He pauses. It’s possible she has somehow faked what he’s seeing. But what purpose would that serve? And what about the six-figure numbers beside each name? They can only mean one thing. Money. Yet even top-quality fake passports and identities are purchased for tens rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. What kind of facility would a terrorist state be prepared to pay over a million dollars per person for—and how could even the best fakes match the biometrics now linked as standard to genuine identities?
If everything Sigma has sent is what it seems, the fifty fake identities are effectively genuine—indistinguishable from the real deal. The Islamic Republic shouldn’t have access to this kind of expertise. Nobody should—because it means some of the world’s secure and sensitive systems have been compromised, and the results sold on the blackest of black markets. And nobody has noticed a thing.
Finally, Azi opens the file Sigma herself created. It’s only a few lines long, but it jolts him back in his seat.
The names, the money, the cause. Do you see what I see? They’re onto me. I don’t know who to trust, AZ. They’re close. This is Gomorrah, I’m sure of it.
Gomorrah. A name rumored at the edges of the most twisted forums: a place the worst people dream of visiting. A punchline to jokes about the stuff no darknet will sell you. Everyone knows what they got up to in Sodom, but what happened in Gomorrah? Brimstone and fire. The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. Those are the Bible’s last words on the matter, but out there in the darkness there’s much more to be said. A marketplace for martyred souls, for life and death. The only place either of them knows that might have sold what she’s found to a terrorist state.
It’s an hour since Azi opened Sigma’s files. His coffee is cold, the city night is a faint din of cars, trains, voices, sirens. The screen waits for Azi’s reply.
Okay, I see it. I see where you’re coming from. How can you be sure? Where did the list come from—the link that holds it all together? Who says this isn’t fiction, disinformation, someone else’s idea of a joke?
Sigma replies instantly, at the speed of speech.
I don’t know if I should tell you. Not yet, not until you know what you’re dealing with. I’m on the run.
Oh shit. For real?
Exposed. Cover blown. Taking a free Wi-Fi ride as I type.
How bad is it?
I’m alive, so they can’t know where I am yet. I wanted you to see it, AZ. Question is, can I trust you?
You know I’m good.
I know AZ. But this is my life, this is *me* we’re talking about. So I’m asking—can I trust *you*? Because pretty soon I think I’ll need a real friend. Offscreen. I want to meet.
Azi doesn’t reply. This isn’t the kind of chat he should be having—not if he values the breath in his body. Past a certain point, there’s no such thing as trust. This is that point. He has a notion that Sigma is a British woman, much as she seems to believe he’s a British man. But he’s equally aware that “she” could be a sweaty bloke eating Doritos in his underwear trying to mess with AZ’s mind—and that is just one among ten thousand possibilities, none of which he can rule out. Real life is off the table.
He looks down at his hands, taking a moment to type and retype his reply. He tries not to imagine whatever might be about to happen to her.
If I can help, I will. But no names, no details. No meetings. Once you take it offscreen, I’m no hero.
A pause at her end.
Cheers, AZ. Can’t expect more. Stay safe. Drop me a line if you change your mind. Gotta run. Literally.
Azi exhales. He could start digging. He’s itching to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong. Sigma has earned his help and he wants to trust her—to follow their connection where it leads. But he has rules and following them is the only way to stay safe. Hedge everything, trust no-one. If necessary, watch a few old episodes of “The X-Files” to get in the mood.
Whether true, untrue or somewhere in between, this has peril written all over it—not to mention the serious prospect of physical harm. Azi Bello hovers a last finger over the keyboard, pauses, then clicks. The messages vanish.
Five minutes pass. He douses a new filter of ground coffee with freshly boiled water, logs in as Jim and contemplates a last update for the day—a homophobic rant, perhaps, for variety.
Then someone raps three times on the door of Azi’s shed.
Four
Azi slams shut one of several open laptops that are running in parallel to his other systems. This is one of the kill switches he has engineered to lock and encrypt every device on his networks. The screens on his desk turn blank. A scattered selection of phones and tablets buzz then fall silent. Even the music stops.
At the same time, significantly less efficaciously, he swivels in his seat with enough force to hurtle cold coffee across the shed in a centrifugal wave. The shed is just ten by six feet and every non-coffee-making surface is choked with digital detritus, so this move wrecks several hundred pounds’ worth of exposed circuitry. This doesn’t immediately bother Azi, however, because he’s too busy staring at the smartly dressed woman who has appeared in his now-open doorway and is regarding him, her arms folded, as if he’s a specimen in a petting zoo.
“I told them you’d spill your coffee, Azi. But this really is quite a mess.”
She has the sort of clipped English accent and sleekly bobbed hair that Azi associates with news anchors—if news anchors also conveyed an effortless impression of don’t-even-think-about-messing-with-me menace. Clearly, what’s called for is an assertion of his preparedness and general adequacy to this situation. Equally clearly, he has neither the means nor the will to achieve this.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my house? I mean, my shed. I mean—”
Azi starts to stand up, reaches for a handful of additional words that his throat mangles into grunts, then takes the executive decision to sit down again and close his eyes in the hope that things will go back to normal if he can’t see the world for a while. Unfortunately, he can still hear.
“Azi Bello, it’s a pleasure to meet you at last. Honestly, we love your work. The thing with the fish tank, your recent infiltrations among small-fry neo-Nazis. But now you’ve reached the point of intervention, because the request that just landed on your desk is of very particular interest to myself and my colleagues.”
Azi pushes one hand through his hair and swallows. Hard.
“And what jurisdiction are you working in, exactly?”
Even as he says the words, he thinks he knows. There aren’t many things that earn a hacker this level of attention—and he’s not into any of them. Except, since about an hour ago, for the big “T.”
His system is secure, he’s sure. Which means they must have been watching him some other way. And they must have been watching for a while. Yet the first he heard about anything terrorism-related was from Sigma, just now, so they must have been watching him because of her. And this suggests that several of his worst-case scenarios are playing out in parallel.
By now, Azi’s mind and pulse are racing. Didn’t Sigma’s message suggest that she was on the run from a bunch of people with violence in mind? So mightn’t this assault upon his Fortress of Solitude be nothing whatsoever to do with officialdom, and everything to do with some well-spoken professionals in the interrogation, torture and body-disposal business? On which note, a few measured words seem anxious to emerge from his mouth…
“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck please don’t kill me. I don’t know anything, I swear! I mean, I’ll tell you everything I know. Which isn’t much. Oh shit. I’m about to die, aren’t I? In my own shed!”
“No, not quite.”
“But you’d say that even if you were going to kill me, wouldn’t you?”
The woman sighs, pulls in a short breath, then deftly unfolds Azi’s spare chair and sits in front of him, legs crossed at the ankles like she’s the Duchess of Cambridge watching a parade of veterans and schoolchildren
. Her face is very close to his but, given the space, that could be as much by necessity as by design.
“Azi Bello, you need to stop talking and start listening. You fucked up, and I’m here to tell you what is going to happen next. Don’t even think about arguing, trying to leave, or doing anything other than offering your conspicuously docile participation in this conversation.”
In the absence of alternatives, Azi does as he is told. The woman smiles. It’s not a nice smile, but neither is it obviously homicidal. He smiles back. He can smell coffee drying on his clothes. Why does coffee smell so good when you’re brewing it, then so repellent later on? Is she as repulsed by the smell as him? Should he offer her a cup of coffee? Perhaps he’s just trying very, very hard not to think about what is happening.
“My name is Anna. Now that we’re sitting down calmly, the people watching us from inside a van not far from here are going to be a little bit happier. They will stay that way for as long as you sit, nod and listen. Do you understand?”
Azi sits, nods and listens. Think, his brain mutters. Think. Think. You’re in shock, you’re panicking. Don’t do that. Breathe, pause. Make eye contact. Say something. He moves to sip his coffee, then remembers he recently threw it across the room. So he sips the rim of his empty mug instead. Smooth.
“I get it,” Anna says. “You’re wondering what I know, why I’m here. What you can say without digging an even deeper grave for yourself.”
He winces, and she sighs again.
“Poor choice of phrase. Nobody is going to kill anyone—not if I can help it, anyway. You have no idea how lucky you are that this meeting is happening in such a congenial setting. I’m not even here to arrest you. I’m here because you are going to do something for me.”
“Okay. Sure. Do you want some coffee? I was just making some when you…knocked.”
“How kind. Don’t get up, I’ll pour it myself.”
She does so, turning without rising from her seat. Her movements are smooth and effortless—as if she knows the interior of the shed intimately. As she probably does. His voice catching, Azi skirts towards whatever life-dismantling revelations have just walked into his shed.
“How did you find me?”
“That’s what everyone asks first. The answer is always the same. There’s no way in hell I’m telling you. We’ve known about AZ for years but finding the connections was what mattered. Between AZ and Sigma. Between AZ and Azi Bello. I will say that part wasn’t easy, thanks to your admirable professionalism. But—”
“But?”
“Clever people are always stupid, in their own way. Your sentimental attachment to this place lets you down. The house, the garden, the shed. We’ve been indulging in a little old-fashioned surveillance. Given that you’re as amateurish at physical security as you are good at the digital stuff, we opted for a couple of high-res pinhole cameras in your roof. It worked a treat.” That smile again.
“In my roof.” Azi looks up, as if correctly identifying the roof might win him some brownie points.
“Yes, in your roof. Directly above your desk. Why bother assaulting a well-defended information system if you can record the operator’s every click and keystroke?” She shrugs.
“Well, I wish I’d thought of that.”
“Quite. We have everything, logged, registered, reproduced. All your little secrets.”
There is a barely suppressed laugh in Anna’s voice and Azi’s brain dives to the pit of his stomach, pausing to whisper you are so fucked right now but don’t worry, I’ll be back with a cunning plan just as soon as I’ve dealt with the very serious business of ensuring you don’t shit your pants.
“We know everything about you, Azi, or at least everything we need to know. Most of it is good, much of it is a little worrying. And a few bits, I’m sure you know which, are so impressive that we couldn’t afford to throw you into the warm embrace of the legal system even if we wanted to. Even though certain friends of ours would be delighted to see that happen, on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Sooner than expected, his brain returns with some coherent sentences.
“Okay. Let me see if I get this. You’re not going to lock me up. You’re sitting here drinking coffee when you could be bundling me into the back of a windowless van. So this must be a pretty big deal.”
Azi tails off. It turns out that knowing what people won’t do is not a good guide to what is actually going to happen.
“What do you need from me? Why do you care about Sigma so much?”
“There are things I can tell you, and others I cannot. Please don’t waste my time trying to find out about the second category. Yes, we are very interested in the person calling herself Sigma. We have been waiting months in the hope that she would, eventually, come to you—that she would do what she has just done, and ask for your help. Unfortunately, you have told her that you’re not willing to get out from behind your keyboard. But don’t worry, we’re going to change that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to send Sigma a message. Right now. Saying that you want to meet.”
This is so far from anything Azi expected that he momentarily forgets to be terrified.
“Why would I do that? Why would you want me to do that?”
“Remember what I just told you about questions? I’m going to make this nice and simple, Azi. This young woman—and yes, she is a woman—is extremely important to us, and it is our intention to use you to get to know her a little bit better. You’re a valuable asset. How does that feel?”
“Gomorrah. That’s what this is all about.”
“I don’t want to hear you say that out loud again. Ever. You have no idea what you’re dealing with. If they were sitting here instead of me, you would have minutes to live. And trust me, they wouldn’t be happy ones. Munira Khan. That’s her name. She’ll tell you, I’m sure. She’s getting desperate—and you are about to be the only good thing that has happened to her in a long time. That is all you need to know, for now.”
“No. No way. I don’t do entrapment.” Until the words come out of his mouth, Azi hasn’t realized he feels strongly about this. Whoever Sigma is, she deserves a better friend than him—even if his claim to the moral high ground is pretty tenuous. Anna looks at him steadily, then shifts her tone towards something almost conspiratorial.
“Azi, we are on the same side. The people we are attempting to stop are worse than the infants you’ve been baiting, the ones playing at white supremacy from their bedrooms. These are the people your kindergarten Nazis dream about going to for lessons. We are trying to save Munira—and I’ll be able to tell you more about who ‘we’ are later. Frankly, I’m making quite a show of faith by asking you to help us like this. I know you like to think of yourself as a good guy. This is your chance to make a difference. Here.”
Without fanfare, Anna reaches into her jacket pocket and hands him a pack of papers. There’s one line typed on the first page. VICTORIA STATION, TOMORROW, 10 A.M. Azi opens his mouth, then closes it. Nothing he says will make things better, but he has a feeling they can still get considerably worse. Anna taps the desk.
“That’s where and when you will set up the meeting. We don’t know where she is, exactly, but we’re confident she’ll come to you. We fight faith with faith, these days. The most precious information lives inside people’s heads. And, as you know all too well, the most secure message is the one that passes through no technology at all. Voices and faces, handshakes and crowded public spaces.”
With a last suck on his mug, Azi summons his strength.
“So, what? You’ve got enough on your surveillance system to send me to prison if I don’t help you out. And you’re sitting there, drinking my coffee, expecting me to nod and say thank you for the opportunity to join Her Majesty’s secret service, or whoever you are, instead of serving at her pleasure? How do I know you’re not going to kill Sigma on sight? How do I know we’re not both dead the moment we meet?”
Anna shrugs.
“You don’t. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not offering you a choice. You are going to pay attention to everything we tell you and do everything in your power to help us out. You saw what Sigma sent. It’s real, and we are the people trying to stop it. All things considered, you should be thanking me. Not least because I told them to leave you a little something in your bank accounts.”
Azi’s head shoots up in alarm. “Excuse me?”
“They wanted to empty them out—but I said you could be trusted enough to be left with a little something. You’ll be reimbursed in due course and, in the meantime, we don’t want you too well-resourced. Consider it non-invasive proof of how serious we are. Then consider all the other ways we could have proved this.”
A silence falls as Azi looks around at the place that’s been the heart of his life for over two decades. The peeling band posters. The ancient memes he made into postcards. Lego Gandalf, guarding the server rack. To a stranger’s eyes, it must all look pretty pathetic. That’s the trouble with getting out of the habit of seeing things: it doesn’t stop the world looking back.
“And if I do say no?” he asks. “What if I suggest to Munira, if she does agree to meet me and that’s who she really is, that we’re both in a shitload of trouble and the best thing we can do is run for our lives?”
The woman whose name might be anything but Anna gives him a lovely smile and reaches out across the table to shake his hand.
“We both know you won’t do that. It’s been such a pleasure to meet you, Azi. My colleague will join you shortly, and then I’d suggest taking a shower. The smell of coffee is really quite unpleasant.”
The Gomorrah Gambit Page 3