by Andrew Lane
‘Good question.’ Calum slipped into the seat in front of the keyboard.
‘I have another good question.’
‘Yeah?’ Calum grunted distractedly.
‘Why do you have an alarm that tells you when someone’s trying to hack into a website that nobody in their right minds would want to hack into? What exactly are you trying to protect?’
Calum turned in his seat and locked gazes with Gecko. ‘Maybe there’s other stuff on that website,’ he said. ‘Hidden stuff that I keep there.’
Gecko shrugged. ‘You should use a safe deposit box, like normal people.’
Calum turned back to his screens and keyboard. His fingers flew across the keys. Gecko watched, entranced, as the various screens in front of them all started displaying different things: maps of the world with lines crossing back and forth, scrolling computer code, black and white images from security cameras, all kinds of things.
‘So who is it?’ he asked eventually. ‘The CIA? MI5? The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Horseshoe Crabs?’
Calum was frowning. ‘The IP address keeps bouncing around,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to track, but it seems to be coming from a wireless device just across the river.’ He pressed a few more keys. ‘St Catherine’s College of Art, library building,’ he said. ‘Fourth floor.’ His balled fist crashed down on his leg. ‘Damn it – if I report it to the police they’ll treat it as some kind of joke, but there’s no way I can get out there and check for myself!’
‘I could go,’ Gecko said, surprising himself.
Calum turned round to stare at him. ‘You’d do that? Why?’
Gecko shrugged. ‘Like you said: fourth floor. I know that building. Once I get across the river, there is a route that will take me all the way. I can look in through the windows without anyone noticing me.’
‘You’re not answering the question. You just told me how. What I want to know is: why?’
Gecko smiled. ‘Because it will be fun.’
Tara had downloaded all the web pages – text, pictures and hyperlinks – to her flash drive for later analysis, and for sending on to her unknown handler at Nemor Incorporated. Sitting in the library, alone in the study booths that lined one wall, she still had no idea why she was doing it, though. There was nothing at all unusual about the website. It showed a certain amount of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, as well as a good sense of design, but it was innocuous. Harmless.
Was it some kind of test, designed to see whether she would follow orders? Or was there something more to it, some hidden secret that she just hadn’t stumbled across yet?
On a whim, she checked the size of the directory on the flash drive where she had saved the files – and drew her breath in. The directory was much larger than it should have been, given the number of pictures that she’d downloaded. The pictures would have taken up most of the space – text took hardly any space at all – but based on the resolution of the images, the whole thing should have been only a couple of gigabytes. Not the eleven gigabytes eating up her flash drive.
There was something else there. Something hidden.
She was about to trawl through the various subdirectories one by one, looking for any file names that seemed out of place, when she realized she was being watched.
It was a tickle on the back of her neck, like a psychic breath of air on her skin. She didn’t know how she knew, but it was a certainty.
Without moving her head, she let her gaze roam around the deserted library area. Someone could have been hiding between the shelves of books, but that wasn’t the direction that the feeling was coming from. It was more towards the far side of the room – where the windows were. There wasn’t anywhere to hide there – it was an open area. That meant the watcher was somehow outside the window – like maybe a small remote-controlled drone or something!
Someone from Nemor Incorporated? It had to be. They were watching her, checking up on her for whatever purpose they had in mind!
A sudden flash of anger burst through her like a shock wave. What the hell did they think they were doing? She was a student for heaven’s sake! She had rights!
Part of her wanted to cross straight to the windows, fling them open and have a shouting match with whoever was out there, but another part of her – the more sensible part – had a better idea. She stretched her arms above her head theatrically, and checked her watch in a way that would be obvious from the other side of the room. She wanted to make it look as if she was taking a break. Leaving her tablet on the work surface in the study booth, having activated an app that would sound an alarm if anyone disturbed it, she got up and walked off towards where the vending machines were located.
From the vending machine in the lobby she bought a packet of crisps and a can of drink. Holding them, she walked back into the library, but instead of heading for her booth she moved rapidly down one of the aisles between the bookshelves, anger driving her to run as fast as she could. At the end she turned right and moved quickly along the ends of the shelves.
When she got to the last bookshelf, she was by the windows. Without hesitating – without even thinking – she climbed up on the windowsill. Slinging open the window, she stuck her head out and glanced sideways, along the line of windows.
She was right. Someone was crouched on the sill outside the fourth window along – just where he could observe the seat in which Tara had been sitting. His hands were clamped on the stonework of the building, stabilizing him. His clothes and hair were dark. He was just a silhouette against the sky.
‘Not content with spying on me electronically, you have to do it in person?’ she called. ‘You want to tell me just what you think you’re doing? What harm have I ever done you?’
The figure turned to look at her. It was just a kid: barely older than she was! His hair was long and shiny, and his eyes were the darkest, most soulful eyes she had ever seen.
‘I think you have got things the wrong way round,’ he said. His voice held a slight accent. ‘You have been spying on someone else.’
‘I have not,’ she said, but a sudden flash of guilt washed some of the anger away. What if this boy didn’t have anything to do with Nemor Incorporated? What if he was something to do with www.thelostworlds.com instead? But how could that be true? How could someone have traced her hacking and got here so fast? And why was he outside the window?
The boy looked at her hands. She realized that she was still holding the drink and the crisps.
‘Do you mind if I come in?’ he asked. ‘I could do with a bite to eat. All this running and climbing really builds up an appetite, you know?’
‘And what then? You arrest me for hacking? You report me to the college authorities?’
He shrugged: a smooth motion of his shoulders. ‘Not exactly. I think there is someone you need to meet.’
‘A friend of yours?’ she asked sarcastically.
The boy seemed to treat her question more seriously than it deserved.
‘Well,’ the boy said, ‘I think he is. I think he is going to be a friend to both of us.’
CHAPTER
four
The two of them stood side by side in the rackety lift that linked the ground floor of the warehouse to Calum’s apartment. Gecko could feel anger radiating from the girl standing beside him. He could have fried onions with the force of her emotion. She was furious – but there was something else, some other feeling hidden beneath the anger. Fear?
Just looking at this girl – Tara Flynn, she had said her name was – he could tell that she wasn’t built for free-running. Her muscle development was all wrong, and she slumped rather than stood upright. With posture like that he guessed she didn’t get much exercise. Her skin was pale as well, indicating that she didn’t get out in the sunlight very often. And she wore glasses, which would have thrown her depth perception off completely in the unlikely event that she’d try to jump from one rooftop to another. No, judging by the skill with which she’d been hitting her ke
yboard, he guessed she was one of those techno-zombies – internautas, as they were called in Brazil – that he kept seeing through windows of flats or office blocks at night – faces illuminated by the ghostly glow of LCD screens. If he’d tried to lead her across the rooftops, it would have ended with her splatting into the pavement at some speed.
The lift juddered to a halt and Gecko pulled the doors open. The two of them stepped out into a small hallway. There was a metal door ahead of them, set into brick, with a security-code pad beside it. Gecko typed in the code that Calum had given him earlier, and the door clicked open.
Tara glanced at Gecko. There was a scowl on her face. ‘This had better be worth it,’ she muttered.
‘Hey,’ he pointed out, ‘this wasn’t my idea. You’re the one who tried to break into the website.’
‘Websites are visible to anyone on the internet,’ she said defensively. ‘They’re effectively public property. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.’
‘Actually,’ Calum’s voice called from inside the apartment, ‘that’s like saying that because the outside walls of a building face on to the public streets then the entire building is public property. The logic doesn’t stand up to more than a few seconds’ scrutiny. It’s a fallacious argument.’
Tara’s scowl intensified. Grinning, Gecko led the way inside.
Calum was in his computer chair, facing the door. The ten screens behind him silhouetted him dramatically. Presumably that was intentional. Gecko thought it made him look like a villain in a James Bond movie.
‘It’s like Gecko here thinking that because my roof is accessible by jumping from a nearby building, that makes it all right to run across it,’ he went on. Gecko felt the grin slide off his face. ‘The technical term in that case is actually “trespassing”.’ He stared at Tara. ‘I’m not sure that “breaking and entering” covers what you did, but “electronic theft” probably does.’
‘I didn’t steal anything,’ Tara said defiantly.
‘You downloaded the entire contents of my website on to a USB drive.’ Calum’s voice didn’t have any obvious emotion in it, but Gecko could tell that behind the words there was some anger, but a lot of curiosity as well.
‘That wasn’t stealing – it was copying,’ Tara said defensively.
‘What made you do that? Were you doing it for money, or just for kicks?’
‘It wasn’t a what,’ Tara said. ‘It was a who.’
There was silence in the large room for a few moments while Calum seemed to consider her words. Abruptly he said: ‘Would you like a drink? There’s Coke in the fridge over in the kitchen area.’
‘It’s good stuff,’ Gecko confirmed.
‘Gecko, could you grab three bottles for us?’
Gecko was about to protest that he wasn’t a slave, but then he remembered the trouble Calum had getting around the room. The kid wasn’t going to be able to carry three bottles back from the kitchen area himself, not while hanging on to the ceiling straps.
As Gecko headed over towards the huge double-doored fridge that dominated the kitchen he heard Calum say, ‘Please – take a seat. You’re making the place look untidy. The sofa is comfortable. Just be careful of the broken glass.’
He heard Tara moving towards the sofa. She obviously glanced upward, because she said, ‘What happened to your skylight?’
‘Someone dropped in.’ Gecko turned his head to see that Calum was nodding in his direction.
Tara sat on the sofa – primly, on the edge – and Calum twisted his chair and pushed against the computer table with his right hand. The chair scooted across the wooden floor, ending up just across from the sofa. He twisted his body again so that he was facing the girl. It was obvious to Gecko that Tara had realized there was something wrong with Calum, but she didn’t say anything. Her gaze flicked to the straps that hung from the ceiling, then to Calum’s muscular development. She was quick on the uptake – Gecko would give her that.
He walked across to join the two of them. He passed out two of the bottles, then slumped in the opposite corner of the sofa to Tara.
‘Got a thing against doors, I take it?’ she asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Getting into and out of rooms is a problem,’ he said. ‘Doors are a solution to that problem. They’re not the only solution though, despite the fact that ninety-nine people out of a hundred think they are. And in most cases they aren’t the most interesting or the most graceful solution.’
‘Yes, talking about graceful but unorthodox methods of entry,’ Calum said, ‘let’s get back to the website, and your rather skilful attempts to crack it.’
‘It wasn’t an attempt,’ Tara protested. ‘I succeeded!’
‘Debatable.’ Calum shrugged. ‘But the important question is why. You indicated just now that you were doing it on behalf of someone else. Who are you working for?’
‘I’m not working for anyone,’ Tara protested. She was quiet for a few moments. Gecko could see from her expression that there was some kind of battle going on inside her mind. ‘What I mean is I wasn’t being paid,’ she finally admitted. ‘I was blackmailed into it.’
‘Blackmailed by who?’ Gecko asked, intrigued.
‘Whom,’ Calum corrected.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s “blackmailed by whom”. Not “who”.’
‘Oh.’ Gecko shrugged. ‘Sorry. English is only my fifth language.’
Tara hadn’t registered the byplay between Calum and Gecko. She was huddled on the sofa, staring at the floor. Gecko and Calum waited for a few moments. Eventually she said: ‘Look, it was some dodgy corporation called “Nemor Incorporated”, OK?’
‘Never heard of them,’ Gecko said.
‘They keep themselves out of the news and off the internet, apart from some corporate rubbish that doesn’t tell you anything interesting.’ Her shoulders straightened with pride. ‘There’s a group of us who are trying to get inside their corporate firewall and find out if they’re doing anything wrong so we can expose them to the world’s media.’
‘Computer hackers?’ Gecko asked, nodding. ‘Like those LulzSec people you hear about. Or WikiLeaks.’
She sniffed. ‘WikiLeaks just publish stuff they’re sent by insiders, and LulzSec just try to crash other people’s systems for giggles. We’re more serious than LulzSec and more activist than WikiLeaks. We try to break through the firewalls and scoop up whatever we can find that might be embarrassing or against the law, and then release it to the public.’
‘Illegally,’ Gecko pointed out.
‘We answer to a higher morality,’ she said, as if reciting the words from a script. ‘If companies breaking the law use the law as a shield, then the law needs to be circumvented in order to catch them.’
‘What do you call yourselves?’ Calum asked.
She shook her head disdainfully. ‘Why is it that the first thing people want to know is what we call ourselves? We don’t have a name. We don’t need a name. We’re just . . . us.’
He nodded. ‘OK, I can appreciate your motives. I can even approve of them . . .’
‘Oh, gee, thanks for the endorsement,’ she said with fake wide-eyed enthusiasm.
‘. . . But it doesn’t explain how you came to be here.’
She wriggled uncomfortably. ‘This company, Nemor Incorporated, realized that I was hacking them. And really quickly too. Instantly. They must have some real computer expertise at their end. They emailed me and offered me a deal – I was supposed to hack your website or they would report me to the police and have me arrested. They said they chose me because I had no connection to them, and nothing I did could be traced back to them.’ She paused, and smiled slightly. ‘I’m also better than anyone they have on their books, but they didn’t admit that.’
Silence, for a few moments.
‘What have you done,’ Gecko asked Calum, ‘to attract the attention of some big multinational company?’
Calum’s face reflected a mixture of concentration and confusion.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve never heard of Nemor Incorporated. I know that my guardian – Professor Livingstone – does consultancy work for some defence contractors, but I’ve never heard her mention them. I don’t know why I would have turned up on their radar screens. It’s not like I do anything that overlaps with defence or military interests. I’m just interested in creatures that are either thought to be extinct or not yet registered by biologists.’
‘They were particularly concerned,’ Tara added, ‘with anything that might be hidden within your website. And there is something hidden there, isn’t there?’
Calum glanced sharply at her. ‘You spotted that?’
‘It wasn’t hard to spot.’
‘You need to show me how to cover my tracks.’
‘First,’ she said, ‘you have to break my connection to Nemor.’
Again, silence for a few moments while Calum and Gecko considered what she had said.
‘You sure you want to cast your lot in with us?’ Calum asked.
‘I don’t work for corporations,’ she replied firmly. ‘Not through choice.’
‘So what makes you think I can help you break free from this unfortunate arrangement you’ve got yourself into?’
Tara glanced at Gecko. ‘He told me you were smart.’
Calum smiled. Gecko hadn’t seen him smile before, and he liked it. The smile made Calum’s serious face light up into something boyish. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m actually very smart.’
‘And very modest about it as well,’ Gecko murmured.
‘Much as I would like to take credit for what’s about to happen,’ Calum said, ‘honesty compels me to admit that it’s nothing to do with me. Well, not directly, anyway.’
Tara frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that Nemor Incorporated realized instantly that you were hacking their mainframe, yes?’
‘Yes . . .’
