‘I’m Jack Parlabane. I’m here to see Tanya Collier.’
‘Which company?’
‘Synergis.’
The receptionist clacks away at the keyboard then relays a message over her headset. Parlabane expects to be told to take a seat and wait, but instead she asks him to look straight into a globular camera on a sliding riser, which she adjusts to his approximate eye level.
‘Look at the green light and hold still for a second please, sir.’
A few moments later he is issued with a temporary pass. Then he is told to go take a seat and wait.
He watches people go through the barrier in both directions, their progress followed by a security guard wearing a thick-ribboned lanyard over his blazer, on hand to help in case of any technical problems or to intervene if someone is not supposed to be there. Parlabane examines the card he’s been given and figures the embedded chip now contains his picture, his name, the person he’s here to see and which company she works for. Whenever anyone swipes through, the system will log who came into the building, when they entered and, crucially, whether they have exited again.
A few minutes later he sees a bright and smiling young woman stride towards him, extending a hand.
‘You must be Jack. Tanya Collier. We spoke on the phone. Leo’s in a meeting that’s overrunning, but I’m sure we can find something to keep you occupied.’
‘You can give me the tour,’ he suggests.
‘Yeah, such as it is. Now that you’ve seen the lobby, you’ve probably seen the best of it. Just offices from here on in, really.’
‘It’s certainly a nice address.’
She waves him ahead of her as they reach the barrier. Parlabane makes a show of looking for a swipe dock, and the guard steps across with a helpful smile, a firm hand taking the card and pressing it to a sensor pad instead.
‘Yeah, it’s a legacy of when Synergis was wholly owned by Neurosphere. They’ve got half the building.’
‘And now it’s wholly owned by Leo Cruz?’
‘Not wholly. There are a number of investors, but Leo holds the controlling stake. Because he was taking on a loss-making concern, part of the deal was that the rent here would be subsidised for six months in order to smooth the transition. It was widely assumed that we would be pared back and relocated, but here we still are. A lot of assumptions about Leo’s buy-out have turned out to be wide of the mark.’
She says this with a note of pride and a firmness of assertion. There is a PR agenda at play here. Cruz has a reputation as an asset-stripper, and it has been speculated that the preferential terms of Neurosphere’s sale of Synergis were down to the parent company effectively outsourcing its dirty work.
At the time, Neurosphere was in negotiations that would lead to it receiving major tax breaks and other subsidies in order to retain its manufacturing presence in the UK. It would not have played well were the company to close down the once iconic British brand, even though Synergis was by then a chronically loss-making subsidiary. The assumption Tanya is referring to is that Neurosphere sold cheap to Leo Cruz knowing that he would wield the axe instead.
Tanya beckons him forward into the lift, then taps her card against the control panel before pressing a button for the seventh floor. You can’t even get the lift to move if you don’t have the right credentials, Parlabane notes. He wonders where the stairs might be, making a note to keep an eye out for fire exits.
‘Were you always with Synergis?’
‘No. I already worked for Leo.’
Figures, Parlabane thinks.
‘I’m aware of his reputation, so you don’t need to tiptoe around it.’
‘I vaguely remember a headline about Mr Cruz preparing to “eat his own young”,’ Parlabane admits. It was in reference to the fact that Cruz had actually been one of Synergis’s founders, once upon a time. That he should return to kill off his own creation had a certain grim poetry to it, in the eyes of many commentators. Cruz had in recent years operated as a vulture feeding off the corpses of failed companies, the wide-eyed visionary who was once the great white hope of British electronics long since consumed by the monster he had become.
She responds with a knowing smile. There’s something she’s not saying, and she’s happy to make him wait.
They emerge from the elevator into a glass-walled lobby looking down upon the teeming concourse. Dead ahead is a plush reception area, recently refurbished by the look of it. A woman behind the desk gives Tanya a smile, busy directing calls as they stride through the lobby.
Another set of security doors bars the entrance to the Synergis premises proper. Tanya taps her card in order to access the corridor beyond, then steps aside to beckon him through.
There is a glass case on a plinth against the wall a few feet inside.
‘A little piece of history,’ Tanya says, allowing him to have a look.
Inside is the original prototype of the device that effectively built the company.
Synergis hit its high-water mark in the early nineties, when its new chipset helped pioneer ambulatory heart monitoring and paved the way for medical miniaturisation technology in general. Christened the Synapse, the device was the brainchild of Aldous Syne, a famously flaky and reclusive electronics innovator, but its success was largely down to the determination of a hungry young entrepreneur by the name of Leo Cruz. It was Cruz who formed the company and raised the finance, hustling tirelessly until he had brought the Synapse to market.
Syne was lauded as a genius and caricatured as a typically British eccentric, emerging from nowhere to bring forth a game-changing innovation. From media impressions, admittedly cobbled together from scant resources – the guy never gave any interviews – it was easy to imagine he had knocked this thing up in his garden shed. The very quirkiness of that notion fed into the cheerleading for Syne’s invention in the UK, where people were charmed by the idea that this indispensable new gizmo had not emerged from a decade’s development inside a megalithic Japanese corporation, but was instead an iconic example of old-fashioned homespun invention.
However, as time went on the Synapse was quickly eclipsed by greater innovations in medical monitoring (though the NHS being what it is, the ones it had shelled out for were still in use more than a decade later), and the growing public impression of its inventor was not of a wayward genius but a one-hit wonder. While his early success had drawn comparisons with the altogether less publicity-shy Clive Sinclair, the reason Syne never had the albatross of a hubristic C5 slung around his neck was that he failed to bring anything new or radical to market again. In fact, by the time Cruz and Syne sold the firm, the name Synergis had become a byword for cheap generic knock-offs.
It was once joked on a TV panel show that the reason Aldous Syne was so reclusive was that he was actually an actor hired by Alan Sugar, and the entire Synergis venture was a long-haul ruse to make Amstrad products look good.
Its largest revenue stream in recent years had been Chinese-made, non-branded mobile handsets, and there certainly weren’t any of those in display cases along the corridor. According to Parlabane’s research, the perception within the industry was that its manufacturing plant in Shanghai was the only part of Synergis potentially worth anything, though only if it started making something other than Synergis products.
So far however, Cruz didn’t appear to be following the script the industry had written for this. The Shanghai plant was not up for sale. There had been no redundancies, no move to smaller premises even after the six-month subsidised tenancy expired. People were unsure what he was waiting for, but then a couple of months back, it finally appeared as though the familiar process was underway.
‘I gather that Synergis recently sold off its profit-making children’s and educational electronics subsidiary,’ Parlabane says, as Tanya leads him down a long corridor. There are windows along one wall, giving him a view of a busy open-plan office area. ‘Given the company’s monthly burn, many people interpreted that as an attempt to keep
the lights on a while longer, though nobody seems quite sure what you’re keeping the lights on for.’
She gives him that same look: I know something you don’t know.
‘Do we look like we’re chucking ballast out of the balloon?’ she asks, indicating the activity through the windows.
‘It’s not a picture of resignation and despair,’ he concedes. ‘Though as you suggested, it does look a lot like any other office. My inner geek must have had greater expectations because you’re an electronics firm. Didn’t I read somewhere that you have research and development labs?’
‘Yeah,’ she says, her averring expression giving him hope that these might be on a different site: that eighties-built science campus rising enticingly back into view. Then she extinguishes it again.
‘We have research labs upstairs. I mean, we call them labs but we’re still largely talking about rooms full of computers like you’re seeing here, plus a few electronics work benches.’
Parlabane’s face falls, and she misinterprets the nature of his disappointment.
‘There are a few toys,’ she adds. ‘And there’s the sub-zero room for working at ultra-low temperatures. I suppose when people get suited up for that it looks pretty space-age.’
‘Can I see it?
‘I’ll need to ask. I don’t have clearance.’
‘Just a look-see, peak through the glass?’
‘No, that’s what I mean. My card doesn’t open the doors. We’d need to be escorted. I’ll see what I can do, though.’
‘Thanks.’
She swipes him through another set of security doors into a quieter area where the adjacent office doors are closed and there are no windows on to the corridor. His geography tells him the windows inside probably offer a view of the Thames, so this must be the executive area.
Tanya escorts him into a conference room with a large empty table, attended by sixteen unoccupied chairs.
‘Leo is still in his meeting, I’m sorry. Do you mind waiting here a bit? How are you for time?’
‘No rush.’
‘Can I offer you a coffee?’
‘No thanks, but do you have a Wi-Fi password so I can catch up on emails?’
‘Oh, sure. Select Tricorn Guest and the password is 28Hill, as in the building’s address.’
Parlabane looks at the list of networks that his phone has found.
‘The building’s guest network doesn’t have the strongest signal,’ he says. ‘Probably a lot of users sharing the bandwidth too.’
‘Neurosphere has its own guest network, but I don’t know the current password for that. The 4G is usually pretty good up here, though.’
‘Can you let me piggyback into something a bit more local?’
‘It’s not allowed.’
‘You worried I’m going to hack your network? I wouldn’t know where to start. Despite our recently augmented reputation, most reporters aren’t that technically adept.’
‘You’re not most reporters, Mr Parlabane.’
With that she pops the secure delusion that she knows nothing about him.
‘It’s nothing personal. We’ve got strict data security protocols.’
‘Very sensible. To be fair, I wouldn’t give me access to your networks if I were you.’
She accepts his concession with good grace and leaves him to it. Parlabane waits for her to move out of sight then pops his earpiece back in.
‘There’s several different Wi-Fi networks showing up within Synergis,’ he says quietly.
‘I know.’
‘How?’
‘I can see what’s on your mobile.’
‘Jesus,’ he moans. ‘I’m the journalist whose phone got hacked.’
She giggles, like it’s utterly trivial.
‘You have a whole other version of boundary issues,’ he tells her. ‘Anyway, what do you make of it so far?’
‘They’ve had proper security consultants in. She only offered you the guest Wi-Fi because it will be running off a different server and won’t be connected to anything else. Non-employees won’t be permitted to access Synergis’s own networks because at that point you’re behind the firewalls.’
‘What’s with the four different networks?’
‘It’s for restricting access to different sectors of the company, so that a breach in one sector doesn’t compromise anything else. And those are merely the networks your phone can detect. There will be others.’
‘So we most likely need to get into a network that we not only can’t access, but can’t even see?’
‘I am disappoint. Corporate security intensifies.’
More hacker argot, he assumes.
‘Wonderful. Is there anything I’ve encountered so far that you would interpret as good news?’
‘It’s all good news. The fact that you’ve already got eyes and ears inside the building is an advantage I’ve never had before. It’s about perspective: all you’re seeing is locked doors, whereas I’m getting advance notice of which doors to unlock.’
‘And do you have any thoughts on how we might achieve that? Hello? Barb?’
Yeah, that stumped you, he thinks, with scant satisfaction, which drops to precisely zero when he realises she is no longer on the line.
NO PICNIC
‘Hey. Break time is over. Come on,’ says Snotworm, my charming co-worker who has appointed himself my superior by virtue of having been here a month.
I have to put my phone away, though I don’t disconnect the call, as I am still recording the audio. I slip the handset into my bag, placing it where it won’t get nudged. I will listen back to what I’ve missed later.
‘Hurry up.’
He was getting chewed out by Dot, the manager, when I showed up this morning for my second day at Urban Picnic. I knew right then that he’d be on my case to make himself feel better. I’ve been trying hard not to give him any excuses, but I’m still learning the ropes, so mistakes are going to happen.
After my mass mail-out I got invited to two interviews on the same day: one was for a call centre, which would have suited me okay, because I wouldn’t have to speak to strangers face-to-face. Give me a headset and I can become who you like: work to a script, cold-calling people who don’t want to know, I don’t care. They’re just voices on the other end of a line.
Problem was the interview clashed with Lilly’s school run. If I couldn’t even make that, then there was little chance I’d be as flexible as they required in terms of actual shifts.
Which left me with the second prize: making sandwiches in the Ilford branch of a new fast-food chain. I’d have preferred a burger place, to be honest. They say the grease goes for your skin and hair, but maybe I could hide in the back out of sight and not have to work a till. It’s irrational, I know, but I feel vulnerable when I have to present myself to strangers, like they could simply reach across the counter and take something from me and I’d be powerless to stop them.
A bloke comes in and asks for a DMP. He grunts it out, like he begrudges every syllable. I don’t mind. It’s easier when they ask for one of the signature specials, because then I don’t have to keep asking them stage by stage what they want on their sandwich.
Snotworm sees his chance, though.
‘No, no. What you doing? It’s the wrong way round. The Double Meat Picnic is chicken on first, then the salad, then the ham. Jesus. All them GCSEs but you ain’t that smart, is ya?’
That’s the third time he’s mentioned the GCSEs. Dot must have left my application lying around. Not that it’s bothering him or anything.
I’m pretty sure he told me the DMP was ham first the last time he had a go at me, but I can’t be sure. He makes me bin the sandwich and start again, muttering about the waste. I’ve got no come-back.
Snotworm wins this round.
I consider again how little I’m getting paid for putting up with this, and about how limited my prospects look in the longer term if I’m held back by my responsibility for Lilly. I hate even thinki
ng of her as ‘holding me back’, because I love her, but I feel so frustrated, like I’m never going to be able to explore my true potential. With that in mind, the temptation to turn blackhat is growing by the day. It’s a line I’ve never crossed, but I’m already a wanted criminal and I’m starting to reckon ‘in for a penny’.
I can’t think that way, though. What would be the point of everything that I’ve done to Jack – and of what Jack is doing right now – if I end up getting nicked for something else? I’m a hacker, not a thief, though that distinction is getting more blurry all the time.
I need to stay focused. Primary objective: stay out of jail. I’m not going to follow in Mum’s footsteps, deluding myself that the best way to ensure Lilly’s future is to go after easy money, only to end up somewhere I can’t be any help to her at all. I can put up with Snotworm, same as I can deliver on what Zodiac is demanding.
I feel bad about the way I’ve manipulated Jack, though. I knew he wouldn’t understand my situation unless I put him in the same boat, but he doesn’t deserve this. I didn’t have any choice, though. There was no one else I could turn to. I can’t trust the Uninvited crew. Zodiac could be any one of them, not just Stonefish, and I don’t want to leave any more evidence that can be used as blackmail material. The trick is to pull this off and have nobody but Jack knowing how.
I know I can trust him. I can’t say why – maybe because I can’t afford to think about the alternative. I believe in him, and have done for a while. That’s what makes it all the worse that I’m basically making an enemy of the guy. I’m giving him all the reason in the world to hate me for ever.
ADVERSARIES
‘I think they’re finishing up,’ Tanya says, leaning around the doorframe.
Parlabane stands, grateful to be leaving this improvised isolation tank. It is the only space in the building where he has been at any point unsupervised, most likely because there is nothing in it of any interest or sensitivity. Not so much as a Post-it note with a name scribbled on it has been left in the place.
Want You Gone Page 13