The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘You should refresh your news feeds. I already have.’

  DEAD TO RIGHTS

  ‘If you want to catch Jack Parlabane, the bloke you’re after for killing Leo Cruz, you need to get to Luton Airport right now. He is in the short-stay car park, sitting inside a black Nissan Qashqai, registration number …’

  Parlabane hears Sam’s voice booming through the speakers. The insulated walls of the interview room are absorbing all the reverb, making the sound so dry that she could be sitting only feet away, except he’s never heard her speak so loud.

  Detective Superintendent Feeney nods to DC Kalawo and she stops the playback.

  Feeney looks across the table at Parlabane with a faux sympathetic expression, even a tinge of regret thrown in. Parlabane finds it almost reassuring to be patronised by an old-school middle-aged polisman several years his senior. It’s a cliché because it’s true that you feel your age when the cops start looking younger, though he’s not sure what freaks him out more about junior CID detectives such as Kalawo: the fact that they seem so young or the fact that they’re so polite.

  ‘Horrible night out there,’ Feeney says. ‘Absolutely tipping it down. Hard to see a thing at any distance, and there you were, tucked away out of sight inside your stolen vehicle. Strikes me as very unlikely under those circumstances that somebody just happened to catch a glimpse and recognised you, especially with that nice new haircut of yours.’

  Feeney sighs and gives his head a gentle shake, a combination gesture he’s probably been doing for close to three decades.

  ‘Your partner already rolled on you. That doesn’t suggest she’s going to show much loyalty when we get hold of her, which is only a matter of time, so I suggest you cooperate.’

  Parlabane would have to admit that it doesn’t look good.

  ‘Aye. What were the odds a lassie who trades in deception would go behind my back?’

  Feeney gives him a grim smile, a man who knows surrender when he sees it.

  ‘I’ll give you what you want,’ Parlabane tells him. ‘But I have a couple of requests. First one is a pen and paper.’

  Feeney gives Kalawo another nod. She nudges a notepad across the table and rolls him a biro.

  ‘Second is I want to speak to someone a wee bit higher up.’

  Feeney lets out a dry laugh of bemusement.

  ‘I’m a detective superintendent. As it stands I wouldn’t normally be conducting this interview if it wasn’t such a high-profile case. How high up did you have in mind?’

  Parlabane writes two words on the pad, one above the other.

  ‘I want to speak to Jeremy Aldergrave. He’s the assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the government’s new cybercrime task force.’

  Feeney looks like he’s enjoying this.

  ‘I know who he is. But why stop there? Why not the AG himself? Why not the Prime Minister?’

  ‘The Prime Minister can’t help me. Aldergrave can.’

  Parlabane tears off the top sheet from the pad and holds it out.

  ‘I want you to get in touch with him right now and tell him exactly what is written on this piece of paper.’

  Feeney folds his arms and sits back in the chair, leaving the offered note in Parlabane’s outstretched grasp. Kalawo reads her boss’s gesture and places her own hands on the table. No dice.

  ‘I’ve been in this game too long to let you start playing silly buggers with me, Mr Parlabane. We’ve more pressing things to get on with here. If you’ve something to say, you say it to me. I’m a good listener.’

  Parlabane places the note down flat and slides it across so that it is sitting in front of Feeney.

  ‘It’s your call, officer. But in less than forty-eight hours Jeremy Aldergrave is going to be mired in a media shitstorm that will probably cost him his career, and afterwards I’ll be sure to let the Home Office know you could have helped them avoid the whole thing.’

  LIFE HACK

  The museum is already very busy, humming with kids in the tow of damp-jacketed adults as I knew to expect. It’s a wet Saturday morning after all.

  I chose the Tate Modern because I’ve brought Lilly here a few times to fill part of a Saturday or Sunday. It’s free and she likes it. She finds some of the installations funny, some of them fascinating. Mainly she likes the space itself, I think: the high-ceilinged and expansive galleries and the turbine hall in the basement. Sometimes there’s nothing going on down there and so it’s just full of kids running around.

  I told Jane we would meet on Level Two, and that I would be waiting for her on a bench close to the north-west corner. I’ve been in position for a while, scanning the crowds as they approach from two directions. I’m shaking. Face to face is not my A-game, but I saw no other way to do this.

  I know Lilly’s safe: that helps, but I’m still nervous. She’s been safe since I made the call last night; safe once Jane understood that Lilly’s wellbeing is worth tens of millions to her. I can’t trust Jane as a person but I can trust her to act in her own best interests, same as she can trust me to act in mine.

  A couple of tall Scandinavian-looking hipsters change course to look at a sculpture, and suddenly I see my new best frenemy. She’s on her own. My stomach somersaults. Then a few paces behind her I see Lilly. I let out a whimper as the second she spots me her anxious face is transformed into the smile I know so well. Neither the eye patch nor the baseball cap I’m wearing prevents her recognising me. It takes all my effort to stay where I am and not sprint towards her. That and the fact I don’t have to: she’s already running towards me.

  She overtakes Jane, giving her a brief glance to ascertain permission. I wonder briefly if she told Lilly to stay a couple of paces behind at all times, so that it didn’t necessarily appear to witnesses that they were together.

  It doesn’t matter now. We’re all here, and the game has moved to a different phase.

  Lilly hugs me and I hold her tighter than I ever have. I sniff back tears and dig deep for the final trade-off.

  ‘What’s wrong with your eye?’ she asks, clocking the patch.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I assure her.

  ‘Are we going home right away?’

  That’s Lilly all over. I’ve been through hell to bring us back together, and she’s checking she isn’t getting dragged from the museum too soon.

  ‘Not quite yet. I need to talk to Jane here for a minute.’

  ‘She said her name was Sharon,’ Lilly replies, confused.

  ‘My mistake.’

  I hand Lilly a new Batgirl comic and tell her to take a seat at the end of the bench while we talk.

  Jane sits down on the other side of me, far enough away that it’s not clear we’re together, but near enough for us to talk.

  ‘You got an infection?’ she asks.

  It takes me a second to realise she means the eye patch.

  ‘This is to make sure I don’t get recognised. I spent the night in a hotel around the corner, to minimise my time on the street.’

  She puts out a hand, palm up to receive.

  ‘Okay, let’s get on with it. I delivered my side. Now you deliver yours.’

  ‘There’s no rush. Once I hand this over we’re never going to see each other again, so I’d like to talk for a moment.’

  ‘What, do you think we’re going to be pals just because you’ve hitched your fate to mine? More like you’re leeching off it. Either way, I don’t have anything to say to you, so give me what’s mine so we can cut to the “never see each other again” part.’

  Even though she trusts me not to screw my own future, she’s still as anxious to get the prototype as I was to get Lilly. While it remains out of her hands, so potentially is her fortune. If anybody discovers that the Dimension does nothing before she dumps the stock, then the ball’s on the slates, as Dad used to say.

  ‘Given what you had planned for me the other night, under the circumstances I’m being shockingly nice. I figure the very least you owe me is to fill
in a few blanks. Like why you did this to me?’

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she replies, looking ahead.

  She still hasn’t met my gaze. Maybe she’s thinking about the CCTV cameras and she’s paranoid about us being seen talking.

  ‘It was personal for you though, wasn’t it?’ I reply. ‘Cruz murdered your father, and that’s why you killed him.’

  Oh, she’s damn well looking at me now.

  ‘Your name was originally Sarah Jane Skelton. Your father was Liam Skelton. You gave it away with the name of your ghost company: Milton’s Lake. It’s an anagram of your father’s name.’

  She’s looking at me differently now, the surprise becoming mixed with pain; the stony-faced defiance for the first time becoming something hinting at vulnerability.

  “When your mum remarried you became Sarah Jane Dunwoodie. Then just Jane Dunwoodie, so that Cruz didn’t see the threat. He killed your dad and got rich on his invention. Meanwhile you’re going off the rails, into drugs and street crime by the time you’re fourteen.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I’m a hacker.’

  Stonefish’s logins got me her previous names and addresses. After that I had other sources to draw upon.

  I know all about her now: in and out of institutions, learning all the wrong lessons, mixing with more and more dangerous people as a result. Shoplifting, assault, car burglary, house-breaking: juvenile convictions soon graduating to the adult versions. It gave her an apprenticeship and a contact list that would serve her well in her quest to even the score.

  ‘I was in one of those young offenders places,’ I tell her. ‘Only for a few days. I was lucky. I got saved because of politics, lap of the gods shit. I could have gone the same way as you, except I don’t think I would have survived like you. I’d have been crushed by it. Doesn’t excuse you trying to kill me, though.’

  ‘I’m not apologising,’ she says. ‘You’ve no idea what I’ve been through, the life I’ve had.’

  ‘I’m not expecting an apology. But I think I’m due an explanation.’

  Something in her softens. She swallows. She looks at me fleetingly, but when she begins to speak, she’s staring straight ahead again, like it’s easier that way.

  ‘It was a few years ago when my mum got sick. I had to look after her because she didn’t have anybody else. I knew she wouldn’t be getting better, but it’s a funny thing: helping her helped me straighten out, or maybe it kept me too busy to get into anything I shouldn’t. I was on Carer’s Allowance, living off that.’

  ‘I got bumped from Carer’s Allowance because they found out I was in full-time education.’

  I hate sharing this, hate sharing anything with this bitch, but it has an effect. She nods, so subtly you might not notice, but it’s there: an acknowledgment that we do have things in common.

  ‘After my mum died, I was clearing out all her stuff. Took me days. While I was up in the loft I found this old computer: turned out it belonged to my dad. She got it when the firm shut down. It still worked. I looked through it like it was an electronic treasure chest, trying to get a sense of him. That’s when I found the designs.’

  ‘For a miniature cardiac monitor.’

  ‘It was the Synapse, from the exterior design right down to the chipset. That’s when I knew what had been taken from me, and by whom.’

  I can feel her anger driving her to speak: driving what she has to say, driving the need to say it. She’s never been able to tell anybody this, and she might never get another chance.

  ‘I had a purpose for the first time in my life, and I dedicated myself to it.’

  ‘So the whole thing was your idea? The Dimension, the pump and dump?’

  ‘I’m my father’s daughter. I inherited his gift for intricate design. I worked out a way I could use Cruz and then destroy him.

  ‘I got myself a meeting with Cruz ostensibly to pitch the concept of the Dimension. He knew his stuff, reckoned this kind of technology was still a decade away. That’s when I told him I hadn’t come to him because I thought we could build it: I came to him because he had a proven track record of selling something that doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Syne. I bet you really had his ear at that point.’

  ‘Cruz thought I was there to blackmail him. When he found out what I really had in mind he was delighted. Like you, he thought we were kindred spirits.

  ‘My plan was to buy up some failing electronics firm, any outfit we could get cheap, but it turned out Cruz was already in preliminary talks about buying back Synergis.’

  ‘Was it you I was talking to on IRC? Were you Zodiac all along?’

  ‘Sometimes it was him, sometimes it was me. We both needed to monitor your progress, make sure you were going to pull it off.’

  ‘So you knew I was spear phishing for your login? Why did you give it to me? No, I know: you had another login. High clearance and secret.’

  ‘We both did. You didn’t think we’d invite hackers into our shit without taking precautions.’

  ‘Was anyone else in on the scheme? Danny Winter, for instance?’

  She gives a dismissive snort, amused and yet derisory.

  ‘No. Winter’s just a useful idiot. He had his eye on Synergis too, and Cruz suspected he was acting as a front for the Chinese. They’ll all be in for a big disappointment after they’ve paid to see my hand.’

  She gives a thin smile of cold satisfaction.

  ‘So now that we’ve had our little chat, how about you hand me the prototype and we can both be on our way?’

  I take the device from my pocket but I keep hold of it, gripped tight so she can’t make a snatch for the thing.

  ‘I only have one more question.’

  She tuts, but she knows she’s in the home straight: the prototype is almost in her clutches.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘The same one I asked back at the start: why me? That’s all I want to know, then the Dimension is yours.’

  ‘No particular reason. We needed a plausible scapegoat, a hacker.’

  I put the prototype back in my pocket.

  ‘Bullshit. There’s more than that.’

  She frowns, busted.

  ‘Early on I asked Cruz if there was anybody else who knew about Syne, who could put a spoke in our plans. There were two people who might potentially have worked out the truth about the Synapse. They had both been involved in different aspects of acquiring the design, though only one of them had ever met Cruz. The one who hadn’t was a hacker. He was never going to be a threat, especially as Cruz said he had blackmail material on him. But the other one was—’

  ‘My mum.’

  ‘What about our mum?’ Lilly asks, suddenly looking up from her comic.

  ‘I’ll tell you later, Lilly. Two more minutes, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Jane is eyeing me cautiously, wondering how much I already know and how I know it. She isn’t going to lie any more: there’s nothing to be gained from it.

  ‘That’s why the drugs and the gun were planted in our flat, wasn’t it? To discredit her in case she came forward.’

  I keep my tone even, hiding the anger. I don’t want her thinking I’m about to do anything rash.

  ‘It was Cruz’s idea,’ she insists.

  ‘Who physically did it, though? Was it one of your house-breaking contacts from the bad old days? Should we be worried that they are a loose end or a loose tongue?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘It was me. I wouldn’t trust anyone else. I’d have had to pay them more than the drugs themselves were worth to be sure they didn’t just bugger off with them. Plus, as you say, it would be another loose end that might unravel.’

  ‘How did Cruz know who my mother was, though? She went by an alias back then.’

  ‘Maybe she let him get closer to her than she intended.’

  I struggle to keep a reaction from my face, but Jane isn’t looking for one. She simply wants this over w
ith.

  ‘He kept tabs on her from a distance down the years, in case she ever turned up trying to shake him down. He had all kinds of channels of information, contacts from his old hacking days. That’s how come he knew about the Saudi website business. So when I said we needed a hacker as the centrepiece of the plan, he insisted it be you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when you got done for robbing Cruz’s company, you would tell your mum you’d been blackmailed into doing it. Then she’d make the connection and get the message: whatever you know or think you know, keep your mouth shut, because we can get to your daughter.’

  I nod, deciding that I’ve heard enough. I get to my feet and take the prototype from my pocket.

  ‘Come on, Lilly. We’re making a move.’

  Jane holds out her hand and I pass her the device.

  ‘There’s one final thing we’ve got in common,’ I tell her. ‘We both inherited talents from our parents. Yours from your father, mine from my mother.’

  ‘What talent is that?’ she asks scornfully.

  ‘I have this gift for being able to get some idiot to trust me – to tell me all kinds of precious secrets that she really ought to have kept to herself.’

  The look on her face is delicious. This is the bit you don’t get to see when you’re doing this online, the moment they realise they’ve been hacked. I have to say, it’s so much better IRL.

  There is half a second during which she knows something’s up but can’t tell where the threat is coming from. Then she sees that the answer is every direction. All around her, art lovers reveal themselves to be undercover cops.

  PLAYING TO THE GALLERY

  It was personal for you though, wasn’t it? Cruz murdered your father.

  Sam’s voice is crisp and clear through the loudspeakers, one of the officers tweaking the settings to filter out the background noise. Parlabane is standing in the Operations Centre watching the action unfold on a vast bank of monitors, while cops in headsets sit before individual screens, quietly talking to their counterparts in the field. There are feeds from CCTV cameras inside the gallery, as well as several more from bodycams attached to the undercover police on-site. The principal audio is coming from a microphone pinned inside Sam’s jacket, but there are auxiliary feeds from devices hidden on the underside of the bench and from directional mics being carried by officers in the vicinity.