“You, you can’t threaten me,” he stammered, “I’m your, your only source, I know that. Without me, you’ve got nothing.”
The Russian turned the card over in his fingers, its metal contacts gleaming in the starlight. “And without this, you are worth nothing…except perhaps the life insurance for your wife and children.” The Russian leaned forward, snorting sour breath into his face, and something hard pressed against his chest, something lodged under the Russian’s ill-fitting sport coat. He closed his eyes, trying not to think about what it was.
Something clicked. The Russian stepped back.
Nothing happened. He opened his eyes to see the Russian was holding the car door open for him. “You need rest. Go and have a good night’s sleep. I will see you here again in three days.”
He slid back inside the car and let the Russian close the door with a flick of his wrist. It started on the second attempt, and he drove away, back down the hill, not looking back. He didn’t want to see the Russian watching him in the rear-view mirror, didn’t want to imagine the hint of a smile on the man’s face.
Just a few more weeks, he told himself. You’ve been doing it for months. A few more weeks and it would be over. The debt would be paid, and everything would go back to normal, because he only had this one thing to do, because he wasn’t actually a Russian agent or mole.
Not technically.
2
“And what are your opinions on cryptographic mechanisms expressly designed to deny visibility to third parties, such as law-enforcement agencies?”
She caught a flicker of interest in the eyes of the casually-dressed young man sitting on the other side of the interview desk, and knew she finally had his attention. That was a good development for Miss Jane White, who’d asked the question, because so far the interview hadn’t been going her way. Despite the cool, fully air-conditioned ambience of the room, she felt the back of her neck begin to warm, and pinpricks of sweat rose on her body. The interview room itself was spartan and anonymous, a deliberate choice to deny the candidate an opportunity to form too many ideas of whom, exactly, he was being interviewed by. The company Miss White worked for had never been stated, not even when Rob Carter, the young man sitting opposite her, had entered the room.
The job posting was itself obscure: “Elite coders, interesting work, well paid.” It barely read like a call for applicants. To further the point, they hadn’t posted it on the usual job sites, where CVs of the eternally hopeful masses piled up by the thousands, and algorithms seemed convinced that every listing that merely contained the word ‘computer’ was The Perfect Opportunity for the large subset of those masses who had the word ‘computer’ anywhere in their CV. No, Miss White had been very careful about where this job could be seen. Hacker board communities, unlisted IRC channels, anarchist email lists. Places that didn’t advertise themselves, that you had to know to look for, that trolled newbies mercilessly until they proved their skills. Places that would ensure the people who responded, applied, and ultimately walked through the plain glass door of this red brick King’s Cross building, waited in the distinctly logo-less lobby, glanced hopefully down the receptionist’s blouse as she gave them directions, climbed the breezeblock stairs and, finally, entered this very room were exactly the kind of people Miss White wanted to see.
Curious. Driven. Excited by the prospect of clandestine work, hidden corridors of power, the potential to change the world.
Rob Carter ticked every one of those boxes, and more besides. Miss White (whose hair matched her name, her contrasting brown eyes conveniently focusing the young man’s attention away from the rest of her face) had hoped all along he’d apply for the post. In fact, the moment Carter made contact, she rejected every other applicant and stopped answering further enquiries. Now here she was, opposite the very man she’d wanted to see, trying to get him to open up.
She fumbled with her pen, waiting for him to answer. If she fucked this up, her boss would be furious.
The interview had begun in a fairly standard fashion. They’d gone over his CV, even though Miss White had read it a dozen times, just to be absolutely sure he wasn’t bullshitting about his talents and achievements. His self-taught coding skills, the game app he made while still at school, the trouble he’d got into for hacking his sixth form college’s system and altering coursework grades. Dropping out of uni when he realised he already knew everything on the Comp Sci syllabus. Contracting on and off for game studios, contributing to open-source projects that focused on cryptography and zero-day exploits.
What he hadn’t talked about yet — what Miss White was so keen to steer the conversation towards — were the projects that weren’t so open. Carter had a strange habit of taking holidays in places with well established hacktivist communities, who then coincidentally released impressive new exploits and tech demos in the days after he moved on. That, ultimately, was all she cared about.
Carter narrowed his eyes. “So is that what you’re doing here? Building stuff the law can’t snoop on?”
“The balance between security and privacy,” said Miss White, raising an eyebrow, “is a question everyone in the community must wrestle with these days. On which side do you fall?”
He replied with a lopsided smile. “Whichever side pays better.”
Now she knew he was interested. Giles, her boss, had suggested she try to keep Carter’s interest through less subtle means — “How about a tight blouse and a push-up bra?” — but that wouldn’t hold for more than a few minutes. True, the hacker community was still overwhelmingly male, not to mention socially awkward. And Carter was better-looking than many coders she’d known, meaning he probably had less trouble with women, and maybe figured he stood
