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In the corner of the field was a huge beech, and, wearily, I forced my tired legs to carry me just a few meters further beneath its sparse canopy, and then collapsed against the trunk, the rucksack clutched to my chest. I knew I should eat something, drink something, but I was suddenly so tired, nauseous with it, that even just opening the bag seemed like an effort beyond what I could manage.
Come on, babe. It was Gabe’s voice, gentle in my ear. You’ve got to eat something. It was what he had said to me so often when I got home after a night chasing around the corridors of some remote office, too exhausted to do anything but collapse into bed. I thought of our last conversation, of me bossing him around, demanding fries, bitching at him about his fucking bacon. God, what I wouldn’t give for just one more kiss, one more crack, one more dad joke about one-hundred-percent vegan nuggets being made out of real vegans…
Gabe as a dad. The thought was too bittersweet to bear. I swallowed. Then I opened the bag and peered inside.
The first thing I checked was not how much food I had left, but the phone. It was there, and thankfully unbroken, in spite of being thrown out of a train window and dropping fifteen feet onto rocks. The next thing I did was unscrew the lid from the plastic bottle of water in the side pocket and drink about a gallon. I was, I realized, extremely thirsty—I just hadn’t noticed.
So much water on an empty stomach made me feel even sicker, but I knew I had to eat something. I’d had nothing since the teacake in the cafe in Hastings, and that felt like several lifetimes ago. There were a few energy bars left at the bottom of the bag, and some instant noodles I had bought from the hostel. I didn’t have any way of heating the noodles, but I opened one and crunched the powdery shards dry, and then ate an energy bar.
Then, giving way to the urge that had been growing ever since my conversation with Cole, I pulled out the phone, opened up Signal, and called Hel on her mobile.
It rang. And rang.
And then Hel picked up.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” I said without preamble. Hel let out an audible gasp, and I could hear her brain racing, trying to figure out what she could say.
“Should I call you back?” she said at last.
“Sure. Use Signal and this number.”
“Signal?”
“It’s an app. Encrypted.”
“Okay.” Two syllables, but I could hear the urgency vibrating in her voice. She was as desperate to talk to me as I was to her. She hung up, and I waited. And waited. It was getting cold, and dark, and I took the sleeping bag out from the rucksack, spread it in the shelter of a hedge, and climbed into it. I was just struggling with the zip when my phone buzzed, almost making me drop it. It was a Signal call from a number I didn’t recognize—a mobile number—and for a second my stomach flipped, thinking of Cole and the way he had duped me—but this was a voice call. It had to be Hel, surely?
I picked up.
“Is this secure?” was the first thing Hel said. “I used Signal and I’m on a phone I bought yesterday from that phone shop on the high street, is that enough? I’m pretty sure the police are monitoring my other phone, but I don’t think they’ve bugged the house. Would they do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I tried to think, did it matter? As long as I didn’t say where I was, maybe not. “Fuck, Hel, it’s so good to talk to you.”
“Oh Jesus, Jack. Where are you? Are you okay? Are you really okay?” She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “I was so worried when I didn’t hear anything from you. I knew the police couldn’t have found you, because they’re still tearing your house apart, and they’ve an unmarked car outside ours twenty-four/seven, but I had no idea if you were dead in a ditch. And your picture is all over the papers—did you know that? They made you sound like some kind of—”
“I know, I’m so sorry,” I said, breaking in gently. “I’m okay—but Hel, listen, has Cole been in touch with you?”
“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?”
