The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers Read Free Book Online

cupped a hand under it as he bit in and walked into the living room.
    He was worried about dropping crumbs, but the room was already a mess: chairs knocked over, table upended, the couch cushions were in a pile on the floor and ripped open. He stood and stared at the carnage. It didn’t look like a burglary at all—it looked more like someone had been looking for something in particular.
    The expensive things in the room were untouched: the television and entertainment center, the paintings and knickknacks on the mantle, even Mr. Baxter’s Rolex, which he always forgot in a bowl by the front door. So if those things were still there, what had been taken?
    The rest of the first floor had been similarly tossed, but he didn’t see anything specifically missing. Finally, he crept slowly up the stairs. The master bedroom was open and empty. He went past it and took the narrow, winding staircase into Evan’s attic.
    It was in chaos. Books had been pulled from shelves. His desk drawers had been dumped.
    And his computers were gone.
    Evan had several laptops and a few desktops, all of them in active use for various tasks such as file sharing and gaming. He had probably needed his workhorse laptop to stream the video, but he wouldn’t have taken all of them. Even his stacks of external hard drives and bins of memory cards were missing.
    Max sat in Evan’s desk chair. He swiveled slowly, taking in the whole room. He suspected the rest of the house had been ransacked to disguise the real target.
    There was another possibility: Maybe Evan had seen all this before his parents did. It had spooked him, sent him on the run. And ultimately, it had convinced him that the only way out was to kill himself.
    “Jesus,” Max said.
    He poked around the mess of books and loose cables scattered around the carpet.
    He didn’t know what he was looking for. A suicide note? A pay stub from Evan’s supposed job would be nice, if that hadn’t been a cover story to get him out of the house without arousing suspicion. Wherever it was, he must have stayed out late often, or else his parents would have been alarmed when he didn’t come home. Maybe they were already wondering where he was.
    Max looked at the posters on Evan’s wall. Above his bed, close to the ceiling, was a long strip of paper: a reproduction of the first long-distance telegram, transmitted by Samuel F.B. Morse in 1844. It was a series of Morse code notations with the translated letters written below: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?
    Evan said that the telegraph, one of the many obsolete technologies that he was infatuated with, was the first internet. His online handle had been inspired by the telegram’s use of “STOP” to indicate a period at the end of a sentence.
    Max climbed onto the bed and reached his hand up. He swept it along the printout, feeling for anything behind it. There was a slight, rectangular bump in the middle. He peeled the paper from the wall and turned it over.
    A white plastic card was taped to the back. Next to it, Evan had neatly handwritten the lines “HTTP Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “A patient waiter is no loser.”
    Error 503 was the inspiration for Max’s online handle. His specialty had been implementing Distributed Denial of Service attacks to take down websites. He’d had a fleet of botnets, computers infected with malware so that with a click of his mouse he could use the network to cripple a site with requests in a matter of minutes. It had seemed like fun at the time, but Max wasn’t proud of it now. He’d given Evan access to the botnets when he got out of hacking, but as far as he knew, he’d never used them.
    Max examined the quarter-inch thick plastic card. It was about the size of his palm, and from the embossed “HID” in one corner, he knew it was made by one of the world’s top manufacturers of security systems.
    A keycard? For what?
    He added it to his pocket with the folded printout then took one last look around before