The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  I can hear Lilly humming a song to herself in the bathroom while I’m on hold. She likes doing that when she’s using the electric toothbrush. I don’t know if it’s the sound it makes or the way it feels inside her mouth, but she can be in there for ages, and the upside is her gnashers always get a decent scrub.

  ‘Putting you through now,’ says the receptionist.

  The bloke picks up right away.

  ‘Nigel Holt,’ he says, sounding a bit grouchy. It is first thing in the morning. I decide to up the bubbly quotient, and even change my choice of false name to something more frothy.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Holt. This is Pippa Sparks from Data Disposal Solutions. We’re expanding into the City right now and I was wondering if we could offer you a free quote for secure disposal services?’

  ‘We already have a contract for that, with ten months left to run.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, could you tell me who that is with?’

  ‘SecuShred.’

  ‘Of course. Know them well. We do like to plan ahead at DDS. Would you be interested in finding out if our quote might be cheaper?’

  ‘Sure. We’re always looking for a competitive tender.’

  ‘That’s great. And so we’re quoting on like-for-like services, can you tell me a bit about your facilities?’

  ‘If you give me an email address I can send you a breakdown.’

  ‘That would be very helpful. And how often do they pick up? Is it weekly? Monthly?’

  ‘Weekly.’

  ‘And which day? I mean, we can change that to suit you, but so I know how it would work with our current schedule.’

  ‘They’re due tomorrow, as it happens.’

  Lilly comes out from the bathroom and I check the time. Have to scoot soon.

  ‘Just need a minute, Lill.’

  I finish the call and nip to my bedroom, where I look up SecuShred’s website, checking out promotional photos of their staff and paying close attention to what they get kitted in for work.

  ‘Read-ee!’ Lilly shouts.

  I download some high-res images of the SecuShred logo and save them to a flash drive.

  Lilly is waiting in the hall when I emerge, school blazer on and her bag already slung.

  I walk her to the Loxford, figuring there’s a place on Ilford Lane that will do the job rapid. All the way up there she talks about what she and Cassie are going to be playing at during interval, innocent games of make-believe.

  I envy her so much right now. I’ve already lied at length to a stranger this morning and I’m planning to commit two crimes before lunch.

  DRESSED FOR SUCCESS

  Parlabane is waiting in the ticket hall at Monument again, roughly eighteen hours since he was last here. He’s the one running late this time, though with less emphasis on the running part. Ordinarily he considers lateness an arrogant discourtesy, but he’s not so concerned about propriety when it comes to people who are effectively holding him hostage.

  He’s supposed to be working on a follow-up to one of the lines that emerged from his visit to the arms trade exhibition, though he has hinted to Lee that he has something else in the pipeline. He cleared up the issue of the “big story” tweets by admitting he was hacked by his Uninvited source as a prank, but if anything this merely seemed to boost his cred.

  It may be desperation talking, but he has started to convince himself that he can maybe make this into a story. Everything would need to be anonymised, and his own part airbrushed out, but there is scope for a first-hand account of how one of Uninvited’s self-styled digital insurgents practises the craft of infiltration.

  It’s no wonder she has evaded detection until recently. Every time he looks at her, his brain struggles to connect this skinny and awkward adolescent girl with the demonic cyber-Loki who has haunted and quietly terrified him since insinuating her way into his life, like she has slipped into computer networks across the globe. He learned the hard way not to underestimate her, but given some of the ruthless and connected bastards he’s found himself on the wrong side of down the years, it seems incredible that this should be the one who has gripped him most tightly by the balls.

  She acts like sustained eye contact is a struggle, let alone that she would be capable of hurting anybody, yet a little while ago she and her mates wiped several million off the stock market, and her finger remains over the nuclear button that could detonate Parlabane’s career, life and liberty.

  To put the buttercream on top of this dainty little cupcake, she’s been hitting him for money too. It’s not a shakedown in the classic sense, but he finds it pretty galling that as well as everything else, she’s making him bankroll this thing.

  First of all she got him to shell out for the spy cams and the SSD that he subsequently lost, and then last night she tapped him for sixty in cash before they parted ways, assuring him he’d find out why this morning.

  She looks him up and down as he approaches. He thinks she’s going to say something about him being late, for which he’s warming up a tasty reply, but it seems she’s appraising his appearance.

  ‘Did you bring the tools I asked you to?’

  ‘Yes. Are you going to tell me what they’re for?’

  She’s playing a power game, drip-feeding him only as much information as she needs him to know at any given time. He senses there’s a vulnerability there, but nothing he can use until he can somehow get a few steps ahead of her.

  She reaches into her rucksack and pulls out a pale blue garment.

  ‘You need to get changed into this.’

  He unravels it, which is when he sees that it is identical to the one she is wearing under her jacket. It is a polo shirt, with a logo printed on the left side of the chest, saying SecuShred.

  ‘Lovely,’ he says, working it out. ‘Start the day with an indictable felony, that’s what I always say.’

  She coaches him on what to say as they walk from the Tube station to the service bay where their journey ended the night before.

  ‘Why don’t you do the talking?’ he asks.

  ‘Good point. Because I’d totally look like your boss if I did that, and it wouldn’t raise anyone’s suspicions.’

  ‘They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. That and Jim Davidson.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘I envy your youthful ignorance more and more by the second.’

  In contrast to last night’s furtive peeking around the corner, they stride confidently up to the booth and speak to the uniformed guard manning the barrier.

  Parlabane holds up his phone showing a fake email she has sent him, prominently displaying the Tricorn House masthead.

  ‘Morning. John Saxton and Kath Hale. We’re from SecuShred. We’re responding to a report from Nigel Holt’s office about a damaged hopper in your enclosure there.’

  The guard gets them to fill out two temporary visitor passes, which he tears from a sheet and hands to them.

  ‘And you’ll have your own keys,’ the guard says, at which point Parlabane stifles a groan.

  He had assumed they only locked up the enclosure overnight. This is in keeping with everything else he has seen, and the only upside is that it might drive home to ‘Barb’ that this is a non-starter.

  She doesn’t appear to be seeing it that way, however.

  ‘Sure,’ she replies, without skipping a beat. ‘Strict company policy that we sign out the keys for each premises before we leave the depot.’

  ‘On you go, then,’ the guard tells them, waving them through.

  She sweeps off confidently towards the enclosure, Parlabane picking up his pace to pull alongside.

  ‘Look, I know I told you I can pick locks, but I can’t do it so quickly and inconspicuously that this guy isn’t going to notice.’

  ‘That’s not how we’re getting in. Come on. Role-play time.’

  ‘I can do a really convincing pissed-off Scottish guy right now. Beyond that my parts are limited.’

  ‘Good thing that’s ju
st what I need.’

  Then he gets it.

  He makes a decent show of bickering, then his ‘subordinate’ stomps off back towards the booth, where the guard is already on his way out to meet them.

  ‘Everything okay?’ he asks.

  Parlabane nods to his colleague like she’s a naughty child with some explaining to do.

  ‘No,’ she answers glumly. ‘Like an idiot I’ve signed out the keys for the wrong place.’ She holds up what Parlabane assumes to be her house keys. ‘These are for SinTek over in Wapping. They’re right next to each other on the board. Looking at a two-hour round trip to get back here, gonna knock our schedule right off.’

  ‘Nah, don’t be daft, love. Got our own set right here.’

  ‘You’re a life-saver, mate.’

  BURIED TREASURE

  Upon Parlabane’s suggestion, they take their haul back to Mairi’s flat, so that they have somewhere private to sift through it. He had entertained some doubt as to the wisdom of letting Buzzkill know where he is staying, which lasted the fraction of a second it required for him to consider that she probably already knew and that if she didn’t, it would hardly be a challenge for someone of her skills to find out. Besides, he reasoned, it would provide the perfect opportunity to make a start on levelling the playing field.

  Most of the paper they discovered in the enclosure had been shredded, though there were a few complete sheaves; probably because they were innocuous, but you never know. They took as many of these as they could inconspicuously carry, but most of their hopes rested on the discarded USB sticks and a single hard drive that were lying in a hopper amid a bed of broken and burned-out circuitry.

  ‘Barb’ is hunched over the table in Mairi’s micro-kitchen, performing some kind of surgery on her laptop in order to connect it to the hard drive. She boots up the machine then Parlabane hears a whine and a familiar purring from the HD.

  ‘Result?’ he asks hopefully.

  She retains her look of concerned concentration, so he grasps that merely getting the drive to run doesn’t mean she’s home and dry.

  ‘I’ll know in a minute. I might need to take this elsewhere and put it through a few processes to retrieve what’s on it.’

  She rattles the keys, typing into a shell in an operating system that definitely didn’t ship with a marketing campaign.

  ‘Result,’ she confirms.

  That’s when the real work begins.

  ‘There’s like a gazillion docs on this drive,’ she says, as Parlabane hands her a mug of tea.

  The simple civility of the act towards someone who is ruining his life seems at once natural and weird, like there are two versions of this reality and he is phasing between them. In one they are enemies, hijacker and hostage. In the other they are working together towards a common goal: friends even.

  It is a fiction, however. As he leans over her to place the mug on the table, he slips his free hand inside her jacket with practised dexterity. He palms the Oyster card he saw her slip into her pocket earlier, carrying it back with him to the worktop where his own mug is waiting.

  He glimpsed it before at the ticket barrier, enough to see that it was a student card with a photo and therefore a name. Now he has the chance to read it.

  Sam Morpeth.

  He glances back at her. She is totally immersed in what she is doing, enough for him to return the card as he passes behind her, as well as depositing a little secret something too.

  ‘I think this came from a back-up server array,’ she says. ‘It’s mostly accounts and admin stuff, going back years: got details of every last purchase of paper clips. Look at this shit: company policy on chewing gum. Who has a company policy on chewing gum?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll bet when they emailed it, they flagged it “highest priority”.’

  ‘It’s going to take a while to sift through this for anything useful. That’s the part they never show you when there’s a hacker scene in a movie. Hard to do an exciting montage of someone pecking away at a keyboard for five hours straight, sipping Red Bull and brushing biscuit crumbs from their lap.’

  ‘What about sorting by date?’

  ‘Duh-uh. Obvious suggestion is obvious. I already did.’

  ‘Okay. Then try searching for references to the abbreviation RBA,’ he suggests.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because reasons. Just do it.’

  She keys in the request, and the salvaged hard drive hums again.

  ‘Two hundred and eighty results. What’s RBA?’

  ‘Exactly what you think.’

  ‘Right Back Atcha?’

  ‘I had a hunch it might be Cruz’s codename for the project.’

  ‘I’ll ping these over to your machine for you to search through,’ she says. ‘I’m going to keep busy with this.’

  ‘What should I be looking for?’

  ‘Names of people working on the project. Job titles, departments, contact details, command structure. What jargon and terminology they’re using.’

  Parlabane settles down on the sofa, bracing himself for a long and tedious haul. He glances at her, patiently intent, not restive or frustrated the way he is likely to be pretty soon. He realises she was talking from personal experience when she mentioned pecking away for five hours. So much for the digital generation with their short attention spans and lack of application.

  He flicks at the touchscreen, scrolling and scanning. He finds purchasing correspondence between Synergis and Optronix, the firm Cruz is considering acquiring according to the documents on his desk. It manufactures miniature laser equipment, and a quick look at its website shows that its lens technology is used in applications ranging from DVD players to holographic projection.

  He notes names and details as she suggested. Large acquisitions for the R&D department mostly seem to come through Jane Dunwoodie, the shy but serious woman he met on his tour. Similar purchasing authority indicates the seniority of Will Ludemann in IT and Sanjay Singh in Security, as well as confirming Nigel Holt’s position as head of Maintenance and Buildings Operations for the whole of Tricorn House.

  He doesn’t see anything to get excited about, which is why he is startled by Sam suddenly calling out with unguarded satisfaction.

  ‘Yes. Wrecked.’

  ‘What have you got?’ he asks, getting up and looking over her shoulder.

  ‘Gatekeeper Systems Europe. According to this, they’re about to roll out a firmware upgrade.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Our foothold. A very big foothold.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  Parlabane slams her laptop closed, causing Sam to jump.

  ‘No. Enough of the fucking teases and trails. You’re like human clickbait. If you want my help, I need to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, at all times. You spell out to me very explicitly what you’ve got in mind, and you don’t assume any knowledge just because of this “kindred spirit” bullshit, okay?’

  She turns around and folds her arms. For a moment he fears she’s about to go in the huff, but then she tells him to take a seat, whereupon she begins to explain her plan.

  By the time she is finished, Parlabane has decided that she is quite possibly the most dangerous person he has ever met, which is saying something. Hearing her politely and plausibly lay out the means by which she intends to subvert multi-faceted state-of-the-art security systems makes him want to clear out his bank account and move to a desert island where there’s no Wi-Fi.

  She is inventively and resourcefully deceitful in a calmly logical way that he finds coldly unsettling, but the truly scary thing about her is that she has made him believe this job is possible.

  RESPONSIBLE BEHAVIOUR

  Sam bundles up her kit in a hurry, evidently having lost track of the time.

  ‘I’ve got to be somewhere,’ she announces. The calm and calculating young woman has gone, and suddenly the nervous and awkward girl is back.

 
; She leaves with such haste that Parlabane almost expects to find a golden slipper on the stairs. Not that he’s anybody’s Prince Charming, let alone hers. He’s old enough to be her father.

  He gives her a five-minute start, then heads out to follow her. She’s probably halfway to the Tube station by the time he hits the street, particularly given the speed at which she walks, but he doesn’t need line of sight. There is a tiny GPS tracking device in the lining of her jacket, which he secreted through a small tear he spotted while taking her Oyster card. He picked it up at the same time as he was buying those spy cameras he ended up sacrificing at Tricorn House.

  He is able to track the location on another recent purchase: a second phone, one Sam doesn’t know about, so that he has an uncompromised line of communications.

  The signal disappears after only a few minutes. He feels a pang of concern that she has sussed his ruse already, but the more likely explanation is that she is underground. She didn’t notice, but there was a receipt folded inside the SecuShred polo shirt when she handed it to him. She got them printed at a place in Ilford that morning. It’s low odds she’s on the District Line towards Barking.

  Parlabane continues to Aldgate Tube station, where he buys a ticket and boards a train heading east. Sure enough, the signal pings back again as he reaches Bow Road. She is a couple of stops ahead.

  He gets off at Barking, tracing her progress north towards Ilford. He reckons she’s still on foot but it’s a tough call: between the speed she walks and the pace of the traffic, she could be on a bus.

  Since she outlined her plan, and particularly since he realised it is feasible, it is all the more imperative that he gather as much information about her as he can.

  He has a big decision ahead of him, one from which there is no going back. He hasn’t done anything seriously illegal yet, allowing that stealing trash is a sufficiently grey area. All of his conversations with Sam can be considered hypothesis rather than conspiracy, especially if he frames it as part of an investigation to find out what she planned to do.

  She is a loose cannon capable of inflicting great damage, but she is also young, she is naive and most importantly she is being manipulated by individuals far more dangerous. Parlabane still thinks the best solution is to ease her into police hands, but doing that without him ending up as collateral damage is going to be a delicate job. She is reckless, she is irresponsible and she has no grasp of the disproportionate real-world consequences of her online activities. Nor does she seem to appreciate how deep are the waters she is swimming, and what monsters lurk there. Maybe a night in the cells would be the wake-up call she needs.