by David Caris
Megan studied the woman’s face and marveled at her gumption. She could’ve spoken to Megan afterward. She could’ve watered down her promise. Instead, she was putting everything on the line. Megan admired that – and found it deeply suspicious.
She pointed out through the glass, to an empty conference room. ‘We’ll talk in there. Everyone else, you know what to do. “What”, so I know what I’m going to be fronting the press about tomorrow. Is all our sensitive data one hundred percent encrypted? You let me know via Nix every time you find something that isn’t. After that’s done, it’s a case of return to battle stations for as long as you’re willing tonight.’ No one was listening. She clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. ‘We’ll run the Cyber Incident Response Plan from 5:00 p.m.. Re-route our traffic, filter, block, work your magic. Then it’s the steps in the plan. Survey, limit, record, and record by hand. You stop at Step 3. No Step 4. You do not notify the authorities. And no Step 5, either. No notifying affected individuals. Nobody speaks for the company but me at those two levels.’
Megan led the woman with the gumption through into the conference room and pressed record on a small dictaphone. She offered her a chair, but she waved her hands in refusal. ‘No, I have a herniation in my back. L5/S1. Right at the base here.’ She twisted and pointed.
‘I take it that’s painful,’ Megan said.
‘When I sit it is. And when I lie down. And often when I’m standing. But aside from that, no.’
Megan couldn’t tell if she was joking.
‘They found it in a scan. Computers. MRI. It’s amazing what you can find in all the noise when you know the signal you’re after, and when you have the technology to search for it. Herniations, lesions, cancers… All just sitting on the inside, doing the wrong thing, waiting to destroy you.’ She laughed as if to say “oh well”.
‘I’ll stand as well then. You seemed pretty confident back in there. Is there something you know that I don’t?’
‘Well, I’m good with computers. People look at me and they assume because I’m female that I can’t code. But it’s female coders you really have to watch out for. Coding is just like a foreign language, and nobody thinks it’s strange when a woman gets better at French…’ She rolled her eyes, then frowned. ‘What was the question again?’
Megan felt her heart sink.
A loony tune, and she’d just given the woman a freaking one-on-one.
‘I was enquiring as to the source of your confidence,’ Megan said without much hope.
‘Oh, that’s easy. My boyfriend. My confidence comes from my boyfriend.’
‘O… kay. I’m on kind of a deadline here, so let’s… who did this to us?’
‘I can get their addresses. Aurelius. The team of coders I worked with… It’s a bad name for accounting software, I know. It sounds more like some secret surveillance program, right? In a movie or something.’
‘Aurelius is accounting software? Used in this company?’
‘It’s only used in this company. That’s how I know it’s us.’ She took out her phone sheepishly. ‘Don’t bite my head off, but it’s still turned on. I’ve reached out to just about everyone I know. I haven’t said what’s happening here, but they’re all fine. The whole world is fine, except us. And the only software we have in this company which isn’t used by other companies is Aurelius. You get where I’m heading with this?’
For the first time in the conversation, Megan did.
‘We built it custom, for our needs. We’re in so many different industries here at Curzon, none of the generic accounting software on the market comes close to doing everything we want. It does some of it, but then it falls flat on its face with other things, like the new IaaS data center and our efforts to get market share in that space for example. It was just easier to build it to Curzon’s exact specifications, so that’s what we did. We bought out a small company, took their years of hard work, and bent it into a shape that worked for us.’
‘There were five of you working on this?’
‘Right. Me and four men. Two of them English, two of them French. The Frenchmen are Paul Kante and Jules Gasly, and the Brits are –’
Megan held up her hand in a stop gesture as she scribbled down the names. ‘Are you sure you’re happy to go on the record with this?’
‘Of course. But it’s just your base level, everyday idiocy. He was a nice guy. I had nothing against him. I liked him. But you fired him because he was incompetent, and you totally should have. You just weren’t fast enough to stop this.’
‘Right. Who are we talking about?’
‘Jarrod Sims. You don’t remember him?’
‘Should I?’
‘I guess not. I just assumed that you signed off on all that kind of stuff… firing people. And he thinks you do. He hates you.’
‘I see. We’ll need to find Jarrod then.’
‘I was sleeping with him – just to get that out there, up front.’
Megan recoiled slightly.
‘Oh no, it’s not like that. I’m not saying he harassed me or forced me into anything. I’m just declaring an office romance before you find it. And that’s how I know where he lives, too. I go there sometimes, after too many drinks – you know how it is.’
‘Not really, no.’ Megan checked her watch. ‘I’ll need the three other names. And yours for that matter. And then I want you to start back at the beginning and tell my PA, Nixon Hsu, everything you can about Aurelius.’
‘I’m Samantha Griffin, but everyone calls me Griff.’
‘Nice to meet you, Samantha.’
‘Griff.’
‘Griff.’
‘Can I call you Meg?’
‘No.’ She went for the door, but Griff surprised her. ‘You need to get personal security.’
‘Because of Jarrod Sims? He’s violent?’
‘God no. Jarrod’s a coward.’
‘Then…?’
‘One of the other three. Krathwohl. Krathwohl’s always scared the living shit out of me.’
Chapter 6
Head down, hands in his pockets, Kovac walked back to the place he was renting. He used quiet side streets, which functioned like tunnels. There was no easy way to follow him without being seen.
No one was following him.
Letting himself in through the front door, he found a business card on the rug. It was stapled to a single A4 sheet. The sheet had a photo of the twelve-year-old boy Kovac had seen die earlier in the day. It wasn’t a mugshot. It was a picture of the boy attending what looked like some kind of youth event. He was smiling, his arms draped over his friends’ shoulders. Under this photo was a short bio and an appeal for information. It was a flyer, Kovac realized, presumably distributed right throughout Putney and Fulham.
He skimmed the business card stapled to this flyer. He expected it to belong to a cop, but it didn’t. It was for a woman working at the local council. Zoe Joannou-Clark. Her job title listed her as a “London Accommodation Pathfinder”.
Whatever the hell that was…
Kovac didn’t read the boy’s story. He didn’t want to know. The kid was dead and finding a killer wasn’t going to change that.
And anyway, Kovac thought, he had his own problems.
He threw the letter in the bin, the card still stapled to it, and took out his cell phone. He thought about turning it on but knew better than to risk it. He removed the SIM card and snapped it in two, before pocketing the MicroSD card that contained all his data. Then he smashed the phone on the corner of the kitchen bench.
Time for a fresh start…
Kovac checked his Glock and knife, and holstered both again. They slid perfectly into polymer molds, and he was glad he had insisted on custom-shaped Kydex. He paused at a mirror and checked for any hint of a print. But the shape of each weapon was erased by his belt, loose-fitting jeans and baggy shirt. No way to know he was carrying.
Kovac didn’t love appendix carry. Even with his midsection as flat as it had
been in a long time, he didn’t find appendix carry comfortable when sitting. On the plus side though, it did avoid conspicuous bumps. He turned 360 degrees, looking for any tell, but his little Glock was invisible. Important in a country like this one, where he didn’t have the right to carry a slingshot let alone a semi-automatic.
He made a final adjustment to his belt, shifting the holster a little off 12 o’clock, then grabbed his spare .38 magazine. He had designed the holster to take this extra magazine, and it too slid in perfectly. This gave him a total of thirteen rounds.
He checked in the mirror one last time, then let himself out the rear door.
He walked until he located a payphone, which took longer than expected. He ended up near Fulham Football Club’s home ground, Craven Cottage, where he finally spotted an old-fashioned black phonebooth.
He was expecting a phone from the dark ages, but found a modern digital payphone inside. A retrofit.
There was construction going on nearby and a generator just outside the booth, making it almost impossible to hear. Kovac didn’t like shutting himself in: it reduced his ability to monitor his surroundings. But he had no choice, not today. He stepped into the booth, secured the door, then punched in a sequence of numbers for a cell phone back in the States. To his relief, it started ringing.
The woman who moved Kovac’s money and the woman who handled his ID were one and the same. She went by the online handle “onethousandandonebytes”, and used a profile picture of a Middle Eastern fashion model with high cheekbones and piercing fox eyes. In reality, “onethousandandonebytes” was Bibi Dauguet, a rotund, Mauritian woman in her mid- to late-fifties with wiry, greying hair, a ruined hip and a tongue made sharp by chronic pain. Kovac had asked her to test Curzon’s systems for vulnerabilities, which meant there was an outside chance this hack was her doing.
‘What have you done to me?’ she asked in her thick, French accent when Kovac said hello. Her voice was so taut it was close to a wail. ‘John, John, John, it’s all over the news.’
Kovac put a finger in one ear to block out the generator and two construction workers shouting instructions to one another.
‘This isn’t our doing then?’
‘Pffft. No.’
‘Okay. Can we exploit it?’
‘No. You’re not listening. All this craziness, it’s exposed us. It’s exposed me.’
Kovac reminded himself not to buy into the panic: everything was dramatic with Bibi. And difficult. Kovac had known Bibi six and a half years but had only met her in person twice. The first time had been at the Colorado estate of a San Francisco logistics magnate. Kovac had been providing security while a contentious deal was finalized with Curzon. Everyone on that job had been exactly like Kovac. Male, ex-military, muscled. It was a good group, focused on the job, and quick to drink after the deal went through. The only one who didn’t belong was Bibi. She had been employed by the logistics magnate. She was the only female, the only employee over fifty, and all she had with her was a green backpack.
‘Bibi,’ Kovac said into the receiver, ‘you don’t get caught. You told me that yourself. And I believe it. I’ve seen what you can –’
‘That was before. This is different.’
Kovac took a deep breath. His past hit him in a series of images. Headshots, drownings, hangings, injections, car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, a forklift for one poor bastard… It was an endless parade of corpses, and all the bullshit about remembering faces was just that – bullshit. They were all lost to him, like he was seeing them through frosted glass.
And that was just fine.
Kovac didn’t need to see any clearer than that. He didn’t need a hundred ghosts in his bedroom every night.
The problem was, the faces weren’t lost to Curzon. Somewhere, there were files. Records, dates, names, photographs. Somewhere, there was a trove of data, and if it found its way into newspapers Kovac would be finished at every level. It would go beyond the psychological. There would be legal ramifications and a host of new enemies to contend with.
His mind shifted from offense to defense. ‘What do they have, Bibi?’
‘I told you. Everything. They have it all.’
‘You sure? From what I’ve read, it looks pretty amateurish. All the environmental –’
‘No, no, no. Don’t fall for it, John. That’s them waving their hands, saying “look over here”. But you must look beneath… they’re there. They’re in.’
‘Who’s in?’
‘I don’t know. Big. Like a government maybe. Like the military. This isn’t a person, it’s an army.’
Had Kovac just ruined Bibi Dauguet’s life?
He thought about the green backpack again. Bibi’s dedication to that bag had been noted by everyone on the Colorado job. She had never let it out of her sight, or even off her shoulder. Eventually, the mercenaries had started to bet on what was inside.
Before everyone went their separate ways, Bibi had emptied it. She had taken out three smartphones, two Lenovo laptops, a Galaxy tablet, a collection of USB sticks, and a ball of tangled cabling. She had lit a joint and asked Kovac to name a celebrity. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, with a smile, ‘why you must never take a nude selfie in your bathroom mirror.’
It had gone on all night: Kovac and the other men drinking and watching in awe as Bibi hacked sports stars, newscasters, musicians, even a senator. By the time they all rolled into bed around 4 a.m., everyone had known exactly why Bibi was at the estate. She had been to the virtual realm what they were to the physical. The best defense money could buy.
‘Why are there black SUVs outside my hotel, John? Tell me that.’
‘You’re at your hotel?’
The generator cut out and suddenly Bibi’s voice was all Kovac could hear. ‘And now I go through security, and the TSA agents, they don’t ask me to take out my laptop? The woman ahead of me, yes. The man after me, yes. But not me. I go straight through. Why do you think that is?’
Kovac knew why. Bibi was a person of interest. And whoever was interested in her didn’t want TSA agents spooking her.
With the generator off, it was quiet. Kovac heard birds in the park behind him and a roar from the nearby football stadium. He looked over and saw the stadium’s lights were on. It sat on the edge of the river, and he saw men hawking tickets and handing out magazines as people strolled in. Judging from the roar, they were latecomers.
He removed the finger from his free ear and took a little of the pressure off the phone receiver. ‘Where are you, Bibi? Which airport? Where are you headed?’
Bibi said something in French, which Kovac assumed was an insult. ‘I think, Kovac, we both know I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Can you see them, the agents?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘What do you need from me? How can I help? Talk to me, Bibi.’ If Kovac lost Bibi, he lost his ability to maneuver. He realized he had come to rely on her too much. It was a product of his never really believing he would need her.
Or did it go deeper than that?
Bibi had impressed him. So much so, he had wanted to depend on her. He had asked around after Colorado, and had discovered Bibi was a celebrity in her own right. She was famous within the Defcon crowd, and she worked out of Nevada for all but the coldest months of the year. Her fame stemmed from a long list of whitehat hacks, which she tweeted to the world at large.
Kovac had traveled to Nevada and tailed her, watching her enjoy her fame to the full. She went to VIP hacker events, hobbled round Airbnb mansion parties, posed with fans for selfies and took a perverse delight in toying with journos over expensive dinners. So long as someone else was picking up the tab, and so long as no one minded her being permanently stoned “for the pain”, Bibi was happy to play along.
Kovac had eventually come to see that it was all an elaborate cover. A hacker with bad intent posing as a hacker with good intent, to avoid scrutiny. Bibi was exploiting a key human mental bias: a desire for consistency. P
eople associated her with the battle against the dark web, then searched for evidence to support their conclusion. It happened subconsciously, and most people shied from the discomfort of contradictory evidence without even realizing they were doing it. Like all the best operatives, Bibi had found a way to hide in plain sight.
Kovac’s second meeting with Bibi had been an offer of employment. He had pocketed her for a rainy day, never mentioning her to Bishop, and never bothering with a redundancy. From that point forward, she was his get-out-of-jail-free card – a card he had needed in the wake of Japan.
‘They’re here. You have all your money, John. Get what you need in cash and get offline.’
‘Don’t hang up on me Bibi.’
Kovac watched the construction workers pack up. They looked as if they were in a rush, perhaps having been ordered onto another job. He opened the door on the booth and took a look around. The street felt a little quieter. ‘You’re at the airport now, right? Which airport, Bibi? McCarran?’
‘No.’
‘Reno?’
‘No.’
‘Boulder?’
‘John, stop it. It doesn’t matter. Focus. You can’t help me. They’re here at the gate.’
‘The FBI?’
‘I think so. Be smart, get offline, and for God’s sake don’t come here.’
As much as Kovac hated to admit it, Bibi was right. She was stateside, and there wasn’t anything he could do but listen as an FBI agent introduced himself. Kovac heard him ask Bibi to end her call and follow him. He explained he was going to need to cuff her once they passed through into the restricted area.
‘Shit.’ Kovac ended the call and exited the booth, and that was when he saw the man in the rumpled jacket.
Chapter 7
The man in the rumpled jacket wasn’t alone. Kovac could feel it. There was something else at play here.
The street had been busy when Kovac arrived and now it was emptying fast. It wasn’t just the departure of the construction workers, either. It was everyone. Even the area around the football stadium had fewer fans approaching.
Kovac set his sights on the stadium and started walking, using reflections in a few neighborhood windows to monitor his surroundings. The stadium sat at the end of an ordinary suburban street. It had the river behind it and a park off to the left.
