To Kill a Man - Maggie Costello Series 05 (2020)

by Bourne, Sam

  There, filling the screen, was a stunning Renaissance painting. It showed two women pinning a man down on a bloodstained bed, one of the women thrusting a knife into his neck. The man was nearly naked, the knifewoman full-breasted, her neckline plunging and low. The painting was Judith Slaying Holofernes, apparently the work of a seventeen-year-old woman from seventeenth-century Italy.

  The entry explained that this was a depiction of the possibly apocryphal story of the Israelite heroine who had beheaded an Assyrian general: the general had intended to rape Judith, but she killed him first. Next in the search engine’s list of offerings was a blog post, headlined: On women fighting back, in art – and in life.

  Now Maggie stared at the closed folder named ‘Judith’, locked and sealed. She looked from that icon to the picture of the avenging women and then back to the folder – and she knew with complete certainty what kind of secrets were kept within.

  Chapter 46

  Washington, DC

  Maggie tried to transfer the ‘Judith’ file to the memory stick she produced from her bag: she’d get Liz to see if she could break into it. But the folder was wise to that trick. It had been encrypted in such a way that it refused to be dragged onto the stick, skipping back to the desktop each time Maggie tried. Luckily the Russian file was less resistant.

  Next, she went back to the computer to check one last thing – whether Natasha had met with any of the other women in the lead-up to the death of Jeffrey Todd. She began typing, but now no letters showed up on the screen.

  She tried to click again on the browser, just in case she was stuck in another application. That didn’t work either. She shook the mouse, but still it refused to respond.

  Meanwhile, the cursor was moving around the screen. She had seen this before: sometimes it happened if the batteries were running low on the mouse or, occasionally, if there was interference from her phone. She took the phone off the desk and put it on her lap, but it was no use. The cursor was whizzing around, apparently with a mind of its own.

  Now she saw that its movements were not random. The cursor was closing down documents one by one, clicking shut the various files and folders Maggie had opened. Eventually, it went through each of the search tabs she had opened, the details of Gargi in Bangalore, the academic papers written by Fiona, the conference webpage for Emory University, removing each of them from display. Soon, most of what was on the screen had been removed, clicked into disappearance. Just one document was left and it remained open, the cursor dragging it into the centre of the screen and, after another click, expanding it so that nothing else was visible. The whole screen was filled with a single message, aimed at her.

  You may know a lot, but you won’t know everything.

  Maggie stared at it a while and then tried to click it out of the way. No good: she had lost control of the machine entirely.

  The cursor blinked at her, defiant. And now it typed new words, below that sentence of Natasha’s. Each letter appeared only slowly, as if the keys were being punched one finger at a time, by a child.

  If

  I

  Were

  You

  I

  Would

  Get

  Out

  Now

  And then the computer screen went dark.

  Maggie threw everything into her bag, leapt out of the chair, flung herself upon the door and headed for the exit. She pulled at the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. She had forgotten the green exit button, big and shaped like the head of a mushroom, at the side of the door. She pressed her entire palm against it, but there was no click of response. There was no sound at all.

  She gave the button another nudge and then another. Nothing. She yanked at the handle, as if that would make any difference, as if the door might have changed its mind.

  She turned back into the open-plan office, looking for an exit, anywhere.

  Just rows of desks and windows that, given the floor they were on, did not allow themselves to be opened at all.

  Her skin was beginning to crawl, the need to get out urgent and desperate. Her phone began to ring. Not now, not now.

  Maggie broke into a jog, as she headed for the opposite corner of the work area. As she got closer, she could see there was a door unlike the others: it did not lead off into a personal office. Could this be a fire exit?

  She turned the handle and, to her relief, it moved. She pushed and a second later the light came on, revealing that she had walked not into a stairwell, but a stationery cupboard.

  Maggie turned around and was back in the open-plan area, looking at every sealed window and realizing there was no way out. In desperation, and in the full knowledge it was futile, she ran back to the door that had been electronically closed off. Perhaps, a small hopeless voice told her, this was just a system error that had corrected itself. Perhaps the door would open now.

  She got there, pressed the green button and, of course, it didn’t work.

  Now Maggie took a closer look at the door. There was a handle, but one that didn’t turn. It was fixed, there solely to be pulled once the lock was released.

  Her eye moved all around the doorframe, as she looked for any kind of mechanism that could be sprung manually. She squatted down by the handle, squinting into the gap between the frame and the door. But there was nothing there; the handle was dumb, there was no normal lock that you could start tinkering with. Not that Maggie would know what to do, even if there were. In the house in Dublin, growing up, when she and Liz were forced to fend for themselves – which was often – odd jobs usually fell to Maggie. She’d had to learn her way around a toolbox and she still knew one end of a screwdriver from the other. But this was not bleeding a radiator; this was in a different league.

  Now her gaze settled on the left-hand side of the door, and two metal hinges. She squatted down to look closer at the lower one. The two parts – one attached to the frame, the other to the door – were held together by a long, vertical pin. On this one, the pin was peeking out just enough to be visible. Speculatively and with little confidence, Maggie tried to get her fingers, still cut and scratched from her encounter with the wannabe rapist, around the top of it and pull.

  It was near impossible to get a grip on it, or to get her fingernails under the head where she might find purchase. A brief moment of encouragement came when it moved just a bit, but her next efforts were in vain. She applied so much force to her fingernails as she sought to grip the pin-head that, when her finger slipped, the metal of the hinge sliced the skin of her index finger, drawing blood.

  Only then did she have the obvious thought. If she couldn’t pull the pin out from above, why not push it out from below? She lay down, her head on the floor looking up, to assess it. Now she knew what she needed.

  She sprung up, and all but sprinted back into the working area. She started checking out desks, rummaging through several of them to find what she was looking for. There were pencils, but they were too thick. There were promotional ball pens, marked with the logo of Gonzales Associates, but, when she opened them up, their innards were plastic. She needed something more old school. She headed back into Natasha’s office.

  On the desk was a china pot, like a mug without a handle, decorated with a line drawing of what seemed to be a bucolic English scene. It contained pencils, two fountain pens and exactly what she was searching for: an upmarket ball pen. She unscrewed it and, to her relief, there it was: a metal refill, thin but tough.

  Her phone buzzed again. She looked at the screen. A number appeared, but it made no sense: 0-000-000-0000. The message, however, was unambiguous.

  Out.

  Now!

  She ran back to the door and, lying on her back, pushed the pen refill upward into the slot. She pushed and felt the slightest give. Now she pushed as hard as she could and heard a click.

  But the pin had not pop
ped out. The refill had snapped under the pressure, breaking off at the nib, coating her fingers with thick, viscous ink. A drop landed on her shoulders.

  There was no time to go back to Natasha’s desk. She would have to use what she had and damn the mess.

  Now she turned the refill around and, holding it by its leaking, inky end, inserted it once more. This worked better; the bottom of the refill better matched the dimensions of the pin. A focused push and she could feel the pin give. A little more, a little more and, pop, it was out.

  There was the second hinge to do. Maggie tried to stretch upward, and though she was tall enough to touch it, her outstretched arm couldn’t get the precision or pressure. She darted into the working space and grabbed a chair, wheeling it into position. She climbed up and onto the seat, wobbling as it swivelled.

  Now she stood, feet planted wide apart on the moving seat, the leaking metal refill in her stained hand, attempting to repeat the manoeuvre she had performed on the lower hinge. She pushed up, then pushed some more, trying to ensure the seat she was standing on did not start spinning. She felt the pin move a smidgeon, then a tiny bit more.

  A half-second later, she was knocked backwards, off the chair and flattened onto her back, smashed in the head by the full weight of the door, which now lay on top of her. She remained there for a second or two, brain throbbing, wondering if she could even move. She could see nothing, except the wood in front of her face, but even that seemed to be spinning.

  With great effort she shoved the door to one side, so that it slid off her, landing on her right. The pushing of the pin inside the hinge must have worked, but she’d been an idiot: she should have realized that once the pin was out, there’d be nothing holding the door in place.

  As quickly as she could, she got to her feet, though it was not fast. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand; it came back bloody. She staggered her way to one of the desks, where she helped herself to a box of tissues. There was a lot of blood and her nose felt painful and tender. She wondered if it was broken.

  There was no time to check. She reached for her bag and walked through the now-doorless archway. She pressed for the elevator, but was not surprised to see that the indicator did not light up and that nothing moved. Whoever had taken over Natasha’s computer and locked the door had clearly hacked into the building’s entire system.

  But not, Maggie reckoned, the fire escape. She looked for the sign for the stairs, just off the elevator lobby, knowing that no building in DC or anywhere else was allowed to have electronically controlled access to the fire escape; it had to be open even if everything else failed. And it was.

  Maggie rushed down the stairs as quickly as she could manage, her face, her nose, her head all throbbing in unison. Finally she reached the ground floor, where she saw the emergency exit. A push against the horizontal metal bar and she was out, back into the cold of the outside world.

  Panting to catch her breath, Maggie pulled out her phone. There was the missed call from a few minutes earlier: Liz. There was a string of texts too, most of them variations on Call me right now. Maggie pressed the button.

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Mags. Thank fuck. You need to get away, get somewhere safe.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Seriously. These people are powerful. I don’t know what you’ve got into, but whatever it is you need to get out.’

  Maggie thought of these women, the connections they had, the power they wielded in cities across the world. One of them was a plausible candidate for the American presidency, for God’s sake. They had power and, as Chicago and Bangalore had proved, they were also ready to be utterly merciless.

  ‘I know, Liz,’ she said quietly, sniffing back the blood that was still trickling into her throat. But her sister was barely listening.

  ‘I’ve been going through the stuff you sent me, and that Gab thing. It was brilliantly done – spoofed EXIF data, cycling devices, machine translation, the works – but here’s the thing. There’s a common path between that and the listing on the, you know, rape site thing.’

  ‘The listing of me, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I think they both came from the same source.’

  Maggie all but rolled her eyes. ‘Of course they came from the same source. Someone is trying to take me out, Liz. Either get me raped or scare me off. The point is—’

  ‘The point is who. Exactly. So they trace back to an operation which seems to work by spinning up synthetic personalities, using them to seed authentic identities on the major social networking platforms – or just buying dormant ones from a grey-market hacker, of course – and then activating them as needed to engage in co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour.’

  ‘Liz, English!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. It traces back to a troll farm. In St Petersburg.’

  ‘Florida? Or Russia?’

  ‘Russia. I think. Hang on, let me check.’

  ‘Jesus, Liz.’ Maggie was watching two men on the opposite street corner. They had been talking to each other. They were now looking at her.

  ‘Yes, Russia. Definitely.’

  ‘You’ve traced these threats to there?’

  Maggie thought of Fiona Anderson, working out of a swanky international law firm in Moscow. Could she be the hidden hand behind all this? Would she really unleash a would-be rapist and an army of alt-right stalkers and incel maniacs on another woman, just to stop the truth about the revenge circle coming to light? The thought appalled her. And yet she couldn’t, in all honesty, dismiss it.

  ‘They all trace back to an office in St Petersburg. St Petersburg, Russia. It’s dressed up as some kind of academic institute, but here’s the thing. That wasn’t the end point. I kept on finding this strange connection, like a pathway, between that institute and a company based here in America. In fact, it’s based in DC.’

  Maggie felt her skin go cold.

  You may know a lot, but you won’t know everything.

  ‘Mags? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I think it’s that company that’s behind these attacks on you. I think it’s them who want to stop you.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They’re incredibly secretive. They’re a tech company that hardly anyone knows about. They’re trusted with all these security contracts and, you know, they’re based in DC. So there’s lots of conspiracy theories saying they must be deep state.’

  ‘What’s their name?’

  ‘They’re called Imperial Analytica. Big international reach, been involved in elections in Australia, India, Britain, Germany, Latin America. Everywhere.’

  ‘And they have a connection with Russia?’

  ‘I can’t be one hundred per cent sure.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But that’s what it looks like, yes.’

  Maggie was trying to think. She could feel the vein in her temple throbbing. ‘Liz, how’s your Russian?’

  ‘It’s shit. You know it’s shit. I gave up after one term.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s shit. Look, see if you can make sense of this anyway. I’m going to send you a picture of one word right now. Text me back what it says.’

  Maggie hung up and, as her hands trembled, she reached for the yellow pad she had stashed in her bag. She found the page where, like an infant tracing a map she didn’t understand, she had copied the Cyrillic letters that Natasha Winthrop had used to title the folder packed with thousands of contracts, documents and that single sentence. You may know a lot, but you won’t know everything.

  She took a picture of the word and texted it to Liz.

  Three dots appeared under her message, the sign that Liz was typing a reply. Come on, come on.

  A message arrived.

  It’s not a Russian word.

  Then another.

  It’s in Russian characters, b
ut it’s not Russian.

  Please, Liz. Come on.

  And then a single word appeared.

  Imperial.

  Chapter 47

  By Jake Haynes, New York Times

  WASHINGTON

  A US-based data-mining company employed by the presidential campaign of Senator Tom Harrison has links with the Kremlin, has engaged in illegal hacking of US citizens’ social media accounts and appears to have been involved in a campaign of violent harassment targeting a former White House official, according to documents seen by the New York Times.

  Washington-based Imperial Analytica is revealed to have been involved in a practice known as “micro-hacking”: breaking users’ passwords to raid their supposedly private data, from credit card details to the content of confidential direct messages. While rival companies simply “scrape” data from publicly available online sources—Facebook posts, tweets and the like—Imperial’s micro-hacking allowed the Harrison campaign’s digital data team to target US voters with greater precision than ever before.

  “That’s our secret sauce,” one Imperial official is quoted as saying in correspondence with Harrison campaign officials.

  The cache of documents also reveals that Imperial Analytica functions as a front for a secretive company based in St Petersburg, Russia. Hidden in a labyrinth of offshore shell companies, the corporate structure’s ultimate owners are two oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin. Analysis of data patterns reveals intense traffic between Imperial’s head office in Washington, DC, and the St Petersburg operation. According to one expert analyst consulted by the Times for this report, “Imperial Analytica and Russia are linked by a strong, thick neural pathway. Whatever the Harrison campaign knew would have been known, instantly and in real time, in St Petersburg. It’s a safe assumption that such information would have been of great interest to the company’s friends in the Kremlin.”

  Evidence has also emerged that Imperial Analytica directed a dirty tricks operation against a former White House official, Maggie Costello, now advising indicted Washington civil rights lawyer Natasha Winthrop as she faces a homicide inquiry. Ms Costello was the victim of a “doxxing” attack, in which her home address was published online, leading to a break-in by a violent intruder on Thursday. A call on alt-right social media platform Gab, urging users to track Ms Costello’s movements and post photographs of her, can also be traced to Imperial and to its undisclosed parent organization in St Petersburg.