“It sucks,” he says. “People were mellow for a while after—it—happened. Then I went back to being Hard-On Howard and they started beating the crap out of me again. And Sam isn’t around to protect me.”
Samara. The girl I loved. The girl I killed.
“She was my only friend,” Howard says.
“Not your only one,” I say. “Not anymore.”
He smiles. “Thanks, Ben.”
“My name is Daniel now,” I say.
“You have a different name?”
“Different mission, different name. I’m trained to switch identities. I was only Benjamin for a short time.”
“How do you keep the identities straight?”
“I don’t attach.”
“To the name?”
“The name, the place, the circumstances of the assignment. None of it.”
“What about the people?” Howard says.
I shake my head. “Especially not the people,” I say.
He bites at his lip, troubled by the idea.
“So what about me?” he says.
“You’re special,” I say.
“I knew it!” he says, beaming. “But wait, what should I call you?”
“Call me Daniel. It will help to keep us both on the same page.”
“Will you tell me your real name sometime?”
There are only three living people who know my real name.
Father and Mother. And Mike.
“Sometime I will,” I say. “I promise.”
“Daniel,” he says. “That works for now.”
“For now.”
“You sounded bad on the phone,” Howard says. “So tell me what’s going on.”
I hesitate, wondering how much I should reveal to Howard. But he’s already here, already exposed. He’s risked everything to come here and help me.
“I’m in trouble, Howard.”
“Does it have something to do with this card?”
“That’s just a part of it.”
“I’d like to hear it all of it,” he says.
I take a breath, hovering between talking and putting Howard back on the train and asking him to forget everything.
It takes me less than a second to make a decision.
I pull away from the station.
As I drive back to Manchester, I tell Howard about the camp, about Moore inviting me in, about Father and The Program disappearing, about my attack at what was supposed to be a safe house. He listens, his head bobbing, not freaking out even as I share details about The Program and some of what I do for them.
I don’t tell him about previous missions or targets, but I give him enough information to endanger him forever, to threaten the lives of his family and anyone he’s ever known or cared about in the world.
To his credit, he listens closely, occasionally asking questions or inquiring about details, but respecting when I set a boundary.
I finish as we pull into a Holiday Inn near the Manchester airport.
We sit in the parking lot while he considers all of it. He leans forward and rubs his fingers through his curly hair over and over again.
“I see why you called me,” he says. “It’s a confusing situation.”
“I’ve been running scenarios, but I don’t have the answers. Not yet.”
He leans back in his seat, still pulling at his hair.
“I think we should start with the SDHC card and see what we find. If I can crack the card, you’ll know a lot more about this—what did you call them?”
“A freelance team.”
“Right. This freelance team and the people who hired them. That will tell us some of what we need to know.”
“That sounds like a good starting point,” I say. “What do you need from me?”
“Power,” he says. “And Cheetos. Lots of them.”
“We can get those,” I say.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I RENT A SUITE AT THE HOLIDAY INN.
I politely ask the desk clerk for a suite in a quiet part of the hotel with nobody next door. With vacancy rates high, they are more than happy to comply.
The minute we get into the room, I jimmy the lock to the adjoining suite and open the door. Now we have two connected suites, one under a false name on the hotel’s computer system, the other not on the system at all.
I go back into the first suite and I see Howard emptying his duffel, removing power cords, multiplug outlets, surge protectors, coaxial cables. A miniature electronics store comes out of the bag.
“Did you bring any clothes?” I say.
“Why?” he says.
“To change. You might be here a few days.”
“Hackers don’t change,” Howard says, like it’s a crazy question. “We have priorities.”
He runs extension cords from the outlets in both rooms, then he sets up double laptops, an iPad and iPhone, a power unit, Wi-Fi cards, and various other small machines that I haven’t seen before.
“All right. Let’s take a look at the card.”
I pass him the micro SDHC card pinched between two fingers.
“This is an SD card reader right here,” he says, showing me a small device attached to one of his laptops. “But I’m not going to put it in there.”
He flips the card around in his hand, examining it from every angle. Then he places the card on piece of white frosted glass, and a schematic registers on the laptop screen behind him. I see a printed circuit board and assorted electronics, all miniaturized inside the confines of the card casing.
“Just what I thought,” he says. “It’s not really an SDHC card at all, more like a secure communications device posing as an SDHC card.”
“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s very sophisticated. What do you know about the guys you took it away from?”
“Not very sophisticated,” I say.
“Which means they were given the card along with some kind of special reader at the same time. That would allow them to access the data, but if they lost the card or it got taken away from them, nobody else could read it. I’m guessing if you put this in a regular SD reader, it destroys itself.”
“Can you get into the card, Howard?”
Howard examines the schematic, whistling softly under his breath.
“It’s going to take a while,” he says.
“Stay at it, as long as it takes.”
He brings up some application on his laptop. I see numbers flying by as a cursor scans the schematic on the screen.
“Tell me about Moore’s camp,” Howard says. “What’s it all about?”
“They think the government is weak, and they’re trying to do something about it.”
“They’re right, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“The government is weak. I mean, I could hack the banking system right now if I wanted to. I could probably even get inside the Homeland Security network if I had a few days, and there are only like a dozen guys who could even begin to try and stop me. A dozen guys protecting the entire government.”
“There’s got to be more than that.”
“Okay, a hundred guys. Two hundred. I guarantee the IT department at Google is bigger than the cybersecurity core of the U.S. government right now, and Google pays a hell of a lot better, too.”
“You could hack all that stuff, but you don’t do it,” I say. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not a dick.”
“But other people do it.”
“They are Phalli giganticus. I can’t speak for them.”
“But you understand them.”
Howard groans, like he’s having to explain something boring to a child.
“Why do people do it?” Howard says. “Because they can. Because it’s fun. It makes them feel like hotshots to get behind the infrastructure and see what’s in there. I understand the impulse. You know in those old movies where kids break into school on the weekend, get into the gym and play some hoops, or rifle through a teacher’s desk to see if they can find the test key for a quiz?”