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

heading home.

5
    Max carried his paper cup of coffee to the reading nook in the back of Bean Up, where he and Courtney had sat on their first date. They had talked until the shop closed, and the night ended with a vanilla latte-flavored kiss, with a hint of cinnamon.
    The empty chair across the small round table seemed accusatory. Courtney must still be angry with him; she had sent an e-mail early that morning saying she would drive herself to school. She’d likely stayed up all night writing her article. It wasn’t online yet, and he wondered if she really would post it.
    Max yawned. He drank half his coffee, letting the hot liquid do the work of waking him up until the caffeine kicked in. The scalding black brew tasted like punishment.
    He stifled another yawn and opened his laptop.
    After getting home from Evan’s the night before, he’d curled up in bed with his computer and ran every decryption program he had against the text Evan had sent him. Considering what Evan had done a short while after sending it, Max believed the message was important, and that he was meant to decipher it.
    A coffee grinder droned behind the counter. The gay barista who always gave Max free refills smiled when Max looked over.
    In junior high, Max and Evan used to trade notes encrypted with the simplest of substitution codes, the kind where A equals one , B equals two , and so on. They soon moved from that basic cipher to devising their own, more complicated ones, and their interests gradually shifted to computer hacking and decrypting databases of passwords to get access to people’s e-mails, social media accounts, and private systems.
    Most computer systems stored passwords as encrypted hashCodes. It took a long time to crack them by brute force with software, but dictionaries of words and their corresponding hashCodes—called rainbow tables—made it much easier.
    If someone used a common word like “password”—which plenty of people actually did—it would take under a second to crack the hashCode by checking it against these tables. And once you had one password for a site or system, you often had access to that person’s other accounts. Lots of people sacrificed security for convenience by using the same password everywhere.
    Max was starting from scratch, though, with no hint at a possible cipher key that could help him translate Evan’s text. He didn’t even know where to begin.
    He stared at the forty-two characters on his screen, which he had meticulously retyped. There were few repetitions and he could see no discernible pattern. He checked them over carefully once more. If he misremembered even a single character, the code would be much harder to crack—if not rendered entirely useless. But his memory hadn’t failed him yet. He routinely recalled passwords as complicated as this one.
    Max lifted his heavy head and rubbed his eyes. They stung from fatigue, and his neck ached from craning it forward. When he picked up his cup, he was surprised it was empty. He checked the time in the corner of his screen: seven-thirty. He should have left two minutes ago to get to school on time.
    He didn’t move. The only reason to go to school was to act normal, and he didn’t think he could go through the day pretending that he wasn’t mourning his best friend. He might be able to reclaim his cell phone, but he’d already written it off; if the FBI had checked it, they would want him to answer some difficult questions.
    In fact, once they cracked his phone or otherwise discovered STOP was Evan, they would be looking for Max. No reason to make it easy on them by being exactly where they would expect him to be.
    He wasn’t ready to face Courtney yet either.
    Max fired off a short e-mail to his dad inquiring about the lawyer. It might be a good idea to have that phone number with him if things went south today.
    He loaded Full Cort Press . Courtney’s most recent blog post was from yesterday where she said she was excited about