Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (20 page)

‘– you may recall, Minister,’ continued Raeworth, looking directly at Krish, ‘your own office asked us to withdraw from Parley on Tuesday morning. To allow you to carry out your own investigation?’

Bethany, too, turned to Krish, who cut in.

‘Well, careful, Detective Sergeant. The emails were actually posted on this overseas blog. The messages on Parley only
linked
to them. We’ve no evidence Parley is to blame.’

For the first time, Bethany had a prickling sensation of Krish working across her.

‘You do know, Mr Kohli, we can have a digital forensics team in there in a matter of hours. Crawl over every inch of their servers if we choose. And Ms Farr’s equipment.’

‘Ah,’ said Krish. ‘Well.’

He gave Bethany a brief look and she twigged. She nodded:
Go on.

‘See, the difficulty there,’ he said, ‘is that Parley don’t hold their own data. It lives on the servers of their parent company.’

Raeworth continued to look at him impassively. Krish spooled him a little more line.

‘Mondan?’

The policeman’s face did not noticeably shift, but he seemed to catch on.

‘You realise,’ he said slowly, ‘that at some point someone needs to have to look at Mondan’s servers. If you want to know how and when this hack took place.’

‘
Alleged
hack,’ said Krish quickly. ‘Right now we’re investigating an
allegation.
’

The policeman did not reply.

‘So,’ said Krish, breaking the silence. ‘Seems to me our best route is this overseas blogging service,
fortrez.is
– where our emails were posted?’

‘Yes, Mr McLean,’ said Raeworth with visible relief, ‘that is our main lead. But to trace the source of those posts we need the account information from –’ he consulted his BlackBerry ‘– an Israeli ISP,
FortrezEilat.
We’re working through the usual international channels to subpoena the account but I must tell you this process can be slow.’

‘Slow as in not today?’

Careful, Krish. Not too eager. Nobody had mentioned tomorrow’s launch but they were all aware of it. So little time left to shut this thing down.

‘Frankly our Israeli colleagues are liable to drag their heels. Unless nudged. If the minister wished to use Foreign Office channels?’

Bethany shook her head as though brushing away a bothersome fly. She was looking down into the startled face on the
Mail
’s
front page
.
The photo, from some greasy nightclub, must have been taken on a phone. Meagre flash splashed over a patch of dancefloor like a glassful of liquid, catching a foreshortened Danielle Farr as she tugged at a rope or chain, her body twisted until strips of black latex dug into her puppy fat. At the other end of the rope, clipped by the edge of the frame, was the naked back of a kneeling man. Farr was caught in the instant of noticing the photographer, a blot of birthmark staining the side of her face like a collision of inks on a printer’s plate.
Please, what am I doing here?
she seemed to ask.
Why this degraded place? This vicious splash page?

‘Can’t we just block it?’

The three men looked at her with just a tinge of condescension.

‘This blog, I mean. If we can’t shut it down in time – I mean, if we can’t do that easily – can we not just stop anyone from seeing it? In this country?’

There was a silence. The senior officer began to speak but Krish cut in.

‘Between these walls – yes, that is something we could do. We do that with content hosted offshore that’s in breach of UK law. We
can
block it. The question is, do you
want
to?’

Krish had answered politically and completely missed the point. She’d just suggested they clamp down on free speech; and it had been as easy as breathing.

‘So,’ said Krish, ‘can we talk about our email security? That is why you’re here?’

For the second time, Raeworth showed his relief.

‘Of course, sir. Four of my DCs are setting up now.’ He gestured through the glass wall, towards the open-plan space occupied by Bethany’s Private Office. ‘They’ll interview your staff as they arrive.’

Bethany got up and walked to the glass to peer over the stripe of frosting. Across the office one of the juniors, Steve Crow, was being led into a room by an anonymous man. Steve turned towards Bethany with a look of – what? Resentment? At the table Raeworth continued in his flat northern diction.

‘We’ve also prepared this protocol.’

He dropped a 1950s-looking manilla folder, bearing Met insignia, in front of Krish. He picked it up and scanned the contents.

‘These are standard protection techniques we hope you’ll be happy to comply with. Your IT team will monitor outbound traffic. We’re searching email logs for the last two weeks. They’ll flag all past and future mail carrying any of this list of keywords.’

He reached across the table to pull the final sheet out of Krish’s folder. Bethany walked across to see. Her eyes jumped two-thirds of the way down the list, to the words
Sean Perce; Perce; S Perce.
Just below this,
sic_girl; sick girl; sic; sicgirl; Digital Citizen, DigiCitz, dCitz.
She glanced up at Raeworth, who was looking directly back into her eyes.

‘May I speak frankly, Minister?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

She walked to her desk and made busy with documents.

‘In our analysis,’ said the policeman, ‘there is a strong risk further email material has already left this office and is being held back.’ He knew the trick of speaking softly when he had your attention. ‘It’s our belief the pattern of these posts reflects a build. So I am bound to ask you, Minister: are you aware of anything else that may come to light? Anything that might cause further discomfort?’ He looked briefly to Krish. ‘It would of course be helpful if you were completely frank at this stage, Minister.’

All three men were looking at her. She had thought of almost nothing else through every sleepless hour of the past night: what was still to come out. This moment was her opportunity to tell these public servants everything; tell Krish what he’d been waiting patiently for her to say. She must tell them.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

She smiled her most carefree smile.

YOU DIRTY BLOGGER!

I.T. whizz Dani Farr (28) is the brains behind hit social media site Parley. What her HALF A MILLION cyber-fans don’t know is she also has a seedy second life selling porno pics and flicks on the Internet. Most of these images are TOO SHOCKING to publish though you can see some of them on our website.

Curvy Danielle, who is often seen at trendy Soho sex parties, is full of secrets. This morning she was exposed for leading YET ANOTHER double life. Sex-mad Dani is accused of being behind a string of damaging leaks about government minister Bethany Lehrer (46). Could she also be the mystery hacker who broke into the government’s controversial online ID card system, Digital Citizen?

Two

‘Imagine a world where all you see is stuff you already know about.’

‘I only need turn on the television for that,’ said J-R.

‘But,’ said Mark, ‘you can turn your television off.’

Here on the concrete embankment the two friends were exposed to all the weather dragged in from the estuary. A rising wind rinsed the air; though on the facing bank a grey fug still clung to the City.

‘Actually,’ said J-R, ‘I haven’t owned a TV since 2009.’

Mark chuckled as he worked his little computer on the café table.

‘Oh, J-R. You haven’t changed.’

J-R smiled, rewarded. His mac flapped against the metal legs of the chair. Mark looked up, still typing.

‘I wonder if you even know who will.i.am is?’ he said.

‘You are – what?’

‘Ha! Kim Kardashian?’

‘Now, Mark –’

‘Well, do you? Come on. Louis Walsh.’

‘Welsh Secretary before the last-but-one reshuffle.’

Mark stopped typing for a moment.

‘You’re joking?’ J-R was a sphinx. ‘You are. Aren’t you?’

They were both laughing.

‘Perhaps I am,’ said J-R. ‘But I have no idea who any of those people are. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I don’t know why it should even matter.’

A tunnel of wind lifted their words and scattered them among the grey-white birds looping above. The moment held a few seconds too long. J-R gestured at the screen.

‘We’re looking at what?’

‘It’s called
grubly.exe.
’
Mark raised his voice against the birds and wind. ‘Two months ago nobody had a record of it. Suddenly it’s on everyone’s computer. It’s on mine. We security folk talk about Trojan horses.’

‘Viruses?’

‘Ish. But Grubly – here’s something that deserves the name. Something we welcome through the gate with open arms, that’s secretly filled with – I don’t know what.’

‘Greeks?’

‘More like eyes. Ears.’

Mark’s screen was filled with a torrent of numbers and symbols from the fringes of the character set. It streamed south to north, fast as the machine could render. Every now and then the flow ceased, then more gibberish burst the logjam.

‘I have this Grubly process contained in what I call a suspension tank – a sealed off area of memory. It’s seeing what I choose to let it see. I’ve written code to track what it sends and receives. This is a live read of what it’s currently sending.’

‘Sending to where?’

‘That’s one question. Some anonymous shadow site that’s apparently in Poland but might be in Timbuktu for all I know.’

‘Or London.’

Mark’s approving look was a delight.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The other mystery is
what
it’s sending. That’s buried in hard-core crypto. Best I can do is traffic analysis. So I do know
when
Grubly fires up and starts transmitting, and I know how
much
it sends.’

‘And –?’

‘Everything.’

J-R’s voice was coated in catarrh. He cleared his throat.

‘Everything what?’

‘It’s keyed to respond to my every action,’ said Mark. ‘Thank God this laptop is a sacrificial lamb. This thing strolled in past my worm detection. It looks – all innocence. But whatever I do – open a window, close a window, send a mail, delete a file, wave at the camera – it splurges more data out to – wherever.’

‘But why so indiscriminate? What could anyone even start to do with all that information?’

‘I think –’ Mark hesitated. J-R leaned in to hear. ‘See, the world is narrowing. We each live in a bubble of attitude. Everything tailored for us. No happenstance, only what I already am and know. At a certain point I find my shape is less in here.’ A palm flat on his chest. ‘More out there.’ Laying the palm on his keyboard.

‘Fascinating; but with my usual slowness I’m failing to see the relevance.’

Mark made a strange kind of sigh, drawing his shoulders up to his ears as he inhaled, then firing the air out through his nose, as though blasting bad air from his lungs.

‘A couple of years back I was depressed. Clinically.’

His eyes followed a black bird – a cormorant? – along the surface of the water.

‘Mark? I –’

Mark turned to him with a pale smile.

‘Doesn’t matter. This was a while ago. I’m quite a solitary person as a rule. I prefer to resolve things for myself. So I did some research online. Self-diagnosed, found out the extent to which I really did not want to medicate, decided not to see my doctor. Shining example of why the last person to get you out of a self-dug pit is yourself.’

‘I had no idea. When was this? You know I – that you could have—’

‘I do know. This is honestly just a kind of tech parable. I use these a lot on my blog. I’ve written about this as it happens’

It didn’t sound like a parable to J-R.

‘So there it was,’ said Mark, ‘and I decided I’d think no more of it. Fat chance. For the next few weeks, it seemed like the whole Internet was designed to tell me as much as it could about mental illness.’

‘The Internet sometimes seems that way to me, too.’

‘For a time my online experience was transformed. Ads for antidepressants on every news page. Recommended items were universally self-help. My searches were just odd – often way off what I was looking for. As if the very concept of depression is enough to overwhelm all other thoughts.’ Mark stroked small radiating circles on the trackpad of his computer, like ripples in a pool. ‘Our experience of the world defines much of what we think about ourselves. Much of my experience is online. For a few weeks I became another person; and I didn’t much like being him. Eventually I got sick of it. Being the kind of person I am, I was able to dive into my cookies –’ He glanced at J-R ‘You realise I mean settings files here and not biscuits?’

J-R nodded. He had not realised.

‘– and I suppose I’m lucky. I was able to get rid of all references to talking cures and serotonin inhibitors, and was soon back to being me again. Funnily enough, this experience was rather cleansing. It seemed to help me out of my low patch.’

J-R studied his friend’s face as he spoke towards the water; its fine haze of reddish stubble.

‘Thank you for sharing that with me,’ he said.

He reached over for Mark’s mouse-arm before realising he didn’t know what gesture of comfort felt appropriate. He touched the buttons on Mark’s cuff for a few seconds, then withdrew his hand a few inches. Mark’s eyes went down to the fingers, then to J-R’s eyes.

‘The point I was making,’ he said, ‘is, the existing algorithms are too blunt to capture me properly. To really know me the system would need richer data, longer tails. Everything about me, in depth and volume. Insane amounts of data. Then it could start to learn what I’m like as a whole, and what I’m
not
like. So, depth? This Grubly is trying to get to know me pretty deeply. And volume? You’re giving Mondan, what, thirty million people?’

J-R swallowed.

‘Oh, more.’

Mark whistled softly.