Don't Turn Around (15 page)

Halfway down the page, a name jumped out at her.
Alex Herbruck
.

She remembered Alex. An Irish kid with brownish-red hair, green eyes, skin mottled by freckles and pimples in roughly equal proportions. A Southie who compensated for his small stature with an attitude of sheer ferocity. Their stints at The Center had overlapped a few times. They’d always gotten along okay. He tried to kiss her once, but when she shoved him away he didn’t take it personally, just halfheartedly called her a lesbo and moved on to Dulcie Patrick.

She’d liked Alex, at least as much as she’d liked anyone there. Noa opened the folder and discovered a similar jumble of files. She clicked a few buttons, grouping them by file type so that there would be some sort of organization as she combed through them.

Right away, a series of jpegs jumped out at her. That was odd. Her file had only had one, of her lying on the table looking dead.

She clicked, and a photo filled the screen.

It was definitely Alex. And he was definitely dead. His eyes were closed but his lips hung open and loose, paleness setting his freckles in stark relief. He looked even smaller than she remembered; it seemed like the table was swallowing him.

But that wasn’t the worst part. His chest had been peeled open, each side stretched out by some sort of metal clamp. The exposed interior was bright red like the rind of a fruit. On the right side the rib cage had been cut away, revealing a glimpse of charred lung. Alex had been a chain-smoker; she remembered him puffing away when they were ten or eleven years old. Once they’d caught him stealing packs out of the janitor’s locker and he’d almost been sent to juvie for a few days.

Noa clicked on the tab to close the picture. Her right hand was shaking so badly she had to clasp it with her left to steady it. Even though her screen had reverted to the default version of the night sky, she could still see the image of Alex there, like it had been engraved in permanent pixels.

She scrolled down the list of folders, zeroing in on names. None of the rest sounded familiar, but she kept scrolling down … down … down, for what seemed like pages and pages.

After fifty names, Noa stopped counting and sat back in the chair. Was it possible that there had been that many of them? And were they all dead?

There was only way to find out. She steeled herself, went back to the top of the page, and opened the first folder.

CHAPTER NINE

P
eter sat before a terminal in the Tufts computer lab. Fortunately security was lax here. He’d hovered by the door for less than five minutes before another student came by and waved their ID card in front of the access panel.

He held a hand to his mouth, stifling a yawn. He’d barely slept last night. Luckily it was midterms, so the Tufts library had been open when he stumbled out of Amanda’s dorm. He curled up in an oversized reading chair tucked in the corner and tried to sleep, but every half hour or so jolted awake. He had gritty eyes and a terrible taste in his mouth. He’d tried to clean up in the men’s bathroom by the periodicals room, but still. Storming out of Amanda’s room had probably been a mistake.

Not that he would have been able to sleep there, either, he reminded himself. Peter rolled his head from side to side, then cracked his knuckles in succession, right hand, then left, before settling back to work.

He’d learned his lesson about trying to access AMRF’s files; he definitely wasn’t in the mood for another visit from Mason. But that didn’t mean he was going to just lie down and take it, either. /ALLIANCE/ was still down, along with the backup wiki. So he was cruising the chat forums and imageboards frequented by his minions. There were numerous new threads posted on all of them, variations on the theme, “WTF happened to /ALLIANCE/?”

He logged into the most popular one under his handle, Vallas. It took ten minutes to compose a call to arms. Part of him wished he had more information to give them, or at least a better sense of what he was getting them into. The last thing he wanted was to put any of his fellow hackers in Mason’s crosshairs.

But it was unlikely that a single corporation would be able to retaliate against the sheer number of hackers he was amassing. Peter planned on posting the same message across more than a dozen boards, accessed by thousands of members of the hacker community.

Still no word from Rain when he checked his email, which worried him. She hadn’t struck him as a con artist—if anything, over the past few months she’d been one of the most reliable and steadfast members of /ALLIANCE/. What he’d told Amanda about the honor code was no exaggeration: Hackers helped one another whenever they could, and a strike against one was generally taken as an affront to all.

Consequently, Peter had gone from wondering if Rain had robbed him to concern that while digging around on his behalf, she might have fallen victim to Mason and his goon squad. After a moment’s thought, he shot off another email to her, just the question
u ok?
in the subject heading. Peter blew out a breath of air, thinking. He had no other way of tracking her down. He’d just have to hope that wherever Rain was, she was all right.

Feeling slightly better, Peter turned back to the post he was composing. He should have done this in the first place, he thought with a grimace, but he’d been worried about the fallout for his parents. Well, now he didn’t have anything left to lose.

Peter finished typing the post and hit send, then sat back to watch the reaction. What he’d written was simple and to the point:

Attention /ALLIANCE/ questers: We are under attack! Someone stole our domain name and took down our site and backup wiki. They’re striking at our core, trying to scatter us. But we will not be overcome! Time to strike back. Cover your tracks and stay groovy and I’ll see you on the other side … Vallas
.

Within a minute, the thread started going nuts with people railing about how this was a typical attempt by “the man” to exert control over the internet with Orwellian big-brother tactics, others raging about free speech, still more spewing vitriol about what the bastards deserved to have done to them. The handles ticked by quickly, comments posting so fast he had to start scrolling almost immediately.

Peter skimmed the tirades. Smiling, he posted the same message on every other wiki, forum, and imageboard he could think of. Not that he needed to bother—it had probably already gone viral, shooting across cyberspace, passed along like a virtual baton. And the people he really wanted to reach wouldn’t bother posting a diatribe. They would have understood the subtext of what he’d written, and were probably already gathering.

“Cover your tracks and stay groovy” was a code that any regular /ALLIANCE/ user would recognize. But Mason would probably take it at face value, assuming that a punk kid was laughably throwing around military jargon.

At least that’s what Peter was hoping.

He logged into The Quad and started a thread under the heading, “CYTASG.” Then he waited.

Within minutes, users began flooding the room. He waited until a few dozen were present and accounted for, then typed in,
Thanks 4 coming
.

This totally sux, man,
wrote Loki.

Peter recognized that handle—Loki had helped with most of the /ALLIANCE/ operations over the past year.
I know
.

So what do we do?
asked Moogie.

Peter had been thinking this over. He wanted to carpet bomb the bastards, but he also was dying to know what they were up to.
I want to go full Anon/HBGary on them
.

There was a brief pause.

Moggie typed,
Dude, seriously? Brick them?

Grab data first, but yeah
.

Silence.

Bricking, or “phlashing,” was serious. The goal was to damage a system so badly that it couldn’t be accessed until its hardware was replaced. And replacing hardware was insanely expensive and incredibly time-consuming. Getting information off the server first was trickier, but it had been done before.

If they succeeded, the servers involved would be rendered completely useless, effectively turned into bricks. And if there weren’t backups stored elsewhere, the company could lose everything.

So any hesitation to participate in such an attack was understandable. The whole point of /ALLIANCE/ was to act within the boundaries of the law—Peter had enforced that rule from the get-go. Bricking a server was, technically, a violation of the Internet Architecture Board’s proper-use policy. It was also illegal in most countries.

Not totally cool with that,
typed Ariel.

I get that,
Peter wrote.
Won’t hold it against anyone who doesn’t want in, you’re all still welcome to be part of /ALLIANCE/ when it’s up and running again. But trust me, these are some seriously bad guys
.

I’m in,
Loki said.

Me 2,
wrote Moogie.

One by one, users either signed on to the raid, or checked out of the chat room. Fewer left than Peter had been expecting; he had mixed feelings about that. Based on what little he’d told them, if he’d been on the other side of things, he probably would have been among the first to log off.

By and large, the longest-running members of his ad hoc community remained, those stalwarts who’d played critical roles in all of /ALLIANCE/’s previous missions.

Honestly, it was a little touching. Especially considering the magnitude of what he was asking.

Loki typed in,
How do u want it to go down?

Internet vigilantism was a wonderful thing, Peter reflected as he laid out his plan.

Noa sat in a corner of the café sipping coffee. Her hair was tucked into the black cap from the boat, and she wore a pair of oversized sunglasses that she’d bought for five bucks from a street vendor. Not the best disguise, but she was at a table in the back that was partially concealed by a sickly palm tree. It afforded a good view of the MailPlus entrance and stores on either side of it, but she wasn’t easily visible from the street.

She’d been here nearly an hour. Her coffee was long cold, but she still took tiny sips of it. She’d gulped down about a gallon of water already, too, repeatedly refilling her glass from the free jug on the counter until the server gave her a funny look. Noa was dying of thirst, but still not hungry. She’d tried to choke down a banana and a muffin, with little success. Which was starting to bother her. It was strange not ever feeling hungry. Stranger still was that even when she tried, she couldn’t force food down her throat.

Stress,
she told herself.
Just too much stress. Nothing to worry about
.

A MailPlus employee had appeared at 8:23 a.m. She was in her sixties, heavyset, hair a few shades too blond, eyeglasses dangling from a long beaded chain. She unlocked the doors, then trundled around and rebolted them behind her. No one Noa recognized, which might pose a problem.

Noa watched the woman walk around the store turning on lights and powering up copy machines. At precisely eight thirty a.m. she unlocked the front door, then went to stand behind the main counter.

A model employee, from the look of things. Also not a good sign.

Noa spent another half hour sitting there watching a steady procession of people enter MailPlus. None of them lingered, and no one looked blatantly out of place. Either they went to a machine and made a few copies, headed toward the back where the mailboxes were, or approached the counter. After a few minutes, they concluded their business and left.

Noa got up and returned to the counter. Ignoring glares from the girl working the register, she filled her water glass again and carried it back to the table.

This spot offered a good vantage point of a large swath of the street. The parked cars on either side of the block were empty, and the spaces turned over steadily; not a single vehicle had stayed more than twenty minutes. It was also seriously cold outside, so Noa had a hard time believing someone would be hanging around out there. Maybe she’d finally caught a break and the coast was clear. They might still be combing through the Harvard library for her.

Still she hesitated, last night’s pursuit fresh in her mind. Whoever was after her had invested a lot of time and resources into tracking her down; that was clear. And if they’d found her in the temporary Cambridge apartment, they probably knew all about her PO Box. They’d assume that eventually she’d need access to cash, and would be forced to come here to claim it.

And they were right. She really needed to get in there. What the past few days had made alarmingly clear was that there were some things the internet couldn’t provide. Noa was kicking herself for not stashing a cash reserve somewhere.

Right now, across the street in box number 460907, there should be an envelope containing a new bank card. Getting her hands on that envelope was key to getting her life back. With it, Noa could withdraw enough cash to buy a fake ID. There might even be a check waiting, from her last freelance job for Rocket Science. She could deposit it in a new account, under a new name. Find a short-term sublet on Craigslist that accepted cash, somewhere to hole up safely while she unraveled what had happened to her.

But no matter what, she had to get into that box.

The bells dangling from the café door jingled, catching Noa’s attention. So far there had only been three other visitors to the café, all stroller-pushing moms who ordered lattes to go.

A guy walked in wearing a wool suit and overcoat. Hair going gray at the temples, muscular build—decent looking for an older guy. Panning down to his shoes, Noa frowned. He was wearing combat boots. Even though the dark sky promised rain, the boots definitely didn’t go with the suit. And now that she looked more closely, he seemed uncomfortable in it, arms shifting like he was trying to make room in the sleeves.

The guy scanned the room, eyes glancing off Noa. Had they hesitated before continuing on to the girl behind the counter?