“Get over yourself” had stung. It was three years since the incident Bridge and Dr Nayar referred to only as The Doorkicker, and while she’d made a lot of progress, she still didn’t feel ready.
Giles hadn’t cared. “It’s not even a real field op,” he’d said. “All you have to do is sit in a room and ask him questions.”
“You mean interrogate him,” she protested. “Not the sort of thing they cover in basic at the Loch, is it? Get someone from Five, if you think GCHQ can’t handle it.”
“Five will put Carter in the net, but they can’t reel him in. Just talk to him, nerd to nerd. I know you want to get back to OIT eventually, and this will be a really good step for you.”
Operator In Theatre. The coveted SIS fieldwork status Bridge had gained, and lost, in the space of one week. Bloody Doorkicker. She shrugged. “I’m still in therapy. I’m not ready.”
“Mahima says you are. You’ve improved more than you realise, and now you need to get back in the game.”
Bridge scowled. “Oh, does she? Well, Dr Nayar’s got her opinions, and I’ve got mine.”
“Indeed, and you’d do well to remember which of those I have to consider when deciding whether to put you back on the list. Spoiler: it’s not yours.” Giles Finlay was exactly the kind of man who’d pull rank to win an argument, but she’d expected and hoped better of Dr Nayar. Bridge hadn’t been to therapy since that day, and judging from her texts every week since, the doctor had no idea why.
Giles was also the kind of man who’d take credit for the operation to bag Carter, but Bridge had less of a problem with that. Let him deal with the Directors, the Ministers, the suits in their old school ties. He was good at politics in a way she never would be.
She was desperately thirsty. She hit the cold tap, bent down, and gulped at the freezing water. Her hands were still shaking, though less with each deep breath. She turned to Giles. “Can I take a day off? I’ve got some holiday carried over.”
To her surprise, he barked a laugh. “Not getting out of the paperwork that easily. Go see the doc first thing — that’s an order, by the way, no more avoiding her — for psych debrief. Then I want to see you back at your desk, writing this up. After all that, maybe we can talk about days off.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but the look in Giles’ eyes was clear. “Please don’t tell me this is for my own good.”
“I should coco. You’ll thank me when you get your OIT back.”
The door closed with a sigh as he left. Bridge looked up at her reflection and sighed with it.
3
T > By Jove, Ponty, I think I☺ve cracked it.
P > cracked what
T > The ASCII art. It☺s a puzzle.
P > like how?
T > Like a code.
P > bloody hell
She retreated, as she so often did, to the shadows.
Or rather to ‘Tenebrae_Z’, one of her oldest friends, with whom she chatted regularly on a secure messaging server. They’d built it together, handcoded the whole thing from scratch, then piggybacked it on an admin machine somewhere deep in Telehouse North, the colocation facility in Docklands where dozens of service providers and internet backbone carriers routed their UK traffic. Bridge had been there once with her colleague Monica Lee, and Monica’s GCHQ liaison Lisa Hebden, to observe installation of a hard routing intercept, but she’d never been by herself. By contrast, Tenebrae_Z had regular access. He was one of the privileged few with keys to a server floor, owing to his clearly important but never outright-stated day job.
At least, that’s what he told Bridge and everyone else when they first met on Usenet, the now outdated and virtually defunct message board service of ‘newsgroups’ left over from the internet’s early days. He certainly knew what he was talking about, and she’d run her own trace on the chat server to confirm it really did live somewhere in Telehouse. It all checked out.
But, despite being friends now for almost a decade, Bridge and Tenebrae_Z had never met in the flesh. She didn’t even know his real name.
T > It☺s not just on f.m.b-r. I found instances on other French groups, too. All low traffic, barely used. Every piece is 78 x 78 chars, all innocuous images like the ones we already found. Flowers, dogs, Michael Jackson☺s face, etc.
P > which one
T > Which one what?
P > which face, he had loads
T > ROFL
To be fair, Tenebrae_Z didn’t know Bridge’s real name either. Everyone on the uk.london.gothic-netizens newsgroup knew her simply as ‘Ponty’, a silly play on her name and heritage. She’d come up with it on the spur of the moment when she first ventured into the deep end of the internet, graduating from the shiny, friendly web forum UIs inhabited by norms to the murky areas of pure text and command line interfaces. She’d been a fresher at Cambridge, then; black-clad, white-faced, and big-haired, with an inglorious social record and a teenage arrest for hacking. The last thing she needed was to screw up her chances of a First by using her real name to post to a newsgroup devoted to hacking and subculture.
In fact, what nearly sent her degree sideways was her second arrest. She’d cracked the university servers several times without anyone noticing, no big deal. But then one of her mathematician friends was approached by a faceless civil servant after a lecture, and gently asked if he was interested in a career of ‘discreet but challenging government work’. The man left a card containing only a name and phone number. Figuring he must have been a spook, Bridge was determined to find out who exactly he worked for, to give
