the Poet said.
“I know,” answered the other as he disappeared into the dark and left us alone.
Dear God, what had I fallen into?
CHAPTER 85
“SO … HI,” HE said, putting down the case he’d carried over. As he sat cross-legged on the ground facing me, he seemed like any other average white kid. Baggy pants, ring tee, and a mop of shaggy hair. The kind you hide behind when you don’t fit in.
Everything about him was young. Exactly as young as I thought he’d been pretending to be online.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“How old do you think?” he said.
My impulse then was the same as it would have been for any boy this age: round up. Don’t offend him by shooting low.
“Nineteen?”
“That’s exactly right,” he said, but I knew he was lying.
“And you two are brothers?” I asked.
“That’s not important right now.”
Oddly enough, he was right.
He opened his case and took out a pistol, then set it on the ground. That was followed by a large hunting knife, which he set next to the gun. The flashlight was on the ground, too. The details of everything were sketchy there in the dark, but he seemed to be putting on some kind of show. I could tell he wanted me to see this, one bit at a time. Like maybe he had something to prove.
Finally, he took out a phone and started texting something.
“Did you really think that piece of crap malware was the way to go?” he asked without looking up. “It was pretty rookie for someone like you. We’re not idiots, Angela.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think you were.”
“You had six hours. I could have coded something better from scratch in half that. You probably could have, too. Maybe even gotten away with it.”
He wasn’t wrong. The truth of it cut into me. I hadn’t thought this through.
And then, another realization.
“Is that your app?” I asked. “Did you write it?” I’d assumed all along that the other guy was their coder.
The kid smiled down at his screen, thumbs still busy. “Duh,” he said. “What do you think of it?”
“I think anyone would love to have fifteen million copies of their work out there,” I answered honestly.
“Seventeen million now,” he said. “And don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to hack at that level.”
“The difference is, I never wanted to kill anyone,” I said.
“Are you sure about that?” He stopped and looked up from his phone for the first time since he’d taken it out. “What about Darren Wendt?”
The name hung there in the air. I wasn’t even sure how to respond.
“Oh, yeah,” he went on. “I know all about you. Ever since that day at Boston Latin. You completely changed the game then. You should be proud.”
I was processing everything as fast as I could. There was a lot to take in. When he went back to his phone, I thought he was still texting, but then he held up a picture for me to see.
“Remember this?”
It was an image of Billy and me standing outside Mass General, taken from across the street. “Ever wonder how we got the number of that burner phone?”
“I assumed you hacked Justin Nicholson’s account,” I said. “He was one of the only people I gave it to.”
The kid’s face lit up. There was an odd innocence to his smile, like he was genuinely happy to be sitting here, talking to me.
“I love that you know that,” he said, already navigating to the next image. When he held this one up, I saw a picture of myself getting into George’s car outside the Bureau field office.
“Poor George,” he said. “You may have changed the game, Angela, but George paid the price.”
It was a struggle to keep my anger down. “You didn’t have to kill him,” I said.
“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” he told me. “There are lots of people we didn’t have to kill. But George? He was in the way.”
“Of what?” I said. “Of me?”
The kid rocked his head side to side. “That’s a bit simplistic. But as a binary question, let’s say yes.”
It was all coming together, in its own twisted way. As far as I could tell, he’d created that app just to see if he could. Then he killed those girls and their families because they were there.
Now he’d turned his micro attention span on me. Which begged the question, How do I keep this kid distracted?
How long could I survive?
CHAPTER 86
THIS GUY WAS the genius of the future. He seemed