The Silence of Six

by E. C. Myers

  “Risse, go lock the front door,” Penny said.

  “What’s going on?” Risse asked in the background.

  “Just do it. Hurry!” Penny said.

  Max pulled the car away from the curb and prepared to turn it around.

  “Go!” Max said. “I’ll meet you two on the street behind your house.”

  He heard Penny fumble the phone and then the call was disconnected. He turned the car around and circled the block to the house behind Penny’s, forcing himself to drive slower than he wanted to. A dirt path to the right of the home led to a common cement-paved patio. Max parked right in front of the small road and got out to open the passenger doors. He watched the back door of Penny’s house anxiously, rocking back and forth on his heels. There was nothing he could do but wait.

  Thirty seconds later, the storm door and back door swung open and banged against the side of the house. Penny barreled out and made a beeline for Max. She was still wearing that bright pink jacket.

  He admired her form, head up, arms pumping, knees high as she sprinted across the scraggly backyard. She was fast, even carrying a bulky black duffel over her shoulder. She would be great on the Granville track team.

  Penny skidded to a stop next to his car. She threw her bag into the backseat and spun around to look back, breathing heavily.

  “Risse?” Max asked.

  “She was right behind me.” Penny took a step toward her house. Max grabbed her arm to stop her.

  “Get in the car. I’ll be right back.” Max darted down the dirt path. When he reached the patio he heard a crack from the front of Penny’s house, and wood splintering. They were breaking in.

  If he went inside to look for Risse, he would basically be turning himself in.

  Max kept running.

  The glass in the storm door was cracked and it was hanging from only its top hinge. The back door banged open again and Risse bolted out. She staggered into Max’s arms and dropped her duffel bag.

  He grabbed the bag from her and pushed her toward the car. “Keep moving!” he said.

  He slung the bag across his chest and followed Risse. It felt like he was lugging bricks.

  They ran toward the car. Penny was behind the wheel, craning her neck to watch them coming.

  Max tossed Risse’s duffel bag into the backseat. Risse tumbled in after it and Max slammed the door behind her before jumping into the passenger seat.

  The car peeled away as Max pulled his door closed. In the rearview mirror, he spotted the man in the brown suit running into the street. The agent waved his hand, as if trying to flag down a taxi. Then he started chasing after them. He tugged something out of his suit jacket and pointed it at them. At first Max thought it was a walkie-talkie.

  “Gun! Stay down.” Max hunched forward.

  Penny swerved the car from left to right on the street to make them a harder target. The agent with the gun stopped in the middle of the road, legs spread apart, and took aim. Max pulled his attention away from the mirror in time to see the light ahead turn red—and a pickup truck approaching from the left, perpendicular to their path.

  “Penny!” he shouted.

  She jerked her attention from the mirror to the road ahead.

  They couldn’t stop in time.

  Max yanked the wheel to the right as Penny accelerated, then she pulled it back, hard, to the left. The chorus of shouts inside the car was joined by a honking horn and the horrible screech of tires.

  The car swerved sharply around the truck and miraculously cleared it. Max was jolted up and down in his seat and his stomach lurched as the tires on the right side bounced over the corner of the sidewalk. Penny wrestled the vehicle back onto the road and slowed down to the speed limit.

  The truck’s horn continued to blare behind them. Max twisted around in his seat to look out the back window. The truck was stopped in the middle of the intersection at an angle, half-turned toward them. He hoped no one had been hurt; it looked empty except for the driver.

  “Ev-everyone okay?” he asked.

  Penny glanced in the mirror. “Risse?”

  Risse’s head popped up into view. She had fallen or rolled into the footwell.

  “Ow.” She rubbed her right elbow. “I’m okay. Were they really going to shoot at us?”

  “I think so,” Max said.

  Risse settled into the seat behind Max and buckled in.

  “That was close,” Penny said. “Sorry.”

  “Did you hack the DMV to get your license?” Max asked.

  “License?” Penny asked in a shaky voice.

  Max looked in the rearview and saw the gray SUV pull around the stalled truck.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. I can lose them.” Penny hunched forward over the wheel and pumped the gas.

  Max steadied himself by grabbing on to the dashboard.

  “Are we really doing this?” he asked.

  “I practiced driving on these roads.” She raced through an intersection as the light went from yellow to red then made a quick right. She seemed more in control of herself and the vehicle now.

  Max pressed his back into his seat and watched the SUV in his mirror. Penny increased the distance between them by weaving through cars.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Now that they’ve seen the car we have to ditch it. I know a remote place where we can hide out a while, and then dump the car later.”

  She made a hard left. Another car honked. Penny waved an apology.

  Max’s pulse was racing as if he’d just played in a tough soccer match.

  “Did those goons follow us from the school?” Penny asked.

  “I don’t think so. It looked like they had your address,” Max said.

  “How?” Penny asked. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So it’s just a coincidence they turned up the same day you did?”

  “Maybe they made the connection between you and Evan.”

  “What about Mama?” Risse asked.

  “She’ll be fine. If they question her, they’ll be lucky if she knows what day of the week it is,” Penny said.

  The gray SUV wasn’t behind them anymore. Max looked ahead nervously, wondering if they were trying to head them off somehow. But there were fewer cars on this section of road.

  Penny turned onto a side street. “I think we lost them,” she said.

  Max and Risse looked behind them. There were now no other cars in sight.

  “Or they gave up for now,” Max said. As Penny had pointed out, their pursuers now had a description of the car and probably its license plate number, so it would be easy to find them again until they got off the road.

  Penny drove through a thick canopy of trees down a long, winding path that was just wide enough for their compact car. After a few minutes on bumpy back roads they reached an abandoned stone cabin in a small clearing. The front door was boarded up, covered in graffiti. A dead tree was leaning against the back wall.

  “And here we are,” Penny said. She parked the car out of sight of the road.

  “Didn’t I see this place in a horror movie?” Max asked.

  “We’re away from everything and everyone. You can’t even get a cell signal out here,” Penny said.

  “Now that is scary,” Max said.

  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 overtu
rned 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.”