Published by
Lightning Books Ltd
Imprint of EyeStorm Media
312 Uxbridge Road
Rickmansworth
Hertfordshire
WD3 8YL
www.lightning-books.com
First edition 2017
Copyright © Antony Johnston 2017
Cover design by Ifan Bates
Lyrics from “Scars Flown Proud” by Faith and the Muse © Monica Richards/Elyrian Music
Lyrics from “Abandoned” by Straylight © Antony Johnston
All lyrics used with permission.
All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without permission of the publisher.
Antony Johnston has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
ISBN 9781785630613
For Bill, Brenda, Percy, and Gwen
Contents
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1
He wasn’t really a mole. Not technically, and that’s how he justified it to himself.
Of course, he didn’t have any real choice in the matter. Not if he wanted to keep his job, his career, his pension, his family…his life. And what would his wife say, if she knew? If she knew where the money to buy their new car, her new clothes, their evenings in fine restaurants, came from?
The same money that had landed him in this current mess.
What he was doing was definitely espionage, he couldn’t talk his way around that. But he wasn’t actually working for the Russians; not in the sense that people meant when they said, “There’s a mole in MI6,” in those classic stories of British public schoolboys growing up to betray their country. He didn’t work for an intelligence agency. Just another government man, punching his card and collecting his salary.
The only difference between him and anyone else on the project was that he was here, driving up a dark, tree-lined road in the middle of nowhere an hour before midnight, with a Toshiba SD card in his wallet. An SD card holding what were, technically, state secrets.
He wasn’t even getting paid for them. He’d already been paid, for the other thing, and that had gone about as badly as it could have, so now he owed them. It was only fair, the Russian had said when approaching him months ago, that he repay his debt. He couldn’t, of course. The money was spent. But the Russian expected that, anticipated it. People spend money when they have it. So the Russian would accept something else, instead. It wouldn’t cost him a penny.
But it had cost him more than enough sleepless nights. Tonight, he thought, tonight would be the last one. It had to be, didn’t it?
When the Russian first approached him, he’d asked if they could do the handovers at a café. Since coming here to work on the project he’d adopted a place in town as his regular lunchtime haunt. The sort of place guidebooks and low-budget travel programmes would prefix with “charming little”, gushing about “local flavour” and “authenticity”, oblivious to how being invaded by people from out of town — people like him — would chip away at that very same authenticity, until all that remained was a place where tourists went to take selfies and feel pleased with themselves for finding somewhere “so off the beaten path.”
He just liked their tea.
The Russian had called him a stupid amateur, and insisted they meet at a secluded car park atop a wooded hill just outside town instead. He’d noticed on previous visits there was no cellular signal up here. Perhaps that had something to do with it.
He pulled into the car park, stopped the car, and turned off the headlights. There were no street lamps out here, and the sudden darkness left him momentarily blind as his eyes adjusted to it. A sharp rapping on the driver’s window made him cry out in surprise. He still couldn’t see, but as he opened the door he smelled familiar sour notes of alcohol and cheap German cigarettes, and knew it was the Russian.
And who else would it be, anyway? Nobody knew he came here for these meetings. Nobody followed him. For the duration of the project he was living alone, in an apartment on the edge of town, and on the Russian’s advice had removed the complimentary GPS unit in his long-term rental car. On the way here tonight there had been one car that seemed to follow him from somewhere in town — he didn’t notice it until they were on the outskirts, but it had definitely been there for some time — until the car turned off before they crossed the river, going in a completely different direction. After that he’d checked the rear-view mirror every ten seconds for the rest of the journey, but saw nothing.
“Good evening, Comrade,” said the Russian, his accent as thick as the smoke he blew into the cool, dark air. “The stars are very fine tonight.” He was right. This far from town, the lack of light pollution meant you could see almost every star in the sky, right to the horizon.
He shook his head all the same. “Comrade? You do know the Soviet Union hasn’t existed for decades.”
The Russian looked back over his shoulder with a thin smile. “Yes, of course. Absolutely.” As usual, the Russian’s car was nowhere to be seen. Either he parked it elsewhere, or he walked all the way here from town. Both seemed plausible.
He took the Toshiba card from his coat pocket and offered it to the Russian. The card itself held everything incriminating; if anyone looked at the mini-tablet it came from, all they’d find were photos of his wife and family, and an almost complete collection of Chris Rea music. He was just missing a couple of the early albums. One of the project coders had offered to ‘torrent’ them for him, which he knew was some kind of illegal internet thing, but that sounded too risky, considering what he was doing. The thought of his family made him protective and defiant, so as the Russian pocketed the memory card he took a deep breath and said, “I think now you’ve had enough.”
“Excuse me, what?” the Russian frowned.
“I said, I think you’ve had enough from me. I can’t keep doing this, someone is going to notice eventually. It’s amazing I haven’t been caught already.”
“You owe us. And your debt is not yet repaid.”
“It must be,” he protested. “The project will be finished in a few weeks, you must have enough by now.”
The Russian took a slow step towards him. He backed up against the car as the Russian held up the memory card between them. “I gave you many of these. You will fill them all, and then maybe we have had enough.”
“You, you can’t threaten me,” he stammered, “I’m your, your only source, I know that. Without me, you’ve got nothing.”
The Russian turned the card over in his fingers, its metal contacts gleaming in the starlight. “And without this, you are worth nothing…except perhaps the life insurance for your wife and children.” The Russian leaned forward, snorting sour breath into his face, and something hard pressed against his chest, something lodged under the Russian’s ill-fitting sport coat. He closed his eyes, trying not to think about what it was.
Something clicked. The Russian stepped back.
Nothing happened. He opened his eyes to see the Russian was holding the car door open for
him. “You need rest. Go and have a good night’s sleep. I will see you here again in three days.”
He slid back inside the car and let the Russian close the door with a flick of his wrist. It started on the second attempt, and he drove away, back down the hill, not looking back. He didn’t want to see the Russian watching him in the rear-view mirror, didn’t want to imagine the hint of a smile on the man’s face.
Just a few more weeks, he told himself. You’ve been doing it for months. A few more weeks and it would be over. The debt would be paid, and everything would go back to normal, because he only had this one thing to do, because he wasn’t actually a Russian agent or mole.
Not technically.
2
“And what are your opinions on cryptographic mechanisms expressly designed to deny visibility to third parties, such as law-enforcement agencies?”
She caught a flicker of interest in the eyes of the casually-dressed young man sitting on the other side of the interview desk, and knew she finally had his attention. That was a good development for Miss Jane White, who’d asked the question, because so far the interview hadn’t been going her way. Despite the cool, fully air-conditioned ambience of the room, she felt the back of her neck begin to warm, and pinpricks of sweat rose on her body. The interview room itself was spartan and anonymous, a deliberate choice to deny the candidate an opportunity to form too many ideas of whom, exactly, he was being interviewed by. The company Miss White worked for had never been stated, not even when Rob Carter, the young man sitting opposite her, had entered the room.
The job posting was itself obscure: “Elite coders, interesting work, well paid.” It barely read like a call for applicants. To further the point, they hadn’t posted it on the usual job sites, where CVs of the eternally hopeful masses piled up by the thousands, and algorithms seemed convinced that every listing that merely contained the word ‘computer’ was The Perfect Opportunity for the large subset of those masses who had the word ‘computer’ anywhere in their CV. No, Miss White had been very careful about where this job could be seen. Hacker board communities, unlisted IRC channels, anarchist email lists. Places that didn’t advertise themselves, that you had to know to look for, that trolled newbies mercilessly until they proved their skills. Places that would ensure the people who responded, applied, and ultimately walked through the plain glass door of this red brick King’s Cross building, waited in the distinctly logo-less lobby, glanced hopefully down the receptionist’s blouse as she gave them directions, climbed the breezeblock stairs and, finally, entered this very room were exactly the kind of people Miss White wanted to see.
Curious. Driven. Excited by the prospect of clandestine work, hidden corridors of power, the potential to change the world.
Rob Carter ticked every one of those boxes, and more besides. Miss White (whose hair matched her name, her contrasting brown eyes conveniently focusing the young man’s attention away from the rest of her face) had hoped all along he’d apply for the post. In fact, the moment Carter made contact, she rejected every other applicant and stopped answering further enquiries. Now here she was, opposite the very man she’d wanted to see, trying to get him to open up.
She fumbled with her pen, waiting for him to answer. If she fucked this up, her boss would be furious.
The interview had begun in a fairly standard fashion. They’d gone over his CV, even though Miss White had read it a dozen times, just to be absolutely sure he wasn’t bullshitting about his talents and achievements. His self-taught coding skills, the game app he made while still at school, the trouble he’d got into for hacking his sixth form college’s system and altering coursework grades. Dropping out of uni when he realised he already knew everything on the Comp Sci syllabus. Contracting on and off for game studios, contributing to open-source projects that focused on cryptography and zero-day exploits.
What he hadn’t talked about yet — what Miss White was so keen to steer the conversation towards — were the projects that weren’t so open. Carter had a strange habit of taking holidays in places with well established hacktivist communities, who then coincidentally released impressive new exploits and tech demos in the days after he moved on. That, ultimately, was all she cared about.
Carter narrowed his eyes. “So is that what you’re doing here? Building stuff the law can’t snoop on?”
“The balance between security and privacy,” said Miss White, raising an eyebrow, “is a question everyone in the community must wrestle with these days. On which side do you fall?”
He replied with a lopsided smile. “Whichever side pays better.”
Now she knew he was interested. Giles, her boss, had suggested she try to keep Carter’s interest through less subtle means — “How about a tight blouse and a push-up bra?” — but that wouldn’t hold for more than a few minutes. True, the hacker community was still overwhelmingly male, not to mention socially awkward. And Carter was better-looking than many coders she’d known, meaning he probably had less trouble with women, and maybe figured he stood a chance with Miss White. Truth be told, and under different circumstances, he probably wasn’t wrong. Get a few double vodkas down her on the dancefloor of some dark subterranean club, and she wouldn’t turn her back on him.
But in an age where eight-year-old kids knew where to find swathes of free online pornography, a flash of skin wouldn’t keep Carter’s attention for long. To really get him interested, you had to talk hacks. Dangerous, semi-legal hacks.
Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips, and her voice cracked a little. “Let’s try a little thought experiment, then. Say a corporation is developing a new network protocol, and we’d like to see it. We know the identity of the project’s deputy lead, and we have his home address. An inside source has also given us the specs of their central server, with several undisclosed script vulnerabilities. What’s your attack vector?”
Carter smiled. “Holy shit, are you a front for the Chinese?”
Miss White half-smiled in reply. Enough to insinuate, not enough to confirm. She repeated, “What’s your vector of choice?”
Carter leaned back and folded his arms. “Nah. If you know who I am, you know what I can do.”
“You’re evading the question, Mr Carter. Is that because it’s beyond you?”
“Fuck off,” he sneered. “You know it isn’t.”
Miss White looked down, made a note on her pad in silence, then looked back up at Carter. Waiting.
“Christ’s sake,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You go after the deputy lead. If you’ve got his ID and address, then you can get his phone number. He’s probably in a credit card dump on a pastebin somewhere, so you match him up on that, and there’s your new angle. Spend half an hour on the phone to Amazon to get into his account, use whatever you find there to crack his email, boom. Or maybe he doesn’t bother to shred, so you dig through his wheelie bin and get the card from there. Same difference.”
“Half an hour on the phone?”
Carter imitated a distressed customer. “Oh no, my daughter made an account for me, and now I can’t remember my password. But I can give you my date of birth, address, phone number, credit card number, can you just give me a new password so I can buy her a birthday present, pleeeeease?”
Miss White smiled despite herself. “Fair enough. But this is all social engineering. Why not go straight for the corporate server?”
“Waste of time, it’s probably done up like Fort Knox. Get into his email first, you’re bound to find something on it. Everyone slips up, uses their personal email for company stuff. Why spend weeks trying to hack it when you can just walk in with the password?”
“So what you’re telling me is that you’re just a con man, not a real hacker.”
Carter’s forehead reddened slightly, and a muscle in his neck twitched. “They’re the same thing,” he said through gritted teeth. “And you still have to know what to look for. If you do
n’t know what goes where, you’re just running around breaking shit and setting off alarms. I’m not a bazooka, I’m a sniper bullet. I get in, locate the target, and get out without them even knowing they’ve been buzzed.”
Miss White shrugged casually. “But you’re not skilled enough to do the same with the script vulnerabilities? You’re not familiar with ZFlood, or MaXrIoT, or Bunker_Stalker?”
“Of course I’m familiar with them,” Carter snapped. “I wrote a couple of hundred lines in ZF 1.0, for God’s sake, then did three bug fix releases solo. And I used Bunker on the DGT, because I was buggered if I was going all the way to Belgium just to grab a bunch of contract records.”
Miss White put down her pen and stood up. “There you go,” she said.
The door opened behind Carter. He turned, startled, as two broad-shouldered men in grey suits entered. Shocked and confused, he looked back at Miss White, but she was already leaving the room, sliding out of sight behind the security officers who’d been waiting to arrest him as soon as he admitted to hacking the EU Directorate-General for Trade in Brussels.
She shoved open the ladies’ bathroom door and let it close behind her, shutting out the fading sounds of Rob Carter insulting her, her parents, her presumed sexual orientation, and anything else his rage could muster. She collapsed back against the door, short of breath, her head spinning as she threw the wig on the floor to reveal her dark hair.
Then Brigitte Sharp staggered to the sink and leant on it with all her weight, forcing her arms to keep her upright. She stared at the mirror, trying to work out what looked wrong, then remembered she was wearing coloured contacts as well. Her hands trembling, she slowly squeezed them out of her eyes and let them fall into the sink.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, Dr Nayar was shouting something at her. Something about her feet, the floor…
She kicked off the high heels, part of her Miss White disguise, and felt the cold, firm touch of the floor on her feet. Let her weight sink through her stomach and hips, down through her calves, her feet, into the floor. Let the world carry its own weight.
The Exphoria Code Page 1
