The Ghost Network (book 1)

  Published by arrangement with Ferly.

  The Ghost Network: Activate copyright © 2019 by I. I. Davidson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

  Andrews McMeel Publishing

  a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

  1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

  www.andrewsmcmeel.com

  ISBN: 978-1-5248-5305-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955953

  Editor: Jean Lucas

  Designer: Tanja Kivistö

  Art Director: Spencer Williams

  Production Manager: Chuck Harper

  Production Editor: Amy Strassner

  Digital Production: Kristen Minter

  ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES

  Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: specialsales@amuniversal.com.

  Akane Maezono inched her toes out over the vertical drop. She couldn’t even see the ground.

  And that’s just how she liked it.

  Above her, the night sky was piercingly black, with just a scattering of stars. And even though she knew a two-thousand-foot skyscraper didn’t bring her closer to them, it certainly felt that way. Up here on the roof, the night seemed darker, the air so much clearer. The wind that engulfed her was cold enough to sharpen her brain with icy clarity. Sprawled out below her were the bright lights of Tokyo. She gazed at the office windows and pitied the salaried workers who stayed late and dutifully at their desks. The sea of red brake lights made it seem like half the population was paralyzed in traffic. I don’t have those problems. Akane grinned in sheer delight and clutched the straps of her BASE chute.

  The drop site was a fairly broad alley behind the building, but it was barely lit. It had to be that way, but she’d scoped it out before in careful detail. She knew exactly where she had to land, and she’d be out of there before police and building security knew what had hit them.

  Her heart was racing, and her veins were surging with adrenaline. Two thousand feet to the ground. This is going to be awesome.

  Taking a deep breath of the crisp air, she prepared herself to leap—

  The piercing alarm on her phone earpiece startled her.

  She stumbled backward, and her feet slipped back onto the roof. Blood surged through her veins even more at the shock of the interruption. She quickly pressed the button by her ear.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Akane, get out of there.”

  She was silent for a moment, breathing hard. “What the—who is this?”

  “It’s John. I don’t have time to explain. You’re busted!”

  “John?” John whom she’d never actually met? John her fellow hacker who lived in Vancouver? “John Laine?”

  “Get out of there!”

  “No!” she snapped. Half angry, half curious, she asked, “What are you talking about, John Laine?”

  With a long, impatient sigh, he said, “Building security’s onto you. They’ve called the cops!”

  Shoot. She glanced around anxiously, half expecting the entire metropolitan police department to come dashing across the roof. “How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter! Look, just run and I’ll explain later.”

  “How did you even know where I was? I’m totally psyched up for this jump—”

  “And you’ll blow it.”

  “Yes, I would now, because you’ve freaked me out!” Cursing, Akane ran for the stairwell.

  “And they’re bringing cars up the alley, which will ruin your drop site.”

  Point taken. She gripped the door handle but paused, scowling. “I’m out of here. As soon as you explain yourself.”

  She heard him exhale with frustration. “Great plans, Akane. Lots of detail. Awesome preparation. I hacked them.”

  “You couldn’t have! They were on my own secure server! You needed a special download to break the code.”

  “Well, I guess I downloaded it.”

  “You. Couldn’t. Have.” He really couldn’t have. She was a way better hacker than he was. What was more, she knew every detail of his system, and his hardware didn’t have the capacity—

  “I was worried, so I tracked you. Akane, if you want the truth, I don’t know how I cracked that code. The download started automatically. Sheer luck, I guess. The rest was easy—I hacked the building’s security system, and I hacked the police radio. Is this enough information to convince you to get out of there?”

  It certainly was. It was just as well she’d hacked the building’s security and layout herself, or she wouldn’t have known about the alternate exit routes. As she let the stairwell door slam behind her—cutting off the coolness of the breeze and the stars—she was already running, tears of disappointment stinging her eyes.

  She wiped them away, annoyed. Dang it, John Laine—

  He’d done the right thing. Her feet pounded down the stairs. He’d acted as her virtual ground crew without her even knowing it, and he’d done the right thing.

  But as she ducked into the fire escape and bolted down the stairs, two at a time, she could hardly decide whether she was grateful or angry. Even the hot buzz of frustrated adrenaline was overpowered by her utter disbelief.

  John Laine could not have hacked my plans. I know what he can do on a computer, and he’s not capable. He had no way of accessing that code. It did NOT start downloading automatically.

  And friend, fellow hacker, or not, she was going to get to the bottom of this. Because there was only one thing she knew right now, and she knew it with absolute certainty.

  HE COULD NOT HAVE DOWNLOADED THAT KEY.

  “Stop it, John. I can’t breathe.” Jake Hook was overcome with laughter, his usually pale face bright red because of his struggle to stay quiet. “Nah, I don’t mean it. Do it again!”

  John Laine grinned at his co-conspirator, waving his hand to shush him. Any minute now, the boy was actually going to explode. “Mrs. Long is gonna kill us, Jake.”

  “Only if she c-catches us.” A huge snort of laughter escaped. “And quit calling me Jake. You know by now my name is Slack. Quick, she’s coming again!”

  The two of them were huddled behind a parked pickup truck and peering over its hood at the doors of Bentley Mall. Slack had his phone propped against the truck’s side mirror, with the camera running.

  He should have been getting good footage; John could see their school principal quite clearly.

  The poor woman decided to have another go at leaving the mall. With her jaw clenched, she marched toward the doors, swinging her shopping bags like she planned to barge straight through the glass if they dared close on her again.

  John waited, counting in his head, then tapped his own phone screen as the doors slid shut. This time, Mrs. Long was so close she nearly bumped her nose on the glass. She staggered back and actually yelled at the doors.

  Slack fell over backward laughing and smacked his head on the Chevy’s fender, but this didn’t sober him up at all. Rubbing his head, he quickly scrambled forward again, with tears running down his cheeks. “She backed up. Open them!”

  “We should stop,” John said, starting to feel guilty. “What if she’s got an important appointment or something?”

  “If the dragon’s got an appointment, it’s with some poor kid for dete
ntion.” Slack peered eagerly over the truck’s hood and raised his phone. “No mercy, John!”

  Slack had a point. Anyway, this was the best hack yet, so they should make the most of it. John’s finger hovered over his screen as Mrs. Long glared at the sliding doors. She took another two steps back.

  He opened them.

  She didn’t scream or yell this time. In fact she almost caught him off guard by sprinting forward to break free. In just the nick of time, he jabbed the screen with his finger, and the doors closed. Mrs. Long twisted just enough, but her shoulder collided with the glass and she bounced back, dropping both bags.

  “Are you even getting this?” John peered doubtfully at Slack, who had collapsed against his arm, his messy blond hair obscuring John’s screen.

  “Enough,” gasped Slack, getting control of himself to check the camera. “Anyway, I can edit it. This is going to get epic views.”

  John peered over the truck again, and his eyes widened. “Hey, she’s got the security guard. Time to go!”

  Half dragging the giggling Slack, he crawled around the truck and between another two cars. Lifting his head, he peered back at the mall entrance. Mrs. Long was pointing at the doors and explaining something in very animated terms to the perplexed guard.

  “Wait!” he whispered. Frantically, he tapped his phone screen again, canceling the hack. As the security guard walked hesitantly forward, the doors slid obediently open.

  The guard turned to Mrs. Long and spread out his arms in a disbelieving shrug.

  “Cracking me uuuppp,” hiccuped Slack, wiping his eyes as he lowered his phone. “I got that too. Let’s get out of here!”

  The two boys ran hunched over between the cars and bolted across College Road. The angry blare of a car horn followed them as they dived into the trees on the other side. They kept running, following the sluggish brown water of the stream till they were safely under the iron railway bridge. John staggered to a halt, panting.

  Slack was way behind, but when he caught up, John knew what had slowed him down: he was still laughing. “That was the best one yet!”

  “Better than filming Mr. Brewster picking his nose in the elevator?” John grinned.

  “Way better.” Slack wrinkled his nose in deep thought. “Maybe just about equal to Madison Harper squeezing that zit before she took a selfie.”

  “I still feel kinda bad about that one.”

  “Don’t,” Slack ordered him. “She’s the vainest, meanest Mean Girl in junior high. She’d do it to someone else in a heartbeat.”

  “If she was smart enough to hack a phone,” agreed John, and they both collapsed in giggles again.

  The summer heat of Fairbanks had truly passed, and the September breeze that whistled under the bridge had an air of coolness. John was still hot and sweating from their run. Stripping off his jacket, he flopped back into the scraggly grass and closed his eyes. His online life had always been interesting—much more interesting than daily life in Fairbanks, Alaska, or in Vancouver before that—but with Slack around, it was a lot more fun.

  OK, he’d always thought of himself as a good guy, a white-hat hacker, and most of the time John was still that. Helping out the victims of online hoaxes went a long way toward making up for an occasional prank video, like the one they’d just taken of Mrs. Long. Besides, he’d brought Slack over from the dark side, hadn’t he? Before the two of them had met, Slack’s hacking adventures had served mostly to fill his room with more expensive electronic equipment than any thirteen-year-old should own—all purchased with fake gift cards and stolen credit card details.

  But after that, when Slack had hacked John’s phone to track him and then John had hacked him right back in revenge, they’d discovered that they had a lot more in common than they thought. John had suddenly gained a new friend in real life—his first since he and his mother and sister had moved north from Vancouver. And Slack had been wildly excited at the idea of joining John and his online friends in their hoax-hunting group, the White Eyes.

  John still felt a little twinge of guilt for making Mrs. Long look so ridiculous by hacking the mall door controls. But hey, he reasoned, the pranks that Slack thought up were pretty harmless. It was kind of like being a trickster—like Loki, and wasn’t Loki his favorite character in the Norse myths he loved? Loki was OK—well, when he wasn’t killing people and wreaking havoc. And anyway, it had been a long time since John had laughed this much.

  Not since his father’s disappearance, in fact.

  “Hey.” Slack’s voice interrupted his thoughts at exactly the right moment, just before they got too dark. “How’s your sister?”

  John ripped up a handful of grass and threw it at him. “She’s as big a pain as ever. Don’t get your hopes up. Leona thinks computer geeks are lame.”

  “Also, she’s too old for me,” sighed Slack, rolling onto his side and propping his head dreamily on one hand. “Don’t say it.”

  “I wasn’t going to, but she is! She’s sixteen, and she’s really, really boring. When she isn’t being annoying.”

  “One day she’ll appreciate me,” sniffed Slack, tossing his hair. “She’s a sophisticated city girl, and she’ll take a while to recognize the fine, down-to-earth qualities of a northern boy is all. And she’s not boring, by the way. She drives your grandpa’s snowmobile like a demon.”

  John rolled his eyes. “Well, at least she got the two of us together, so she’s useful for something.”

  “Yeah,” said Slack. “If Leona hadn’t told me you were your momma’s precious baby since your dumb accident . . . ”

  “ . . . your own sister wouldn’t have told Leona exactly the same about you,” John finished for him, and they both started to laugh again.

  When Slack had decided to hack John’s phone, it had been as a kind of twisted revenge for that breach of secrecy by Slack’s sister, Nina. Slack couldn’t have foreseen that it was never going to work: John was always on the alert for hostile phone hacks, since his father had constantly drummed the dangers into his head.

  But John was glad now that Slack had made the attempt. It was pretty strange that they’d both had serious accidents before they even started school, but it was just one more thing he and Slack had in common. He hadn’t thought he needed a friend in Fairbanks—after all, he could talk to his best friend, Akane, in Tokyo with the swipe of a touchpad. So he’d kept to himself when his family first moved to Fairbanks, and he’d probably gotten a reputation for being moody and unfriendly. But meeting Slack had changed everything in a few short weeks.

  Still, thinking about Akane had reminded him, so he scrambled to his feet and brushed the grass off his torn jeans. “I need to get back,” he told Slack. “I told Akane I’d talk to her this morning.”

  Slack glanced at his phone. “You’re way late.”

  “I mean this morning for her. It’s 9 a.m. in Tokyo.”

  “Huh. Fun’s over, I guess.”

  “Except that you want to join the White Eyes, right?” Suddenly nervous, John raked back his long black hair with his fingers. “Why don’t you come back with me and we can talk to Akane together?”

  Slack leaped to his feet, his ice-blue eyes flashing with his broad grin.

  “Sure! Especially if your sister’s going to be there . . . ”

  Was Obaasan ever going to go out? Akane rested her chin on the windowsill and stared out at the blossom-less cherry trees. The beautiful view of Gotenyama Garden might be all her grandmother needed for entertainment, but Akane was bored. Her father was at work, her mother was at the supermarket, and her three perfect sisters were allowed to go out, of course. And she was stuck here inside with Obaasan, who, given her love of gossip, seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time to get ready for her daily trip to the market.

  OK, her current situation might have something to do with yesterday’s exploits, but it had been a
whole sixteen hours since the cops had caught her on top of the Mori Tower at the Toranomon Hills complex. Her luck had to run out sometime—especially since a year ago she’d warned John Laine, repeatedly, never to hack her projects again—and yesterday had been the day.

  Akane had gone out of her way to wash the rice dishes and miso soup bowls from breakfast. Surely, she’d made up for her mishap already. Didn’t her grandmother trust her anymore?

  She hadn’t even been BASE jumping—this time. Sure, she’d been taking photographs, and the climbing gear and the BASE chute on her back had taken some explaining, but no harm done. And even if she’d jumped, there’d still have been no harm done, because it wasn’t like she was some amateur.

  And now, in more than one sense, she was grounded. Akane sighed.

  “Mata ne, Akane.” Obaasan’s voice behind her contained a distinct note of warning. She was pulling on her favorite yellow coat. “See you soon. I won’t be long.”

  “Jya ne, Obaasan.” Akane tried to give her grandma a quick smile as she left, though she could hardly contain her impatience. As soon as the door of the apartment clicked shut, she darted to her computer and turned it on.

  And there was John, waiting for her in the window in the corner of her screen, looking anxious and almost as impatient as she was. She let out a sigh of relief.

  “Hey, I thought I’d missed you.” He grinned. Akane clicked to enlarge him, and his rugged face filled the screen. She casually greeted him, “Ohayo, John! How’s it going with that doofus who thought he could hack you?”

  “Uhh . . . ” John’s eyes shifted to the side with a sudden awkwardness, and someone shoved him aside. Another face peered at her: ice-blue eyes, tangled blond hair, and an indignant smirk.

  “The doofus is right here,” said the new arrival. His scowl faded as he stared at Akane, and his eyes widened.

  Akane peered back at him, unrepentant. “Well, the doofus ought to have known better than to try to hack John Laine,” she pointed out sternly. “Not only is he wise to that, but also he’s got friends who will notice if he doesn’t.”