Read Online Countdown by Natalie Standiford - Free Book Online

cracked his knuckles, tipped the brim of an imaginary cowboy hat at an imaginary pretty schoolmarm, muttered, “Evenin’, ma’am,” to the imaginary schoolmarm, and went to work.
    Now that he’d figured out what had happened to any hint of a link between Debi Ann and the Cahills, Pony was pretty sure he could find a way around it.
    With one hand he felt around the pizza box for more sustenance. Nothing but cardboard. The pizza was gone. He frowned and went back to work. Here he was working in the ritziest digs he’d ever seen — the command center on the Cahill estate — where they had everything a hacker could want: a private satellite, top-of-the-line equipment, custom security, and airtight firewalls . . . everything. But they couldn’t seem to get enough pizza to feed the crew.
    Pony had his own private corner in the command center, across the vast room from where the Cahill dudes did their thing. It was a strange new experience for Pony, working with other people, being part of a team. That wasn’t the Hacker Way, and it took some getting used to. Ian Kabra, the slinky Brit, wasn’t the friendliest guy Pony had ever met but he was a quick thinker, good at coming up with sneaky strategies. Pony gave Hamilton Holt a wide berth — Ham was a big dude and quick to throw a punch, which Pony was eager to avoid. But he had to admit Ham had a nose for security and was even a decent hacker in his own right. Pony liked Jonah Wizard the best. Jonah was laid-back but smart, and he understood that Pony wasn’t just a computer scientist — he was an artist. It took a highly refined sense of rhythm and finesse to surf the web the way Pony did. He’d been a hip-hop fan forever, and Jonah was one of his favorite rappers. Too bad the guy was on hiatus. But now that Pony was inside the Cahill compound, he understood why Jonah wanted to drop out of the limelight. For this family, the limelight was nothing but trouble.
    Pony did a search of the Starling family until he found an old photo on a genealogy site. It was labeled THE STARLING FAMILY, 1975 , and it showed fifteen people, adults and kids of all ages, who looked as if they’d gathered for a birthday or some other big occasion. But, weirdly, Pony noticed as he looked closer, they were all in costume. A boy tagged FRANK STARLING wore a white fright wig, glasses, and a big white mustache à la Albert Einstein. There was a woman, Candice Jones Starling, dressed as Marie Curie, with green paint on her hands — to indicate radiation poisoning, Pony assumed. She held a beaker in her hand. A gray-haired man tagged as Eustace Starling posed on an old-fashioned tricycle with a huge front wheel, dressed as Thomas Edison. They were all, every last member of the family, dressed up as famous scientists, and each one was tagged with a name . . . except for one little girl, about five years old, holding binoculars to her eyes while a toy chimp rested at her feet. Her costume, Pony guessed, was young Jane Goodall. She was the only one without a Starling name attached to her. Maybe she was a neighbor’s kid, not part of the family, but that was unlikely, since she was dressed up in costume like the others. Pony had a hunch.

    There was only one other person — besides the digital cowboy himself — with the skillz to pull off this kind of hacking operation. April May.
    Pony hacked into Boston City Hall files to check on Debi Ann’s maiden name. There it was in black and white: Debi Ann Stapleton. But when he looked into that, he found that the name had been “corrected” recently.
By Her Supreme Highness, no doubt.
    He sat back to admire her work. She was a genius, and she was thorough. She let nothing get past her. That was why Pony was suspicious that she’d let him follow her trail this way. What was she up to? Was she trying to tell him something?
    Or was she