Hide Me

She pulled up a chair and thought about Zubiri’s password. She could acquire it any number of ways, but the important thing here was speed. Mentally, she raced through her options.

If she knew more about him, she’d probably hazard a guess. Most people chose easily remembered words, no matter how often you warned them. The dog’s name; maybe the wife’s. Perhaps with a couple of digits appended, as if that would be enough to confound the bad guys. Harry made a face. Zubiri didn’t strike her as the type to care for dogs or wives.

She drummed her fingers on the table. Simple brute force often worked best. Take a crowbar to something and eventually it had to cave in. Her sledgehammer of choice was usually a dictionary attack, a program that stepped through thousands of words hoping to jimmy the lock open with one of them. Trouble was, Zubiri’s password had looked long and complicated. Hitting the right word and number combination could take her several hours. Besides, if there was one thing she’d sensed, it was the man’s fierce national pride. She was willing to bet his password was in Basque, and while her attack program incorporated most foreign dictionaries, his ancient ancestral language wasn’t among them.

Harry stirred in her chair. Zubiri’s voice ramped up outside, his consonants growing harsher. As far as she could tell, he was only a few feet from the door. Her heart cantered for a beat or two. She had one option left, but it was far from ideal. It would leave telltale tracks, unmistakable footprints that would lead directly to her. She darted another glance at the door, then hauled her laptop bag onto the table.

She ripped open the front Velcro pouch, rummaging inside for a USB memory stick, which she jammed into the side of Zubiri’s laptop. Then she stabbed at the power switch and rebooted the machine.

The laptop hummed. She fixed her eyes on the screen, tracking the startup messages. Outside in the corridor, a copier stuttered to life, its mechanical clacking drowning out Zubiri’s voice. Harry kept her gaze on the laptop. Then she hit a key, interrupting its routine, redirecting it to follow orders from her programmed USB stick. The laptop whirred. Sniffed at the stick. Then it swallowed her program like a dog with a biscuit, blithely passing control of its own innards over to Harry.

Her fingers rattled across the keys. She bypassed the rest of the startup grind and instead hooked into the bowels of the hard drive, probing its recesses till she found the list of users permitted to access the machine. There were two: Zubiri and the familiar Admin account, the built-in user that administered the computer. Both had passwords. Both were encrypted. No time to unscramble either one of them now.

But then again, she didn’t need to. Why go to the trouble of decrypting cyphertext when she could erase the password altogether? Remove the lock, and you were left with an open door.

With a few deft strokes, Harry blanked the Admin password, leaving Zubiri’s intact. Then she whipped out the USB stick and rebooted the laptop one more time.

Her spine buzzed. Leave no trace. That was the cardinal rule for delinquent snooping, but in this case she’d had no choice. The next time an Admin user tried to access the laptop, they’d know its security had been breached. And it wouldn’t take them long to trace things back to Harry.

She closed her eyes briefly, then refocused on the screen. This time, she let the bootup drill run its course, until finally the logon prompt appeared. Username: Admin. Password: Who needed it? The laptop sprang to life and she was in.

Immediately, she keyed in a search for slideshow files. Then she leaned back to wait, straining for sounds of Zubiri over the clatter of the copier outside. For all she knew, he could have finished his call and was on his way back to the room. Her armpits felt damp. Maybe she was wasting her time. After all, what did she expect to find?

The search threw up a single slideshow file. She flipped it open and stared at the words on the opening slide:

TCO NETWORK

TCO. What the hell was that? The slide was dated 5th March, and was accredited to one Chief Inspector Eli Vasco. Harry had been right. Zubiri had borrowed the slides from his boss. She noted the English words and wondered about the intended audience.

She jumped to the next slide, the first photo of Riva Mills, then flashed through the procession of now-familiar faces: the adolescent Riva; Stephen McArdle; Clayton James; Ginny Vaughan; the smiling Gideon Ray. Finally, she reached the last three unseen slides.

The first was a list entitled ‘Criminal Sectors’. Harry’s eyes widened as she scanned down through it: drug trafficking, armed robbery, sex trade, extortion, corruption, human trafficking, smuggling, tax fraud, arts fraud, cybercrime, forgery, gunrunning, commodities fraud.

Harry’s brain reeled. She raced ahead to the next slide. Two lists, the first headed ‘Transnational Criminal Organizations’.

Harry blinked. TCO.

She flashed down the first column, her skin turning clammy: Colombian cartels, Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, Russian Organizatsiya, Italian Mafia. Her vision blurred. The list went on. Jamaican Yardies, Bulgarian Mafiya, Albanian Fares, Mexican Federation, Nigerian organizations.

Jesus. Her eyes darted to the second column: ‘Terrorist Organizations’. Another long list. Japan’s Red Army, Peru’s Shining Path, Colombia’s FARC, IRA splinter groups, Islamic Jihad movements.

Something cold slid into Harry’s stomach. The list read like a roll call for murder and mayhem.

The copier outside juddered to a halt. She jerked her head up. Zubiri had gone quiet. Her gaze shot to the door, but she couldn’t get a fix on him. A torrent of adrenalin drenched through her veins. She flew ahead to the last slide, caught her breath as she took in the single line of text. Then she powered the laptop off, snapped the lid shut and two-stepped back to her seat.

Blood pounded in her ears. Behind her, she sensed Zubiri entering the room. She wiped her palms along her thighs, the last slide still scorched on her retinas like afterimage burn-in:

Criminal Proceeds for last six months: $900 million.

Chapter 10

‘So you still told them no?’

‘Of course I told them no.’ Harry’s initial flash of pleasure at receiving Hunter’s call was definitely starting to wane. ‘Why would I do otherwise?’

‘Exactly. One dead hacker’s enough. No sense in offering up two, right?’

Harry swung her legs off the bed, biting back an unreasonable urge to bait him by saying she might still change her mind. She pictured him at his desk, the phone wedged into his shoulder, his sandy hair spiked up from shoving his hands through it. She flung aside the map she’d been studying when he’d called, then closed her eyes, relenting slightly. Hunter was only concerned for her safety, after all, and if she was honest, her frustrations had nothing to do with him.

It had been a couple of days since she’d talked to Zubiri. She’d left his office, thanking him for his time and firmly declining his proposition. Then she’d walked away, expecting to feel relieved, but instead she’d felt oddly empty.

Her gaze roamed her bland hotel room, sliding over its neutral tones of greys and creams. She felt aimless. Directionless. Soon she’d terminate her arrangement with Riva, and after that, she’d have nothing. No client, no assignment. No reason to stay on in San Sebastián. She fingered the map on the bed beside her, tracing the route she’d marked out in thick red pen. No professional reason, anyway.

‘Harry?’

‘Sorry, you’re right. It’s too risky, I’d be a fool to do it. But I can’t help feeling involved.’

‘Because you found McArdle’s body?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I’d just like to know what happened to him, that’s all.’

‘Your pal Zubiri doesn’t know?’

‘If he does, he hasn’t told me.’

She flashed on Zubiri’s slides: drug trafficking, armed robbery, Colombians, terrorists. Proceeds of $900 million. The scale of it was staggering, but in her humdrum hotel room, the whole thing seemed frankly unreal. She was tempted to relay everything she’d learned to Hunter, but she’d given Zubiri her word that their discussions would remain confidential. Though right now, she wasn’t sure she owed him anything.

Hunter cleared his throat. ‘Look, I know you told me not to go digging, but to hell with that. I went out on a limb and did it anyway. Hold on a second . . .’

She heard the quick snap of pages being turned, and imagined him frowning, his tie probably loosened and his collar undone in the manner of a man who couldn’t abide restrictions.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Okay, Stephen McArdle. You know his background: hacker from Belfast, paramilitary connections. Did you know he wanted out?’

‘After eighteen years?’

‘Word is, he was spooked. Turning paranoid. He knew too much about the organizations he worked for. Maybe someone back in Belfast thought so, too.’

Harry recalled what Zubiri had said: Try to leave and you end up dead in a ditch.

‘So you’re saying he was killed by paramilitaries? Which ones?’

‘Take your pick. He seemed to work for them all at one time or another.’

‘Where’d you hear this?’

‘I poked around. Stepped on a few toes, exceeded my jurisdiction.’

‘I thought you were meant to be keeping your nose clean.’