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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.
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.
