Chapter 24

<<There’s nothing wrong with @MichaelFStewart that reincarnation won’t cure,>> Heckleena tweets, adding another dollar to the campaign.

@Wes_chu, Don’t count on it, Gumps replies to the question: Will she say yes?

When Jonny next pops into the ward, I don’t even give him the chance to say hello. We clutch each other. My ribs still ache and I’m exhausted but I don’t care.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be,” he replies. “You’re sick.”

“Was,” I grin. “I’ll be discharged soon.”

“Don’t rush it.” Jonny releases and glances down at his hands. “I asked my mom if you could stay with … but …”

“No, totally understand.” I wave off his embarrassment, sitting back down on the hospital bed and totally aware that I’m still wearing one of those humiliating gowns that open in the back. “The Ottawa homeless shelters are five star, I hear.”

“Really?” He looks hopeful.

I laugh. “Yeah, hot tubs and unicorn steaks. I’m kidding. My van will do until we have Assured Destruction back.”

He shakes his head. “I dunno. It’s pretty cold. Let me ask around, maybe someone—”

“No,” I say, a little too forcefully. The last thing I want is Hannah’s or someone else’s parents looking over my shoulder while I investigate a firebombing. “I’ll find somewhere to stay. Don’t worry.”

He shrugs. “All right.”

“Jonny, thanks for … for everything.” I drag him to me by his fingertips. Our lips meet; lingering on them, I shut my eyes.

“What are friends for? We start the clean-up tomorrow,” he says softly. “Oh and I brought you this.”

“Thank you!” He pulls my laptop from his courier bag and hands it to me. It smells of smoke but is otherwise fine, having been in the basement, high on a table, when the fire started. Peter’s armor is still stuck in its USB port.

“I don’t know about Shadownet, though,” he adds. “The drains didn’t keep pace with the fire hoses and the basement flooded.”

Shadownet has already evolved to the cloud so the loss is minimal at best, but losing Gumps and my dad’s hard drive with its photos and last message—that’s a hit.

“It’s okay.” I hug the laptop to me. “Thanks.”

After Jonny leaves, I change into jeans and a T-shirt before venturing online. First stop: Darkslinger. I have nine private messages; all are from Sw1ftM3rcy.

I click on the first. It’s from not long after I arrived at school, weeks ago.

Payment is due by midnight every day. My count is 16 downloads so far, that’s $160 due, but I’ll assume you’ve given out a few freebies. So let’s make it a hundred bones even. You can pay me through my merchant account. We’ll call it software services. LOL

I stare at the screen for a while before I piece together what this means.

Crazy Jan shared Sw1ftM3rcy’s link to Hannah and Ellie. They wouldn’t have known that I needed to charge for it, and they probably forwarded it on to others who then would have forwarded it on. A Zombie Worm anti-virus would be more viral than a celebrity sex tape. I’m afraid to click on later messages.

The next PM is okay. Only two hours later Sw1ftM3rcy wrote: LOLZ, where are you? You started out okay, but I figured you’d have more downloads by now. This is Big! Don’t make me reconsider. Ottawa’s buried by the Zombie Worm. BWAHAHAHA!

And it’s followed by: Now we’re cooking, 225 downloads. I should never have doubted you. Feel free to make a deposit in the “bank” early.

Then: 1,121 sales! Girl on fire! You’re my top franchisee. There should be an award, but we both know the real award is the over 10 grand in cash.

It’s gone viral. Not twelve hours after I sent the link to Ellie and Hannah. Ten grand. He’s talking about the ten-thousand-dollar profit we both should have made …

2,945 downloads. I’m getting hits outside of your territory, my little bitmule. Deposit $20K in my account within the next hour or I shut down your link.

Next message.

You are cut off. 18,544 downloads. Being a good person, I’ll round down. $185,000 dollars. You owe me. I’ll find you.

And finally.

Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t expunge you before I hunt you.

I hit the power and hold it down until the screen blinks black. And sit in bed, shuddering.

The rest of the day, I’m down, but as I watch the pledges rack up on my campaign and the tweets flash past, I galvanize myself. Sw1ftM3rcy doesn’t know who Lolz is for real. I’ll be out of here soon, and then we’ll see who hunts whom.

I stay at the hospital longer than I thought I would. A few weeks on my back doesn’t help my energy level. Three days after I wake, I discharge myself. By the time I do, they can’t keep me in bed. They’ve removed my cast and I’m pacing back and forth down the halls, hanging with the eating disorder kids since they get extra pudding.

Three days is the same amount of time it takes to fully fund the Kickstarter campaign. I’m overwhelmed. Three weeks ago nothing seemed possible and now everything does. People all over the world contributed to help rebuild Assured Destruction. Heckleena and Gumps earned a thousand dollars all by themselves. Karl and Ethan sold out, and fashion faux pas are being fixed across the Twittersphere via pictures sent to Tule by funders. The comments and shares lift my spirit.

The morning of my discharge, I take the bus to my mom’s hospital and soon reach her bedside. Peter stands as I enter.

“Thanks for the Christmas earrings,” I say to him.

My mom smiles at me. Her Kindle is in her lap, and her skin has a healthier if not lustrous hue. With her MS you can’t ask for miracles.

“They may take our lives—” She says it like Mel Gibson does in Braveheart and it warms me. My mom’s funny only when she’s well enough to be. “But they’ll never take our …”

“Piiizzzzzaaa!” I respond and Peter lifts an eyebrow.

I hug my mom. “I’m out and our friends have come together to help rebuild Assured Destruction after the fire.”

“That’s wonderful; Peter told me all about it.”

He’s nodding.

“You can stay with Peter until it’s ready,” she adds.

And I freeze. The Peter issue has been a long time in coming.

I want to talk to my mom about so much stuff. About Dad. About his grave. My distrust of Peter and his intentions toward my mom, which I totally can’t figure out.

“What is it, Janus?” she asks.

I’m also what people call an open book. I glance from her to Peter, who tilts his head, but there’s no warning in his crystal blue eyes.

Is my mom well enough to handle the truth? Will she be angry that I never destroyed Dad’s hard drive? That I invaded her privacy—because that’s what I did, mania or not. But can I afford to set foot in Peter’s lair?

“I … will you tell me why Dad left?” I ask.

Her smile drops and she slouches back on to the bed. I’m a terrible daughter. She’s not even out of the hospital and I’m looping this over her shoulders. Peter shifts from foot to foot.

“Yes,” she whispers. “All right.”

Even though I already know why he left, I wring my hands. This is my mom’s side of the story. I glare at Peter in a silent suggestion that perhaps he might want to go leap in front of a bus.

He takes the hint. “I … should run a few errands, but will be back—”

“No, stay,” my mom says and then turns to me. “Peter’s part of this. Peter’s the man who caught your father.”

This is unexpected. And now it’s not my mom who continues with the telling.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Peter says and his eyes tighten. He draws shallow breaths.

He’s nervous too, I realize. “You’re not Peter Moore, are you?” I ask.

His chuckle echoes in the room. “My name is Peter Moore. I was an agent with the United States Postal Service.”

“A mailman.”

“No, you see … before the Internet, fraud was mostly carried out by mail. So the USPS had a huge fraud unit. When Internet fraud started, it made sense for the unit to continue into that field too.”

I recall the keychain he took his armor from: USPS. I also recall how he handled Fenwick. Heck, the man before me was some sort of covert agent. I give him a nod to show I understand because I sure as hell can’t speak.

“In my final years before my retirement I had a big case. A case I’d been working a lot of hours on, too many really, but I was so close to cracking it. Credit card fraud, money laundering, spam botnets, a huge marketplace for hackers. It involved multiple agencies across the world. I was so close.” He shakes his head and I know he’s talking about Darkslinger. “It led to Ottawa, then right to your doorstep.”

He glances back to my mom and hesitates.

“Janus,” she says. “Your father was a money launderer. Assured Destruction was a front.”

So this is why Peter keeps trying to shut Assured Destruction down. He doesn’t believe it can support itself without illegal means.

“It wasn’t always,” she adds. “Before I became sick Assured Destruction did all right, but your father started seeking out new sources of income. He found them in a group of hactivists. By the time he figured out that they weren’t really good people, just criminals out to make a profit, he was in too deep.”

“Your father knew the other players too,” Peter says. “He could identify them and he was an excellent recruit.”

“What?” I blurt. “A recruit?”

“Yes, in an investigation, we seek out people we can use to gain evidence. Your father was involved in illegal activities yet had a young child and a sick wife. He had a lot to gain by working with us rather than with the gang.”

I now understand Peter’s reaction when I explained I was visiting former customers. He knew I was walking back into my father’s world.

“But that night he finally left us?” I ask my mom. “Why did he tell me to ask you why he was leaving?”

She sighs her capitulation. Everything’s on the table.

“It was staged,” my mom replies. “I’m sorry. I had to distance us from him, for your safety. The gang was listening. Your dad planned it with me.”

The white van. That explains the gap between the emails on my dad’s computer and the blow up.

“You lied to me.” I can taste the powder of my molars as I grind them. “You kept lying after he left.”

“I never told you,” she says. “I didn’t want you to think Dad was a bad person.”

“But he was,” I say. “And I thought you two met on an Internet dating site—”

“I’m sorry.” My mom’s shrinking as I watch. “After it was over, we gave ourselves space. We gave you space. And Peter had to retire before he could come back for me. But we’d fallen in love. And we never fell out of it. The Internet site just seemed like a plausible way to explain how we met.”

They’d been seeing each other for years … it explains the strength of their relationship. She places her hand over top of his and it feels as though she’s making a choice. Him over me.

“What about Daddy, what happened? After what was over?” I resist tears but my eyes fill anyways. I know exactly what happened.

Peter accepts a nod from my mom and continues the story.

“It was planned. All of it. At the start of each new year, there’s a sort of general meeting of hackers. Your father would attend. Many arrive face to face, others by video links. Anonymity was not allowed. And he was wired.”

“They caught him,” I say.

“We can only assume,” Peter responds. “He never came back. After the failure of the operation, they pulled me off the case. Stripped the resources. Many presumed he fled and I’d misjudged him.”

I knew differently. Peter and my mom had sent him to his doom.

“And Darkslinger? The armor? CrowBar? You’re not retired from the case, are you?”

And his uncertainty is back. Fear widens his eyes, and the chords in his neck press at his starched collar. And then I understand. He hasn’t told my mom about his work with me. He didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship, but he couldn’t stop himself from using me to continue the investigation. The one that got away.

“What are you saying, Jan?” my mom asks.

“Sorry, just thinking …” Do I break this wide open? I feel the blood rush to my face. “It would be hard to let something like a big case go. Right?”

“Yes, Janus, it is difficult. Maybe we can talk more about the actual case over dinner,” he says.

I can’t think straight, so many different emotions flood through me. I bite my tongue.

“I have to leave,” I say.

“Please don’t,” my mom replies. “It’s been so long. We’ve so much to discuss.”

If I open my mouth again, I will explode, and nothing will be the same.

I agree. I need to talk, but not with my mom. It’s Peter and I who have a lot to chat about.