It seems likely Cicatrix lives in the UK too, something Stonefish is quick to deduce when he takes a look at the files Cic has fired across to him.
Buzzkill knows from Jonathan Rockwood’s emails and from sifting through his network precisely when the RSGN is launching its shiny rebrand. The developers are uploading a reskin of the website tonight, so that it is live when RSGN starts running its new ad campaign on UK TV tomorrow evening.
Uninvited are all over White Frost. They know what all the files are called, they know where they are stored and they know when the RSGN’s Customer Communications department are scheduled to replace the website’s existing content with the new stuff. The true beauty of it is that the RSGN will be uploading the hacked version of its own website, doing Uninvited’s work for them.
It’s a matter of swapping out the legitimate files and overwriting them with Uninvited’s improved versions, by giving the new files the same names. Cicatrix created some very polished graphics for this, and Stonefish is carefully placing them in just the right locations.
It’s possible to do a smaller-scale version of this if some dick at work is pissing you off (and you have, ahem, managed to finesse his login details). You wait until he’s got a big PowerPoint presentation coming up and then ‘improve’ his pptx document by sticking some quality porn stills four or five slides in, so that he’s well into his stride by the time the bomb goes off. Extra points if you can also hack his phone or cloud storage and put his own selfie-porn in there.
Uninvited are not hacking anything financial, by the way. None of them is that good, or that bad. They’re not blackhats. They don’t steal from people. Juice probably wasn’t joking about shorting shares, but that’s not the same as theft or fraud. He’s well into that stuff, and showed the others how to set up an account on a site he uses, but Buzzkill didn’t feel right about risking the cash, not to mention the potential digital trail.
On the RSGN site, the links taking people to their bank account information are still live: that stuff runs on a completely different frame and connects to infinitely more secure servers. If it was in the real world, the account login portals would be the tellers at their windows, and the Customer Communications content would be the posters on the wall.
Essentially you could say that Uninvited are just defacing those posters, but you’d be selling them extremely short, and not in the way Juice likes.
Stonefish reports that the installs are complete and the overwrites verified.
K-zag confirms that he has absolute control over the Sierra Nine and Sierra Eleven servers.
Juice is running a program that lists who is logged on to the Customer Communications intranet. He is copy-pasting the updates into the Uninvited chatroom so that they can watch RSGN fuck themselves over in real time.
These guys are legends.
Buzzkill’s right index finger is repeatedly hitting F5 to refresh the bank’s homepage as it sits open on the screen. The page stays as it is for a stubbornly long time. Then there is the tell-tale delay as updated content begins to load, before rsgn.co.uk reveals the redesign from hell.
Buzzkill is almost literally living the meme: rolling on the floor laughing. Uninvited deliver again.
But this is just the start. The real fun will begin about thirty seconds after the good folks at RSGN notice the damage. That’s when they’ll find that they can’t change the content back because Uninvited have locked them out of their own system.
THE MAKEOVER
A couple of hours later Parlabane is feeling less pain. The chicken was very good, and the caipirinhas are playing their part, but what helped the most was simply opening up and talking to someone else about his day. It doesn’t look quite so bleak once it’s been refracted through the detached lens of someone else’s perspective.
It never does. No longer having that is the hardest thing about not being married any more.
Han gets up and lifts both their glasses.
‘You want another?’
‘I probably shouldn’t, but what the hell.’
As Han strides off to the kitchen, his height making him seem all the more mismatched beneath the flat’s low ceiling, Parlabane reflexively snatches a quick look at his phone, concerned not to seem rude, especially as Han is still talking.
‘You ask me, these Broadwave people wouldn’t get you to come down here, waste your time – waste their time – if they didn’t think you had something they might want.’
He briefly scans his emails for anything from Broadwave, uncertain whether no news is good news, then has a glance at Twitter, which causes him to gape when he sees what is trending both UK and worldwide.
‘Everything you talked about today, they knew all that without you getting on a plane. It’s not about what happened already, it’s about what you do next.’
In less than two seconds he is looking at rsgn.co.uk. It seems the site has had visitors, though at first he can’t detect what is wrong.
The centrepiece of the page is an image Parlabane recognises from fresh new posters he has been seeing all day on the Tube and at bus stops, the flagship image of RSGN’s latest design revamp. They each show a smiling and photogenic – but conspicuously not too sexy – member of staff standing in a welcoming posture: one hand beckoning the viewer as a valued customer, the other holding an iPad with the bank’s logo on the screen. The new slogan, which no doubt some bunch of spunk-weasels in Camden got paid seven figures for, reads: ‘How can we help you?’
On the posters he saw examples male and female from across the ethnic spectrum, but the face chosen for the website is predictably female, blonde and about as Caucasian as it is possible to get without actually being a member of the royal family.
Parlabane observes that the RSGN logo on the iPad is rotating, his eyes drawn to a smaller line of inset text stating: ‘Click on the tablet to discover what we’re all about.’
He clicks, and an image expands from the iPad to fill the frame around the grinning branch manager from Whitebread-upon-Twee. This is where the fun begins. It is an animated graphic comprising two rotating digital counters, one above the other, with captions beneath explaining what the figures show. The top one displays, in real time, how much money the RSGN has made since the user surfed to the site; the other how much the bank’s senior executives have made in the same period, if last year’s earnings and bonuses are a reliable guide. A third counter, not moving, shows how much the taxpayer gave to the RSGN in the 2008 bail-out.
Parlabane spots a hand-swipe icon at the bottom of the graphic, captioned: ‘See what else we’ve been up to.’
With each swipe the image is replaced by another graph or bar chart. One shows the amount of tax estimated to have been avoided by the ‘high net worth’ clients of the RSGN’s Swiss-based private banking arm. Another displays the estimated number of people murdered by the Central American drug cartels the bank was revealed to have been knowingly laundering money for. As a kicker, a third graphic plots on the Y-axis the number of RSGN executives prosecuted each year by the British authorities for their roles in the bank’s various crimes and scandals, against an X-axis timeline running from 2008 to the present. The graph is blank, permanently flatlining at zero.
Parlabane quickly checks the customer login portals. They still work. It is only the image content that has been affected, but nobody is going to want to move money on a page bearing hacked graphics.
The RSGN’s whole ad campaign and rebrand is going to have to be scrapped. Every poster he saw today will be taken down, the image corrupted by being rendered instantly synonym
ous with the bank’s past misdemeanours and its present security embarrassment.
But that’s going to be the least of their worries. Several of the tweets he saw made mention of the fact that though the UK markets are closed for the day, New York is still trading. He can picture another real-time counter displaying how much money this is wiping off share prices.
This is going to be messy.
Parlabane scrolls down to see what other damage has been done. He sees a photograph of the RSGN’s chief executive officer and other board members at a black-tie dinner, sipping champagne with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. They are moist-eyed with laughter, some doubled over, almost spilling their drinks at something Osborne has said.
A caption reads: ‘And then I told them we’re all in this together!’
Finally, at the bottom of the page, there is a brief message:
Dear RSGN,
You have had visitors. The reality fairy has dropped by and given your corporate image a vigorous make-over with her magic truth wand.
You really should have expected us.
There is no name, only an icon:
It is signature enough: an instantly recognisable hallmark. This was Uninvited.
One name immediately leaps to mind:
Buzzkill.
Han walks back in from the kitchen, carrying two more caipirinhas.
‘Seems simple enough to me,’ he says. ‘These Broadwave folks, they want someone who can find them a story they couldn’t find themselves. A story nobody else got.’
SECRET SELVES
I remember Dad talking about getting the beer scooter home, his Geordie accent still playing in my head as I recall the words. I didn’t understand it, never having been drunk, but I do now: it is about being so distracted that you aren’t aware of having travelled. The bus has almost reached Barking, and so I must have been on it forty minutes, yet I have no memory of the journey.
I have been thinking about my situation, about my conversation with Mum and the options it has left me. I don’t know how I thought or even hoped Mum would react: it wasn’t like I expected her to reveal the location of a secret stash of money to tide things over. Or to say: ‘Well, maybe it’s past time I told you who your birth father was, in case he wants to step in and help out.’
I only wanted to talk about what I was dealing with, and for Mum to give me some sympathy. Some fucking credit, at least.
As the bus slows approaching my stop, it hits me that I have allowed myself to be defined by two things. One is Lilly; and the other is my inability to stand up for myself, most problematically against my mother.
That meeting at the prison was our whole relationship in microcosm. Me being told I am selfish for wanting anything other than whatever suits Mum. Being told I don’t love Lilly if I ever express my frustrations at being landed with responsibility for her yet again.
What, and I’ve had my time, is that what you’re saying?
Well, yes. You got to make your own decisions, Mum. Some bad shit happened that wasn’t your fault, but that doesn’t excuse all the other bad shit that definitely was. And the bad shit didn’t only happen to you. In fact, some of it didn’t happen to you at all. It only affected you, sometimes far less than it affected other people.
I can’t believe you sometimes, Samantha. You’re so selfish. What would Lilly think if she heard you talk like this about looking after her, as though you just want rid of her.
Was it selfish to want more than the first zero-hours minimum wage job that would allow me to get by as long as it fitted around the Loxford School timetable? I love Lilly, but my whole life can’t be about Lilly. I am her sister, not her mother.
The doors hiss closed and I step down on to the pavement, still so immersed in my thoughts that I fail to notice I am walking straight towards Keisha. With her headphones in and her head down, Keisha hadn’t noticed either, until I hopped off the bus and directly into her path.
She is wearing a Burger King uniform, which is perhaps why I didn’t notice her and sense the danger.
As our eyes meet, Keisha looks briefly upset, an unfamiliar vulnerability in her normally aggressive expression. I can tell she hates being seen like this, and hates me all the more for having done so.
I bow my head and resume my progress, saying nothing. After the initial surprise, there seems a brief moment when it is understood that we can both walk away pretending it hasn’t happened.
Only in my mind, it turns out.
‘Hey. Hey. You fuckin’ lookin’ at me? Yeah, you was. I saw you fuckin’ lookin’ at me.’
Keisha is following me, speeding up to keep pace. Keisha never walks fast, as it ruins the air of supreme indifference she loves to give off. Her blood is up. This briefest of encounters has really narked her.
‘I’m fuckin’ talkin’ to you. You fuckin’ stop and look at me when I’m fuckin’ talkin’ to you.’
We are on the main drag and there are plenty of people around. I understand that Keisha is unlikely to do anything physical to me in front of so many witnesses – not now that there could be adult-scale consequences – but it was never the violence I most feared from Keisha and her mates. The physical assaults were almost a release when they came, as that meant the other part was over: the confrontation, the ranting, the loud voices, the rising anger.
‘I saw you checking out my uniform, you snide bitch. You think I’m shit, don’t ya.’
Something inside tells me that if I stop and face Keisha, that will get it over with, that her fury will burn itself out. But everything else inside tells me to get away from the angry, shouting person who is burning up with rage and hate.
‘You think I’m shit, but at least my mum ain’t in fuckin’ prison. And at least I ain’t got no fuckin’ mong for a sister.’
That stops me, like a switch over which I have no control.
‘Don’t say that about Lilly.’
‘I’ll say it if I like, because it’s true. I looked it up. She’s got Down syndrome. That’s where the word mong comes from, ’cause they used to be called mongoloids.’
Oh, wow, you looked something up, I don’t say. That’s a breakthrough moment for you. And did your lips move while you were reading it, like they used to in class?
‘Yeah, you’re fuckin’ clamped, ain’t ya? Always thought you was so smart. Least I never pissed myself. That’s all anybody will ever know about you.’
No, at most you never pissed yourself, I don’t retort. And that’s all anybody will ever know about you.
But that is when the worst of it hits me. I am not better than Keisha, and I’m not going to be either. I am going to be applying to Burger King and anywhere else that might have me, first thing tomorrow. Then someday soon Keisha is going to walk into wherever that might be and see me standing there. It is going to be the best day of Keisha’s life.
I get back to the flat, the anger and impotence churning away, burning me up from the inside. I want to lock myself away, maybe go to sleep right now and hope I feel better the next day, but neither of these is an option. I have Lilly to pick up in a couple of hours.
The kettle has just boiled when I hear a knock at the door. It is loud and insistent, and my first thought is Old Bill. Then I remember about the inspection from the social. I thought that was next month but maybe they say that so they can come early and catch you unawares, get a more accurate snapshot.
I look around the place, reckoning it seems tidy enough, but wonder what someone else might see, what evidence they would be looking for that would seem invisible to me. There isn’t time to do anything about it.
I open the door and find three men standing there. I recognise them straight away. They are bad news: low-lives my mum had dealings with. Drug dealings mostly. The two in front are Ango and Griff. I know that Ango’s surname is Angola, which is the only exotic thing about either of this pair. They both look like they were born in a hoody and jogging bottoms.
They work for the guy standing behind t
hem, known as Lush. His real name is Lucius Cresswell. When I first heard it, I pictured some public school type in a cravat who might burst into tears if you dissed his favourite opera singer. I was wrong on multiple counts.
‘My mum’s not home,’ I say, but even as I speak they are pushing past me and into the flat.
‘Yeah, I know,’ says Lush. ‘She’s inside. I heard. But that don’t mean she gets a holiday from owing me money.’
‘I don’t have any,’ I say weakly, my voice fading to a dry nothing.
‘It’ll have to be payment in kind, then, won’t it.’
Behind him I can see Ango unplugging the TV and the DVD player, carelessly spilling Lilly’s discs on the carpet. Griff heads down the hall, rooting through the bedrooms. He comes out of mine a few seconds later carrying the laptop that had been sitting on my desk.
Neither of them speaks. They are quick and efficient, business-like, as though I had hired them for a removal.
I just stand and watch, thinking Lilly would have put up more of a fight.
SUMMONING THE DEVIL
Parlabane’s finger hovers over the Send button, instinctive caution forcing him to take a moment to consider if he really wants to do this. He’s had some strong coffee but he drank rather a lot of Han’s caipirinhas. He’s three sheets to the wind and he knows his judgement ought to be clearer before making such a decision, but equally, he knows that chemically induced disinhibition might be a necessary prerequisite for going through with it.
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