The Ghost Network (book 1) Read online

  As John and Slack hurried away, John glanced back over his shoulder and caught Roy’s wink. He grinned to himself.

  “What was that all about?” he asked Slack.

  “I dunno, John, but that woman is terrifying. Roy doesn’t like her.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Heck, she was a communist spy, though! Being scary is probably in the job description.”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Slack with feeling, “but I’ve got a real hankering now for a few Zen-like nuggets of obscure wisdom. And we’re late for Yasuo.”

  “Makes me hanker for a sloppy joe,” grinned John. “Come on, we’d better run!”

  There was something very reassuring about the climbing wall, thought John, but for a few moments after he stepped in front of it, he couldn’t figure out what it was. Then he realized: It’s solid and ordinary. It’s a big textured fiberglass wall with handholds. It’s not going to give me a screen headache.

  He grinned, clipping his harness with a carabiner. Physical effort wasn’t his favorite thing—he’d been the worst hockey player in either Vancouver or Fairbanks and the last pick for everybody’s baseball team—but he was amazed at how enticing it was now.

  Any excuse to disengage my brain for ten minutes.

  It was an odd sensation but not unpleasant. His mind felt like a blank screen but not a faulty one: he could just let it relax into sleep mode for a while. Information will download in the background. The programs are initiated; let them run.

  What was wrong with him? It must be all that coding homework; he was starting to think like a laptop. Grinning, he reached out and seized a molded grip.

  He was not expecting the wallpaper.

  The artificial surface was gone. He was standing at the foot of a vast sandstone butte, its flanks gilded by the Arizona sun, and there was warm, dusty rock beneath his fingertips. With a yelp of surprise, he startled backward, and the wall was once again a fiberglass construction in a small, glass-walled room. Furrowing his brow, half-smiling, John reached out once more for the resin grip—and in an instant, he was back in Monument Valley.

  “Wow,” he muttered, impressed. So much for switching off from the digital world.

  “One of my favorite new products,” said an amused voice. “But a bit expensive to take to market just yet.”

  Poised on the lowest grips, John twisted to see Roy Lykos approaching across the red desert sand. No, he thought, he’s walking through a perfectly ordinary room. “It’s pretty impressive!”

  Roy glanced up and around as he pulled on his climbing shoes. “If the sun’s too much, there’s a rock face in the Andes,” he mused. “Or the Old Man of Hoy in Orkney—it’s thoroughly overcast there.”

  “This is just fine.” John grinned.

  “Good.” Roy nodded with approval. “I like Arizona. Plenty of space to think.” He gripped a small outcrop of rock, then gave John a wink. “The nano implants are good for more than recalling your food preferences.”

  They certainly were, and suddenly John didn’t mind the intrusiveness of them. “I always wanted to learn to climb.” He hesitated, a little embarrassed. “My dad was really good at it.”

  “I’m amazed he had time.”

  John glanced at Roy, startled. “You know about him?”

  “You could say that.” Roy paused his climb. “I did presentations at medical conferences. He was a fine man, with much to contribute to the world. I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  “Me too.” The words caught in John’s throat.

  “He’d be proud of you, John. That’s quite a talent you have.” Roy reached for another grabhold and pulled himself higher.

  “Thank you.” John felt his cheeks burning as red as the digital rock face.

  “I mean it. Your computing abilities are almost a natural instinct. They fascinate me.”

  John twisted to look at the desert floor, far below. It wasn’t frightening. The illusion was convincing and made the ascent seem higher than it could possibly be, but his brain knew it was just that: an illusion. He paused to catch his breath and to compose himself, hanging by one hand. “My dad would have liked me to go into medicine,” he mumbled at last.

  For a moment, Roy didn’t speak. He seemed entirely focused on hauling himself up the overhang above him. When he finally rested, he looked down at John, and there was understanding and kindness in his face.

  “Maybe, John, but do you think he’d be disappointed if you didn’t? He wouldn’t. Your father was a great man, and he was respected for a reason. He was the best at what he did. I think that is what he’d want for you. And one day, John, you will be the best at what you do. At what you love.”

  John had been fumbling for a foothold; as his shoe caught it, he felt a surge of pride mixed with embarrassment. Did Roy Lykos really just say that? Almost without thinking, he reached for the last grips and hauled himself up to the overhang. He sat down panting beside Roy, and they stared together over the wild desertscape.

  “I hope you’re right,” he muttered, pushing back his hair. “Thanks.”

  “No need to thank me.” Roy rested a hand on his shoulder and turned to him, his face serious. “I know I’m right, John. There’s something in you that’s special, and it’s going to take you right to the top. Trust me.”

  John swallowed hard. “I do.”

  “Good.” Roy was brisk again. “Speaking of the top, I think we’re finished here. The next stretch isn’t for beginners, and I think, in this one thing . . . ”

  “I’m a complete amateur.” John laughed. He was amazed he’d gotten this far up the butte—maybe following Roy’s lead had been the secret. “My dad gave me a few lessons, but he didn’t really have much time . . . ” He didn’t want to dwell on that. “Anyway, yeah, I’d better go. I’ve got a class with Imogen Black in twenty minutes.”

  “Better get going, then.” Roy smiled. “I know the work here seems unremitting, but in your case in particular, it’s going to be totally worth it. By the way, if you want your climbing to improve, Yasuo’s your man. And he always has time for students. Just go to his room and ask—his door’s always open. Literally.”

  “OK. I will!” John grinned.

  “Now,” said Roy, his eyes suddenly intent. “Climbing up is the easy part. Let’s see you rappel . . .”

  Akane gave a strangled yell of frustration and shoved her chair back from her desk.

  “Akane?” Obaasan’s voice drifted through from the next room. “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing, Grandmother!” called Akane hastily. “Stubbed my toe.”

  The old woman seemed to accept that; Akane could hear her gossiping once again with Mrs. Hagashi from next door. Relieved, she turned back to her computer screen.

  No wonder John hadn’t been in touch, she thought, reading again in mounting irritation. What a stupid rule. I thought it was a school for computer geeks?

  Landline, indeed. And a ten-minute call once a week! Only to immediate family!

  Rules, she thought as she clenched her jaw, were there to be broken. Especially for people like her and John. She interlinked her fingers and flexed them then set to typing furiously.

  Of course, she should have anticipated that the Wolf’s Den security would be troublesome. Every way she turned, there seemed to be firewalls and barriers and tricky little misdirections. They did not want their students having outside contact, she realized, as yet another ACCESS DENIED message flashed at her.

  I’m Akane Maezono, she reminded herself. I’m a White Eye Hoax Hunter. And if they want me to turn right, I’ll turn left.

  She exited the tempting little window that popped up. Closing one eye, biting her lip, she clicked back to coding mode and typed again. Someone at the Wolf’s Den thought they could beat her, did they? Whoever it was, they were making her angry now. And when Akane got angry, she di
dn’t lose her temper. No way. If anything, she got cooler than ever: cool enough to see things out of the corner of her eye, like floaters in her peripheral vision. And those were usually the things they least wanted her to see.

  Akane sat back, tapping her fingernails against the edge of the desk. If someone was this keen to stop outside contact, they were bound to have spent less time protecting other files.

  Like the staff dossiers, maybe . . . Akane grinned.

  Oh, she loved it when this happened. As if there was a second screen inside her head, she knew suddenly and completely what she had to do. The code came to her so smoothly and swiftly she could barely type fast enough to keep up.

  She wasn’t even sure she was keeping up. As her fingers flew across the keyboard, lines of encrypted code rippled into a blur across her vision. There was something transcendent about this feeling. She’d heard of it happening to other people, in other ways: artists, maybe, when the pencil or the paintbrush took over, or soldiers, when they slipped into an automatic, fluid combat mode. Excitement made her scalp tingle, but she kept typing: it was like a duel, but in a strange way, the program wasn’t just fighting her; it was dancing with her. She could almost hear the beat and pulse of the music . . .

  Akane gave a high, hoarse gasp as she snapped her hands back from the keys. ACCESS GRANTED.

  “Akane? Is everything all right?” Sharp knuckles rapped on

  the door.

  For a moment Akane was so out of breath she couldn’t answer.

  “Akane?”

  “It’s fine, Obaasan!” She licked her lips and cleared her throat. “It’s fine, uh . . . I thought my computer crashed, but it’s OK. Don’t worry!”

  “Well, don’t worry me so! I’ve been knocking for a long time. Food is almost ready.”

  As she listened to her grandmother’s footsteps shuffling away, Akane closed her eyes and heaved a sigh of relief. Then she opened them again and stared at the screen.

  That name. What’s that name doing there?

  She’d told Obaasan everything was fine. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t fine at all.

  <<>>

  John must know. Surely John knew?

  No, thought Akane. If John had known, he would have told her. And John said he’d never even heard of the Center before he was ordered to go there.

  The bigger question was Should John be told? It was an odd enough coincidence that Mikael Laine had been a director of the Wolf’s Den Center—and what on earth did a neurosurgeon have to do with computer technology anyway?—but it was even odder that his name hadn’t yet been removed from the list of directors.

  OK, he was only presumed dead, but still. It would be so upsetting for John to see his father’s name there, as if nothing had happened, as if he were still alive. It might even give him false hope. Not to mention the shock of realizing his father had a prior connection with his new school.

  There was a familiar buzzing at the back of her brain, one that had been there for a year. Akane thought of it as a background program that she kept running, working out an old and bewildering enigma while she focused on current day-to-day problems. She never discovered how John had, out of nowhere, downloaded a key to her own private system to act as her unwanted virtual ground crew. The intrigue had long ago overtaken her annoyance at her BASE jump being thwarted.

  Especially since, she could truly admit now, John had been right.

  It was odd, though, that she felt that background program running now. Somewhere in her mind, she must have found a connection between this mystery and that infuriating, long-standing one. Human brains, she mused wryly, could be even more puzzling than computers.

  Akane narrowed her eyes and cracked her fingers. She’d already found the weak spot in the Wolf’s Den. And where there was one weak spot, there were only slightly stronger spots that relied on the exact same security measures. She’d always had a good instinct for where to start exploring, and the tickle in her brain told her that now that she’d found the list of directors, their email addresses were not going to be many connections away.

  It was time to go phishing.

  Those angry eyes. They were a threat. The boy should be neutralized.

  John didn’t know how he was a danger, but all that mattered was that the boy was wrong. The pastel preppy clothes were wrong. The dark curly hair was wrong. Everything about him had to go. For John’s safety. For Slack’s. For everyone’s.

  The boy did not even resist when John leaned close to him and wrapped his hands around his throat. His eyes still flashed with fury, but he didn’t fight at all. And it took nothing. Barely a squeeze of John’s fingers. Like a hologram, the boy flickered, and buzzed, and dissipated to nothing. The last thing left of him was those angry eyes, blazing into John’s. And then those, too, faded out like a lightbulb.

  John didn’t care that he’d killed the boy. Why should he care? All that mattered was that John was safe now.

  Except that there was that other boy, the one with the muscles and the black T-shirt. There he stood, right in front of John, and he had to be eliminated too—

  John was startled awake, breathing hard. Across the room, Slack was snoring violently, but John was grateful: his friend’s snorting grunts must have woken him.

  Reaching for his water bottle, John wiped his hand across his face and felt cold sweat. That dream had been horrible. It hadn’t been bloody or gory, but that murder had felt real. He’d killed Leo Pallikaris, and he hadn’t cared. Worse, he’d been glad he did. A thrilling sense of a job well done clung to him.

  And a nagging feeling that the task was not complete yet, that Adam Kruz was still alive . . .

  He threw off the quilt and got up, his legs shaking slightly. Reaching for his phone, he checked the time.

  “Slack!” he yelled. He shook his friend. “It’s half past eleven!”

  “Mumph,” grunted Slack. “It’s Saturday. Five more minutes . . . ”

  “You want to eat?” demanded John. “Because Hack Club starts in thirty minutes . . . ”

  “Wait, breakfast?” Instantly alert, Slack jumped out of bed. “You should have said so in the first place . . . ”

  <<>>

  It was no wonder they’d slept in, thought John as he watched Slack cram another pastry into his mouth. The past few weeks had been exhaustingly intense, and being in Roy Lykos’s classes had turned out to be a very mixed blessing. John still felt prouder than he’d been about anything in his life—but his brain was fried. In this past week alone they’d hacked a Russian missile system, gained access to the next Marvel movie plot, and brought down the entire British broadband network.

  It might be wrong of him, but he wished it hadn’t all been a simulation. The excitement had felt very real, but every hack they devised, every security wall they breached, was part of a gigantic offline virtual world: Global Two.

  “It’s just as well I’ve turned over a new leaf,” said Slack, through a mouthful of Danish. “What I could do to Madison Harper now . . . ”

  “Use her phone to fire a nuclear warhead at Fairbanks Junior High,” suggested John with a grin. “Two birds with one—ow!”

  “Don’t even think about it,” scolded the passing Salome, as John winced and rubbed the back of his head. “Don’t talk about it, for sure. You want to be expelled?” She sat down with her tray and glowered at both of them.

  “No, Salome,” said John sheepishly.

  “Well, don’t even joke. And don’t boast. The teachers don’t like it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Because we’re script kiddies,” said Slack.

  “You are. Certainly next to Roy,” she said primly. “You’d better get a move on, by the way. Leo and Adam always get to Hack Club early, and if you want to beat them—”

  “What is it with those two?” complained Slack. “They took an instant dislike to us.”

>   Salome shrugged. “You got into Roy’s class, which was bad enough. But you’re getting a lot of his attention too. They’ve been his favorites till now.” She sighed. “But don’t worry. And don’t get too comfortable either. Roy’s favorites change by the day.”

  “How about you?” asked Slack. “You coming to Hack Club?”

  “Of course.” Salome relaxed, sipping on an espresso. “But I set up my hack last night. All I have to do is press a button. I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  “Wow,” whispered Slack as the two boys walked away. “She’s terrifying.”

  “Salome might be, but Adam and Leo aren’t. We can take them, no problem.” John gestured across the atrium. “Look, there they are. Salome was right—they’re getting a jump on everybody else.”

  Adam and Leo were jogging down the stairway at the far end of the atrium, toward the basement—the one place in the complex that sunlight didn’t reach. The location made Hack Club feel like even more of a guilty secret, but it gave it an extra edge of excitement too. After all, the club wasn’t meant to exist. The students had set it up purely for their own entertainment.

  Only the elite students, of course. And if Adam and Leo resented him and Slack for getting into Roy Lykos’s classes, they were probably doubly annoyed about Salome inviting them to join their secret club. John grinned to himself as he opened the basement door and set off down the stairs with Slack on his heels. Adam and Leo might think they were the kings of the school, but he had plenty of non-homicidal ideas for dethroning them.

  The stairwell here wasn’t the sleek high-concept type; the steps and rails were plain steel, and John and Slack’s footsteps sounded disconcertingly loud. This part of the school felt like the backstage of the theater of the Center itself: plain, utilitarian, analog. Hack Club’s basement room was on the lowest level; beyond it there was nothing but a plain door with a lever bar. At this level, that couldn’t be an emergency exit. John figured it was a cleaning closet, and since it never seemed to be accessed, Hack Club was safely private. As he and Slack opened the basement room door, Adam and Leo were already glaring at them.