“Well how am I supposed to get into her place?”
“Just go round there. Say you need to speak to her. Say you’re feeling sad about me dying or something, and heard that we were together. She might be feeling sad too.” From the look on his face Amber realized that Billy really needed this to be true.
“But how do I…” she waved a hand over the box of electrical covert gadgets. “How do I install it? What do I do?”
At once Billy seemed happier again. He showed her what to do. How the phone-charger devices were the easiest, you just had to plug them in, they were pre-programmed to record and transmit, whenever they picked up sound, and you could even dial into them remotely. They drew power directly from the mains. But that wasn’t all Billy wanted.
“The hardest thing is this, but it’s also the most important.” He held up a USB stick.
“What is it?”
“It’s really good. You need to install it on her laptop, and it will let me see everything she’s done, plus I can get more audio, wherever she takes the laptop. But…” he hesitated a second.
“But what?”
“Well, you need to be careful. She doesn’t have the quickest laptop, so it’ll take about two minutes to install, and while it’s running, it’ll be visible what you’re doing. So you need to make sure she doesn’t see what you’re doing while it’s installing.”
After that he pulled out another box, this time one from a store and in it was a new cell phone. Billy explained it was a pre-paid cell that wasn’t tied to anyone. In theory they should be able to use it without danger of it being tracked, though to be on the safe side he’d installed peer-to-peer encryption, whatever the hell that was. But there was one more thing, something that he didn’t seem to have prepared. Billy asked her to buy him a new computer. He scrawled down a list of specifications, telling her to have it delivered to the Silverlea Surf Lifesaving Club, where his Dad could pick it up and deliver it to him, in case the FBI were monitoring her purchases.
It was only when she was driving away that the weight of it all hit her. She’d driven there, a tiny bit of her wondering if there was some mistake, but mostly needing to be sure, to allow herself to truly begin to grieve. She was leaving with her world blown apart, having agreed to a crazy plan that she didn’t understand, and seemed utterly futile. Yet with no idea what else to do.
Back at home – her old home at least – her mom was surprised to see her, but Amber explained how she’s failed to get on the ferry, and instead needed time to think, to get used to the fact that Billy was gone. It wasn’t hard to keep her face downbeat and somber, as if he really was dead. The truth was he might not be dead, but he was truly in a heap of trouble, and there seemed little chance of him getting out of it. Worse, if she really was going to do what he asked, then surely she would be guilty of aiding and abetting a felon. She didn’t know what the penalty for that was, nor did she care to look it up.
Instead, when she was in her room, late that night, she typed in the specifications for the computer Billy had asked for. And then, after a few moment’s shock, she called him on the burner phone.
“What is it? Have you done it already?”
“No! I’ve just seen how much this computer costs.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, it’s the cheapest I could find.”
“It’s seven thousand dollars. For a computer.”
“I know. But you’ve got your savings, after Dad bought us back out of the business.”
“I know I do. But I only have seven thousand dollars left.”
“That’s why I choose that computer. I could really do with a slightly better one, but I can boost that one with bits I have here…”
“Billy! It’s seven thousand dollars. Do you really need a computer that powerful?”
There was a silence, and she could imagine him, sitting there, surrounded by nothing but marshland, a little bubble of tech, protecting him from the full weight of the Government’s justice machine. She didn’t understand it, but she realized he was pitifully out-gunned.
“OK. I’ll get it.”
“Make sure you send it to the Silverlea Surf Lifesaving Club. You’ve done work for them before, so it won’t look suspicious.”
Amber nodded, and then told him she would do it now. Then there was a moment’s silence.
“Thanks Amber,” Billy broke it after a while. “Thank you for believing in me.”
Then the line went dead.
Chapter Fifty-Six
There were four long hours on the ferry the next day to think about it. Five if you included the bus there and the wait to board. Amber used them to try to make sense of what she was doing.
There was no doubt she believed Billy. At least, she believed he hadn’t been behind the bombings. She wasn’t beyond imagining that he could have been involved in some kind of campaign against Fonchem – the fact that he agreed to fly his drone over the site demonstrated that. But a bombing was a million miles further than he would ever go. There was no way. Whether or not James and Oscar really were the guilty parties though – she only had his word on it, and she knew he’d been wrong before, maybe on more times than he’d been right. At the same time, inviting him to dinner, and using a pressure cooker, which they encouraged him to touch – well that was just weird and too much of a coincidence given how one was used to house the bomb. Plus of course they had traveled with him to Lornea, at least if Billy was telling the truth. But she had no idea why they
