrounding it felt colder than the rest, the scab itself just a narrow line. The weird thing was that it barely hurt anymore. Earlier it had felt like her ribs were cracked and broken, the cut itself sharp and painful. But now the wound barely throbbed. And her foot already felt better, too. She unpeeled the gauze and checked; the cut must not have been as deep as she thought; it was barely even visible. Strange.

And even though she felt exhausted, Noa couldn’t sleep. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how. Not that that was unusual. She’d suffered bouts of insomnia her entire life—especially at The Center, where sleep made you vulnerable. But after Noa got her own apartment, that had changed. For the first time in her life, she’d slept eight, nine, sometimes even ten hours a night. It was amazing what a difference feeling safe made.

Now, apparently, that was gone again. Noa lay there examining the various water stains covering the ceiling, and other, darker marks that looked suspiciously like blood spatter. Her mind drifted over to Vallas, and she frowned. Meeting him in person kind of changed her whole view of /ALLIANCE/. It wasn’t that he was just a kid, like her; most people her age were useless, but she’d met enough exceptions to know better than to underestimate them.

It was more that Vallas was clearly a rich kid. That bugged her. Plus he’d practically accused Noa of stealing from him, which really ticked her off. Here she was trying to figure out who had kidnapped her, and she had to waste time researching something that was probably ridiculous.
It’s important,
he’d claimed. She could just imagine what a kid like that thought was important: whether or not he’d gotten early acceptance to Harvard, probably, or if they were testing shampoo on bunnies in a lab.

Not that she supported that sort of thing, but Noa hadn’t gotten involved with /ALLIANCE/ because of their animal-cruelty efforts. They’d drawn her attention with other raids, against the type of people that she’d once fallen prey to.

And World of Warcraft? Really?

The whole thing irked her. As soon as she got access to her money again, she’d send Vallas a check. The last thing she wanted was to feel indebted to a punk who probably lived in some Brookline mansion.

But then, her own research seemed to have hit a dead end.

Even though it was late, Noa sensed she wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep yet. Sighing, she went back to her laptop and tapped a key, bringing it out of sleep mode. A Google search for Project Persephone spit out a bunch of links to Greek mythology sites and books, but nothing that seemed to be an actual “project.” She went into her email and found a new message from Vallas. He’d sent the link, along with a single word:
Thanks
.

“Yeah, whatever,” Noa muttered to herself. She wondered what was up with that story about a bunch of commandos breaking into his house. It seemed ridiculously implausible, but she decided to take some precautions just in case. There were entire international proxy servers devoted to helping you cover your tracks. Set up mainly to protect financial schemers and pornography-sharing creeps, they also functioned as a sort of superhighway for hackers. Noa covered her tracks by hopping from a server in Colorado to one in Virginia, then to the UK, Russia, China, India, Texas, Brazil, Mexico, Japan … leaping from one to the next until she could be relatively certain that her true location would be untraceable. It was like creating a vast and complicated spiderweb. By the time she finished, even if investigators managed to follow half the threads, they’d never make it back to the beginning before she’d finished the hack, signing off and leaving behind a dead end. Because if Vallas hadn’t just been lying to impress her, the last thing she needed to deal with tonight was more armed men. By the end, Noa had gone through a few dozen servers, ending with one based in Hungary, a country with few Internet laws. Then she finally accessed the corporate mainframe.

She was immediately confronted by a firewall. No surprise there; any company worth their salt had a decent one in place these days. Legend had it that the only one hackers had never managed to infiltrate was Coca-Cola; supposedly that corporation spent a fortune keeping their secret formula secret.

Noa started with the standard protocols. She compared it to trying to stick a pin into a balloon without popping it—you had to probe carefully so that it didn’t just blow up in your face; a lot of sites went into automatic lockdown if they detected an infiltrator. She should know—her work for Rocket Science mainly consisted of setting up those sorts of protections. Or if the walls had already been breached, it was her job to try and mitigate the damage, and ensure that it didn’t happen again.

The trick was to act as if you were someone who belonged, but were stumbling around, like a drunk guy having trouble fitting a key into his front door. At every company there were plenty of employees with legitimate access to the server who had trouble remembering passwords and entered the wrong one a few times. The truly great hackers breached the wall that way, waiting for the server to spit out hints.

This one was sophisticated, though—clearly established by people who knew what they were doing. Noa found herself intrigued in spite of her doubts about Vallas. Whatever they were hiding, it probably wasn’t college admissions information.

She kept at it. Hours passed. The sun came up and daylight seeped through the thin curtains, but Noa was so absorbed she didn’t even notice. It was well after eight a.m. when she finally had a breakthrough and her screen suddenly flooded with information. Noa sat back as stacks of folders populated her screen: way too many to fit on a flash drive, she immediately realized. There were thousands related to Project Persephone, amid other projects with similarly obtuse names.

Noa felt a surge of annoyance. Vallas should have been more specific about what he was looking for; she couldn’t send him this much data. She decided to assemble a sampling—hopefully that would suffice. After all, it wasn’t like he’d actually be paying for this. She didn’t mind helping out fellow hackers for free on occasion, even when they turned out to be spoiled rich kids. And he had done a lot of good via /ALLIANCE/.

She started clicking on folders at random, moving them onto the flash drive. Twenty seemed like a good number. And if what he was looking for wasn’t among them, that was just too bad. She needed to get her own house in order.

Twelve folders in, she froze on one titled, “TEST SUBJECTS: BOSTON.”

That wasn’t what had caught her eye, though. The third file down was named “Noa Torson.”

Peter’s heel beat a steady rhythm against the floor. It wasn’t something he could help, just a nervous habit he’d developed as a kid. Still, he could tell it was getting on Bob’s nerves.

For once, his father didn’t lay into him about it. “Tell me again
exactly
what Mason said.” Bob was leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped.

“I told you,” Peter said impatiently. “He said to give you and Mom his best, and then he said someone would come by to fix the door, and that you should call him.”