Spoil the Kill

Chapter 5: The Written Word

As Easy already told us, it's Jonny's birthday on Tuesday. His friends are throwing him a party on Saturday. From the chatter on MyFace, it's going to be big ... and a masked costume party at that. For the first time since finding him, we have advance notice of when and where he's going to turn up. If we're springing a fake surprise attack on him – with some of Easy's trolls as witnesses – this might be our only chance. But it means setting him up to be snatched for real, with very little time to lay out our thing.

Jonny spends his birthday mooching around town with one of his mates. Manikin and I are following him, while FX checks out the house where the party will take place. This is a little more awkward, because we should all be in school. None of us go – we just kind of educate ourselves along the way. Mani's taller than me, and can look a lot older when she wants to, but I'm always nervous when I'm out on a weekday. The Safe-Guards can't stop and question me, of course, but a copper might – if you ever saw them out on the streets anymore.

Jonny splits off from his friend, agreeing to meet up later that afternoon. I wander after him as he makes his way into an internet café. Mani and I have been leap-frogging, swapping positions with each other so that neither of us has to shadow him too closely. I'm hanging behind him and watch him take a seat against the wall on the far side. I pay for a half hour and a bottle of water, then sit down at a PC that gives me a half-decent view over his shoulder.

Manikin comes in a minute later and does the same, sitting a couple of rows in front and to the right of him. She brings up some website that's mostly black, and I realize she can watch Jonny without him noticing, because he's reflected on her screen. We both have our earpieces in, so we can talk to each other.

"I can't see his screen," Manikin says. "What's he doing?"

"Checking his emails," I reply softly. "It's not from the account that FX found on his phone though. Can't make out what he's reading – but it looks like numbers ... Hang on ..."

Jonny has a book out on the desk beside him – an old paperback. He's glancing repeatedly up at the screen and down at the book, flicking quickly through the pages. I get a glimpse of the title on the cover: Strangled Silence. It's one of those paranoid surveillance state thrillers – became a bit of an underground classic after the WatchWorld system was introduced and those kinds of books were quietly withdrawn from the shelves of libraries, bookshops and even online retailers.

"Mani, he's reading something in code. Whatever it is, he's using the text of the book as a key. And who's he most likely to contact on the sly?"

"His dad," Manikin murmurs. "He's talking to his dad."

"That's a blacklisted book," I tell her. "I know a book dealer who can probably get me a copy. If we can get those numbers off the screen, we might be able to find out what they're saying."

It's a pretty secure but easy-to-use system of code, and very old school, but when you have a government that's suspicious of anyone who wants to hold onto their privacy, digitally encrypted emails tend to draw the attention of WatchWorld's hugely powerful computers, which trawl the web searching for criminal and terrorist communications. Old-fashioned codes like this are less likely to raise a red flag.

By using only page numbers, line numbers and a number to indicate which word on the line, you pick out words from the book to compose your message. Jonny's made a mistake by using it in public. The numbers should seem completely random with no pattern to them. Only somebody who knows which book to use, and has a similar printed edition, can decipher the message - ebooks are unreliable because the text reflows.

But now that we know what the book is, we can find each word that each set of numbers in the message refers to. Now all we need are the numbers in the message.