The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  ‘It’s possible that this woman Eveline Plaats and Abigail were killed in the same way,’ Maddy began. ‘Trouble is, we don’t know enough about Eveline’s very last movements. Specifically, we don’t know where she worked that day. But someone knows.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘CleanBreak. It’s a “domestic services” agency. They send cleaners out on jobs; they probably have records of who worked where. You know, on their system. But they won’t tell us anything.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Come on, K.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how illegal that is? People have been jailed for this sort of thing, Maddy.’

  ‘I know, but that was for, like, hacking the Pentagon. This is—’

  ‘I was nearly jailed, Maddy. As you well know.’

  Madison replied with a moment of respectful silence. If ever Maddy had to explain who her friend and colleague really was and what she really did, she usually went for the news-in-brief version, explaining that Katharine was once part of ‘the hacking community’, a phrase whose absurdity Maddy would acknowledge with an attempt at a smile. Katharine had found her way to the LA Times after she had broken into the system of a major food company, revealing internal correspondence that showed the company had knowingly labelled their own products falsely. Or, as Katharine would helpfully chip in, ‘They were selling shit and they knew it.’ She handed the information over to the Times who then came under pressure to reveal their source. They refused. Katharine lay low for the best part of a year but once the pressure had eased, and several executives of the food company had been indicted, she was quietly hired. Initially in ‘systems support’, she had gone on to become a crucial part of the newsroom, deploying her intimacy with all things computer to ferret out data others wanted hidden. Nearly ten years older than Maddy, she remained as tech savvy as a teenager.

  ‘The answer’s still no,’ Katharine said gently, leaning forward to touch Maddy’s hand, a sign she had not abandoned the effort to persuade her friend to stop this craziness and grieve.

  ‘Will you at least let me explain?’ Maddy implored. She told Katharine everything she had so far: the unexplained and improbable deaths by heroin overdose of three women who had no history of using drugs, each woman of a similar age and appearance. ‘The police won’t even accept these other two were murdered at all. They’re giving the same bullshit they tried with Abigail. You know, “Maybe there was a drug habit.” Or sex, or whatever. But I’m convinced – no, I’m not convinced but I think it’s at least possible – that these things are connected. I don’t know how, I don’t know who. But it’s got to be worth looking at.’

  ‘So let the police do it, Maddy. That’s their job.’

  ‘It should be their job, I agree with you. Hundred per cent. But they’re not doing it, K. Don’t you see? It may be nothing. But I have to at least look. If there’s even a chance this could lead to the person who killed Abigail, I have to look, don’t I?’ She could feel her throat drying. ‘And the truth is, I don’t think I can begin to mourn until I know who did this.’ It was a statement Maddy had not yet made to herself. She was almost surprised to hear the clarity of it.

  Katharine looked down and shook her head. She did not speak for a long while, Maddy allowing her the silence. Eventually, she raised her face. ‘I’m doing this because I know you loved your sister. And because I would want my sister to do this for me.’

  Maddy nodded, letting the silence between them acknowledge the fact that she had seen the tears in her friend’s eyes. Katharine, no more able to speak than Maddy, squeezed her hand, before finally surrendering to a release of laughter. ‘Look at me,’ she said, wiping away the moisture from her cheek. ‘And I’m meant to be the butch one.’

  She pulled the laptop towards her, flipped up the lid and got to work.

  ‘OK, let’s start at the beginning.’ First she went to a domain Madison dimly recalled from the last time they mounted an operation like this: windowssecurityfix.com. It sounded global and mighty. In fact it was a homemade little site of Katharine’s own. She tinkered away for a few seconds, muttered something about updating for the latest version of Windows and then opened a new tab.

  There she searched for CleanBreak, found it, clicked on it and inspected their website. ‘I can’t be certain, but I’d guess that this is a small- to medium-size business, with fifteen to twenty employees.’ That had been Amy Alice’s rough estimate too, safely recorded in Maddy’s notebook. ‘There’s a chance they have an in-house mail server. I might be wrong, but let’s start with that and see where we get to.’

  She went to the Contact Us page and noted the email address: info@cleanbreakcleaning.com. A second later, she opened up another tab where she logged onto an email account. Not, noted Maddy – who had seen this trick before – in Katharine’s own name, but one of her multiple aliases.

  Katharine set about composing an email to an imaginary employee she knew would not exist, christening him with the least likely name she could dream up: tarquin@cleanbreakcleaning.com, writing the single word Contact into the subject field and then this brief message:

  Can you send me your rates, please?

  She pressed ‘Send’. A few seconds later, she murmured, ‘Thank you very much, that’ll do nicely.’ The message had just bounced back, an auto-response which apparently informed her that her message to tarquin@cleanbreakcleaning.com had been undeliverable but which, to Katharine’s trained eye, revealed so much more. A quick look at the headers exposed a long string of gobbledegook – or at least that was how it seemed to Maddy. But for Katharine it was a pane of glass, entirely clear. It told her that CleanBreak used a Windows server for its email and, therefore, almost certainly used Windows for everything else. Above all, it revealed what she was looking for, the name of the cleaning company’s internet service provider: Unicom, Chinese-owned and the biggest ISP in the country.

  Thinking out loud, she weighed up the probabilities that a company of that size and type would have its own dedicated IT person. She guessed they wouldn’t, that at most they would have an administrator whose multiple duties included keeping the computers ticking over and calling for help when things went wrong. She looked up from her screen. ‘Cellphone at the ready please, Maddy. OK. You know what to do. And remember: slowly.’

  Maddy took the phone and dialled the number for CleanBreak, asking to be put through to the person in charge of IT. A short delay and then she began, expertly adopting the voice of a middle-aged, suburban woman. She spoke slowly, and got slower.

  ‘Hello there, dear. I’m calling from the administration department of Ventura High School and, well, I don’t know where to start. Some of our students have been receiving the most awful email messages today … Hold on, I’ll explain what it has to do with your company. What was I saying? Oh yes, awful messages. And what’s that? Well, that’s just it, dear. We’ve traced them to a company called, hold on a moment, that’s it, CleanBreak Cleaning. Exactly. Yes, I know … But they say it very clearly. Info at Clean Break cleaning dot com. That’s the address. Now, some of them have pictures. Well, photographs …’

  On she went, receiving an enthusiastic thumbs-up from Katharine.

  Now, using a program on the laptop and with headphones firmly on, Katharine dialled CleanBreak for herself, reassured that the administrator at the other end was suitably tied up. She cleared her throat as she waited for the call to be answered. Once it was, she sat up straight and – a bit too loudly for a corner table in a café – asked to be put through to the person in charge of computer systems.

  ‘Hello, this is Unicom calling with an urgent issue. Am I speaking to someone at Clean Break cleaning dot com? OK, I need to notify you that your network is being actively used to spread a piece of malware and we need to take … What’s that? OK, let me back up and put it real simple. The network you guys use has been infected with a “zero day” virus, that is a “zero day” virus. We have a fix for it, but we need to act very swiftly … No, I’
m afraid we don’t have time for that process, sir … Well, I’m happy for you to do that, sir, of course that’s your right, but that will entail termination of your service within the next three to four minutes … That’s right, we’ll have to cut you off the internet … I see that, sir, but we have a duty of care to our customers …’

  Maddy was waving her hands, signalling that she couldn’t keep up her end much longer. ‘Let me just get a pen, dear,’ she was saying, but it was clear she was struggling: whoever it was at the other end had lost patience and would soon surely be slamming the phone down. Katharine stepped up the pace.

  ‘All right, sir. This virus is spreading and Unicom’s policy is very clear. We have to cap off the source and that source is you … Good, OK. So here’s what I need you to do. Yes, that’s the good news. There is a fix for this. No, you don’t need your manager to help you. It’s real simple.’

  Maddy was holding up her phone. Her decoy efforts were exhausted.

  Katharine, however, was in full flow. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to see his face when you’re the guy who got the whole office cut off. Sudden termination can often trigger loss of all data. Yes, exactly. So let’s do this. Go to windows security fix dot com … Yep, two “s”s. No spaces, no dots … You got that? Excellent. Now see that little icon there, on the top right? That’s the one. It says “security dot exe”. Yep, that’s it. Just click on that for me. Uh-huh. Just wait for it to roll through. OK, what’s it saying now? “Security patch applied, your system is now secure.” You’ve got those words on your screen? Excellent. Now tell me, have you got a little … That’s it, the little smiley face! Good, that means we’re done. Yep, all done. That’s right, there’ll be no termination of your supply. Let’s just hope we’ve stopped that “zero day” in its tracks. They can be real evil, those viruses, believe me. All right now, sir, you have a good day now. No, thank you.’

  Maddy and Katharine exchanged a mute high-five, dampening both sound and gesture in deference to the fact that they were in a public place. Then Katharine entered a few keystrokes and was suddenly looking at the internal system of the CleanBreak cleaning company – fully exposed to her gaze the instant the hapless junior on the end of the phone had allowed himself to be bullied into downloading and installing a piece of software that acted as an electronic traitor, granting remote access to the person who controlled both it and the bogus windowssecurityfix.com website where he had found it. And that person was Katharine.

  She turned the screen around for Maddy to see. With no graphics, this was plainly the back end of the CleanBreak system. Visible was a kind of menu:

  SHOW TABLES;

  PAYROLL

  PREMISES

  TAX

  ROSTER

  Maddy pointed at the last of those and Katharine took back the machine. She typed in answers to the questions that appeared, in single, blinking lines of text.

  DESCRIBE ROSTER

  Date

  Client

  Employee

  ‘What date are we talking about?’ Katharine asked.

  ‘January ninth.’

  ‘OK.’ A few more keystrokes and then, ‘Spell the name we’re looking for. Real slowly.’

  ‘Papa, lima—’

  ‘You know I can never do that shit. Just spell it like a normal person. Slowly.’

  ‘P. L. A. A. T. S. First name Eveline.’

  A frown appeared on Katharine’s face. ‘No one of that name on that day. Could you have got the date wrong? Are you sure—’

  ‘One hundred per cent sure,’ Madison replied. ‘Can you look again?’

  Still nothing.

  Of course. Maddy leaned forward and said quietly, ‘Search for Alice. Amy Alice.’ It was she who had been due to work that day. It was Amy Alice’s shift Eveline had done.

  A few more keystrokes, the briefest smile of satisfaction and then Katharine’s face darkened, as if a shadow had passed over it. She turned the screen for Maddy to read for herself.

  Next to Amy Alice’s name was a simple description. The words were plain enough, but still Maddy had to read them and read them again to be sure. But even after she had looked away, catching Katharine’s aghast expression, they were still there, carrying the same message in glowing light.

  Amy Alice: Accommodation Units 88 to 101, S48 Division, Garrison of the People’s Liberation Army, Port of Los Angeles.

  Chapter 18

  How many times had he done a wardrobe session, a dozen? Maybe two? The first candidates Bill Doran worked for would spend a maximum of two minutes on this exercise, usually delegating it to their wives. That changed as the industry got slicker, as more PR consultants were hired and experts popped up spouting seven jars of hooey about earth tones and ‘giving off a beta male aura’ and bullshit of a similar stripe. Now he was expected to pay attention to whether the candidate wore a red or blue tie or, more commonly, went open-necked and rugged.

  He had gotten used to that, even become quite good at it. But now, he understood, he had to take it to a whole other level. He was working for a woman now; different rules applied. Like it or not, choosing the main campaign photograph – the one that would appear on the website and on lawn signs, on lapel buttons and as the final still image on the TV spots – was serious business.

  Some wanted her in vivid red or canary yellow, conveying, it was said, strength and confidence. Others wanted something softer: ‘Everyone already knows Elena Sigurdsson is tough enough to put Berger’s balls in the blender. We need to show she can also be kinder. And gentler.’

  ‘Sure, if this was Leonard Sigurdsson we were selling.’ It was Ted Norman, mid-fifties, ruddy-faced chair of the state party. Hawkish on every issue even, it seemed, clothing. He was dressed like a Florida retiree: slacks, short-sleeved navy shirt. This man was, Doran concluded to his own amusement, the very personification of the Republican party activist: white, male, affluent and angry. The very rims of his eyes seemed aflame, with something that was either rage or melancholy or perhaps both. Doran could have sketched a profile of him then and there: watches Fox, likes no music recorded since 1978 and never vacations abroad. And, if he had to bet, suffers from high cholesterol.

  ‘You do “kinder, gentler” with a woman and she’s weak,’ Norman was saying. ‘You might as well show her tearing up. If there’s a nuclear accident on the San Andreas fault at three o’clock in the morning, people don’t want the governor to give them a hug. They want to know she’ll take charge. And anyone who doesn’t like it better get the hell out of the way.’

  A few of the kids in the room stared at their feet, doubtless embarrassed by the lack of sophistication. But Doran knew better: Norman was the authentic voice of the activists. They might not know how to win an election – in fact, if you let them get their way, they’d lose you an election every time. But you had to show respect. They were your base. Without them you were nothing.

  As the conversation entered its thirtieth minute, Doran watched and listened, aware that he had not spoken yet. That was no bad thing. It preserved his authority, set him above the fray, the adult in the room who would settle the squabble among the (mostly) kids. But in this instance, his silence sprang from a different source.

  With each argument made by Sigurdsson’s conflicting advisors – each of them speaking about her in the third person, as if she were not in the room – a hole was opening up before his eyes. The hole was at the heart of this campaign. They couldn’t decide how the candidate should look because they couldn’t decide what the candidate should be. They had not yet agreed her core message. Sure, they had come up with plenty of slogans, several of them now focus-grouped, shrink-wrapped and ready to roll into production. But that was not the same thing. What they lacked was a mission, the raison d’etre of the campaign. It was the question that had undone candidates stronger, more experienced and better placed than Elena Sigurdsson: why are you running? And, as he listened to the debate over earrings or no earrings, he realized that Sigurdsson could
not yet give a decent answer.

  ‘What if,’ the candidate said finally, ‘we don’t have a single image at all? What if we have different photographs for different contexts? So when I’m talking crime, we go with the pant-suit and jacket. When it’s education, we go with that one.’ She pointed at a picture of herself in weekend wear, a sweater draped over her shoulders and gently tied, with a backdrop of California countryside. To Bill Doran’s eye, she looked like a woman in one of those five pm ads for Depends or Tylenol, generic and middle-aged, but he got the idea. And, as the competing factions in the room warmed to her approach, agreeing that it made a sensible compromise, offering the best of both worlds and all the rest of that baloney, he had the sinking feeling that his gloomiest analysis had just been borne out, indeed vividly demonstrated before his very eyes.

  ‘Now,’ Sigurdsson said, clearly relieved to have moved away from a debate about her appearance. ‘I’ve been thinking about our security message. I like what we have so far, guys, but I’m thinking how we can sharpen it up a little.’

  Hold on, what was this?

  ‘I want to play to my strengths, run on my experience. As a prosecutor.’

  Doran suspected he knew where this was going – and he quite liked it. ‘You mean, whack Berger on all the crimes he hasn’t solved, all the bad guys he hasn’t put away?’ he asked. Ted Norman was nodding enthusiastically.

  Sigurdsson nodded too, but her gaze was focused on Doran alone. She gave him a look that said, ‘Bill, you and I understand what all these over-educated kids don’t understand. Which is that, in the end, this stuff is pretty simple.’

  He leaned forward, warming to this new line of thinking. ‘Do you have any particular variety of bad guys in mind?’

  She smiled. ‘What would you suggest, Bill?’

  They both knew the answer to that, but he could see that she wanted him to spell it out – perhaps in order to enlighten some of the younger members of the team who, unlike both Doran and Sigurdsson, had not yet built a career, or at least not given it a boost at several critical junctures, by milking one kind of crime in particular.