Shadow Code (A John Kovac Thriller Book 2) (John Kovac Thriller Series)

by David Caris

  ‘That’s true so far,’ Juliette said, ‘though I’m yet to figure out how that’s possible.’

  ‘Griffin claimed she had reached out to just about everyone she knew, and everyone else was fine.’ Megan paused, clearly trying to recall the rest of the conversation. ‘She said Aurelius was the only software we use that isn’t in use at some other company somewhere. So, given it was just us being hacked, she concluded Aurelius had to be the weakness, the vulnerability.’

  ‘She’s drawing a very long bow there,’ Juliette said. ‘And from what I saw of Aurelius, she’s massively overstating its importance for our accounting.’

  ‘Can you remember anything else?’ Kovac asked Megan.

  ‘I’m not sure there was more… She said we bought out Wilson Software Solutions, took their years of hard work, and bent AccountMe into a bespoke version of the software that worked for us. We did it with a team of five. No.’ Megan held up four fingers. ‘Four. Four and Griffin, for a total of five. With Griffin the only woman in the team.’ She added her thumb to the count. ‘One team member was called Jarrod Sims and Griffin confessed she was sleeping with him.’

  ‘She just volunteered that?’ Kovac asked.

  ‘Yeah. Like I said, she was kind of kooky. And I don’t make a habit of asking staff who they’re sleeping with if I can avoid it. We fired Sims, I think. A while back. I don’t know when exactly. Another guy on the team was called Krathwohl. She didn’t give his full name, but she said he was scary and that I should watch out for him. I think we fired him, too. Both men blame me apparently, so, yeah, they can get in line.’

  Juliette said: ‘So, from my perspective, from a systems perspective… staff are almost always the weakest link. And I highly doubt Aurelius is the only proprietary software Curzon is using.’

  Kovac said: ‘Let’s imagine for a moment this is a revenge scheme by Sims and Krathwohl. If I bring them to you, Juliette, does that help us untangle the ball of string? Does that at least get our hands out of the gardening gloves?’

  ‘Providing you can convince them to help me, yes, it would, but –’

  ‘I can be convincing,’ Kovac said.

  Megan fought down a smile. ‘Okay. Juliette, you set up and coordinate your teams from here like we discussed, at least until we have power back at the London office. Use as much space as you like, rearrange things however you want. Keep us up to date on anything you find. Kovac, I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Megan that’s –’

  ‘– not my job?’ She laughed. ‘You want to talk about a derailed day? I’m normally up around 5 a.m. too, for a meeting with my PA, and then it’s a meeting with my EA, meetings with my senior team, meetings with my father, meetings inside meetings where we talk about the chicken and egg problems this company throws up every other minute. And don’t get me started on check-ins with clients, and email as I’m driven from one PR opportunity to another. But not today …’ She held out her arms and did a full circle in the vast, silent loft apartment. ‘Today, no one can reach me, and I’ve already sent out the company’s initial statement to the press with my name at the bottom. So until the power comes back on at the London office and Juliette has answers, I’m a free agent.’ She saw Kovac squirm as he predicted what she was about to say. ‘That’s right, like it or not, Kovac, I’m going to join you for that chat with Griffin, Sims and Krathwohl. They’re a longshot, sure, but right now they’re the only lead we have. And I’ll take that over a company-wide reboot any day of the week.’

  Chapter 16

  Van Heythuysen liked this place. There were treadmills. There were boxing bags. There were rubber torsos bolted to the walls. It was a physical place, even a brutal place. Dog eat dog.

  The first thing he picked up on was the stink of sweat, ancient and ingrained. It made sense. The air was warm against his skin. A clammy warmth. The sort of warmth that came off too many bodies in a windowless room.

  Or in this case, a basement gym.

  The walls – a mix of old brick and giant mirrors – echoed with the thud of punches. There were maybe fifteen boxers, all grunting and flinging sweat, all pushing through their own special hell. Van Heythuysen glanced up. A few old ceiling fans were turning, but so lazily they had spiderwebs.

  At one end of the gym, a radio was on. It was playing Give It Away by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  But Van Heythuysen wasn’t here to travel back in time with the Peppers, or to even box. He was here to find a new client.

  He crossed the gym like he owned it, catching his reflection in one of the mirrors and enjoying a jolt of surprise. He was still in his suit from his shift at the call center, and he was lean. He looked hungry, in every sense of the word. A new man.

  The man Van Heythuysen had come to see was standing in a corner of the gym, wearing a bright blue hoodie. He was standing beside an oil heater mounted to the wall, which may or may not have been contributing to the ridiculous heat down here. He was in his late 20s, fit and strong-looking.

  White, Van Heythuysen noted. No beard, nothing that screamed “radical Islam”. He was leaning back against the bricks, his arms folded, his eyes taking in the entire gym. He didn’t look at Van Heythuysen, and didn’t acknowledge him when he arrived.

  Van Heythuysen dropped back against the wall beside him.

  For a moment, they were silent.

  If Van Heythuysen believed everything he was told, this man was a representative of The Brotherhood, a branch of the caliphate that was slowly challenging Western hegemony.

  But of course, as Van Heythuysen well knew, there was no caliphate. The caliphate was a Western invention, a boogeyman conjured up by fear-mongering journalists. What the media called the caliphate was these days nothing more than a collection of scattered, fragmented Jihadi terror groups. And of those groups, this one – the so-called “Brotherhood” – best understood the future of recruitment.

  That was why Van Heythuysen was here, why he had agreed to take this meeting.

  ‘How much?’ the man asked. He didn’t move. Didn’t unfold his arms, didn’t straighten up, didn’t even glance across.

  ‘Five-hundred thousand,’ Van Heythuysen said.

  ‘All in?’ he asked.

  ‘Per name.’

  Now the man looked at him, subtly rolling his ink-black eyes sideways as if to say “you’ve got to be kidding”.

  Van Heythuysen wasn’t kidding. Not in the slightest. It was a fair price. Two times five hundred thousand, for a total of one million. To which he would add a final name – for free.

  ‘It was made for Five Eyes?’ the man asked, referring to America’s global surveillance partnership with its English-speaking allies.

  ‘It doesn’t give a shit about the usual red flags. What do you care about last-minute plane ticket purchases and stopovers in known terrorist hotspots? For that matter, what do you care about biometric data? You have all that.’ Van Heythuysen edged a little closer, lowering his voice, even though they were close to the radio here and there wasn’t any real risk of electronic surveillance. ‘My engine’s different. Surely you noticed that.’

  Engine? Van Heythuysen silently reprimanded himself. Why had he said “engine”? It was a buzzword, of the type he had used in his desperate pitches to moronic venture capitalists. Once upon a time, he had memorized phrases like “We zero-in on anomalies in big data”. Why he had ever thought that would impress anyone, he couldn’t now say. Why hadn’t he just given it to them straight?

  He would make up for that now. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve had it running for a year now. Let’s not waste each other’s time. It’s an algorithm, looking for a particular mindset, and as you’ve seen, it’s very fucking good at finding it. It gave you four names, did it not?’

  ‘Two are dead. Alcohol and drugs.’

  ‘So two you can use. And keep in mind, those four came from a tiny pool. Imagine if I gave you whole countries.’

  The man rolled his shoulders back, stretching them without u
nfolding his arms. At the limit of the stretch, his upper back popped quietly. He relaxed again, watching two young boys climb into the ring at the center of the gym. He called out to one in Arabic, and the boy gave a quick deferential nod in reply. The boys touched gloves and started sparring, adding their small contribution to the omnipresent thudding.

  Van Heythuysen said: ‘As you saw from the sixty, I don’t care about national or religious affiliations. And that’s good for you, because we both know your best recruits don’t always start with religion. They start with nihilism, and you show them the better path. I look through exabytes of data for any and all leakage pointing to a particular state of mind.’

  He waited for the man to ask what leakage was. He didn’t.

  Van Heythuysen continued: ‘With this approach, you get your leads – the names and addresses of thousands of impressionable men you can recruit, radicalize and deploy.’ He paused. There were no overt signs the man was even listening. Van Heythuysen persisted. ‘It finds lone wolves. And if it doesn’t, if it turns out I’m full of shit, your organization is no worse off. You don’t pay me for each wolf I locate, remember. You pay me for each wolf you successfully utilize. No attack, no fee. From your perspective, it’s all upside.’

  The man pushed off the wall. ‘We’re interested. We’ll go with the two we have.’

  ‘Okay.’ Van Heythuysen smiled. He held his hands out as if to say, “so why put me through the hard sell?”. ‘You have the email address I gave you, the one we used to arrange this meeting. Log into it. I’ve drafted an email. I’ll add a name for free. Call it a signing bonus. You won’t even need to speak with him. He’s got his own plan, something big, and he’ll credit you for it. You just have to nod and pay his family.’

  ‘So not free.’

  ‘Trust me, when you see what this guy has planned for Paris, you’ll happily throw loose change at his relatives. Combined with whatever you have planned for London, the Brotherhood will be a household name. You pay up, and after that you’re on your way. You’ll get the full lists. Every city.’

  Van Heythuysen had once dressed in a suit for this. He had taken elevators up into boardrooms. He could still remember his canned pitch. “I can detect depression, resentment, social isolation, even a tendency to externalize blame. I find everyone with mental illness, seeing what everyone else sees after an attack.” For all that however, there had only ever been one serious buyer. Curzon International.

  ‘You hack to do this?’ Luther Curzon had asked.

  ‘How else to see into people’s souls?’

  ‘How though?’

  Van Heythuysen had given it to him straight. ‘At the Internet Service Provider level. That’s the beauty of it. Fast, yet vast. My algorithm commandeers ISP resources to process data at what we call the “edge”. The cloud is already completely out of date. With the Internet of Things clogging it up, the future, Mr. Curzon, is edge computing.’

  Luther Curzon had liked that answer. He had insisted he was Van Heythuysen’s new best friend. And then he had screwed Van Heythuysen out of everything. His fucking life’s work… He still cringed at the memory of it now. He had put his best shoes on that day, shined them until gleaming. He had bought a new suit, he had even – like the chump he was – bought a briefcase. He had believed Curzon was his ticket, and Luther had sensed his desperation from a mile out.

  Luther had made a pitch of his own. He had explained, as if perhaps Van Heythuysen didn’t know, that Curzon had the clout to not only win government contracts but alleviate government concerns about privacy and profiling. Together, the two of them would keep Western civilization safe, and best of all there would be no need to hack anything.

  The man now started towards the boxing ring, moving to exit. It seemed the meeting was over, though he paused for one last question: ‘The free name,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

  Van Heythuysen thought for a beat, but saw no harm in giving it to him now. ‘Kovac,’ he said, ‘John Kovac.’

  Chapter 17

  Kovac ditched Megan.

  He wasn’t cruel about it. But he had no intention of being accommodating, either. He knew she was only sticking with him because she didn’t want him to vanish. And even if she wasn’t inundated with work tonight, she soon would be. She would need to be available as various sections of Curzon attempted to come back online. Her many talents would be wasted running down longshots.

  He stole Griffin’s address while Megan was showing Juliette around the apartment. He thought back to the slip of paper beside the docking station in her office at work. Megan had picked it up at the end of the meeting, like she knew she would need it later. He checked her lightweight black blazer, which she had left on the sofa, and when he didn’t find it there he checked her tote bag. Sure enough, there it was. It had a London address on it with the single word “Griff” at the top.

  Kovac “borrowed” Megan’s car keys, too. He didn’t even need to search for these. The loft was so open he could hear both women talking about procedures for getting in and out of the apartment while Megan was gone, and Megan explained how Juliette could access and use her car if needed. Kovac simply followed Megan’s instructions. He plucked a key fob from a near-empty fruit bowl in the kitchen, let himself out of the apartment, and made his way to an underground garage.

  He was sitting in this stolen car now – a white Aston Martin Superleggera – staring across a quiet, rain-soaked street towards a window covered with cardboard. The rain had come out of nowhere and ended just as quickly. It had left everything dripping and gleaming under night lights, and had made the drive from Soho down across Vauxhall Bridge a visual feast.

  From there, Kovac had followed Clapham High Street to Griffin’s address. Her place had turned out to be in Clapham, right on the edge of Brixton, just past a floodlit, dilapidated housing estate that was in the process of being torn down.

  It was a simple terrace house. Griffin was on the top level, the only one in the street without working drapes or blinds. Hence the cardboard, Kovac figured. The row of matching terrace houses opposite looked straight across the road, into Griffin’s living room. The cardboard was privacy on a budget.

  Kovac had been watching Griffin’s apartment for half an hour, all the while ignoring phone calls from Megan. She must have received the number from Bishop at some point, and she was no doubt angry. But Kovac had no regrets. He didn’t work for Megan or Curzon, whatever he may have said in her office.

  Was this even a lead, though?

  Sitting here, his longshot felt more like a moonshot.

  It was late and the street was narrow and quiet. There had been one man walking a dog, a few partygoers stumbling home, but otherwise nothing. Kovac’s car drew attention, like a white stallion trying to hide amidst ponies, but it didn’t matter. With the cardboard, Griffin’s world didn’t account for “outside”. It began and ended at the internal walls of her apartment.

  There were two narrow gaps in the apartment’s cardboard blinds. Except for periodic sweeps of his surroundings, Kovac had been focused on these gaps to the exclusion of pretty much all else. One of the gaps was near a TV. It kept changing color. It was useless. The other gap was an inch or so wide, running from the base of the window to the top. It was a product of one sheet of cardboard ending and a new one beginning, and silhouettes were moving across it. Each silhouette that passed was featureless. No race, no gender, no clothing details… But there was one crucial data point: height. Kovac could determine height by comparing each silhouette that flicked across the gap to the window frame. And from this, he had concluded there were two people in the apartment. One was about five-five, the other six-four or perhaps even taller.

  It was possible there were three people. He couldn’t rule that out. Two who were five-five, or two who were six-four. But he doubted it. Kovac’s guess was a couple. One tall man and one shortish woman.

  Or was it one man who was five-five and one woman who was six-four…?

  The
odds didn’t favor this any more than they did three occupants.

  He watched the six-foot-four silhouette blink across the gap in the cardboard again and realized he wasn’t going to learn anything new sitting here. His little stakeout had delivered as much as it was likely to.

  He checked the street.

  Still empty.

  He reached across. He had his Glock and spare magazine in their holster, but on the passenger seat under a woman’s jean jacket that he had found on the rear seat. It was uncomfortable to wear the holster while seated. He lifted the jacket and emptied the holster. Then, raising his hips, he positioned it inside his belt at the front. He slid the gun and spare magazine in and pulled his shirt back down. Then he opened the car door and stepped out into the street. He locked the Superleggera with the fob, before checking his shirt one last time. No print.

  He did a final check for traffic and pedestrians. He looked left and right and listened for anything in nearby streets. Then he checked every window he could see from where he was standing. All empty.

  Good to go.

  He crossed the road.

  Chapter 18

  Kovac searched for cameras as he approached Griffin’s terraced building, but there were none. He arrived at a knee-high brick wall and stepped over it without breaking stride. He crossed the three-foot deep front yard, and stepped up to the main door. It was wood, but real wood, not ply. It had a central section with frosted glass, but positioned in such a way he couldn’t break it and reach inside for the handle. Not the sort of door he was going to defeat any century soon – not quietly, anyway.

  There were two buttons to the right of this door, in a silver panel built into the brick. Buzzers for each apartment, he assumed – upstairs and down. And there was a window off to his left, with a steel grill on it. This was painted white to match the main door, and it clearly belonged to the downstairs apartment. But he couldn’t see which room. The drapes were pulled shut.