The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  I know now that I’d do anything to stay out of their hands. I can tell myself that it’s the best way for me to safeguard Lilly in the long term too, but deep down I know that this is only an added justification, and I can’t hide behind her any more.

  I don’t want to go to prison. I’m just a girl. I’m nineteen years old, and I don’t want to go to prison.

  ‘We have to get off the road,’ Jack says, and I don’t argue.

  Jack drives us back to the Goodnight Inn on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. I already checked they have vacancies and, almost as important, room service, as we want to limit our exposure. On the way there I also look up the BBC website and make sure they aren’t running our photographs to illustrate the Cruz story.

  It’s still only the artist’s impression of Jack, though the report now also mentions the arrest and release of ‘an unnamed couple in Barking in connection with a concurrent cyber-attack on the computer network at Synergis’.

  There’s no suggestion that they think the attack originated from the same building, but they probably wouldn’t tell the press that anyway. Do I dare to let myself believe the Cohens never thought to mention me after all? Or that I got extra lucky with an inadvertent double bluff? Maybe the cops reckoned the hacker was spoofing the Cohens’ IP address, and it hasn’t occurred to them that something so grand-scale and sophisticated would be carried out from the flat above by someone who didn’t disguise their location.

  Hmm. It’s a comforting possibility, but I’m not sure I feel that lucky. Not on current form.

  I don the makeshift niqab again and go to reception, where I rent us a room, paying cash. The girl offers me a twin or a double and I go for the former. I give the name Samira Rasook, which is one of my many fake Facebook profiles.

  As she fills in the fields on her computer, I glance at the clock behind her.

  It’s just gone four. Mel hasn’t called back.

  Lilly will be walking out of the school doors any minute. She’ll be looking for me, searching the usual crowd of faces, but this time she won’t find me. She’ll be confused, then she’ll be worried, and then she’ll cry. Someone will ask what’s wrong. A few minutes later I’ll get a call on my mobile asking where I am.

  I feel sick. I’m glad nobody can see my face.

  I put down a cash deposit for extras and she hands me a keycard inside a white cardboard wallet. The drill is that I will send Jack the number and he will follow separately in a few minutes. The room is on the second floor towards the end of a long corridor, close to the emergency exit. I wonder if we’ll be needing it.

  As I open the door, I hear a chime alerting me to a new email. I take out my mobile and my stomach knots to see that it is from Lilly’s school. I finger the screen impatiently, already wondering if and how I should reply, but one glance is enough to tell me it won’t be necessary.

  Hi Sam,

  Just to let you know Lilly has been picked up okay, so no need to worry.

  Sorry to hear about the break-in.

  Best,

  Dorothy Miller

  Relief envelopes me like a warm quilt. Mel got her shift changed, and I go from fretting to calculating in a shamefully short space of time.

  With Lilly somewhere familiar, I can stretch it to an overnight. I’ll have to blank Mel’s calls, then phone and apologise when it’s getting too late for Lilly to be heading home, at which point I will grovellingly request (or Mel might offer) that she simply sleeps there. Lilly doesn’t have any pyjamas with her but she and Cassie are close enough in size. The main thing is that Lilly will feel safe. I know it might only buy me a night, but I’m living this hour to hour.

  I breathe out, the release of tension lasting only until I remember all the things that haven’t changed.

  FACIAL RECOGNITION

  Sam has the BBC website displayed when Parlabane enters the room. Her laptop is sitting on the dresser at the foot of the nearer of two single beds, the Cruz story dominating the frame. It hasn’t been updated since the last time he looked, about ninety seconds ago, and nor has there been any fresh news on the other feeds he is monitoring.

  He takes a moment to more closely scrutinise the artist’s impression on a decent-sized screen. A glance in the mirror reassures him that his still startling lack of hair makes the resemblance even less striking. The receptionist downstairs, for instance, could look up from this same web page and see Parlabane walking through the lobby without making a connection. However, it’s not his present appearance that’s a threat: the real danger remains the sketch ringing a bell with someone who already knows him.

  At least this appears to be all the cops have to go on, for now.

  ‘Looks like you were right about Lansing,’ he says. ‘He didn’t sell us out after all. Not this time anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean, this time?’

  ‘As opposed to before, when he sold out you and Christ knows who else.’

  Sam pouts. She seemed quite taken with Lansing, but then it wasn’t her that he was pointing an arrow at.

  ‘He didn’t have much choice,’ she states. ‘We all do things we’d rather not when we’re being blackmailed.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  Parlabane places his bag on the bed nearer the window and is pulling his own laptop from it when Sam’s words dislodge something that was bothering him back at Lansing’s place.

  He turns to face her and she looks up, anticipating that he has something to say.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Lansing sold you out specifically. What I mean is, in the other instances he was commissioned to identify hackers from their aliases. It didn’t matter who they turned out to be. In your case it was the other way round. Why did Zodiac want you in particular?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she responds with a shrug. ‘I guess it was because I had pulled off something so big at fifteen. He must have reckoned that with a few years’ more experience I’d be among the few hackers capable of what he was asking.’

  He doesn’t believe she’s holding something back – not this time anyway – but her answer doesn’t stack up.

  ‘So would you say you’re the best in the business these days?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Far from it.’

  ‘See, that’s just it. Zodiac was already playing the field to ensure he had the right personnel for the Synergis job. Lansing admitted he delivered details on lots of other hackers, who Zodiac then blackmailed into doing what he wanted. You said yourself he had other people working different angles.’

  ‘True, but so what?’

  ‘So there has to be another reason he wanted Sam Morpeth in particular, and for the role of fall girl, no less. This was personal.’ She looks stunned. This hasn’t occurred to her even in her most paranoid moments.

  ‘You mean like revenge?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or maybe there was something else that made you the perfect candidate to take the fall.’

  ‘The Saudi thing,’ she suggests. ‘If that got dredged up as part of the investigation, it would make me seem a plausible perp for other crimes.’ This doesn’t sound right.

  ‘If having form was the issue, then anyone in Uninvited would fit the bill. Zodiac’s got proof you hacked RSGN, remember, so it can’t be that.’

  ‘Well, the Saudis are the only people I can remember pissing off – that know my real name, I mean.’

  There’s the spark, the connection. She’s right. It’s not about something she did.

  ‘Your mother,’ Parlabane says. ‘What did you say her maiden name was?’

  ‘Ruth Roberts.’

  It doesn’t mean any more to him than it did before, but neither Ruth nor Roberts is particularly distinct.

  ‘Have you got a picture of her?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Sam opens a folder on her laptop and toggles through a selection, from the very recent all the way back to a shot of Sam as a toddler, sitting on her mum’s knee inside a soft play area. It’s got to be sixteen, seventeen
years old, taken on an early smartphone.

  Parlabane swallows.

  He feels shock and a jolt of disbelief, though the latter is not born of any instinct to doubt what he is looking at. It is the expression of his incredulity that only now is he seeing something that has been in front of him all the time.

  He’s aware Sam is reading him for the merest micro-response, so there’s no point in trying to conceal his reaction. The woman he’s looking at could read people too, like she was bloody telepathic.

  ‘You did know her.’

  Sam looks expectantly at him, tense with anticipation.

  He’s starting to see a lot of things. Something about Sam always seemed familiar but he couldn’t quite place who it was she reminded him of. He can now.

  ‘That wasn’t her name. She called herself Aurore.’

  ‘Aurore what?’

  ‘Just Aurore. There are few people in this world who can get away with going by a single name, but believe me, she was one of them.’

  ‘You never asked her surname?’

  ‘Oh, I asked, and I tried to find out, but she was careful. I get it now. R. R. Aurore.’

  ‘Careful why? How did you know her?’

  Parlabane hasn’t thought about this stuff for so long, probably because it was padlocked in the memory vault marked ‘Regrets’. He thinks back to how he knew her: who she was, who he was, all that could have been.

  ‘She was a source. At least, I was cultivating her as a source: a potential whistleblower.’

  ‘On what?’

  What indeed.

  ‘Industrial espionage.’

  Parlabane invests this with sufficient gravitas as to convey unmistakably that he believes she is tied to this somehow, but Sam is suddenly less interested in the matter at hand as about what happened back then. After all, she’s been waiting a long time to find out. ‘When was this?’

  ‘It would have been twenty, twenty-one years ago. I was working in London, part of an investigations team on one of the broadsheets. That’s why she only gave me an alias.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Essentially we were in the same field, the same game. Funnily enough, she was the one who sought me out, like you did, and gave much the same justification, that she reckoned we had a lot in common.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Even then there were rumours about how I worked. I found ways to cover my methods, claiming things had been leaked to me when I had actually, ahem, “acquired” them, but there were people who sussed that there was no way I could have got certain information by legitimate means. These fell into two camps: one was the people I acquired it from, and other was fellow players.’

  ‘You’re saying my mum did the same as you? Broke into places and stole information?’

  ‘It would be a disservice to say she did the same thing as me. Aurore operated with far more guile and panache. Why would she break into a building when she could talk or trick her way in? I was risking life and limb scaling walls and picking locks, while she tended to breeze right in through the front door. She showed me a little of how she operated: a potent combination of charm, glamour, confidence and an unerring ability to read people.’

  Sam seems rapt, eager to hear more, but she doesn’t seem particularly surprised. She didn’t get her talents from the wind, he guesses.

  ‘Why did she show you? Was it for a story? Surely she’d be giving away her techniques.’

  ‘I was never entirely sure. Magicians love to tell you how something can’t be done, so that you’re looking out for the wrong thing. She liked to play games with people, and I began to suspect she was playing me.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I was working on several stories at that time, and I thought maybe she was trying to get close so she could ascertain how much I knew about a particular investigation. After a while I came to realise there was an alternative explanation: that she was sounding me out to determine whether she could trust me.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘So why would she lie to me about knowing you?’

  He left a lot of threads hanging when he made his hurried exit from London back then, and he now realises she was the largest of them. She’s been following him on social media, he remembers, but taking pains to make sure he can’t reciprocate.

  ‘I guess it’s a door she doesn’t want you looking behind,’ he offers.

  There is a moment of silence.

  Sam looks over at him.

  He knows what’s coming.

  ‘Jack? Were you and she, you know …’

  Parlabane sees it all now: why Sam got in touch with him; why she did so tentatively, by removes; why she kept saying ‘friends don’t keep score’ as the favours kept totting up. He even sees why she snared him into the Clarion job, thus tying his fate to hers.

  He knows the question she can’t quite bring herself to ask, and the greater one beyond it too. But he can’t give her the answers that she wants to hear.

  FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL

  I surprise myself by not crying.

  I think if Jack had answered otherwise, the tears would have flowed, but there is no release to start the waterworks, only an angsty choked sensation, like there’s nowhere for all this churned-up emotion to go.

  He doesn’t speak at first, just shakes his head. There’s a gentleness in his expression that tells me he guessed where this was going; what I was really asking him.

  I know he’s telling the truth.

  In that moment, I realise not only how much I wanted this to be true, but how long I have already believed it. I’ve been in denial, pretending it was just a possibility, on the edge of my bigger quest to discover more about my mum.

  I had not rehearsed an alternative scenario.

  ‘I won’t deny there was a spark of something between us, and I was flattered by the attention, but I wasn’t sure what she was up to. I didn’t trust her. And then when I realised that she might actually be looking for my help, that made it complicated in a different way. I couldn’t take advantage of her. And more problematically, in the end I wasn’t able to give that help.’

  ‘Help with what?’

  ‘She had been riding a tiger for a long time. She was involved with dangerous people and I think she wanted out but she wasn’t sure how. Maybe she thought I could help because I worked for a big paper: if we exposed the people she was afraid of then she’d be protected as a source. She was never explicit about anything though, always elliptical, like she was afraid of the consequences of asking. It can be like that when you’re trying to coax a whistleblower to come forward and go on the record.’

  ‘So why couldn’t you help her?’

  ‘I was getting into deep trouble of my own, making too many enemies through my investigations.’

  ‘Is that why you thought she might be trying to scam you for information?’

  ‘Precisely. Sometimes it pays to be paranoid.’

  ‘So what happened? Did you break off contact with her, or what?’

  ‘I broke off contact with everybody, though not quite voluntarily. I came home one night to find my flat had been burgled, and not by some junkie looking to tan my video. The place had been gone through methodically: they took every computer disk, every file, every folder, every notepad. They even removed the hard drive, which not many people knew how to do back then.

  ‘I called the cops, then about two seconds later it hit me that whoever had stolen all my research might also take steps to get me out of the picture while they were at it. A popular tactic back then was planting class-A drugs then tipping off the police. In this instance, like an idiot I had called the police for them, so I had to find the stuff before they got there. I tore the place apart, making far more of a mess than the break-in, and I found enough Charlie to send me down for a decade. It was a lucky escape but I took the hint. I left the country, moved to LA.’

  I hear the end of this and at some leve
l I take it in, but it’s as though he has faded into the background. I feel the walls of the room racing away and Jack becoming distant too, leaving me alone and exposed as the realisation hits home.

  He notices. I don’t know if my mouth is hanging open or I look spaced out, but it’s clear something is wrong.

  ‘Sam? You okay?’

  ‘My mum was telling the truth. All along she was telling the truth.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She’s in jail for having a gun, and for possession with intent to supply. She told me the gun and the drugs were planted and I didn’t believe her. Shit, I should have seen this last night. They turned the place over looking for my laptop, to sabotage my VPN. That wasn’t the first time these bastards were in our flat. This was Zodiac.’

  ‘The MO isn’t unique, but it’s a hell of a coincidence.’

  ‘Why would they be planting drugs on my mum nine months ago over something she was linked to twenty years back?’

  ‘Same reason as they were planted on me back then. To get her out the way, keep her from making connections, keep her from talking about what she knows. And if she were to talk, a convicted drug dealer doesn’t have a lot of credibility. Jesus. We need to speak to her.’

  ‘That’s going to be tricky. It’s too late to email a visit request for tomorrow. I could put one in for Sunday, but if I get named in the meantime, the cops would be waiting for me. That’s if we’re still on the loose by then.’

  ‘What about phone calls? I know she has to call out, but can you get her a message to ring you? Through a lawyer maybe?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll give him a call, though.’

  As I dial Mum’s lawyer, Anthony Bledsoe, I notice a notification from my Stoolpigeon program. Six more people have downloaded the zip file and it is busy homing in on their locations. Seven. Eight. It keeps going up.

  I get lucky, catching Bledsoe at the office before he has left for the weekend. I tell him it’s a family emergency but he’s not happy to comply. He explains that if it’s not pertaining to my mum’s case, he’s on dodgy ground making this kind of request, and the fact that I can’t give him any specifics isn’t helping sell it either.