But in an age where eight-year-old kids knew where to find swathes of free online pornography, a flash of skin wouldn’t keep Carter’s attention for long. To really get him interested, you had to talk hacks. Dangerous, semi-legal hacks.
Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips, and her voice cracked a little. “Let’s try a little thought experiment, then. Say a corporation is developing a new network protocol, and we’d like to see it. We know the identity of the project’s deputy lead, and we have his home address. An inside source has also given us the specs of their central server, with several undisclosed script vulnerabilities. What’s your attack vector?”
Carter smiled. “Holy shit, are you a front for the Chinese?”
Miss White half-smiled in reply. Enough to insinuate, not enough to confirm. She repeated, “What’s your vector of choice?”
Carter leaned back and folded his arms. “Nah. If you know who I am, you know what I can do.”
“You’re evading the question, Mr Carter. Is that because it’s beyond you?”
“Fuck off,” he sneered. “You know it isn’t.”
Miss White looked down, made a note on her pad in silence, then looked back up at Carter. Waiting.
“Christ’s sake,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You go after the deputy lead. If you’ve got his ID and address, then you can get his phone number. He’s probably in a credit card dump on a pastebin somewhere, so you match him up on that, and there’s your new angle. Spend half an hour on the phone to Amazon to get into his account, use whatever you find there to crack his email, boom. Or maybe he doesn’t bother to shred, so you dig through his wheelie bin and get the card from there. Same difference.”
“Half an hour on the phone?”
Carter imitated a distressed customer. “Oh no, my daughter made an account for me, and now I can’t remember my password. But I can give you my date of birth, address, phone number, credit card number, can you just give me a new password so I can buy her a birthday present, pleeeeease?”
Miss White smiled despite herself. “Fair enough. But this is all social engineering. Why not go straight for the corporate server?”
“Waste of time, it’s probably done up like Fort Knox. Get into his email first, you’re bound to find something on it. Everyone slips up, uses their personal email for company stuff. Why spend weeks trying to hack it when you can just walk in with the password?”
“So what you’re telling me is that you’re just a con man, not a real hacker.”
Carter’s forehead reddened slightly, and a muscle in his neck twitched. “They’re the same thing,” he said through gritted teeth. “And you still have to know what to look for. If you don’t know what goes where, you’re just running around breaking shit and setting off alarms. I’m not a bazooka, I’m a sniper bullet. I get in, locate the target, and get out without them even knowing they’ve been buzzed.”
Miss White shrugged casually. “But you’re not skilled enough to do the same with the script vulnerabilities? You’re not familiar with ZFlood, or MaXrIoT, or Bunker_Stalker?”
“Of course I’m familiar with them,” Carter snapped. “I wrote a couple of hundred lines in ZF 1.0, for God’s sake, then did three bug fix releases solo. And I used Bunker on the DGT, because I was buggered if I was going all the way to Belgium just to grab a bunch of contract records.”
Miss White put down her pen and stood up. “There you go,” she said.
The door opened behind Carter. He turned, startled, as two broad-shouldered men in grey suits entered. Shocked and confused, he looked back at Miss White, but she was already leaving the room, sliding out of sight behind the security officers who’d been waiting to arrest him as soon as he admitted to hacking the EU Directorate-General for Trade in Brussels.
She shoved open the ladies’ bathroom door and let it close behind her, shutting out the fading sounds of Rob Carter insulting her, her parents, her presumed sexual orientation, and anything else his rage could muster. She collapsed back against the door, short of breath, her head spinning as she threw the wig on the floor to reveal her dark hair.
Then Brigitte Sharp staggered to the sink and leant on it with all her weight, forcing her arms to keep her upright. She stared at the mirror, trying to work out what looked wrong, then remembered she was wearing coloured contacts as well. Her hands trembling, she slowly squeezed them out of her eyes and let them fall into the sink.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, Dr Nayar was shouting something at her. Something about her feet, the floor…
She kicked off the high heels, part of her Miss White disguise, and felt the cold, firm touch of the floor on her feet. Let her weight sink through her stomach and hips, down through her calves, her feet, into the floor. Let the world carry its own weight.
Ten. And breathe, and count. Nine. And breathe, and — the scent of hazelnut.
“Good work, Bridge. How are you feeling?”
She opened her eyes, not realising she’d closed them. In the mirror, the reflection of her boss standing in the doorway.
“Giles, this is the Ladies.”
He looked confused for a moment, then dismissed it and continued, “You bagged him. Celebration time. I know it’s against your religion, but do try and look happy.”
The sting had been her idea, and it required a level of technical knowledge that only someone like Bridge could pull off. But she hadn’t wanted to be the one carrying it out. She’d suggested Giles use someone from GCHQ instead, who could conduct the ‘interview’ and trap Carter into incriminating himself. Giles had put his
