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

the debate. He cleared the cache and refreshed the page to make sure she hadn’t published her exposé yet. If she blew Evan’s cover, Max would have even less time before the Feds became interested in him. He couldn’t even be sure that she wouldn’t mention Max in the story, after the way they’d left things last night. She’d made it pretty clear that getting the scoop was more important than anything, including him.
    Max looked around the coffee shop at the other early risers. A guy in a red and gold Los Medanos College hoodie sat at the table next to him, typing on his MacBook with just his index fingers, as if he were playing “Chopsticks” on a piano. A copy of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and a messy stack of index cards rested beside him.
    Max leaned over. “Excuse me?”
    The student glanced at Max and plucked one white earbud from his ear.
    “Could I borrow a pen?” Max asked.
    The guy rummaged in the messenger bag on the chair beside him and pulled out a red ballpoint pen without a cap.
    “I think this writes.” He handed it to Max.
    “Thanks.” Max scribbled on a gray napkin made of 100 percent recycled paper. The ink was sticky and the pen tip almost tore the thin paper, but it worked.
    Some things were better done on paper than on a computer. He scribbled Evan’s code across the top of the napkin. It stood to reason that it wasn’t as easy as a substitution of one for one, with all those random numbers and punctuation marks and other characters.
    “Do you want something better to write on?” the LMC student asked.
    Max smiled. “That would be great,” he said.
    “I don’t need these anymore.” He passed Max a short stack of index cards with almost illegible notes on the front of each. “The backs are clean.”
    “Thanks,” Max said.
    Max messed around with the text message for about an hour while his second cup of coffee went cold. He tried dividing it into words based on where the spaces were and applied every cipher he remembered, backwards and forwards. He tried merging some of his and Evan’s favorite ciphers. He pulled out all the numbers then put them back again. He arranged the sequence in different patterns, sorted them by length, built intricate matrices until it resembled a cracked-out game of Scrabble.
    Max shredded the last index card. He hadn’t done cryptanalysis in a long time. Either this was the toughest code Evan had ever devised, or it wasn’t a code at all and he was just wasting time.
    If it was a passphrase, it was way too long to be useful to most people, even for Evan and his astonishing mnemonics. But it was possible that he had created a one-off passphrase, knowing that only Max’s memory could retain one this complicated.
    So if it was a passphrase, the trick was figuring out what it was for—just as he had to do with the keycard he was carrying, which unlocked a door somewhere in the world. Until he found out where they fit, he would have to keep them safe from whoever had ransacked the Baxters’ house.
    “Hey, can you watch my stuff for a minute?” the college student asked.
    Max nodded absentmindedly, gazing out the wide front windows.
    After a minute of staring at the street in front of the shop where he’d parked his dad’s Impala, he registered a black sedan that was now parked in the spot behind his. The side windows were tinted, but Max could see the occupants through the clear windshield. The driver wore dark sunglasses and a green polo shirt under a gray windbreaker. His passenger had on a black T-shirt and a blue and white varsity jacket, and was typing on a bulky black laptop balanced on the dashboard.
    Max was getting an ugly vibe from these guys. They looked too old to be college students and more like actors hired to play teenagers on television. He glanced at the LMC student’s table suspiciously. Was he with them?
    Max’s laptop screen had gone dark to conserve power, so he tapped a key to wake it up. He refreshed Courtney’s