The Insider

Slowly, Harry eased herself up on to her hands and knees. She stayed there on all fours, swaying, as the blood drizzled back into her head. On the ground beside her was her battered satchel. Someone must have retrieved it from the track. She reached out for it, her fingers touching the silver DefCon logo.

Someone put a hand on her arm. ‘Are you okay? Did you … was it an accident?’

Harry swallowed, and thought back to the fist in the small of her back, and the words someone had whispered in her ear before she fell.

The Sorohan money … The ring …

She shivered, looking up into the sea of strangers’ faces. She couldn’t deal with their questions. Not now.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident.’

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‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

Harry shivered and shook her head. ‘I’m not sure of anything right now.’

She closed her eyes and sank lower into the seat of Dillon’s car, trying not to mark the upholstery. Her suit was streaked with grime and black dust, like something that belonged in a skip, and she guessed her face must be the same. Her whole body ached, and her right knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

She peeked at Dillon’s profile. His nose always reminded her of Julius Caesar’s, strong and straight with a high, aristocratic bridge. He was dark, almost as dark as she was, and his six-foot frame slotted easily into the driver’s seat of his Lexus.

‘So come on, tell me again,’ he said. ‘What exactly did this guy say?’

‘It was more of a whisper, really. Sort of rough and sandpapery.’

Dillon turned to look at her. He had a habit of setting his mouth in a straight line, with an upward tuck in one corner as if he was holding back a smile. ‘Okay then, what did he whisper?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it was something like: “The Sorohan money, give it back to the ring.”’

‘But what the hell does it mean?’

Harry shrugged, and examined the palms of her hands. They still stung where the gravel from the railway tracks had dug into her flesh.

‘And he didn’t say anything else?’ Dillon said.

‘There wasn’t time to say anything else. I was falling, remember?’

‘I can’t believe someone tried to push you under a bloody train.’

‘I’m finding it kind of hard to deal with myself. Not sure the police believed me, either.’

A tall young police officer with a bobbing Adam’s apple had arrived at the train station to question her. Someone had wrapped her in a scratchy blanket, and she’d told her story between sips of hot sugary tea. All except for the words that she’d heard before she fell. That would have to keep for a while. When Dillon had phoned and insisted on coming to get her, she’d been glad for once to let someone else take charge.

Dillon swerved to avoid a cyclist and Harry’s stomach flipped, taking a moment to catch up with the rest of her insides. So far, it had been a jerky ride. Dillon alternated between pumping the accelerator and slamming on the brakes, with no real let-up in between. At this rate, she’d be lucky not to get whiplash.

She’d worked for Dillon for less than a year. He’d head-hunted her the previous summer from another software firm, hounding her with the same restless energy he seemed to apply to everything. It was the second time their paths had crossed in the last sixteen years. The first time, she’d only been thirteen.

That seemed so long ago. She leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes, flashing on an image of herself at thirteen: fists clenched, wild hair, caught up in a kind of double life. Come to think of it, maybe she hadn’t changed all that much.

She’d figured out early on in her childhood that she’d need a means of escape to survive her home life. Her solution had been to live two lives: one as the girl she called Harry the Drudge, whose mother opened her letters and read her diaries, and whose father wasn’t around enough to be much of an ally; the other she lived as Pirata, an insomniac who sat in the dark and prowled the electronic underground where she was both powerful and respected.

That was in the late eighties, before the internet had taken off. Pirata spent her time dialling out over slow modem connections to bulletin-board systems, electronic message centres where people shared ideas and downloaded hacker tools. By the time she was eleven, she’d taught herself how to penetrate almost any kind of system. She trespassed lightly, never pilfering, never causing harm. But by the time she was thirteen, she was ready to take things to the next level.

Harry could still remember the night she did it. The room had been dark, the only light a greenish glow from her computer screen. It was two o’clock in the morning and she was war dialling, programming her computer to make continuous phone calls until it found a number that allowed it to connect. She sat curled up in her chair, hugging her knees for warmth, listening to the thin screech of the modem as it dialled and disconnected. She wasn’t worried about her parents waking up to find her. They were too busy with their own problems to pay much attention to her.

Suddenly she’d had a hit. The caterwaul of chatty modems was unmistakable. Another computer out there had answered her. She straightened up, tapped out a command on the keyboard and hit Enter. Almost immediately the other computer spat back a message that made her clap a hand over her mouth.

WARNING! You have accessed a Dublin Stock Exchange computer system. Unauthorized access is prohibited and can result in disciplinary proceedings.

Harry had curled her feet back up under her and chewed her fingernail. Up until now, the highest profile network she’d ever invaded belonged to the University College of Dublin. Security there was lax, mainly because there was no confidential data lying around. The Stock Exchange, on the other hand, had to be crackling with sensitive information. She knew she should disconnect. Instead, she swung her feet to the ground and yanked her chair in closer to the keyboard.

She could tell by the characteristic ‘Username:’ prompt that the operating system was VMS. This was both good and bad. On the one hand, there were many ways to circumvent VMS security once she was logged in. On the other hand, logging in without a valid username and password wasn’t going to be easy. And to make matters worse, she’d be disconnected after three bad attempts.

Her fingers hovered over the keys while she considered some likely account names and passwords. Best to stick to the obvious. She typed in ‘system’. At the ‘Password:’ prompt, she typed ‘manager’, and hit Enter. Immediately the ‘Username:’ prompt re-appeared, challenging her to try again.

Strike one.

Next she tried ‘system’ and ‘operator’.

Strike two.

She had one shot left. She flexed her fingers and in her mind ran through the passwords that had worked for her in the past: ‘syslib’, ‘sysmaint’, ‘operator’. All were good bets, but there were no guarantees. Even the username ‘system’ might be wrong.

Then another possibility struck her; she shook her head – no chance. But it was so unlikely, she decided to give it a try. She typed in the username ‘guest’, left the password blank and hit Enter. A message unravelled on the screen:

Welcome to the Dublin Stock Exchange VAX server.

And there on the next line, waiting politely for her instructions, was the coveted VMS $ prompt. She was logged in.

She sat back and grinned. Administrators would sometimes create an unprotected ‘Guest’ account for new or infrequent users, but the practice was highly insecure. She was beginning to realize that the weakest point in any system was a lazy administrator.

She rolled up the sleeves of her pyjamas and started to type, sidestepping security blocks and dodging her way further into the system. Every time one of her commands outwitted the other computer, she bounced up and down in her chair.

When she figured out that she was inside a database server, she wiggled a thumbs-up sign at the screen. Goody. Databases were full of interesting information. She rummaged through the files. The records seemed to represent financial transactions of some kind, but the details made little sense to her. Then she found a list of vaguely familiar acronyms: NLD, CHF, DEM, HKD. It wasn’t until she saw ESP in the list and recognized it as the symbol for the Spanish peseta that she understood what she was looking at. Foreign currency symbols. She must have stumbled on records of foreign exchange trades.

Harry scanned the data and blinked when she saw the sums of money involved. So many zeros. She itched to leave her mark, to let them know she’d been there. What harm could it do? With a flurry of fingers, she added a couple of zeros to some of the smaller trades.

Then she backtracked out of the system, shut down her modem connection and scampered into bed. But she couldn’t sleep. She’d slipped a little further into the black-hat world, and now she wondered what she’d started.

She didn’t have long to wait before she found out. The Stock Exchange discovered the security breach and recruited the services of an independent consultant to trace the source. The expert they hired was a twenty-one-year-old graduate who was a crackerjack in software security. It took him just a week to track her down.

His name was Dillon Fitzroy.

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‘Tell me about KWC.’

Harry dragged her gaze away from the traffic and saw that Dillon was looking at her. KWC. Had that only been today?