Don't Let Go (13 page)

Peter regarded her gravely. “I wish you’d told me sooner,” he finally said.

Noa bit her lower lip. “I would have, but . . . I didn’t want you guys to worry about it, not when we were basically running for our lives every night.”

“So what do we do?”

She gave a short laugh. “That’s what I like about you, Peter. You always think there’s a way to fix things.”

“That’s because there usually is,” he insisted. “We could find another doctor, someone we can trust—”

“After what happened to Cody?” Noa was already shaking her head. “No way. It’s too dangerous.”

“Well, you can’t just keep getting sicker,” Peter said reasonably. “I mean, what if—”

The sudden appearance of Loki looming in the doorway cut off his words. “Who’s sick?”

“No one,” Noa said, straightening in her chair. “Everything cool?”

“Just wanted to check the monitors again,” Loki mumbled.

Peter rolled out of the way as Loki bent over the keyboard. With the press of a few buttons, views of the property started scrolling through the upper monitors. Instead of focusing on them, though, Loki seemed to be scanning what Peter had been working on. Which made Peter uncomfortable, although he couldn’t pinpoint why. It wasn’t like he’d gotten close to finding the decryption key.

“No luck, huh?” Loki asked, apparently reaching the same conclusion.

“Not yet,” Noa said. “But we’ve still got more drives to go through.”

“Right.” Loki scratched his beard; a considerable amount of that morning’s freeze-dried eggs had managed to lodge themselves in it. “So you’re looking for an archive file?”

Noa and Peter exchanged a glance, and she said, “Of course.”

“Well, you can rule out the duplicate files, right?” Loki rocked back on his heels. “Maybe you should be searching more than one drive at once, looking for dupes.”

Peter felt like an idiot; Loki was right. They should’ve been scanning as many drives as possible simultaneously, composing a list of duplicate files that could be ruled out. “That’s genius,” he said appreciatively. “Thanks, man.”

“Yeah, well. I have my moments,” Loki mumbled, but he looked pleased by the compliment.

“Can we tap into a few more of these?” Noa asked, motioning to the other towers.

“Be my guest,” he said expansively. “By the way, I’m making meatloaf tonight. That okay with you?”

“Absolutely.” Peter fought to sound enthusiastic. The meatloaf was almost indistinguishable from the beef bourguignon and the Salisbury steak; he doubted there was real meat in any of them.

“All right, then.” Loki cleared his throat, then shambled off.

Peter turned to find Noa staring after his retreating back with a frown. “What?”

“I don’t know, it’s just . . . something about him kind of gives me the creeps.”

Peter snorted. “That’s not surprising, since he’s pretty much the creepiest guy I’ve ever met. Nice of him to take us in, though.”

“I know,” she grumbled, “I just don’t like the way he looks at me.”

“Well, he’s probably never spent this much time in a small space with a gorgeous sea creature,” Peter teased, adding, “or any girl. I don’t get the sense he had much of a social life.”

“Maybe,” Noa said, sounding unconvinced.

“Can you imagine?” Peter said. “Hey, baby. Want to come check out my bomb shelter?”

“I bet there are girls who are into that sort of thing,” Noa said, the corners of her mouth tweaking up.

“Sure. Chicks love paranoid dudes. That’s why I’m always going on about the zombie apocalypse.”

Noa laughed out loud, and Peter felt another rush of satisfaction. “All right, Torson,” he said. “Enough clowning around. Back to work.”

She smiled at him, shaking her head as she turned back to her terminal. “Thanks, Peter.”

“For what?”

“For being here.”

She gave him a real smile, and his heart flipped. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’ll always be here.”

A shadow flitted across her face; he realized with a sinking feeling that Zeke had probably promised the same thing, then hadn’t been able to deliver on it. “Noa, I mean it. Anything you need—”

“Let’s get back to finding that file,” she said tersely.

Peter nodded, but continued to watch as she turned to the keyboard, her pale fingers shaking slightly. Then he sighed and went back to work.

“Okay,” Teo said. “This is it.”

They both stared at the box. “I’m glad,” Daisy said firmly. “Let’s get it over with.”

Teo repeated the actions that had become rote. They were unwrapping the bug in Flagstaff, Arizona. They’d cut a meandering path north for a while, then east, before heading south again. He had no idea if the signal had been received at any of the other locations; they’d unwrapped the bug every night, for a few minutes each time. Maybe that wasn’t long enough for them to be tracked. But he was done risking it. Tonight, they headed west for good. If everything went as planned, they’d be in Los Angeles tomorrow.

“Ready?” he asked.

Daisy nodded, holding up the hammer. “Ready.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Teo held the tracker carefully in his palm and started the countdown in his head. It was earlier in the day than they usually did this; the sun had just set. They were standing beneath a highway overpass, which was clearly being used by the homeless. It looked a lot like the camp in San Francisco where he’d first run into Noa, Daisy, and the rest of them.

That felt like a lifetime ago, even though it had only been four months.

Once three minutes had ticked off in his head, Teo dropped the bug onto a chunk of concrete. Daisy angled the hammer directly above it.

“Check it out, we got roaches.”

Teo spun, startled. Three boys stood ten feet away. They were all dirty and unkempt: street kids, wearing sullen expressions

“Sorry to crash your space,” he said quickly. “We were just leaving.”

“Yeah?” The tallest boy approached. He was wearing filthy jeans, an old pair of Converse sneakers, and a ratty green fleece even though it was still warm outside. A watch cap was pulled low over his forehead. Something in his eyes reminded Teo of Turk, which was definitely not a good thing. “We don’t like people messing with our shit.”

Teo shifted so that he was standing in front of Daisy; she had frozen with the hammer in her hand. “We didn’t touch anything. We were just—”

“Just what?” Watch Cap interrupted, stepping forward to get in Teo’s face.

“Let’s go, Teddy,” Daisy murmured, tugging at his arm. There was a frantic edge to her voice; they both knew situations like this could go south fast.

Watch Cap barked a laugh. “Yeah,
Teddy
. Maybe you should go.”

The other two were still hanging back. Moving slowly, Teo guided Daisy toward the bushes on the far side of the highway. The opposite of how they’d gone in, but hopefully there was an exit there.

The three boys watched in silence as they walked away. Teo kept his body at an angle, still monitoring them. He saw the kid pick up the bug, holding it high to examine it.

“The hell is this thing?” he called out.

“I don’t know. We found it,” he lied.

“They’re full of shit.” A boy with a shaved head peeled off from where he’d been leaning against a support beam. “I bet they planted it.”

“You’re with those guys,” Watch Cap spat. “The ones that took Angie.”

“Wait,” Teo protested, still backing away. They were nearly at the bushes. He had no idea what lay on the other side, but if they could just get there, they’d have a chance. “We’re not with anyone. It’s just us.”

“Get ’em,” Shaved Head ordered.

Teo pushed Daisy firmly on the back and yelled, “Go!”

They charged for the bushes. Branches tore at his face and bare arms as he fought through, realizing belatedly that it was some kind of cactus. Daisy yelped in pain, but he forced her forward.

A sudden yank on his backpack, and he went flying. Teo landed hard on his back, panting. All three boys stood over him. Watch Cap held the bug up and said menacingly, “Tell us where Angie is, you little shit.”

“I think this is it!” Peter said excitedly.

Noa sighed. “You said that a half hour ago.”

“Yeah, but this time I
really
think so,” Peter replied with slightly less enthusiasm.

Noa rubbed her eyes, then wheeled her chair across the floor to him. She squinted at his monitor; the archive folder was open, and the cursor blinked beside a file that read: filename.ext.gz.

All the server drives were part of a RAID system, a redundant array of independent disks. Basically, that meant most of the drives should be redundant; the “dupes” Loki had been talking about. From the look of things, there were a total of eight file systems on the forty-two drives. So for each file structure, there were five drives that should contain exact copies of the same information.

They were counting on the fact that a bunch of researchers would hate dealing with such a high level of security. There had to be software that took the key from somewhere and applied it to the files as they were opened, so that researchers didn’t have to go through the encryption/decryption process on their own every time.

Which meant that if one of them pulled a drive off the RAID to use it, they’d have to download a copy of the key file; otherwise, it would be like trying to open a locked door without a key. And if they stored that key file on the disk, rather than using the security framework, it would make the information on that drive slightly different from the others.

Unfortunately, every drive contained an insane number of files, and finding that deviation was problematic. So they were digging through the file systems, trying to unearth something that didn’t match up.

And there was a chance that Peter had just found it.

“Filename,” she said dubiously. “Seriously?”

“I know.” Peter cracked his knuckles. “But it’s definitely a deviation. What do you think?”

“Maybe.” Noa puzzled it through. It was almost too whimsical for Pike & Dolan; “filename” was the default label for a computer file. Assigning it to the decryption key was roughly the equivalent of naming your kid John or Jane when your last name was Doe.

Still . . .

“I found the same deviation on another drive, too. Look.” He clicked on the file to open it, and a box immediately appeared on-screen.

“You’re right.” She felt a rush of excitement. “So we found the key. Now we just have to crack the password.”

“Right. Easy. Of course, it could be ten characters, or a hundred.”

“And here we are without a supercomputer,” Noa said morosely. With access to one, this could take less than a minute.

“We could break into a facility somewhere,” Peter offered. “Isn’t there one in Boulder?”

“Janus? Sure. But that place is a fortress. Maybe if we had more people, but . . .”

“But we don’t,” Peter said with a sigh. “And we still look like a couple of refugees.”

“Exactly. I don’t think ‘naïve college kid’ will play well there.”

They sat in silence for a minute, mulling it over. It was ironic, Noa thought. Here they were, probably two of the best hackers on the planet; three, if they counted Loki, although so far he’d pretty much left them to their own devices. And still, even with the massive computing array in front of them, it could take months to crack this password.

They didn’t have that kind of time. She could tell by Peter’s downcast expression that he’d reached the same conclusion.

“Everything cool?”

They both turned. Loki was standing in the doorway holding a couple of mugs.

“Just peachy,” Peter grumbled. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a supercomputer in one of these tunnels?”

“Look at you, getting greedy.” Loki raised the mugs. “Thought you might be ready for a coffee break.”

“I’d love some,” Noa said, gratefully taking a mug from Loki.

He passed the other one to Peter, who mumbled a thanks. Tilting his head to the side, Loki scanned the screens with a paternal air, like he was watching his kids accomplish a feat on the playground. “Anything?”

“Peter might have found the decryption key file,” Noa offered.

“Yeah?” Loki bent to peer over Peter’s shoulder, looking intrigued. He barked out a laugh. “Well hot damn. Filename, huh?”

“It’s still password protected,” Peter said, his knees tapping out a cadence against the bottom of the table. “That’s why a supercomputer would come in handy.”

“Maybe,” Loki said. “But I’m willing to bet there’s a back door built in somewhere.”

Peter snorted. “No way. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of encrypting it?”

“You know how this stuff works,” Loki said disdainfully. “Joe Schmoe can’t remember the password, so he writes it on a Post-it note and sticks that to his monitor.”

There was a lot of truth to what he was saying. Back when Noa was freelancing for an IT security firm, what they called “the human element” was the culprit behind most unauthorized accesses to computer systems. All it took was an absent-minded software developer leaving his laptop in a café, or a stranger wandering into a server room, like Peter had done at Pike & Dolan.

“You mind if I take a gander?” Loki sounded like a kid begging for a toy.

“Be my guest.” Peter pushed out of the chair.

“Huh,” Loki said, pursing his lips below his beard. “Whoever set this up knew their stuff.”

“Told you,” Peter said with resignation.

“Whoa, wait a minute.” Loki ran a finger along the code, hovering an inch away from the commands. “Check out this one: .ffly.”

“So?” Noa asked.

Loki straightened and stared at her, an odd glimmer in his eye. “You never heard of Firefly?”

“The hacker?” Peter frowned. “Of course. Everyone’s heard of her.”

“I thought Firefly was in jail,” Noa said, surprised. Firefly was an Australian hacker who had masterminded a plot to bring down the prime minister. But in the process, she’d been caught. Noa was a little murky on the details, but she was pretty sure the woman had been sentenced to at least a decade in prison.

“Someone must’ve sprung her,” Loki mused, knitting his bushy brows together. “’Cause this is definitely her framework.”

“I don’t see how that helps us,” Peter muttered.