Digital Circumstances

by BRM Stewart

  ‘Listen carefully, boys – here’s the deal,’ Talbot said in his low growl. ‘I’ll get this set up as a computer shop, and you boys will repair computers for anyone who comes in that door, just like you did for me. We’ll give you a float to buy stock – whatever sort of shite a computer shop sells – and all the tools and bits you’ll need.’

  Davey was grinning widely, head up, looking around.

  I was excited, but the practicalities shouted in my mind. ‘Just a few things,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Martin.’

  I tried to prioritise my questions. ‘How do we get it set up? We don’t know anything about how to do that.’

  ‘Come in first thing Monday morning. A guy named Ian Mackenzie will be here. Tell him exactly what you need, how you want the place to look, how you want it set up, and he’ll get it ready – you have a think before then. His bills will come to me. Tell him you want to be open next Saturday and I’ll break his fuckin’ arm if you’re not.’

  OK, I thought. I looked round, and from a blankness in my head I suddenly could see what such a shop needed to look like – similar to the others we’d seen, but better. I looked at Davey, who had drifted towards the back room, away from where customers would be, and I could see that he had visualised his workshop.

  ‘Will we sell computers too?’

  ‘Maybe. If you make enough money to get stock.’

  ‘So how much do we charge?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘How much will you take?’

  Davey looked at me sharply, but Talbot just smiled. ‘Nothing at all, till Christmas. If it’s still a going concern at Christmas, we’ll talk about contracts and all that fuckin’ nonsense. But not before. Till then, you just take the money you get. If anyone pays cash, you can keep it – but spend it wisely, and you’ll need to renew your stock. If it’s a credit card, or you give a receipt, then it needs to go through the till.’

  There was silence for a minute, and I thought it all through. What else… what else… ‘How about doing all that stuff - sending out invoices and things, and collecting money, and taking orders, handling enquiries?’

  Talbot nodded. ‘We’ll get a wee lassie for you. She’ll be here Saturday morning when you open. I’ll pay her. We’ll make sure she knows how to cash up and use the night safe at the bank.’

  Davey and I looked at each other. We were grinning, and then his face dropped.

  ‘Just one problem,’ he mumbled to Talbot. ‘There’s two computer shops up the road – one is where we got your stuff yesterday. We’ll be competing with them.’

  ‘So – you’ll just have to fuckin’ compete, OK?’

  I thought of the Pakistani guys that ran that shop, young and keen, as were the Indian guys in the other shop. But maybe we knew more than them. Maybe we were better – bugger it, we’d have to be. We were intelligent, and we were young and keen too – we could take them.

  There was a blur in my peripheral vision, and I ducked and reached, and caught the bunch of keys that Talbot had tossed to me, just before they hit my face.

  ‘Don’t forget to lock up, boys. There’s an alarm, so you’d better read the instructions.’ And he turned on his heel and was gone, Sandy smiled at us as he handed me his business card – ‘Just call me if there are any hassles; Mr Talbot doesn’t like to be troubled by detail’ – and turned and pulled the door shut behind them.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. Then I laughed. ‘God, is this too good to be true or what?’

  Yes, it was too good to be true, but we had nothing to lose and everything to gain. For a couple of nerds with no other job prospects, there was no decision to be made. We were naïve enough to ignore the weight of responsibility that had just been placed on our shoulders, and young enough to think ‘Fuck, let’s go for it’. Earning money for doing the stuff we did all day for nothing. Brilliant!

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s think out the layout – till and counter there, by the door, where it was in the original shop – obvious place – but everything else gets ripped out. How about we leave it all open, so folk can see us working on the computers, know we’re not ripping them off…’

  We talked for an hour and worked out how it should look. Then we spent an hour getting our heads round the burglar alarm and how to set a new code we could both remember – half the instructions had worn away with time.

  Finally, we were outside with the door locked and the alarm not going off. ‘Fancy a pint?’

  There was a pub called Krajewski’s diagonally across the road, on a corner, and we went over and in. We liked it immediately: wooden floors, traditional layout, booths with big tables and pews. They had a good selection of beers, and looked like they sold food too. And they didn’t ask us for ID, even though we were under-age and looked it. We paid the tall, thin waitress with the tufts of red hair and the nose piercings, and sat at the bar and toasted ourselves. ‘Here’s to a couple of lucky bastards,’ we said.

  ‘We’ll need a name,’ Davey suddenly said.

  ‘And a phone line – two phone lines, one for the shop and one for a modem.’

  ‘We’ll sort that out on Monday.’ We clinked glasses. ‘Here’s to the future,’ we said.

  We were back on track, looking good.

  *

  Ken Talbot and Sandy Lomond walked across the street and round the corner to where their car was parked.

  ‘You think this will work, boss?’

  Talbot shrugged. ‘Don’t care. They know their stuff and I think they’ll work hard. We’ll keep them afloat till Christmas, and then see how we’re fixed. Meanwhile we can leave cash in their accounts for stock, move it in and out. We need a lassie who’s obedient but not too bright.’

  Sandy opened the car door. ‘Plenty of them in Glasgow,’ he murmured.

  Chapter 6

  New York – early last winter

  Mark Grosvenor had taken the packed A train from his home in Brooklyn, got off at Fulton Street and walked up through the extremely cold but dry day along the narrow Nassau Street into the wider, tree-lined streets of the financial district, towards Federal Plaza. He was huddled inside his black greatcoat, a woollen cap on his mass of white hair, gloved hands holding his briefcase, breath steaming through the bushy white beard. He knew the exercise was good for him, but it exacerbated the arthritis in his hip and made him walk with a limp – many people assumed he had been shot in the line of duty, and sometimes he didn’t clarify for them that the real reason was so mundane.

  In truth, he was glad he’d got the phone call the day before and had the chance to get away from home for a spell of work. His thirty-two year old son, along with wife and child, had moved back home after he lost his job. After years of getting accustomed to a calm, peaceful environment, Grosvenor and his wife found themselves again at the centre of constant activity, noise, and untidiness that seemed impossible to control.

  Grosvenor made his way up to the 23rd floor, and along to the small, windowless conference room. Kurt Jackson was already there, with another younger man, both of them dressed in dark suits. Grosvenor shuffled off his coat, stuffing his cap and gloves into the pocket, and sat down at the long table, while Jackson got him a coffee from the jug.

  ‘Hi, Mark. Cold out there, eh? Oh, by the way, this is Maxwell Stuart.’

  Grosvenor cradled the coffee cup and stretched his legs under the table. ‘Hi Maxwell.’

  The young man bobbed his head. ‘Morning, sir.’ He was thin and pale, with hair that was short, black and gelled; he sipped from a bottle of water as he played with the trackpad on the laptop in front of him, keeping it from going to sleep. His voice was soft and Southern, a contrast to Grosvenor’s deep New York growl.

  Jackson sat down at the top of the table, sipping his own coffee, running a hand through his limp, thinning grey hair. ‘Thanks for coming in, Mark. Steve Roberts, one of our IT guys, had first shot at some intelligence that came in and reckoned there was something in there, so he passed it up the line. I’ve r
ead his report and I’m satisfied that the intelligence indicates that there is a real cyber threat to the US. It therefore falls under the remit of the FBI. The two of you will form a Cyber Action Team to investigate the implications of this intelligence, reporting to me.’

  Grosvenor nodded at the standard formalities, and shifted his chair to look at the screen on the wall.

  ‘That said, I think we’ll get to it. Max, in your own time.’ Jackson sat back, looking at the screen.

  Grosvenor saw the young man wince slightly at the short form of his name.

  ‘OK,’ Stuart began, hunching over the laptop, stroking the trackpad. He coughed and his voice grew firmer. ‘This is where we start.’

  On the screen came the picture of a man’s face; he was aged around forty five, with well-tanned skin, balding dark hair, a big moustache, a bullet-hole in his temple.

  ‘This man is Aleixo Ramires. He was shot to death – a single gunshot – in a villa he owns in a town called Portimao on the Portuguese Algarve, on October 4th this year. Local police carried out the investigation, but found no clues at the scene. No fingerprints, no DNA.’

  ‘A hit,’ Jackson clarified, and Grosvenor nodded: ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Ramires was a self-employed accountant. Portuguese police are positive that, amongst his clients, were several criminal gangs, some organised, some disorganised. They were sure he was involved in money-laundering, and probably helping himself to more than his ‘fair’ share, as these people often do.’

  Stuart’s presentation zoomed out, rotated, and zoomed back in, to a map of the Iberian Peninsula, with Portimao and Lisbon marked. ‘This is a map of Portugal and Spain,’ he said.

  Grosvenor got up stiffly to get himself a top-up of coffee from the jug. ‘I know where Portugal is, Max.’ He sat down again, scratching his beard.

  ‘Ramires has his main home in Lisbon. Local gossip was that he’d been involved with escort girls since his wife left him two years ago; some of them are also run by organised crime gangs.’

  Jackson sensed Grosvenor’s growing impatience. ‘So we have clear and obvious links to major crime – pretty definite.’

  Grosvenor nodded and gave a small grunt.

  ‘OK.’ Stuart stroked his laptop, and the presentation whirled to a picture of a high-end laptop. ‘The Portuguese police agency concerned – GNR – retrieved this laptop from the house in Portimao, presumably belonging to Ramires. They’ve spent a month or so trying to get stuff off it.’

  Grosvenor frowned. ‘So this was nothing to do with retrieving or stealing information: it was a revenge hit.’

  Jackson nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Anyway – ‘ another whirl and a page of numbers filled the screen. ‘The disc was password-protected but not encrypted. Key files on it were also password protected. We’ve no idea at present if there was a backup to the cloud or a network drive somewhere. Portuguese IT forensics have spent the months trying to get names and addresses off it, with minor successes – they confirmed links with major criminals, but also found a few names on our most wanted list – including Alexandr Bobnev.’

  Grosvenor sat back and gave an appreciative low whistle. ‘So this guy wasn’t just laundering money for local gangs: if he was connected to Bobnev, then he’s been involved in international money laundering. And carders?’

  Jackson repeated: ‘Looks that way. Much bigger than they thought. Carry on, Max.’

  ‘At this point GNR contacted our Computer Analysis and Response Team – this was three weeks ago. They sent over a mirror of the hard drive from the laptop, and Steve Roberts and other guys got to work on it. CART didn’t find any more names, but they did trace credit card numbers from the hard drive, and a couple came back to US citizens – couple of guys in New York: they’re clean, innocent – numbers were probably harvested from Internet sales, and then Internet bots got back to their computers and started gathering email addresses and other stuff. The usual kind of thing. These guys were pretty shook up when we told them.’

  ‘So,’ Jackson said, getting himself more coffee while Stuart sipped at his water. ‘We have opened a case-file on this.’ He sat down and leaned forward on the desk, Grosvenor copying him. ‘Two lines of attack. Max here is working on more analysis of the hard drive. We have purchased the infected computers from their owners, and Max will see whether he can follow the trail back to the source – matching code fragments, checking email metadata from Prism, that sort of thing.’

  Grosvenor nodded. ‘You want me to start investigating the hit.’

  ‘Yes. It may be that the hit was purely local gang-related, and you’ll just help the GNR tidy up a case that’s growing cold. But it may be that it was something to with Ramires’ cybercrime connections, and the link to Bobnev, in which case you might be able to uncover something significant.’

  Both men sat back in their chairs, and Grosvenor looked at the screen which again showed the map of Portugal. ‘They’ll give me access to anything I want?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve given GNR your name. I’ve emailed you their contact details.’

  There was a few minutes silence, while Stuart kept stroking his laptop, Jackson looked at Grosvenor, and Grosvenor looked at the map of Portugal, sipping his coffee.

  ‘Hotels there keep records of guests, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll start there – pull in the names of guests in hotels around that time, in the immediate area at first. Run them past known sightings and contacts and the usual suspects. If that doesn’t give anything, I’ll also want flight lists of people coming into Portugal at the time, from anywhere.’ He sighed. ‘It’s gonna be a heap of names. Even with the computers crunching it all, it’ll take time.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘No CCTV near the crime scene, I suppose.’

  ‘No.’

  Grosvenor finished his coffee. ‘OK, then, it’s just going to be a lot of work. I’d better get to it.’ He stood up.

  Chapter 7

  Glasgow – twenty five years before, almost Christmas

  Ken Talbot’s accountant was a wee guy with cropped hair and glasses, wearing a suit. He introduced himself as Tom, shook hands with us all, then sat himself at a desk in the corner of the workshop.

  ‘Sam will give you anything you need,’ I said. He nodded.

  He sat there all morning, refusing cups of tea, or coffee from the takeaway place up the road, systematically going through the folders of receipts and takings Sam had kept, asking about a couple that had slipped through our net – customers who had paid cash, which we’d pocketed, but forgot to tear up the evidence.

  Sam was our receptionist, a small thin teenager who wore black jeans and a baggy black top, chains draped around her waist, wild thick black hair which covered most of her pale face. Some days I thought she was attractive, and she would remind me a bit of the Fiona I had never found again, but those evenings when she came to the pub with us, she sat silently, responding to questions with nods or single words. She served customers well, and directed enquiries efficiently, but at quiet times she would just stand staring out of the window at the passers-by.

  Davey and I had our usual busy Monday – customers would do silly things with computers over the weekend, like installing demos from games on magazine cover disks that didn’t work on their system and they couldn’t get rid of properly. We shook our heads at their stupidity and ignorance, but couldn’t deny it was making us a nice living.

  In fact we were making a very nice living indeed. An early boost had come when the computer shop a few doors up from us had closed down, just a couple of weeks after we opened. They’d been robbed on a Saturday afternoon – which was odd, because I felt there were better places to rob nearby – and then the two young Pakistani guys who worked there were mugged one evening after they left the shop. Next thing, they’d sold up and, in beautiful symmetry, it had been reincarnated as a Pakistani grocer’s shop. When confused customers arrived, they looked around, clutching their compute
rs, and saw our shop – they were so grateful it was almost pathetic. We’d branched out into selling software too, and printers, and were wondering whether to now start selling computers. The market was strange: the variety that we’d grown up with – Atari, Commodore, Acorn, Dragon, it was endless – was disappearing, and people were now fixating on IBM PC clones, largely Amstrad PCs and word-processors. Somebody brought in an Apple Macintosh one day, and we loved it; others had copied the WIMP idea, as indeed Apple had originally, but Apple did it best, we felt.

  We were selling modems too. People were using email, and could get information from Prestel.

  Home life had eased in one respect: I was giving mum rent money, and our relationship had been improving as a result – she saw me working long hours, earning money, dodging the life of standing on street corners that had seemed to be my destiny. Then Alan had appeared in her life. He was a primary school teacher, physically small, who took off his glasses and shut his eyes when he spoke to me. The little council house was crowded on the weekends and nights he stayed over. Worse, he quizzed me about the business, and about Sandy Lomond and Ken Talbot – he told me to be careful of them, like he knew anything about them, or the computer business.

  Davey and I spoke about getting a flat together, near the shop. We could walk to the shop instead of getting the bus, walk to the pub, dead easy to get into town, walkable to the new Scottish Exhibition Centre – the ‘big red shed’ – which had been built on the now-disused Queen’s Dock and was emerging as a major concert venue. The whole area around us was being re-developed, and it felt like a better place to be rather than Drumchapel. It was an attractive dream, but we couldn’t yet commit to it.

  Finally, around midday, Tom closed the last folder and gave it back to Sam. He made a short phone call, and then asked us for a coffee – Davey went for it.

  As he came back through the door, three men followed him in. One was Sandy, one was Ken Talbot. The other was Charlie, almost unrecognisable in a suit and a camel coat. He gave us a wide smile. ‘Hi, guys.’ He locked the door behind him, and turned over the sign to show we were closed.