Phantom Wheel Read online

  Downstairs, someone turns the music up so high that I swear I can feel the walls shaking. I consider going down and telling people to chill a little bit, but I’m not that kind of guy. Besides, they deserve to blow off some steam with everything they’ve been through the last few weeks.

  So instead of complaining, I pull out my earbuds and plug them in.

  An hour and a half later, my computer dings, and I’m so deep down my latest rabbit hole on this bogus corporation that I almost miss that my facial recognition program just went off. When my brain registers what’s happening, I click over and nearly lose it, because Agent Shane Donovan is staring at me from my computer screen.

  Only his name isn’t Shane Donovan. According to the 2001 yearbook from Salvation High—in Salvation, North Dakota—Shane is actually Daniel Davies.

  Armed with this new information, I dig a little more—and that’s when I hit the jackpot. Because Salvation, North Dakota, is the hometown of Franklin Enterprises, where Daniel Davies got his first job in 2006—and where he is still employed to this day. Franklin Enterprises, it turns out, is a little-known subsidiary of global communications conglomerate Jacento.

  I think back on the code they wanted me to write when I showed up at 2367 Sepulveda, code that sent me running out the door because I didn’t want any part in creating code like that for the CIA—even if they already employ half a dozen people who could do it.

  But the CIA seems like child’s play now, because why the hell would a communications company want code like that? A communications company that has access to tens of millions of cell phones and tablets all over the world. Just the thought is enough to make my blood run cold.

  Especially considering the way Jacento pretended to be the freaking CIA… which I’m pretty sure is a crime all on its own. Besides, if what they were doing was on the up and up, why’d they have to lie about it?

  Suddenly I’m very, very interested in what skills the other five people in that room had—and what tasks they were asked to complete.

  The bad feeling intensifies, and now it’s so overwhelming that my hands shake a little as I pull up another file, one I’ve labeled SELLOUTS.

  I’d been pissed as hell at the crap they pulled with those ID stickers—names and handles—but when we were mixing and mingling before Issa showed up, I made sure to memorize everyone’s. Not that it was hard. There was a ton of talent in that room—everyone Jacento picked for that little “audition” already has a rep in the hacker world.

  I pull up the profiles I’ve started building on Ezra/EazyH, Seth/5c0ut60, Alika/W4rr10r W0m4n, Harper/5p3ct3r, and Issa/Pr1m4 D0nn4. I start looking at some of their old hacks that I’ve compiled, trying to figure out what each might have done during the “audition.” But it’s not like the hacks are a tell-all—like me, what they’ve claimed credit for is probably only a tenth of what they’re capable of.

  Which means I am completely screwed.

  Sure, given enough time, I could probably hack their personal accounts—no matter how good their defenses are. But common sense, and the sinking sensation in my stomach, tell me there is no time. Not now, when I’ve already wasted a month gathering intel.

  I study the profiles again, looking for anything I might have missed. But there’s nothing. Which means I’ve got no other option. I need to know exactly what these guys did.

  But which one of them do I trust? And who can I get to trust me? It’s not like I made a great impression when I stormed out before the “testing” even began.

  In the end, I go with my gut. A quick Google search turns up a school email address in her city of residence, so I fire off a quick email that I hope doesn’t make me sound like an idiot. And then I wait, hoping like hell that she’ll decide to answer.…

  Five excruciating hours later, Alika emails me back. It’s seven in the morning, and I haven’t slept all night, too afraid I’d miss a response from her. And too determined to dig up as much as I can on Jacento and any shadowy connections it might have.

  Turns out there’s a lot of them, if you know where to look. But that’s another part of the story—right now I just need to know what Alika knows and how her part of the audition fits with mine. I swipe on the email, wait impatiently for it to load. But when it finally comes up on the screen, my stomach sinks.

  Why is it any of your business what I did for my audition? You didn’t even stick around for yours. Please don’t contact me again.

  Damn. Just damn. It’s exactly the answer I was afraid of—and exactly the answer I deserve. This girl doesn’t know me at all—not that I know her either, but at least I’ve learned something about her over the last few weeks as I was digging into who she and the others are and what the CIA/Jacento might be using them for.

  But that’s exactly why I’m not ready to let this go yet. Not ready to move on to Seth, who’s the next one on my list. Because I have researched this girl and I’ve figured out enough about her to know that I want her on my side during this. And not just because her daddy is secretary of state.

  Without giving myself time to think, I hit Reply. And then I just type.

  Please, Alika, hear me out. Something’s really wrong with this whole situation, and I need help to piece it together. It’s why I left to begin with—because something didn’t feel right. I just found out the place they took us to didn’t belong to the CIA at all. It belongs to a real estate company that rents it out to movies when they need an office building. Basically, it’s a soundstage—the whole thing is fake. And the week we were there, it wasn’t rented by the CIA or anything affiliated with them.

  Please. Here’s my number. Call me and I’ll explain more.

  617-555-0166

  Owen

  I hit Send and I wait. And wait. And wait.

  After about fifteen minutes, I hear the first stirrings of life in the house. I head downstairs, where the noise is coming from, and hear Jerome in the shower, singing at the top of his lungs. Awesome.

  A quick tour tells me everyone else is still sleeping—in the living room, the family room, on the enclosed patio. Back inside I find Scooter passed out in the middle of my dad’s pool table, and for a second I think about waking him for no other reason than his face is planted on the ball rack and I’m pretty damn sure that can’t be comfortable. I’m also sure it’s going to leave a hell of a bruise.

  But I just leave him—if I wake him up, I’ve got to deal with him, and right now I’ve got enough going on without having to entertain a bunch of starving football players. They’re my friends, sure, but they’re still assholes at least half the time.

  I screw around for a few minutes, make myself a cup of coffee and a couple of Pop-Tarts. But by the time I scarf one down I’m pretty damn close to jumping out of my skin, so I pull out my phone and head back up to my parents’ room. A quick stop by my own room reveals Blake lying on my bed, with a girl on either side of him. I’m not even surprised.

  It’s no use checking my email—I’d know if Alika replied—so I pull up my messages instead. And fire off a quick one to my mother, just checking in.

  She answers within seconds.

  Everything’s good

  I feel my shoulders sag a little in relief. Usually—not always, but usually—it’s apparent pretty early on how the day’s going to go. The fact that it’s about eight now and things are calm, even though my dad never sleeps past five anymore, is a good sign. Not absolute or anything—because that’s way too much to hope for—but good.

  Which means I can give everyone a couple more hours to sleep before waking them up and herding them out.

  Then again, time’s ticking by so slowly at this point that I might lose my mind before those hours are up.

  Screw it. I pull up the files I’ve been keeping on this audition thing and start digging again—I want to tie Jacento directly into that whole debacle in L.A., and I want to do it with more than just fake Agent Shane Donovan.

  I’m deep down another rabbit hole, working my way
through layers of code so crunch I think my head might explode, when my phone rings, completely splitting the silence. I nearly jump out of my skin and fumble for it with hands that are suddenly clumsy as hell. My friends are pretty much all in the house right now, so it’s either my mom calling to tell me something’s gone really, really wrong at home, or…

  A quick look at the screen shows it’s an unknown number. I swipe to accept the call, with my heart pounding a little faster as I do.

  “Hello?”

  “Owen?” The voice on the other end of the line is huskier than I expect it to be. Alika looks so prim and proper, but she sounds anything but.

  “Alika?”

  “Yes.” She pauses. “I’m not even sure why I’m calling you.”

  “I’m glad you are. Have you heard from the CIA yet, about your audition?”

  “No, not yet.” She sounds hesitant. “But they said three or four weeks.…”

  “You won’t hear from them. The CIA had nothing to do with that trip to L.A.”

  There’s a long silence, then, “What are you even talking about? We were all there—”

  “Yeah, but it was just a front.” I grab my laptop, start attaching some of the research I’ve uncovered. “I’m about to send you some information. Look it over and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  I hit Send before I even finish the sentence.

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Why should you trust them? The whole reason I walked out is because I didn’t like what they wanted me to hack. It didn’t seem like a test. It seemed like a real hack, and I didn’t trust them.”

  “What did they want you to do?”

  My brain is screaming caution—I don’t really know if I can trust this girl. But I know I can’t trust Jacento, just like I know I’m not going to get anywhere if I don’t trust someone, so after a few seconds, I say, “They wanted me to write the code that would help a worm spread as quickly as possible in anything that runs macOS.”

  “I don’t believe you.” There’s no hesitation in her voice.

  I shove down my annoyance at the matter-of-fact statement, concentrate instead on getting her to listen to me. “Why would I lie? There’s no point.”

  “There’s no way you could write code like that in a day. Or a month. The whole idea is absurd, no matter how good you are.”

  “I actually have a lot of the code written already, so it wouldn’t be nearly as hard as you’re implying.”

  “You’ve already got the code?” Now she sounds more than skeptical. She sounds worried.

  “I hacked iTunes a while ago, after the big Sony hack, just to see if I could. I wasn’t looking to steal info, though—just wanted a good look at their encryption and what they were running.”

  “Which wasn’t enough, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I’ve got the info you sent,” she says, and there’s a long silence as she opens the docs, looks through them.

  I force myself to give her time.

  Finally Alika starts talking again, and this time she sounds way more concerned. “I don’t understand. What does Jacento want with us?”

  “The bigger question is, what does Jacento want that they’re willing to hack iTunes and who knows what else to get?”

  Another long silence. Alika’s definitely a look-before-she-leaps kind of girl—it’s why I picked her—but it’s frustrating as hell when I’m sitting on the other end of the line trying to figure out what she’s thinking.

  “They wanted a new blended threat, one that piggybacked off Stuxnet and could infect iOS,” she finally says.

  “And you could do that? Just pull Stuxnet code out of your ass and create a worm for a whole different operating system based on it?”

  “I did a major research paper on Stuxnet at the end of my junior year—I know the code inside and out. A lot of it doesn’t work in this situation because the zero-day exploits were designed for Siemens control systems, but the theory behind the code is solid, obviously. It was just a matter of adapting it to a different OS, especially since I didn’t have to find the back door in—”

  “Because that was somebody else’s job.” I can’t help thinking about the skill sets of the other four people in the room with us. Any one of them could have found that back door without breaking a sweat.

  Another few moments of silence and then, “Yes. Probably.”

  “How detailed was this research project of yours? And how could Jacento have known about it?”

  “Very detailed,” Alika says with a sigh. “It was actually a discussion of how the principal properties of Stuxnet could be adapted to other operating systems—I spent a considerable amount of time working up code to prove it, though that was part of the project and not included in the actual paper.”

  “Which is how you could do something like this in a day. Because you’d already done it, basically.”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “And your paper is published? I mean, how did Jacento figure out you’d done this?”

  “It’s not published, but it was my big junior year IB project, so it was sent out to be judged by a committee. Plus I used it in all my college applications, so…”

  “So it’s not exactly a secret.”

  “Nowhere near a secret,” she agrees.

  “They must have known what I did with iTunes too. Otherwise, why would they come to me for it? I mean, they didn’t say, ‘We want you to hack iTunes,’ but I recognized the system right away from what they were asking—it’s pretty unique.”

  “I bet. So, Owen, what does this…” Her voice trails off, like she can’t even figure out what to ask.

  “What does this mean? I’m not sure, but it’s not good, right? I mean, what does Jacento need with this kind of access? And if they had us on Apple, does that mean the others were working on exploiting Android?”

  She swallows audibly. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, we should probably figure it out, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.…”

  “You guess? These assholes used us to do God only knows. How do you think that’s going to work out for us once everything’s in place and they get what they want? I’ve seen Live Free or Die Hard. Trust me, in cases like this, it does not go well for the hackers.”

  “What is it with you guys and old movies?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind.” She pauses. “So, you think we should contact them?”

  “I think we have to contact them, yeah.”

  “Okay. How? I don’t even know their last names—”

  “I do. I memorized their name tags. I’ll dig for their numbers, set us up in a group chat.”

  “You think that’s smart? Won’t the CIA—”

  “You mean Jacento?”

  “Yeah, right. Jacento.” She sighs. “Won’t Jacento be watching for that?”

  “I’m on a Jacento phone right now,” I tell her even as unease crawls through me at the thought.

  “Yeah, me too. I’m betting all of us have Jacento phones.”

  “You want me to set up a ghost chat instead?”

  “Actually, yeah. That’s probably the best idea. Can you get their IPs?”

  “Are you deliberately trying to insult me?” I demand, and I’m only half-teasing.

  “Umm, no?”

  “Is that a question, or a statement?”

  “At this point, I don’t know what it is. I feel like my brain’s about to blow up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve felt that way for the last month, so—” A crash from downstairs has me springing to my feet. “Look, I’ve got to go. But I’ll put something together in the next couple of hours. Keep an eye out.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  There’s another long silence, and I start to hang up, but then Alika surprises me. She says, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” I can hear footsteps thundering up the stairs.

  “For being susp
icious while the rest of us were blinded by what we wanted the truth to be. So thanks for digging. And for reaching out to me.”

  “Yeah, umm, you’re welcome.” There’s another crash. “Okay, I really, really have to go.”

  I hang up and rush downstairs, just in time to see Blake race through the living room and out to the backyard, clutching a throw pillow under his arm like a football.

  “Seriously?” I look at the table he knocked over during the impromptu game of football. “Aren’t you all still tired from your big night of partying?”

  “Never too tired to play football,” Scooter tells me as he jumps up and catches the pillow that Blake just sent soaring.

  “Yeah, well, try to wrap it up in ten minutes, will you?” I roll my eyes as I head back upstairs for my gear. “I need to get home.”

  “Hey, where you going?” Jerome calls from his spot near the door. “Aren’t you going to play?”

  “What’s more important than football?” Scooter calls after me.

  I think about my dad, about hacking, about the mess I’m currently caught up in. “A lot of things.”

  It takes some wrangling, but I manage to get the guys up and out of the house pretty quickly after that. As soon as I get home and check on my mom, I head up to my room. Once I’m back at my laptop, it takes me about twenty minutes to get the info I need to set up the ghost chat. The only problem is, what do I say to get their attention? And to get them to respond?

  I think about it for a while, but I don’t want to overexplain right away, so in the end, I just type one sentence. Then I hit Send before I can change my mind.

  5

  Harper

  (5p3ct3r)

  YOU’VE BEEN PLAYED

  The words show up in a box at the bottom of my screen on an otherwise ordinary Sunday, sent from a phantom chat account that identifies only as OH. I stare at them for long seconds, trying to figure out who sent them—and what they’re in reference to.