“What’s up?” Haylie shouted over the radio. “Where are you?”
“I think I’m standing on it,” Vector whispered back, trying to move his mouth as little as possible as he spoke. “Bertrand Russell is in a mosaic right here in the middle of the Portico.”
Sweat began to form on the back of his neck as he felt the stare of the two agents behind him. He shuffled his feet, trying his best to seem uninterested about the patterns on the floor.
“Okay,” Haylie said. “I’m trying to fix this code; I added a few things. But I’m still getting the import error.”
“That seems like a pretty easy thing to fix.”
“Wait a minute,” Haylie stopped, typing away at the keyboard. “Are you using Python 2.7?”
“No,” Vector said under his breath. “I upgraded to 3.0.”
“When did you do that?” Haylie shouted back. “How have we not talked about that … that’s kind of a big deal. You know that most of the big applications don’t even support–”
“Can we please talk about this later?” Vector whispered, heart pounding. “I need to get moving, like, now.”
“Okay, hold on. Let me update my version,” she said, groaning. “This is going to screw up so many other things on my machine. Hold on.”
Vector slowly retraced his steps back to the other side of the Portico. He caught a view of the two agents. They were on the move, beginning to make their way up the stairs, one on each side. Damn.
As Vector caught his breath, the double doors at the top of the landing swung open with a loud thump and a gaggle of Japanese tourists pushed their way out into the hall, filling the top landing. Seeing his opportunity, Vector made his way into the middle of the group and out the other side.
The agents reached the outer edge of the Japanese mob, and began to push their way in.
“Now would be a great time,” he said, ducking behind a man with a map extended out with both hands. “Let’s do this.”
“Got it,” Haylie said. “Incoming.”
The Portico suddenly echoed with a collection of notification alerts. A screaming chorus of buzzes, chimes, bells, and ring tones sounded off and sent the crowd into a full-on panic. A woman at the center of the crowd shrieked, pushing the bodies all around her, screaming “Terrorists! It must be terrorists!”
A wave of fear spread across the crowd, with a steady row of bodies now flowing down the stairs and towards the exit. The two agents were shoved back down the stairs as more cries and screams echoed off the chamber’s stone walls.
Vector dodged his way past the parade of fleeing tourists and sprinted across the landing, taking out his phone and snapping a few photos of the mosaic before disappearing back into the crowd.
“Did you get it?” Haylie shouted over the mic.
“I hope so,” he replied over a collection of hurried breaths. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Just go with the flow of the crowd; get out the front exit.”
“I’m … almost there,” Vector said between pushes and shoves. “I’ll make my way around a bit before heading over, lose anyone that might be tailing me.”
Vector flew through the exit and into the crisp spring air, weaving into the crowds, past the fountain at the center of the square and into the gray ether of London.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Trafalgar Hotel - London
March 11th, 4:27PM
Throwing off flecks of water with a shake of his head, Vector entered the hotel room. Haylie stuck her head out into the hotel hallway to check for anyone else lingering about, but sank back in after seeing that everything was clear. Vector peeled his jacket off, tossing it onto the hook on the wall.
“You weren’t followed?” Haylie asked.
“Nah,” Vector replied. “I spent some time doing circles in the area around a few buildings and side streets, just in case. I think the two blokes in there were too busy trying to figure out what just happened to even notice me leaving.”
Closing the door, Haylie hurried back to the desk where her laptop sat idling, the screen glowing with the colors of no less than five stacked application windows. She slid into the chair, rubbing her eyes, trying to remember where she had left off.
“It was a good plan,” Vector said, peeling the curtain back to sneak a view of the shiny, rain-soaked street below. “The stingray and group text … I never would have thought of that.”
“That’s not the half of it. It wasn’t just any regular text message that I sent,” she said. “I added some Machina code to make things interesting.”
Vector turned back from the window, his eyes wide. “You did what?”
Haylie had expected a cold response from Vector on Machina, which is why she hadn’t brought it up earlier. She knew from years of back-and-forth with him that Vector tended to err on the more conservative side of hacking. The Machina exploit, in particular, was a lighting rod for attention in the hacking community. It was a bug in a popular mobile OS, granting free access to roughly nine hundred and fifty million phones around the globe if used in the right way.
“Where did you get the code from?” Vector asked.
“It’s everywhere, Einstein. Things are easy to find if you know where to look.”
“I can’t believe you did that.” Vector paced the room, nervously looking back at Haylie and down to her screen. “This is serious stuff.”
“It’s not that bad, chicken,” Haylie said. “And now we can get full access to unpatched devices that were in the museum. I’m getting hundreds of results here. It might be the break we need to find these guys.”
“You’re going to get us thrown in jail; you know that, right?” Vector said, placing his hands on his head. “We’re already in a load of trouble here. Bloody hell, this just digs the hole deeper.”
“What do you think is happening here?” Haylie shot back. “If these guys succeed, everything’s going to change. And it’s not going to change someday, it’s going to change tonight. Tonight. All this stuff we do.” She pointed down to her computer and the other equipment now littering the hotel room. “It’s all going to be completely worthless. And these people, the same powerful people that have always just done whatever they want, they’ll have to answer to no one but themselves. The rest of us will be left out in the cold, begging them for our electricity back, which is exactly what they want.”
Haylie scrolled the list of numbers, metadata, and messages from the stingray’s log, eyes flying left and right as she searched for the line of text she had marked a few minutes earlier. She double-clicked on a listing, bringing up a detailed data dump from one of the devices that had been catalogued.
“Here,” she said, jabbing a finger at the screen, “Check out this text message. It was sent right after you bolted out the door.”
xx6789:> no sign of the girl. some strange activity with phones in the museum, we’re keeping an eye for anything else out of the ordinary
Vector mouthed an inaudible sound and then stood back up, smiling. “You just rooted one of the agent’s phones?”
“I sure did,” Haylie said. “I’ve got all the device information here. But check this out, it gets better.” Scrolling down a few more lines, she selected a response to the same number.
xx8890:> understood. remain sharp. find her, she’ll be there.
“So what?” Vector said. “It’s just a message back to the agent.”
“I’m not interested in the message, I’m interested in the device information,” she said. “This text is from their boss, and the response was caught by our stingray. We now have data from that phone as well.”
“What about the photos of the mosaic I sent? Did you find anything?”
Haylie switched windows. “One of the tiles—over here, a black tile from the blindfold in the mosaic—there’s a tiny little QR code. It must have been glued on there. You can see it better when I zoom.” She hit a few Command-+ keystrokes to resize the image. “This is the best angle out of the
five you sent. I should be able to read the code from here.” She brought up her QR code scanning app and snapped a picture of the screen.
Copying the URL over to her browser, she hit return and waited for the page to load. The window flashed with a burst of white and loaded a black background with white shell text. The text read:
loading console…
“What is it?” Vector said, hovering over Haylie’s shoulder.
“It’s an interactive shell.”
A cursor appeared. It blinked on and off like a traffic signal, waiting for input. What does it want me to do? She typed a quick “?” and hit return. The console simply started a new line, the cursor continuing to blink, but nothing else.
“Check the page source,” Vector said. “Maybe there’s a clue in the HTML.”
“Wait, look at this,” Haylie stopped, pointing back to the screen as text began scrolling inside the shell. The output was being displayed one, two characters at a time in fits and starts. This isn’t a Raven clue. Someone is typing on the other end.
ADMIN:> Hello, Crash. It’s good to finally meet you.
Haylie and Vector exchanged confused stares. Haylie rubbed her hands together to loosen her joints and rested her fingers on the slick, black keys.
GUEST:> Who is this?
The two sat, waiting for a response.
ADMIN:> My name is Martin - I’m a friend of Caesar’s.
Anger clouded over Haylie’s face as her rage became focused on a man, a name. Martin. You’re going to have a bad day today, Martin. She took a deep breath and typed back.
GUEST:> Tell me where I can find him and I won’t tell anyone your plan. I just want him back.
“Get your phone out,” Haylie yelled over to Vector. “Try to figure out who owns this URL. Maybe they got sloppy.” Vector nodded and began typing at his phone with frantic thumbs.
ADMIN:> It’s a shame I had to shut down the rest of the Raven puzzle. You’ve been getting too close, I’m sure you understand. But the last puzzle—I just wish you could have seen it.
“Can they trace this back to us? Are you masking your IP?” Vector asked.
“I’m on the hotel’s Wi-Fi but routing through the Tor network,” Haylie responded. “They won’t be able to figure out where we are.”
ADMIN:> I’d love to meet up, but maybe I should come to you? It’s going to be difficult for you out in public right now.
Haylie glanced over to Vector, checking on his progress. He held up the results of the network lookup and shook his head, signaling no luck. She re-read his message, not understanding what Martin was trying to get at.
GUEST:> What are you talking about?
The console stayed static for a few seconds, only showing the blinking white cursor. Haylie drummed her fingers on the cheap wood desktop, waiting for the next message.
ADMIN:> Oh, poor thing. You haven’t heard the news. Turn on your television.
Sitting back in her chair, Haylie looked over at Vector, who was already scrambling to find the remote. He pointed it at the screen and scrolled, finally finding a news channel, Haylie stared into the screen for a few moments, not believing what she saw.
“Scotland Yard, in connection with the FBI and Interpol, announced they have positively identified the hacker who is responsible for the catastrophic attack on Iceland just a few days ago, which left dozens dead. Her name is Haylie Black, a seventeen-year-old student from Texas, who also goes by the hacker name ‘Crash.’
She is now being connected to a number of exploits in the United States, including the Super Bowl power outage and gaining access to the head of the CIA’s personal email.
The joint task force has confirmed that she was seen in London as recently as yesterday. They are asking all residents to report any sightings, and to consider her armed and dangerous.”
Next to the anchorwoman was a large, pixelated picture. It was Haylie’s own face, looking straight back into her eyes.
She crouched over in her chair, her head in her hands. This can’t be happening. This just can’t…. Feeling Vector’s hand on her shoulder, she sat up and feigned composure. She stared down at the screen and saw one last message.
ADMIN:> Haylie, we’re going to do such wonderful things together. You’ll see. We’ll have a man waiting on the third bench from the entrance to Paddington Station. We haven’t much time. Chop chop.
As she reached up to type a response, the console went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Trafalgar Hotel - London
March 11th, 4:46PM
Rain pounded against the window as the two sat in silence. Vector had muted the TV, leaving only a silent slideshow of images: rotating pictures of Haylie, Iceland, and police officers at podiums. Bright blue banners scrolled across the bottom of the screen reading:
NOTORIOUS HACKER IDENTIFIED AND CONFIRMED IN LONDON.
Vector looked over to Haylie as she sat motionless, collapsed on the desk in a heap. He reached out to touch her shoulder. As soon as he made contact, her hand snapped around her body, swatting his arm like a nagging fly.
“Get away from me,” she muttered.
“We can still fix this,” Vector said, pulling his hand back. “We’ll just meet them at the train station tonight. They’ll cancel the alert; everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “And even if it worked, they’ll still force me to help them. I can’t … you know that.”
Thinking back to the events of the day, and considering the little time they had remaining, Vector shook his head. “I don’t see that you have a choice.”
Haylie stared back at Vector with daggers in her eyes. “I always have a choice.”
Vector moved to the window, pulling back the curtain. He could make out the smudged white and red lights splashing along on the street below. He heard Haylie’s voice, rising slowly, from behind him.
“You … you helped them,” Haylie said. “You helped them design Raven. You took their money.”
“I didn’t know!” he shot back. “How could I have any idea what they were doing? It was a job just like any job.”
“No!” she yelled. “You should know better than that. You helped build this; you helped them get Caesar. And now they’ve got my face everywhere. All I ever wanted was to be left alone. I just want to be left alone.”
“You’re talking nonsense. You need to eat.”
“Shut up,” Haylie stood and slammed her laptop shut. “Don’t talk to me like everyone else does, like I’m just some girl you get to boss around. I’m not just smarter than you, I’m better than you. Live with that.”
Vector reached out with an extended hand—why, he wasn’t quite sure—as Haylie threw her computer into her bag. Two seconds later, the door slammed shut behind her.
> > > > >
She’d felt alone her whole life, but the weight had never pushed down on her like tonight. Haylie paced down the crowded streets, just trying to get away from everything she knew. Hurried commuters brushed past her on both sides, surrounding her with a chorus of languages she couldn’t understand. The passing grays and blacks of faceless trench coats swam by her on all sides, covered with beads of water dancing on dark shoulders.
Haylie had traced a figure-eight through the streets of London over the past half hour, blending into the thick flow of locals, and fighting the confused stops and starts of tourists covered in cheap plastic ponchos. She kept her eyes on the soaked sidewalks below her, her hood tightly draped over her wet, knotted hair.
Passing umbrellas dripped cold water down as she twisted down the street, squinting to shield her eyes from the downpour as the rain flew in the sides of her glasses. She paused on a rounded street corner, feeling bump after bump of the passersby grazing against each shoulder. She checked up and all around to find her bearings, but had no idea where she was.
I just wanted to stay out of the spotlight … I just wanted to help Caesar. But now we’re both in this.
This is all my fault.
She looked up to see a CCTV camera hanging from the wall, pointed straight down at her. Snapping her head back down to her feet, she pulled the hood of her rain jacket farther down her face and moved on; heading somewhere and nowhere at the same time.
Pulling out her phone, she clicked the top button to power the device down, shoving it back deep into her pocket. They’re everywhere. They’ll track me. They’ll find me. She looked around the street corner, searching for signs or landmarks. She coughed out a pathetic chuckle, spitting water from her lips as she exhaled; realizing that she didn’t even know where she was trying to go.
Twisting around the iron poles at the sidewalk’s edge, Haylie trudged down King Street and past a muted rainbow of storefronts. She slunk under purple then blue then white then red awnings and around construction pillars; the rain came and went with each makeshift roof. The puddles underneath her feet grew dark as the slosh of passing taxis on wet cobblestones filled her ears with a constant tide of white noise.
Turning onto a walkway with a sign reading ‘Covent Garden,’ Haylie crouched, resisting the urge to plop down on the wet brick and just let the rain pour over her, wash away everything. Up ahead, she saw a large structure supported with four thick pillars. She slowly slunk under the shelter, falling into a sitting position between two pools of water on either side of an old doorway.
Crash Alive (The Haylie Black Series Book 1) Page 24