Code of Silence

Code of Silence - Chapter 22

Alex was pacing around the sofa where we'd been sitting, not quite sure what to say or do. I looked across at Theo who had returned to his chair, face now buried in his hands. The whole situation was like a bad dream.

"Don't worry, we'll get this sorted somehow," I said, crouching down beside Theo's chair. I hoped my words might help Theo, but I was terrified; my heart was racing and I was clueless about what we should do next.

Anyone could see that Theo was going to struggle to think properly right now. After all, he'd just taken one and a half million euros from Anatoly Dragovich, a member of the Vory, one of most dangerous criminal organisations in the world, and there was no way of just apologetically handing it back. Maybe he could continue with the deal he'd agreed with Dragovich. But that would potentially implicate him in some sort of global cybercrime activity, jeopardising his father's chance of freedom and dragging the rest of his family into this nightmare at the same time.

There had to be a way out of this, but I was struggling to see it. Calling the local police right now seemed futile. They hadn't really been able to do anything to help locate and release Theo's father so far. Apart from maybe providing a presence at the house, they couldn't stop the Vory coming after us. And Dragovich would want to see something in return for the first payment he'd made. Fortunately, Theo's mother and sister were due to fly to Greece the next day to spend some time comforting relatives while the investigation continued. At least they'd be safer there, and less easy to track down for anyone that might have a reason to.

I turned to Theo again. "Have you talked to Khan about this?" Theo just shook his head slowly as he stared silently at the floor.

I thought it would be worthwhile. At least Khan might have a clearer understanding of it all. Maybe we were overthinking things or maybe we were just in too deep. A fresh perspective would be helpful, so we decided to head over to the university the next day to see if we could catch up with Khan.

After a while, Theo pulled himself together a bit and went downstairs, asking his mother if we could stay over for the night so that we could head to the university together the following day. Theo's mother and sister were on an early flight the next morning, and he told us she'd been happy to know that he would have some company after they'd gone. We were welcome to stay.

We spent the rest of the evening running through a plan for the next day. If we could get to the university early it would still be quiet. Theo would encrypt everything on his devices and home servers before we left to provide a higher level of protection, but this wasn't something that could guarantee security. Any experienced rogue hacker employed by a foreign state to infiltrate another country's election campaign could sure as hell crack open Theo's box of tricks.

As a backup, Theo had created some new coding that would self-delete any versions of the existing Vvox programme, a sort of self-destruct button, that would be triggered by any unauthorised access, hacking attempts or malware it detected. This would effectively wipe everything out permanently, and leave the only master key copy of the AI voice coding on Theo's SED. It was a risky move, but as long as we had the physical SED then we were in control. It was also a very valuable item now, worth at least three million euros on the internet, probably a whole lot more on the dark web.

Khan was someone we could share things with, and he might have some immediate answers or suggestions. I'd messaged him saying we would be there first thing, hoping that Khan would also be in early doing his usual preparation for the forthcoming term. I hadn't had a response yet, but thought we would track him down easily enough in the morning. The plan was to travel in Alex's car, as Dragovich was familiar with Theo's and would no doubt be monitoring its movements. If it remained at the house all day then the assumption would be that Theo was at home. Dragovich was unlikely to pay another visit, as he knew the police were keeping an eye on the family and could drop by at any moment.