The Assassin Game by Kirsty McKay Page A

looks at me again.
    Marcia looks at me too. I don’t like her expression.
    â€œHe is good at this,” I say. “Well, I think so anyway; I haven’t seen him since we were eight. But even then he used to take computers apart and put them back together, program games for us to play, and that kind of thing. Then we…moved apart…and I heard he was a whiz kid. He was at Cambridge, I think?” I look at Vaughan. He nods encouragingly. “He probably knows a bit about computers.”
    Vaughan snorts at this. “A bit?” He thinks about it, smiles. “Oh, a bit! I get it. Quite good!”
    Alex looks him up and down. “We’re not lacking in talent at Umfraville, if you haven’t already noticed. Don’t you think that if anyone had the skills to effectively hide something like that, they would have done it already? What makes you so certain your site could stay hidden?”
    â€œBecause it already is.” Vaughan points his dagger at the laptop. “Wi-Fi. Are we capable here?”
    â€œOnly just,” Marcia says. “We put signal boosters on the cliff, directing the signal down from Main House, but it’s patchy.”
    â€œWell done you,” Vaughan says, moving to the laptop. “May I?” he asks no one in particular and brings up the Umfraville home page. He taps away with his slim, quick fingers. “ Et voila. A portal.”
    A piece of art pops up on the screen. Seeing as art is the only thing I know anything about, I recognize it. It’s by William Blake. My tastes are pretty modern, but this guy I like; he knows his spooky all right. And this picture doesn’t disappoint. It’s of a wood, with two people walking through it, and three weird owl creatures sitting in the trees. And on first glance you don’t necessarily see it, but the trees are made of people. There are faces and body parts in the trunks, as if they are trapped there. It’s heavy stuff. I can’t remember the title, but is it something to do with murders?
    â€œExcuse the obviousness. I couldn’t resist.” Vaughan moves his mouse in a pattern over the owl creatures, then clicks on something and a password prompt shows up over the signature at the bottom. He types something quickly, and the picture explodes in a thousand pixels. It is replaced by a faded-red background with a watermarked image of a skull and the header, CRYPT, at the top. Below there is what looks like a news feed, with pictures down the side.
    â€œWhen I knew I’d be coming here, I hacked the Umfraville intranet and built this. I’ve been updating regularly. Rather a strange business, posting while no one’s watching. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” He grins. “This site went live four months ago. Plenty of time to have shown up on the radar by now.”
    â€œSome of that was break.” Alex is reading the screen, shaking his head. “Nobody would be looking.”
    â€œWrong,” Vaughan said. “The school intranet had a lot of tinkering over the summer. They had someone do some serious coding to keep the likes of me out. Nobody noticed I was already there.”
    Marcia guffaws. “I have a couple kids on the newspaper who always have their heads in the intranet, trying to hack out into the net or, er, into school records.” She shrugs at us, semi-apologetically. “‘Crypt’ has been live four months, you say?” She raises a thick eyebrow at Vaughan, and he nods at her. “That’s more than enough time for my guys to have found it.” Her dark-brown eyes flick to Alex. “He must be very good indeed to hide it for so long.” She leans in and starts scrolling through the feed, clicking on links to other pages. “This is incredible. There’re so many possibilities, Alex!”
    â€œIt won’t last.” Rick is showing his disapproval