by E. C. Myers
“All this must have taken a lot of work,” Max said.
“He didn’t mind hard work when he was properly motivated. When Infiltraitor—Ty Andrews—disappeared, it hit him really hard. They worked together.”
“Where did he work?” Max asked.
“Panjea,” Penny said.
Panjea? Max was stunned.
He’d thought it was a big deal that Evan was in Dramatis Personai, but he also had been employed by one of the most powerful tech companies in the country, if not the world.
“I can’t believe he worked for Panjea,” Max said.
“They employ a lot of Dramatis Personai members. They have some kind of elite hacking group. Evan was supposed to put in a good word for me, but he changed his mind and brought Infiltraitor on instead.” Her mouth tightened. “I was furious. He knew how much I needed the job, but I guess it was lucky for me. You really didn’t know?”
“When did Evan start there?” Max asked.
“Last October. No, late September.”
Max had already distanced himself from hacking and Evan by then. But now that he thought back, Evan hadn’t put up any resistance. In fact, he had subtly encouraged Max’s decision, saying that it wouldn’t change anything between them. Max now wondered whose idea it had been in the first place. He’d been moving in that direction for a while, but had Evan nudged him the rest of the way?
The thing about social engineering was that you used people’s own inclinations to get them to do what you wanted. You couldn’t force them to do anything. They always have a choice.
Max leaned back and stretched his arms forward. A sore joint popped softly. “Evan never mentioned a job. He probably wanted to avoid paying back the thirty bucks he owed me. What did he do for the greatest social media service in the world?”
“He didn’t talk about it much. He said he couldn’t. But it had to be one of their biggest projects if he was on it. He’s a brilliant programmer.” She flinched. “He was the best.”
Evan had been working for Panjea for over a year, and Max hadn’t known about it at all. Had they been that out of touch? It wasn’t like he had forgotten to update him on the news in passing; Evan had actively kept this from him, along with his activities with Dramatis Personai—and Penny.
“That reporter, Kyle Marks, had a tech vlog, right?” Risse said. “He did a lot of stories about Panjea.”
“So you think Evan found something out about Panjea, and the government killed people to cover it up?” Risse said. “They would have been investigating it too.”
“Maybe they were. Evan’s question implied someone knew what he was talking about,” Max said. “If he hadn’t killed himself, I bet he would have been targeted next.”
“We don’t even know that their deaths are murders. We just have Evan’s suspicions.” Penny spread her hands, palms up. “Just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Maybe Evan was murdered too?” Risse asked quietly.
“I saw him shoot himself,” Max said. “It didn’t look fake to me, but I’m no expert. Maybe that’s why the video is being suppressed?”
“Could someone have made Evan do it?” Penny said.
“How do you force someone to commit suicide in front of millions of people?” Max asked.
“Threaten someone they care about.” Penny looked at Risse.
Max nodded. That would do it. Evan would have taken a bullet for his parents, or Max and his dad, and probably even Penny.
“If we could get the full video out there, people would start wondering why his death was being hidden,” Penny said.
“Until we can get hold of it, we have to deal with what we do have. We think we know what ‘the silence of six’ is, but if those people were murdered, we don’t know who killed them, or why,” Max said.
“We should go through every one of these files thoroughly,” Penny said. “Who knows what else we’ll find? We’ve already established a link between at least three of the victims, four if you include Evan: Panjea.”
“That’s their slogan. ‘Everyone’s connected,’” Risse said.
Max opened Ariel Miller’s file. “I want to find out more about Ariel. She was a sysadmin, but there has to be a reason her death captured Evan’s interest. This file’s named X-1, so she was the first one who died—six months ago. If her family remembers anything weird about her behavior leading up to her death, or if they remember anything unusual about the accident, it could help us build a case,” Max said.
“Give me a copy of the files and I’ll go through them while you do that,” Risse said.
“That would be a huge help. The sooner we read them, the sooner we’ll know what we’re up against,” he said.
Penny shook her head. “We don’t want them, Risse.”
“We’ll be fine with encryptions, air-gapped machines, all that spy stuff you’re good at. I need to do something. If we’re right and the U.S. government is killing American citizens, we can’t ignore that,” Risse said. “We shouldn’t let Max take all the risks.”
“I don’t know.” Penny pursed her lips.
“Come with me,” Max said.
“To San Jose,” Penny said.
She and Risse exchanged a long glance.
“Okay,” Penny said.
“Yeah?” Risse asked.
“But only as far as San Jose,” Penny said. “If we don’t find proof that something bad happened to Ariel, we’re coming back home and you’re on your own, Max.”
“I’ll take it. Thank you,” Max said.
“This is why I joined Dramatis Personai in the first place. Besides, I have to see what Evan found out about the other members. I hate to think it’s possible, but one of us must have tipped off the FBI about his involvement.” Penny folded her arms. “I want to know who it is.”
“That’s what I figured too,” Max said. “When can we leave?”
“As soon as we hike back to town and steal another car. We already have everything we need from our house,” she said.
Risse unzipped her duffel bag and pulled out a series of items. “Spare laptops, chargers, backup batteries, burner phones, USB sticks, headphones.” The last item was a pair of oversized vintage headphones that seemed out of place among the more modern tech. She lined everything up on the table.
She peered inside the bag. “Also hair dye, makeup, hats, sunglasses, a couple changes of clothes, snacks, five hundred dollars cash, toiletries, and . . . sundry. Oh, and socks. You can never have too many socks. These have toast on them.” She held up a pair of socks decorated with cute cartoons of anthropomorphic toasted bread. “Everything a girl on the lam could ever need.”
“‘On the lam’?” Max said.
“She watches too much TV.” Penny reached inside her sister’s bag and pulled out a plush lavender unicorn. “You brought Thea too?”
Risse grabbed it from her. “Hey, I packed this when I was, like, thirteen.”
“That was last year,” Penny said.
“I’m both impressed and disturbed that you have go-bags,” Max said. If he’d thought that far ahead, he wouldn’t have had to steal and improvise once he was on the run. But he’d gotten out of hacking so he wouldn’t have to worry about that kind of thing, or so he’d thought.
“That’s what it means to be American in today’s world. You’re lucky we were so prepared.” Penny looked Max up and down. “But we’ll have to find you some new clothes, and see what we can do to foil facial recognition software.”
Max frowned at the reminder that he was now a public fugitive. He had no right asking the two of them to travel with him when that meant putting themselves at risk of exposure and capture.
“Penny, maybe—” he began.
“Too late. We already said we’d come along. Don’t worry, the Feds are looking for one teenager, not three,” Penny sai
d.
“We’ll be part of your disguise,” Risse said.
Penny put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Max smiled. It might not be true, but it felt good to hear the words, and even better to not be on his own anymore.
13
The first order of business was getting new wheels. They walked back to a residential neighborhood, where Penny and Risse watched in admiration as Max war texted into an older model Volkswagen Jetta. Risse made him guide her through the steps until she got it.
San Jose was a straight shot down I-5 South. The first four hours of the drive went quickly, with Penny and Risse reviewing Evan’s files on their friends in Dramatis Personai and shouting out the interesting information they discovered.
“There isn’t much on 0MN1,” Penny said from the front passenger seat. “Mainly a bunch of chat logs where Evan highlighted certain things 0MN1 mentioned: place names, comments about the weather, the time of day, phrases that might be particular to specific regions.”
“Maybe he didn’t have enough to go on,” Max said.
“He had better luck with the others,” Risse said from the backseat. “Get this. Edifice is a forty-year-old security guard in Wilmington, Delaware named Edward Swift.”
“All he had on PHYREWALL was his first name: Matt. And the note ‘Cleveland’ with a question mark,” Penny said.
“I’m compiling all this data into a spreadsheet. I’ll put a copy on your thumb drive, Max. It’s named TLDR.” Too long, didn’t read.
“Risse loves spreadsheets. She has a spreadsheet to keep track of her spreadsheets,” Penny said.
“Is there something weird about that?” Risse asked.
“Good thinking, Risse. Thanks,” Max said.
They stopped halfway to San Jose to pick up some takeout. When they got back on the road, Penny drove to let Max rest. But instead he tackled more of Evan’s files—beginning with the one he had compiled on Max in the LinerNotes.odt file.
The information wasn’t new to Max, of course, but it was by far the most complete profile Evan had prepared. Whereas the details about DoubleThink had been sparse, the profile on 503-ERROR seemed to have been written to impress the reader with Max’s abilities and accomplishments. That made sense if Evan had written it to convince Penny that Max was worth trusting and helping.
Max scrolled back to the head of the lengthy document to look at the picture at the beginning. It showed a much scrawnier fourteen-year-old Max standing behind The Hidden Word, his and Evan’s favorite bookstore, until it closed the year before.
“Why did he pick this photo?” Max mused aloud.
“It’s a nice picture,” Risse said, leaning forward from the back seat to look over Max’s shoulder. “I thought we were the same age when I first saw it.”
“Seat belt!” Penny said.
“I’m fine,” Risse said.
“It’s the law,” Penny said.
Risse laughed. “We’re in a stolen car.” But she leaned back and buckled in again.
“The thing is, this photo’s three years old. Every other profile has the most recent picture Evan could find, and he had plenty of pics of me,” Max said.
Evan had snapped this with his DSLR camera when they were freshman. Back then they had been hanging out at the bookstore every day, reading everything they could find on computers and phone phreaks and hacking. The owner, Mr. Stenzler, hadn’t minded stocking books he knew they wouldn’t buy. Maybe that was one of the reasons the store had closed.
“Evan was sentimental,” Penny said.
“Maybe he just liked it?” Risse said.
“Evan was big on nostalgia, but he didn’t work that way. He couldn’t help but be consistent with everything. It would have bugged him if this one profile picture was different from the others, unless he’d chosen it for a reason.”
Something told Max this was significant, and whenever that happened, he was exactly like Evan—he couldn’t let it go until he’d figured it out.
“He included your profile on the disc he wanted me to deliver to you. Maybe he wanted you to see it,” Penny said.
“So he wanted to remind me of something? Our early days hacking?” Max stared at the image and thought back.
“That store was called The Hidden Word, so maybe there’s a word hidden in the photo!” Risse said, leaning forward again.
“Seat belt,” Penny said.
Risse sighed and flounced back. Her seat belt clicked back into place.
“Actually, there’s a USB drive embedded in the wall of the bookstore,” Max said. You could barely see it in the lower right corner of the image, even if you knew to look for it.
Max had read about people who embedded thumb drives in buildings for others to discover and had suggested that he and Evan do the same thing. Portable drives were cheap, and Max had a ton of them lying around the house that had been discarded by his dad’s company.
Using Mr. Stein’s workshop, they had fashioned a cement brick around a 500GB drive, and then swapped it for a loose one from the crumbling facade of The Hidden Word. Anyone who plugged into the portable drive could download thousands of free e-books Evan had mined online. Or they could add their own. But of course, only Max and Evan knew it was there in the first place, and as far as he knew, no one else had ever discovered it. Evan had installed a program that would execute on any computer plugged into the drive and let him know whenever files were copied or added.
“Are you saying he might have put something important on there?” Penny asked.
“It’s possible. We installed a few of those drives around town. I haven’t thought about them in a while,” Max said.
“If there’s something waiting for you back in Granville, then why didn’t he send you that picture directly instead of sending it to me?” Penny said.
To bring us together, Max thought.
“Even though it’s unlikely anyone else would figure it out, if he’d texted or e-mailed the pic to me as a hint, it would have drawn more attention to the store. The drive is hidden, but it isn’t impossible to find—that’s the whole point.”
“What about playing around with the image itself? Alternating colored pixels, messing with the contrast and saturation, that kind of thing.” Risse started typing on her laptop.
“That’s smart, but Evan would have expected someone smart to think of it,” Max said.
“So it doesn’t have to be smart, it just has to be something you would think of?” Penny asked.
“Hey,” Max said.
Risse giggled.
“I’m kind of being serious. Max, Evan must have picked that picture because it has a personal meaning for both of you.”
Max nodded. “We had just gotten into hacking around this time. Really simple stuff. We tried phone phreaking, but that wasn’t really our thing. I just liked messing with people and getting them to tell me stuff they didn’t mean to, and Evan liked wandering around in systems where he didn’t belong.”
“That’s the best!” Risse said.
“We were just getting into encryption, too. Evan thought it was important to respect the history of hacking, so we tried to recreate everything we read about, using those books as a primer on manipulating technology.”
“What did you learn about manipulating images?” Risse asked.
“Lots. Hmm. . . .”
Max opened a window to display the hashCode behind the image. “There was a way to embed messages in the garbage code of an image file. It would never display as anything but noise in the picture, or it would be completely invisible, but by examining the code. . . .” Max whooped. “You were right. Something’s been inserted here!”
“What is it?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know. I was looking for a message, but this is more complex. Letters and numbers that don’t belong
there. . . .” He looked up. “It could be another passphrase, or even another file.”
“How could he fit another file inside that one?” Penny asked.
“The file size isn’t big enough to include another file, unless it’s a very small one, like a short text file or a simple executable,” Risse said.
“You have a copy of my file?” Max asked.
“Just the picture,” Penny said.
Risse stuck her tongue out at her sister.
“I need a copy of the original so I can compare them for differences,” Max said.
“Do you have it?” Penny asked.
“Sure. On my backup drive at home,” Max said.
She groaned.
“But there’d be a copy of it in Evan’s cloud. He kept everything.” Max looked out the window at the dark trees whizzing by them as they sped down the Pacific Highway. “I need to get online.”
“Isn’t that too risky? What if the Feds have found his cloud already?”
“I just need to connect to it for thirty seconds,” Max said.
“They would still have a record that someone had been there, and who else would have access to his account?” Penny said. “You’d be tipping them off that there’s something important in there.”
“So they’d find the original photo,” Max said. “That won’t help them. And maybe they’ll waste resources looking through a couple terabytes of files for whatever it is they’re after.”
“I don’t know,” Penny said.
“We don’t have a lot to go on. We have to chase down every lead, and I have a hunch about this,” Max said.
“Okay. But we aren’t stopping. Risse, give him the spare laptop.”
Max copied the photo from his computer to a new SD card and loaded it on the machine Risse handed him from her go-bag. They were serious about keeping everything separate and contained.
“I’m making a private wireless network with my phone,” Risse said. “It’s going to be kind of slow.”