by James Goss
“Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment—” He ducked aside from my over-eager chugging, but somehow failed to avoid having a flyer pressed into his hand.
I watched him go. He wandered into the coffee shop. The queue was long, long enough for him to calm down a bit, long enough for him to glance idly at the flyer he’d been handed, and then to run pelting back from the shop.
WHICH WAS WHEN Ray Richardson met me properly.
He was waving a picture of a teenage Nazi’s vagina in my face.
“What the sodding granny fuck?” he was screaming at me. And waving around his arms. It was a risk I’d been prepared to take. Despite the fact that I was a chugger, people were stopping to almost notice the scene. After all, it’s cheering to see a charity mugger being threatened with violence by anyone. And the thing about Ray Richardson was that, even after a few months in PR, he was still a solidly-built piece of engineering.
“Is this man bothering you?” a few people asked.
“Lay off him, mugger,” said someone else.
Ray bristled even more at this. Because, obviously a black man punching a white man only happens for one reason. His expensive suit was because drugs or crime or something, obviously.
“It’s fine,” I said loudly. “The guy really doesn’t fancy giving money to cats, that’s all.” I laughed, breaking the tension. A few people scowled, but the tension went out of the scene. Ray realised that overt aggression wasn’t winning him prizes and instead stood there, concentrating his simmering rage into a look that boiled the piss in my kidneys.
When the small sort-of crowd had got back to ignoring me and wandered away, Ray leaned forward, forcing a pleasant smile onto his face. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your new best friend,” I told him. “First of all, I’m not blackmailing you. Not really. Actually, I kind of work for you.”
“Your granny you do,” said Rick.
I produced a flask from my tabard. “Fancy a coffee? This is really good.”
IN THE CENTRE of the plaza, two people drank coffee on a bench carefully designed to be comfortable to sit on for only ten minutes and absolute agony to try and sleep on. A small remote-controlled helicopter weaved overhead. A billboard flickered. ‘Sodobus: Every Child Taken Care Of,’ against a stock photo of a teddy bear abandoned in a puddle.
“WHAT DO YOU want?” Ray’s opening gambit was defused by the coffee. It really was very good.
“I want to know if I can trust you,” I said to him. “I’ve recently discovered that I’m employed by your company, at arm’s length. As... well, I guess you could say a cleaning contractor. And I need to be absolutely certain you know nothing about me.”
“Sunshine, I can assure you I know sod all about you and what goes on here.” His face narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you doing this to me? What do you do for me? Is this another plot to trip me up?”
“I kill people.”
“Bugger my Uncle Ted.” Ray had had enough. He gave me a look of disgust and stood up. “I don’t believe you,” he said firmly. His expression told me he probably did. “You expect me to believe any of this?” he restated, just to make sure I knew he didn’t believe me. “I mean,” he went on, “let me assure you, this isn’t Ghana, and we’re not an oil company. We don’t go around bumping off people. I mean, why would we? There are so many easier and more effective ways. I don’t believe you.”
I listed a few of the people I’d disposed of. “But they don’t matter. This is about something else. Something bigger. The cat in the room.”
Ray finished his coffee, laughing. “This is like a mumbled YouTube conspiracy. You seriously expect me to believe that Sodobus paid you to assassinate Henry Jarman?”
I smiled. “Well, sort of. I wasn’t actually going to kill him—thing is, he was so mental he actually committed suicide to prove he was relevant. And so that his followers would start releasing the Jarman Manifesto.”
By now the Jarman Manifesto had become quite famous. It had been published for months, tweet by tweet and blog by blog, each one spreading out. Some of it was bonkers, some of it had been turned into cat .gifs, but a lot of it made sense.
A lot of Jarman’s more recent posts had been about how governments couldn’t help taking control of the internet, and that perhaps, rather than fighting this, a middle ground had to be found whereby each country’s internet access was effectively placed under the notional control of a charitable trust. An unassailable organisation that existed purely to protect the freedom of access to that information, and would guarantee that the pipes couldn’t be hacked into, spied upon, censored or filtered. The late Henry Jarman made much of the fact that students at Chinese Universities had the fastest internet access in the world, yet had no idea what a 1989 photograph of a boy standing in front of a tank had to do with them.
The late Henry Jarman wanted these charities to operate outside governments, to be unassailable forces for internet good. To be ‘vast cuddly Stephen Frys.’ On our side and talking to each other. Organisations that were, like the internet, hard to filter, block or divert.
It was a good idea. It was contentious, but what had made it immediately popular was that the government had immediately denounced it as nonsense. If Henry Jarman had been alive, people would have called it the bonkers ramblings of someone who no longer got invited onto Question Time. But, because he was dead, he was suddenly accorded a lot more respect and sympathy. The leader of the opposition said it “certainly raised interesting questions.” Several bodies had stepped forward to offer to model this foundation. Which would, naturally, be called The Jarman Freedom Foundation.
CURIOUSLY, THERE WAS no proof that Henry Jarman had actually written his manifesto. It was all being handled by his previously unpaid media advisor. A young woman called Michelle Fischer. She’d not been with Jarman long before he died—this wasn’t suspicious, as his staff churned like his temper tantrums. What was interesting was that she’d previously been an intern at Sodobus. Sodobus who were also, very quietly, and at huge arm’s length, becoming involved in setting up the Jarman Freedom Foundation.
I FINISHED TALKING. I felt like a proper spy, pulling from my ‘Save The Earth’ satchel various supporting documents and photographs. I was also about five per cent aware that I looked like an utter nutter.
BUT RAY RICHARDSON had stopped laughing. He took another sip of coffee. He moved awkwardly from side to side, as the bench was getting uncomfortable.
It was easy to dismiss all of this, but I could see that one tiny bit of it had struck home. Michelle Fischer. He’d actually encountered her during her internship. He remembered her because she wasn’t blonde and seemed quite competent. He’d even caught her rolling her eyes during an interminable presentation. He’d offered her a job in his team, but she’d declined. He suddenly wondered why.
“Look,” said Ray, “what do you want?”
I’d shrugged. “These benches are agony and I’m freezing my bum off. Can I come and meet you in the office later?”
“Dressed like that?” he said.
I smiled. “No, I’ll be even more disguised in plain clothes. I’ll come in as everyone’s going. Just stay late and it’ll be fine. I’ll find you.”
RAY WENT BACK to his desk and got on with his work. He looked around the office, drowning in sudden paranoia. Even the ludicrous billboard and the laughable helicopter fed his irrational panic. I may not have changed the world, but I’d shaken him a little. What if Sodobus was actually secretly a lethal organisation that was just pretending to be hapless? Lulling the world into a false sense of security through its vague incompetence? After all, despite all its many failings, it was still making huge amounts of money. Ray looked out into his office bowl of blonde clownfish. What if his Marketing and Communications team were all skilled assassins working very hard at overthrowing governments while also carefully inserting spelling mistakes into press releases? When he was a child, he’d been ashamed of his dad’s job at a builder’s m
erchants. That was until one day when he’d realised that his dad was secretly a spy. That had made it all okay.
Even when he was being taunted at school, it had given him the strength to continue. Because he knew, he knew that deep down, the colour of his skin or the cheapness of his clothes or the nastiness of their flat didn’t matter. Because his dad was a spy. He had to be. It was all that made sense.
THE OFFICE EMPTIED at 5pm. Actually, the office emptied by about quarter to. By half four there had already been two childcare emergencies and someone else had sloped off wordlessly. One man had gone to get changed into sports gear and sat at his desk in lycra, swigging a protein shake.
Ray normally tried not to notice this, but he couldn’t make his mind stick on anything.
Soon he was alone with just his fevered thoughts and his endless email. He heard the contract cleaner pottering around.
He went through to the kitchen, figuring he may as well risk a cup of machine coffee. He entered his PIN and pressed a button. And then waited while it went through its pantomime.
At first taste, Sodobus coffee was remarkably like coffee. The machines went to elaborate lengths to convince you that this was freshly ground. A dome of coffee beans jiggled with a reassuring grinding noise whenever you entered your PIN and pressed the ‘Americano’ button. But the level of the beans never went down. They were as ornamental as a snowglobe. Whatever happened inside the coffee machine was carefully hidden away and contained no contamination from real coffee beans.
“I WOULDN’T DRINK that if I were you,” I said. I was standing next to him, wearing a cleaner’s outfit. I hadn’t been lying when I said I worked as a cleaner for Sodobus.
Ray smiled at me. “Very clever,” he said approvingly. “Now, what’s this about the coffee? I wouldn’t drink it either. It’s vile, but still...”
I shook my head and gestured to it. “Why does it have a keypad?”
“Oh...” Ray wasn’t sure. “The photocopiers and printers have them. It’s something to do with cost codes.”
“And your PIN code is...”
“The department’s or something I guess,” Ray shrugged. “Why?”
“What about if your PIN number was unique? What would that then mean?”
“Only that they’d know I liked strong black coffee and... and... how many cups of it I had a day, and when, and...”
Ray Richardson stopped talking and stared at the machine in horror.
“So that’s why it tastes different as the day goes on...”
I nodded at him, and handed him a print-out from the caterer. It showed details of the slightly different blends of coffee handed out:
Good Morning—the perfect pick-me-up cup caffeine derivative
Meeting Blend—the grab for those on the go caffeinated beverage
Slow Roast—a mellow savour for the dedicated fan of caffeinated products
“My granny,” whistled Ray. “What the hell are they putting in it?”
“Well, caffeine’s a drug,” I said. “They just add a few things as well. All perfectly legal herbal extracts and so on. Slow Roast is actually a decaffeinated blend with valerian extract. Of course, if you don’t like it, you can go out to the posh coffee shop opposite. That Sodobus also owns.”
Ray boggled. “They’re controlling our moods, selecting coffee for us based on algorithms? But what... what if my PA gets in twelve coffees for a meeting?”
I shrugged. “The algorithm gets screwed.”
Ray tapped the print-out against his cheek. I could tell that this little detail had swung him. He turned to me. “So, how did you get this?”
“The helicopter,” I explained. “It’s a relatively simply drone. It’s been hacking into everyone’s phones.”
HACKING INTO A phone this way is reasonably easy. What we don’t realise is that our phones are constantly making noise even when they’re silent. If you’ve got your wifi enabled, then it’s constantly checking to see if any of its approved networks are within reach. Fly a drone past an office space and it’ll encounter a building full of phones chirruping to see if they can connect to the free wifi they’re signed up to at the nearest coffee shop. It’s fairly easy to use the drone to capture that data.
It’s easy enough to pop into the coffee shop, find the details of their wifi network and set your drone up to mimic it. When the drone wanders back within range, those phones will automatically try to connect it, thinking it’s the coffee shop. Actually, it’s acting as a relay to the coffee shop, which will allow you to scrape the data that’s filtered through it. It’s not a perfect technique, but you should soon gain an idea of who owns the phone, what their passwords are, and even their credit card details. If you were able to zap the QR code it just took your phone’s browser to a seemingly empty page that actually gave me even more access to your phone. Thank you.
Corporations spend a fortune making sure that their own IT is securely nestled behind firewalls and Virtual Private Networks and so on. The problem with this is that it’s fiddly. And everyone who walks into and out of the building has a phone on them. The phones are far less secure because their IT security isn’t looked after by a paranoid man with a ragged ponytail and careful training. The phone’s owner is in charge of its security—and is in a hurry, is busy, or just doesn’t care. The drone even offered unsecured free wifi. Quite a few chumps took advantage of it. Thank you more.
One thing we’ve all learned from the last few years is that corporate email is stored, internet usage is logged and blocked. The great thing about your own phone is that it isn’t. If you want to gossip or backstab, you can send bitchy Gmails without your boss knowing. Maybe the government, but not your boss. Your phone will let you look at Facebook and porn without getting you fired. One thing that your phone also excels at is making your nice safe corporate internet insecure. Got a long dull meeting? Not a problem, set up your phone so that you can access your work emails throughout. Brilliant.
And all so very, very handy for me. In addition to several gigabytes of personal email data, I also had the usernames and passwords to several people’s company email accounts. And as I was here on an overnight cleaning shift, I had plenty of time to log on and use them. And was even being paid to wipe my fingerprints off afterwards.
RAY LAUGHED WHEN I finished my explanation. It was a nice laugh, and he should have done it more often.
“So, what do you want?” he asked.
“Revenge,” I told him.
Ray looked at me carefully, considering his options. “Let me show you something,” he said.
RAY SHOWED ME his inbox. Recently, he’d noticed it was being clogged with documents. So many emails were being sent to him that IT had written to him to warn him about excessive bandwidth usage and then sent him on a compulsory all-day training session about ‘Inbox Zero.’ On the day he’d been away, the volume of emails he’d been sent had exactly doubled. Nearly all of the emails contained a big attachment, frequently in French, German or Italian, and occasionally he’d spot something jaw-dropping hidden away on slide 37 of a PowerPoint deck.
“What’s it all for?” he asked me. “I go home every night wondering how many things I’ve missed. Thousands of unread PowerPoints, .pdfs and spreadsheets. How many things I’ve unwittingly signed off on. Are you in there somewhere?”
I squinted at the hundreds of unread messages, all of them red-flagged as urgent. I shrugged.
“I think you’re being set up,” I told him.
“Really?” said Ray. “That’s what my wife thinks.”
I nodded. “Funny that.”
RAY RICHARDSON CAUGHT a late train home that night. He’d followed my instructions and gone to a high street store and bought a cheap notebook, plugging in the USB stick that I’d given him. He sat scrolling through the data I’d mined from the drone. Most of it was junk, but every now and then he’d spot something and move it across. It turned out Ray was a natural at this. Trying to keep up with his Sodobus inbox had taught
him invaluable data-sifting skills. He sent me a text using the pay-as-you-go phone I’d given him. “I think I’ve found something,” he said. “They wanted inbox zero? I’ll give them inbox zero. Sod ’em all.”
He walked through the door late and his wife looked up, surprised.
“You’re smiling,” Amanda said.
“Yup,” said Ray and kissed her.
“I’ll open a bottle of wine,” she said. “Non-alcoholic wine that tastes of sweat and strawberries.”
IN ORDER TO bring down an evil company, you had to find the one good man who worked for it. Because you could bet that he really hated his boss.
I CAN DESCRIBE the head of Sodobus [UK] pretty well, because I’d spent much of the last couple of weeks cleaning her office. That lets you really get to know someone. The things they throw away, the things they try and hide, the things they ostentatiously display.
Elise Olsen was a mother of twins. This was about the only fact of any interest anyone knew about her. On her desk was a photo of two Aryan teenagers grinning mid bungee-jump. It was angled so that she could see it, but also so that everyone who sat opposite her knew that she was human really, that she had emotions, that she had children, that she hadn’t simply been recently unwrapped from cellophane.
Everything else about her was carefully Edam-bland. She belonged to a family of Swiss bankers adept at handling the accounts of Nazis and Russian oligarchs with cold discretion.
If anyone knew what was really going on at Sodobus, it was Elise Olsen. But she’d spent her whole life giving nothing away. The only thing you’d remember from a meeting with her was that picture of those two golden children, forever falling, never hitting the ground.