Page 14 of Hide and Seek

“Yeah.” Jace taps his fingers against the arm of his chair. “I’m not finding anything on that front either. I pulled the school swipe logs and looked at his card history, and he’s never been in either of the King houses or any of the buildings associated with them.”

“I don’t get him,” I tell my brother. “Nothing about him makes sense. He’s this genius hacker, but he literally handed you a way to hack him. He has incredible situational awareness and knows I’m following him, but he hasn’t bothered to alter hisroutes or even close his curtains. He’s rich as fuck, but he reads books about Marx and socialism and used his skills to take down a fake charity.” I shake my head. “He’s a walking contradiction.”

“That he is,” Jace agrees. “And this will really bend your noodle, but the charity job isn’t the only thing he’s done.”

“You’ve found more?”

He nods. “It took some digging, but it looks like our boy retired his old hacker name just before he started here at Silvercrest. The charity job is the most high-profile one I’ve found, and so far it looks like that’s the only time he’s teamed up with others to do a job, but there’s evidence of hacks going back almost five years.”

“Five years, like he was thirteen when he started?”

“Yup. The first few years were mostly random things like hacking public address systems and playing creepy music over them or changing the messages on electronic signage on highways and on the side of the road with silly slogans or middle fingers.”

“Sounds familiar.”

Jace grins. “We all gotta cut our teeth somehow. Public mischief is a rite of passage for us hackers. The interesting thing about our boy is that, as far as I can tell, he went right into white-hat hacks after he was done playing around and fucking with people.” He snaps his gum loudly.

“Like what kind of white-hat jobs?”

“Like erasing school lunch debt for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of kids around the country. He also doxed dozens of sex offenders who were considered at high risk to re-offend but were released anyway. And he doxed a shit ton of cops who were fired from other precincts for things like assault, sex crimes, wrongful deaths, all sorts of nasty shit, and hired at new ones.”

“And you didn’t find any evidence of him using his abilities to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it?”

Jace shakes his head.

“This kid is a walking contradiction,” I say again. “Nothing about him makes sense.”

“Good thing you like puzzles,” Jace muses and pulls his knife out of his pocket again. “So what are you going to do?” He flips open the knife, then snaps it shut a few times in a blur of glinting metal.

“Keep watching him until I know what his deal is.” I blow out a frustrated breath. “But I think it’s time for some more intensive surveillance. We need to figure out what’s going on before we can decide what to do about him. And we really don’t have any time to waste with the break coming up.”

He grins and pulls open his desk drawer. “I thought you might be going in that direction, so I took the liberty of getting this for you.” He digs out a small box that looks like it’s for jewelry and holds it up.

“Gee, thanks,” I say dryly. “You shouldn’t have.”

He throws the box at me. “Open it before you sass me, asswipe.”

I catch it with one hand and flip up the top. “Oh,” I say when I see the tiny camera nestled in the cushioned interior. I recognize the model, and it’s one of the best ones out there.

“That’s what I thought.” He smirks.

“Thanks.” I snap the box closed and put it on the bed next to me. “Do I want to know where you got this?”

He grins. “Depends. Do you want plausible deniability?”

I snort-laugh. “Do I ever?”

“I may or may not have intercepted a couple of packages that were supposed to be delivered to King House.”

“Tampering with mail is a felony,” I say with a teasing smirk.

“So is half the shit I did before lunch today.” He shrugs. “Felonies are like Pokémon at this point, and I gotta catch them all.”

I laugh. “You’re well on your way to a full set.”

“Like you aren’t.” He huffs out a laugh. “But if anything, it’s the Kings’ fault. I wouldn’t have had to break the law if they didn’t order tech they can’t be trusted with. Not my fault I have to babysit them.”

“It’s almost like they want you to fuck with them and their mail.”