Page 38 of The Refusal

“I don’t understand.”

He rubs his hair back and forward in his hands. “I don’t want to lose him”—his voice cracks—“You get that, yeah? He’s my best friend, and I don’t have anyone else. You’ve got to promise to help me.”

I shake my head at him. “I’m not going to agree to anything until I understand what’s going on. Why are you afraid that Janus is going to be upset? Why aren’t you angry with him for putting something on your system?”

Fabian lifts his head with his hand over his mouth and focuses on the benches outside, on the street starting to hum with people talking into their headsets as they walk to work. The counter is getting busier. He stirs his coffee, sips it, and stares out the window some more.

“You know I hack into some fairly dodgy places?” he starts.

What the hell is coming next?

“Define dodgy.” I don’t like where my stomach goes when he makes a face. I cross my eyes at him, and he laughs.

He waves his hand. “All this stuff I do”—he pauses—“I’m pretty careful. They don’t usually find out. But I’ve been wondering recently whether someone has noticed that I’ve been poking around.”

Perhaps heisbeing blackmailed.

“Definesomeone.”

He shrugs. “I’ve dug around in a lot of systems over the years, and I don’t do anything with the information generally. Well, what I mean is, I don’t sell it. But you understand better than anyone that I need to keep out of the limelight to do what I do.”

He’s right. He wasn’t someone who was familiar to me when Janus mentioned him.

“I’ve explored a lot of systems: the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans—”

“Holycrap, Fabian,why?” I say, my voice rising. Breathe. Breathe.

“Um—I’m interested, okay? I went into a tricky Russian system more recently—” He holds up his hands when I roll my eyes at him. “I wascareful, but I think they worked out someone was in there. So I set up a test. There’s some brief written information on the Web about me, and I can monitor who’s looking at it and I picked up some activity from Russia—pretty fucking amateur of them—although they possibly wanted me to know they were looking me over. It could even be the Chinese wanting to make it appear like the Russians. Anyway, who knows about any of this shit? I’m sorry, Jo, I’m as paranoid as hell.” He stops and inhales. “Then I got a warning.”

“You werethreatened?” My heart sinks. Once you’ve gone beyond hacking online and they’ve located you … I mean, wow. That’s serious.

“Yeah, some random guy came up to me and said I needed to ‘watch those that were close to me.’” He makes air quotes around the words. “He was right in my face, and then he was gone. I chased after him but then lost him in a backstreet. Since I don’t have much family to speak of, I wasn’t too worried, and I thought it was some kind of joke.” He shrugs. “The usual crazies you come across in Manhattan. But then I picked up some chat online about Janus Industries’ security after the TechConn conference, and it made me wonder …”

They know what Fabianlookslike and followed him?Oh shit.

“… whether they might be trying to get at me through him, that perhaps it reallywassome sort of warning. So I went into Janus’s system and put some code in there to track what was happening and see if I could work out where it was coming from, who it could be, what might be going on. It’s been a bit trickier to access the network lately.” He smiles wanly at me.

This is so like what I’ve done that I could laugh, but Fabian is staring down into the dark swirl of his coffee, eyes shuttered.

“I’ve tried hard to make sure none of my activities ever touch him,” he mumbles. “Finding a connection between us online is quite difficult.”

He’s been trying to help. I slump a little in my seat, placing my hand over his on the table. He grips my fingers in return like I’m the only thing anchoring him here.

“Do people employ you to do this stuff?”

The curiosity about how this all works for him brings a million questions into my mind. No wonder he’s paranoid.

“Yeah, sometimes. Occasionally I sell information that’s not too controversial. But more often I’m testing systems to find the holes, and they pay me well for that.” He flexes his shoulders back. “I could probably charge a lot more, but I’m pretty wary.”

I stir my coffee, thinking. “The Russians, Chinese, or whoever … they haven’t tried to hack into your system?”

“They can’t.”

“What do you meanthey can’t?” I raise my eyebrows at him.

He starts ticking things off on his fingers. “The ports are locked down. I wrote my own kernel and verify the code mathematically. There are two operating systems checking each other—I’ve developed a lot of my own tools. It’s pretty impregnable, even for the best hackers.”

I gawp at him. “That’s insane amounts of work.”

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