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“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.”
Halfway down the article was a grainy blown-up shot of me walking through Charing Cross station, my head down over my phone. It was black-and-white, but you could tell that my hair was probably no longer red. Below were links to three pieces about Gabe’s death, each illustrated with a photo of him taken from our company website. I knew I should click through, find out what information the police had already put out there, but his warm, friendly face, smiling out of the screen, felt like a punch in the stomach, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I shut down the phone, but closing the screen did nothing to lessen the sick feeling of dread that had been building in the pit of my stomach the whole time I was reading. In one way, the article wasn’t a surprise—it was, after all, only confirmation of what I already knew: that the police were looking for me and considered me a suspect in Gabe’s death. But somehow, seeing the facts set out so brutally was still a shock, and the way the police had phrased their quotes… who also goes by the name Jack. How had they managed to make a simple abbreviation sound so shady? And as for We would ask the public not to approach Ms Cross directly—like I was armed and dangerous, for God’s sake! The photo was good, as well. No mercifully blurred black-and-white mug shot. They had taken my professional head shot from the Crossways company website, along with Gabe’s. It was high-res, well lit, and even with my hair bleached straw white and bags of exhaustion under my eyes, I was very recognizably the same person. Was the woman with the toddler already calling 999?
I glanced out the window, and then pulled up the train timetable on my phone. We were about fifteen minutes away from Northampton, but that was a big station which would almost certainly have ticket barriers and probably British Transport Police on standby. I absolutely could not afford any kind of altercation at a place like that. I’d be arrested within seconds.
The next stop was ten minutes further down the line, at a place I had never heard of—Long Buckby. Google showed it to be a small village with a station that didn’t seem to have even a ticket office, let alone fixed barriers. It was exactly the kind of place I’d been hoping for. The only problem was that it was twenty-five minutes and two stops away. If—if—the woman with the toddler was calling the police right now, they would almost certainly board the train at Northampton. In ten minutes they could sweep the entire train.
I stood at the window, chewing my nail and considering my options. Option one was to get off at Northampton and try to tailgate through the barriers behind another passenger—but I didn’t like my chances. In a rush hour crush with commuters pushing and shoving I might be able to pull it off, but it was only just gone four p.m. and doing the same thing in a sparsely filled station was much harder. Option two was to stay on the train and try to hide until Long Buckby. If I made it that far, I was probably home free. The problem was, if the woman with the toddler had called the police, then staying on the train past Northampton was pretty much a one-way ticket to jail.
Option three… but there I ran into a brick wall. The only remaining option was what my last resort had always been—to stop running and give myself up to the police. Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that. It would make the whole thing pointless. Except… would it?
I took my hand out of my mouth. I hadn’t seriously considered giving myself up before. But my trip to Sunsmile had changed—well, not everything. But it had changed a lot. I now had evidence backing up my story.
My statement to Cole had been a lie—I hadn’t been recording our conversation; there wasn’t any setting on my phone to allow me to do so, though I was pretty sure I could have found an app somewhere, if it had occurred to me in advance. But I hadn’t thought of it—and so when I’d told him I would stream the conversation, it was nothing but bluff. Still, I did have a recording I could take to DS Malik: the one of Cole’s voice sitting on the Sunsmile database. I just had to hope that when Malik and Miles listened to it, they were as certain as I was that the speaker wasn’t Gabe. Because the problem was, Gabe and Cole did sound a lot alike. Same deep voice, same North London accent. It had been close enough to twist my heart with grief every time Cole spoke to me these past few days.
The problem was that even if Malik and Miles agreed that it was Cole on the recording, that might not let me off the hook. What if they thought we’d been in it together? Cole setting up the insurance in Gabe’s name, me collecting on the policy. We wouldn’t be the first couple to commit a murder for financial security and a new future. The fact that I’d been found hiding out at Cole’s cottage would likely seal their suspicions.
No. I couldn’t trust this to Malik and Miles—not again. They had proven already that they were willing to go for the easy solution rather than dig for a complicated truth. I couldn’t afford to give them a second chance—not until I had got to the bottom of what was really going on. Because as much as I wanted Cole on the hook for his part in this, I wanted to find Gabe’s killer more—and I was pretty sure that wasn’t Cole.
That left me with two options: Northampton or Long Buckby. The only question was which.
I was still trying to make up my mind when the train began to slow, and eventually came to a halt with a screech of brakes. The silence after the roar of wind through the half-open window was like a strange vacuum. I could hear the patter of rain outside and the hiss and tick of the train’s air brakes. From far up the carriage came a child’s slow exhausted wail, and I knew how it felt.
Then a crackle came over the speakers.
