Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I ran into Lady E on the stairs. You didn’t tell me she’d met Emily.’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘She seems to have had quite a conversation with her. Knew all about her school and Belfield, and heaven knows what else.’ She looked at Renoir accusingly. ‘It sounds as though they spent a lot of time together.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Lady E just doesn’t see many young people.’

  Kate nodded. ‘I think she’s lonely. Do you know what she said to me? “Everybody thinks I’m dead.”’

  ‘Why don’t you stop working?’ he said, pointing at Kate’s computer. ‘Let’s have an early drink tonight.’ And when she agreed he led the way into the living room, thinking what contrast lay between her cheerful communicativeness with him and the tense semaphores of the email exchanges he had just read.

  What had he learned from his hasty inspection? That she and Benedict had met several times at one o’clock at the Cavendish Hotel (which he had already known); that something was happening on the 10th, presumably the 10th May. What could that be and why did it sound familiar? Kate said she’d close with Roddy for the Gatehouse some time after the 10th, but that hardly seemed relevant. Whatever else was supposed to happen, Kate obviously thought the date was important (and from his ‘we’re well and truly cooked’ Benedict did as well).

  It was highly improbable he would get another chance at Kate’s emails. But if he couldn’t get at the problem through Kate what could he do? He wondered about this as he thought fleetingly of how he had followed Benedict, then realised the answer was staring him in the face. The other side of the equation. But Benedict wasn’t going to open his soul to Renoir or do anything to make his job easier.

  What could he find out without being detected? Not a lot, it seemed. Sure, he could buy Benedict’s credit rating for a hundred and fifty bucks online, but it wasn’t going to tell him very much. As Renoir discovered after moving from the army into the private sector, even rich people could have terrible credit ratings, because even rich people – sometimes especially rich people – didn’t like to pay their bills on time. Conversely, people who were broke but careful could look positively A-1.

  How then to begin, here in London without the usual fallbacks of his trade – such as people, including private investigators to check references and background stories, or technical resources, some supplied by the Defense Department, which could tell him everything from an applicant’s high school grades to the amount of time an employee spent playing solitaire on the company’s PC the day before. There seemed only one person he could turn to, and he did it reluctantly.

  There was eight hours time difference, but knowing Ticky he called at three thirty in the afternoon his time, certain she would be there. She left her house in Berkeley every morning at six to beat the traffic, arriving at the office forty-five minutes later, when she would first have a run, then shower in the company’s solitary stall, microwave a big bowl of porridge, make a pot of herbal tea and start the first of what were usually eleven hours in front of a terminal. Classic Silicon Valley. When he phoned, she answered right away.

  ‘How’s Kate?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said but then came to the point. ‘Ticky, I need some help.’

  ‘Have you got tax problems or something?’

  ‘It’s more high-tech assistance I want.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I can’t tell you what I’m looking for. Not because it’s secret but because I don’t know for sure myself. But it’s a bad guy, I can promise you that.’

  There was a long pause that Renoir ended. ‘I need your help,’ he said again. ‘Kate knows nothing about this, and I really need to keep it that way.’ He thought, Ticky, we go back a long way, we worked a lot together.

  She seemed to be thinking along similar lines. ‘“Auld Lang Syne” and all that, right?’ She paused. ‘What sort of help do you want?’

  ‘I need to get into somebody’s network,’ he said, and explained the problem, leaving Kate out of it.

  When he finished he waited silently while Ticky considered it. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Have you got a clean machine?’

  ‘I’ll buy one today.’

  ‘Set up a Hotmail account then. Make the address that full name you’re always laughing at.’

  Full name? And then Renoir laughed. Ticonderoga. ‘The one that’s close to home?’

  ‘Precisely. And send me the details of the guy’s corporate site – just its web address for starters.’

  ‘I’ll do it right away. Do you think you can get in?’

  She ignored him and went on, ‘I have an intern from MIT who started last week, and I’ve been scratching my head what to do with him. Maybe he can help. Officially, I don’t need to know about it. You’ll have an email in the morning your time, provided you send me the info I need. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Renoir.

  ‘Love to Kate,’ she said, but then added, ‘well, not this time I guess. Bye.’

  Renoir was grateful she had said this. She seemed to trust him, but he could tell she was uneasy about acting behind Kate’s back. But it would be worth it if she managed to get him into Benedict’s network.

  She couldn’t. The email came later than expected on the following afternoon and read: Firewalls everywhere and the sharpest password security I have seen this year. I am confident we could get in, but assume from the tone of your voice yesterday that the three-month time frame this would require won’t be satisfactory. Can I suggest you take the personal route? Algorithms enclosed.

  He wasn’t surprised by her message, reading it on the new laptop he’d bought that afternoon on Tottenham Court Road, going for a high-end machine since he figured he might need all the processing power he could get. If it were any sector other than banking it might be worth her continuing to try and get in, since even very big corporations were sometimes vulnerable – thanks to poor security, or just less of it than they should have. But not in banking, where clients were obsessively security conscious. If there were even a whiff of anybody outside getting into a bank’s system, clients would head elsewhere fast. Especially personal clients.

  Kate would be home soon, but he ran the attachment of algorithmically generated emails, addressed to 1,250 email addresses that were based on the simple combination of two words: Conrad Benedict. He sent these to all the standard providers, including Hotmail, AOL, Virgin, BT and others. He left it to run overnight and came back in the morning after Kate went to work to find he had a winner. He emailed Ticky: Got it – conrad.benedict@aol.com. Rocket science.

  And virtually by return, after a brief conversation on the phone which found her up and about in Berkeley at three in the morning, Ticky sent him an electronic birthday card attached to an email. ‘You’ve got a choice,’ she’d explained. ‘You can put something in there that will watch his every move – it takes a snapshot of the screen every few seconds so it captures keystrokes. The problem with that is you’re more likely to get caught; the longer you hang around the more likely some security program will alert him that you’re there. The alternative is to go in and out. It will grab whatever you want – documents, email, whatever you specify – and then send them to you, though not all at once, unless he’s online for a long time. The advantage is it’s not easily detectable and once it’s done it comes out of the machine along with all the other material, so there’s no evidence you’ve ever been there. The disadvantage is you can only do it once. You can’t very well send him a second birthday card.’

  He thought for a moment and decided. ‘One-shot deal sounds best. I don’t want him to get suspicious, much less know someone’s got inside his machine.’

  And so now he was sending a birthday card, from his new PC, and from the equally new Hotmail account of one Linda Dove. The message was simple: Conrad, happy (belated) birthday greeting. Next year I’ll be on time. xxx L. Renoir used only an initial, but made it personal (thou
gh not louche) so that Benedict would scratch his head and think ‘who the hell is this?’. And, crucially, open the attachment, which was a simple Flash animation. It showed a girl in a riding outfit astride a hunter, which jerkily jumped a fence before it came to another, where it baulked. The rider was thrown forward, did a somersault over the jump and landed neatly on her feet. A banner ran across the screen: I’d jump over anything for you. Happy Birthday!!

  And while Benedict tried to puzzle out just who Linda Dove was and whether he had been drunk when he’d met her, a software application would go to work immediately, sending out copies of the entire email correspondence held on Benedict’s computer at whatever rate the connection allowed. If he wasn’t logged on very long, then it would pick up where it stopped on Benedict’s next visit to the Internet.

  Renoir specified that Benedict’s emails should be sent first, then Word documents. Nothing else; if he included graphics, the size of the files would take forever to transport. Similarly, he avoided spreadsheets, since he assumed that a personal banker would have about a million of them on his machine. Renoir was in any case looking for the words which triggered a movement in numbers, not the numbers themselves.

  He didn’t know why he was surprised, since he could not have said what he was expecting, but it turned out there were 2,237 emails in Benedict’s Inbox, 1,565 in his Sent box, and 212 deleted. The Junk box was empty, and there were no separate folders. A large, unmitigated mess, in other words, at least for Renoir’s purposes. Daunted, he looked to see what else had come in from Benedict’s PC, and his heart sank. There were over twenty folders holding Word documents; opening the first two at random, he found that each held over a hundred separate documents. Infuriatingly, both the folders and documents seemed to be labelled in a system that might have been Chinese for all the sense it made to Renoir, with a prefatory capital letter, a lower case one, then a number which ranged on the screens he looked at from 0001 to 1127.

  What was he supposed to do? Sift through several thousand emails, addressed to people he had never heard of? The Word documents seemed equally impenetrable. He would have to look through six hundred documents, many of them over 100k in length – it was hundreds of thousands, no millions, of words. Even the labelling of them by letter seemed to have no mnemonic value. He looked under ‘P’, hoping (or dreading; he wasn’t sure) that ‘Palmer’ would show up, but found instead an excerpt from a casebook on natural gas regulations, and a speech given by a New York financier named Platt on the origins of the derivatives market.

  He continued to feel entirely at sea until he looked at the email he’d had from Ticky just that morning, with an attachment called simply TOOLS. Her penultimate paragraph said, If, as usual, you don’t know what you’re looking for, these bits and pieces may help.

  The tools were listed as forms of search: Keyword or Proximity Search; Free Search (all text), Search By: Email, PDF, Documents. Then Sorting By: Date Received, Dates in Documents, By Recipient (alphabetical), By Sender (alphabetical), and – here it said FUZZY Search – by Dominant Topic.

  Maybe this would help. He began, again, with ‘Palmer’, and was delighted to get back thirty-seven entries. But they proved a farrago of uninformative citations: reference in the trade press to Kate and Seymour Carlisle. There was nothing remarkable in this mix of PDF and Word documents and text files. Until he opened a document with the formidable label ESAf17134.

  At first there seemed nothing unusual about it – it was an address about oil exploration. Yet it seemed familiar, and as he scanned through it he recognised the speech that was giving Kate so much trouble. What was Benedict doing with it? He went through this copy page by page, and came to a highlighted section on expert systems, where Kate argued that companies needed to revaluate how they used them for oil finds. Why was this highlighted, presumably by Kate? He scrolled slowly to the end of the document, but could see no obvious changes, until he found a simple dated message at the end:

  09/03

  Are you happy now? K

  This was a few days after she had shown the same speech to Renoir, her partner. Did she prefer the input of her ex-boyfriend? He looked through the other documents again, but found no clues there – and nothing with any message for Benedict.

  He scanned the subset of emails, looking at senders’ names, and found his interest piqued by ‘Kiki Reisberg’, an exotic note among an otherwise innocuous roster of Anglo-Saxon surnames. Opening it he read the following:

  Mr B,

  Sorry the suite at KGH is booked, but never mind – we’ll have more than enough room. And this time I’ll bring the baby oil.

  Yours anticipatingly,

  Kiki R

  So Benedict did enjoy sessions in hotel rooms, only with someone rejoicing in the name of Kiki Reisberg, who sounded suspiciously like a high class call girl. Poor Helena, thought Renoir, she must have baulked at baby oil.

  Where else should he look? Browsing, he would be awash in an ocean of words. He thought of what he knew about the man. Surprisingly little. He’d checked Who’s Who but Benedict had yet to make it there; Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage, consulted in the London Library, had proved equally barren. Anyway, what good would it do him if he knew what school Benedict had attended, his place of birth, his mother’s maiden name? Sweet FA, as the English liked to say.

  Was it possible that Benedict and Kate were up to something perfectly legitimate, some consultancy perhaps, which she was providing? But then why had she lied? Just to spare his feelings, in case Renoir was jealous? No, there was too much subterfuge for anything legitimate. Which left scams, much as Renoir was reluctant to admit it. And from what Alastair had said, Benedict was no beginner in that arena.

  Then he remembered the elliptical reference in Benedict’s email. Acer, as in Acer Oil, a client of the Carlisle Consultancy. He ran a search, starting with documents, and found two links right away – one in particular to an article in Business Week which he reluctantly paid to read. From it he learned that Acer was a mid-sized independent, which specialised in regions which were borderline, in terms of their potential; so much so that the big companies didn’t expend drilling resources on what was seen as marginal. Natural gas off Scandinavian shores, unexplored parts of Azerbaijan, once-worked pockets off Indonesia that Acer thought worth working all over again. Nothing remarkable there, but one paragraph near the end of the article caught his attention right away:

  Acer’s edge is in its exploration of expert systems technology to make oil and gas finds which the more conventional techniques of its rivals cannot unearth. Despite scepticism voiced by these more traditional practitioners, Acer has been consistently successful in locating significant natural gas and oil deposits in areas thought to be of negligible value by its competitors. SHARE WATCH: BUY.

  Renoir went and found a newspaper and checked the shares page. There was Acer all right, trading nicely at 373p. But wait a minute. He checked the Business Week piece again – it had appeared six months before – and discovered the shares had then been trading at only two pounds. The stock was riding high.

  And then he understood. It was Acer, it must be, and Benedict would be shorting the shares. Someone – someone? thought Renoir bitterly – would have tipped him off, someone who knew the company’s reliance on expert systems was excessive, its ‘proven reserves’ more fiction than fact. He could imagine the market’s reaction to X million barrels of oil moving from proven to . . . probable? More like problematic.

  And any conceivable doubt that he had found what he was looking for was removed when he ran a check through Google, which gave him the most recent mentions of Acer in the press. Preliminary news of the company’s half-year results, he read, were positive, though as usual the company counselled shareholders to wait for the official results due on May 10.

  The following Friday. And the same day, May 10, when Kate was due to give the speech she had sent in draft form to Benedict. Why? Not that it mattered; the importance of the date had no
thing to do with the speech. The real significance, as he looked again at Acer Oil’s press release, was that on the same day the company would announce its official results. And Renoir would have happily bet every one of his last remaining dollars that, to an unsuspecting world, these would seem catastrophic. But not, it seemed, to Conrad Benedict. He would make a fortune selling Acer short. Why in the name of God was Kate going to help him do this?

  And then it was blossom time. They picked up Emily from school in High Wycombe, then stopped at the pub in the village for supper. When they reached the Gatehouse it was dark. Not having seen the finished house, Emily raced upstairs to inspect her room, a large corner one decorated with blue and pink wallpaper she had picked. She had been allowed a make-up table, though not, blessedly, allowed make-up, since Kate loathed the precocity of so many pre-adolescent girls.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked as she toured the room, opening the closet door, pulling open and shut the drawers of her dresser, even looking under the bed in her excitement.

  Emily opened the window. She cupped her chin in both hands and propped her elbows on the windowsill as she stared out at the black starless night above Burdick’s Field. ‘Oh, Renoir,’ she said, almost breathless in her satisfaction, ‘it’s perfect.’

  In the morning he let Kate sleep and made Emily a big breakfast. ‘American style,’ she called it – cereal followed by pancakes with maple syrup. She chatted away while he drank his coffee and ate some toast. ‘Renoir, did you have cereal when you were a boy?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why are you asking me that?’