The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  Eventually, after six weeks that seemed like a year, Giles gave in to her begging and allowed her to return to her desk. But nothing more; her OIT status was rescinded, her duties strictly office-bound, and every moment of every day she felt the eyes of everyone in the building on her, chipping away at her fragile façade of control.

  There she is. The one who got Adrian Radović killed. The one who cracked under pressure, who tried to run before she could walk, who wasn’t ready for the big time, wasn’t ready for theatre.

  Ciaran was very supportive. Monica said nothing either way. That was fine.

  Dr Nayar said she was mistaken, that everyone in the Service understood the perils and challenges of going OIT. That nobody blamed her for Adrian’s death, she’d done all she could. But she hadn’t, had she? She’d frozen at the first sign of real trouble. Adrian was dead because she hesitated, as sure as if she’d fired the bullet herself. Of course Dr Nayar would say she wasn’t to blame — it was literally her job to make Bridge feel better so she could get back to work, back to her desk.

  Sometimes, her desk was part of the problem. Every so often, on hot days, her chair became the seat of a stolen jeep roaring across the desert, with soldiers chasing her and Adrian at her side, laughing over the sound of wind whistling through the bullet holes in his head. The first time it happened, she cried out so loud that Ciaran spilt coffee over his keyboard. Monica sighed and shook her head. Over time those days became less frequent, and Bridge learned to live with them, or at least make no outward sign anything was amiss.

  Server rooms took longer. The first time she tried to walk between two racks the thick spaghetti of network cables seemed to flex, trying to trip her, while the racks loomed and bowed inward, ready to crush her under tons of sweltering metal. Ciaran found her crouched on the floor, covering her head with her hands, sobbing. She still hated going in them.

  But all of that was behind her now, wasn’t it?

  She’d returned from Guichetech, after waiting for the local police to pick up François Voclaine. She’d called Giles, who’d put her on to Emily Dunston, who’d authorised Voclaine’s arrest and made arrangements for him to be taken into custody. In the morning, Henri Mourad would come and transport him to Paris for questioning. Bridge remained incognito the whole time, watching from behind the one-way mirror as Montgomery dealt with the police.

  “Why do you need to remain hidden,” Montgomery had asked, “if you’ve got your man?”

  “Because I’m still not a hundred per cent sure Voclaine is who we’re after,” she said. “But if he is, imagine I leave now, immediately after his arrest. Do you think anyone here will still believe I’m an HR inspector? Or that whoever he’s working for won’t become suspicious and ask awkward questions?” She could tell Montgomery didn’t like it. No doubt her presence here was causing disruption, and the final stages of any project like this were the worst time for any kind of turmoil. But to his credit, he didn’t object further.

  She picked up a microwaveable dinner on the way back to the guest house, eating it in hurried bites between relating events to Giles at the other end of a secure VOIP call. He was pleased, and like her, hoped she’d struck gold. He reminded her that this, her first return to OIT, had been entirely safe and risk-free, and she was forced to concede that yes, he knew what he was doing and he’d been right all along. Well done, Giles, well done.

  But after she ended the call, and tossed her dinner packaging in the recycling, Bridge couldn’t relax. She opened the Dell and re-examined the spreadsheet yet again, not entirely sure what she was looking for this time, but determined to find it all the same.

  47

  Twice a week, James Montgomery wished he had bigger feet.

  He was a size 9, quintessentially average for a man of his height, and nothing in his life had ever made him question them. But now, he realised with grim humour, they were an essential part of what spies called ‘tradecraft’, the methods and techniques by which they schemed and deceived.

  He still didn’t think of himself as a mole. Not technically. But Bridget Short’s arrival, and Voclaine’s arrest, had brought things into sharp focus. He could no longer escape the fact that his actions here at Agenbeux were, at the very least, treason of a kind. And hadn’t they always been? Not just here, but before, when he was first approached.

  London, three years ago, and Montgomery had enjoyed a recent promotion within the department. Enjoyed it so much that when a friendly banker, drinking at the Old Crown one evening, had begun chatting and buying him drinks, he thought nothing of it. Why shouldn’t people buy him drinks? He was a very successful and important man. People thought politicians ran the country, but those who saw behind the curtain knew better. It was the civil servants who did the real work; they who negotiated deals, who made good on ministerial promises, who conducted reviews and assembled reports on what was feasible within the labyrinthine corridors of Whitehall. The banker knew that — bankers ran more of the country than civil servants, after all — and therefore knew Montgomery was a good friend to have, someone in a position to pull strings behind the scenes and make things happen.

  Someone in a position to influence the allocation of a defence contract worth billions of pounds.

  Nobody in the department knew the company was Russian. It was a shell within a shell within a shell, a tangled maze of holding companies and ‘brass plaque’ conglomerates registered in sterling-friendly tax havens. These shadow companies had no premises beyond the same offshore address as a thousand others, no named directors or stakeholders, and unseen paperwork kept well away from prying legal eyes. But if you knew how, and could follow it back far enough, eventually you would find that Joint Allied Star Defence was owned by a syndicate of Russian oligarchs, many of whom had ties to the mafiya and FSB, one of the KGB’s successor agencies. Meanwhile, the other successor, the SVR, was the real employer of Montgomery’s new drinking friend. He discovered this the next morning when, waking in a Soho hotel room, he struggled through his hangover to understand why images of himself in places he didn’t recall were flashing before his eyes. Then he recognised the shape of a television, and the telltale transition flicker of a PowerPoint slideshow, and became nauseous. He remembered nothing of the previous night past his fourth gin and tonic, not even the bored-looking woman with him in the photos, but he was suddenly sober enough to know drunkenness would be a poor defence.

  The Russians understood the value of both stick and carrot. Yes, they threatened to send his wife and employers the photos. But they also opened a Zurich bank account in his name, and wired money into it at regular intervals. And all he had to do was persuade his colleagues that the new equipment contract should be awarded to Joint Allied Star Defence. He didn’t have to leak any secrets, so it’s not like he was betraying anything. Not technically.

  But the Russians and Montgomery alike overestimated his power and influence. He mounted a good argument, but the contract was ultimately awarded to a different supplier. All the money Joint Allied Star Defence had spent on Montgomery, routed through byzantine layers of corporate obfuscation, had gone to waste. For weeks, he expected to suffer a terrible accident at any moment. The pinprick of a hypodermic needle as he crossed London Bridge, or the unusual aftertaste of a drink at the Black Horse, or a sudden hand at his back on the platform at Embankment. The Russians would not forget.

  And yet, they did. Montgomery’s contact, whom he only ever knew as ‘the banker’, stopped calling. After a couple of weeks he looked for the banker, worried that this lack of contact would prevent him from being able to explain what happened, how he’d done everything he could to ensure Joint Allied got that contract. He didn’t want to die because the Russians thought he was lazy.

  But weeks turned into months, and still the banker was nowhere to be seen. Nobody contacted him. Nobody tried to assassinate him. Nobody sent the photos to his wife. Montgomery began to relax, and h
is life returned to normal. He might have thought the whole thing was a fever dream, if not for the Swiss account, and the payments still being made into it. He’d always been cautious with the money — being compromised in the first place through a lack of discretion had taught him a valuable lesson, so he restricted his spending to treats for his wife and family, nice meals out, a new car that was only slightly too expensive. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself through extravagance. But for some reason, the Russians were still paying him. Perhaps it was connected to the banker’s sudden disappearance. Perhaps they’d just forgotten about him. Whatever the reason, within a couple of years Montgomery could have paid off his mortgage, except that he couldn’t begin to justify why he had enough money to do so. By now there was too much to simply explain away as an inheritance or windfall.

  And then, not long after he was chosen to run the Exphoria facility at Agenbeux, they found him again. He asked the new contact, the Russian he met every few days here in France, what happened to the banker. He was told it was none of his business, and he should only be concerned with the matter of his debt to Russia, for his previous failure. That debt was not yet repaid, as the Russian regularly reminded him.

  But the payments kept arriving in Zurich, and Montgomery finally concluded that it was a mistake. The Russians thought they’d stopped paying him, but they hadn’t. He briefly considered telling his new contact, but only briefly. After all, if they hadn’t noticed yet, why should they now? It was, he considered, worth the risk.

  And it really was quite a risk. Every day, he waited until Voclaine took his first post-lunch smoke break of the afternoon. In the morning, the Frenchman’s breaks were fairly short. Even a man like Voclaine knew he shouldn’t really spend all day outside, smoking. But come the afternoon, and especially if he’d had drinks with lunch, Voclaine adopted a more relaxed routine of fifteen minutes or more at a time in the compound. And every time he went out, he invariably left some part of the Exphoria code on his monitor. All Montgomery had to do was cross their office, double-check the blinds were drawn — sometimes the secretary raised them in the morning, despite his pleas for her to stop — and take pictures of the screen using the mini-tablet he kept in the office drawer, paging up and down to capture as much as he could of whatever Voclaine was working on that day. He allowed himself no more than five minutes, just to be sure he’d finish before there was any chance of Voclaine returning. It was normally enough to capture fifty screens or more of code.

  He had no idea if it was useful. The programming side of things was completely beyond him. But the Russian seemed happy enough with what he delivered them.

  That was where his feet came in. Every day, he brought a new Toshiba SD card into the office, from a batch the Russian had given him. Before taking the pictures, he inserted the card into the mini-tablet, and ensured the camera was set to save photos directly to the card, not the internal memory, which contained nothing more than his family photos and Chris Rea albums. After taking the pictures, he ejected the SD card and slid it into his pocket. The mini-tablet, which had its wifi permanently switched off and possessed no cellular capability, was replaced in his drawer. It never left the building, so never drew suspicion from the security guards, or the likes of Bridget Short, for being a ‘second device’.

  The only remaining conundrum was how to get the SD card out of the building. That was where his feet came into it. At around five in the afternoon, an hour before his normal leaving time, Montgomery visited the bathroom and installed himself in a cubicle. There, he carefully and quietly removed one shoe and sock, usually his left, and placed the memory card inside the sock before sliding his foot back inside. It fit under the arch of his foot, and it was just a little too big for comfort. If he’d been just one shoe size bigger, he’d barely be aware of it.

  But he was aware of it, every evening as he left the building. Although the staff complained that security at the facility was like going through an airport, it wasn’t really that bad. For one thing, staff weren’t required to remove their shoes, and the detector wands weren’t powerful enough to ‘see’ the SD card tucked under Montgomery’s foot. If someone suspected, the shoes themselves were perfectly ordinary Oxfords. No secret compartment in a pivoting heel, no hidden piano wire in the laces. An inspector would have to insist Montgomery remove not just his shoes, but his socks as well, to find the card.

  Today, though, was different. For one thing, Voclaine wasn’t here. Montgomery knew Voclaine’s login password, and could access his computer easily. But he didn’t have the first idea of how then to ‘check out’ the Exphoria code, or which part of it to look at. He could hardly ask one of the staff to show him, and even if he could, what if someone noticed that a computer belonging to a man who was no longer in the building was still looking at code?

  He’d considered asking Ms Short to show him, while claiming to be curious at what Voclaine was doing with that second iPhone. She’d returned to the office that morning as if nothing had happened, and he overheard her asking a couple of the project leads if they knew where Voclaine was, to build the pretence that she didn’t know. Now she was maintaining the illusion by interviewing his secretary. But would she believe Montgomery’s curiosity? Surely she knew he wasn’t a computer expert. So he sat alone in his office, frustrated and worried. He had the whole office to himself, but he couldn’t do a damn thing with it.

  And yet, he had to. The Russian had made that clear, and while Montgomery had already expected to die two years ago, he had no desire to hasten the event now. As he exited his office, mini-tablet in hand, he was assaulted by a sudden memory. Hard steel, the Russian’s pistol, pressing against his body while the scent of cheap German cigarettes and vodka-soured breath flooded his nostrils. He almost retched, stumbling into the eastern corridor and steadying himself on a wall as two French junior programmers walked past, consumed by their conversation. Montgomery’s French was good, and he knew they were talking about something technical, but he didn’t have the specialised vocabulary to follow exactly what they were saying. It didn’t matter. They barely registered his presence as they turned ahead of him, down another corridor and toward the office of a project lead.

  He wondered where they’d come from. Perhaps one might have left their screen on, with code still visible?

  Montgomery’s lanyard gave him access to the whole facility, and he was in and out of enough staff rooms and offices on legitimate grounds that nobody would question him using it to access an office now. All he had to do was find the unattended screen of a random coder, someone like Voclaine who was casual — one might say laissez-faire — about the requirement to lock all screens when leaving a desk, click around, and take photos. He could do it. It would be fine. He was the boss, wasn’t he?

  The third office he looked into, a two-desk setup, was empty. Only one desk looked in use, but the glow of the screen illuminated the empty chair in the dim lighting. Montgomery touched his lanyard to the entry lock and stepped inside. Definitely nobody here, and judging by the mess, whoever used the occupied desk had become used to working alone. But when he stood before the monitor, Montgomery’s heart sank. It was locked, fixed on a password login screen. The username, ‘Derek Angler’, meant nothing to him. Evidently one of the British staff, but not one he’d come across personally, so he had no hope of guessing the password. He wondered if Derek could be persuaded to give him access, somehow. Perhaps a simple bribe would suffice? Could it be that easy?

  “Can I help you?” Derek Angler entered the room, carrying a small plastic tray of pasta salad and a plastic fork. Montgomery flinched, startled, and muttered something about mandatory computer breaks. Derek gestured at the food in his hand. “It took me ten minutes to retrieve this from the back of the fridge, it’ll be fine. Besides, I’m on a crunch at the moment. Sorry, who are you? Are you from HR?”

  “I, I’m James Montgomery. The site manager.”

  Derek shru
gged. “Oh, right. Excuse me,” he said as he squeezed past Montgomery to sit in his desk chair. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Oh, there’s, there’s no problem. Just checking up on all the Brits here, you know? Have to stick together, all strangers in a strange land. Haha.”

  Derek shovelled a fork of pasta into his mouth. “I’ve been living here for three years. Not that much of a stranger, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Ah, yes, well. Enjoy your lunch.” Montgomery backed toward the door, collided with the closed glass, fumbled for the door button, and finally staggered out into the corridor.

  He returned to his office, and found his secretary back at her desk, while Bridget Short’s office was empty. She must have gone for a smoke break. He entered, and saw her computer was still logged in.

  48

  Bridge had been fifteen when she was first arrested for hacking. The police asked her why she did it, and she replied, “For the truth.”

  Bridge had always thought of the truth as a mountain peak, a hard and solid thing that stood proud and unchanging. To reach it, you might have to negotiate tricky paths, shifting scree, falling boulders. But if you were persistent enough, determined enough, you could eventually reach the summit and the truth would be revealed. It was a philosophy she was already inclined towards, that became fully crystallised by her father’s death.

  She was fourteen when he died, and undergoing a particularly morbid period where she spent most of each day contemplating her own mortality. After several years raiding her sister’s music collection and removing all colour from her wardrobe, her teenage years had begun the process of backcombing her hair, covering herself in silver jewellery, and experimenting with stark black, white, and red makeup. The year before, at the moment her mother served an evening dinner of pork, Bridge declared her conversion to vegetarianism and accused them all of dietary murder. Her plate ended up on the floor. She ended up in her room.