by Jon Evans
“I told you. We don’t know. We only have his password. Which is ‘chevalier’ incidentally. Think he fancies himself a knight? Or he’s hoping for a gong? He’s got a British passport too if I recall.”
“If you have his password, why can’t you read his files?” Estelle asks.
“Because they’re paranoid bastards, aren’t they? They use SecurID tags. Little keychain things that generate a new six-digit number every minute. In sync with their server doing the same thing. You have to enter both his password and his current SecurID number to log in as him. Or any of the other top management.”
“Fucking hell,” Angus shakes his head. “We break into their office and plant bugs and we still don’t have their passwords?”
“We’ve got their home addresses,” Estelle says. “That’s a start. But we wanted their details, schedules, security plans.”
“What I wanted was culpable evidence,” Angus says. “Not that I expect the police would actually arrest anyone from a major company. But if we could create litigation risk for them, that would weigh heavily on their share price.”
“You sound like you’re planning a takeover,” Danielle says.
Angus nods. “If we had the money we would. Take it over and shut it down. Easiest solution. But driving them bankrupt works just as well.”
“Listen,” Keiran says, “I did find something interesting.”
They look at him.
“There’s a stack of encrypted documents on their network server, in a directory called ‘Project Cinnamon’. And not your standard shite Microsoft password protection. Serious public-key encryption.”
“Can you crack the codes?” Danielle asks.
Keiran half-laughs. “No way. Your National Security Agency couldn’t decrypt this if you gave them a decade. These files are secure. That is, until someone on one of our bugged computers reads them. When they enter the pass phrase, our lovely little bugs will remember every word they type.”
“It could be weeks before anyone reads those files,” Angus says. “Months.”
Keiran nods. “A lot of hacking is waiting.”
“We don’t have that kind of time. What about their email? That’s what we wanted most. Can we read that?”
Keiran sighs. He doesn’t like being the bearer of bad news. “Sorry. The Exchange database file is encrypted. Not like Project Cinnamon, but we’d need a SecurID code, again, to read a given person’s mail. Or root access to read everyone’s.”
“Root access,” Laurent repeats. “Who has that?”
“Gendrault, presumably. The CIO, definitely.”
“CIO?” Estelle asks.
“Chief Information Officer,” Keiran says. “Or CTO, Chief Technical Officer. I don’t know the French equivalent. Geek in chief, essentially. We have his password too. And he must be easier to get to than Gendrault. If we can get our hands on the CTO’s SecurID for a minute…” Keiran lets his voice trail off into pregnant space.
After a moment Laurent smiles. “My friend, you are thinking far too small.”
Keiran looks at him quizzically. “Not something I’m often accused of. How so?”
“The CTO’s little security device would maybe be useful. But not as useful as the CTO himself. It will be he who set up their security, no? He will know where all the encrypted bodies are buried. He must. It’s his job to keep them safe.”
“Sure,” Keiran says, “but even root access won’t let us decrypt those files, and I don’t think he’s likely to up and tell us the pass phrases.”
“That, mon ami,” Laurent says, “is where I disagree.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Estelle asks Danielle.
Danielle doesn’t know what to think. On the one hand, it’s Laurent’s idea, she doesn’t want to say anything against it, but on the other – “It seems so…drastic. Breaking into their office is one thing, but this…”
Estelle nods. “Keiran?”
Keiran shrugs. “It’s the logical extreme of social engineering. I’m sure it will be very effective. I want nothing to do with it.”
“We won’t know what you need to know,” Angus says. “You’ll need to be there.”
“Angus. Mate. I agreed to help you, and you agreed –”
“I know what I agreed. We need you to be there. You won’t have to do anything but ask questions.”
Keiran shakes his head. “I don’t like it.”
“I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you to be there.”
Keiran doesn’t say anything.
“Angus didn’t want to be in that parking garage,” Estelle says quietly.
“Fuck,” Keiran says. “What are you two, a double act? All right. But this is the end. No more. I use whatever you get from this, find whatever I can, and then I’m done, I go home, and, no offense, but as far as I’m concerned, we never see each other again except maybe to hoist a few pints and talk football. Am I being perfectly clear?”
Angus nods. “Transparent.”
The apartment falls silent for a moment.
“I don’t like it either,” Angus says. “But it’s effective. And this is war. And this man’s not bloody innocent. Not with his job. At best he’s wilfully ignorant.”
Estelle says, “This is extreme.”
Angus looks at her, taken aback. “Are you saying we shouldn’t do it?”
“No. I’m saying this is extreme. What if something goes wrong?”
“If you actually do this,” Keiran says darkly, “and something goes wrong, we’re all behind bars till our teeth fall out.”
Estelle nods her acknowledgment of this truth, and pauses, visibly deliberating. Danielle looks at her, hoping that she will say she is opposed to Laurent’s suggestion. Then Danielle won’t have to decide whether she wants to fight the idea or not. Estelle’s opposition will effectively be a veto. And surely gentle Estelle will say no to something this extreme.
“This is war,” she says. “Think about Jayalitha. Not just that they murdered her, and murdered her family, but remember why. She knew something. She found out something important, something that scared them so much they had to kill her. We have to find it too. We can’t afford the luxury of being squeamish. We’re the only hope of thousands of dying children. I wish there was some other way, but there isn’t. We have to do this.”
* * *
Their Paris apartment is near the eastern edge of the 11th arrondissement, working-class Paris, half blue-collar whites, half African immigrants, both maintaining an uneasy truce that consists largely of staying out of one another’s way. Danielle loves it fiercely. She loves the smell of boulangeries, the buzzing Wednesday and Saturday markets held along the wide median of Boulevard Charonne, the galleries and statues and architectural treasures around every corner, the quiet rubber-wheeled Metro and the glorious Art Deco signs that indicate its stations, the effortless style of French women, even though they always make her feel frumpy. She even speaks a little of the language, thanks to America’s East Coast upper-class quirk of studying French rather than far-more-useful Spanish in high school.
She had been to Paris before, as a backpacker, and liked it well enough but was frustrated by crowded hostels, rude French service, long lines at the tourist-soaked Louvre and Eiffel Tower and other obligatory tourist stops. She thought it overhyped and overcrowded. But here, away from the theme-park city center, she understands that living in Paris, more than anywhere else in the world, means living surrounded by beauty. It already feels almost like home.
Two days after the La Défense protest, Danielle and Laurent leave their apartment for what starts as a short walk and turns into an epic journey. To the vast roundabout of the Bastille, then along Rue Rivoli, past chocolatiers and creperies and music stores and smoky little bars, until they reach the Gothic majesty of Hotel de Ville. There they cross the Seine onto Ile de la Cité, pass Notre Dame, and continue into the Latin Quarter, Danielle’s favourite district, between the Seine and the Sorbonne
, full of students, artists, bookstores and cinemas. After a long walk through the Jardins du Luxembourg they continue west along the Seine. Danielle feels like she is walking in a movie set, surrounded as she is by vast architectural wonders: the Eiffel Tower perching spiderlike ahead, the Musee d’Orsay and Les Invalides to her left, the Louvre and the Tuileries to her right, and the dark Seine coursing between them as it has for centuries. Since setting out she and Laurent have hardly talked, only walked companionably, sometimes hand in hand, in a silence which she knows she must eventually break.
Danielle takes a deep breath and says, “Laurent?”
Laurent looks at her.
“Your plan? I don’t know about it. I just don’t know.”
He nods, slowly. “I could sense your hesitation.”
“It’s not that I don’t think it will work. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.”
“It’s the wrong thing,” he says. “But less wrong than doing nothing.”
“There has to be some other way.”
“There probably is. But the alternatives are slow. Children are dying, Danielle. We don’t have the luxury of time.”
“Then…” She hesitates, knowing she is about to take the most cowardly road. But she can’t abide any of the alternatives. “Then I don’t want to be there. I’m sorry. I just, I can’t, I don’t have the stomach for it. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t want to be involved.”
Laurent nods again, thoughtfully, as they walk past the gleaming dome of Les Invalides, Napoleon’s tomb. “Let’s take a little detour,” he suggests.
He leads her halfway to Les Invalides, then veers left, to the Musee Rodin. The museum itself is expensive, but entry to the gardens is only one euro. Near the entrance, above a field of gravel, a vast iron sculpture looms. Danielle recognizes it. Rodin’s masterpiece, the Gates of Hell. Two iron gates, in which tortured human forms lie half-suspended. Above them, a man sits with his head resting on his fist, contemplating the world. The Thinker. The larger, more famous version of that statue is some fifty feet behind them, but that piece was only a study for this masterwork.
“You have to come,” Laurent says.
“What?” Danielle asks.
“You have to join us for this. I’m sorry. I don’t want to demand. But I have to. You’re…” He hesitates.
“What?”
“I don’t yet really believe in your commitment,” he says finally, not meeting her gaze, his voice low and rasping. “To us or to me. There. I’ve said it. I feel like you might drop us, drop me, and go back to New York at any moment. I ‘m not sure you want to be here. I’m not sure you want to be with me. I need you to be present for this so I know I can believe in you.”
“I –” Danielle stares at him. She is appalled by his demand, but she also feels horribly guilty, that she has been so distant, allowed Laurent to grow insecure, to doubt her. She wants to rush to comfort him.
“I love you,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere. You understand that?” She grabs him, pulls his head down to her, kisses him roughly. “You can believe in me.”
He smiles, but wanly. “And I love you. But can I believe in your commitment? Not just to us, but our cause? Fighting for a better world, whatever the cost, whatever the consequences for ourselves? Because if you can’t believe in that –”
He leaves it unsaid.
“I do believe,” she says.
“Whatever the cost? Whatever the consequences?”
“What you’re talking about makes us no better than them.”
“I know. That’s what I mean. We disgrace ourselves by even talking about it. Part of the cost I’m talking about isn’t capture or jail. The cost is having to do awful things.” He gestures at the Gates of Hell. “We don’t have the luxury of only sitting and thinking. We have to go through those gates. And if you believe what we’re doing is right, you have to join me.”
She looks at him, realizes she is softly shaking her head, makes herself stop.
“You’re willing to let it happen, as long as you’re not there,” Laurent says. “You just said so. But I’m sorry. That’s not good enough.”
Danielle closes her eyes. She thinks of the children with warped faces and deformed limbs in that village near Kishkinda, of their bright eyes. She thinks of her hopes for the protest, how she thought it might change the world, and of her sickened relief when it ended.
“All right,” she decides.
“You’re sure? You’re certain?”
She nods slowly. She feels his fingers on his chin, turning it up towards him. He kisses her. She realizes she is crying, and she presses herself into Laurent’s iron arms, leaning against his unyielding solidity, trying to melt into him, letting his kisses take her doubt away.
* * *
Jack Campbell, Chief Technical Officer at Kishkinda SNC, is surprisingly easy to kidnap. His modern, minimalist fourth-floor apartment is in a building with security cameras and electronic locks; but he is single, and drinks heavily on weekends, and is all too eager to join a tiny but very pretty American girl with purple-streaked hair and black velvet gloves for a nightcap at her home. He is too drunk to be suspicious when his new friend ‘accidentally’ gives the taxi the wrong address, then leads him on a five-minute walk through the dark alleys with which the 11th arrondissement is replete.
Campbell is so drunk he sways and staggers as he walks. His first hint that all is not well comes when a masked and gloved Laurent appears out of a shadowed nook and knocks him dazed and sprawling with a single punch to the solar plexus. By the time Campbell has any idea that this is more than a simple mugging, he is handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged, and in the back of a rental Citroen, seated between Estelle and Laurent.
Angus drives. Campbell moans through his gag a little at first, but a few elbows to the gut from Laurent cure him of that habit in a hurry. Danielle sits in the passenger seat, eyes wide, heart racing. Everyone else seems cool and matter-of-fact, professionals at work, but she is terrified. She is in the midst of committing a serious crime. They have beaten and abducted a man. And there may be worse to come. Danielle hasn’t done anything herself, won’t do anything, but she doubts that will mean much to the authorities, going along will be seen as conspiracy, almost as bad as committing the crime herself. She has somehow, without doing anything other than following her heart, become a criminal. She supposes she was already that when they broke into Kishkinda’s offices, but that felt more like a college prank than a violation of the law. This is different. They have hurt this man already. This is violent crime.
She doesn’t understand how Angus can drive so coolly. Every car they see looks at first like a police car, every pedestrian seems to be staring suspiciously at them. She cannot even imagine what she would do if the police were to stop them now. Would she panic and crumble? Or would she be calmly alert until the crisis passed? Except it wouldn’t pass. If the police stop them now, Danielle’s life is for all intents and purposes over.
Chapter 21
No one is in the alley behind their building, or seems to be watching, as Angus and Laurent hustle Campbell out of the car, into the back stairs and up to the apartment. Even an insomniacal nosy neighbour would not see enough to provoke a phone call to the police. Or so Danielle hopes. She follows the men upstairs as Estelle parks the car. When she enters the apartment she feels a little bit better. They are safer now. Discovery is unlikely. They still have to get him out of here, when they are finished, but at least they can pick and choose their own time to do so.
They sit Campbell down at the kitchen table, his hands still trussed behind his back, a dark scarf still wound around his eyes, the ball gag purchased at a sex-toy shop still filling his mouth. He makes a low noise deep in his throat as Laurent expertly ties the chain of his handcuffs to the back of the chair and produces their victim’s keychain, anchored by a small black lozenge with the SecurID logo and a liquid-crystal screen that displays six numbers. Laurent drops the lozenge in
front of Keiran, who sits at the table’s opposite corner, laptop before him, looking like he has eaten, and swallowed, something disgusting. After a moment Keiran types the SecurID number into his laptop.
“Listen,” Angus says in a harsh whisper. “We’re going to ask you some questions. If you answer them fully and truthfully, you will not be hurt. Understand?”
Campbell doesn’t move.
“Understand?”
Campbell nods. Laurent unclips and removes the gag.
“What the fuck is this?” Campbell demands, his voice rising into a shout, his words slurred. Laurent quickly pinches his nostrils shut and reapplies the gag as Campbell breathes in.
“Marvellous,” Keiran says. “Bloody excellent. Our subject is too drunk to think. Well done. Full marks.”
“Sorry,” Estelle says. “He was already half kettled by the time I walked in.”
“I’ll sober him up,” Laurent says.
Keiran snorts. “I don’t think black coffee is going to do the trick.”
Laurent takes Campbell’s nose firmly between his thumb and forefinger and gives it an abrupt, forceful twist. There is an audible snapping sound. The strangled remains of a scream escape Campbell’s gagged mouth. He writhes so violently that Angus has to lean on his chair to prevent him from falling over, and blood begins to pour from his nose. The other four people in the room stare aghast at Laurent.
“Bring a towel,” he says to Danielle. “Move! We don’t want his DNA everywhere.”
Moving numbly, she obeys. He presses the towel to Campbell’s face, keeping the blood from seeping onto the table.
“Wait for the blood to clot,” Laurent says. “He’ll be sober enough by then.”
“Fucking hell,” Angus says quietly. He seems a little shaken. Estelle, standing next to him, does not.
Laurent looks at him. “If you don’t have the stomach for this we should stop now.”
“No,” Angus says. “No, I’m fine. That was…unexpected. That’s all.”
