Ten. And breathe, and count. Nine. And breathe, and — the scent of hazelnut.
“Good work, Bridge. How are you feeling?”
She opened her eyes, not realising she’d closed them. In the mirror, the reflection of her boss standing in the doorway.
“Giles, this is the Ladies.”
He looked confused for a moment, then dismissed it and continued, “You bagged him. Celebration time. I know it’s against your religion, but do try and look happy.”
The sting had been her idea, and it required a level of technical knowledge that only someone like Bridge could pull off. But she hadn’t wanted to be the one carrying it out. She’d suggested Giles use someone from GCHQ instead, who could conduct the ‘interview’ and trap Carter into incriminating himself. Giles had put his foot down and told her to get over herself, go see OpPrep for a disguise, and spring the trap.
“Get over yourself” had stung. It was three years since the incident Bridge and Dr Nayar referred to only as The Doorkicker, and while she’d made a lot of progress, she still didn’t feel ready.
Giles hadn’t cared. “It’s not even a real field op,” he’d said. “All you have to do is sit in a room and ask him questions.”
“You mean interrogate him,” she protested. “Not the sort of thing they cover in basic at the Loch, is it? Get someone from Five, if you think GCHQ can’t handle it.”
“Five will put Carter in the net, but they can’t reel him in. Just talk to him, nerd to nerd. I know you want to get back to OIT eventually, and this will be a really good step for you.”
Operator In Theatre. The coveted SIS fieldwork status Bridge had gained, and lost, in the space of one week. Bloody Doorkicker. She shrugged. “I’m still in therapy. I’m not ready.”
“Mahima says you are. You’ve improved more than you realise, and now you need to get back in the game.”
Bridge scowled. “Oh, does she? Well, Dr Nayar’s got her opinions, and I’ve got mine.”
“Indeed, and you’d do well to remember which of those I have to consider when deciding whether to put you back on the list. Spoiler: it’s not yours.” Giles Finlay was exactly the kind of man who’d pull rank to win an argument, but she’d expected and hoped better of Dr Nayar. Bridge hadn’t been to therapy since that day, and judging from her texts every week since, the doctor had no idea why.
Giles was also the kind of man who’d take credit for the operation to bag Carter, but Bridge had less of a problem with that. Let him deal with the Directors, the Ministers, the suits in their old school ties. He was good at politics in a way she never would be.
She was desperately thirsty. She hit the cold tap, bent down, and gulped at the freezing water. Her hands were still shaking, though less with each deep breath. She turned to Giles. “Can I take a day off? I’ve got some holiday carried over.”
To her surprise, he barked a laugh. “Not getting out of the paperwork that easily. Go see the doc first thing — that’s an order, by the way, no more avoiding her — for psych debrief. Then I want to see you back at your desk, writing this up. After all that, maybe we can talk about days off.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but the look in Giles’ eyes was clear. “Please don’t tell me this is for my own good.”
“I should coco. You’ll thank me when you get your OIT back.”
The door closed with a sigh as he left. Bridge looked up at her reflection and sighed with it.
3
T > By Jove, Ponty, I think I’ve cracked it.
P > cracked what
T > The ASCII art. It’s a puzzle.
P > like how?
T > Like a code.
P > bloody hell
She retreated, as she so often did, to the shadows.
Or rather to ‘Tenebrae_Z’, one of her oldest friends, with whom she chatted regularly on a secure messaging server. They’d built it together, handcoded the whole thing from scratch, then piggybacked it on an admin machine somewhere deep in Telehouse North, the colocation facility in Docklands where dozens of service providers and internet backbone carriers routed their UK traffic. Bridge had been there once with her colleague Monica Lee, and Monica’s GCHQ liaison Lisa Hebden, to observe installation of a hard routing intercept, but she’d never been by herself. By contrast, Tenebrae_Z had regular access. He was one of the privileged few with keys to a server floor, owing to his clearly important but never outright-stated day job.
At least, that’s what he told Bridge and everyone else when they first met on Usenet, the now outdated and virtually defunct message board service of ‘newsgroups’ left over from the internet’s early days. He certainly knew what he was talking about, and she’d run her own trace on the chat server to confirm it really did live somewhere in Telehouse. It all checked out.
But, despite being friends now for almost a decade, Bridge and Tenebrae_Z had never met in the flesh. She didn’t even know his real name.
T > It’s not just on f.m.b-r. I found instances on other French groups, too. All low traffic, barely used. Every piece is 78 x 78 chars, all innocuous images like the ones we already found. Flowers, dogs, Michael Jackson’s face, etc.
P > which one
T > Which one what?
P > which face, he had loads
T > ROFL
To be fair, Tenebrae_Z didn’t know Bridge’s real name either. Everyone on the uk.london.gothic-netizens newsgroup knew her simply as ‘Ponty’, a silly play on her name and heritage. She’d come up with it on the spur of the moment when she first ventured into the deep end of the internet, graduating from the shiny, friendly web forum UIs inhabited by norms to the murky areas of pure text and command line interfaces. She’d been a fresher at Cambridge, then; black-clad, white-faced, and big-haired, with an inglorious social record and a teenage arrest for hacking. The last thing she needed was to screw up her chances of a First by using her real name to post to a newsgroup devoted to hacking and subculture.
In fact, what nearly sent her degree sideways was her second arrest. She’d cracked the university servers several times without anyone noticing, no big deal. But then one of her mathematician friends was approached by a faceless civil servant after a lecture, and gently asked if he was interested in a career of ‘discreet but challenging government work’. The man left a card containing only a name and phone number. Figuring he must have been a spook, Bridge was determined to find out who exactly he worked for, to give her friend an edge. Some basic research on public websites led her down a rabbit hole, and she began to chip away at government servers, hacking into records and administrative databases. She got as far as discovering that the name on the card was fake, the phone number was real, and the faceless man appeared to be linked to Westminster Palace itself, before the police broke down the door of the house she shared with two other students.
After she was released on bail, a different but equally faceless civil servant approached her to make the same offer, with an added sweetener; they could make all this trouble with the law disappear, as if by magic. The only conditions were that she had to achieve a First, and to keep her nose clean from now on. It was all the motivation she needed, and Bridge still found it ironic that an offer to her friend, which he ultimately declined, had led directly to her own career.
SIS gave her a fully backstopped cover story to protect her family and friends, which she maintained in public spaces online. But on u.l.g-n her misdirection went even further; she claimed she ‘worked in finance’ and refused to say any more. Not that anyone asked. Almost all of the regular netizens used aliases, and those who didn’t were cagey about what they did away from the safety of their keyboard. The group’s specialist demographic meant much of the discussion was technical talk about hacking, coding, obstinate servers and idiot users, so it was understandable many wanted to remain anonymous.
Tenebrae_Z was more anonymous than m
ost. All anyone on u.l.g-n knew about ‘Ten’ was that he was some kind of BOFH — Bastard Operator From Hell, online slang for a high-level admin doomed to work with idiot users — and that if his tales of weekends in the garage were to be believed, he owned a selection of very fast and very expensive vintage cars.
T > Found 14 images so far. Oldest dates back six months.
P > so random. any clue who’s posting them?
T > Anon user, black hole email, obscured IP. That figures, if it’s a puzzle. WHICH IT IS :-D
P > how did you even work out it’s a code
T > That would be telling.
P > I AM NOT A NUMBER!
T > LOL. Actually, a number is what I decoded from one of the recent posts. A phone number.
P > (@ o @) / !!!
T > I called it earlier.
Bridge and Ten hadn’t liked one another to start with. Their first proper interaction was an all-out flame war that split the group right down the middle, and just for once it hadn’t been Linux vs Red Hat, or Vi vs Emacs.
Not long after she joined the group, someone — she didn’t remember who, it had been yet another newbie who stumbled in, caused arguments, then disappeared — posted a rant declaring The Mission to be the apotheosis of ’80s goth, as proved by the decline in Eldritch’s work after Hussey’s departure, and by the way, Fields of the Nephilim were a flour-filled bag of shite.
This was a red rag to Bridge’s bullish and unconditional love of The Sisters Of Mercy, plus the lingering remnants of a pre-teen crush on Carl McCoy, thanks to her older sister’s bedroom posters. It was her sister’s record collection that had drawn Bridge into the subculture in the first place, starting with French ‘coldwave’ bands like Asylum Party and Excès Nocturne before diving deep into the UK import scene. When she’d later moved to England, she was shocked nobody had heard Mary Go Round’s Dark Times, or Opéra de Nuit’s Invitation, and talked them up whenever she could. Sure, most of this stuff had been released before Bridge could walk; but so was half the British music her new friends talked about.
She responded to the inflammatory post with the kind of withering disdain and righteous fury normal people might reserve for someone suggesting that Hitler had a point, and at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. To Bridge’s disgust, Ten sided with the newbie, and for the next three weeks uk.london.gothic-netizens became the sort of place the Daily Mail would hold up as a poster child for why the internet was destroying modern society.
But over the course of thousands of words of intense argument about the definition of modern goth, the role of Bauhaus and Joy Division, the genius or pomposity (or both) of The Reptile House EP, the border between goth and metal, and whether Siouxsie and the Banshees were the last true post-punks or the first true modern goths, Bridge realised she and Ten had a lot in common. Not their specific tastes, which were almost diametrically opposed, but their attitudes to life, music, and most importantly hacking, were completely in sync.
They began private messaging, bitching about events and people on the newsgroup, occasionally helping one another out with tricky coding problems. After Bridge started working for the Service, she suggested they build an IRC server to keep their conversations entirely within their own control and untraceable. Ten went one further, challenging her to help build their own protocol, so as to keep it entirely unrecognisable to prying eyes, and offered to host it in a hidden partition of an admin server in Telehouse North. Nobody would notice a few tiny encrypted packets flying around the wires, and as they both used onion skin multi-node random routing to hide their true digital locations, even if the server was discovered there would be nothing to connect it to them.
P > what was it, like a competition winner’s line?
T > Nothing so glamorous. Just a bloke. I said I’d got his message. He’s here in London, we’re going to meet tomorrow night.
P > WTF, you have no idea who he is
T > Well, he’s obviously a massive nerd, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
P > seriously Ten, who is this guy. could be a nutter
T > You’re just jealous because he’s going to lay eyes on me before you do ;-D
After they built the chat server, Bridge almost suggested they should meet in person. But something had stopped her — perhaps an instinct for self-preservation — and she never did. He never did either, and so they never had, and wasn’t it maybe better that way? After years of chatting, bitching, and laughing, could either of them live up to the others’ expectations? In Bridge’s mind, Tenebrae_Z was a six-foot-tall young David Bowie with long jet-black hair and a penchant for tight leather trousers. She knew it was ridiculous, of course. But she was self-aware enough to know that if what she actually found was a five-eight guy with his roots showing, and a perfectly normal middle-aged belly that would stop any sane man considering leather trousers, it would inevitably feel like a let down. The only thing she knew about Ten’s appearance was an upside-down Celtic cross that he wore, as some kind of private joke, that he’d once taken a photo of for the newsgroup. But it would take more than an almost-funny necklace to get over the inevitable disappointment of reality.
Likewise, while Bridge was by no means unattractive, it had been a long time since she backcombed her hair to within an inch of its life, caked herself in white foundation and black eyeliner, and pulled on a pair of spike-heeled boots. SIS insisted even technical analysts stay in shape, so she could probably still fit into her trusty old buckled leather corset, but it hadn’t left the back of her wardrobe for years. Dyed black hair and the occasional silk choker were the only concessions to her younger days that Bridge could still get away with, and it was all a far cry from the image of Patricia Morrison’s younger sister Ten was doubtless hoping for.
P > be careful, OK
T > My dear Ponty, the game is afoot! How irresistible to a man of my character!
P > jfc
T > I’ll tell you all about it when I get back tomorrow night, promise. Signing off now.
P > cyal8r
She logged out and closed her laptop. For the last few weeks she and Ten had been following these seemingly random pieces of ASCII art — impressionist images made up of regular text characters arranged in a way that, when you squinted at them, they looked like a picture of something.
Someone was posting them, one every couple of weeks or so, to an obscure French newsgroup. Who? And why? They didn’t know. There was never any follow-up, never an explanation. But now, somehow, Ten had figured it out. Found more pieces of art that had been posted in other newsgroups, and decoded one of them to find a phone number. Now he was going to meet the man behind them.
Bridge’s mind drifted back to something her mother had told her as a child, about a treasure hunt, where an artist had made a solid gold hare brooch covered in gems and buried it somewhere in England… Masquerade, that was it. The artist then made a puzzle book of surreal paintings, which contained a hidden code leading to the brooch’s location. Bridge’s mother had shaken her head at the silly eccentric English as she recounted how the whole country went quite mad for a while, trying to solve the mystery and find the treasure. But Bridge was so fascinated by the idea that her father bought her a second-hand copy of the book during a work trip to London, and she spent a happy summer trying in vain to solve the puzzle.
Thinking of it now, it seemed like an old-world geocaching puzzle. Maybe this was something similar for the online age? Posting random pieces of ASCII art in obscure places, in the hope that someone tenacious enough would be compelled to dig into them, and figure out the code? It had been done before in the form of Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. But ARGs were normally big PR operations linked to movies or videogames, and neither Bridge nor Ten had been able to find any announcements about it here, in France, or in fact anywhere else online.
They’d only stumbled across the images themselves because s
he was still subscribed to france.misc.binaries-random. Once it had been a good source of French jokes, memes, and photoshops, and was a comfort blanket for the small part of Bridge that remained nostalgic for her childhood, growing up in Lyon, and even the infuriating habits of her French mother. But traffic had slowly dropped off as spambot posts took over, and for years now the group had been an endless stream of garbage. She wasn’t sure why she was still subscribed, but she was, and looked in every so often to see if there was anything interesting. There wasn’t — until these strange, random posts of ASCII art began to appear.
Bridge finished her tea, yawned, and headed for bed. Tomorrow night was dinner with her sister and the girls, and she was looking forward to it. But she knew she’d spend the whole evening impatient to get back online, and find out if Ten had dug up their very own golden hare.
4
“Adrian!”
Bridge couldn’t breathe. She stared at Adrian’s body as his jacket slowly, ever so slowly, changed colour from desert camo to a dark, rusty crimson, spreading out from the bubbling wound. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t look away.
“Yop tvoyu mat!”
The guard’s surprised shout wrenched her back into the cold, dry room, but things seemed to be moving at half speed. Slow enough for Bridge to finally take a breath, her survival instincts kicking in, and move. She raised her pistol, turned one-quarter into the sight line, squeezed once, twice. The guard fell, his trigger finger spasming, spraying semi-automatic three-shot pulses into the surrounding racks. Servers exploded in showers of electric colour.
The other guard was still shouting, firing indiscriminately.
“Stupid fucking doorkicker,” she muttered, and fumbled inside Adrian’s jacket for what he called his ‘ICE’ grenades. Slick and wet, her fingers slipping over them, struggling for purchase. They were in the middle of a desert, why were the grenades so wet?
The Exphoria Code Page 2