by David Caris
She sandwiched this appeal for cooperation with a final threat: anyone caught talking with the press was also choosing to end an otherwise prosperous career, and to forgo any hope of compensation in the event of a personal hack. This threat, unlike the first one, had no time limit. It was permanent. ‘Regarding the Guardian leak,’ she said, ‘the perpetrator will be found.’
It wasn’t her best speech. She was a little breathless throughout, each sentence an effort. She spoke from the throat, not the chest, and only towards the end of the speech did she realize she was gesticulating and pacing like a woman trapped in some kind of delirium. It was so dark, she wondered how much people up the back could see anyway.
When done, she thanked everyone for their understanding and cooperation and exited stage left. There was a hulking presence waiting for her in the almost pitch-black space between two stage curtains – and she recognized the shape at once. She wrapped her arms around it in relief. ‘Bishop.’
‘Nice speech.’
‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’
‘Don’t say that. For one thing, it’s not true. And even if it was, people are looking to you right now.’
She nodded, one ear pressed so hard to his enormous chest she could hear his heart beating.
Slow and steady, just as she remembered it.
It was an odd thing to find comfort in Bishop. He looked like some kind of mutant, with his shaved head, giant jaw and laser focus eyes. He would have fit right in on the set of some sci-fi movie about Navy SEALs being infused with predatory animal DNA. But scary-looking or not, she had always been able to rely on him for a good hug. Megan had known Bishop most of her life, and she owed him for a lot of the success she had enjoyed from her twenties onwards. He had taught her self-discipline. He had taught her to manage stress. And most beneficial of all, he had taught her to chase her goals each and every day, not just when she felt like it. To chase them until they were done, not just going well.
She not only owed Bishop, she trusted him. Especially now. For a brief moment, she let herself feel like that teenage girl again. But despite all this – or perhaps because of it – she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the possible data breach with Nicholas.
‘That bad, huh?’ He pulled back and led her through a cold corridor to a small break room with a kitchenette. He shut the door with one foot, dropped a peppermint tea bag into a disposable cup, and filled it with water from a unit on the wall. He handed it to her. ‘What do we know? Catch me up.’
‘I don’t know how they did it and I don’t know what they have. But it’s definitely some kind of ransom attack.’
‘How do you know that?’
She took a tentative sip of the tea, expecting it to be boiling hot. It wasn’t. It was lukewarm, the unit on the wall having lost power like everything else in the building. She put it aside, beside a small lifeless microwave. ‘They sent me a photograph.’
‘Of?’
‘Me, Daniel and Kovac.’
‘Kovac?’
‘Kovac. It’s the photo you took, the three of us standing in front of the dam at the farm.’
‘There’s no way they can have that photo.’
‘Well, someone sent it to me.’
He opened the door again and checked the corridor left and right to make sure there wasn’t anyone listening. There obviously wasn’t, because this time he left the door slightly ajar. He went on monitoring the corridor. ‘From what address?’
‘A Curzon IT address of some kind. I can’t even remember. I was just panicking it had gone out to the whole company.’
‘Had it?’
‘I don’t think so. My address was the only one in the email.’
‘Could be everyone else on blind copy.’
‘Maybe, but why would they do it that way?’
Bishop shut the door. He crossed the break room and started searching through cupboards. He located a packet of mint chocolate biscuits. He ripped the outer layer of plastic off and tossed the plastic tray filled with biscuits down onto the table in the middle of the room. He turned a chair backward and straddled it. Then he reached forward and took out two biscuits at once, holding them between thumb and forefinger. He bit into both simultaneously. ‘Well shit,’ he said, chewing. He brushed crumbs from his jeans. ‘And we’ve got how long to figure this mess out?’
‘Until 5 p.m.. After that, I have to let staff leave. That’s when it will spill into the media in earnest. The Guardian’s already on the scent.’
Bishop took out his phone. ‘I saw that.’ He handed the phone to her, then checked his watch. ‘So less than two hours to go.’
The Guardian article was on the screen. Megan skimmed it. It was quoting unnamed sources and throwing a lot of mud to see what would stick. ‘I’m meeting with the entire IT staff up in my office. You want to join me, glower at them until one of them confesses?’
Bishop didn’t smile. He rarely if ever smiled. But she caught the glimmer of amusement in his eyes all the same. ‘No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’m going to have to bring Kovac in.’
‘I thought you wanted to leave him alone.’
‘That was before.’
‘Do we have any idea where he is?’
Bishop grabbed two more biscuits. ‘Yeah. He’s here.’
‘In London?’
He nodded, chewing and brushing again.
‘How long have you known?’
‘Days,’ he said with a full mouth.
‘How many days?’
‘A lot of them.’
‘And you were planning on telling me when?’
This time Bishop shook his head.
‘I see.’
‘After everything that happened, we owed him that, Megan. Hell, if you want the truth, we owe him a lot more than that. But that’s all he’s asking. To be left alone. The fact this company exists is entirely down to Kovac.’
Megan thought back to Pemberton in the Australian desert, where she and her father had found themselves under siege. She hadn’t performed well under pressure and it was hard not to take Bishop’s words now as a rebuke. ‘I was planning to get in some more training. I was pretty rusty at Pember –’
‘Any time, but right now you’ve got a company to run – and a nerd conference, right?’
‘Right.’ Megan handed him back his phone. ‘Shouldn’t you switch that off?’
‘It doesn’t run quite like yours.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Actually, it does.’ He checked something on his phone, then asked for Megan’s.
‘I left it upstairs,’ she said. ‘Right now it’s just a heavy chunk of metal and glass.’
‘It’s more than that.’ He went for a napkin and rifled through drawers looking for a pen. There wasn’t one. ‘Hang on a sec.’ He exited and returned with a ballpoint. ‘Right,’ he said, drawing nine dots on the napkin. ‘You start here and do it like this.’ He drew a complex pattern, with arrows at the end of each stroke to indicate direction. ‘Activate the security feature that lets you put in a pattern instead of a fingerprint. When you do, it’ll reboot and load a different version of Android, one Curzon modified extensively, one you can trust. But something to keep in mind, you won’t have any privacy. I’ll be able to see everything.’
‘So no more live cams, huh.’
‘Quit joking, Megan. This is serious. I’m in effect giving you access to a separate network here, one that will put you in touch with me and your father securely.’
‘Got it.’ Megan made a note to switch on. Clearly, tea and biscuits were done, and Bishop was one hundred percent in work mode. ‘Can I still call other people?’
He nodded. ‘And they can call you. The phone will feel the same for you, but the security will be improved and we’ll be able to monitor if anything goes wrong.’
‘How did you find out Kovac’s here?’
‘I took the time to study up on his rainy-day plans, long before this all started.’
‘You’ll approach him you
rself?’
‘In a way, yes.’
‘In a way? You still think he wants to kill you for what happened in Japan?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt it. I think he blames himself for that. But I guess it’s about time we found out. You worry about your meeting with the nerds and leave Kovac to me.’
She tried the tea again, taking a gulp of it to counter her dry mouth. ‘Why do we need him? Besides the fact he showed up in that photo, I mean?’
‘We don’t need him.’ Bishop stood and turned the chair back around, slotting it in under the table. ‘Right now, he needs us.’
Chapter 5
Megan had to take the stairs all the way to the seventeenth level, and she was more than simply out of breath when she arrived. She was exhausted.
She found her office pretty much as expected. Dark and crammed full of people.
The door was propped open.
She stepped inside, trying to slow her breathing.
It was quiet without the low hum of central air conditioning, and warm on account of all the bodies crammed in, waiting on her. Her chair was empty, but the other two chairs in the room had been filled based on seniority. They had been snagged by her Chief Operating Officer, and a second individual she had never seen before. Everyone else was standing, but even here seniority determined one’s position relative to her desk.
A status galaxy, she noted, with her desk as the central star. The youngest staff had all been forced to the outer reaches, their backs to the floor-to-ceiling windows. ‘Hi everyone, and thank you for coming at such short notice.’ She used what Nix called her “meeting voice”, and it was strange to think how vulnerable she could be with Bishop, only to turn around and show zero weakness here. But that was the job. Public Megan and private Megan. ‘Let’s get straight into it, shall we? This will be quick.’
Since most were standing, Megan remained standing too. She offered her chair to Nix. ‘Can you take notes for this one, Nix?’ she asked, her breathing beginning to settle now. ‘We’ll need a record of everything we do and say tonight.’
He slid into the chair, already prepared with a pen and paper.
She refocused on the room, estimating it held around thirty staff. ‘And that goes for everyone here over the coming days and weeks. Don’t leave anything to memory. It might be a while before you get debriefed, and memory, as we all know, decays and lies.’ There were nods. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Speak to me as you would to a child. I can drive a mouse around Windows and Office just fine, but that’s where my technical capabilities end. My job – and my interest – is the Cyber Incident Response Plan. I’ve skimmed it, but there will be people in this room who know it by heart, correct? The power goes back on at 5:00 p.m.. When that happens, I want to be ready. What does the plan call for in this situation?’
No one spoke. A few shifted their weight from one foot to another. A few others cleared their throat and glanced around. But no one stepped forward or raised a hand.
Brilliant, Megan thought. All her marching around making threats had triggered everyone’s lizard brain, ass-covering reflexes.
Or was that too harsh? For some, Megan knew, this silence was down to simple nerves. These individuals weren’t normally invited to meetings on the seventeenth level. They only heard from her in whole-company emails or saw her on TV. For her senior staff, it was probably fear, too. Fear or – like her – a sudden sense of vulnerability. She hadn’t felt like this since Peng Biao grabbed her stepsister, Lottie, and it wasn’t a feeling she had fully processed from last time. She wasn’t ready for this all over again, but that made no difference. It was happening, and everyone expected her to fix it.
The man in the second chair – the man she had never seen before – cleared his throat and said: ‘We survey the damage, we limit the fallout, and we notify police and other relevant agencies.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s really all we can do today. We’ll notify affected staff when we have that sort of granular detail, but that won’t be today.’
‘Figure out what it is, and get the experts in,’ her COO said, nodding his agreement. ‘Simple.’
Megan’s Chief Operating Officer was Alan Hart. He wanted her job. He wasn’t happy with her promotion to the CEO role, and he was struggling to hide it. He was a dour, portly man on the verge of 60, with paper-white hair and deep bags under his eyes – bags which always seemed to convey disinterest. But Megan knew better. It wasn’t disinterest. It was displeasure.
Alan wasn’t a friend. She had pulled him up on poor performance twice in the past, and he was exactly the type to hold grudges. If he could find a way to use this hack to humiliate her, he would do it.
‘For that matter,’ he continued, ‘are we sure we need everyone from IT up here? If we turn the power back on, maybe most here could get to work going through our security logs. That’s why we keep logs, after all. So we can puzzle out what –’
‘Thanks Alan, but that’s not the way I want to proceed with this – not yet anyway.’ She refocused on the man in the second chair, the one who had been brave enough to speak first. He was a little younger than Alan but of a similarly smug, privileged ilk. His hair was dyed shoe-polish black, and he had the physique and tight-fitting suit of a man who worked out compulsively. ‘Thanks for kicking us off, but I didn’t get your name.’
Thankfully, one thing Megan was good at was dealing with smug, entitled men. They were the one group she always met head-on, giving no quarter. She had tried to flatter and persuade them in the past, win them over, and she had learned the hard way that it led to her being seen as weak.
He pointed to his own chest in surprise. ‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kevin Davis. Chief Technology Officer.’
‘For Europe?’
He affected a small, awkward laugh. ‘For the entire company.’
It was a blunder and one that put her on the back foot, but Megan didn’t try to cover it – or apologize. ‘I thought Cooper McConville was still in that role, but obviously I’ve skimmed one email too many.’
‘Cooper resigned last week.’
Megan would’ve remembered news like this. Which meant she hadn’t missed an email; the resignation had been kept quiet. She filed the information for later investigation.
Kevin twisted in his seat and flashed a smile at the group. ‘New guy,’ he said, raising one hand. ‘Picked a great week to start.’
There was subdued laughter.
Megan said: ‘We can’t go to the police, Kevin.’
Alan sat up at this, like Megan had just blown up his perfect plan for this meeting. Which, needless to say, was the same plan he always had – hand the work over to someone else and pick fault with everything they did.
Kevin blinked a couple of times in the dark. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard me.’
‘That’s policy,’ Alan spluttered. ‘And common sense.’
‘Let’s keep this professional, Alan.’ Megan addressed the room at large again. ‘Open question. I don’t mind if you’re a coding savant or the one who cleans dust out of the company’s computer fans – every opinion is valid today. Is our sensitive data adequately encrypted, or are we vulnerable?’
Silence again.
Alan eventually said: ‘There’s a procedure for this, Megan. Information gets escalated –’
‘Thanks Alan, but as you pointed out, I’ve switched the power off. And from what I’ve seen in this company, escalation equals delays. Each layer of bureaucracy adds or subtracts words until they’re sure their own ass is covered. We can’t afford that right now and I don’t have the time or inclination to read between the lines. I don’t even have the light to read between the lines.’ She pointed to the dead ceiling lights. ‘So no long convoluted email chains, please. I want it straight, even if it stings for some in this room. Even if it stings for me.’
Kevin held up two palms, as if to placate her. ‘I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Megan. We don’t even kno
w what this is.’ He started counting off on his fingers. ‘It could be targeted phishing, it could be faulty code, it could be –’
‘Stop, please.’ Megan knew she was cutting these two men off a lot, and maybe she came off as a ball-breaking bitch. But neither of them knew about the photo or Kovac. Nevertheless, she sought to start with common ground. ‘I completely agree. We don’t know how yet, and there’s a temptation to get into that. But I’m asking the room to come at it from the result, not the cause. I’m asking what. Let’s assume they’ve stolen everything we have. Let’s treat that as a given. Now, out of everything they’ve stolen, what can they open? What can they share, what can they shame us with? In other words, what can they hold over us?’
She waited. A few people started exchanging murmured thoughts in pairs.
A start.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘So you can all talk. This is a ransom attack, I know that much. So you tell me, what’s going to be in the newspapers tomorrow? What’s going to be on social media, on TV? I want you to write it on a piece of paper with your name and role at the top. Then you give it to Nix here on your way out.’ The exchanging of ideas had grown louder, and Megan had raised her voice to compete with it. She wasn’t expecting questions. She was expecting everyone to get to work. But one hand went up – a heavyset woman in her late twenties in the outer reaches of the status galaxy. ‘Yep, shoot,’ Megan said, pointing.
‘I know you don’t want “how”, but what about “who”?’
Everyone went quiet and turned to look at her – even Alan and Kevin. There was confusion for a moment, until everyone sorted through her grammar and her meaning registered.
‘I’m sorry, you know who did this to us?’ Megan asked skeptically.
‘I think so.’
