Cyber Dawn (A Ben Raine Novel) (14 page)

We arrived at Dragonfly Coffee just after seven in the evening. The shop was small and decorated in typical coffee shop fashion, with large, over-stuffed chairs, local art on the walls, and a small stage for music or poetry in the corner. The lights were dim and an alternative rock station played softly on the stereo. I immediately liked the place. It was quieter and cozier than the Starbucks near our school.

There were two customers, sitting together at a small table by the window. A bored looking barista, who Sarah introduced as Ted, sat behind the counter wearing headphones and reading a book. While Sarah chatted with him and ordered our drinks, I called my sister Amanda.

“Ben?”

“Hey, sis,” I said. Her voice was hard to hear. It sounded like she was in a bar or club.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m out with friends. One sec.”

I heard footsteps as the background noise slowly faded. A moment later, she said, “That better?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” I replied.

“Ben, I heard about Megan.”

I sighed. Several minutes after I hung up with my mom, she had called both of my sisters to enlist their help in checking up on me.

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t call you back,” was all I could think to say.

“I can’t believe it, Ben. Are you . . . okay?”

“Yeah, I’m all right,” I said. “Look, I don’t really want to talk about it.”

After a pause, Amanda replied, “Sorry. So what’s up?”

I explained what I needed. Amanda told me she kept all her photos in an old online photo account. She gave me the username and password.

“You sure you’re okay, Ben?” she asked again as I was about to hang up.

“Yeah, sis, I’m okay.”

“I can come home this weekend if you need me to.”

Amanda went to school at Boston University. Coming home wasn’t as simple as she made it sound. But I appreciated the offer.

“You don’t need to. I’m fine. Really.”

“Okay, Benjamin. Call me if you need anything else. Okay?”

I said that I would and then hit END on my phone, just as Sarah walked up with two cups of coffee.

“That was fast,” she said, handing me a cup.

“Yeah, she was out with friends,” I replied. “In a hurry I guess.”

As Sarah took a sip from her mug, I used her laptop to log into my sister’s photo account. She whistled softly as the screen filled with thumbnail images.

“You weren’t kidding when you said she took a lot of photos,” she said.

I smiled. “Amanda was crazy about a camera my parents got her for Christmas just before I was diagnosed. It drove me and just about everyone at the hospital crazy. But Amanda isn’t the type to take no for an answer.”

I navigated to a folder labeled CPH and scrolled through several rows of photos. I clicked on a group shot of the hospital staff and it filled the screen. “This one was taken before my surgery.” I pointed at an older man with thinning gray hair. “That’s Dr. Kaiser in the back,” I said. “I still can’t believe he’s dead. I knew the guy pretty well. Although I didn’t particularly like him.”

“He took your leg,” Sarah said, gently patting my knee. “Can’t say I blame you.”

I centered the screen on Carter. Just like I remembered, he stood in the back, trying to go unnoticed. He was tall, wore glasses, and had dark hair and a full beard. He held a clipboard and had on a white CPH medical smock. I zoomed in. Written in script above the chest pocket were the words:
DR. ALLEN CARTER
.

“Look,” Sarah said, pointing at the photo. “A contractor badge.”

She took control of the laptop and zoomed in on the badge, which was clipped to Carter’s chest pocket. The badge was white and had his photo and name on it. Across the bottom, the word
CONTRACTOR
appeared in bright red text.

“That’s why we didn’t find much about him in the system,” Sarah said. “He wasn’t a CPH employee.”

“I had no idea,” I said. “I didn’t talk to him much. He was always there, so I just assumed he was one of the doctors.”

“Let’s keep looking,” Sarah said. “Bound to be more photos of him.”

As she flipped to the next photo in the group, something caught my eye.

“Wait, go back,” I said.

“What?”

“Zoom in again. This time on his waist.”

Sarah frowned, but did as I asked. It took me a moment to rationalize what I saw. A second later, my heart froze. Clipped to Carter’s belt, half exposed by the unbuttoned smock, was another plastic badge. Just like the one on his chest, it bore his photo and name. But instead of the word
CONTRACTOR,
there was a large blue logo.

“He . . . worked for CyberLife?” Sarah asked.

My mouth moved, but no words came out.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s good I guess. We have a lead. But why do you look like you just saw a ghost?”

I licked my lips. “This photo was taken just before my surgery.”

Sarah arched an eyebrow. “So?”

“Months before I met CyberLife.”

Sarah looked back and forth between the photo and me. “You sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I had my surgery, got fitted for a regular prosthetic, and went through three months of chemo. That’s when Dr. Merrick first reached out to my parents.”

I stared at the zoomed-in image of Carter. My memory flashed through my diagnoses, surgery, and chemo treatments several times.

No mistake.

Unless my parents had met CyberLife before and not told me about it, the timing was all wrong.

“Well, it might be nothing,” Sarah said. “Maybe CyberLife was working with the hospital to find a candidate for the pilot program. Maybe they didn’t decide on you until later.”

I took a sip of coffee. “I don’t know, Sarah. Maybe.”

She gently squeezed my knee. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “Either way, this is a piece of the puzzle. Now we just have to figure out where it fits. Let’s see what else we can learn about Carter. Sound good?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I said.

I stood up and grabbed the two mugs of coffee off the table. As Sarah’s focus turned back to her laptop, I walked to the counter and refilled both of them. A minute later, I sat back down and pressed my back into the soft, overstuffed couch. Sarah had pulled her hair into a ponytail, revealing something on the back of her neck. I sat back up and took a closer look. It was a small tattoo that spelled: Ak1rA

I narrowed my eyes and tried to pronounce the word. “A-keer-a?”

Sarah snapped her head around. “What did you say?”

“Um, not sure,” I said. “Just trying to figure out what your tattoo says.”

She clamped her hand over it. An embarrassed smile formed on her lips. “Oh, that. Um . . . it’s my screen name.”

“Your what?” I asked.

“My screen name. You know, for websites, online games, and stuff. It’s also my hacker handle.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Hacker handle?”

“I know, it sounds geeky,” she said. “But hackers don’t use their real name online for obvious reasons. They use a handle.
Ak1rA
is mine.”

I stifled a smile. She scowled and punched me in the leg.

“Ouch!” she exclaimed, shaking her hand. “Wrong one.”

We both laughed, and I said, “Yeah, you have to be careful when you do that.”

She flexed her hand several times and then turned back to her laptop.

“So what does it mean?” I asked.

“It was the name of . . .”

When she didn’t finish, I asked, “What?”

She bit her lip. “. . . the name of a video game character I used to play all the time—Akira.”

I grinned.

She scowled.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m a geek, what can I say.”

“Nah, it’s cool,” I said.

“No, Ben. It’s definitely not
cool
.”

“Well, I like it,” I said.

She shook her head. “Thanks. Now stop staring at me. Go get me some more coffee or something.”

“Already did,” I said, pointing at her cup on the table.

She looked down at the full mug. “Sorry. Kinda focused.”

There was no point hovering around her while she worked, so I stood and walked across the small shop to a stack of old books and magazines piled on a table. As I flipped through them, something poked at the back of my mind. The letters
A-k-1-r-A
didn’t seem familiar. But the way Sarah pronounced it, did.

Akira
, with an
i
.

I walked back to the couch, put my hand on her shoulder, and looked again at her neck.

A-K-1-R-A.

“Ben, seriously? It’s just a tattoo.” She groaned.

For the second time in five minutes, my heart froze. I had seen that word before.

Monday night on Megan’s phone.

Akira

The other text message.

Sarah has known Megan all along.

21

“Ben, what the hell?”

“Come on, we need to talk,” I said through clenched teeth. “Now.”

I pulled her toward the front door.

“Okay, jeez,” she said. “That hurts. Let go.”

I let go of her arm, opened the door, and nudged her through. We walked around the corner and into the alley. It was freezing outside and neither of us wore a jacket. I was too angry to care.

Once I was sure we were alone, I turned to face Sarah. I moved in close and she backed up and into the old brick wall. My anger flared. I stared at her, breathing heavily. The cold air froze as it left my mouth and nose.

Sarah swallowed hard. “You’re . . . scaring me, Ben.”

I clenched my jaw, and said, “You lied to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your tattoo, Sarah.”

“What about it?”

“I’ve seen it before. On Megan’s phone. Just before she died.”

She jerked back, her eyes wide. “Ben, I can . . . explain.”

My heart sank. I had wanted her to deny it. Give me a good excuse. Tell me I had lost my mind.

“I–I did know her,” she said, lips quivering.

“How?” I snapped.

“She . . . she hired me. The same way you did. But she kept her identity hidden. I didn’t even know her real name until you told me. She used an online screen name.
Paragon
. I didn’t know that you knew her—or that she had been killed—until you told me.”

My face was inches from Sarah’s. Her eyes darted from me to the ground. She couldn’t hold my gaze.

“Please, Ben,” she said quietly. “You have to believe me.”

I hesitated, then asked, “When did you meet her?”

“Two weeks ago. At the Starbucks by school.”

Sarah’s eyes welled up.

I thought back to our conversation about Megan and the photo I shared with her. Two weeks ago was about right. That’s when I had unexpectedly run into Megan at Starbucks.

Did I tell Sarah when the photo was taken?

I didn’t think so. If she was telling the truth, it explained what Megan had been doing there in the middle of a workday. “Then what,” I said.

Sarah was crying now. “She told me that she developed some software and that her company was trying to steal it from her. They claimed it was theirs and she was angry and thought they were just trying to rip her off. She wanted my help hacking into their server so she could remove the source code to the program.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When were you supposed to do this?”

Sarah used the back of her hand to wipe the tears from her face. “It was supposed to be next week. But Megan called me early on Monday morning and told me it had to happen right away.”

My last minute appointment . . .

Megan acting strange . . .

The hidden underground laboratory . . .

The fire alarm with no fire trucks . . .

I swallowed hard as the pieces snapped together.

Sarah continued. “I logged in to the network using her VPN credentials. Then I moved the files from a server to some storage device she had on her. That was it. I didn’t hear from her again.”

“Did you know she worked for CyberLife?”

“Yeah, but not until Monday when I logged into the VPN. When you mentioned your leg came from CyberLife, I didn’t think much of it. I mean, half the kids in our school are their customers.”

I nodded.

“Then you showed me the picture of her. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right.”

I flashed back to Wednesday night. Right after I showed her the picture was when she became upset and ran to the bathroom. “Why didn’t you say something?” I pressed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to. I had made my mind up in the bathroom. You’d been so honest with me. I wanted to do the same. But when I came out Sofia was there.” She paused and sniffed a few times. “I–I lost my nerve.”

I exhaled and slowly nodded. Sarah didn’t seem to be lying to me. If she was, she was one hell of an actress. What she said fit with what I had seen from the other side of things. But there was one part that still didn’t make sense.

Why was Megan stealing from CyberLife?

Sarah shivered. She wore only a t-shirt. I pulled my sweatshirt off and placed it over her head. She didn’t resist as I pulled it down over her body. When I finished, she wrapped her arms around me and pushed her head into my chest.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

I stood motionless, hands still clenching the bottom of my sweatshirt. As quickly as the anger came, it faded away. I reached up and placed my arms around Sarah’s back and squeezed.

With her head still on my chest, she whispered, “I should have told you sooner. I’m so sorry about your friend.”

We stood in the cold alley and held each other for several minutes. I was half-frozen, but didn’t care. I wasn’t going to be the one to end it. “So you’re sure Megan was stealing something from CyberLife?” I said. “A software program?”

Sarah shook her head against my chest.

“But you said . . .”

“I know. That’s what she told me. But the files I helped her transfer were too big to be a software program. It was like a terabyte of data. And the data just didn’t look right. Not like any program I’ve seen anyway.”