And the only reason he would already be in their pay…
“If it were me,” Hel said now, “if I were running some criminal gang, or some shady government hacking firm—I wouldn’t be putting pressure on Apple or Google to hand me the keys to the kingdom. I mean, sure, I’d try—wasn’t there a case where the NSA told Apple to build a back door so they could get into some terrorist’s iPhone? But Apple told them to fuck off, if I remember right. Because they could. They’re bigger than any government, and they have more to lose by forfeiting their customers’ trust than they do from pissing off the US security agencies. No, if it were me, I’d be going straight to the engineers. And not the ones at Apple, but the guys at the medium-size firms, the ones in charge of the small but popular apps. I’d be encouraging them to make their apps ask for all the permissions they could: Camera. Microphone. Files. Call list. Exact geographical location. And then I’d put on the pressure and make them build a back door to send that information straight to me. Because those people—individuals with families they care about and bills to pay—they can be bought. Or coerced.”
“People like Cole,” I said with a groan. “Fuck. Fuck.”
“You think I’m right?”
“I mean… fuck. Hel, I honestly have no idea, but it makes a lot more sense than that crock of bullshit he tried to give me.” My head was throbbing, along with my ribs. “And it would make sense of Gabe’s actions too. I mean, Gabe might have gone to Cole for advice about a phone exploit, but he’d definitely have gone to him if he discovered a problem with one of the apps Cole himself was responsible for. Cole was his best friend—he’d have felt obliged to give him a heads-up that the shit was about to hit the fan.” My head felt like it was about to split in two. Or maybe it was my heart. I wasn’t sure.
“Exactly. Which would have put Cole in a mildly tricky position if it was just something he’d overlooked, but a completely impossible one if it was a back door he’d been bribed to introduce,” Hel said. Her voice was dry.
“Oh my God.” I wanted to be sick. I wanted Hel to be wrong—but it was too horribly plausible. It made sense of everything—of Gabe’s actions, of Cole’s. It even explained how Cole was able to afford such an extravagant flat. If Cole had been taking money from someone—whoever it was—to leave a back door to one of his apps open, and Gabe had stumbled over that door in the course of one of his pen tests, of course he would have warned Cole, and of course Cole would have gone to his handlers. He would have had to. Not because he wanted to betray Gabe, but because he would have had no choice but to fess up that the door was about to be closed. Only the group didn’t want it to be closed. They wanted it to stay open. At all costs.
“Jack?” Hel said now, her voice a little worried. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Fuck.” My mind was racing. What was the exploit? Was it something Cole had had access to, all this time? How much access did it give him? Had I ever put one of his apps on my phone? The thought made me feel sick—the idea that he might have been spying on me and Gabe for weeks, maybe even months. “I think you’re right—you must be. But how can I prove this, Hel? They took Gabe’s hard drive out of his computer.”
“Didn’t he back up anywhere?”
“I don’t know. Not regularly. Oh Jesus.” I felt like I was going to throw up. As I sat there, trying to figure out what to do, how to get out of this unholy mess, my phone gave a quiet beep, and when I looked down at the screen, a fifteen-percent battery warning was showing. With a sinking heart I remembered the battery pack Cole had lent me—still sitting where I had left it on the table in the cottage. “Shit, I’ve got to go, Hel. My phone’s nearly out of battery, and I don’t have anywhere to charge it.”
“You don’t have a plug?” Hel’s voice at the other end of the line had sharpened with concern. “Jack, where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, though I felt anything but. I had the strange sensation of being both hot and cold at the same time, the same feeling I remembered from being a little kid with the flu, and I felt like I wanted to be sick, though I was fairly sure that was more to do with Cole than anything else. “I should go. I’ll call you tomorrow, on this number, okay?”
“Okay. I love you.”
“I love you too.” My throat hurt as I hung up the phone, and for a long time I did nothing except stare at the blank screen, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. I should turn off the phone, save the battery, but there was one other person I wanted to talk to. Badly. I just wasn’t sure if I could yet.
In the end, I switched off the phone and simply lay there, staring up at the stars through the fluttering vestigial beech leaves. I don’t know when I fell asleep.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 MINUS TWO DAYS
When I woke up, my first thought was that I might be dying. I was unbearably, unbelievably cold—cold enough that the chill I’d felt in Cole’s cottage by the sea seemed like a childish version of this sensation. This was cold harsh enough to physically hurt—there was frost on the plowed field, and on my sleeping bag, and my breath around the edge of the bag had frozen into a glazed sheen that cracked and flaked when I tried to move.
My second thought was that I was going to be sick. I’d felt queasy all night. But now I felt really, properly ill, to the point where I knew that as cold as I was, I had to get up or I was going to throw up in the sleeping bag.
Shakily, moving as fast as my frozen limbs would let me, I struggled onto my hands and knees and began to try to crawl out of the bag, but it was too late. Halfway out, I felt my guts clench and seize, and I threw up—a surprisingly extravagant amount, given how little I’d had to eat the day before.
For a long moment I simply crouched there, the sleeping bag down to my waist and trailing back across the plowed field like a caterpillar halfway through shedding its cocoon. I was shivering with a mix of cold and nausea, waiting to see if the vomiting had stopped. I thought it had—and then another wave hit me, but this time there was nothing to throw up, and I simply dry heaved over and over onto the frozen ground, until finally my stomach reluctantly accepted that was it, there was no point in continuing, and I sat back, trembling, onto my heels.
Well, on the plus side, I hadn’t thrown up on my clothes. On the minus side, I felt very, very ill, and when I put my hand under my top, exploring the dressing across my side, I could tell why. My fingers came away sticky and crusted, and I could feel my pulse throbbing in the wound. I was sweating and shivering at the same time, and I knew if I didn’t get to hospital there was a very strong chance I wouldn’t be Cole’s problem anymore, or Malik’s. Words like septicemia and sepsis were floating through my head. Things that left you needing not just antibiotics but an organ transplant. Maybe even a coffin.
For the first time, the reality of what I was doing began to hit home. I had told Cole that in some ways, it would be a relief if I died, if someone cut my throat. But I had said that imagining some kind of cosmic exchange—my life in return for the truth about what had happened to Gabe. This—this was very different. Did I really want to die, pointlessly, of sepsis in some lonely field, leaving the truth about Gabe undiscovered and my body for some farmer to find when he replowed the field?
No. I wanted to follow this trail to the end and stop anyone else from suffering the same fate as Gabe. What happened after that—well, after that I didn’t really care. But that meant I had only limited time left. In a day or two, I might not be able to walk, let alone dodge cops, Cole, and everyone else who wanted to see me either dead or locked away for life.