Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (2 page)

‘Some wee girl posting online. You realise how shite the timing is? After what you said in the House last week, in Oral Questions. You specifically used the word—’

‘Yes, all right. Don’t remind me.’

‘—
unhackable.
’

‘But if this is some lone stirrer?’ she said. ‘We’re rebutting her?’

‘Beth. It’s real. It’s not just this girl. Someone’s defacing our homepage. Every time we take it down, fix it and put it back up, they graffiti it all over again.’

‘Graffiti? On a website?’

‘Or the equivalent. They keep adding this same screwy message in typewriter font.
The nature of information will be free,
some bollocks like that.’

Bethany sat forward.

‘
The nature of information
,’ she said. ‘Those exact words?’

Krish left one of his significant pauses before asking, ‘Any reason the words should matter?’

‘No, none. I thought it sounded familiar.’

‘Point I’m making, this is concerted and it’s credible. This blogger lassie seems to know a hell of a lot more than we do. She says our data’s being used to target Digital Citizen users. Taxpayers, Beth. Voters. We can’t rebut a thing like that until we know what’s true.’

‘We sure as hell can’t stay silent and let someone trash us.’

‘Press pause a second and listen. This girlie’s posted what she claims are departmental documents, saying we
knew
the data was hacked, as much as two weeks ago. Saying
you
knew.’

Bethany wanted to sit down all over again. This could not be. This Friday she’d be announcing the nationwide roll-out of Digital Citizen. Four days. Could she not get through four slender days without some further blow-up?

Krish was letting the point hang.

‘Which is clearly nonsense,’ she said.

‘If you say so.’

‘Come on, Krish. Do you not know a stunt when you see one?’

She pushed back her unruly hair, fast-forwarded through the consequences.

‘This is so –
gah!
’ she said. ‘People like this: all they ever do is undermine. We’re asking the public to surrender this personal, private thing – their identity. They need to believe we have a safe place for them online. This woman – this – blogger? She’s out to kill trust. We need to cut off her oxygen – right now, before the breakfast news cycle. I don’t care how credible she sounds.’

‘No chance. None. This thing’s out there already.’

‘When did everyone start assuming government’s out to get them? She probably thinks she’s ‘‘protecting’’ people from us. That’s such crap.
We
’
re
the ones protecting
them
. I’ve worked so hard to get our message across. You know I have.’

‘I know if this thing goes tits up, it comes back to you. I know this was your programme from the off. You fronted up the
Personal as your fingerprint
campaign, you crowbarred the money out of Treasury, you led the procurement—’

‘Yes, thanks for the fact check. I’m waiting for the good news.’

‘Just saying, like. And you had to pick Mondan to hold the data. Who the hell is Mondan, anyway? You couldn’t go with Terasoft, like we’ve done for every bit of government tech since Harold Wilson bought his first pocket calculator. You had to pick good old
unhackable
Mondan.’

‘Yes, can we please try to start from a place we
haven
’
t
been hacked? At least until someone proves to the contrary?’

She pushed back her hair again and took three pranayama breaths. Come on, Beth. You’re Minister of State for a Digital Society, dammit, not some jobbing newbie. Engage your tummy muscles and get to work. Move the conversation on. There was something Krish had said before, that she’d let pass. Oh, yes.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Wait. You said somebody is
targeting
our pilot group? Targeting how? Have members of the public been harmed?’

‘Well, now—’

Krish let out a breath. The pause that followed was way too long for her liking.

‘You’ve heard of the Giggly Pigglies?’ he said.

She pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it.

¶NewsHound:

BREAKING: Unidentified hackers access private data of members of the public who signed up to the government’s Digital Citizen online ID programme. More follows.

¶9th&sunset:

Noisy night. The whores and the pundits are all breathing fire.

Take my advice: keep your head low and your hands clean. No telling who they’ll turn on next. They sicken me, with their phoney indignation and their ready blame.

We’re all human. We’re all dirt.

¶maglad:

Oy oy lads! Who is this Betty Learner? Should I care?

¶pieandmash:

I think she’s like Minister for the Internet? Brunette. OK on the eye. Kind of milfy. High heels.

¶maglad:

We have a minister for the internet? Who knew? Do I need a minister? I need a haircut. And a shag. But a minister?

Two

That unwelcome stranger, the sun, creeps in through the skylights. From outside the first hints of day break through: the hiss of the artics’ brakes as they pull up at the sheds below; the Bengali shouts of the packers; the crump of Beemer doors slamming in the yard as six armed men approach the building. Dani Farr is unaware. Alone in a halogen pool, all she hears is the white noise of her computer’s fan, all she sees are the slashes and curly braces shimmering over her twin displays like insects dancing on the surface of a pool. The only parts of her that move are the fingers flicking across the keys.

She’s in the state that Gray calls
the code-freeze.
You could set off a bomb outside the window, she wouldn’t flinch. One time, a month back, the building was cleared for a fire alarm, when a Pop-Tart went molten in the sales team’s toaster. It was soon put out with a blast of phosphate from the extinguisher but not before the whole place was evacuated. After an hour stamping in the yard with stone-cold lattes, the staffers were cleared to file back inside: to find Dani immobile in her chair, still coding, eyes locked on her screens. They moved around her silently, replacing their headphones and logging back in as though trying not to wake a sleepwalker.

Daylight spreads across the wooden floor. This is the Skunkworks: the high-ceilinged warehouse space where Dani and her team of software engineers turn out their elegant, efficient packages of code. Any night of the week you’ll find one or two of them up here, burning the small hours at a battered workstation, wrestling with some herculean deadline. Usually, Dani loves working through the night: the way the Skunkworks morphs into a new and private space; the midnight pizza sessions; the long trudge home at dawn, climbing four flights to her flat with a carton of milk; passing tomorrow morning on its way downstairs. But tonight she’s stuck with a brain-dead hunk of uncommented code she said she’d fix by morning. It’s nearly morning and there’s no way she’ll fix it in time; but her fingers don’t know how to stop working the keys. The sound of their typing fills the room like water coursing through underground caves.

The buzzer sounds. Dani’s mouse-hand jerks, sending her mug skidding over the desktop. She grabs at it, knocks it further, catches it with both hands – it’s empty. She resets it, making the handle perpendicular, and gives a bleary look around. The buzzer sounds again, for longer. She pushes aside a purple lick of hair and thinks: first, is there anyone else in the building to get that? – answer clearly no; second, what cunt is ringing the doorbell at argh o’clock in the morning?

When the buzzer sounds again and doesn’t stop, she lets out a swear and stamps the length of the room to the videophone.

‘Fucking what!’ she shouts into the handset.

The buzzer stops and she notices the video screen: the crested badge held up to the camera, the crop-headed men glaring from behind it.

‘Oh, shit, sorry,’ she says. ‘I mean, just – sorry. Hold on.’

She holds down the door release then crosses to the lift and jabs the button, letting out more ‘fuck’s like a junkie flushing away her stash of pills. She pulls out her phone, swipes to the Parley app and proffers.

¶Nightshade:

shit on a cracker
police?
what have i done NOW???

Nobody answers her proffer – the Internet is still in bed – but her phone tags on its own silent commentary.

)) blue hum ((

Sparkles fill the corners of Dani’s eyes. She pushes the lift button for a second time. There’s a clank somewhere down the shaft then silence. Some muppet has left the grille door open on another floor.

‘Fucksticks!’ she says, and heads for the stairwell.

In all her rich vocabulary, the strongest insult Dani can lay on anything is
pointless.
This has been a pointless night. And already the morning is shaping up wrong.

‘Hands Where I Can See Them
!
’

‘What the –?’

Dani shrugs off the man’s grip and backs away, raising her phone on instinct to film him. On the little screen, a scrum of bodies closes in, closely followed by their larger real-world counterparts. Five – no, six – men with generic sweatshirt hoods over jacket collars.

‘I’m filming this!’ she shouts, still backing off. ‘Smile, dickheads, you’re on social media.’

‘Put your phone away, miss.’

When she saw these douches on the entryphone she thought they were cops – else she’d never have buzzed them in. Stupid, stupid. This is some gang of Dalston crims, come to filch the Macs from the studio and rape or stab her.

‘I have a hundred thousand devotees,’ she says. ‘They’re watching this live. You’re going to jail.’

But if anyone’s even watching at this hour, by the time they sound the alarm these thugs’ll have had their way with her.

Dani’s backed up against the brushed metal of the reception desk, still breathless from running down eight flights of stairs. In the corner of her eye, off camera, two goons move to flank her. The big guy – the one who grabbed her arm just now – is almost on her. His aftershave should be banned by the Geneva Convention. He reaches for her phone.

No, he’s holding out something for her to see. The screen res of the phone is too crappy to make it out so Dani moves it aside and looks at his real hand. In it is a plastic wallet containing a photo ID and a silver Nick Fury shield.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant R –’ he begins.

But his name is lost as someone grabs Dani from behind. She wriggles free but two arms snake under her armpits and yank her back. Her phone drops to the floor. Goon Number Two scoops it up. As she struggles, the guys behind her start digging in her jacket pockets.

‘And this,’ continues the first goon, as though all of this was massively normal, ‘is Detective Constable A –’

‘Hey, fuck!’ Dani interrupts. ‘Tell this guy to stop touching my arse!’

They’re feeling in her jeans pockets. She jackknifes forward against the arms then suddenly drops her weight – but the grip’s too hard. They pull her up and have a good old grope in her butt pockets while ‘Detective Sergeant R –’ calmly pockets his laminate.

‘Miss,’ he says, ‘if you’d simmer down my colleagues wouldn’t need to restrain you.’

‘Restrain this, you fucking pigs!’

She starts to flip him the bird but the guy behind her yanks her sideways and slams her into the reception desk, pointing his finger all up in her face – like
Go on, try it.

‘She’s clean,’ he says.

‘Hey, ow?’ she says back.

They step into a ring around her. She brushes herself, panting for breath, and stares out the tall man whose name begins with ‘R’. Then she turns to his minion whose name begins with ‘A’ and holds out her hand.

‘Give me back my phone.’

The minion looks at his boss, who shrugs. Minion holds it out like a piece of snotty rag and she snatches it back. She checks it for new dinks but it was already trashed so who knows? The video’s still rolling on it, though – Dani’s still livecasting. She makes a show of rotating the camera from face to face, thumb-typing captions as she goes.

¶Nightshade:

in case they find me in a bloody heap
this guy is detective sergeant Racist
or something
this guy is detective constable Acne
these others are redshirts – no names

‘All right, enough,’ says Racist, flapping a hand at her like a celeb saying
no pictures.
‘Put the phone away.’

)) brick echo ((

To her surprise, she offs the phone and puts it back in the arse pocket of her jeans. The men shift their feet. Seems the moment of danger has passed. If these guys say they’re police, OK, let’s say they’re police – but not because they showed Dani some hazy photo and a tin badge. It’s 30% the way they act and 70% the atmosphere they’ve brought into the room.

Plus, Racist has a notebook out. And an actual
pen.

‘Your name?’ he says.

Time was Dani would have kicked off big-time at this whole thing but ever since she sort-of-punched a colleague last year she’s been working on a project of being accepting of authority. So she sets herself a goal: answer their questions then shut the fuck up.

‘Farr,’ she says. ‘Danielle Farr.’

What’s with the
Danielle
?
Only her mum calls her Danielle. And her boss, Jonquil. Oh, shit: Jonquil. She needs to message Jonquil, asap. She puts her hands in her back pockets, casual like, and touches the phone with her fingers. Racist is giving her this
who are you trying to kid?
look.