Digital Circumstances

by BRM Stewart

  Helen and I only had a few days of our holiday left. We drove out to Sagres, from where, apparently, Columbus had set sail westwards. We drove up into the mountains, and ate chicken piri-piri while gazing down at what seemed like the full stretch of the Algarve. We had another day on the beach, making love in the afternoon and again after a last meal in what we chose as our most favourite, most expensive restaurant.

  And then we flew back to a cold, wet Glasgow, and back to our flat in the West End and work.

  I tried to find out what I could about the murder in Portimao on the first evening back, but no British people were involved so there was nothing in our papers. I found stuff online, including descriptions of the victim, and talk of money laundering and connections to organised crime. When I read that, I stopped looking.

  *

  On the Monday after we got back, Helen was up early and into her study in our flat, on her laptop and blackberry, clearing emails, chasing up people, resuming discussions on deals that were under way. Several of the conversations were with my ex-wife Elizabeth: they both worked in publishing, trying to make sense of – and money at – the new digital world: helping promising writers publish on e-readers, picking up authors who had already self-published on e-readers and had established a track record, developing magazines and books for tablets. She seemed glad to be getting back to work, and I hoped she’d just forget about some of the events in Alvor.

  After breakfast I took a taxi through the rain and the cold down to St Vincent Street and my office – ‘B&D Software Solutions’ – near the highest point of that road, looking east to the city centre, west to the motorway and on along Argyle Street to where it all began. The buildings here were two hundred years old, home to lawyers and accountants, small creative companies. And us.

  Inside our offices on the second floor, we had established a quiet, calm atmosphere: modern and stark, with comfortable chairs, a coffee machine, and a very pretty secretary to welcome prospective and returning business customers. Three offices led off the main reception area, and there were a couple of small meeting rooms, and a larger conference room with projection facilities.

  Claire looked up as I came in. ‘Hi, Martin. Good holiday?’ Her smile was wide, her long red hair curling past her shoulders in slow, thick waves, intelligent green eyes shining.

  ‘Great, thanks.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic. I made myself a coffee – Claire shook her head – and sat across the desk from her. ‘Fabulous weather, and a great chill-out.’

  ‘So what did you get up to?’

  ‘Well, mainly sea, sun and sex,’ I grinned and she laughed.

  We chatted a bit about some of the things Helen and I had done – no, Claire had never been there: her skin couldn’t handle strong sunshine – and where we’d gone.

  ‘Is Sandy in?’ I asked eventually.

  Claire shook her head. He went away for a few days – due back tomorrow.’ She was on the computer, checking his calendar. ‘He was in Portugal too.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘’Carry over’… or something like that.’

  ‘Carvoiero?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Anywhere near you?’

  ‘Not far,’ I murmured. Not far at all, I reflected: just a few miles on the other side of Portimao. So, what had that thing in Portugal been about really?

  ‘Anyone else coming in today?’

  ‘Yes.’ She peered at her screen. ‘Graham has a pitch at two, a law firm. In the conference room. It’s booked till six, and then he’s planning to wine and dine them. He’d like you to join him, to help field any questions – he’s sent a meeting request.’

  ‘OK,’ I stood up and fixed myself another coffee. ‘To work.’

  I went past the other two offices to mine. One door had a dark, gluey rectangle where the nameplate had been hurriedly prised off, when Colin Strachan had left suddenly, four years ago. Sandy Lomond used this office when he was around. The second office was Graham Turner, with the label ‘Head of software sales’. My office had my name on it, and the title ‘Head of software development’.

  Inside, I closed the door and sat in my big leather chair, switched on the two computers – the iMac with its 27” screen, and the PC I’d inherited from Colin – and looked at the photograph of Helen on my desk. I reached to touch it. I’ll get out and make this all OK, I said; I promise.

  I sipped my coffee, and my mind went in two directions: one was trying to motivate myself to work, the other was still on my plan to get out of all of this. It was urgent now, after the Portugal business. I thought about Colin Strachan, and how he’d got away – Sandy hadn’t even been angry, and I wasn’t aware that he’d ever tried to find Colin. Maybe I should try to contact him; he’d left me a mobile number, but I’d never called, and maybe he’d changed it after all this time. I could even go to see him, wherever in the world he was.

  Most urgently though, I needed to talk to Andrew Russell again – my old schoolmate and nowadays my personal financial adviser. I nodded to my reflection in the computer screen. Portugal had scared me.

  I picked up the phone and speed-dialled. As I waited to speak to Andrew, I watched the emails and appointment requests pour in.

  ‘Hey, Martin – how’s it going?’

  I could hear background chatter. ‘Hi, Andrew.’

  ‘Good holiday?’

  ‘Yes – fabulous weather, good chill out.’

  ‘Sea sun and sex?’ he said.

  ‘That’s pretty much it. Listen. Can we meet up this week some time?’

  ‘Sure.’ A keyboard clacked. ‘Solid this week, mate. How about…’

  ‘How about after hours?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Sure.’ More clacking. ‘Tomorrow at six thirty? Blackfriars?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘To do with…?’

  ‘Same as before,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to step up the pace.’

  Andrew sucked in his breath. ‘Double-dip recession, Martin – maybe a triple. Not a good time to get out. And you risk attracting attention.’

  ‘I’ll need to take that chance,’ I said. ‘I need to get a move on with this, Andrew.’

  ‘OK. See you tomorrow, Martin.’

  I put the phone down, and settled to work.

  It took most of the morning to catch up with what had been going on. We had four people along Argyle Street in what had been our original premises, ‘Bytes and Digits’, back in the day. The two Franks were primarily hardware people, and Ian and Craig did most of the software, leasing out work to an agency in India as necessary. We had a string of clients across Scotland, from fairly large businesses down to shops and one-man operations, and a bunch of loyal hobbyists. We installed hardware and software for them, and kept it all up-to-date and safe. Well, safe from other people.

  I checked that all of that side was working properly, that Ian and Craig were sorting out any problems – they kept me informed of anything major – and that our client database was up-to-date; I left it open on screen, showing the table of IP addresses and admin passwords and sorted by the date I had last changed those passwords. Most days I did some research into the latest developments in online security, reading press releases and following the forums. I would also usually phone around a few clients, checking that they were happy, maybe suggesting some hardware upgrade or replacement that might be useful for them, organising it if they said yes. It all kept our customer base loyal and grateful.

  But today I had other things to catch up on.

  I booted the PC into our bespoke version of Linux and logged on with my password. I stayed with the command line here: no windows environment or visual cues, just my memory. I typed ‘strangle10’, and that program started up, giving no clues that anything was happening at all until it put up two numbers, a nine-digit and a six-digit. On my phone, I sent a text to a contact called Straiton containing those numbers. This person would access the identified bank account, and transfer whatever money was there to other accounts, includ
ing mine. Hopefully there were enough steps in that process to obscure any direct connections between B&D – specifically me – and the people out there.

  Now I typed woz84. Again there was just a long pause while the program went out to somewhere on the Internet and came back with a list of six numbers: IP addresses this time. I angled the monitor and went over to our customer database on the Mac. The IP addresses corresponded to six of our clients. I worked my way down the admin passwords that hadn’t been changed in the last month – most of each password stayed the same, but I changed digits in there using the date of change as a key; except for the clients that Woz84 had given me: these stayed the same, because the people out there were getting on-going returns from those clients.

  And finally I typed Gregory on the PC, and got a ten-digit number back from somebody somewhere, and a question-mark prompt. The number was divisible by nine, which meant that all was OK, the whole system was safe. I made up a ten-digit number that was also divisible by nine and typed it in, then pressed return. After a minute or so I got the command-line prompt back.

  All that remained to do now was to check for updates for the operating system. I did that, and agreed to download and install them from the repository.

  While it got on with that, I went to get another coffee, had a brief chat to Claire, and came back to stand and stare out of the window.

  Out there was a person, or maybe a whole organisation, called Gregorius. We basically sold him access to our customers’ computers, and from there they could step across to all of their clients’ computers. We had also left gaps in the security of the software systems we had installed, so that Gregorius could install its own software without any alarms being raised – or, if a problem arose, the customer would phone us and I would go round and ‘sort it’. The software could be anything: I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. But it would be the kind of form-catcher and keylogger I’d installed in Portugal, which our anti-virus installation would say was perfectly fine. Gregorius could harvest details of bank accounts, email addresses, passwords; they could go on to steal money, carry out identity theft, or set up a computer as part of a botnet which might be used at any time for anything from sending out mass spam emails to bringing down computer systems belonging to commercial organisations or even governments.

  None of this was of my doing. Colin Strachan had set it up, but I’d been left running it all when he’d vanished that day. And I just had to keep doing it, until I in turn managed somehow to get away from here. Sandy knew about it of course, and Ken Talbot probably did too. I wondered whether either of our programmers had any suspicions, or had done any investigating.

  I finished my coffee and turned back to the PC: all done. I shut it down with a sigh.

  Helen phoned. ‘Hiya, darling – how’s it going?’

  ‘Busy busy,’ I said. I pulled the iMac out of its sleep. ‘We have clients coming in this afternoon – if that goes well, we’ll have survived the recession for another day. How are you?’

  ‘In the middle of lunch with Elizabeth. It’s looking good. The whole Scandinavian crime thing is still going strong – our problem is getting good translators.’

  ‘Good stuff.’ No mention of Portugal – maybe it had all blown over.

  ‘Anyway, are we free for dinner tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then wished I’d checked on the reason for the question.

  ‘Curry with Jim and Catherine – they were on the Algarve in the summer, loads to talk about.’

  Yes, I thought: Catherine was a literary agent, so she and Helen would have loads to talk about. I‘d met Catherine but not Jim, though I knew he was a schoolteacher: I had never forgotten the reaction I’d got when my mum had tried to get me back into school to try again with my exams, never forgiven. But I was down on Brownie points: ‘Sounds great! Where and when?’

  ‘Oran Mor at seven, Balbir’s at eight. OK with you?’

  ‘I’ll be tight getting back to the flat – might just go straight to the pub.’

  ‘No problem. See you then. Love you.’

  ‘Love you, darling.’

  *

  The sales pitch that afternoon seemed straightforward. Graham was the sort of guy who oozed massive confidence that hid little actual knowledge – I supplied that, stepping in to answer or head-off questions, explain the jargon that Graham spouted effortlessly but had only a limited understanding of. I watched his easy style, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, no tie, short hair spiked with gel, the young handsome face, the smile – the less he understood a question, the wider the smile became. He got us clients like this because people saw him as one of them, and hence trustworthy.

  Well, maybe it wasn’t so straightforward this time. One of the clients – she introduced herself as Rebecca, was dressed sharply in a dark suit with heavy-framed glasses, and never smiled – asked a lot of good questions about security: she knew her stuff. I could see her colleagues were slightly embarrassed in the way she pressed Graham, and that they were largely baffled, as was he.

  Graham explained about our own anti-virus software.

  ‘Why wouldn’t we use a commercial product?’

  ‘Ours is better?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘How can it be better that something like Kaspersky, which has an international database, sharing knowledge of viruses, and can be customised too.’

  Graham’s smile split his face, and I leaned forward. ‘Our anti-virus has access to other international databases, and we share our knowledge.’ This was true: the last thing we wanted was some other bastard stealing money before we could steal it. ‘And our product – free, as part of the package – is based on other similar products, actually Trend. But ours understands the environment you are working in, and will not pester you with false positives: it lets us know here if there is a problem, and we can patch it, as part of our on-going commitment to keep your system secure and your business safe and operational. So you have the advantage of a tailored product, with all the features of a normal off-the-shelf one.’

  Graham was still grinning like an idiot, but I could see Rebecca wasn’t convinced; none of her colleagues was about to argue with her knowledge – she was the key person in the room, and Graham hadn’t spotted that, because she wasn’t pretty: he had been talking mainly to the men.

  I made the judgement call. ‘But we are more than happy to install the anti-virus software of your choice on the system, and help you customise and manage it, including updates. It’ll be more work for us, but we’re happy to do it.’ It would be more work for Ian and Craig: I wasn’t going to be touching this one. We’d do a straight install.

  Rebecca nodded, and she smiled for the first time: ‘That would be good. Sorry about the interruption – carry on, Graham.’

  ‘No problem,’ Graham said. ‘We want our customers to be happy – we rely on you feeling safe and secure. We want to protect your data like it was our own.’

  He had ordered wine and canapés for after the business part of the meeting, along with lager and orange juice. Rebecca steamed through a large glass of red and seemed relaxed as Claire topped her up. As far as the male clients were concerned, having Claire around was the clincher: their eyes lit up as she smiled and leaned forward unnecessarily to fill their glasses. They admired her long legs, and didn’t notice her engagement ring.

  Just after six, I made my excuses. Graham walked with me to the main door of the office. ‘Thanks, Martin.’

  ‘She knows a lot about Internet security,’ I said, indicating Rebecca. I found myself thinking about the lost opportunities here: lawyers could have interesting contacts and clients. Then I shook my head: Jesus, I was thinking like a criminal. ‘Have you seen Sandy recently?’

  ‘He’s in the Algarve, apparently. Some business thing came up that he had to go and deal with. I think it’s all done now, so he’s just having a break.’

  I nodded. ‘Do you know a friend of Sandy’s
– short blonde girl, young, very pretty.’

  Graham shook his head. ‘I’m sure I’d have noticed.’

  I sighed. ‘You certainly would have.’

  *

  On the way back to Byres Road in the taxi, I realised I was a bit drunk. With the swaying of the taxi, and then the cold fresh air as I got out, I suddenly felt very drunk indeed: Claire had kept topping up the large wine glasses, and I hadn’t managed to grab any lunch.

  I stumbled up the steps of the converted church into the wooden, beery busy-ness, and the first thing I made out was Helen’s frown. Jim and Catherine were already there: him tall and white-haired, a smiling affable look on his face, Catherine just as tall, stick-thin with bobbed brown hair with patches of red.

  I greeted them at the table: Jim insisted on getting the round in – I thought a beer would be a good idea – while I sat down heavily.

  ‘Busy day?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Clients,’ I said. ‘We had to get them drunk to clinch the sale.’

  ‘And you were on orange juice?’ Helen suggested.

  I caught her look: the serious pissed-off look from Portugal was back, I wasn’t forgiven, and turning up drunk wasn’t helping. What had happened? We’d never been like this before.

  Red wine makes me thirsty, so I drank the pint of the pub’s own lager very fast, and felt myself inevitably get even drunker.

  There was inconsequential chat about the Algarve – ‘Lucky with the weather’, ‘Lovely breeze in the evening’, ‘The people are so nice’, ‘recession’s hitting them hard’ – and then it was time to wander down a dark damp Byres Road to the Indian restaurant at its far end, past the record shop, coffee bars, the underground station, obscure posh grocers – many that were clients of ours. The road was filled with people, middle-class like us, but also students and homeless people: all of Glasgow on the one street.

  We made it to the restaurant, were seated at a table in a busy corner, and ordered beers – Kingfisher. I stared at the name on the beer glass, and Helen frowned again, obviously thinking I was going mad. We spoke more of the Algarve – ‘Gorgeous little beaches’, wonderful food’, ‘Did you explore much – oh, Sagres, how wonderful’ – and I gratefully pounced on the popadoms, and then my pakora starter.