The Last Hack
Page 8
I nod to myself. Keisha wouldn’t be worried if all she had in her photo account was a few selfies and two dozen pictures of her dinner. She’s got n00dz.
Keisha doesn’t ask any tricky questions, like how Jools could track her down from a single photo. It always helps when you’ve got a mark who’s not so bright.
Ever wonder why there’s so much bad grammar and spelling mistakes in phishing emails? You’ve probably thought to yourself: stupid fraudsters, you’re not going to fool anyone if you can’t even take the time to get that stuff right. That’s because you don’t understand. It’s deliberate. If you’re smart enough to spot the mistakes, you’re not their target. But if you’re thick enough not to notice that they can’t even spell, there’s a better chance that you’ll be thick enough to fall for their scam.
Which isn’t to say you’re too smart to fall for a different scam. You might think otherwise, but has anyone ever got you to share your “pornstar name”, where you combine your first pet’s name and your mother’s maiden name? You know, the answers to the two default security questions on every account you ever registered?
She sends me the login details as fast as she can type them. She doesn’t pause to think, doesn’t skip a beat.
Her password is ‘specialK’. Seriously.
I download everything. It’s a few gigabytes’ worth, so I give her a running commentary on my bullshit progress while it’s all coming through. She doesn’t ask what ‘locking out’ these hackers involves. The correct answer is, of course, ‘Not being stupid enough to send an anonymous stranger your password.’
Fifty quid says she does this verbatim, thinking it’s genius, without changing the specialK part. Not even after what’s about to happen to her.
Quite literally, I’m betting: to my hard drive.
I scroll through my haul, past hundreds of shots of Keisha, her idiot mates and her poser boyfriend, until I strike gold. Nude selfies: a selection of arm’s length downward angle and mirror shots. A pic of her on a bed giving her boyfriend a hand-job. Oh yeah, here we go: two frames later it’s in her mouth.
It’s a good look for her, I reckon.
I upload a selection of the pics to a file-sharing site, then I send the link to everybody she’s Facebook friends with, and to everybody I can think of from our school who she’s definitely not any kind of friends with.
For good measure I post the images on a couple of message boards as well, and by that time the guys are starting to show up on our chat channel.
I begin typing:
THE WALK OF SHAME
Parlabane stirs from a vivid dream about drinking coffee to find a mug of the stuff sitting on the bedside table. He gazes up through blurry vision and sees Lee Williams staring down at him, looking amused. She is wearing an Afghan Whigs T-shirt – his Afghan Whigs T-shirt – and nothing else.
His eyes are open but he would hesitate to describe his status as awake. Nothing is quite making sense yet. He recognises his surroundings, though they aren’t his home, and he recognises the woman standing by the bed, but the fact of her being here doesn’t fit. The fact that she is, as of a few days ago, technically his boss is not helping.
She catches him taking in her bare legs and the look of confusion mixed with mild alarm etched on his face.
‘Don’t freak out, we didn’t do anything.’
This merely makes him more confused, given the fragments from last night that are starting to emerge, if not quite assemble.
She giggles and clambers over him to the other side of the bed, beside which there is another cup of coffee perched on the opposite nightstand.
‘Only messing with you, sleepyhead. We did everything.’
Lee laughs again at his semi-conscious bafflement, starkly contrasted by her lively energy. He begins to recall the Broadwave party, how much they drank, how late they were up and how, indeed, they did everything. Several times.
She has no right to be in this condition, he thinks. Then he remembers her age, which explains much but makes him feel so much worse in so many ways.
‘I partially sussed your espresso machine. Couldn’t work out how the frother thing works so I made us Americanos.’
‘Thank you. You’ve sussed more than me. It’s not my espresso machine. It’s not my flat. My friend Mairi is letting me stay here while she’s away on tour.’
‘Ah. That tracks. I was wondering about all the cushions and the White Company bed linen.’
Parlabane takes a gulp of coffee and feels the memories of the previous evening wash back into his mind like the liquid is washing down his throat.
He had been on a night out with his new colleagues, celebrating his Uninvited scoop and the job it bagged him. The session started at Perseverance Works before progressing to Soho and then back to Hoxton. Adding to the dream-like haze is his difficulty in comprehending how these people were labouring under the collective misapprehension that he was cool; none more so, it appeared, than Lee.
She had said she lived nearby, her way of explaining why she was jumping into a cab with him as he was leaving the final bar. Now that the fog is clearing, he doesn’t recall ever telling her where he was staying.
‘You don’t live nearby, do you?’ he states.
She smiles coyly.
‘Not exactly. Camberwell.’
He gulps down more coffee, wondering about this weird sensation that is gripping him from the gut. He realises it’s fear.
‘So what do we do next?’ she asks, apropos nothing specific. Her expression is beckoning and sincere.
Parlabane really doesn’t know whether she means here in this bed, the rest of Saturday or with general regard to the future. At this point it’s like years are falling off her by the second and he keeps getting correspondingly older.
What the fuck has he done?
He plays back the time they spent together, in the few days since he started work, and socially the night before. She had dialled down the fangirling, but she seemed to look up to him with a mentor-to-pupil vibe that he found all the more flattering given what a prodigy he considered her to be. He was more than comfortable with that. He didn’t need to come over like he was down with the kids, so acting his age lent emphasis to his experience.
They got very friendly during the pub crawl, but the age gap provided an assurance of distance. Plus, the fact she was gay meant he wasn’t tempted to listen to the little voice in every male head that was constantly suggesting behaviour that m
ight make him seem more of a prospect.
If there was one moment that seemed to sum this up, it was when she offered him some coke and he said no.
Parlabane never touches the stuff, and it is often a source of tension. All those years married to Sarah gave him a profound respect for the properties of pharmaceuticals and a wariness of consuming them in any way that wasn’t reliably measured. His private position on recreational drugs is that they should all be legal, but talking about doing them – and the amazing times you had on them – ought to be punishable by death. He has never said this to anyone though, so any time he gets offered, there is an awkward moment after he declines. The person offering clearly wonders whether he or she is being judged, and Parlabane reciprocally wonders whether he is too.
With Lee, there was no such awkwardness. It felt like something was mutually understood, a demarcation either side of which they could both comfortably get on with their separate roles.
So how did this happen? What did he say? What persona did he drunkenly adopt that has irretrievably fled in the cold light of day?
Lee watches his paralysed distress and her sincere look cracks into a bashful smile.
‘You looked petrified, Jack. I can see the wheels turning. You’re desperately trying to be a good guy and do the right thing. Problem is you don’t have a roadmap for this. Don’t worry about it. It was a bit of fun, that’s all. It’s only weird if you make it weird.’
‘It’s weird that I must be twenty years older than you. I don’t even like it in movies when they flatter the male lead by casting him opposite a woman half his age.’
‘It probably wouldn’t make you feel better if I told you that was part of the attraction.’
‘No, let’s not go there. But I have to say, you’re a lot less gay than I assumed.’
‘Well, don’t make any assumptions on the basis of last night either. You might be just as wrong.’
He nods, gives her a grateful smile.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ he says, thanking her for a lot more besides.
He is feeling some relief but his head is still in a spin.
‘I’ve been out of the game a long time. I was married fifteen years, and since then …’
He lets it hang.
‘Yeah,’ Lee replies. ‘That’s why I knew you were a sure thing.’
There’s nothing like getting exactly what you want to make you realise that what you thought you were missing isn’t the problem.
Parlabane is walking along the banks of the Thames, past the Blade of Light, squally rain and a chill wind forcing the tourists to scurry for cover. He isn’t feeling it. He isn’t feeling much, that’s the problem. He’s been walking almost two hours. Ideally he’d be climbing, but there aren’t a lot of mountains around the Home Counties, so this has had to suffice.
He got the job he wanted, in the vanguard of a media technology that hadn’t even been conceived of when he first started work in this city. He can draw a line under the Leveson fall-out, declare himself professionally back on track.
Last night he had sex with a gorgeous bisexual woman almost two decades younger than him, in case he needed affirmation of his virility. Casual, no-strings sex at that, with a friend and mutually respecting colleague who was utterly cool about the situation. Wasn’t that like the Holy Grail for guys?
Yet he’s seldom felt so old as in realising that casual, no-strings sex was what it had been, and that it was something he couldn’t handle.
He spent the past few years wishing he could go back to being who he was when he was Lee’s age. Well, he’s just had a taste of it and it’s made him realise that he can’t be twenty-five again, any more than he can redraw the past and erase his mistakes.
After Lee asked him ‘So what do we do next?’, in that panicked moment when options and possibilities frantically ran through his mind, he tried to picture a future with her in case that was what she wanted. He came up blank, like some plausibility buffer was preventing anything getting through.
He’s over Sarah. Lee’s the first new partner he’s had sex with in fifteen years, and neither Sarah’s name nor face crossed his mind until now. But being over Sarah is not the same as being over the end of a marriage. He had always thought he would be someone different by this point in his life: not merely a husband, but a father.
He looks across the river and sees that he is parallel with Temple Gardens. He thinks back to the strange meetings he had there, and the offer he was ultimately made by a nameless woman trying to recruit him as a spook. He had been tempted then, he had to admit: drifting aimless, needing to be needed, vulnerable to the idea of someone moulding his talents to a greater purpose.
‘I don’t have to sell it, Mr Parlabane. You made up your mind thirty seconds ago.’
She was right, but she blew it with that. She stepped right on his ‘fuck you’ reflex, though maybe that was her intention. He wasn’t going to be much use as an agent of the state if he couldn’t suppress it. So if it was a test, he failed with flying colours.
In that moment he defiantly told himself he could still carve out a future on his own terms. That’s why he turned her down. He told himself that there was still time, that he could get everything back on track once he had turned his career around.
He’s done that, yet here he is, still moping.
He thinks back to a couple of hours ago. As he drank the coffee Lee brought him, she noticed him start to withdraw again, and she wasn’t having it.
‘I’ve worked out your problem.’
‘I only have the one?’
‘I doubt that. But I’ve nailed the thing that’s eating you this morning, for sure. You’ve been through a lot of shit, Jack, and you’re so used to it all going wrong, you’re having trouble accepting it when things go right.’
She spoke the truth, he couldn’t deny it.
Things are going right, yet instead of allowing himself to feel happy about it, he is frantically searching for a catch, or even a booby trap. Perhaps this is because in his experience, the feeling that everything might be working out is a reliable precursor to a meteor coming out of the blue and putting a big hole in his life.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
I get off the District Line at Paddington and make my way up to the main concourse. I’ve got a tingling in my chest, a sensation that travels out to the ends of my fingers as though I’m a human tuning fork. It’s like I’m in love or something. I could say it’s a blind date, but it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, neither I nor the person I’m going to meet even knows the sex of the other. We know quite a bit more about each other than that, though. Or at least we both think we do.
Nothing is certain. Nothing is verifiable.
There are no girls on the internet. All girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents.
I’m aware this might be a dumb move, and I can already hear my own voice telling me I told you so.
I need this, though. I can’t explain why, but I need this. Actually, I can explain why. I just don’t like admitting it to myself.
I am lonely. I live with another person, with Lilly, but I am lonely. There’s a harsh limit on what I can talk to her about, so I feel more like a single parent than an older sister. It’s not only since Mum went away either. I’ve felt this way for a lot longer than that. I don’t have any real friends, close friends. We moved around so much when I was younger, but even now that we’re settled I have never managed to fit in. I have always been shy. I’m not anti-social, but I have a hard time opening up to strangers. I like to listen more than I like to talk, which means I tend to blend into the background whether I intend to or not.
It hasn’t helped that I have always been needed to look after Lilly whenever my classmates were doing extra-curricular activities, but to be honest, I’ve reached the stage where I don’t think it’s worth the effort anyway. I’ll be gone from there soon, with or without my A levels.
There are a few people I speak to at school
, but I can’t talk to them about what’s really going on in my life. I can’t talk to them about the things that matter.
A while ago I carried out a few hacks on my own, including improvements I made to UKIP’s website, which was how the name Buzzkill came to the attention of certain like-minded individuals. When they asked me to come on board, I had my reservations, but I never looked back. There was something far preferable to being part of a hacking collective: something more impressive, more menacing. There is a reason Anonymous’s slogan is ‘We Are Legion’.
Being anonymous is not about being nobody. It’s about all the people you might be. The moment you are named, it takes that power away. That’s why being part of Uninvited feels more exciting than just being Buzzkill. This is the one place in my life where I feel part of something.
That is why I am here to meet Stonefish IRL: in the real world. In the flesh.
I walk past a newsstand and see the latest Evening Standard. ‘BANK HACKERS WILL BE HUNTED DOWN VOWS CYBERCZAR’, a billboard declares confidently. The story was on the front pages of half the newspapers I saw on the Tube journey here, illustrated by a photo of the new sheriff of Interweb Creek, some gawky-looking posh-boy named Jeremy Aldergrave. He looks like he was probably attending polo matches when he was my age, while legends like Mendax and Ferox were hacking satellites and nuclear installations. I’m quaking in my boots.
I ride a short escalator down into the glass-enclosed concourse known as The Lawn. There are shops on three sides around a busy courtyard cluttered with chairs and tables. Dozens of people are hunched over coffees and snacks, crammed in next to strangers and luggage. It is difficult to tell if anyone here is with anyone else in particular, and that is why I have chosen it.
I check the time. It is about a minute to eleven. I walk a circuit around the shopfronts, wondering about every face I pass, every person seated in the courtyard. Right now any of them could be Stonefish; and to Stonefish, right now any of them could be me.