The Insider

There were plenty of empty desks, but Harry wanted one at the back. She reached the end of the room and snagged an empty desk in the corner. She dumped her bag on the chair and waited for the round-faced girl at the next workstation to finish her call.

‘Apologies again about that, Mrs Hayes. Bye now.’ The girl typed something on her keyboard and winked at Harry. ‘Another unsatisfied customer.’

Harry smiled. ‘Is there any other kind?’

‘Not around here.’

Harry stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Catalina. I start work here this afternoon.’

‘Oh, great. I’m Nadia.’ She grasped Harry’s hand. Her nails were long and crimson, and she wore a silver ring on every plump finger, including her thumb.

Harry gestured to the empty desk. ‘Okay if I sit here?’

‘Sure, no one’s using it.’

Harry sat down and switched on the PC. ‘I don’t think I’ve been set up on the system yet. Any chance you could log me in?’

Nadia hesitated. ‘I’m not really supposed to do that.’

Keep it casual. ‘Oh, right. I just wanted another peek at the helpdesk system before Mrs Nagle gets back from lunch.’

Nadia chewed her bottom lip, and then smiled. ‘Why not? Don’t want her to catch you out on your first day, do we?’

She pulled off her headset and walked over, leaning across to type in her username and password. Harry could smell a mixture of Calvin Klein and peppermints.

‘There you go,’ Nadia said.

‘Thanks, I owe you one.’

Harry waited until Nadia was back at her desk, busy with another call. She adjusted the angle of her screen so that no one could see what she was doing, and went to work.

With a few keystrokes, she broke out of the helpdesk application into the computer’s operating system. Harry shook her head and almost tutted. It should have been better protected.

She poked around inside the PC, dipping into its files and directories, but it was a standard desktop and had no secrets to tell. She clicked her mouse and soon had a view of all her network connections:

F: \\Jupiter\shared

G: \\Pluto\users

H: \\Mars\system

L: \\Mercury\backup

S: \\Saturn\admin

This was more like it. This was her way into the bank’s central computers.

Harry stepped through the list of networked machines, trying to gain access. Some she could drop right into and view their files, but most of them blocked her at the first keystroke. She dug a little more, searching for something she could use. And then she found it: the system password file. Stored inside were the usernames and passwords of everyone on the network. It was her key into the system. She double-clicked with her mouse and tried to open the file. Locked.

Harry frowned and checked the time. Her heartbeat cranked up a notch. She’d been here twenty minutes already, and still had a lot of ground to cover. She discarded the password file and began ransacking the network, burrowing deep into its file system and sniffing every corner. She knew what she was looking for, and it had to be here somewhere. And sure enough, there it was, tucked away on a shared drive available for anyone to read: the unprotected backup copy of the password file.

The back of Harry’s neck tingled. It was always the same whenever she hacked into a system that was supposed to be secure. She wanted to beat a drum roll on the desk, but there was a time and a place for everything.

She opened the backup file and scanned its contents. The usernames were in clear text, but the passwords were all encrypted. Harry glanced over her shoulder. Nadia was chatting with a customer on the phone, her nails clacking on the keyboard.

Harry slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and drew out a CD which she slotted into the computer. It contained a password-cracker program, and she fed the backup file into it. She hunched over a computer manual and pretended to leaf through it as she waited for the cracker to do its job.

It could take a while. Dictionary attacks often did. The program was stepping through the entire dictionary, encrypting each word and trying to match it against the encrypted passwords in the file. After that, it would try letter and number combinations. By the end of it, she’d have all the passwords she needed.

Harry peeked at her watch again. Gooseflesh broke out on the back of her neck and she massaged it with her fingers. She had maybe ten minutes before the supervisor got back, and the cracker could take fifteen. It was going to be tight. But then, breaking and entering always was. That was what made it so irresistible.

Her father had always said she’d end up a burglar, ever since the day she’d hurled a brick through the kitchen window and climbed inside. She’d got locked out after school, but all she could think about was the port scan she’d launched from her computer that morning and what it might have found. She tried to explain this to her father later, as he crunched about in the broken glass, his face incredulous. She was sure he’d confiscate her PC, but instead, he upgraded its processor and presented her with her own set of house keys. To eleven-year-old Harry, he’d acquired some serious kudos that day.

And she had acquired a new name, because that was when her father had first started calling her Harry. There were times when she longed for an exotic Spanish name, like the one her sister had been given. Amaranta was tall with ash-blonde hair. She’d been born while Harry’s mother was still infatuated with her husband’s half-Irish, half-Spanish charm. But by the time Harry was born, her father’s financial disasters had forced them out of their mansion to a cramped terraced house, and her mother’s taste in names had dulled. Harry was the one who inherited her father’s sooty Spanish eyes and blue-black curls, but her mother had been unimpressed. Rejecting anything faintly Spanish, she had christened her daughter Henrietta after her own mother, a prim woman from the north of England.

‘But whoever heard of a burglar called Henrietta?’ her father had declared after the incident with the window, and had insisted on calling her Harry ever since. Now she never answered to anything else.

Harry checked the cracker program. It was almost finished. She scanned the list of passwords broken into clear text so far. There was Nadia’s. Username ‘nadiamc’, password ‘diamonds’. And Sandra Nagle’s: ‘sandran’, password ‘fortitude’. She shook her head. No good. She needed a heavy-hitter account, one with privileged access.

And there it was, at the bottom of the list. The network administrator’s password: asteroid27. Her toes wriggled inside her shoes. Now she was like a security guard with the master key to the building: she could go anywhere. She owned the network.

She logged in under her new privileged status, and immediately disabled the network’s auditing program. Now her activities couldn’t be recorded in the audit logs. She was invisible.

Harry prowled the servers and plunged into any file that looked interesting. Her eyes widened at some of the data she could access: customer credit ratings, bank revenues, employee salaries. She could view everyone’s emails, including those belonging to the chairman of the bank.

She hopped into another database and tried to make sense of the numbers in front of her. Her fingers froze on the mouse when she realized that she was looking at some of the bank’s most confidential customer information: account numbers, PIN codes, credit-card details, usernames and passwords. The stuff of hackers’ dreams, and most of it wasn’t even encrypted.

Harry scrolled through the data. It would be so easy to lift money out of these accounts. No one would even know it had happened. She was a ghost on the system, and left no footprints.

‘She’s back early.’

Harry looked across at Nadia, who was nodding towards the other end of the room. Sandra Nagle was standing by the double doors, consulting a clipboard.

Shit. Time to move.

Harry’s fingers jitterbugged over the keys. She copied the list of cracked passwords on to her CD, and dumped some customer account data and security PINs on to it for good measure.

The copy was slow to execute, and she looked up to check on Sandra Nagle. She was working her way down the room, stopping every few paces to check in with a helpdesk operator.

Harry knew she should wrap it up, knew she was taking a risk, but she still had one thing left to do. Manipulating the mouse, she disguised one of her own files and stashed it in a corner of the network. She always liked to leave a calling card.

The woman strolled in her direction, making notes on her clipboard. She stopped to interrogate a girl sitting a few feet away from Harry.

Harry cleared the system event logs to obliterate any possibility that she could be traced. She re-enabled the auditing facility and then glanced up.

Sandra Nagle was looking right at her.

Moisture trickled from Harry’s armpits. She heard the swish of nylon mashing against nylon as the woman marched towards her. She closed down her access to the network and flipped the helpdesk application back into view just as Sandra Nagle reached her desk.