Impact

by Robert Clark

  The guy had been fat and sweaty, and lived in a two-bedroom flat that had so much computer equipment, the ambient temperature was hotter than the sun. He told me he’d had the police round on more than one occasion thinking that he was growing weed because the helicopters flying overhead pointed their heat-sensor cameras at his house and it lit up like an oven. His landlord hated him and threatened to kick him out because of it.

  But he told me a lot of useful things that stuck with me. The type of things you tell a friend over a pint. “Did you know how easy it is for a hacker to guess your password?” et cetera. Stuff I figured everyone should have a basic knowledge in, hence why I interviewed the guy in the first place.

  He told me that some of the most commonly used passwords in the world were 111111, 123456, 12345678, qwerty, and - most ridiculously - password. He told me that of over ten million people, those five passwords accounted for over seventeen percent. Statistically, you’ve got almost a one in five chance to guess someone’s password by just trying those.

  But he told me that’s just one part of the problem, because not everyone is that stupid, but most people aren’t far off. He told me that the next biggest problem was that people used words close to their hearts. Names of their spouses or children, that kind of thing. It’s a big problem. A quick background check on the victim will bring up most of the likely candidates. People are too open with their private lives. Even whacking a couple of numbers in there would eliminate a lot of the damage, but people don’t do it. They think they’re beyond cyber crimes. That kind of thing happens to other people, right? Why would someone attack them personally?

  But they don’t think how big cyber crimes spread. It’s not like breaking into someone’s home. One man at one computer could bring down half the world with the right knowhow. But getting that fact across to the general public is harder than you’d think. No one wants to think they’ve got the spotlight on them.

  Did Amie Giroux think she was safe?

  I tested the theory.

  I typed Nostradamus into the bar and hit enter.

  Twenty-Two

  The laptop processed the input and ran it against the line of code that correlated to passwords. It summarised the data and came to a conclusion.

  And it unlocked.

  The blurred background image suddenly sprung into focus. It was of two women. The one on the right was Amie Giroux herself. The other was someone I didn’t recognise. Not Marie, that’s for sure. The pair lay in what looked like a garden or park, with long blades of grass sticking up between the two. The pair were laughing. A snapshot of intimate joy. Even now, looking at the picture, I felt like I was intruding. I stared into Amie’s eyes. What had caused her to end up on the tracks of an oncoming train?

  The desktop wasn’t populated with much. A couple of mp3 files of songs Amie must have enjoyed provided little but an ambient background soundtrack while I searched. Her musical tastes weren’t exactly my forte, but it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. The quirky female vocalist accompanied a peculiar mixture of jazz and electric guitar that never seemed to fit quite perfectly, but I’d certainly heard worse.

  The other files on the screen were more interesting. A video file entitled Les raisons took almost a minute to load up. The face of Amie Giroux filled the screen, the tired, red eyes already burned into my memory. I didn’t need to play the video, once was enough, and I was pretty certain I couldn’t get anything more out of a personal message from one sister to another. I closed the file with glacial fingers and went on to the next file.

  It was a word document.

  Or more accurately, a will.

  Beside her sweet Nostradamous, and her dilapidated home - both of which were bequeathed to her older sister - Amie’s life was one scant of possession. It was hard to tell if she had lived this way her whole life, or if she had sold her things when life fell on hard times. Either way, it wouldn’t take long to divvy out her belongings to the small number of recipients committed to page. A meagre legacy to leave behind. Poor woman.

  What annoyed me the most was the inconsistency of the whole thing. Neagley hadn’t denied killing Amie, yet what kind of person wrote a will and filmed a goodbye speech if they weren’t long for this world? What was the relationship here? What was Neagley’s involvement?

  I closed the will and moved over to the web browser.

  Sat in a rainy carpark with no ethernet cable in sight, the webpages presented themselves as static snapshots of the past. There were four tabs open at the top of the browser from a selection of French websites I didn’t recognise. The first up was a message board. The screen was filled with lines of conversation between a collection of people all using strange aliases derived from a near random selection of letters and numbers. Although my French was far from poor, the fluency of slang and abbreviations made it borderline impossible for me to read. The best I could do was determine the odd phrase. “Keep trying,” “have you thought about,” and “I knew someone who might help” all stood out, but each was followed by dialect my old French teacher either forgot to teach me, or I forgot to learn. After a couple of lines, I swapped over to tab number two.

  Which was easier to understand, if a little confusing. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what AirFrance was all about. Filling the screen were flight details from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, to - of all places - Zürich. The date on the screen was just a few days old, meaning the flights had been and gone without Amie. The prices weren’t bad, a couple hundred euros, but from what I’d seen of Amie’s house, she didn’t have the kind of cash spare to splash out on a trip to Switzerland.

  And why Zürich, of all places? Did she have friends or family there that she was eager to see? Was there someone out in Switzerland that could answer the questions I had bouncing around my head? One thing I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going there to find out. No way I’d get on a flight without handcuffs, and the chances of getting to Switzerland by car without being spotted was slim.

  But it wasn’t the destination that perplexed me the most. It was the choice of ticket.

  A one way flight to Switzerland.

  I stared at the screen, eyes narrowed in deep contemplation, searching for answers that felt so close, yet so far. I was missing something vital, but what?

  On to tab number three.

  The email client was marred by a large pop-up box occupying the centre of the screen, the word expiré nice and big right in the middle. Expired. How fitting. The interrupted email was barely visible beneath the pop-up, but I could see the company logo at the bottom of the page. It was small, maybe a centimetre in width, but something about it sparked something in my brain. It dislodged the cobwebs deep inside, but why?

  I turned up the screen brightness all the way and leaned in close. It was blurred, but not enough to be completely illegible. I was certain I’d seen it before somewhere, but the specifics wouldn’t bubble to the surface. Not yet. I clicked the little cross at the top of the pop-up box, and for a fraction of a second, the email returned with crystal clarity before the webpage went blank, unable to reload.

  But I saw it. I saw the logo.

  And I remembered where I’d seen it from.

  I moved to the last tab. Number four.

  It was a private message from an online forum. The language was clear and concise, written by a woman who described herself as being in her late sixties. An eloquent typist, thank God. I understood every word of what she was saying. Drunk it all in like a glass of ice cold water. I reached the end and blinked numbly at the screen. Then I read it all over again, start to finish, forcing my mind to take it all in.

  I went back to the first tab. The message board. I reread what I could and started to gain some context from the slang. Trembling fingers danced from tab to tab, finally starting to gain some sense of understanding from the random strands of information. Each part joined in, fitting with the precise precision of a jigsaw.

  And most importantly of
all, an answer.

  My throat was dry. My brain numb. If I was right, this whole thing became something different entirely. Something I hadn’t expected at all. And I wasn’t sure if that thought brought comfort or horror. What I felt was something slap bang in between.

  I tried to look at it differently, to see it from another angle, just in case. But I just kept coming back to my theory. I couldn’t see any other options. Nothing else made sense. My theory barely made sense itself, but it was the only thing closest to sense. I just couldn’t believe it.

  I looked up and saw a lone figure approaching the car. The windows had steamed up, but I could see the distinctive outline of Marie. Her coat flapped up in the breeze. How the hell could I tell her what I’d found out? How would it make any sense to a woman so rooted in her beliefs that both she and I were wrong? I’d already upended her world once in the last few days, now I had to do it all over again.

  I pressed the button to wind down the windows, but without the keys in the ignition, it didn’t work. Instead, I opened the door to get some fresh air into the coupé. Marie was only a few dozen yards away, so close to finding out the truth.

  A car pulled up in front of me, blocking Marie from my sight while the driver searched for an available space. It was little more than a blur through the window. It paused for a few seconds, then pulled away.

  And Marie was gone.

  I climbed out through the open door and looked around, expecting to see her nearby, but as my eyes fell on the moving car, my heart sank as realisation dawned on me.

  The dirty brown sedan.

  Twenty-Three

  I slammed the passenger door shut and threw myself around to the driver door. The seat was cranked all the way forward, but I didn’t have time to adjust it. I jammed the key in the ignition and threw the car into first gear.

  Tyres squealed on wet tarmac as the coupé lurched forwards. The sedan had already pulled out of the car park, back onto the street in the opposite direction, and as they passed by, I thought I could see two male heads turn to look at me.

  With the window still clouded over, I buzzed down both windows and rubbed at the windshield with my sleeve. It gave me just a slither of visibility, but it would have to do. I spun the wheel and shot out into the street to a flurry of angry horns, narrowly missing a taxi heading the other way. With one hand on the wheel, I changed up a gear and then fumbled with the seat belt.

  The small gap in the window was far from ideal, but I could see the car up ahead. Whether it was the Part-time Model or Buzz Cut at the wheel, I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was stamped on the accelerator and shot forward like a bullet from a high-powered rifle.

  I did the same, trying desperately to close the gap. Wind and rain sucked in through the open windows, clearing most of the fog in seconds. With a clearer view, I could see the fleeing vehicle with more clarity. And all the problems that came with it.

  The sedan shot across an intersection with the lights on red, slicing through an infinitesimally small gap between a lorry and a bus. I stamped on the brakes, skidding out into the centre of the intersection, mere inches from the rear of the bus. Ignoring the chorus of horns, I twisted the steering wheel right, jumped down into first, and twisted around the bus.

  At which point, I saw it. The sum of my fears. The exact opposite thing I needed right now.

  Through the rain-soaked windshield, the flashing blue lights dazzled me more than the sea of headlights, so much so, I couldn’t even see exactly where the police car was. But as the siren cut over the noise, I saw it coming right for me. With the brown sedan already out of sight, they had gone for second best. They wanted something. The runner up prize, and little did they know, they were going to hit the motherlode. My heart going like the clappers. My mind a mess. I had to get away, fast.

  I swung the wheel to a hard right and twisted the coupé away from the police car and catapulted off down the right-hand street. Already, I could hear the police car speed up, eager for a chase like a hound to a hare. I swerved in an out of oncoming traffic until I could get over to the right side of the street, then I pushed the coupé for all it had.

  I shot across the next intersection with my heart in my mouth and pushed the coupé to the limits. In the city, it felt like lightspeed, and in the rain, like lightspeed on ice. The road turned left, and as I followed it round, the wheels caught the sheet of rainwater, and the back end of the coupé pirouetted sideways. I fought to correct it, but it was too little too late, and the rear bumper of a white panel van came racing up to greet us.

  The impact felt like being punched by a giant, and sent the coupé spiralling out into the road like a professional ice skater. Lights and rain blurred everything together, so the view from my window was like that from the Tardis halfway through a time jump.

  My insides churned like the contents of a blender, coming to a stop only when the coupé met another equally solid, equally abrupt object. The airbags exploded, the force stunning and disorientating in a second. Blood erupted in my mouth with volcanic fury. My head rung like a school bell. I fumbled for the door handle, my hand weak and useless as it pulled to. The door swung out, and I collapsed sideways into the rain. Wearily, I looked around at the carnage I’d caused.

  The van had ploughed into the car in front, which had twisted off the road and into a parked car. The thing that had brought me to a stop turned out to be the front of a bus. The driver was in his seat, face down into the steering wheel, and I could see other passengers further back climbing up out the aisle.

  What had I done?

  ‘You need to get out of here,’ shouted the Wolf, ‘right now. You need to leave.’

  ‘These people…’

  It was all I could say. The wolf snapped.

  ‘Go. Now.’

  I staggered left, onto the pavement, towards the nearest house. Flashing blue lights lit up the front of the building as sirens drew close. I ran, ignoring the pain in my head and legs. Voices behind me shouted, but I ignored them.

  I ran up the driveway and threw my weight into a tall wooden gate at the back. It snapped open like a saloon door, and I kept going. Lights flicked on, illuminating a quaint garden. I ignored it all. Kept going. I reached the fence at the rear, leapt over, and landed on concrete.

  I ran around the side of the building, but to the left a garage had been built. The roof was too high to climb up, and as I turned around to try the right side, I saw two police officers leap over the fence.

  They shouted in unison.

  ‘Stop!’

  Neither had a gun. Instead, both held batons up like short swords. Two on one had worked back up in the woods with the model and the Buzz Cut, but it wouldn’t here. Not with them armed and me feeling like I’d tumbled down a mountain.

  I ran for the fence. It was tall. Maybe seven or eight feet. Much taller than me. And it looked strong. Made of thick concrete beams like it was part of an enormous construction. The officers ran too, coming at me head on, not trying to cut me off. Their mistake. I ran faster than I’d ran in my whole damn life. Faster than Olympic athletes could ever dream of. I broke Guinness World Records. I broke the damn sound barrier. That’s how it felt at least. When I was close, I threw up my hands, leapt off one foot, and hit the concrete wall with everything I had. My hands caught the lip of the wall, and my momentum carried me up. My legs ran up the side. Just enough. I flicked my thigh over the side and swung over.

  A hand caught my ankle. The cop, fingers gripped tight. It killed my momentum dead. I felt him heave like he was ringing an old church bell. I lost my balance, and fell forwards, gripping the top of the fence with all the fear as though I was hanging from a tightrope. The cop heaved again. He was strong. I felt my weight shift sideways, back towards the garden and a lifelong prison sentence. Not today.

  I rolled away, countering the cop’s efforts by flinging myself the wrong way. The cop’s grip was strong, slowing my fall so that I ended up hanging upside down like a corpse in an abattoir. Com
pletely useless. My leg was in agony. The tendons at breaking point. They were going to tear my leg off if I wasn’t careful. Fat lot of good I’d be as a fugitive with a leg missing and a trail of fresh blood following me around. I tried to yank it up. My weight was too much for him to hold, and his grip eased up. I felt the shift. Felt the drop. Then I felt the pain as I fell two foot down, right onto my face.

  Head and neck all bent out of shape, I struggled to my feet. In the scuffle, my shoe had come loose. I looked around, but it wasn’t there. Shit. I’d have to do without it. With just one shoe, I hobbled as fast as I could across another well kept garden, and out into the street.

  With houses on one side, and shops on the other, the street I found myself in was busier than the others. The last of the day’s shoppers drifted in and out, paying no mind to the man who just stumbled into their world. I glanced behind me, but the officers weren’t there. Struggling with surmounting the wall, perhaps. With the brief respite, I slung off my coat and threw it into a nearby bin. Then I hobbled across the road and ducked into the nearest shop. It was an antiques store. The walls were lined with random knick knacks with astronomical prices. I slowed my pace and perused the wares, all the while with one eye out on the street.

  The officers appeared around the corner of the street. Glancing both ways, one pointed to his partner, and the pair ran off to my right, ignoring the store entirely. I waited until they were gone, then I hobbled out and went left. I made it round the corner without anyone else spotting me and slowed to a walk.

  Then the phone in my pocket started to ring.

  Twenty-Four

  The caller ID showed the one number saved to the phone’s contacts. Marie. I thumbed the answer button and pushed the phone to my ear. I didn’t speak.

  There was silence for a few moments. I kept walking, glancing around for signs of someone following me. No one.