Don't Turn Around (9 page)

Usually when he sent a text, Amanda got back to him within the hour, and it had been two. Peter ran a hand through his hair. Couldn’t let it stress him out. He had other things to deal with.

Peter kept at it. This time he was accessing the AMRF files via a Virtual Private Network. VPNs were mainly used by companies to give employees secured access to corporate networks. But they also allowed individuals to surf the Web anonymously, because the services employed private proxy servers that encrypted data.

Peter usually preferred to cover his tracks on his own, but this was an easy way for him to log on, and the connection would only show that he’d used the VPN server, not AMRF’s. The drawback to VPNs was that they were painfully slow.

Peter checked email on his phone while he waited. Aside from the terse message she’d sent this morning, there was nothing new from Rain. /ALLIANCE/ was still abnormally quiet, too. He logged on to the site’s main page to see what was going on, and was met by a 404 error that read:
Page not found
.

Peter frowned. He clicked through again, refreshing the page, and got the same result.

Someone had taken his site down.

Not only that, there was a message attached that the domain was available. Which was impossible, since he’d purchased rights to the /ALLIANCE/ URL for the next decade.

He felt a flare of rage. There was a backup wiki in place for just those types of incidents. He went there to post a message about what was going on, and to mobilize members to retaliate … only to discover that the wiki was down, too.

Peter collapsed back in his chair. He was angrier now than he’d been in a long time, angrier even than last night. They’d broken into the home he lived in, sure, but destroying the online home he’d created was so much worse.

And stupid. Because there were dozens of forums and imageboards where he’d be able to get the message out to members. And once they found out what was going on, they’d ruthlessly go after the perpetrators. In the past, /ALLIANCE/ had accomplished some impressive acts of hacktivism. When Amanda found out about a trendy organic shampoo company that was secretly experimenting on stray dogs and cats, Peter organized a mission where late one night /ALLIANCE/ members hacked into the company’s database and destroyed the production line, turning an entire factory into a giant bubble bath.

He’d come up with an even better revenge scenario for these bastards. Of course, first he had to figure out who they were.

The loading symbol stopped rotating on the library computer. Peter tapped a few more keys, looking for a way through the firewall. It was immediately apparent that this was going to be trickier than he thought. Cracking a system was painstaking, kind of like playing chess. There were a thousand variations, and each attempt could produce a different outcome.

Peter quickly became engaged. You could tell a lot about a company by their firewall. This one had been designed by a pro. As he probed it, he experienced a wave of admiration. There were even a couple of safeguards he’d never encountered before, which was rare.

The hours flew past. The elderly users of the other terminals shuffled off after noisily gathering up bags and umbrellas and scarves, replaced by teens working on term papers. Peter barely noticed the shift.

When his phone beeped again, he jumped. It had made the sound for a text; probably Amanda finally getting back to him. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. The display read:
Blocked
.

Peter slid his finger across to unlock it. The text was just two words:
Get up
.

Spam, maybe? He’d been getting more of those lately; he’d have to work on blocking them when he had time to sift through his phone’s code. Which wasn’t today, that was for sure.

Peter was in the middle of trying another tactic to mount the firewall when his phone beeped again. This time, the text read:
Get up, or I’ll make you get up
.

Peter looked around the room. There were a few middle-aged people hunched over books, teens whispering and giggling in low voices, a residual elderly man. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. And nobody seemed like they’d be able to make him do anything.

Peter hesitated, then typed
F U
and hit send. He turned back to the keyboard, brow furrowed.

A few seconds later, a hand clamped down on his shoulder.

Noa stretched out on the couch with the laptop balanced on her belly. The Cambridge apartment had turned out to be even nicer than she’d expected, with brand-new furniture, a widescreen TV, and an insanely comfortable bed. Small, but cozy and not cluttered with a lot of junk. Better even than her own place, although for one hundred fifty dollars a night, it should be.

The doorman hadn’t even blinked when she showed up to collect the keys, just handed them over and pointed to the elevator.

Noa entered the apartment and stashed her leftover sandwich in the fridge, cranked the heat to eighty, and kicked off her boots. She pulled one of the extra blankets off the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. Then she plopped down on the couch and started going back through the files.

She had to fight to maintain focus; all the dense scientific jargon made her eyes glaze over. Most of them turned out to be basic charts and graphs, anyway: blood-pressure readings, heart rate, body temperature, something called “pulse/ox.” The dates at the tops of the charts ranged over three weeks.

She could read computer code for hours, intuitively grasping it, but a lot of this stuff was beyond her. From what she could tell, many of the files were handwritten doctors’ logs that had been scanned in. Aside from the date at the top, the writing on those was unintelligible. She’d spent ten minutes squinting at a single word without being able to decipher it.

The typed documents were almost as bad; she didn’t even have a clue what half the symbols meant, and internet searches for them turned up hundreds of different potential results.

After a few hours Noa gave up. Her eyes were swimming, and she felt a migraine coming on. At least she was finally warm again. She shut the laptop and shuffled back to the fridge, keeping the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She sniffed the sandwich again, but still wasn’t hungry. So instead, she poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the window.

The studio apartment was a few blocks from Harvard Square, on the fifth floor of an old brick building. The rest of the street was primarily single-family homes, a mix of architecture that ranged from colonial to Greek revival. Trowbridge was a one-way street that ran north, black pavement confined by redbrick sidewalks set slightly above it like riverbanks.

It already looked like winter outside. Everything had a sterile white cast, like it been bleached and hung out to dry. Noa felt a pang of sadness—it was as if she’d missed fall entirely, which was disorienting. Especially since during that time span, her birthday had passed. Not that it was something she’d ever really celebrated, at least not for a long time. On the first of every month, The Center used to serve a mealy, store-bought cake after dinner for everyone who’d recently had a birthday. That was all she’d usually gotten. One foster family had made an effort, throwing a party for her in their basement. But she’d only lived with them for a few weeks, and she didn’t have any friends to invite, anyway. In the end, that turned out to be even more depressing than the ones at The Center. The foster mom had grinned broadly over the candles and asked if she felt any different. Noa replied, “Yeah, fourteen sucks even worse.”

And now she was sixteen.

Funny. This year, she did feel different.

Down below, a guy strolled past with a dog on a leash. No other people in sight. After leaving the café, Noa had taken a seriously indirect route to get here. She switched from the T to a series of buses, doubling back on herself to make sure she wasn’t followed.

But maybe she was just being paranoid. Tomorrow would be the true test, when she tried to get into her PO Box. She planned on arriving early, well before they opened. There was a café a half block from the MailPlus where she had rented a box. Noa was pretty sure that from there she’d have a view of the front door, and would be able to tell if anyone was hanging around who shouldn’t be.

Noa finished the water and stepped away from the window. Dusk was falling outside, and she was finally feeling tired. She drew the shades shut and went to bed.

Peter twisted around. The guy in the suit from the night before, Mason, was standing there. Again, he appeared more mildly annoyed than angry. His eyes were the oddest shade of gray, almost as pale as the whites surrounding them.

“Come on,” he said, keeping his fingers tight on Peter’s shoulder.

“I’m not done here.” Peter tried to keep his voice casual as he gestured toward the computer. “Term paper.”

Mason’s eyes flicked toward the screen. When he saw what was there, they narrowed. “You’re not a good listener, are you?”

“And you’re kind of a jerk. Now get your hands off me.” Peter shook loose of his grip.

Mason let go, but bent double so that his mouth was level with Peter’s ear. “I left some friends at home with Bob and Priscilla. They’re waiting for us.”

Peter froze, his hands braced over the keyboard. There was a clear note of menace in Mason’s voice. How the hell had they found him here? His pulse kicked up. He wasn’t exactly close to Bob and Priscilla, but they were his parents. He didn’t want anything to happen to them, especially not because of something he did.

But would it be better to try to get help from here? Once they were all stuck in the house, they’d be isolated. Peter glanced around the room—he’d been so absorbed, he hadn’t noticed it had emptied. Just a few kids at the end of the row, completely fixated on their computer screens. An old man dozed in an easy chair by the stacks, a forgotten newspaper rising and falling on his chest. Peter dimly remembered passing a security guard on the way in, but was pretty sure he hadn’t been armed or anything.

“There’s only one right move here,” Mason said softly, as if reading his mind. “You make a scene, and it’ll be too late for them.”

Peter remembered the fear in his parents’ eyes last night, his mother saying,
Mr. Mason doesn’t do anything without a reason
. What the hell had they gotten mixed up in?

“I need to get my stuff,” he said.

Mason nodded and stepped back, hands hanging loose but tense by his sides. Like if Peter made a sudden move, he was braced to anticipate and block it. He watched Peter shove stuff into a backpack.

“And that.” Mason nodded toward the monitor.

Peter hit a few keys, backing out of the firewall and closing down all the other open windows. He logged off, sending the terminal to the home screen, then slung the pack over his shoulder and stood. Funny, even though he had seemed enormous last night, Mason was only an inch or so taller than him, five-eleven or maybe six feet. Maybe he was just less imposing in the daytime. Still, it gave Peter a measure of confidence.

“I have to get my car.”

“We’ve already brought it to your house,” Mason said.

“What? How’d you know where it was?” Peter had left his car parked back by the diner.

Mason just continued to give him that smug smile. He held out a hand and said, “Cell phone, please.” When Peter hesitated, he raised an eyebrow. “If you give it to me now, I won’t have to break it.”

Peter dug his iPhone out of his pocket and handed it over.

Mason kept a hand on Peter’s elbow, steering him out of the room and down the stairs to the exit. Peter’s mind raced, backtracking through his day, trying to remember anything out of the ordinary. Had they been following him this whole time? Or maybe planted a bug on him somehow? He could kick himself—he’d been so careful to cover his virtual tracks, yet something as obvious as a tail hadn’t even occurred to him.

Mason picked up the pace as they descended the stone staircase that led to the street. An SUV was parked in the loading zone out front, engine idling. The rear door opened. Mason shoved Peter in, slammed the door shut, then got into the front passenger seat. The doors locked.

One of the big guys was in the backseat with him, taking up most of it. Peter couldn’t say for sure if he’d been at the house last night, or if they all just looked alike. He was wearing the same outfit as the others, a black long-sleeved shirt and pants with a sidearm tucked in a hip holster. He glared down at Peter as if daring him to try something.

“A black Ford Explorer?” Peter managed. “Don’t you think that’s a little cliché?”

In the front seat, Mason barked a short, sharp laugh. It wasn’t a comforting sound. Without turning around, Mason said, “The real shame here, Peter, is that you’re a very likable young man.”

Peter fell silent. He decided that he’d rather not know why that was a shame, at least not yet.

The guy next to him finally shifted his gaze out the window, apparently deciding that Peter wasn’t going to make trouble. Peter watched the familiar scenery pass by as they snaked through downtown, headed toward the on-ramp that led back to his house.

Bob and Priscilla were sitting in the living room when they arrived forty minutes later. Two armed guys were posted in opposite corners by the doors to the room. When Mason led Peter in, his mother started to get off the couch. Bob grabbed her elbow, stopping her. Priscilla hesitated, then sat back down. There was something in her eyes that Peter couldn’t quite identify—apology? Sadness?

She gave him a weak smile and said, “Peter, honey, are you okay?”

“Okay? Fuck no.”

“Language,” she said automatically.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Bob’s voice was full of bluster, although there was a tremor behind it. “You really let us down.”

Neither of them had directly acknowledged the strangers in the room. They were acting as if this were just an ordinary family meeting. After propelling Peter inside, Mason stepped back against the wall. He stood there silently watching, like they were putting on a play for his amusement.