Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  The picture forming was of a man who had tried many different things in the course of his life, finally channelling his energy into politics.

  Arthur Fried hailed from Wales. His family was originally from the United States but had moved from there to Swansea and then to Newport. There Fried attended comprehensive school and then immediately went to work doing manual labour in a large foundry. His family were deeply religious. Fried enjoyed describing these parts of his history because they gave him an opportunity to talk about his faith background and demonstrate his affinity for the common man.

  Quickly Fried escaped the factory, leaving to study marketing at Gwent College in Newport. After graduating, he tried out various professions: estate agent, radio announcer, sales representative for an arms importer, hotel chain service manager, chamber of commerce chairman.

  All speaking professions, Lia noted. Selling guns was probably more of the same. The quick moves between careers told of enterprise but also restlessness and perhaps hinted that no one had wanted to engage the young Fried with a more permanent employment contract.

  Next, Fried founded a couple of companies, an estate agency and a business consultancy. Then he moved to the US for a few years, a time about which the newspaper articles had nothing to say other than vague references to more business activities. Clearly his religious fervour grew during his time in America. After returning to Britain he developed an interest in social issues and the Fair Rule party.

  ‘That was a decisive moment. As if I had stepped out of the darkness into bright sunlight. I realised that Britain lacked a true voice of the people, a party that could restore the honour of the nation. I knew that, despite all of my personal shortcomings, this was the mission God had in store for me,’ Fried had told The Scotsman.

  The pastimes of this ‘voice of the people’ were golf, shooting, volunteering and church service. His wife was an American, Anna Belle Fried, whom he had met in New York, and every article remembered to mention that she had once won her home state’s beauty contest.

  Lia frowned. Shooting, parish work, founding companies and a much younger Miss Ohio. Not exactly the path of the average Welsh lad.

  Lia managed to get through all the major stories in which Fried appeared before small noises at the front door of the office began to announce the arrival of the others.

  When Timothy Phelps showed up, Lia decided to see if he could add any insight.

  ‘Morning, Tim.’

  ‘Good morning, darling.’

  ‘What do you know about Arthur Fried?’

  ‘That’s a strange question to start the day,’ Timothy said, looking at Lia curiously. ‘Why are you interested in Fried?’

  Lia had already cooked up an explanation.

  ‘An illustrator is offering us caricatures of political figures. He sent me his drawing of Fried as a sample. I was wondering whether we might have any reason to do a larger story on him.’

  ‘Well, with the general election coming up, that’s possible. Fried’s lot are gaining popularity. It is interesting.’

  Britain had always had its conservatives, Timothy observed, but Fair Rule was trying to unite all the voices shouting at the fringes, from the young yobs in the housing estates to the older generation of right-wing Christian moralists.

  ‘A difficult but intriguing combination. I’m not exactly hankering to go to their party conference. But Fried is a very powerful personality.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He’s a strong speaker. Never afraid to spread his opinions around. He’s a reporter’s wet dream. But I still get the feeling he has bigger plans. Once there were whispers that he would defect to the Tories, but it stayed only a rumour. And he’s doing better as the leader of his own gang than he would as rank-and-file in a big party that would try to control what he said.’

  ‘And his private life? Any skeletons?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. His wife is quite the bombshell. She’s a leggy bottle blonde doll who works in some parish church. They have two little kids. So all the ingredients of a normal family, but still there’s something plastic about those two that’ll send shivers down your spine. Like they’re robots carrying out some set program. Presumably God’s vision for the future – I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s great to be coming up with topics for stories and series we can do,’ Timothy added. ‘That’s one of the best things about Taylor – he’s always producing new ideas that none of the rest of us think of. Given the success he’s been having, a profile of Arthur Fried would definitely be in order.’

  Walking back to her desk, Lia wondered whether Timothy’s reference to Taylor was a coincidence. Timothy was Matt Thomas’ right-hand man in the office. Had he heard something about the plans for a new AD?

  Lia was on a roll during their morning meeting, which yielded an idea for a series of stories on books and musical albums of social significance from the Noughties. When the editorial staff started trickling off to lunch, Martyn Taylor said, ‘Well done, Miss Finland.’

  When Lia arrived at the Studio that evening, Mari was tied up with work.

  ‘Paddy and I are having a meeting. Maybe you could go and see Rico in the meantime. If you’re going to start bringing us more work, then it would be best for you to know the whole gang.’

  Mari opened the door for her into the IT kingdom, and Lia slipped into the dimly lit room.

  Seeming to snap awake, Rico left his computer to come and greet Lia as though he had been waiting for her.

  ‘You came at a good moment. I’m just opening the Well. It takes time, so you can have my undivided attention.’

  Rico led her to his machine and resumed typing for a moment, giving Lia time to observe him.

  At thirty years old, with his black, curly hair cropped short, Rico was as thin as a rail. His Brazilian features would have been most prominent around his eyes were it not for the strange glasses he was wearing, which could have belonged to Elton John or some drag performer with an eyewear fetish. The frames pulsed with light, the lenses had points that turned into tiny reflective surfaces when viewed from a certain angle, and above all this wobbled colourful bits of wire projecting from the frames towards the wearer’s temples.

  ‘My friend makes designer art glasses,’ Rico said when he noticed Lia’s gaze. ‘I’m his guinea pig. The name of these is Web 7.7. They work pretty well on me, don’t you think?’

  This was the first time Lia had exchanged more than a few words with Rico. He was fun, lively and an impossibly fast talker.

  As Lia stared at the screen filled with scrolling lines of code and bits of text that meant nothing to her, the talk turned to computers.

  ‘What is the Well?’ Lia asked. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘That’s no surprise.’

  Some IT pros knew about the Well, Rico said, but even among that group it was more legend than reality.

  ‘Access is guarded carefully to keep from ruining it.’

  The Well was an opening through which the top tier of computer wizards tiptoed into places where they should not be. It was an online meeting place for hackers. After breaking down a system’s defences and figuring out how it worked, they would add to the Well the information they had gleaned and then sometimes do a little mischief or strike a blow for peace and freedom. The Well was a website full of secret files describing back doors into hardened networks. When someone gained access to a system, a corporate intranet for example, he would post information about what to look for and how to cover your tracks once you were in. The files changed rapidly and access to any given target was fleeting.

  Recently the Well had offered access to the data systems of several large banks and the internal network of a French army unit, the Gendarmerie Nationale. Using these holes, you could have looked at what was happening in the accounts of the richest people in the world or what secret memos were changing hands in the Directorate-General of the gendarmerie in Paris on rue Saint-Didier. The Gendarmerie Nationale w
as a favourite target of hackers because it had once become mixed up in the sinking of a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand in which two environmental activists died. Although hackers were not generally interested in politics, getting one over on the French military police was a matter of honour.

  The location of the Well changed frequently, generally being housed either on old, disused servers or servers whose operating systems used outdated technology and which the companies or government authorities in question no longer bothered to protect. Using servers like this was a hacker’s bread and butter. Usernames for the Well and access to its files were encrypted and stored on yet another separate server.

  One of the important features of the Well was that cracked security systems only stayed visible for a short time. What was available in the Well was different every day. The purpose was not to make money or do damage but to share information.

  But you had to work in the field for a long time and catch the eye of more experienced operators before you could even get close to the first gateway. When someone did finally gain access, he felt a responsibility to use the Well’s information with due respect for the work of those who gathered it.

  ‘What happens if someone talks?’ Lia asked.

  ‘Nothing like that has ever happened. If someone did that, he would never work in the field again. Angry computer wizards would track him down and pummel his every movement on the net.’

  ‘Can they really do that?’

  ‘Yeah, you can track just about anything a person does if you have enough firepower behind you.’

  Rico nodded out into the room, and Lia realised he meant his computers.

  ‘Aren’t you breaking the rules by telling me about the Well?’ Lia asked light-heartedly.

  ‘Yes, actually,’ Rico said just as cheerfully. ‘But you don’t have access to it. And if you told someone else about it, they would probably just think you were paranoid.’

  Even most experts who worked at computer security firms considered the existence of a site like the Well impossible.

  ‘And besides,’ Rico added as if stating a truism, ‘the fact that you’re here means Mari has decided you’re safe.’

  ‘And I am,’ Lia said. ‘I know so little I couldn’t be a risk to anyone.’

  Rico smiled, taking off his bizarre glasses and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘These things make my head feel funny,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe they need a little more refinement.’

  Rico showed Lia around the machines in the room. Some of them were programmed to track people or organisations whose information could be of use to the Studio. Rico didn’t want to name them, but he proudly mentioned that they included two British police forces and three international communications companies.

  A few dedicated machines secured Mari’s, Rico’s and the others’ computer traffic, monitored possible attempts to break through their security and kept watch over the office. No one outside could circumvent the measures he had put in place, Rico assured her. He also had a backup electrical generator, so the only thing that could crash the system was an explosion that took out the entire floor of the building. For internal Studio communication, Rico had developed an instant messaging application with direct access to all their computers and mobile phones so they could stay in constant contact.

  ‘And here are my Mills.’

  The Mills were machines Rico used to produce websites, online discussion boards and web histories for use in organising gigs. He showed her an example of how a program was monitoring aeroplane enthusiast discussion boards and using them to create new content. If you read the messages that the Mills created closely, you might notice that some of them were linguistically simplistic or copied from other online discussions. But these creations served their purpose: people usually only glanced at web pages, and if they didn’t look very high quality, they moved on to other pages – believing they had seen genuine discussion threads.

  ‘So if we wanted to create discussion online about you, for example, the program would sprinkle mentions of Lia Pajala here and there. Your name would appear in an old message on one of these aeroplane sites and a list from five years ago of people someone remembered attending a convention.’

  And thus Lia would have an online history, which it would be difficult to prove was fake.

  Lia listened, her head spinning. Finally she changed the subject.

  ‘How did you and Mari meet?’

  A smile flitted across Rico’s face.

  ‘Hasn’t Mari told you?’

  It had happened four years before.

  ‘I was a lazy hacker bum. I wasn’t really doing anything, just spending most of my time hanging around BigSmoke.’

  BigSmoke was one of London’s hacker spaces, the type of semi-public meeting place for hackers you could find in any metropolis around the world. Any hacker who joined could come and sit, mess around online and trade information.

  ‘Of course almost all of us were young men.’

  Sometimes hackerspaces held open houses when anyone could drop in. Usually there weren’t many guests, but one day Mari turned up. A whole room of men fell silent in an instant.

  ‘Because she was a woman?’

  ‘No, because she was a woman.’

  Attractive, under the age of thirty, and coming to ask about computers, Mari elicited an almost comical reaction.

  ‘There wasn’t a bloke there who wasn’t falling all over himself to help her. And get her phone number. Except me.’

  ‘What do you mean, “except you”?’

  ‘I could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t interested in that. She was really looking for someone to work.’

  Mari had said she was looking for a person who knew websites and information systems. That had failed to narrow the range of potential helpers at all. But she chose one from the crowd.

  ‘They exchanged numbers. And then you should have seen the winding up he got the rest of the night.’

  Mari called the next day, but not to ask the man for help.

  ‘She asked him for my number,’ Rico grinned. ‘That’s how it started. Pretty quickly I knew I wanted to be a part of this.’

  In the middle of Rico’s story, Mari appeared at the door and motioned for Lia to follow her.

  ‘Rico is lovely,’ Lia said.

  ‘I knew you would like him.’

  Paddy was waiting in Mari’s office.

  ‘Patrick Moore,’ he said, hand outstretched.

  He was large, with broad shoulders; keen eyes peered out from below Paddy’s buzz cut and strong brow.

  ‘What do you think of the Studio?’ Paddy asked.

  ‘Hard to say. It’s the most unique workplace I’ve ever seen. Confusing and exciting.’

  ‘I think this is the best place to work I can imagine,’ Paddy said and smiled at Mari. ‘Unfortunately for me there just isn’t enough work here for me to live on it.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mari said. ‘I pay you better than anyone else. It just isn’t enough to support your wanton lifestyle.’

  Paddy laughed.

  ‘I play poker. And sometimes I like to fly to far-off places,’ he explained to Lia.

  ‘To escape gambling debts,’ Mari said.

  Paddy laughed again, and Lia almost thought she could sense some sort of tension between them.

  Soon Paddy excused himself, and Mari collapsed on the sofa next to Lia, pulling her legs up under herself.

  ‘I’ll get right to the point. Arthur Fried – did you find anything?’

  Lia spoke about the vanilla offerings of the news archives and her conversation with Timothy Phelps. Mari was interested in Timothy’s thoughts.

  ‘The marriage is a good observation. There is something fake about them, some kind of acting. We’ll have to dig into the wife as well.’

  Lia said that even after reading so much about him, she still didn’t understand why Fried was supposed to be Satan. What was this all about?

  ‘I can’t say yet,’ Mari
said.

  For the time being she simply had a firm conviction that Fried was worse than he looked.

  ‘I don’t want to ruin his personal life. What I want is to cut off his political career so thoroughly he could never make a comeback.’

  ‘And if you’re wrong? What if he’s just one extremist conservative politician among many?’

  ‘I know that this sounds strange, but so far I’ve never been wrong. If we just dig deep enough, we’ll find some dirt on Fried. But just one revelation won’t be enough; an operator like him could recover from that.’

  At its apex, politics was extremely unkind, but, based as it was on reputation and charisma, politicians often survived crises. If one unfortunate thing came out about a popular elected official, the party protected him and the electorate didn’t necessarily lose confidence. After several scandals, however, supporters started trickling away. No one working in politics wanted to have anything to do with someone who had lost his reputation.

  ‘And I want Fried out of the game permanently.’

  Making a brilliant return after stumbling was not at all unheard-of for politicians. All they needed was to wait a year or two for people to forget. Strangely enough, surviving some cock-ups could even be seen as a benefit for a politician. As if in losing his position a decision-maker also gained life experience.

  Mari asked Lia to continue, encouraging her to make note of everything that might lead to evidence that Fried was not as squeaky clean as he made himself out to be. Mari and the others at the Studio were also researching other channels.

  ‘And what about Holborn Circus? Have you had time to think about that?’ Lia asked, changing gears.

  ‘Actually, I have a meeting at a pub tonight related to that. Do you want to join me?’

  They walked to The Rake. Along the way, Mari told Lia about the man they were going to meet.

  He was not a particularly charming person, but he had one important virtue: he knew people in the London underworld, and he sold his information to anyone who had money and whose own connections could be useful to him. Mari had acquired information from him before.