“I can’t tell you,” Cole said, and now the anger and anguish were gone from his voice, and he sounded scared—genuinely scared.
“Cole, I swear to God, I’m recording this conversation, and unless you want me to release it on Twitter, right now, you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“No!” he yelped, as terrified as if I had brandished a live wire at his face. “Christ, Jack, do you want to get us both killed?”
“Then tell me!”
“They. Will. Kill. Us,” Cole said, enunciating each word very slowly and distinctly, as if speaking to a small child. But I had the impression that he was doing so not to patronize me—though that might have been part of it—but to try to keep his own voice from shaking. “Do you understand that, Jack? They will kill me for telling you, and you for finding out.”
“I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck,” I spat back, matching my tone to his, with angry mockery. “Do you understand that, Cole? I’m facing life in prison. I’ve lost the only man I ever loved. I cannot tell you how little of a shit I give about the idea of someone cutting my throat too. In fact, you know what? At this point it would be something of a relief. The only thing, the only thing I care about is finding out who killed Gabe. If that gets me killed too, I honestly don’t give a damn.”
There was a long silence. A very long silence. I could hear Cole’s trembling breaths at the other end of the line. It was clear that, perhaps for the first time, he really understood how far I was prepared to go with this.
“I can’t tell you who,” he said at last. His voice was very low. “I don’t know who—but I can tell you why.”
“Okay.” It had started to rain now, the drops sliding sideways across the half-open window and spattering my face. I closed my eyes, feeling the coldness drip down my nose. It felt like crying, but it didn’t soothe the ache in my heart. “Okay. Why?”
“Fuck,” Cole whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Look, can we do this face-to-face?”
“You must be kidding me.” I laughed at that, a harsh rasp that jolted my ribs and made me wince. I pressed a hand to the dressing. “So you can hand me over to the police again? That was you who told them I was at Sunsmile, wasn’t it? You must have been laughing up your sleeve when I spilled the beans to Hel. And when the police turned up at your cottage—they didn’t follow you, did they? It was you, you called it in.”
“I was trying to protect you,” Cole said desperately, and the strange thing was that I could almost, almost believe him. “Please, Jack. Please.”
But I was done with this.
Cole had betrayed Gabe, and then he had betrayed me too—over and over and over.
“Cole,” I said with finality, “I swear, if you don’t tell me what you know right this second, I’m going to livestream this conversation to Gabe’s Twitter account. I’m going to send it to every Discord group he ever joined, I will post it on Reddit and stream it on Twitch. And I will name you, on every single platform. I have no idea how many people that is—but Gabe’s Twitter account alone has almost 100,000 followers. I’m pretty sure a bunch of them are your followers too. You want them to hear your voice, admitting your complicity in the murder of your best friend?”
“Fuck!” Cole shouted, so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. There was a noise at the other end that I couldn’t quite decipher. It sounded like he might be sobbing. Then his voice came back, trembling and angry. “Listen to me, Jack. If you pursue this, if you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you—”
“You are done threatening me,” I said coldly. “And I have no interest in hearing anything from you other than why my husband had to die. So spit it out, or get ready to go very, very viral.”
“Do you know what a zero-day exploit is?” Cole demanded.
I frowned. “Is this some kind of test?”
“No, I’m answering your question. Do you know?”
“Of course I know. It’s a way to hack into a device that hasn’t been fixed. One that the software developer doesn’t know about—hence the zero days. That’s how long the developer has had to fix it.”
“Correct. And you know that the serious ones—the ones that affect, say, every single person with an iPhone—they’re valuable, yes? Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars valuable, on the black market?”
“Yes.” I was properly puzzled now. Where was this leading?
“Well, Gabe found one. A big one. He came to me to ask for my advice about what to do. I told him his best bet was to go to the software developer and claim the responsible reporting bounty. But instead, he”—Cole paused, swallowed audibly at the other end of the line—“he decided to sell it on the dark web. I don’t know who he went to, but he must have messed with the wrong people because they decided… well, they decided they didn’t want to pay whatever he was asking. They decided they’d rather just take it. So that’s what they did.”
When I hung up on Cole, for a long minute I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, trying to absorb what he had told me, barely even noticing the way the raindrops from the open window were blowing into the carriage and speckling the screen of the mobile.
Then I pulled myself together, turned around, and almost dropped the phone. The woman from the toilet was standing behind me, holding the hand of her toddler.
For a brief instant her eyes met mine, a direct and unblinking stare like a challenge. Then she turned and moved up the carriage, in the opposite direction from where I had been sitting.
I felt all the breath go out of me. How long had she been standing there? Not long, surely. Her toddler was too small to wait patiently silent while his mother eavesdropped on a stranger’s phone call. Which meant that she had likely only caught the last part of our conversation.
Racking my brains, I tried to replay what I had said and figure out whether it would have sounded suspicious. Cole had done most of the talking, I remembered that. My input had been limited mostly to stuff about coding, hacks, and exploits—at least for the last few moments. But before that… I had mentioned Gabe’s name, I was pretty sure of it. And I had talked about his murder. Or at least referred to Gabe being killed, I couldn’t remember the exact words I’d used. However I’d phrased it, though, I was pretty sure I’d said enough to get someone curious searching for the case on their phone. Fuck.
Opening up the phone again, I pulled up Google and typed in Gabe coder murder, then waited as the screen filled with results.
The first one made me go first hot, and then very, very cold, so fast that it was almost sickening.
It was an article on the BBC, and the headline was “Wife of Murdered Coder Sought for Questioning.” The preview image was a picture of me.
My hands shook as I clicked through to the story. It was dated and time-stamped earlier today, and at the top, immediately below the headline, was a large photo of me, taken from the Crossways Security website, captioned Jacintha Cross is wanted for questioning in relation to the murder of her husband. Police have asked the public to report any sightings by dialling 999.
Beneath the photo, the article continued.
Police investigating the murder of digital security expert and “hacktivist” Gabriel Medway, who operated under the username Gakked in the online hacking community, have today released a statement confirming they are urgently seeking the programmer’s wife, Jacintha Cross, who is wanted for questioning in relation to her husband’s death.
Ms Cross, who was initially interviewed voluntarily by the Metropolitan Police, has not been seen since Tuesday 7th February. Police are urgently seeking her in connection with their enquiry and have appealed to members of the public for their help.
Jacintha Cross, 27, a security consultant who also goes by the name Jack, was last seen near the town of Rye in East Sussex but is thought to have left the area, possibly travelling by bus or train. She is described as white, 5’2”, of slight build, with hazel eyes and mid-length, distinctively dyed red hair, but a police spokesperson cautioned that she may have changed her appearance.
Detective Inspector Branagh of the Metropolitan Police said, “We are urgently appealing to members of the public for their help in tracking down Ms Cross, who may be travelling under a false name or with forged documentation. We would ask the public not to approach Ms Cross directly, but to report any suspicious sightings to the police by dialling 999.”