The Last Hack
Page 36
EXTREME METHODS
Jack goes into the bathroom, phone in hand. I don’t know who he is talking to, but it makes me edgy that he would want to be keeping secrets right now. I decide I will stand at the door and earwig, but as I get to my feet I hear a ping from the laptop that sends a bolt of ice right to my chest. It is the direct message alert I have assigned specifically to Zodiac.
I look back at the screen and see the text, automatically opened in a small window on top of the browser I’d been looking at.
My heart is thumping, the sound of blood pulsing in my ears as it always does whenever his words are on the screen. Then I remember that he can’t threaten me anymore. The only ammo he ever had was that he could turn my name over to the feds. Well, they’re already looking for me, so he’s shooting blanks now.
I allow myself a smile. Does he think I’m fucking stupid?
There is a link underneath the text. It’s a live webcam address.
I am about to ask what we would be exchanging but the darkest part of my instinct already knows. I think back to the message from the Loxford School, the question I avoided because I was too busy feeling relieved: why would they be emailing me?
I click on the link, my mind whirring like an old hard drive as it searches desperately for alternatives as to what Zodiac’s exchange might be.
Lilly is sitting on a chair, staring blankly towards me. There is no sound and she seems oblivious of the camera. I guess she is looking at a laptop. I can tell she has been crying. I can tell she is scared.
I thought I knew helplessness. I thought I knew emptiness. I thought I knew fear.
Now I know differently.
I believed my concerns for Lilly’s safety were a result of my burden of responsibility, but now I understand that they are totally about how much she means to me. It’s not because I’m all she has now: it’s because she’s all I have now, and I only grasp this as I see her frightened face on the screen. I love her so much that I can’t imagine surviving in a world without her, especially if I knew it was my fault.
Jack steps out of the bathroom and I look up at him. He reads it in my face even before he looks at the screen.
I turn the laptop away. I can’t bear to look at it. Jack stares at it intently. I know he’s analysing it, searching the image for clues. Zodiac’s too smart for that, though. It looked like a blank room to me. Could be anywhere.
‘How?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. I got this message from the school saying she’d been picked up. Zodiac knew I wasn’t going to be there. He must have spoofed my email address and sent them a message faking my consent for someone else to collect Lilly.’
‘Can you call them? Ask who it was?’
‘There won’t be anybody there until tomorrow morning.’
Jack casts around the room like he’s assessing options.
‘We have to go,’ he says.
I’m relieved he isn’t suggesting anything other than complying with Zodiac’s demands.
‘Damn right we have to go. I’m gonna be at Paddington at ten-thirty tomorrow with that prototype no matter what it takes.’
‘No, I mean we have to go now. I just spoke to my boss. The police know I was seen leaving my building with a woman in a niqab. That’s going to be public knowledge at any moment, if it’s not been added to the reports already.’
‘So I’ll need to disguise myself some other way in the morning,’ I argue. ‘It’s still best if we lay low here overnight where nobody can spot us.’
‘Somebody has already spotted us: the woman on reception.’
‘She didn’t see us together, though,’ I remind him. ‘We came in separately. She won’t call the cops purely because a woman checked in wearing a niqab. She and the hotel would be wide open to racism charges.’
‘And what about if the woman in the niqab offered no ID and insisted on paying in cash? Do you fancy those odds?’
‘Not much, no.’
I shut my laptop and stuff it into my bag. We both use the toilet again, aware that the next time we need to go, it may be at the risk of exposure. Then we make our exit.
We leave via the fire escape so as not to go through the lobby again. I almost lose my footing on the aluminium stairs because I am feeling so shaky, afraid that someone is going to see, that at any second I’ll hear them shout ‘Stop!’ I know that if I get caught now, if I’m not free to hand over the prototype, then I have no idea what will happen to Lilly. Given that Zodiac was prepared to murder me simply to cover up another killing, I am under no naive illusions about his attitude to loose ends and liabilities.
We climb into the Qashqai and drive quietly out of the car park. Jack’s given me his hat so that, at a glance, neither of us looks like the media images, but I feel sick every time we stop at lights.
I see a sign for the motorway but the car heads in the other direction.
‘Aren’t we heading for London?’ I ask.
‘Eventually, but not yet. There’s another potential danger now that they know about your fancy dress costume. Witnesses are bound to come forward saying they saw a white male and a woman in a niqab at Stansted Airport. If they check the CCTV cameras they’re going to see us getting on a shuttle bus to the long-stay car park, and if we’re really unlucky, they might even clock the Qashqai.’
‘Number-plate recognition,’ I say, feeling the walls of the car close in tighter.
We head out into the sticks, keeping off main roads as much as possible until we have left the glow of streetlights behind. The rain makes the darkness seem impenetrable, the Qashqai’s headlights barely picking out the bends in the road. Usually I would find it scary but tonight it feels oddly comforting. When we pass oncoming cars I feel reassured when I fail to make out any faces behind their windscreens.
Jack pulls off the main road into a country lane between a line of trees on one side and a hedgerow on the other. But for the sat-nav I would have no sense of where we are. He kills the lights but keeps the engine running for the heat.
‘It’s desperate,’ he says.
‘Anything that keeps us hidden until morning is okay by me,’ I say.
I think how my priorities have changed. Less than an hour ago, I could think of nothing other than how to stay out of the hands of the police. Now I know I will be delivering myself into their custody by returning to central London, but as long as Lilly is safe, I will feel better than I do now.
‘No, I mean it’s risky of Zodiac to be taking Lilly. He needs that prototype and he knows that his window closes the second we get caught by the cops. He had to act quickly, get himself some leverage in a hurry, but he’s walking a thin line to do it. If the authorities find out Lilly’s been abducted, then it would be catastrophic for Zodiac to be caught with her.’
I think where he might be going with this and know I have to put the brakes on it quick-style.
‘We can’t tell the cops he’s got her. If they went public or if it leaked out, she would become a …’ My throat dries and I can hardly bring myself to say it. ‘A liability.’
‘I’m not suggesting we tell them. Not yet anyway. I’m saying he’s had a lot of time to plan all the rest of this, but now he’s winging it and he might have made a mistake.’
‘I’m not doing anything that puts Lilly at risk.’
‘Lilly’s already at risk. And when the best-case scenario is a successful broad-daylight handover in a London railway station with
half the Met already looking for us, then that sounds pretty risky too.’
‘Have you got any better ideas?’
He stares through the windscreen, into the night beyond.
‘There has to be something we’re missing. Some edge we can use to get her back.’
I gaze out into the rainy blackness also, the pitter-patter of it on the roof hypnotic as I allow my mind to drift. So much information, so much data came pitter-pattering down upon me today that seeing the connections might be like linking two random raindrops. But then I recall a jolt and I see where both our thought processes got sidetracked.
I was focused on the possible link between Jack and me, the possible link between Jack and my mother. That wasn’t the link that mattered.
‘You said my mum was trying to blow the whistle on someone or something when you knew her. It has to be linked to whatever connected Zodiac and Lansing back then too. What if this murder Lansing mentioned wasn’t just a scare story to keep him quiet?’
Jack takes out his phone.
‘What indeed,’ he says.
He’s waving the handset and frowning at the screen. He’s got no service. We need to get back on the road.
Jack drives while I monitor the signal, which improves as soon as we crest the first slope. There’s no let-up in the rain, which a blustery wind is rattling against the car in angry handfuls as Jack pulls into a passing place and turns on the hazard warning lights.
He switches his handset to be used as a mobile hotspot and opens his laptop, upon which he starts searching paid-for subscription news archives. Hackish instinct and my innate desire to be obliging combine to make me wonder how I might crack the login to score Jack permanent free access.
I realise I’m an addict: I can’t see a security measure without feeling compelled to circumvent it.
I see him open a link in a fresh tab and strain to read the tiny text from the passenger seat.
‘Found anything significant?’ I enquire hopefully.
He grimaces.
‘I don’t think so. Drowning of a senior executive on the UK board of IBM. Ruled suicide. Guy’s wife had just left him. It’s too early anyway: 1991. Wait, though.’
‘What?’
‘Here’s one that overlaps with the time I knew your mum. Liam Skelton, proprietor of Skeltronix Limited. Listen to this: murdered after disturbing a burglar during a break-in at his offices.’
‘Woah. Where have we heard that before?’
‘There’s a whole stack of results on this one. Yeah, listen to this: “Daniel Stroud, 49, was convicted at Cambridge Crown Court of murdering Liam Skelton, 35, at the offices of Skeltronix Ltd in Saffron Walden. Stroud, who has a string of convictions for burglary, was sentenced to life for bludgeoning the electronics entrepreneur to death.”‘
‘What was Skeltronix?’ I ask, never having heard of it.
‘Hang on, there’s a lot more.’
Jack opens several tabs and toggles back and forth between them faster than I can keep focus.
‘This one didn’t go away. Stroud maintained his innocence and his conviction was the subject of a TV documentary claiming it had been a miscarriage of justice. How does this sound? “Stroud always claimed that he had been hired to break into the offices but was never able to come up with a name for the third party. He said he had been contacted only by phone and been paid a small advance on the job left in a dead drop.”‘
‘Anonymous third-party outsourcing, intended to put a patsy in the frame,’ I say. ‘I think this is where I came in.’
Jack opens still another link and scrolls down the page at speed.
‘It appears Stroud was released seven years into his sentence following a media campaign and an appeal. Officially the case remains open, but as always with these deals, the police didn’t go busting a gut to find a new perp and thus prove that they’d got it wrong the first time.’
‘So who was this Skelton?’
‘He’s described as a workaholic obsessive who was divorced before he was thirty. Survived by his ex-wife, Frieda, and a daughter, Sarah. Says here he designed micro-circuitry for Marconi and Texas Instruments before setting up his own firm.’
‘And what did he make?’
‘Looks like Skeltronix was a real Mom-and-Pop outfit. Or just Pop, significantly: the firm folded after Skelton’s death. It was a small-scale operation making diagnostic circuit testers.’
I can’t help but feel disappointed.
‘Doesn’t sound like anything worth killing for,’ I say.
‘No. I got the impression your mum practised fairly high-level industrial espionage, and Lansing was subcontracted to steal documents and blueprints pertaining to state-of-the-art innovations. In Skelton’s case, I don’t see what was worth stealing.’
‘What are diagnostic circuit testers?’
‘Two electrodes connected to a box, according to this picture. Beyond that I can’t say.’
But I can. The grainy photo sparks an image in my mind, electrodes and wires running to an electronic panel. I see my mum in hospital, with that thing attached to her hip. I feel a buzz run through me, like I get when I’ve just cracked someone’s password.
‘I’ve worked out what was worth stealing. The Synapse. It was Skelton’s invention.’
‘Jesus,’ Jack responds. ‘You’re right. That’s it.’
‘Skelton was killed so that he couldn’t kick up a fuss when Cruz’s ripped-off version hit the shops.’
‘Except it wasn’t Leo Cruz who stole it.’
I am about to ask who else it could be, but I don’t have to. I’m only moments behind Jack in getting there, and it comes like a rush, as though the wind outside is suddenly whipping through the interior of the car.
The answer has been there all along, hiding in plain sight: an electronics geek, highly protective of his privacy; a reclusive ‘genius’ who had one great idea and then disappeared back into the shadows when he failed to follow it up.
The name without a face. The invisible power behind the throne.
I mouth a single word.
‘Syne.’
PHANTOMS
Parlabane is staring at the only photograph of Aldous Syne that he can ever recall seeing. This is the highest-resolution image of it he has been able to find, but it’s a scan of an already grainy original. It is familiar to him from seeing news stories and features back in the nineties, though it usually ran small alongside far larger, usually commissioned shots of the publicity-hungry Cruz.
‘It’s so obvious now,’ he says. ‘All those years ago, he stole Skelton’s revolutionary design for an ambulatory cardiac monitor. He had the vision to recognise that it would transform an entire industry, and the ruthlessness to ensure its true creator wasn’t around to take the credit.’
‘Using much the same MO he is still employing today,’ Sam observes bitterly.
‘Syne sought out Cruz and together they marketed the Synapse, but when technology moved on, Syne was unable to come up with anything new.’
‘Or more accurately he was unable to steal anything new.’
‘Cruz told me he got back in the innovation game because Syne emerged from the shadows with a new idea. Syne must have stolen the Dimension too. But from who?’
‘Speaking from experience, it’s possible the victim doesn’t even know they’ve been robbed. Uninvited hacked lots of places that to this day don’t know they were hit.’
‘You’re right. And what better way to cover up the fact that you’ve stolen an idea than to stage a break-in and say it’s been stolen from you?’
‘But that wasn’t the only reason he staged the break-in,’ Sam reminds him. ‘Why did he kill his partner?’
Parlabane thinks back to the conversations he had with Cruz: charming, personable, maybe even needy.
‘Could be Cruz belatedly found out the truth about the Synapse and had a fit of conscience,’ he suggests.
‘Or maybe he found a way of using Syne’s big secret to
try and cut himself a bigger slice,’ says Sam. ‘Either way, he messed with the wrong psycho.’
The photograph shows Syne at an electronics workbench in what looks like a garage or a shed. The colour is washed out, which is probably why in Parlabane’s memory the shot was black and white. Syne looks a lot like an Open University professor tinkering around on his day off. He estimates it must have been taken in the early eighties or even late seventies, but this is an assumption based on very little evidence, as there is nothing in the shot to date the image: no magazine covers, cassette boxes or even technology that would impose a cut-off date.
There are book spines visible on a shelf in the background, but even at this resolution the titles are only legible enough to convey that they are not in English. In fact, Parlabane remembers speculation as to Syne’s background largely due to these pictured volumes appearing to be Hungarian, Polish and German.
The thought that Syne could be orchestrating all of this from far outside the UK is not one he chooses to share with Sam immediately. At the moment he knows it is crucial that they concentrate on the good news, which is that they finally know who they are dealing with. The bad news, which he also keeps to himself, is that as far as Parlabane knows, nobody has ever been able to locate this man.
‘I feel sick to think that this shifty creep has Lilly,’ Sam says. ‘But like you said, he’s made a desperate move. I get what you’re saying now about bringing in the cops. If he turns up to Paddington with Lilly and the feds swoop in, we’ve got him nailed.’
Parlabane wishes he still held his previous belief in this strategy, but the picture has changed.
‘We have to consider the possibility that it wouldn’t be Syne who turned up with Lilly. He’s outsourced just about everything else.’
‘No,’ she says, her expression adamant. ‘He’s acting alone on this. He has to be. He subcontracted some things, but others he had to have done himself. You can pay someone to break into a place. You can blackmail someone to break into a place. But what happened at Tricorn House is more complicated. All the swipe-card IDs are tracked, for one thing.’