Page 78 of Zero Days

The phone was still ringing, vibrating across the table, and I was still trying to make up my mind when a woman strolled past, pushing a sleeping baby in a buggy, and remarked, “Well it ain’t gonna answer itself, is it?” with a kind of weary pissed-offness that put my back up.

You have no idea what I’m dealing with, I wanted to snap at her. But the truth was, that went both ways. Maybe she had lost someone too. Maybe she was afraid. Maybe she was mired in postnatal depression.

Okay, she almost certainly wasn’t on the run from the police, a suspect in her dead husband’s murder. But either way, she was right. The phone wasn’t going to answer itself, and I wasn’t gaining a great deal by letting it ring. It had already connected to the cell towers, beaming out its location to anyone who knew the number. Picking up wouldn’t change much. And the truth was, the ringing was starting to drive me crazy, boring into my aching head like a drill.

I took a deep breath. I picked up the phone. I pressed answer.

“Who is this?” the caller immediately demanded.

I blinked. The voice at the other end was immediately familiar—but I couldn’t place it. The speaker was a woman, and it sounded like she was somewhere busy; I could hear the sound of computer keyboards clicking in the background, people talking. For a crazy minute I wondered if it was Keeley calling from the Sunsmile call center—if she had tracked me down to demand what the fuck I had been playing at. But no—that was insane, of course it was. She didn’t have my number, let alone Gabe’s. And glancing at my watch I saw that it was too late for Sunsmile to be open. But I did know that voice. Was it one of Gabe’s friends?

And then, as the caller spoke again, repeating her question with a sharper intonation, “Who is this?” I knew.

It’s me,” I said very quietly.

There was a long silence. When the caller spoke again, she didn’t sound abrupt anymore. In fact, there was a warmth in her voice, a smile like someone whose Christmases just came all at once.

“Hello, Jack,” she said. “It’s really, really good to hear your voice.”

I shut my eyes.

Malik.

DS Habiba Malik. The woman I had last heard calling me through the sea mist, threatening to hunt me down with dogs. And now her voice was in my ear, with an intimacy that made me shiver. Because it was that voice, her voice, that had grilled me hour after hour on the night of Gabe’s death, and then again the next day, pulling apart my story and putting it back together in the most damning way. It was Malik who had urged me through my account again and again, winkling out details I barely remembered, picking up on inconsistencies I hadn’t even noticed myself—and it was her voice that had made me run, when I’d heard her out in the corridor, urging my arrest.

And although she’d been wrong about my guilt, she’d been right about practically everything else—more often than I wanted to admit. This case had stunk, from beginning to end. It was all wrong, just as she’d told Miles that night. And she’d had me pegged too. Where Miles had looked at me and seen nothing but a harmless, grieving widow, Malik had seen me for what I was—someone steely, someone determined—a flight risk. And she’d been right.

Fuck. In one sense answering the phone hadn’t done much—Malik must have known, as soon as Gabe’s phone lost service, that I was behind it. But I had given her certainty where before there had been doubt. Now the police knew exactly where to look.

“Jack, look, I understand,” Malik was saying in my ear. Her voice was kind, sympathetic—the tone she’d used on that first night, when she had helped me pick out clothes to take to the police station and wash Gabe’s blood off my hands. But I knew that kindness was a means to an end. I had done enough calls like this myself—calls where you just wanted to keep your mark on the line long enough to get the information you needed. I was Malik’s mark. And she was good. “Your sister told us what’s been going on,” Malik was saying now, her tone warm. “She told us you didn’t do this. But you can’t help yourself by running. We want to believe you. We want to find out who did this, but we can’t do that without your help. Will you help us, Jack?”

“I know who did it,” I said. My voice shook. “At least, I know who led them to Gabe. His name is Cole Garrick. He works for Cerberus Security. And he is—” My voice cracked. “He was Gabe’s best friend. And you need to arrest him right now.”

“We’re looking into all—” Malik began, but I interrupted.

“Listen to me—this was a contract killing, by the people who employ Cole. He’s probably got an alibi up to the hilt because he wasn’t the one who actually cut Gabe’s throat, but he was the person who started all this, and he was the person who put Gabe into their crosshairs, and if you wait to act, they will kill Cole too. If you want him alive to stand trial, you need to take him into custody right now.”

“Let’s talk about all this at the station,” Malik said persuasively. “You must be exhausted, Jack. Let me send a car to pick you up.”

I put my hand to my head, feeling something very close to a hysterical laugh bubble up inside me. Exhausted? Exhausted didn’t even begin to cover it. I felt… I felt like I had nothing left to give, nowhere else to go. My side hurt. My joints hurt. Everything hurt, and I felt constantly on the verge of throwing up. Was it really time to stop running? Maybe it was.

But then I heard something. My head went up, listening. It was a police siren. And when I put my head down and looked out of the food court window, I could see blue lights slicing through the darkness of the car park.

If I gave myself up now, I would have to trust Malik to believe my story, read Gabe’s garbled notes, understand the significance of what I had found, and, more importantly, act on it, before Cole’s handlers got to it.

Because whatever Cole had done, whatever he deserved, I didn’t want him to die. I wanted him to end up in prison for what he had done to Gabe, but I didn’t want him killed.

Most crucially of all, I wanted that zero-day exploit—the exploit that had cost Gabe his life—patched so that no one else could ever benefit from it. Whatever those people were doing, whatever information they were gaining, it was worth killing for. And Gabe had taught me there was only one sure way of making certain that patch happened.

Publicity.

“Goodbye, Malik,” I said, and I stood up, packing away the laptop.

“Jack,” she said, and her voice was sharp now. “Jack. Don’t—”

I hung up. I turned off the phone with Gabe’s SIM in it, and my own, and shoved both into my rucksack.

Then I began to walk. Not particularly fast. Just the brisk walk of a woman with somewhere to go and something to do. And not towards the door, where I could see another pair of blue lights pulling into the forecourt. With my head down and my hood pulled up, I was walking the other way. Deeper into the service station. Towards the stairs, and the overpass that lead to the southbound service station.

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