“Cole? As in, Gabe’s friend? No, not a word. How come?”
“If he makes contact, do not trust him, okay?” I felt a lump rise in my throat at the impossibility of spelling out the depths of Cole’s betrayal—everything he had done over the last few days and weeks. “He’s behind this, Hel—maybe not all of it, I don’t honestly know, but he’s been lying to me the whole time, and he set up the insurance policy.”
“Insurance policy?” Hel said blankly, and I realized—I hadn’t even told her about that when we met back in the shopping mall. Literally all I’d done was grab the bag and run. It was in the text messages that I’d spelled out the situation—texts I’d actually been sending to Cole. Hel hadn’t heard a word from me since I disappeared into the shopping center on Monday afternoon. No wonder she’d been going out of her mind. Briefly, I explained the sequence of events: the interview with the police, the email about the insurance policy, the realization that I was being framed and my decision to flee—and then my meeting with Cole, the fake messages, the trip to Sunsmile, and my subsequent furious call with Cole—all of it. I could practically hear Hel’s brain ticking as I related the whole thing.
“And he all but admitted it,” I finished. “Not Gabe’s murder, but the policy—he even had the nerve to claim he’d been trying to protect me. I just wish I’d been able to record that call. Because as it stands, it’s his word against mine, and if he says it’s not him on the Sunsmile call, I don’t know how to prove it is. Or what if they believe it’s him on the recording, but think we were in it together?”
“Quite,” Hel said. She sounded incredibly troubled, as if she’d spent my breathless outpouring putting two and two together… and making an answer she didn’t like. “Because there’s holes in his story you could drive a truck through, aren’t there?”
“How do you mean?” I felt desperately tired, my brain not working properly. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but the sun was going down, and lying in the warmth of the sleeping bag… it was all I could do not to fall asleep to the comforting sound of Hel’s voice in my ear, the illusion that I wasn’t alone in this nightmare. “The first bit, the bit about Gabe stumbling over a vulnerability and going to him for advice… I think that’s probably true. Gabe might well have wanted Cole’s take, especially if it was something to do with phones. Gabe never did much with phones, but that’s Cole’s area—his whole deal is phone security and antivirus apps. And if the problem was serious enough—you know, something that affected lots of users, and compromised the security of the whole phone—then I could buy Cole’s fear, and the idea that someone would kill to acquire the vulnerability. The people who deal in those kinds of hacks aren’t playing—we’re talking organized crime, rogue states, that kind of thing. I mean, say it’s some kind of hack that lets you see the phone’s location twenty-four/seven; if you’re using that as a way to track down and assassinate your enemies, you’re not going to be above the idea of murdering the coder who discovered it to cover your tracks.”
“But do you think Gabe would have dabbled in that market?” Hel asked a little skeptically, and I shook my head.
“No. Absolutely not. And not just out of self-protection—I just can’t imagine Gabe flogging off a hack to the highest bidder. It’s not… it’s not Gabe, you know?”
Now I said the words aloud, I realized that that part of Cole’s story had troubled me from the start. Gabe had absolute contempt for hackers who sold exploits. The idea that he’d auction off a vulnerability to any cybercriminal or oppressive government with enough money… well, it was laughable. The issue was, I had no idea how to convince anyone else of that fact. I knew from talking to Gabe that really big hacks could go for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market—maybe millions. With enough money on the table, Malik would argue, principles became cheap.
“I agree with you as far as that goes, but actually I was thinking of a different problem,” Hel said. She sounded as if she was frowning on the other end of the phone. I could hear cartoons playing in the background, and if I closed my eyes and tried hard enough, I could almost imagine myself lying on the sofa in Hel’s kitchen, the girls watching TV in the next room, the comforting smell of cooking filling the air. “My issue is, even if you buy Cole’s argument that he was trying to save you from the same fate as Gabe, how did he know what was going to happen to Gabe?”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to understand what she was saying, and then shook my head.
“Sorry, I’m shattered, Hel. You’ll have to give me the Conspiracy for Dummies version.”
“I mean,” Hel said, and her voice was gentle, but there was an urgency underneath that made me uneasy, “even if you accept all the rest—Gabe going to Cole, then putting the exploit on the market, and then being set up by the people he’s dealing with—how does Cole get wind of Gabe’s life being in danger? From what Cole says, even Gabe didn’t know. So how did Cole see it coming?”
“Huh.” I raised myself up on my elbow, ignoring the twinge of pain in my side. Now I was frowning too. “You’re right. That’s… weird.”
“Wind back to the beginning for a moment,” Hel said. I could tell she was getting into her own idea, pitching it to me the same way she’d pitch a particularly knotty story to her editor. “Let’s buy Cole’s argument and suppose that someone—whether that’s the NSA, NSO, MI6, or just your regular run-of-the-mill organized crime cartel without any fancy letters to their name—let’s suppose they did make contact, and Gabe listened. Let’s suppose that poor Gabe ended up falling in with someone so unscrupulous, so desperate that they were prepared to kill to secure that exploit, and let’s suppose as well, by the way, that he was stupid enough to do all that without protecting his identity or covering his tracks—which I also have difficulty buying. How on earth, in that scenario, does Cole get warning of what’s about to happen? Let alone enough warning to steal Gabe’s credit card and ID and set up a whole insurance policy in your name? No. The whole thing is absolute BS and the police won’t buy it for a second. The only question is what they’ll think really happened.”
“Fuck. You’re right.” I was sitting up now, hugging myself to try to keep in the sleeping bag’s warmth, annoyed with my own stupidity for not noticing this before Hel had pointed it out. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that. If Gabe didn’t see this coming—and I’m certain he didn’t—how did Cole? And why was he so frightened when I spoke to him? Because he was frightened, Hel. I’m sure of that. He sounded honestly terrified, like he thought they were coming for him too.”
“Exactly,” Hel said. “Cole is in on this, Jack. Whether he killed Gabe or not, he’s knee-deep in this shit, and he knows more than he’s letting on.”
“But wait…” I put my free hand to my head, trying to quell the ache that was building there, but then regretted taking the pressure off the pain in my side. It was the only thing that made the wound hurt less. I switched hands with the phone and pressed again on the dressing, feeling the heat underneath it. “Hang on. The only way that he could have had forewarning of what was about to happen to Gabe—”
“Was if someone told him,” Hel finished for me. Her voice was grim.
“But why?” My voice, even to my own ears, sounded like that of a plaintive child on the verge of tears. The thought that Cole, Cole might have had warning of what was about to happen to Gabe, but hadn’t lifted a hand to save him… “Why would some Mafia kingpin or whoever the fuck it was bother to tell Cole their plans? The only reason I can think of—”
I stopped. Hel didn’t reply, but she didn’t have to, because the answer had already come to me, with a sickening inevitability. The only reason someone like that would have warned Cole about their plans was because he was already in their pay.