A Dark Ghost

Part Two: Chapter Ten

The coughing had died down a little, not as noticeable as before but still there. It was a little weird not having Jude, Vida and Ruby around. I was beginning to miss Jude's constant chatter, and lack of poker face while playing cheat, Vida's sarcastic comments and rude-but-accurate nicknames, and my inside jokes with Ruby. Hopefully, it wouldn't be too long until they came back. I was trying to find Nico to ask him how his remote-control car was coming along, but I couldn't find him anywhere. He'd been disappearing more and more lately and no one could figure out where to.

On the way, I spotted Cate running around looking frantic. As I raised my hand to wave to her, she spotted and grabbed me, pulling me by the arm into a nearby empty room.

"Hey, Cate. What's—" I could barely finish my sentence before she shoved a chatter in my face, it's dim light still harsh up close. It had a conversation on it between two people, and it seemed normal enough.

"It's a convo, why the stress?" As I pushed the small device further away from me, my eyes adjusted and I could actually read the messages. It was a conversation between Cate and Vida, but something was wrong. The tone wasn't quite right on the messages being received. Scrolling through, I saw the final two messages. Later, gator. In a while, crocodile.

Later, gator was our standard goodbye, but it was never followed by crocodile, it was followed by in an hour, sunflower - a play on Cate's call-sign. Vida would never get that wrong. Which could only mean...

"This isn't Vi, is it?"

Cate shook her head. We were in deep shit.

~

It wasn't that hard to find Cole when both Cate and I were looking for him. I tried to multitask by looking for Nico as well to see if I could figure out how our chatter connection had been hacked, but he'd disappeared again. In the end, I found another green and brushed past them on my way to finding Cole. After watching a few online talks about hacking, programming and secure signals and once we had found Cole, Cate got me a faster computer to figure out when we stopped talking to Vida and started talking to someone else.

As it turns out, we hadn't had our connection interrupted for that long - only a few days, but there was no other way of getting in contact with the real Vida, other than finding out who or what was intercepting and redirecting our messages. I sat, hunched over the computer screen with my fingers flying over the keys. Cole and Cate were practically breathing down the back of my neck in both anticipation and awe - they'd only ever seen me switch from blue to red and back - never seen me as a green or yellow.

"The signal's encrypted. I've managed to get through the first firewall, but our mystery person here is rerouting not only their signal to bounce through separate US satellites, but also masking their IP address using a proxy or VPN which means I can't find their signal or identity through there."

"Uhh, English?" Cole raised his eyebrows, a recognisable sign of confusion.

"Long story short, I can't find them." I sighed, shutting the laptop. "We just have to wait and hope there's an improvement on the other end. Hopefully, they'll figure out it's not us just as quick as we figured out it wasn't them."

Cate piped up nervously, "So there's nothing we can do?"

Shaking my head, I replied, "We can't do anything except wait."

"Well, actually no. There is one thing that we could do." I turned around to face Cole, his eyes burning intensely with an idea. "We could catfish them."

"Catfish?" Cate echoed, weighing up the possibilities.

"It's when—" He started to explain, but was quickly cut back off by Cate.

"Don't mansplain this to me, I'm not so old I don't know what the word 'catfishing' means."

I turned my laugh into a fake cough at a glare from Cole, contemplating the success of the idea. If it worked, we could figure out why the person on the other end had intercepted our signal. If it didn't, on the other hand, we could potentially reveal the fact that we knew it wasn't our agents on the other end and possibly put them in danger. Then again, if they were already in danger, we wouldn't know because they still can't contact us directly. It's a lose-lose situation.

Unable to make a decision, we did the least bias thing possible. The decision was made to flip a coin.

"Heads - we do it. Tails - we wait." Cole picked up the dime and rolled it between his finger and thumb before flicking it up into the air, catching it and placing it on his hand.

Slowly, he moved his other hand from on top of the coin.

It had landed on heads.