Page 97 of Master of Lies

Concentrate, Masters. Think.I had one pass at this. One. No second chances.

I entered the address of SmokeScreen on the darkweb, and the first dialog box popped up on a black screen, no explanations, no directions.

I tried to clear space in my mind for the first of the eight passwords. I had a good capacity to visualize, but I’d never tested it under conditions like these. The last line of the poem, backward. I created a visual image for reference. Huge letters, as big as buildings, on a mountaintop. The last line was “Nothing gold can stay.”

So it would be .yatsnacdloggnihtoN. Got it. I fixed that image firmly in my mind. Imagined the hilltop at night. Imagined the letters illuminated, blazing with colored lights. As I entered the first letter, I just mentally switched the lights off in that letter, and let it go dark.

I began, slowly and carefully, to enter a string of numbers and symbols after it. Random filler. A clever way to buy time and look busy and compliant.

I hoped it would give the Drakes more time to find me. I’d chomped down on my tooth sensor convulsively the whole time I was in the trunk of the car. I still was biting it, probably in vain. I doubted the RF signal could escape from this place. They’d brought me down here with a hood over my head, but I had definitely gone down, down, down, three flights at least. This grotty old cinder-block room had the look and smell and mold level of an industrial sub-basement.

I couldn’t look at Jed. He looked terrible. His eyes swollen shut, his lips split and bloody, his nose clearly broken for the umpteenth time. God knows what they had done to the rest of him.

Nicole hovered over my shoulders, trying to follow what I was typing. She held up her phone, filming me as I enter the numbers.

After about ten minutes, she made a suspicious sound. “Really? You committed that much code to memory? Two possibilities here, bitch. Either you’re bullshitting us, or you’re one of those robot freak savant types. Which is it?”

“It’s sort of more the second thing, but…oh, shit. Oops, that was an q, not an a. When you threaten me, I get flustered. Sorry.” I backed up, fixed it, and proceeded to insert a bunch of random numbers afterward.

“Yeah, she’s definitely fucking with us.” Boer was hanging over my other shoulder now, too, squinting at the characters filling the screen. “I better get the hacksaw. I think she needs a nudge, don’t you, Nicole?”

“I think that for once, Wex, you may be right,” she said.

Oh fuck. I had to throw those bastards some meat. Right the fucknow.

I narrowed my focus to a laser point, and entered the rest of the letters I had left in that line all at once, dloggnihtoN, followed by about twenty random numbers and symbols.

I took a deep breath, my finger hovering over “enter.” Please, God. Please, let me not have fucked it up and transposed something with my icy, trembling fingers.

I entered. Waited. The beach ball twirled. I held my breath…every muscle in my body rigid…and a fresh dialogue box appeared, inviting me to enter another password.

“What the fuck is this?” Boer demanded.

I shot an apologetic glance over my shoulder at him. “There are eight of them.”

“This will take for-fucking-ever,” Boer growled.

I turned back to the screen, and found that knife, shoved up under my eyeball again. “You do understand what happens if you disappoint us, right?” Nicole said.

I looked down the foreshortened blade that filled my field of vision. It was ice cold against my skin, the point stinging the skin under my eye. “I think I have a clue,” I said. “Shall I proceed?”

She gave me a menacing stare. “Don’t show me attitude, bitch,” she said. “I have all the power here, and I will take it out of you, and him, in blood. And I will enjoy the fuck out of it.” She pressed the knife harder under my eye. It burned. Breaking skin.

“Is that a yes to me proceeding?”

She really wanted me to cringe and grovel, and it would have been the smart thing to indulge her, but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Not while also holding all this information suspended in my mind. I just simply couldn’t do it.

Onward. The penultimate line of the poem was “So dawn comes down to day.” I plugged it into the huge letters-on-the-hill image in my mind. .yadotnwodseognwadoS

This time, having established for them that I wasn’t completely full of shit, I took the liberty of entering even more garbage numbers and symbols between each letter. Pages of them. Ethan said the first password would ping him the location of the computer, so hopefully, he knew where I was now. Who knows, he might already be able to turn on the microphone and listen to us. My task was to use this data entry job to stall, stall, stall. Which was exactly what it was designed for. My brilliant brothers.

I hoped the Drakes were able to follow the signal from my tooth sensor. But whatever. That was outside my control at this point. I had to focus on the task at hand.

“So what is this place, anyway?” I made my voice high-pitched, so it sounded like anxious babbling. “This can’t be a private home, not with a concrete sub-basement. We must’ve gone down, what, three flights of stairs? Where are we? Is this a power station, or a bunker? Some industrial structure? Maybe a factory, or a—”

“How about you shut the fuck up and concentrate on your code, bitch?”

The knife pressed beneath my eye, and I yelped as it broke the skin again. A thread of blood trickled down my cheek and dropped off my jaw.

---