The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  “When did you call them?” Steve asked.

  “Yesterday afternoon. Said I was from ‘Hackney Modern Business Bureau’, that we advocate on behalf of local businesses, and we’re always recruiting for new members.”

  “Is that real?”

  “The bureau? Oh, yes,” said Andrea. “But only as a shell company with a PO box address, and some planted online puff pieces, thanks to some of your lot. It comes in handy from time to time.” She produced a business card from her handbag: Andrea Thomas, Outreach Manager, Hackney Modern Business Bureau.

  Steve smiled. “Do I get a card?”

  “No,” said Andrea, replacing it in her bag, “you’re just the boffin. If he asks, tell him I pulled you out of the IT department so you could talk shop.”

  “Not far from the truth, then.”

  “Exactly the point. The closer you stay to the truth, the easier it is to lie your socks off without giving anything away.”

  “So the cover is that we’re approaching now because they’re a new business?”

  “Incorporated four months ago. I told him we normally wait three months before contacting firms, just to make sure they’re going to stick around.”

  “Him? Male secretary?”

  “Not sure they have one. Startups are often just two guys doing everything themselves, right? The chap I spoke to was Nigel Marsh, one of the directors.”

  “And he agreed to see you right away. Does that strike you as odd? Is it possible he knows it was you that followed him?”

  “Not a chance. We didn’t speak directly in the pub, he didn’t see me tailing him, and yesterday I was just a voice on the phone. But a visit from a local business org is an opportunity for him to look legit, so I’m not surprised he jumped at it.”

  “Or maybe he really is legit. You said you don’t have anything conclusive. It could all be coincidence and mistaken identity.”

  Andrea nodded. “Sure, it could. But Giles Finlay and I both got the same vibe. There’s more to this than meets the eye.”

  The cab dropped them off near the startup’s corner entrance. While Andrea paid, Steve quickly looked around the street, glancing up at building corners, lamp posts, above road signs. “Plenty of cameras,” he said. “Anything dodgy going on here, not much chance we’d miss it.”

  Andrea leaned past him and pressed the top button of an intercom buzzer next to the entrance keycard reader. “It’s inside I’m worried about, not the street.”

  “Hello, SignalAir.”

  “Oh, hi there. It’s Andrea Thomas, from the Bureau. I spoke to Nigel yesterday.”

  “Sure, sure. Third floor, yeah?”

  The door made a buzzing noise, accompanied by the sound of heavy locks disengaging. Andrea pushed it open and they entered the lobby. Just as before, it was cold and spartan. No desk, no receptionist, not even a sofa. A single dragon plant stood in the corner, next to the fire escape stair entrance, simultaneously in need of water and yet threatening to outgrow its pot.

  The elevator was steel and glass, like the lobby. It arrived unbidden, sent by whomever had answered the intercom. They stepped inside, and Steve pushed the button for the top floor. “What’s on the first two floors?” he asked.

  Andrea shrugged. “More tech businesses, but they’re older and unconnected, as far as I can tell.”

  The doors opened onto a spartan corridor of whitewashed brick and harsh lighting, with two doors; the fire escape stairs, and a code-locked entrance to SignalAir, complete with company logo ‘plaque’ made from an inkjet printout. The door opened, and the young bearded man Andrea had followed two nights before greeted them with a smile, extending his hand.

  “Hi, I’m Nigel.”

  As they shook hands, Andrea looked for any trace that the young man might recognise her, but saw nothing. “Andrea Thomas, and this is my colleague Steve. He’s the technical one,” she smiled.

  “Right on, brother,” said Nigel. “Come in, come in.”

  The office was open plan, with whitewashed brick surfaces, a concrete floor, wall-mounted wiring, and exposed ducting in the rafters. The bare minimum necessary to make a functioning office, thought Andrea, which was typical of tech startups. The business itself seemed to follow a similar ethos, with five desks arranged in a quarter of the room, and only two that looked to be in use. The wall next to the door was lined with shelves, empty except for a few binders. Against another wall were several filing and storage cabinets. One was open, revealing stationery. A third wall was an ad hoc kitchenette area, with a kettle, small fridge, sink, and enough crockery for three people. The final wall held windows looking south, towards the City, in front of which was a standing workbench covered in computer chips, circuit boards, and antennae. Andrea had no idea what they were, and made a note to ask Steve later. There was nobody else in the office. “Is it just you here, Mr Marsh…?”

  “Nigel, yeah? There are three of us here normally, but Andy’s on holiday and Charlie’s in Reading for a meeting. We hot desk, so none of us need to be here in the building, yeah? Just me holding the fort today. Tea?”

  It had been a long time since the kitchenette area had been cleaned properly, and Andrea was sorely tempted to decline. But that would seem unusual, and she didn’t want any of this to strike young Nigel as odd. So she said, “Yes, thanks. Milk, no sugar.”

  “Same,” said Steve, and looked around at the workbench and shelves. “So what are you working on here, Nigel? Something to do with eight-oh-two-eleven, is that right?” 802.11 was the technical term for the set of standards defining wifi signals. Steve used it casually, without explanation.

  Nigel didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, sure,” he said, pouring the kettle, “but we’re not working with the alliance. It’s kind of a parallel protocol, yeah? Like, we’re theorising range extension through quantum state information in the bandwidth. It’s amazing, as if you’re stretching the wavelength out for more effective penetration, yeah?” He moved his hands apart, like pulling taut an invisible string, to demonstrate.

  Steve seemed sceptical. “That sounds ambitious. How far along are you?”

  Nigel laughed. “Early days, brother, early days. But it takes real disruption to stand out now, yeah? Andy’s the physicist, the science man. Charlie’s the coder. It’s him you want to speak to if you’re all about the hacking. I’m just an entrepreneur, but I know the jargon and I get the mindset.”

  Andrea nodded, understanding. “You’re the man who sweet-talks the investors and lets the others be creative while you take care of the business side.”

  “Sure, sure, and this is such an amazing place to do it. So…vibrant.” He said it with reverence, and if there was any lingering doubt in Andrea’s mind that Nigel Marsh was an archetypal class tourist, it was dispelled when he handed Steve his tea and said, “Where you from, brother?”

  “Croydon,” Steve replied.

  “Sure, sure, but I mean where are you from, yeah? What’s your homeland?”

  “My mum and dad were both from Kingston,” said Steve, with only the hint of a sigh. “But they met after they came to London.”

  “Right on,” Nigel smiled. “What an amazing world, yeah?”

  Andrea would have happily punched Nigel right in his smug, bearded hipster face herself, but Steve was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing, and for now they had to play along.

  Play along with what, though? There was something off about Nigel, and not just his class tourism. But SignalAir’s lack of substance, or tangible products, meant nothing. There were plenty of tech companies, some of them pulling down millions in investments, with no more staff or equipment than an anonymous, archetypal ‘new Shoreditch’ office like this. As they made small talk, and she gave Nigel her fake business card in preparation to leave, she realised there was nothing here she could put her finger on, nothing to make her any more suspicious of him than s
he already was. Nothing except an unease deep inside that said: something is wrong.

  In the cab heading back, Steve laughed off the ‘homeland’ conversation as nothing he hadn’t heard before, and, inevitably, from rich white kids. “Bet you anything he spent six months backpacking around Asia,” said Steve, “and now he thinks that was enough to erase all his racial privilege. I mean, he probably lived in a yurt for a whole month, so he might as well have grown up working on a plantation, yeah?”

  Andrea laughed at Steve’s imitation. “I’m just impressed you managed to hold on to your tea. So what’s your take? Racism aside, does he seem on the level to you? I’m no techie, but that stuff about quantum waves sounds like sci-fi.”

  “Yeah, but…” Steve shrugged. “I mean, I once knew a bloke who managed to encode tiny bits of data into DNS traffic, so I’d never say it’s impossible. But what Marsh is proposing would be a massive breakthrough in physics. They’d be legends, potential Nobel winners.”

  “Hmmm. That kind of fame doesn’t exactly sit well with covert ops. Could they maybe sell the tech to foreign actors? Would it have any application in guerrilla tactics, maybe drones?”

  “I guess long-range ad hoc control, without the need for extenders or satellites, would be something.” Then he jerked, as if startled. “Hang on. Why drones?”

  Andrea grimaced in apology. “Can’t say; sorry. Would it make a difference?”

  “It might be nothing.” Steve pulled out his Nexus and started typing. “But let me check with Patel.”

  51

  Bridge went straight back to the guest house from Guichetech. She wanted to ensure anyone following would see her do as she’d said, but she also knew she’d need items from her go-bag to break into Montgomery’s flat.

  In the room, she opened the Dell and signed into the secure partition, to check he hadn’t tampered with anything while he was messing around in her fake calendar. God, what an arrogant prick. It would have been bad enough before, when he thought she was an HR inspector, but to start messing around now that he knew she was here undercover —

  FROM: Mourad, Henri

  TO: Dunston, Emily / Finlay, Giles / Sharp, Brigitte

  SUBJECT: Where’s Thumper?

  Bridge froze, her finger hovering above the trackpad button as she re-read the subject line. ‘Thumper’ was the code name they’d assigned to Voclaine after his arrest. What the hell? She clicked through.

  Arrived Agenbeux local police 1015. No sign of Thumper, officers clueless - no idea who he was, said he was never there. Unable to locate senior officer, refused help. Please advise if further action needed, but I have MC to follow up (see H/PAR).

  Bridge guessed ‘MC’ stood for Matériel Chaud, the codename of the case he was pursuing before Mourad got roped in as Bridge’s backup. She didn’t know what the case was, much less where it might take him. But the important part of the email was right there in the subject line. Where was François Voclaine? She’d watched the local police come and pick him up from Guichetech herself. Someone from that station had taken Emily Dunston’s call, agreed to come and arrest Voclaine at the facility, and sent officers to do so. But now they were denying it had ever happened. How? Did Voclaine bribe them all to let him escape?

  The walls of the room slid sideways, skewing off-axis as Bridge fought to stay calm. Had she second-guessed herself one too many times, and got it all wrong? Perhaps it really was as simple as it looked, and Voclaine was the mole. He had backing from a hostile actor, and they’d somehow been alerted to his arrest. Perhaps the local police had been in their pocket all along, paid off and ready to protect Voclaine if necessary. She was angry at herself for not following through, for staying incognito and trusting the local authorities. If she’d gone with him to the police station, stayed with him till Mourad arrived, maybe questioned him herself… She could have gone with them to Paris, left behind this bloody place and been home in time for the weekend…

  No, surely she was overreacting. This was a simple administrative error, and she’d find Voclaine stewing at a different police station, in the next town over. And if that turned out to be the case, she’d kick herself if she wasted this opportunity to check up on Montgomery. It was still possible he was the mole, and Voclaine was innocent, at least of espionage. The truth remained suspended in a superstate, waiting to collapse and become reality. All it would take was one last scramble to clear the mountain summit.

  She typed a quick reply —

  worrying, but hopefully simple admin error? will investigate

  — And logged out, turning to her rolling suitcase. She flipped it on its front, with the steel tubes that encased the telescopic handle uppermost, and took a 10 cent euro coin from her purse. At the base of each tube was a horizontal depression in the metal, an innocuous moulding artefact. Bridge fitted the edge of the coin into the depression in the left-hand tube, and turned it anticlockwise. It was stiff, but it turned, and half a dozen revolutions later the hidden bolt came free, allowing the base of the steel tube to slide down and reveal a small, hollow space. Crammed inside was a Ziploc bag, which she removed and opened. Packed into the bag were a length of high-tensile monofilament, a solid-state micro camera, a tiny wireless audio bug and receiver, an LED flashlight the size of two matchsticks, five hundred US dollars, and a set of lockpicks. Bridge hadn’t expected to use any of these items, or to need the emergency Ziploc at all, while here in Agenbeux. But it was standard issue in OIT luggage, and now she was glad of it.

  Her clothes were a different matter. As the job was supposed to be observation only, OpPrep hadn’t kitted her out with any serious gear, so she’d have to make do with what she’d brought of her own casual clothes. She’d worn most of them to Izzy’s farm, but hadn’t yet put them through a wash, so she rifled through the pile and pulled out a few things. Two minutes later she was wearing black jeans and a plain black t-shirt. She found a pair of clean socks, pulled her own casual walking boots over them, and finished with her leather jacket, dropping the emergency Ziploc in one of the pockets. She only really needed the lockpicks, but as they were probably the most incriminating thing in the bag, she might as well take the whole thing.

  She wished she had some kind of hat, but didn’t, so donned sunglasses instead. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror by the door, and suppressed a laugh. All she needed was big hair, some purple lipstick, and she’d look eighteen again. Except when she was eighteen, the only break-ins she did were virtual ones on computer servers. Now she was about to do it for real. She took an elasticated hair band from the dresser and scraped her hair back into a ponytail as she exited the room.

  Montgomery’s apartment was on the other side of town. Agenbeux was small enough that she could have walked, but it would take at least twenty minutes, and the midday heat would tire her before she got there. Taking her car was a risk. If anyone really was following her, they’d know she wasn’t having a ‘lie down’ after all. But being followed like that would mean the game was up anyway. Better to try and fail than do nothing and let it all collapse around her.

  Nobody appeared to be watching her as she left the guest house, and she didn’t notice anyone tailing her car across town. By the time she arrived at Montgomery’s apartment, she was confident it was merely her usual paranoia that was warming the back of her neck. The address led her to a row of three-storey townhouses, so she parked around the corner and took the driving gloves from the dashboard compartment, shoving them in her pocket.

  His apartment was on the top floor. The upper floors of each house had balconies, and below the top floor these were roofed with tiles. Climbing up them to break in through a window wouldn’t be all that difficult, but doing so without being seen or heard would. Instead, she gambled that a town like Agenbeux didn’t expect crime, and walked right up the steps to the front door. Sure enough, the main house door wasn’t locked, although the lack of security cameras was an
unexpected bonus. There was a hallway, no lobby, and no elevator either. Just a stairway, leading up through the house. She took the steps quickly but quietly, not wanting to attract attention, but doing her best to look like she belonged here. Then she remembered it was lunchtime, and relaxed. Most of the residents were probably at work, and those who were here would be busy eating.

  At the top of the stairs was a single door. The apartment took up the whole floor, like a penthouse suite. Very nice, thought Bridge, and wondered if the project accountants back in London knew what Montgomery’s expenses were paying for. She pulled on the driving gloves, took the Ziploc from her pocket, and removed the lockpick tools. With a final glance over her shoulder, and keeping an ear out for any sudden noise on the stairwell, she set to work.

  She’d been surprised, during the first Breaking & Entering class at the Loch, how easy lock-picking was. She’d always imagined it to be a precise, delicate skill, like the old myths of safecrackers with stethoscopes carefully listening for falling tumblers. In fact, with most modern locks it was more of a brute force act; a simple matter of keeping rotational pressure on the plug with a torsion wrench, then shoving a pick inside and lifting the pins until it opened. Advanced classes for more secure and industrial mechanisms would take longer, but by the end of the first morning Bridge and her classmates had mastered the basic skills well enough that they could now open, the instructor gleefully informed them, eighty per cent of all domestic locks.

  Montgomery’s apartment was no exception. She felt the plug turn a fraction of a millimetre with each pin release, then rotate completely with a satisfying click. Picking the lock had taken less than fifteen seconds, and now all she had to worry about was a burglar alarm. But this was an old town, and old-fashioned with it. The kind of place where her mother would insist people still left their front doors unlocked and were never burgled. Bridge seriously doubted that, but regardless, it wasn’t the sort of place where rented apartments had pre-installed alarms. She slipped inside, closing the door behind her, and found herself in a hallway that opened out on the lounge. When she saw the state of the place, though, she was shocked.