by Sam Bourne
‘She said it’s much better to get it all down when you can actually see the space in front of you.’
Greg said that was no problem and offered to log her into the system as a guest. ‘Your usual login won’t work here,’ he explained. ‘Tighter security,’ he added, with a flicker of macho pride. As he helped settle her in, promising that no one would disturb her here, she gave him her widest smile so far. It’s possible that her fingers brushed his for a second. Accidentally of course.
What he didn’t know, and what she didn’t tell him, was that all that fussing over the keyboards earlier had allowed her to place a tiny device at the end of the cable that connected his keyboard to his machine. This little wonder was one of Jen’s trustiest allies: the keylogger, which had faithfully recorded Greg’s keystrokes, including at the moment when ‘Katy’ had asked him to demonstrate how he typically used his machine. She had made a point of looking away as he obediently typed in his username and password, concentrating instead on his posture – safe in the knowledge that, quietly, the keylogger was storing all the details.
Of course, Jen knew that wouldn’t be enough. A company like this one would rely on two-factor authentication. First, the password you remember. And then a second password, a one-off code, either sent by text to your phone or generated by a YubiKey, a small dongle allocated to each employee and usually found on their keyring. That’s what Greg and his fellow system administrators used.
Grabbing that had been simple enough. Once ‘Katy’ had covered his desk with the fabric swatches she said ‘the designer’ had given her, and as they were being passed around, it had been easy to nudge Greg’s keyring into her bag.
Now, armed with both the keylogger and the YubiKey, she logged out and then logged in again, not as a guest this time but as Greg. With a system administrator’s level of access, it wasn’t hard to get first to the monitoring system, and disable that, then move to the system whereby the company backed up all its data. She set to work, issuing the electronic instructions that would steadily overwrite those back-ups, eventually moving to the live system itself.
She did it as swiftly as she could, always keeping one eye on the shifting dynamics of the office, ready to clear her screen if anyone came too near.
At last she was done. She logged out of and powered down the desktop machine, then returned to Greg’s desk to thank him and his co-workers for helping her out.
He was awkward, unsure how to say goodbye, so ‘Katy’ decided to make it easy for him, giving him a hug – which he maintained – noiselessly using the opportunity to place his keys back on his desk, just behind the coffee cup where they might plausibly have been obscured. She said her goodbyes to the rest of the SysOps team, making a little fingers-crossed gesture as she left, to signal their shared hope that their workspace might soon be getting more comfortable.
The walk back to her car was long, but she wouldn’t rush. No need to look guilty. As she adjusted the mirrors and pulled out of the space, and as she put away Greta, Helen and Katy, at least until the next time, she pictured the electronic ones and zeroes she had sent into battle, steadily advancing like digital infantry, overwriting the drives on which was stored the indexing system that had become indispensable to the population of the entire world – a tool so essential that not only had the company’s name entered the language but their core product had become humanity’s electronic memory bank. People no longer bothered remembering facts, because they knew they could just look them up. This company’s product had become nothing less than an outsourced part of the human brain.
That the test had been so easy to run was almost chilling. Thank God, she thought, she was working for the good guys, a firm that specialized in exposing the gaps in tech companies’ defences so that they could plug them before any real damage was done. Within the next few minutes, she comforted herself, the people who had commissioned her for this project would tip off the target company and alert them to the threat. She had injected a lethal bacillus into the bloodstream; very soon they would stop it in its tracks.
She reached for her phone, to send the message that said, ‘Task complete.’ Only as she typed it did it strike her that this particular project had been arranged entirely over encrypted text. She had never even spoken to her clients, let alone met them.
Still, she did not dwell on that. Instead, she took in the gorgeous blue sky on this warm autumn day and felt the satisfaction of a job well done, watching as the world headquarters of Google receded in her rear-view mirror.
Chapter Twenty-Four
FBI headquarters, Washington DC, 8.51am
‘All right,’ Lofgren said, his voice signalling a new urgency to their deliberations. ‘We clearly need to see the full report of this preliminary read of the manifesto. Once we have that, I shall be working with the White House, notifying Homeland Security, the CIA and other key agencies, as well as allies around the world and specifically those nations with institutions in the Alexandria Group. I will also be proposing enhanced security arrangements at the named libraries.’
Now his deputy, Andrea Ellis, chipped in. ‘Can I suggest that immediately after this meeting, Maggie has a quiet word with the leadership of the Library of Congress? Less . . . formal than if we do it. Our embassies can talk to the international institutions.’
The Director nodded towards Ellis and then to Maggie, indicating that it was agreed. Addressing the group, he said, ‘The approach has to be one of increased vigilance, without causing undue alarm. We know that terror threats of this kind are—’
‘Shouldn’t we talk about why we have this document?’ Interrupting a principal, the host of the meeting, in his own office. At a moment of great gravity. Quadruply bad form, but Maggie ploughed on. ‘I mean, why would they do that?’
‘Because these groups are proud of what they do?’ It was Lofgren’s mini-me again, with a smirk of condescension.
‘They are proud of what they do, that’s true,’ said Maggie. ‘Which is why they put statements – including really long ones – online all the time. But they didn’t do that. They handed it straight to you.’ She was alternating her gaze between Donna and the Director. ‘Which suggests this was something else. A leak.’ She left a beat and, surprised that no one jumped in, she carried on. ‘Let’s say this is a group. What if there’s someone inside that group who thinks it’s gone too far? Who’s now getting worried.’
‘OK,’ said Mini-Me. ‘But then you’d leak information that might actually thwart their operations. Dates, times, co-ordinates.’
‘Unless you were terrified. Unless you’d concluded that the only information you could get out without exposing yourself – to punishment and even fatal risk – was this document. And you did it because you knew that, read the right way, this document would indeed blow the whistle.’
The Director was nodding. ‘All right. And given the urgency, what’s your advice, Maggie?’
‘Well, obviously, you do what you’re already doing. You put the manifesto through intense linguistic analysis, see what else it matches. Books, essays, speeches. See who else writes like this.’
‘Obviously. What else?’
‘You publish it.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the Unabomber move. When the Times and the Post got his manifesto, the FBI recommended they printed it. Which they did. In full.’
‘Director, if I may.’ It was the sidekick. ‘This is a very different situation. The Unabomber was threatening to send another bomb, “with intent to kill”, if his manifesto wasn’t published. We’ve received no such demand in this case. To run it now would be to give the terrorists the oxygen of publicity and to do so voluntarily. I’m afraid you yourself, Director Lofgren, would face accusations of doing the terrorists’ work for them. Given the questions that were raised during the confirmation hearing, and the assurances you gave, I would strongly recommend—’
‘I don’t care about “facing accusations”. We get accused of things all the tim
e. I get accused all the time. The point is, would those accusations be right? Maggie, why should I even consider publishing this thing?’
‘The small reason is that, if we are right about it being a hostile leak, it will wrongfoot the Bookburner. You’d be pre-empting their big moment. They wanted to launch this at a time of their choosing, and now you’re doing it at a time that suits you. That’ll throw them off balance.’
‘Unless this is exactly what they want us to do.’ Mini-Me again. ‘And we’re walking right into their trap.’
‘That’s possible,’ Maggie said, breaking another Washington rule by conceding ground to an opponent. ‘It’s definitely a risk. If they are nodding to the Unabomber thing, which they might be, then publication is what they’ll be expecting. But none of that outweighs the big reason to do it.’
‘Which is?’
‘The wisdom of crowds.’
‘What?’
‘Look, you’ll have the best computer analysts in the world here, no doubt about it. They’ll spot all the idiosyncratic punctuation and all that. But out there,’ Maggie pointed at the picture window with its view of the US Capitol, ‘there’ll be someone who knows more about this than all of your computers. Whoever they are, they just need to read it. It might not work. But it might.’
Andrea was shaking her head. ‘I worry we’ll just be acting as their recruiting sergeant. I’ve seen that happen too. This world is so messed up, ISIS only had to put out a video of a beheading or of burning that guy in a cage, and people flocked to join them. And that can happen very quickly. There might be all kinds of crackpot arsonists who will see the Friday deadline as a challenge. You know, let’s give it a helping hand. As Governor Morrison knows, Friday is already incendiary as it is.’
Mini-Lofgren saw an opening. ‘Where would you suggest we publish this, Maggie? On FBI.gov?’ He looked around the circle, hoping for supportive laughter. Maggie replied that, if it were up to her, she’d give it to everyone: New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, all of them. But, sure, why not, FBI.gov too. The more the merrier.
The secretary was back, her head around the door with another bulletin. The Director stood up to meet her, took the piece of paper from her hand, skim-read it and then, still standing, made his announcement.
‘I have to tell you that, as we’ve been speaking, the National Library of India, held at Kolkata, has been burned to the ground.’
There was a silence of a moment or two. Lofgren bowed his head. Maggie half wondered if he was about to lead a moment of prayer. In this town, you wouldn’t rule it out.
Instead, the Director shook his head quietly, as if in despair of what man was capable of, and then returned not to the circle but to his desk, signalling that the meeting was over. As he moved, he promised to circulate the preliminary analysis of the manifesto to the group as soon as he had it: until then, sight of the text itself would be limited to the analytics team. ‘I don’t want this going any wider until we know exactly what’s in it,’ he said. Once that exercise was complete, and barring any surprises, he would organize online publication across multiple outlets, ‘probably as soon as tonight.’
As they filed out of the room, one of the colleagues who’d been silent finally spoke. ‘Oh, one last thing. Why Florian?’
The Director, already at his keyboard, didn’t shift his gaze from the computer screen. ‘Saint Florian. Patron saint of firefighters.’
Maggie left with Donna, who briefly fussed over her bag, picking up Maggie’s, which was similar, by mistake, then swapping them back. As they walked out, the governor confessed that, though she rated Lofgren himself, she had much less confidence in the federal bureaucracy. ‘We worked inside it, Maggie. We know better than anyone its strange gift for turning things to shit.’
The governor broke away as they reached the elevator, apparently to have a further chat with Andrea, the Deputy Director. It meant Maggie had to get into the lift with three of the others, one of them being Lofgren’s little helper.
Pointedly, she thought, they conducted a conversation without her. Suddenly she was back at school, frozen out by Bernadette Clark and her sidekicks for the crime of having said something intelligent in class.
But now she noticed something different. As they reached the ground floor, all three of them fell into a stunned silence as they checked their phones, looking back at her, then looking down to their phones again.
She assumed they’d seen some breaking news – perhaps yet another library was ablaze or a celebrity historian had been found dead – but she was damned if she was going to ask them. She would check her own phone once they were gone.
But as they left the lift, there was that look again – away from their screens and directed squarely at her. It was a look that combined both pity and contempt.
There was no doubt about it: these three senior FBI officials had just seen something on their phones that was directly related to her. But what was it?
Chapter Twenty-Five
Capitol Hill, Washington DC, 9.41am
It had not taken her long to see what the men in the elevator had seen. Once she was in a cab and holding her phone, heading towards Capitol Hill, it took Maggie only the slightest amount of clicking and swiping to find it.
Her first port of call was Twitter. Her account had disappeared along with everything else, so she had to poke around as a mere onlooker. But once she had typed her own name into the search window, there it was.
The initial item had been posted by a journalist in the Washington bureau of one of the cable TV networks, a twenty-something who specialized in dredging up embarrassing items from the archive. His usual prey were politicians caught in contradiction. They’d failed to turn up to vote on, say, an abortion rights bill and, hey presto, there was a tweet from two years earlier:
Simply no excuse for elected representatives who don’t do their job. If there’s an important vote on an important matter – like the lives of our unborn children – then the least you can do is vote. #Youhadonejob
But now he’d posted this:
Remember White House operative and former peace negotiator Maggie Costello? Turns out she wasn’t always such a, er, diplomat #emaildump
There then appeared screenshots of internal White House memos, sent by email, with dates going back several years, back to when she served under the president who’d first appointed her. If she squinted, she could make out the words.
Vietnam vets won’t like it. They never do. But you know what, a few shots of cripples waving their sticks – who’s going to care?
Then there was one, apparently from Maggie to Donna:
In light of recent events, it’s clear that the usual approach can no longer be relied upon to work. Much more drastic action required. I have good connections with the groups involved. Why don’t I meet their representatives and suggest financial benefits – personal, not institutional – will be available to them, should they agree to roll over on the bill? Happy to discuss further. M x
And another, from Maggie to her mentor, the late Stuart Goldstein:
Can I just say, if anyone needs to get fucked in the ass, it’s our friends on the Hill. They’ve had this coming for such a long time. Especially Hansen and Schilling. Trouble is, they both look like they’d enjoy it. M.
She read each one again, in turn. That was her old White House email address and the dates tallied with when she was in the White House and, in the case of the third one – sent from the personal email address she still used – when Stuart was still alive.
But those words were not hers. They couldn’t be. Mocking veterans as ‘cripples’? Blatantly discussing a bribe? Referring to two respected female members of the United States senate as needing to get ‘fucked in the ass’? It just wasn’t how she talked or wrote. Was it?
Maggie clicked out of that to check the other results of her Twitter search. Someone she’d never heard of had posted a link to a story that had gone up within the last hour on that new political
website, DC Wire.
Former White House official engaged in misogyny, bigotry and possible corruption, leaked emails reveal.
Washington, DC—A top former White House operative described Vietnam veterans as “cripples”, floated possible bribes to lobbyists and fantasized about the anal rape of leading female senators in internal correspondence which has just emerged.
Maggie Costello, widely admired for her role in exposing the . . .
She scanned the rest, stopping at this sentence.
No word yet from Costello, whose Twitter account appeared to have been deleted soon after publication of these emails.
She felt her stomach heaving as she handed a ten-dollar bill to the cab driver and faced the vast complex that was the Library of Congress. What she wanted to do was get straight back into the cab, head home and either deal with this madness or, ideally, hide under the duvet. Instead, she girded herself for what she knew would be a mammoth exercise in compartmentalization. She would have to keep this lunacy out of her mind – and keep this meeting short.
The library consisted of three buildings: the Librarian’s working office was in the tallest and most modern, the Madison, a six-storey structure that boasted it was the biggest building in DC after the Pentagon and FBI headquarters. Andrea Ellis’s office had called ahead, so that when Maggie told reception she had a meeting with the Librarian – an unusually archaic title in this city of Directors and Administrators – an assistant was already hovering to play usher.
As they took the elevator, Maggie realized that the insanity she’d seen pouring out of her phone had caused her to break her usual practice. She’d been scrolling through Twitter instead of checking out the person she was about to meet. Now, with just seconds to go, she typed in the name Denise Wherry, and saw a picture of yet another identikit Washington conservative woman, whose blonde hair was so straight it could have been ironed. Needless to say, she had only recently been named to the job – and by this president. Maggie remembered the appointment: there had been a ruckus because Wherry had no experience in the field whatsoever. She had never worked as a librarian or archivist, but was instead a TV producer. No prizes for guessing for which network.
