Big Brother's Little Sister
Page 23
"Look. We need to make contact with other anti-Government groups, right?" He didn't reply. "Right?"
"Right," he agreed, begrudgingly.
"And all the obvious people who might be anti-Government have been shut down, right?"
"Right."
"And the way they were shut down was by putting their children in Camps, right?"
"Yes."
"So the best way to get in contact is be one of us going to a Camp. Right?"
"Right. I mean no. The best way is for me to go to a Camp."
Oh dear: he's trying to be all chivalrous. The knight in shining armour. Very mediaeval. Very, very outdated. "If you go into a Camp, who'll carry on the attacks?" This was the approach I'd decided on. Frankly, I was pretty sure that if he went to a Camp, he'd last all of 10 minutes before he told the Enforcers everything he knew and we'd be finished. Well, maybe not 10 minutes: 5 was more like it. But I couldn't tell him that: it would destroy his ego, poor little lamb. "It has to be me. I'll be fine. The genius part of this plan - though I say so myself - is that I'll be completely innocent. You need to set me up, then have Kareem inform the Enforcers that he's seen something dodgy going on. They'll come, thinking that they've tracked down some major Floyd activist and take me to a Camp. But on investigating it, they'll find I've been set up. They'll let me out of the Camp after a few days, giving me all the time I need to find some contacts. Sorted."
"Sorted," he said, sounding very far from convinced.
"Yes, sorted."
"It's a terrible plan," he contested.
"If you say so," I countered. "Got a better one?"
Silence down the end of the phone line.
"Thought not. We good to go?"
"I suppose so." He still didn't sound convinced, but then again, I didn't expect he would be. I needed some more time to get him to buy in fully. "We'll need to plan it. Meticulously. And I'm going to need to do some pretty clever stuff to lead them to you, but then make sure they realise that you're not really to blame. Hmm - I wonder..."
I smiled to myself. If he was beginning to think about the technical parts of the plan, then it was only a matter of time before he was fully on board. He'd go through with the plan, even if he didn't realise it now.
Chapter 26 – A hole in the data
The next night, he was ready. "Tell me," I prompted him, and readied myself for at least 20 minutes of brilliant, but almost certainly unintelligible, geeky detail. I do like this boy, I realised, somewhat to my surprise.
In fact, it wasn't that unintelligible for the most part, though there were a few times when he lost me. The short version was that he would set up a new attack from the school servers, as he usually did. This one would be directed at the Young Enforcers network. We didn't know who they all were, but we did know that they got paid on the first day of every month, and he'd worked out a way to pay them negative amounts of money. In other words, he'd worked out a way to empty the bank accounts of every Young Enforcer in the country. This was a pretty hardcore attack, and more than just an embarrassment one, too. We'd been saving it for a while, since Mo had found, deep in the Government databases, the information about the Y.T.s’ bank accounts.
There were a number of options as to what we could do with the information. We'd debated whether we should try to track from the bank account details to the people themselves. Mo wasn't entirely sure whether he could do it, and there was the possibility that some of the systems he would need to get into might end up being better defended that he'd like. To be more accurate, better defended than I'd like, because it was still me what was paying the most attention to the possibility that he might get caught. If we did manage to get the names, we could then publish them, but after quite a debate, we'd decided against. Although we were both firmly committed to non-violent protest, the Y.T.s were really seriously unpopular, and if we did publish their names, I for one was pretty sure that some of them would be attacked and seriously injured. There's a difference, in many people's minds, between a peaceful protest and opportunities for revenge. Single acts of violence against individual Y.T.s seemed more than likely to occur. After what had happened to Ryan, Mo didn't take much convincing. No: far better to hurt them secretly by taking all the money from their bank accounts.
Mo explained that there were thousands of different bank accounts, and quite a lot of work to send the instructions to take money out of each one. He could do it quite quickly from a fast machine, but if we wanted to take our time, then he could use a less powerful one. Here's where I came in - or my school desk tablet, anyway. He'd coordinate the attack by putting the instructions on one of the school systems, removing all traces of where he'd connected to it from, and then disconnecting, setting a timer on it to start the attack at a particular time, as he'd done before. What was different this time was that when the timer went off, the school system would attach itself to my tablet (all of our desk tablets were controlled from the central school systems) and then each separate set of instructions would be sent out from there to the bank systems. The amount of data passing over the network wouldn't be enormous, but it would over quite a long period of time. Crucially, it wouldn't be finished by the beginning of the school day.
Kareem's job was to come in that morning, look at the logs showing the network activity from the school - which would include all the traffic from my desk tablet - "notice" that something was wrong, and call the Enforcers. He would know that this would get me into trouble, so if he did this as planned, we reckoned that he had proved to us that he was on Floyd's side after all.
There were several rather clever parts to this plan, as Mo explained in altogether too much detail to me. First, by using a slow system (my tablet), the attack would go on a long time, giving the Enforcers time to track it. Second, he could make it look, on close inspection, like my tablet had been chosen at random out of all of the school systems, which should help establish my innocence, and allow me to get out of the Camp when I was finished there. Fourth, it gave Kareem a way to show he was on our side without any danger of his getting into trouble. Finally - and this was the nicest - he'd worked out how to send all the money that we were basically stealing from the Young Enforcers' bank accounts to the Police Benevolent Fund, which looked after a police officers and families who'd fallen on hard times. We were both keen to keep the police on our side, and doing this (whilst making sure that the news sites were made aware that what was officially an "anonymous donation" was actually from Floyd) would certainly give them reason to like us.
I liked the plan, and was careful to praise him for his cleverness, which made him almost purr with satisfaction down the phone. It was almost as if he'd forgotten that he was doing his bit to send me to a Child Internment Camp. Boys just have no memory. Or they have no imagination. I don't know: possibly both.
An hour after finishing our call, and during the middle of an assignment on Henry VIII, it hit me, and I hurriedly gave him a call. Luckily, he picked up almost immediately. “Floyd. I've just realised,” I said, breathlessly.
“What?” he replied, surprised.
“The bank accounts.”
“Yes?” he was still confused, which was fair enough, because I hadn't really explained what I was on about. “What about them?”
“Do you have all the bank accounts? For all the Young Enforcers?”
“Yup. All of them.” he confirmed.
It was what I'd feared. “All of them?”
“Yes,” he said again, “why?”
“And how come you had them all to hand? I only suggested a big attack yesterday,” I pointed out.
“I've been saving it. I stumbled across the details while I was … nosing around a month or so ago. It's a really big target, so I thought we should keep it for a special attack.”
I wasn't convinced, but I let it go. “Phyllis, that's your sister's name?”
“No, she is actually called Fliss: that's what they named her.” A pause. Then, “Oh.” He'd realised that I'd worked it out.
He was silent.
“Does it? Does that … include Fliss? Her bank details?” I didn't want to press, but I felt I had to. I couldn't leave it here. “Are her details on the list?”
He paused. I waited. I heard him take a breath, as if to say something, and then let it out again. I waited some more. “Yes. Fliss' details are on it.”
“You need to take them off,” I said, abruptly.
“No.” He didn't go any further.
“Yes. You need to take them off.”
“No. I can't.”
“Can't you get hold of her bank details and work backwards from there? That would let you exclude her, take her out of the list. You said you cared about her. If she ever finds out that you've done this, she'll never forgive you. Never.”
“No. I can't.”
“Well, then we have to stop it. We'll do another attack – a different one.”
“It's too late. This is too good: it's a great match for what we need to do. We go ahead,” he insisted.
This isn't like him. He was being really firm. Almost aggressive. There's something else here. “Is it her?” I asked, as gently as possible.
“What do you mean 'Is it her?'?” he asked, a note of tension in his voice.
There's definitely something else going on. “Are we doing the attack to get at Fliss?” I had no other way to say it.
He sighed. “No. We're not. Not to get at Fliss,” he said wearily.
“Then why can't you take her details off?” I asked.
“Because if I do – and I'm not even sure I could – then it would be a clue. You've spent so much time telling me that we need to cover our tracks, and if I take her details out, there's a hole. A hole in the data, and if they find it, then it'll lead back to me.”
I thought this through. It seemed logical, I had to admit. “Ah. That … that makes sense,” I agreed.
“I'm not worried about getting caught,” he said, quickly. “Well, I am, but not because I'm worried about myself. If they catch me, then there's going to be nobody else trying to get you out. You're going to have to rely on the Enforcers to come to their senses, and I … well, I don't trust them enough to let them out, even if they're confronted with the evidence.” He hurried on, the emotion clear in his voice. “I can't get caught, because if I do, then you might not get out.”
I didn't want to explain that I expected Mum to get me out, because he was right, even if it was for the wrong reasons. I couldn't risk him getting caught, but it was because I wasn't sure he'd cope in a Camp. It wasn't exactly as if I was looking forward to it, but I knew that he'd have a much worse time of it: he just wasn't strong enough. And if anyone found out that his family were all Enforcers, then he would have a very bad time of it indeed. Other children in the Camp wouldn't be likely to treat him very well at all.
“You convinced me to do this. I need to keep it as safe as possible. Which isn't very,” he added sorrowfully.
“Are you sure you can't remove her? Maybe all the Junior Enforcement Corps? Leave just the Youth Enforcers?” I suggested.
“Not enough data if we do that. And the way the data is structured means that...” And he launched into a technical discussion of the problem. I figured he was over his guilt, at least for now, in the excitement – for him – of describing what was going on, so I let him explain, and sat on my bed, half-listening to him and smiling slightly sadly to myself.
We agreed, in the end, to go ahead. I couldn't see a way out of it, and although I knew that Mo wasn't particularly fond of Fliss, it didn't seem that he was being spiteful about it. In fact, by the end of the conversation, I was pretty sure that if could have seen a safe way of removing her details, he would have done. Mo admitted, somewhat embarrassed, that it was going to take him a few days to set things up: this was the most complex set-up of any attack we'd done since the very first time, when I'd forced him to start routing all his moves through multiple computers.
In the end, it took a full week, but as I passed in in the corridor at break one morning, he nodded once, and I knew it was ready. I winked at him, and carried on walking, my stomach suddenly full of butterflies.
We'd agreed not to talk during the week that he was setting it up, partly to let him concentrate on what he was doing, but mainly in case any investigation went deeply enough into our activities to pick up that we'd been communicating. The first thing he'd done as part of the planning was to go back into telephone exchange and set the triggers on his wiping software very low, so that if anybody did try investigating what had gone on, there would be nothing to find. We also agreed that it was sensible, in the lead-up to the attack, not to use the phones. Just for the highest levels of safety.
Which meant that I’d not been able to talk to Mo, which I'd missed – more than I'd expected. I'd not realised quite how much time we'd spent with each other over the past few months, even if had mainly been on the phone, rather than face-to-face. Well, just a few days, and I should be out, with enough information to contact some other groups.
When I got home, Mum was waiting. “I have a plan for tonight,” she announced.
“Oh?” I said, dumping my bag in the hall.
“Pick it up,” she said. “Room.”
“OK, sorry.”
I grabbed my bag and took it up to my room. “What's this plan for this evening?” I shouted down as I got changed. I liked the idea of spending my last night with Mum having a nice meal, but I'd thought that she was supposed to be on duty.
“Come down first,” I heard her call back up.
I changed into a pair of jeans and a floppy top, and slipped on a pair of comfy flat shoes, and slid my bag under my desk. I closed the door on my room and headed downstairs. Mum was in the kitchen. “So, what's the plan for supper?” I looked around, but there was no sign that she'd got anything. Maybe she fancies a take-away.
“Well,” she looked a little embarrassed, “I thought it might be time.”
“For what?” I asked.
She sat down at the table, and motioned to me to take another seat. “Well, you know that I've been spending time with Geoff?”
“Yes. You had mentioned it.” I pulled out a chair and sat.
“Well, I thought it might be time for the two of you to meet,” she replied sheepishly.
Tonight? If all goes to plan, this is my last night at home. I want to spend the evening with Mum. “Tonight? I was planning a nice night in. Maybe a take-away?” I said.
“Another time. Given that I'm on shifts, there aren't that many times that we can both do. I swapped a shift with someone, so this is one of those times. Which means...”
“I've got homework.”
“It can wait.”
“It really can't. I need to do it for tomorrow. We've got Maths – and there's a test.” I was beginning to sound a little panicky, I knew.
“You didn't mention it yesterday. Or this morning.” She was looking suspicious, and starting to look a little annoyed.
“Really Mum: can't it wait? For another day?” I pleaded. “I just really, really don't want to go out.”
“So there isn't a Maths test?”
“Yes, there is,” I lied, trying to sound sincere. “But today's not a good day, you know?”
“Lena, this isn't good, and it's not like you. I've arranged it all: we're going to meet at the nice Chinese in town at seven, which should give you loads of time to start any work you need to get done. And we'll be back by nine thirty, at the very latest.”