The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  *0 51 5 21A 5 D (May 15th, 21 Across, 5 Down)

  * 0 428 18D1 3 A (April 28th, 18 Down, 13 Across)

  * 042 2 2 0D3 A (April 22nd, 20 Down, 3 Across)

  But what did it mean? Even in just the three photos Bridge had of June 18th crosswords, the answers for ‘8 Down and 16 Across’ were all very different.

  The Times: ‘Recalcitrant’, ‘Fallujah’.

  The Guardian: ‘Tankard’, ‘Epistemology’.

  The Daily Express: ‘Hughes’, ‘Europe’.

  Bridge’s stomach rumbled. It was 9 o’clock, and all she’d eaten since returning home that morning was a cereal bar. But she didn’t want to turn away from this, and Ten, now. She’d done that the night before, and now Ten was dead.

  She scolded herself. That wasn’t fair, and deep down she knew it. If she hadn’t gone to dinner with Izzy, what would or could she have done? Sit on the chat server all night, waiting for an alert that never came? The only way she could have helped was if she’d gone with Ten to that meeting, and that had been out of the question. He didn’t give her any real details about the phone conversation.

  The phone number. Ten had said he found it after decoding one of the ASCII pieces. But none of these crossword solutions were numbers. She quickly skimmed the text files she’d saved, but saw nothing resembling a string of digits that could be a phone number in them. Perhaps they were distributed somehow throughout the characters in the 78 x 78 grid? But then what would be the point of the crossword references, if the information was right there in the ASCII? It wouldn’t need ‘decoding’ in the first place.

  Bridge shook her head. This wasn’t doing any good. “Valkyrie needs food, badly,” she mumbled to herself, and put her monitor to sleep.

  19

  A halloumi burger, sweet potato fries, and processed orange juice probably didn’t count as ‘real food’, but it beat mainlining coffee while devouring the half packet of chocolate biscuits in her cupboard, which was definitely what Bridge would have been doing if she hadn’t left the flat.

  The café had been here almost a year now. She hoped it would survive. East Finchley was hardly replete with veggie places, and it would be nice to have a local place where she could call herself a regular, although she did love the easy anonymity possible in London. The café was less than ten minutes’ walk from her flat, and she came in every couple of weeks, but almost never saw the same patrons twice. Even the servers turned over every few months. In a city of almost ten million people, seeing the same faces on a regular basis took effort. She’d grown up in Lyon, which was the third biggest city in France. But with less than half a million people, it was a minnow compared to the shark that was London, and as a child she’d come to know many people, shopkeepers, and neighbours. If she’d been raised here in London, would she have had that same sense of recognising people every day? Probably not. But she had to wonder, was that so terrible? Mankind grew more urban every year, with ever-expanding cities swallowing the suburbs. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing to grow up with a certain self-sufficiency, not needing a sense of community to function.

  Then again, Bridge knew analysts who would argue self-sufficiency was only a step away from alienation, and had a direct effect on the ease with which modern terrorism and right-wing populism had spread. Swings and roundabouts.

  Thinking about terrorism brought her back to the codes. With Ten’s solitary life, Bridge couldn’t blame MI5 for suspecting he might be involved. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that, though she could believe whoever killed him might have terrorist links. In the course of her work at SIS, she’d seen much more innocuous evidence that turned out to have militant roots. Then again, could it just be old-school espionage? The use of codes and newspaper crosswords put her in mind of old stories from the few remaining Cold War veterans at SIS, or tales of the Special Operations Executive during World War II. But that wasn’t how espionage was done, these days. What kind of throwback would even consider using a cipher like that?

  She swallowed the last of her burger, wiped her fingers on a paper napkin, and pulled out her personal phone.

  A text from Izzy, with a short video of Hugo causing lunchtime havoc on the Eurostar that gave Bridge her first laugh of the day.

  A calendar reminder for tomorrow, to visit the launderette.

  An alert from her pedometer app noting she’d done over ten thousand steps today, thanks to her visit to Catford.

  An email from Ten.

  Her thumb hovered over the notification, ready to swipe but held back by her surprise. The email address was definitely him. It wasn’t a mailing list notification, or a chat server alert, or a bloody Facebook birthday notice (not that she was FB friends with him anyway; she only kept it around because Izzy and her mother insisted on using it to message her).

  No, this was an email from Tenebrae_Z@top-emails.net. Could she have been wrong? Was Declan O’Riordan someone else, after all? Was her friend still alive? But she remembered the photos of the u.l.g-n members, the picture of herself, how the posters were all Ten’s favourite bands, and then she saw the subject line.

  FAO Brigitte - Important

  Her thumb had become stone, immovable. She lowered the iPhone, knowing the untouched screen would go to sleep in a few seconds. High in the restaurant ceiling the aircon vent vibrated, pumping out recycled cool air. Her fellow patrons, not many tonight, chattered and gossiped. The metallic clink of utensils and stainless steel cookware sounded from behind the counter, as orders were prepared. She focused on the sights and sounds around her, everywhere but the table, anywhere but her phone. Then Bridge exhaled.

  Ten. And breathe, and count. Nine. And breathe, and count. Eight —

  She lifted the phone and swiped her thumb.

  FROM: Tenebrae_Z@top-emails.net

  TO: ponty@top-emails.net

  SUBJECT: FAO Brigitte - Important

  Hi Brigitte,

  Please don’t be alarmed that I know your real name - I know most of ulgn’s real IDs, it’s not that hard when you have high access to routing servers and stuff. You could say it’s part of my job...except it turns out, it’s actually more like your job, isn’t it?

  I used your real name because I really, really need you to read this. I’m setting this up just after you told me to be careful. I know I laughed, but in the back of my mind, I suppose I’m thinking it can’t hurt. And what could be more careful than a dead man’s trigger? So if I check in sometime in the next 24 hours, this email will never send, and you’ll never read this, and I’ll feel well daft for writing it.

  But if you’re there now, well you know why. I’m going to take one last precaution, because if you’re right - and I suppose you’d know, wouldn’t you - then it’ll be worth it. I assume you can find out where I live easily enough. There’s a skull candlestick in the kitchen, and I’m going to leave my garage keys underneath. All I’ll say here is: Brockley Gate. TR7.

  The game’s afoot, Ponty!

  --

  Tenebrae_Z

  “We are the inheritors, the evidence of heaven”

  She put her iPhone in her pocket, took one last swig of orange juice, and left the café.

  20

  How did he know?

  A dozen questions cried out for attention in Bridge’s mind, but that one kept surfacing, pushing the others aside, even though the others were more immediately pressing. OK, figuring out her real name probably wasn’t that hard for someone of Ten’s abilities. Obtain her IP somehow, drag through ISP records. And he’d used that info to find her address, which is how he’d taken a photo of her coming out of her usual coffee shop in the morning, before catching the tube. So then he must have — oh, God. Followed her to work? That’s more like your job, isn’t it? Had he watched her disappear through a secure gate at Vauxhall, and guessed what she did for a living?

  It was all a bit creepy
. Why not just ask her?

  Simple: because she’d already lied to him, and everyone else, telling their online friends she worked in finance. Somehow, Ten had figured out she was lying, and decided to find out for himself. Bridge had always got the impression Ten worked in some sensitive areas — they didn’t give any old BOFH a key to Telehouse, not any more — but he’d never been specific, and she’d never asked. Now she wondered if perhaps he’d ever consulted with SIS or GCHQ, if that was how he’d recognised that she lived in a world of lies and secrets familiar to him.

  But the closer she got to London Bridge, speeding through tunnels on the Northern line, the more she doubted her actions. An email, scheduled to be sent in the event of his death? It was like something out of Agatha Christie. Mind you, Mr O’Riordan had been an avid reader. The toppling bookshelves in his house were testament to that.

  But it was the Faith and the Muse lyric in his sig that sealed it. Unlike normal people, Ten didn’t have an email signature stored away to be sent with every message. Instead he typed his signature out, by hand, every time he emailed or posted to Usenet, allowing him to insert whatever quotation came to mind at that moment. And there always was one, right under the handle. Most of them went over Bridge’s head, if she was honest. A few classical text quotes, occasionally some Shakespeare, sometimes a Yeats, Wilde, or Joyce (so obvious in hindsight), and the odd song lyric that she recognised. But just as often they were lines she wouldn’t have known if they’d hit her over the head.

  Except this one. She knew precisely one F&TM song, because Ten had once made her an MP3 playlist featuring his favourite bands. The ploy hadn’t worked — she still couldn’t stand The Mission, for example — but she remembered telling him she liked that particular F&TM song. And now its opening line was the signature quote in his ‘dead man’s trigger’ email.

  Who else would know? Who else could possibly know Ten’s sig habits, and that Bridge would recognise a lyric from that one particular song, by that one particular band? Nobody. For the email to be fake required a level of coincidence that she simply wouldn’t credit.

  But if it really was Ten, why didn’t he just tell her what he wanted to say? Why send her chasing down his garage keys, of all things? He wasn’t a spy. And that was one thing Bridge knew for sure, as both she and Andrea Thomson had checked with their respective offices that very morning. He’d even made fun, with the ‘cloak and dagger’ reference. If this really was a practical joke or hoax of some kind, it had gone too far. But it couldn’t be. Declan O’Riordan’s corpse was currently laid out in a city morgue, awaiting autopsy.

  No joke.

  Perhaps he thought Bridge would appreciate this kind of thing, that she might actually enjoy it, having figured out what she did for a living. Or perhaps whatever he’d found when he decoded the ASCII messages was too sensitive to disclose in email. Ten, more than most, knew just how insecure most of the internet really was.

  One other big question was more straightforward, and troubling. Why hadn’t she called this in? What the hell was she doing out here on her own? As she changed to the overground at London Bridge, she considered several justifications. It was late; it might be nothing; Giles would be baffled by the email; she still didn’t have anything concrete to show anyone, or prove anything.

  But deep down she knew she hadn’t called anyone, or asked for help, or advised the police she was on her way, for a simple reason. She had no jurisdiction. And Andrea would fight to take the case from her, citing its fully domestic nature, not to mention Bridge’s relationship with the victim.

  As she left Catford station and approached the house, Bridge wondered if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Night had fallen, and the earlier hue and cry of activity around the house had faded with the daylight. The only hint of anything amiss was the two uniformed police officers standing guard outside the door. But those officers stood between her and the only clue she had about what had happened to her friend.

  “Evening, chaps,” she said, displaying her ID as she walked up the front path. “I was here earlier, if you remember?”

  The senior officer squinted, apparently struggling with that memory, but the younger officer smiled. “The spook girls,” he said. “You and the short one.”

  Bridge returned the smile, suppressing the urge to wonder what Andrea Thomson would make of her new epithet. “Need to take another look inside, if you don’t mind. SOCOs are all done, yeah?”

  The younger officer nodded, and made to lift the crime scene tape across the front door, but the older officer stopped him. “Hold on,” he said, “we weren’t informed. Shouldn’t we get notice from your boss?”

  She’d anticipated this. Actually, she was a little disappointed in the younger officer for intending to let her in so easily. She tapped her ID card, still held loose in her hand. “Do you really think we announce this sort of thing over the radio? There is a reason we’re called the secret service, you know.”

  The policeman shrugged. “Even so.”

  Bridge sighed theatrically. “All right, look. My boss is having dinner with the Home Office PUS tonight. And in about…” she checked her watch, “…ten minutes’ time, the Secretary is going to ask him if the rumours about this case are true.”

  The younger officer looked confused. “What rumours?”

  “Oh, you’re not —” She stopped herself, then lowered her voice. “Look, you didn’t hear it from me, but there’s a suspected IS cell in Turkmenistan that we think might be connected to this Irish chap. You know he worked with computers, right?”

  The senior officer looked sceptical. “SOCOs already took his computer.”

  “And we took it from SOCO, and I’ve spent all day trying to get some sense out of the bloody thing. Which is why I’m here, to make sure we didn’t miss anything this morning.” She checked her watch again, then looked expectantly at the policemen. “And I’m cutting it fine, if you know what I mean.”

  The moment hung in the air, then dropped as the senior officer lifted the tape. “All right,” he said, “but I’d better accompany you.”

  Inside Bridge cursed, but outwardly she beamed a magnanimous smile. “Absolutely. Whatever you need to do.”

  The electrics had been cleared as safe, and under the house bulbs rather than the hard light and shadow of SOCO lamps, Ten’s lounge looked much more mundane. It was still a terrible mess, but something about normal illumination made the scene almost banal. She had to remind herself she was standing in a room belonging to a man she’d known for more than a decade, but to whom she would never speak again.

  The policeman following her hadn’t been part of the plan. She’d hoped to be left alone, to simply go into the kitchen, take the garage keys, and leave. Instead, she now had to play out a charade for the benefit of the officer, rifling through drawers and papers as if she was looking for something unknown. The back of her neck began to warm, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice the golf ball sized beads of sweat on her skin. A burst of static from the policeman’s radio made her jerk around as if someone had been shot.

  “You all right, ma’am?”

  “Yes, sorry…little bit jumpy. Like I said, terrorism. Never good.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Bridge finished rifling through the stack of papers she’d occupied herself with and pouted, as if frustrated and considering another place to look. Then she shook her head and head walked past the officer into the kitchen, praying that Ten was the kind of person who kept books and papers in there alongside food-related items. Knowing there was a skull candlestick gave her some hope.

  It turned out that not only was Declan O’Riordan the kind of person who kept books and papers in the kitchen, but he had also been the kind of person to keep bills, receipts, bank statements, and much more stuffed into kitchen drawers. She removed them all, placed them on the counter, then took her time leafing through while the officer
paced around the room.

  “Seems like a decent area, this,” she said. “I need to find a new place. What do you know?”

  The policeman shrugged. “Changed a lot since we moved here, back in the nineties. It was pretty rough, back then, but it was all me and the missus could afford. Now it’s all slowly turning into cafés and crêches.”

  “Ah, hipster central?”

  The policeman chuckled. “Used to be that if you came across a man covered in tattoos you kept your hand on your baton, know what I mean? These days…”

  Bridge interrupted him, startled. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, did you hear it?” She fixed her gaze on the hallway. “I thought I heard… Oh, never mind. I’m hearing things. Maybe the place has mice.”

  But the line had worked, and now the policeman was also staring at the door into the hallway. Without looking away, he thumbed his radio. “You OK out there?”

  The younger officer replied immediately. “All fine. Something up?”

  “Stand by.” The older officer walked into the hallway, cautious and alert — with, she noted, one hand firmly on his baton.

  The moment he was out of sight she reached across the counter, lifted one edge of the skull candlestick, swiped the keys from underneath, lowered the skull, dropped the keys in her coat pocket, and replaced her hands on the bank envelopes she’d been sifting through. It took one and a half seconds, and she barely looked at the keys. If they weren’t the right ones, she was out of luck. There was no way she’d be able to bluff her way back in a second time.

  “All clear.” The policeman returned to the kitchen, and winked at Bridge as he said into his radio, “The place has probably got mice.”

  She smiled as if embarrassed, then took three random bank statements from the pile in front of her and laid them on the counter. “I reckon this is what we missed,” she said to the officer, taking out her personal phone, “I mean, who keeps bank statements in the kitchen?” She opened the camera app and took pictures, as if documenting the statements. “Some very interesting financial stuff on here. My boss is going to love me for this, thank you.” She put her iPhone away, replaced the papers back in the drawers, and nodded to herself firmly.