The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘So how come you knew about this?’ Jack asks Lansing.

  ‘Computer security, police cyber investigations and hacking are all small worlds with large overlaps. The incident was covered up, but Sam’s name ended up on a lot of lists.’

  ‘But this Zardoz or Zodiac – who I think we can assume to be the same guy – how did he know Sam would still be active as a hacker?’

  ‘He didn’t, for sure, but it had a high probability. Someone who pulled that off at fifteen wasn’t going to give it up. He was looking for someone highly capable and must have figured that with a few more years’ experience, Sam Morpeth was bound to fit the bill.’

  ‘So he tasked you with confirming she was still active and tying her to her new alias.’

  Lansing nods.

  ‘How were you paid? I mean, couldn’t you follow the money to find out who your mystery client was? Weren’t you curious?’

  ‘Of course I was curious. But he paid me in cryptocurrency, meaning there was no way of tracing the payments.’

  ‘Bollocks he did,’ Jack states.

  Lansing tenses up again, his fingers tapping the bow string. The briefly chummy atmosphere of a few moments back has evaporated. I’ve noticed that happens a lot around Jack.

  ‘Look at this place, Gary. Business is good. Million-pound house and articles in the FT. Lance Guard is doing very well. You didn’t need money from some shady anon: that’s not why you did this. He’s got something on you, hasn’t he?’

  ‘He paid me in Bitcoin, and he paid well. Business is seldom so good that you can’t turn down clients, Mr Parlabane. Especially when the work is intriguing.’

  ‘Pish. He blackmailed you, same as he blackmailed Sam. That’s how he works. He’s got something on you, and he’s making sure he’ll have even more on you by the time this is done. Why else would you be instructed to download files then forward them? That’s a redundant step. It’s so these files can be traced to you, tying you into this, so you’ll keep quiet when the shit starts flying.’

  I can see the truth of this hit him. Lansing thought he was clever, expecting the files to have a hidden payload and making that work to his advantage, but now he knows he was kidding himself.

  ‘Jack’s right. You willingly downloaded unknown files from an untrusted source. Why would someone like you do that, unless you felt you had no choice? You were under orders, same as me.’

  He knows I’ve got him, and I think he finally knows we’re all on the same side too.

  RECKLESS YOUTH (II)

  ‘This goes all the way back to the earliest days of the internet, really,’ Lansing says. ‘When we all felt like we were true pioneers in a new land, with eldritch skills and arcane knowledge.’

  ‘You mean like Commodore bulletin boards and FidoNet?’ asks Sam. ‘The pre-dial-up days?’

  Parlabane notes a change in Lansing’s demeanour. He’s warming to his subject and, in Sam’s case, warming to his guest. He’s recognised a fellow hacker, albeit from a different generation.

  Sam, for her part, is demonstrating that she isn’t merely a hacker, but in fact a keen student of all things hackish.

  ‘It started then, yes. I was first online in the late eighties, and it really did feel like I could do what I wanted. You weren’t paranoid about who might be eavesdropping, least of all the authorities. The police were years away from plugging in their first modem, so there was no way they were going to find their way on to these bulletin boards.’

  ‘These were essentially message and file exchange systems, right?’ Parlabane asks, reminding both of them that there is a non-native present.

  ‘Yeah. I mean, we get dozens of texts every day and don’t even think about it, but I can remember what a thrill it was to see a message, a few bytes of text, appear on my monitor and know it had been typed on another computer somewhere else.’

  ‘You had a monitor?’ Sam asks.

  ‘Not back then, actually: figure of speech. In those days my computer was connected to a portable TV. I traded messages with other users; files too. I can’t believe how trusting we all were. I think the mere fact of having made our way on to these boards assured us all that we had enough in common, but we soon wised up. There were boards where people only used nicknames, aliases, and the reason became rapidly clear.’

  ‘That’s when you became Ferox?’ asks Sam.

  ‘Like all hackers, I had several aliases, but when kudos starts being accredited to one name, ego inevitably comes into play. I was a nerdy teen who had discovered a place where I was one of the in-crowd.’

  ‘Can we cut to the part where our villain makes his entrance?’ Parlabane asks, conscious that they don’t have time for this mutual geeking-out session in which Sam and Lansing are threatening to become mired.

  ‘This is when he makes his entrance,’ Lansing replies. ‘I got to know this character on there, a fellow hacker. He called himself Zebedee, like from the Magic Roundabout. When I say hacker, I should clarify. Back then it meant someone who was into programming, into tinkering with code. People who broke into networks and went where they weren’t supposed to go were called crackers. So Zebedee wasn’t one of those. In fact, he wasn’t a major coder either. He was an electronics geek, as we all were, really.

  ‘I was getting off on what I could do, and I posted things as proof of the places I had hacked into. Often it was really banal official stuff, but the value was in where it came from rather than what it was. I hacked into Motorola in 1993. To this day, only a handful of people know about it: the dozen or so hackers on that bulletin board and now you two.’

  ‘What did you hit?’ asks Sam.

  ‘I accessed a server storing design blueprints for a new processor. It was such a high clearance level that to this day I get giddy thinking about it. I copied a few files as trophies and as proof. After that, Zebedee gave me a suggestion, or more like a lead, for what I could hit next. He had done some of the groundwork, but he didn’t have the skills to pull it off himself. It was another electronics firm, far smaller though. I didn’t think it was much of a prize, or a challenge, but he offered me cash.’

  Lansing gives a wistful shake of the head.

  ‘It was never about money in those days. It was about testing what we could do. Mostly, anyway. There was one hacker, come to think of it, who got inside a few companies and then made stock investments on the basis of confidential information he had discovered. A form of insider trading, I suppose, but it wasn’t exactly blackhat. Grey hat maybe.’

  Lansing glances in the direction of the computer monitor then back at Parlabane.

  ‘That was never me, though. Prior to that, I saw hacking as its own reward. But I was at uni by this point, money was tight and my phone bills alone were crippling. I knew I could pull it off and I knew I wouldn’t get caught.’

  ‘And those words never signal disaster, do they?’ asks Sam.

  ‘Except in my case I never did get caught. The sting in this tail was a long time in striking.’

  ‘How did he pay you?’

  Lansing grimaces.

  ‘When I think about the ways I could follow the money nowadays … Back then it was cash in an envelope, handed over by a third party. We both had codenames. The courier never knew I was Ferox, or what I did for the money. I was Zeppo, the contact was Zuul. His aliases and codenames were always zeds. Zebedee said that using this third party was a way of ensuring we each protected our identities, but it was actually his strategy for discovering mine.’

  ‘The same one you used on me,’ deduces Sam. ‘Lure you out into the open and then have someone follow you home.’

  ‘That’s how I learned it, yes, though it took me a long time to realise my mistake. Back then I was too busy enjoying myself. A little money makes a big difference when you’re a student.’

  ‘I can relate,’ Sam mutters.

  ‘I had never been one of the cool kids, and suddenly I felt like I had money and power. I was able to buy better kit, and I was getting o
ff on this James Bond trip. Hacking into systems, getting files, meeting my codenamed contact in London and walking away with another wad of tenners. But then I was harshly apprised of how deep I was in over my head.’

  ‘You were blackmailed?’ Sam suggests.

  ‘No. Not then, at least. Zuul, my contact, got in touch to ask for a meet, and this time it wasn’t to hand over payment. We didn’t know each other’s names but we had built up a degree of mutual trust.’

  ‘Apart from him conspiring to discover your identity,’ Parlabane says.

  Lansing gives him an odd look, like he’s giving this careful consideration.

  ‘It’s possible, but I don’t think so. Certainly the way I work it, the target never sees the person who follows them home. But either way, it was Zuul who warned me that our mutual benefactor might be far more dangerous than either of us had previously assumed. I learned that the boss of one of the firms I hacked had been murdered shortly afterwards.’

  ‘I can relate,’ Sam mutters again.

  ‘As wake-up calls go, it was a bucket of ice-water to the face. I realised I had been utterly in denial about what I was really involved with. I had told myself it was just hacking, and indulged my adolescent cloak-and-dagger fantasies, but the truth is it was industrial espionage, and I had finally been made to understand the stakes.’

  ‘Who was murdered?’ Parlabane asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Zuul said it was best if I knew as little about it as possible, but thought I deserved to know what I was caught up in.’

  ‘Which also meant you couldn’t verify whether this Zuul character was telling the truth.’

  ‘Why lie about something like this?’

  ‘It’s an established tactic of con artists and other crooks in order to make sure people stay quiet. If you believed your hacking activities were connected to a murder, you weren’t going to tell anybody about it, were you?’

  ‘Wait,’ says Sam. ‘Are you saying that’s what’s going on here too?’

  ‘No. I can verify first-hand that it was Leo Cruz who was lying beside me last night, and he has definitely stripped his last asset. But my point stands: Gary backed off and never talked to anybody about what he had been up to. He wasn’t told who was murdered, which company they worked for, or anything that would have let him verify the story, were you?’

  ‘No,’ Lansing admits. ‘I mean, I tried to find out. I scoured the news, but back then it wasn’t like you could simply key the names of a few firms into a search engine and see which one linked to a murder story. My contact was very spooked though, I remember that much. But I realise from what you’re saying that this might have been an act. I don’t know what to believe.’

  Lansing sighs and looks out the window, back across his expansive garden towards his beautiful house. This must all seem very long ago, Parlabane reckons, but he also knows something has recently resurrected the past and threatened everything in Lansing’s present and future.

  ‘When did he get back in touch?’ Parlabane asks

  ‘About a year ago. I got a text message from a burner, untraceable. It said: “Hi Zeppo, long time no see. Let’s have a chat about your Ferox days. Zardoz.”‘

  Fear and distaste are etched sourly across Lansing’s expression. This was the moment his new life threatened to come apart, so it was not a treasured memory.

  ‘I knew straight away. Zardoz was Zebedee: another zed. Always zeds. His next text was a link to an IRC channel. We talked there. When I gave those publicity interviews to the Financial Times and the other papers, I only disclosed what I wanted them to know: a few high-profile but strictly prank-style hacks, incidents that I had checked to make sure were not still the subjects of legal investigation.’

  ‘Whitehat stuff only,’ says Sam.

  ‘Yes. But Zardoz had kept evidence of my blackhat activity from back in the nineties. He had proof of the things Ferox had done – serious industrial espionage – and proof that Ferox was Gary Lansing. He threatened to ruin me if I didn’t give him what he wanted. And as before, what he wanted was simply for me to do something I was already good at.’

  LOYALTIES

  As we stand outside the automatic gates again, I feel a weird sense of deflation. When we arrived here I really thought we were going to find our man. I was scared, especially about sneaking into his office when we knew how soon he would be back, but I thought that whatever happened, we would be closer to the answers we need. Instead we’ve only found that the rabbit hole goes deeper than we feared: more than twenty years deeper, in fact. We don’t even have a next destination.

  Jack puts a hand on my arm, telling me to stay put as we watch Lansing’s Overfinch drive away.

  ‘We don’t go back to the car until he’s out of sight. I don’t want him knowing our make, model and registration, because for all we know he could be on to the police on his hands-free right now, giving them our descriptions.’

  ‘But you said he’s tied into this.’

  ‘Yeah, but his story would sound better than ours if he decided to go to the authorities. I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘I think we can trust him,’ I say.

  ‘Why? Hacker solidarity? That didn’t count for much in Uninvited. Turned out he was screwing you over back then, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s the point. When we discussed that stuff, didn’t you notice? He didn’t name Stonefish and he didn’t connect an online alias to Paul Wiley. He continued protecting their identities when he didn’t have to.’

  ‘He didn’t protect them from Zardoz though, did he?’

  ‘That’s different,’ I protest.

  It’s not exactly a killer come-back, but it’s true. It meant something to me that Lansing didn’t give those guys up to us, even if Jack doesn’t understand that.

  I felt something when I saw his museum. His bow scared me, but I realised he was the truly scared one. Then I saw someone I recognised: a hacker. He had posed as Cicatrix, and I realised some of the things he said in IRC must have been true, though they were only fragments in a kaleidoscope of lies.

  I was sad watching him leave. Under other circumstances, I could have talked to him all night, but I’m less sure how long he would have wanted to talk to me. Besides, he had to go and collect his kids.

  This thought makes me check the time, and that is when I accept that I definitely won’t be at the Loxford to pick up Lilly when school comes out. I feel it in my gut, this combination of fear and guilt, knowing that only a helicopter might get me to Ilford from here in time to collect her, and I understand how much I was kidding myself this morning. Part of me must have still hoped I could pull off a solution to this inside seven hours, even though I haven’t come close in the preceding weeks.

  ‘You okay?’ Jack asks as we climb into the Qashqai.

  That’s when I realise I am filling up.

  ‘Yeah. Just need to make a call.’

  I ring Cassie’s mother on her mobile as the car pulls away.

  ‘Hello, is that Mel? It’s Samantha, Lilly’s sister.’

  ‘Oh, hi. Is everything okay?’

  I realise my voice must have wavered. I’m usually better at keeping my emotions under control, especially when I’m lying. I was about to tell her that I had been roped into doing an extended shift, but the fact she’s picked up on me being upset reminds me I can do better.

  ‘Not really. We were broken into last night, and I’m still trying to make the place safe after the damage. I was wondering if you could pick up Lilly for me.’

  There’s a pause, which instantly puts me on edge.

  ‘Cassie’s off school today with a temperature,’ she explains. ‘She’s actually at her gran’s in Acton because I’m supposed to be working a late one tonight. I think I’ve got someone who can swap shifts with me, but I’m waiting for her to ring back and confirm. Can I give you a bell when I know for sure?’

  ‘Course, yeah,’ I say. ‘But I’ll try someone else just in case.’

&n
bsp; ‘All right, love. Speak to you in a bit.’

  I try Jaffer, from the recycling place, but there is no response: it goes to voicemail after a few rings. I try again, then a third time, and as it clicks to voicemail once more, I feel this horrible numb emptiness as it sinks in that I am out of options if Mel doesn’t come through.

  I have to hold it together. We are on the main street now, approaching traffic lights. I will be conspicuous and therefore memorable if I am sitting in the passenger seat in tears.

  I decide I have to go back to Ilford. Come what may, I have to be there and pick her up. While it is still within my power, my decision, I need to know that I chose her. I know I’ll be late, but I can call the school and tell them I’m on my way.

  I am about to tell Jack, bracing myself for his objection, when I hear a siren from behind us. I look back and see a police car through the rear windscreen, blues and twos, its headlights flashing as it speeds ever closer.

  The lights are turning red up ahead, cars slowing to a stop between us and the junction.

  ‘Lansing went to the cops,’ Jack says. ‘I fucking called it.’

  He grips the wheel tighter and he sounds so angry that for an instant I think he’s about to put his foot down and do something crazy. There are oncoming cars in the way, though: nowhere to go.

  Jack signals and slows, pulling in towards the kerb. Something inside me turns cold and toxic.

  Then I notice that the oncoming cars are pulling in too, mounting the pavement to make a passage. The police car overtakes us, easing along the narrow channel between vehicles until it reaches the junction, where it pulls back into the left and accelerates with a growl of the engine.

  I breathe out.

  In that moment I glimpsed what would happen if I was arrested. Memories of my time at Graythorne engulfed me, like battery acid coursing through my veins. It wouldn’t be three days this time though, and it wouldn’t be a young offenders institution either. It would be years, in adult prison.