Rogue Element

‘Okay, assuming you’re right, and I think you are, what do you suggest?’

‘Fucked if I know, to be honest,’ said Joe, scratching his head vigorously with both hands, scraping crawling things off his scalp with broken fingernails. ‘We can stay more or less here, go back, go sideways, just any way but forwards.’

‘What if we move in a big circle, an opposite circle to the one we’re making now?’ said Suryei.

‘Double back?’

Suryei rubbed out Joe’s track and replaced it with her alternative suggestion. ‘I know it sounds obvious but, yes, basically. Cut across here at right angles and rejoin our original path out from the crash. Then, we should be able to come up on the 747 from behind.’

Joe thought about it. It made sense and was perhaps their only option. ‘Okay, sounds reasonable. We’ll continue to the top of this ravine and confirm our bearings, then slip across hard left.’

‘But what if those assassins think we’ll do that and set a trap for us?’

‘Jesus, Suryei —’

‘I know. I’m just asking what you think. I don’t want to die here, you know.’

‘Okay, well, we can double think this, or double-double think the options, but no matter what we decide to do, we could think ourselves into a trap.’

‘I know that too, okay?’ Suryei’s shoulders had slumped.

‘Suryei, I —’

‘Look, whatever. Let’s just get it fucking over with.’

Joe was too tired to argue.

Despite her exhaustion Suryei did feel less anxious about their revised plan. Their last one, simply making a beeline for the plane wreckage, didn’t take into account the people with guns. She felt a little more confident now and it took some of the heaviness out of her step. Still, it was a wickedly steep climb. Sheer determination kept them going, just one more step. Half an hour’s near vertical climbing brought them exhausted to the summit.

It did them no good. The canopy closed in overhead and any view of the surrounding country below them was obliterated. Joe flopped to the ground with disappointment and exhaustion. He was filled with self-pity until he saw that Suryei had continued to move into the trees. She was no better off, but she wasn’t complaining. She just kept going. He caught up to her. Suryei looked at him and smiled — albeit wanly. They walked in silence along the ridge for a time. The low ground rose to meet them and they found themselves back in the thick of the jungle. Maddeningly, the climb had been for nothing. They hadn’t managed to catch even the barest glimpse of the surrounding terrain.

Joe found a tree he thought he might be able to shin up. Around ten minutes later he was back beside Suryei, panting and weak with exhaustion from the climb and lack of food. ‘We’re okay. Our track is about right.’ He shouldered his rucksack and they walked slowly.

‘Do you do a lot of computer hacking?’ asked Suryei after they had regained their rhythm. They did their best to pick the path of least resistance through the jungle but, now that they were back on low ground, the jungle pressed in on them from every side.

‘A bit. It’s a sideline.’

‘It’s stealing, though, isn’t it?’

Joe looked at Suryei’s back. She didn’t turn her head when she spoke. He wondered how much was conversation, and how much was accusation. Probably both. Talk was dangerous. He had no idea how far noise carried but, without conversation, he felt alone. Perhaps Suryei felt the same. Her question, if it was an accusation, was almost impossible to defend because he knew she was right.

At seventeen, he had gone to work for a software giant in the States, because that was the Mecca if you were seriously gifted. Joe was regarded as one of its brightest stars, but he was easily distracted. Within a few months he’d decided that the money the giant corporation earned was obscene. He created a virus he called Ethiopia which, when activated, consumed any word on the hard disk that was even remotely reminiscent of food, and left a small thumbnail image of a young black child with a distended belly in the space. Joe incorporated the virus into the operating system he was helping to write. The trigger for Ethiopia was keying the word ‘lunch’ into the system’s appointments book. Over 50 000 copies of the new operating system had been shipped before the virus revealed itself.

Joe was quietly but forcefully shown the back door, while the corporation went into damage control. That’s when Joe also discovered that he had a talent for hacking, particularly as the giant’s employees had designed so many systems in use. He knew the way these people thought, and that was the key, getting inside the mind of the programmers. So Joe went to work as a freelancer, spying for companies wanting information from competitors.