by T. M. Parris
The road forked into two identical-looking streets curving away in different directions. She picked one at random and raced down it for thirty seconds, then stopped. This was madness. She hadn’t even seen a face. There must be thousands of men with blond hair in this city. She walked back to the junction and stood, considering whether to try the other prong of the fork or go back and retrieve her coffee and donut. A door slid open behind her.
“Rose? Is that you?”
She turned. James was standing there in a pair of pyjamas, his hair tousled, clutching a carrier bag and a triangular rice ball.
“James! I thought I saw you!” Her elation at seeing a familiar face in this strange location was real. They did a kind of upper-body hug, James using elbows as his hands were full.
“It’s been a long time,” said Rose, trying to remember exactly how long.
James looked strangely energised. “I knew you’d show up. Got my postcard, did you? I thought that might tickle your curiosity.”
“Yes, it was completely bizarre. I didn’t know what to make of it. The fact that you sent one at all is peculiar enough.”
“Ah, well,” James gave a knowing look. “Sometimes you have to travel back in time to hide, you see?”
“No, I don’t see.”
“But you’re here, aren’t you? I didn’t know if I was overdoing it, but that’s the kind of thing you go in for, isn’t it? The cherry blossom in spring, pink carnations, newspaper under the arm and what-not?”
Rose stared at him. “Have you gone completely mad?”
“Oh, yes, right, of course. Very indiscreet of me. Mum’s the word, naturally. Anyway, you’ll want to know all about it, I suppose.”
“Yes, some inkling of what’s actually happening would be useful. But first, please tell me there’s a good reason why you’re walking about in a pair of pyjamas.”
“Oh, that! Well, it’s completely normal in these parts, you see. Couldn’t help but notice other people doing it. When in Rome and all that. I got a craving for one of these rice balls. The ones with the tuna inside or something similar. They have a blue sticker. I’m developing something of an addiction. Maybe they put something in them. I was ready for bed, but I thought I’d just pop out.”
Being tall and fairly broad, with pyjamas in a fierce red tartan, the whole effect was of a giant cuddly bear. Worrying that this was James’ way of fitting in.
“Right. Well, maybe we can go somewhere and talk.”
“Absolutely! I’d invite you back to my hotel room, only it’s more of a cupboard than a room.”
“There’s a coffee place up here.” Rose wondered if her donut was still there.
“Lead the way, lead the way!”
The donut was gone but they ordered fresh ones. From the looks they were getting, sitting in a coffee shop in pyjamas was perhaps not as acceptable as dropping into a convenience store, but needs must. Rose encouraged them to a table away from the window in any case.
“Honestly, Rose, you have no idea what’s involved in sending a postcard in this country.” James described a process in elaborate detail that sounded a lot like how you’d send a postcard in any country.
“I saw Fiona,” she said.
James’ good spirits deflated as though she’d pricked a balloon with a pin. “How did she seem?” he asked tentatively.
“Well, all right, considering she seems to think you’re having an affair.”
“Well, this is the problem, Rose. They seem to have got into my mailbox. And if they’ve got there, where else might they be? It was all terribly fishy right from the start, really.”
“Yes, I think it might help if we go back to the beginning. Who’s ‘they’?”
“She’s one of them. Must be. Or else they’re using her. She never seemed terribly happy about it, to be honest. Can’t say I blame her. Not a very appealing thing to want to do, really.”
“What isn’t?”
“Well, coming to my hotel room and trying to seduce me. Clearly it wasn’t something she did all the time. And obviously I’m a novice, not that I’ve any intention of taking it up. Quite a bizarre episode, all told, though not as bizarre as her knowing which hotel I was staying in. And the room. That was the thing, you see.”
Her head was starting to throb. “James, I really don’t see. Who are you talking about?”
“Oh! Mirai, her name was. At least that’s what she said it was. But who knows, really?”
“A woman called Mirai tried to seduce you?”
“Yes, although not much more than a girl, actually. Early twenties, though it can be difficult to tell how old people are here, don’t you find?”
Rose swallowed her frustration with a slug of coffee, burning her tongue. “But you’d already met before she came to your room?”
“Yes, she was at the conference, you see. The day before. We got chatting in the bar that evening. Well, again, I thought we’d just got chatting, but thinking about it afterwards…”
“And at no point did you tell her where you were staying?”
“No. Well, not that I can recall absolutely everything. We’d had a few drinks. But why would I do that? I mean, it’s not the kind of thing I’d do, is it, Rose?” He was frowning, looking as perplexed as she felt.
“Well, I wouldn’t have said so, James, but sometimes when men go away on business and they’re a long way from home…”
“Rose! Honestly! I would never! Besides, I’ve never been away on business before. It was Fiona’s idea, this. Thought it might improve my career credentials. Me, I’d have been happy without, but I do as I’m told. And now look!”
“Okay,” said Rose. “So she came to your room, nothing happened, and then what?”
“Well, then it was the emails. I phoned home for a catch-up as usual and I could tell straight away something was wrong. It took me a while to realise Fiona had seen some emails, and it was only then that I checked my Sent Items folder and sure enough, there they were! A rather lurid exchange between Mirai and myself, apparently. I’m afraid Fiona couldn’t be persuaded that I’d never seen them before.”
“Did you know she read your emails?”
“Oh, yes.”
Rose felt her jaw drop.
“She didn’t know I knew, of course, but my password’s easy enough to guess. Pretty ironic, really. It won’t do any harm, I thought, I don’t have anything to hide anyway, and if it makes her feel better, why not?”
Rose shook her head. The complexities of long-term relationships passed her by. “Why ironic?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“You said it was ironic that Fiona reads your emails.”
“Well, I mean, given my line of work. That’s the nub of all this, the bottom line, don’t you think?”
“Is it? When I dropped in at your place of work they didn’t seem massively keen to engage.”
“You went there? I’m not surprised. Terribly sensitive they are about privacy. Well, it’s the clients really. We do a lot of cutting-edge stuff. They don’t want anything getting out there.”
“You’d have thought they might prioritise the wellbeing of their staff over some clients trying to protect their copyrights.”
“Well, hang on, Rose, actually they’re pretty keen to do both, I mean if they can’t maintain client confidentiality they wouldn’t have any staff. And it isn’t just about product releases. It’s all about data security. Encryption methods. You know, public keys, private keys? How exactly online transactions are kept safe. If that were ever compromised, it would be the end of e-commerce. You’re not the only people with secrets worth keeping.”
James looked just about as moody as he ever did, which wasn’t very. Bits of a conversation came back to Rose from a post-Sunday-lunch living room a few years ago, the smell of roasted parsnips lingering, children playing with plastic toys strewn across the floor. James, sitting back in his armchair, was espousing the importance of online privacy. Rose had pitched in with some observations
about what some people choose to do given absolute privacy, and how many other people might suffer the consequences. It might have got heated had Fiona not intervened to change the subject.
“Listen, I don’t know how long you’ve had this spy obsession, James.”
“Don’t you? You don’t remember, then?” His eyes twinkled.
“Remember what? I work for the diplomatic service. You need to stop watching all those TV shows and come back to reality.”
“Of course, of course, whatever you say.” He took an enormous bite of donut.
“So you think this has something to do with your work?”
He eyed her, chewing. He’d never talked about what he did at work. Or was it that she’d never asked? It was something pretty mundane, though, unless he’d just given her that impression somehow.
“If it is,” she said, “you need to tell me what you actually do. And why it’s attracting all this attention.”
He wiped his fingers on a napkin. “I’m developing a new kind of cold wallet,” he said.
“What’s a cold wallet?”
“Seriously? I thought you people were up-to-the-minute with this kind of thing.”
“James, enough of this ‘you people’ thing, okay? I work for the Foreign Office.” It was concerning how he suddenly seemed so sure she was more than just a diplomat. And besides, she was itching to add, I’m MI6, not GCHQ. They’re the technical people. “Can you please explain to a poorly-informed public servant who’s come here to try and help you, what the heck a cold wallet is, please?”
“A cold wallet is the most secure means of storing crypto-currency. You have hot wallets, you see, and cold wallets. Hot wallets sit on the exchange all the time and you don’t want that. It’s convenient, of course, but terribly dangerous.”
“Crypto-currency? You mean Bitcoin? The stuff that criminals use for money laundering?”
“Now, now, Rose, there’s no evidence crypto is used illegally any more than regular currencies. And Bitcoin’s just one of them. There are dozens of them now. It was all thought up by this chap calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s the one who first described the idea of decentralised ledgers, which of course makes the whole thing so very secure. It may not have been a chap, of course, or even just one person. No one actually knows who it is in real life.”
“Hang on,” said Rose, trying to piece together this stream of information. “It’s secure, but it’s also dangerous?”
“Oh, crypto itself is highly secure. The whole point is, you can’t have a virtual currency if anyone could just come along and make duplicates of it. You can’t fake Bitcoin. That’s what gives it its value. That’s because the transaction records are stored on a blockchain, which is immutable.”
“What makes everyone so sure of this?”
“Because there are multiple records. Something’s added to the blockchain and authorised by consensus. It’s then effectively copied on all the nodes that are signed up to that system. If you wanted to change something, you’d have to change it on thousands of different drives across the world simultaneously. You can add something, but once it’s on the blockchain it’s staying there. So you can’t copy, and there’s a limited supply. That’s what maintains its value. One of the key tenets of Bitcoin is that there will never be more than twenty-one million of them. Arguably, that gives Bitcoin more long-term value than fiat currencies, which all lose value in the long term as governments print more money.”
“Fiat?”
“Dollars, pounds, Euros. A currency that’s controlled by a central authority. Since its inception Bitcoin’s value has skyrocketed. Lots of ups and downs on the way, of course. But someone who invested a hundred dollars in 2010 would be a multi-millionaire by now.”
“But what is it really worth? It’s not real, is it?”
“Rose!” James was genuinely shocked. “How real is a dollar, if you’re going to be like that about it? No currency’s been real since they abolished the gold standard. Pieces of paper. Not even that most of the time. Figures on a screen. A currency has value for as long as you can trade with it. A fiat currency could be worth nothing tomorrow if people decided it was worthless. That’s happened, hasn’t it?”
“I suppose. But if Bitcoin and the others are so safe, why is data security such an issue?”
“The currency itself is secure, but the exchanges where they’re traded can be hacked. People have lost millions like that. Whole exchanges have been brought down. Hot wallets sit on the exchange server. Hackers can find vulnerabilities and just go in and empty them. Not good. You don’t want to store your crypto fortune online, that’s for sure.”
“But Bitcoin only exists online! It’s a virtual currency. That’s the whole point of it.”
“Indeed, but it can be stored on something that’s not connected to the internet. That’s the best way of keeping it away from hackers. The only way, really.”
“Then how do you trade it? You just said, it’s only worth something if it’s tradable.”
“That’s the thing. Usually a cold wallet is offline, but you need to go online in order to transfer money onto it or off it. You could have a much smaller online wallet for daily trades, for example, but you’d need to transfer back and forth with your cold wallet. Your fortune, your millions now, they’re on the cold wallet.”
“Okay, but I’m still not sure I understand what it is, exactly.”
James did something that looked perilously close to an eye-roll. “Well, they just look something like a standard insertable zip drive. It’s when you plug it in to go online that you’re vulnerable. Even if it’s only for a few minutes, someone who knows what they’re looking for could get in. This is what I’m working on. An advanced level of security for cold wallet transactions. It’s brand new.”
“Would I regret asking how it works?”
James looked doubtful. “Well, you know, all encryption is mathematics at the end of the day. To encrypt something, you need to be able to unencrypt it again, or else it’s worthless. But you need to be the only person who can unencrypt it. That’s why we talk about public keys and private keys. It’s all about multiplying prime numbers, you see. Very big prime numbers. The bigger the better.”
“Right.” Everything was starting to swim in front of Rose’s eyes. “Maybe I can just take it as read that you’re working on a way of securing cold wallet transactions.”
“Yes, well that’s about the long and the short of it. This is all top secret of course. Our client—”
“Yes, who is your client?”
“Rose, I can’t tell you that! I’ve already said enough to get me fired. I just wonder if it might have got out somehow.”
“You think that this Mirai and whoever she’s with are onto what you’re doing for Viziontecc?”
“Well, put it this way, there are billions of dollars’ worth of crypto-currency stored in cold wallets across the globe. Whatever the more traditional commentators think, let me tell you, this is real money with real value and a lot of people would be very interested in getting their hands on it.”
“You think they’re hackers?”
“Well, how did they know where I was staying? Then there was that other time with Mirai.”
“Another time?”
“I went to a Seven-Eleven and when I came out she was there. Waiting for me.”
“She knew where you were?”
“I took my phone with me, as you do. And I paid with a card. Or maybe she followed me there. Oh, I don’t know how but that wasn’t normal. And then…”
“What?”
“Yes. I did wonder about that. She was very put out, I think. Yes, put out.”
James could really do with a lesson in conciseness. “Put out about what?”
“Well, I told her, you see, that Fiona had jumped to the wrong conclusion about the two of us. That was the thing that seemed to rather upset her.”
Then it came together in Rose’s mind. “They wanted to blackmail you.
This Mirai was a honey-trap. They sent her to the conference, and to your room, to – well – compromise you. Then they’d threaten to tell Fiona and you’d be in their hands. But it didn’t work. So, instead they hacked your mailbox and fabricated an affair with some fake emails. What they didn’t count on was Fiona reading them straight away. They were going to dangle them over you and threaten to send them to Fiona. So that didn’t work either.”
James considered. “Well, that would make sense of it all. Yes, indeed it would.”
“This really isn’t bad, James. You managed to foil two blackmail attempts. Completely unintentionally of course.”
“Yes, well, thanks. But I fear Fiona will still take some persuading.”
“Go home, James. That’s the best place for you right now. Probably the safest as well. If they’ve tried twice they may be thinking about trying something else. Just get on a plane and sort it all out when you get back.”
But James looked troubled.
“James? Just do it! You don’t want to stay here, do you? Wandering about in pyjamas and sleeping in a cupboard?”
“Well, it’s just – she was very clear, you see. Don’t come home. I wouldn’t want to risk anything. I mean I’d be doing the exact thing she told me not to do. That could just make everything so much worse, couldn’t it?” He looked as mournful as a Labrador.
“James, she’s as worried as you are. You know she tried to phone you? She left a message. She doesn’t understand why you haven’t called back.”
James looked pained: an abandoned Labrador. “Well, even so,” he said. “A conversation first, I think. I’ll call her first, then check the lay of the land. Yes.”
“How? You left your phone behind, remember.”
“I’ll get a burner phone! You, know, a pay-as-you-go. That’s what you folk call them, isn’t it?”
“James!”
“Sorry. Well, that would work, wouldn’t it? I’ll call her with that.”
“It depends who we’re up against. If these people hacked into your phone, they’ll have your address book, won’t they? All your contacts.”
