‘As I said, he’s not around right now, so I can’t ask him personally, but he’s always interested in new tech. I’m sure he’d be delighted.’
The keyboard was despatched the same day, addressed to the PA with a covering note reiterating what Sam had said on the phone. It was a backlit keyboard with the original logo removed and replaced by something Sam knocked up on her laptop. The result was an impressive-looking piece of kit, almost certainly preferable to whatever was already on Winter’s desk, but the most remarkable properties were out of sight.
As soon as the USB cable was connected, a hidden internal device inside – known as a Teensy HID – would install a program that allowed Sam to access the target computer. However, that was only half the payload: the keyboard also contained a microphone equipped with a mini SIM card for a pay-as-you-go account. It was audio-activated, so that if someone in the office was talking, it would dial a dedicated mobile, which would then record the call.
It should have given them eyes on Winter’s computer and ears on his conversations. Unfortunately, so far the bastard had never plugged the thing in.
Parlabane gets Sam to call again, ostensibly as a follow-up.
‘Hello, is that Clare? This is Tess Jones following up, from Vizion. Just checking if Mr Winter’s keyboard was delivered all right.’
‘Yes, it was. Thank you very much.’
‘And do you know is Mr Winter enjoying it?’
‘I’m afraid he hasn’t been in the office since it arrived. He is in China at the moment, but he’s due back next week.’
Four days later, Sam rings Parlabane to say that the keyboard is finally live.
She gets Winter’s login details for his office intranet, but annoyingly he is careful enough to use a different password for his email, so she can’t access his account independently via the web. She is still able to read his messages, but only while his computer is active, and that is proving a limited window. He shuts it down when he isn’t in the office, and he isn’t in the office much.
‘His security practices are sharp,’ she tells Parlabane. ‘He does everything I would do in terms of day-to-day protocols.’
‘Like a person with something to hide?’
‘Or a person who knows how to keep his stuff secret from people like us.’
‘You mean a person who knows how hackers work?’
‘It’s looking that way. I haven’t found any hacking tools but I wouldn’t expect him to keep them on an office machine, especially when the bastard is hardly in the office.’
Sam forwards as many emails as she has been able to copy, and Parlabane scans through them. In keeping with Winter’s general discretion, there is little that is candid, and nothing that would be compromising were it to be read by persons unknown. On this evidence, Winter is either straight as an arrow or extremely disciplined about compartmentalising his communications. Parlabane thinks of how he was led to a quiet corner away from CCTV cameras and asked to demonstrate an absence of recording equipment before being physically assaulted by this man. Thus he’s betting on the latter.
Adding insult to this particular injury is that he is now out of pocket nearly three hundred quid just to send the bastard a fancy keyboard that he never uses.
Eventually, however, the Teensy HID begins to deliver. The next day, Parlabane hears one side of a phone call in which it is clear from early on that the subject is Synergis.
‘Yeah, well, the share price has gone up because of this fucking article. How was I supposed to see that coming? Regardless, I still believe it’s going to be an extremely worthwhile asset to acquire.
‘Yes, I realise that. I thought Cruz was grandstanding. We all did: it’s how he operates. But it looks like he’s got something of substance behind his posturing for a change. This only makes it even more worthwhile getting in at the ground floor, and my concern has always been that the window is limited. Once the other shareholders decide the long-term returns are worth it, we’re locked out or priced out. But as you and I know, in this business, everything can change overnight.’
Parlabane takes another look through the emails, many of which now take on a markedly different resonance. Dozens of them are to a Mr Sunny Li of Sunstream Corp, and upon a second reading it is clear that the language in these is more neutral and its subjects cautiously concealed compared to Winter’s exchanges with other correspondents. It’s all ‘the opportunity’ and ‘this potential acquisition’; whereas the emails to Metal Box about the unit costs of a particular model do at least name the model and the prices of individual components.
In the emails to Li, if Parlabane makes the assumption that they are talking about Synergis, the picture changes dramatically.
Not being particularly familiar with Sunstream, Parlabane calls Agnieszka Savic for a more informed industry perspective, though he doesn’t disclose the reason for his interest.
‘Well, they’re legit these days,’ is her sardonic and less than reassuring overture.
‘From which I can infer that this was not always the case?’
‘Sunstream are a burgeoning force, a major player in the South-East Asian consumer electronics market: TVs, phones, laptops, tablets. But they’ve struggled to get a foothold in both the US and Europe, largely as a legacy of their origins. They were knock-off merchants, back when China was a Klondike for that kind of thing.’
‘You mean before international intellectual property laws were enforced?’
‘Yeah. Companies like Sunstream were the reason why those laws were being demanded. They just reverse-engineered from US and Japanese originals, and blithely sold their cheap rip-offs to the domestic market and beyond. They’ve cleaned up their act since those days, and discontinued all of the products that were cited in lawsuits, but it’s fair to say that in the west, people are still wary of doing business with them.’
Then she drops the hammer.
‘That’s probably why Neurosphere wouldn’t sell them Synergis.’
‘Sunstream tried to buy Synergis?’
‘That’s the rumour, anyway. People assumed Sunstream were only interested in getting the Shanghai manufacturing plant at a knockdown price, and would have closed Synergis without shedding a tear. However, there’s an alternative theory that they were principally interested in the brand, and that Neurosphere were even less happy about the implications of that than about them asset-stripping a division they long wanted rid of.’
Finally it starts to become clear. Winter is acting as a front for Sunstream to acquire Synergis at the second attempt, but has suffered a setback in that Cruz’s investors may not be so easily tempted by a short-term return if the long term is looking peachy.
How much keener might they be to sell were some act of industrial espionage to befall Cruz’s new project? As Winter told Li, in this business, everything can change overnight.
RAILROADED
I am hunched on my bed, working on creating a clone of the Gatekeeper client support website on my laptop. Normally I would get off on this, but it’s after midnight and I’m knackered after a full day at Urban Picnic.
My eyes are closing on me, and when they do I keep seeing sandwiches.
I decide I’ll wrap it for the night, and am about to shut down when a message from Zodiac pops up in the corner of my screen.
That wakes me up sharpish, sending a jolt of adrenaline right through me.
He doesn’t respond for a coup
le of minutes, then when he does, I shudder at the sight of the words.
I am terrified he is calling me out about Jack: letting me know he is aware I’ve got help, and that I have been keeping this from him. But then I remember about Cicatrix, and find myself wondering how many other hackers he has blackmailed, from Uninvited and beyond.
I go into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, because I know I’m not getting to sleep any time soon after what just happened. I look up at the clock on the wall, which reads 01.30. It is digital, but I can hear a ticking even so.
I am running out of time.
I should have seen this coming.
Jack told me how this Winter creep is in bed with some Chinese firm. Straight away I thought of Stonefish, the sly prick who lured me out into the open and pulled me into this nightmare. I’m not as clued-in as Juice when it comes to the stockmarket stuff, but this part seems simple enough: with the share price still rising, they must have decided they need to act before it gets too high.
So close but yet so far.
Most of what we need is in place. I stayed up late finishing my cloned website and this morning I tricked Nigel Holt, the buildings manager at Tricorn House, into downloading my hacked version of the Gatekeeper Entry Management software. I could make it sound like this part was really clever, but the real work was done when I stole the source code.
The big obstacle remains 2FA: the two-factor authentication system that sends a PIN to your mobile before you’re allowed to log into the Synergis network. If I can’t crack that, everything else I’ve acquired is worthless.
The clock keeps silently ticking, my time draining away.
I take a sip of my tea and glance down at the Evening Standard I retrieved from a bin on my walk home from picking up Lilly. The front-page headline is about a Tube strike. Desperate for a break from wrestling with the 2FA problem, my brain seizes upon a memory, but I find no respite there.
I recall my journey home on the day all of this started, when that girl Mia got on and I overheard her talking to her friend about Keisha.
I’ve been checking up on the news via my fake accounts on Facebook. She’s conscious again, but they kept her in intensive care for more than a week. Every time I think about her, I feel sick. I hated her so much, but I can’t forgive myself for what I did. I know what it is to be bullied by someone like her, but I also know what it is to have my life ripped apart by an anonymous figure on the internet, and there is no question which is worse.
Perhaps I deserve to go to jail: not for the RSGN hack, but for what I did to Keisha. Maybe that would be justice. But the problem is that Lilly is already being punished for Mum’s mistakes. She doesn’t deserve to suffer for my crimes too.
I scan the Standard front page, searching for details in case the strike is going to affect me. The tone is hysterical, acting like some Tube workers wanting better pay and conditions is going to turn London into the set for the next Mad Max movie.
That’s when I realise I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way. I’m seeking hacks and exploits, exploring possible technical solutions to get around the problem of 2FA. I’m forgetting my hacking fundamentals. The best way to acquire login credentials – be they a username, a password or a PIN – is to get some sucker to straight-out tell you.
ASPECT OF THE DEMON
Parlabane is standing opposite the reception desk at Tricorn House, taking a moment to run through the script in his head one last time. He is dressed in a suit in order to blend in. The only blokes turning up in this place wearing anything else during business hours are going to be carrying packages and requiring a signature.
He checks his watch. It is 1.40 p.m. He has timed it for when there is the highest traffic through the lobby, rendering him the most anonymous. He is nervous, though only slightly, but that’s because this isn’t show time. This is just a prelude, albeit still the first of several all-or-nothing moments.
He has done riskier things, but he has never done so much reconnaissance, so much research, so much technical preparation. He has never been in a position whereby the physical act of infiltration would be so simple. And yet he has never been so sure something feels wrong.
It’s not about the risk, he realises: it’s about the stakes. He has finally got his life back on track, and now he stands to lose everything. And what’s making it worse is the fear that he is on some kind of collision course with fate.
The act of trespass has come to define him. It played an inextricable part in building his career, and an inevitable part in almost ending it. It’s the aspect of himself he has most struggled to understand, probably because it is the aspect of himself that he most fears.
Despite his denials, he knows that Sam is right when she claims they are kindred spirits. They have the same addiction, the same demons. The buzz is in devising ways of sidestepping the most elaborate security measures, of coming at the target from a direction they didn’t anticipate. In Parlabane’s case this is often literal: that direction usually being the vertical. People thought that if their office was three floors up, they didn’t need locks on the windows.
But there are other ways in which he and Sam are alike. They each like to defend their dishonest practices as necessary guerrilla tactics against a mighty foe, but neither of them are conscientious freedom fighters, selflessly throwing themselves behind an altruistic cause. They are both outsiders who have often found it easier to unpick the locks and enter forbidden places than to walk into open rooms and feel like they belong.
The problem is that those forbidden places are always empty.
Parlabane is waved forward by a smiley but flustered young woman wearing roughly as much foundation as Joan of Arc would need for an open-casket funeral.
‘Good morning, welcome to Tricorn House,’ she says in a sing-song Cockney accent. ‘How can I help?’
‘It’s afternoon,’ Parlabane says with a smile, pitching for charming and reassuring. Instead she looks panicked, like this is something else she’s got wrong. He’s guessing first day. Shit.
‘Sorry. Good afternoon. Welcome to … I mean, how can I help?’
‘My name is John Finch. I’m doing some contracting work upstairs with Synergis. There should be a swipe card on the system for me.’
She looks blankly at him then glances at her computer screen, almost certainly consulting the list of pre-booked visitors.
‘Who is it you’re here to see?’
‘No, I’m a contractor. I started working here yesterday but there was a mix-up with the swipe cards. They told me I would be on the system when I came back in today, so if you just print me a new—’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t see your name. It was John Finch, you said?’
‘Yes, but I won’t be on the visitors list. I should be on the system for a new swipe card.’
She stares back with a look of gormless confusion. She doesn’t have a clue what he’s on about.
‘If you just tell me the name of who you’re here to see, I can give them a ring upstairs and …’
He needs to extricate himself from this exchange right now.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this call,’ he says, pulling his mobile from his pocket.
He retreats towards the seating area, as though seeking privacy. The last thing he wants is her calling Synergis, because no matter who she sp
eaks to, they won’t have heard of John Finch.
Fuck.
Sun Tzu said no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and it appears that nor does any degree of sophistication guarantee a contingency against contact with a numpty.
He could try again in a minute and hope for a different receptionist, but it’s not like the barbers where you can say you’ll wait for the one you prefer, and he can’t do anything that will make him memorable or draw attention to himself. He’ll have to come back later, when this numpty is hopefully not on duty.
He is about to head for the exit when his mobile does genuinely ring.
It is Lee Williams, calling from Broadwave.
‘Jack. Where are you?’
‘The City. Near Monument.’
‘Doing what?’
There is something testy in her tone, beyond the merely curious.
‘I’m working on something. I can’t really talk now.’
‘You’re supposed to be here at the office,’ she scolds. ‘Candace is in the building and we’ve got a meeting with her in twenty minutes.’
He gets hit with a full bucket of that forgotten-my-homework feeling, blindsiding him amid all of his other anxieties. He has been so preoccupied with what else needs to happen today that he has completely forgotten about Candace flying into town. Christ. This might lose him his job before anything else has even had time to go wrong.
‘I’m sorry, I should have called. I’m following a lead and something came up at short notice: an opportunity to pin down a very elusive source. I kind of got caught up in the chase and lost track of time.’
‘You need to get here, Jack. You’ve got eighteen minutes.’
‘Understood.’
Fuck again.
That meeting could take the rest of the day. He may not have the option to come back later. He needs to act now.
What would Sam do, he wonders.
She’d be someone else, and she’d do it on the phone.
The Last Hack Page 22
