Her Nightly Embrace Page 9

  She kissed me quickly in greeting, in full view of everyone.

  “Got an interview with Cheryl and Roger.”

  “For what?”

  “A job, of course.”

  “What?”

  “Roger will see you now,” Cheryl said, and with that, Julia walked into his office.

  “Eyes on the job, Ravi,” Marcie said.

  I couldn’t help stealing glances at Roger’s office. Julia’s interview seemed to be going well. Roger was all smiles, turning on the charm, no doubt bigging up the agency and the work we did, Cheryl gently but firmly bringing it down to earth with more practical information.

  “Think he’s going to hire her?” I asked.

  “Blond, good-looking girl who could serve as eye candy and a honeytrap?” David said. “No-brainer for Roger.”

  That didn’t make me feel better.

  “So what does Delia want to do once we find out who’s been organizing these attacks on her?” I asked.

  “She hasn’t decided yet,” Marcie said.

  “Ours not to wonder why. Got it.”

  So I sat down with the printouts and started going through the usernames of the abusers, marking out the ones that popped up most often. Delia’s assistant had printed out the page that posted her address, so we had that to go on. And such was the trust Marcie generated in her clients that Delia also gave us the passwords to all of her social media accounts. That gave us a record of the harassment and its escalation in real time. The downside was that we had literally tens of thousands of posts to wade through.

  I didn’t have to read through all of them, of course. What I had to do was mark the names and handles of the abusers who popped up most frequently.

  “I think some of these are the same people who set up multiple accounts to spam abuse at Delia. Sock puppets, they’re called,” I said. “There are the hit-and-run accounts. Those popped up once to post abuse, then got banned, then another came along with a similar username, posting similar insults. Then eventually most of them went away.”

  “Great. Now we can see if any of them are the ringleaders of the harassment campaign,” Marcie said, pulling on her jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check in with Delia. Hold my client’s hand, of course. That’s why I need you to take point on this one. I’m on the phone if you need me.”

  Marcie’s American-ness was always going to be on display, and she used that to her advantage. I had wondered for ages why she worked in public relations when I found out her background. She had studied international relations and journalism at Yale and could have been a journalist or worked for the government. She struck me as overqualified for PR. Maybe she just preferred the cushy life, not that PR was any less stressful. In fact, it was at the last company she worked for that she crashed and burned. The details were vague, but they were nevertheless now an urban legend in the history of disastrous PR campaigns:

  It was one of those overbudgeted TV ads with a huge set and special effects involving fake snow and a temperamental reality TV star. The product was ice cream for a Christmas promo. The director was a hotshot rising star in the ad world well on his way to becoming the next Ridley Scott as soon as he got to direct a proper film. According to Marcie, the set was coked to the gills. And her client was bonking the director. The star, the director, half the crew, the production company, and Marcie had their hands full keeping the reps from the ice cream company from seeing what was really happening. Marcie obviously couldn’t keep that up when the expensive special effects machines went wrong and dumped over a hundred pounds of pink goo that was supposed to pass for strawberry ice cream right over the star, the dancers, and the camera equipment. I forget what the bill was for that. Since the campaign had been Marcie’s baby—she had pitched it—it had ended her career in public relations. She became known as the PR person who put her client in a bad spot with the most fucked outcome imaginable (short of someone getting killed). It was one fuckup, but it was too big to forgive.

  “How did you come to pitch this campaign, anyway?” I asked. “You strike me as too smart for that.”

  “You had to be there,” she said. “There was tons of dough in the ads industry at the time, and we were all coked to the gills, so all kinds of crazy, stupid ideas just sounded like the greatest thing ever at the time.”

  Just as she was wondering if she should pack up and head back to the States, Roger came a-calling. He offered her a position as the go-to gal that celebrities could bring their problems to. She already knew everyone in show business: actors, reality stars, sports stars, celebrity chefs, singers.

  Marcie’s celebrity clients gave Golden Sentinel a very nice turnaround, kept us in our expensive meals and wardrobe accounts that enabled us to look smart and upmarket.

  “What I love about the British is,” Marcie said, “they are a lot more ruthless and creative when it comes to destroying someone through satire. It’s a fate worse than death. Hundreds of years ago, the British perfected the art of it. When they decided they didn’t like a public figure like a king or a politician, they would find the most vicious way to ridicule his worst traits. By the time they were through, they’ll have destroyed his reputation and perception for all time, so we now only know that image of him. The real him is long gone. That is PR as a weapon, and I am a master of that weapon whenever somebody hires us to help save them from scandal. This is what this case is all about. We have to stop this guy from destroying my client’s image.”

  With that, she was out the door.

  FOUR

  So Marcie’s got you doing the dirty work, then?” Olivia asked. “She must be expecting some crazy shit to go down.”

  “Come on, we’re just cross-referencing and compiling data,” I said. “I don’t even have to talk to the client or interview anyone. Just give the information we find to Marcie to give to the client.”

  “Easy-peasy, eh?”

  “Easy-peasy.”

  Olivia chuckled.

  “Oh, Ravi, why do you think Marcie picked you instead of Mark or Benjamin? There’s an angle she’s seeing that only you can bring to bear.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, oh, bloody great mess that’s only going to get much more interesting and fun now that you’re on it.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “No, you come on. Look at this, Ravi.”

  She held up the printouts. “She has you looking for a needle in a haystack. You don’t know if it’s just one needle. We’re talking about a bunch of jumped-up armchair psychopaths who think they can hide behind the cloak of digital anonymity.”

  “Why didn’t she ask you?”

  “Because I would have told her to sod off and sort it out herself.”

  “Wouldn’t Roger sack you for that?”

  “I’m too valuable to sack. This firm’s entire IT security is nothing without me.”

  “Olivia, I’ve been wondering . . .”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Paying my rent, of course.”

  “No, I mean, you have an IQ off the charts, you’re from a respectable Hong Kong banking family. You have mad skills. You could be running your father’s bank, or managing a hedge fund worth tens of millions of pounds, or be the CEO of your own company. What are you doing working at a private investigations firm?”

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, weighing whether to tell me.

  “Penance,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Do you remember that Pentagon hack from the 1990s?”

  “Yes, before Anonymous became a thing. It was just hackers looking for evidence of UFOs, silly stuff like that.”

  “Well, they weren’t that good. They didn’t know how to breach the firewalls until someone on the usenet group they posted on told them how to do it. They were caught, but that ‘someone’ never was.”

  “Those guys who were arrested and extradited to the St
ates never said they had help.”

  “Of course not. They weren’t going to admit some teenager helped them crack that final hurdle to break into the Pentagon’s computers.”

  “What’s that got to do with all this?”

  “It’s background. I was in boarding school at the time. I was always good with numbers, figures, data, code. I wrote a bot that I introduced to the school’s computer network that could change anyone’s exam results. I sussed out how easy it was to peak at the emails coming in and out of No. 10 Downing Street before I finished my A Levels.”

  “All without getting caught.”

  “The best hackers are the ones you never heard about, who don’t give interviews or brag about it on forums and message boards.”

  “So if you never got caught, why—?”

  “I’m getting to that. First year I was at university, my dad implemented a new security system for his bank. They hired Oscar Jong, a bloke who was hyped up as an Internet security guru at the time. Those of us in the hacker scene knew he was a clueless twat with good PR. And my dad had hired him to shore up the online security of our family business.”

  “That must have been irritating.”

  “It seriously got on my tits. My dad and his board of directors were utterly clueless about the Internet. Their solution was to throw money at the problem. I couldn’t very well call up my dad and tell him they hired a Muppet to protect over a hundred million pounds’ worth of bank accounts. So I decided to do my own pentest.”

  “Pen—?”

  “Penetration test. It’s what every self-respecting institution hires experts to do: test the strength of their security systems. In one evening, I had the entire online infrastructure of my dad’s bank under my control. I could have stolen all the money, and I mean literally all the money, out of the bank and transferred it to offshore accounts I could set up instantly if I felt like it. But no, I left all the accounts alone. I did, however, leave a message in the code to let Oscar Jong know just how thoroughly I had owned him. Then I used a proxy email account to write my father and his entire board of directors telling them how easily they had been hacked and how useless Jong was. I made it clear that I was not out to blackmail the bank or hold it ransom, that I was strictly white hat, that I was not going to make what I did public. I only wanted them to get their bloody act together, and Oscar Jong was an idiot and an incompetent. To prove that, I reset his passwords and locked him out of the system, and I challenged him to find his way back in. He never did. I’m the reason nobody hears of Oscar Jong anymore.”

  “So you ruined his career.”

  “He didn’t deserve that career. Anyway, my father freaked the fuck out and wanted the hacker caught. He even hired his old friend Roger Golden to hunt the hacker down. Roger, my godfather.”

  “I didn’t know he was your godfather.”

  “Now, Roger didn’t know or care about computers other than when he used email and watched porn. He barely bothered to look into the hacker scene or go through Oscar Jong’s enemies. He almost immediately sussed out it was me.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “I know you think Roger is an East End chancer with a winning smile and a silver tongue. That’s what he wants everyone to think. Underneath the expensive suit is a steel-trap mind that can read people like a book. He looked at the anonymous emails I’d sent to my dad and the bank and saw that it was personal. He deduced it was someone close to home, not a stranger. He’d known me all my life, even though I never told him I was good at computers or hacking, but he knew me well enough to see that I would be the type to hack the bank’s website to prove its security was buggered. The one time I poked my head above the parapet and I got caught.”

  “So did he tell your dad?”

  “It was a fraught meeting. Roger acted as go-between so that my dad didn’t fly off the handle and go completely mental. He was already shocked that I was capable of doing it. We had to convince my dad that I was doing it on behalf of the family business. My dad at least saw the point, and sacked Oscar Jong. But it also put me on my dad’s shitlist. Part of his problem was that a girl had bested him. Even though he had no problem with me growing up and having my own career, good old patriarchal sexism was still at play here. So Roger offered to take me under his wing. Once I earned my degrees, Roger offered me a job. I’m here for every time a bit of hacking is called for, because I can guarantee we’ll never get caught.”

  Hacking was illegal and unethical, and to do it in private investigations were no exception, but the entire IT infrastructure of the firm was designed by Olivia. Our email was heavily encrypted, our Internet traffic was filtered through multiple proxies, and our firewalls and safeguards were all custom-built by her. Many clients assumed that Benjamin, as our resident tech nerd, was also the head of IT. It suited Olivia to hide behind that façade.

  “So this is my exile. My dad has spread the word that I’m not ready for prime time in finance. Meanwhile, I toil away here and learn the secrets of the whole playing field. One day, I’ll head my own company, on my own terms, and dear old Dad won’t be able to do a thing about it. Now enough about me. Show me what you have.”

  “So why are you doing this for me?”

  “Because I want to see what you do when you piece everything together. It’ll be a giggle.”

  FIVE

  With Olivia by my side, we logged into Delia McCarthy’s social media accounts. I picked out the harassers who appeared most often on her timelines and asked Olivia to trace their IP addresses. Then we cross-referenced them to see how many of them shared the same IP address, which indicated that they were the same handful of people who had set up sock-puppet accounts to make it look like there were more trolls than there really were going after Delia. The IP addresses were with the usual providers: BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Virgin, and so on. Olivia easily “obtained” the real names and addresses behind those IP addresses.

  I typed up the list, coupling the usernames with the IP addresses they posted from and the real names and addresses. There would be enough of a digital trail for Delia to submit as evidence when she decided to prosecute the worst trolls. This was a nice meat-and-potatoes job, easily wrapped up within a day by just going over data and finding the links, solved without my even needing to leave the office or meet the client.

  I’d just finished emailing a copy of the list to Marcia when I heard Julia laughing with Roger and Cheryl in his office.

  “All very impressive,” Roger said as he walked Julia out of his office. “You can start tomorrow if you like.”

  “I’m sure we can find something for you to do almost immediately,” Cheryl said.

  “Thank you.” Julia smiled. “This means a lot to me.”

  Roger winked at me.

  “She’s a keeper, this one,” Roger said. “Hold on to her, Ravi.”

  What the fuck?

  “Attention, children,” Roger said. “I’d like to introduce a new addition to our little family. I’m sure you’ve already met Julia due to her relationship with our Ravi, but now she’s formally joining us. She’s a quick learner, sharp as a tack, and already well versed in the ins and outs of social engineering.”

  Oh, Christ.

  David leaned over to me.

  “Told ya,” he whispered.

  “I’ll sort you out a desk and a computer, dear.” Cheryl grabbed Benjamin to help her set up another workstation and terminal in our open space.

  “Welcome to the Monkey House,” Mark said with a salute.

  While Benjamin set up Julia’s office email and logins, she pulled up a chair and sat next to me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Making myself useful, of course.”

  “But here? What about your studies?”

  “I’m taking a sabbatical. Told my tutor I needed time off to sort myself out. My therapist said I could be of service as a way to offset my . . . condition.”

  “Julia, you know what we get up to a
round here. Why do you want to get mixed up in all of this?”

  “I still remember what we did in Paris.”

  “Er—”

  “It was a hell of a thrill. You were as high as I was afterwards.”

  “So you want more of it.”

  “While being of service, yes. And I get to be closer to you.”

  Olivia was amused. They all were.

  I went into Roger’s office and shut the door.

  “You’re here to talk about your girlfriend, I take it?”

  “Is it such a good idea to hire her? She’s totally green.”

  “So were you when we first took you in.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “As you might have noticed,” Roger said, “Julia is the very picture of an English Rose. You don’t need me to tell you how rare it is to have someone pretty and intelligent who can blend in at almost any establishment and posh setting where they will grossly underestimate her and take her for granted, which makes her the perfect Trojan horse. Julia will be learning on the job with you, so do use her where appropriate. Consider her not just a colleague but a valuable investment in our arsenal of bright young things.”

  SIX

  The cat, a striped orange moggie with an unflappable demeanor, even despite the ordeal she had gone through, meowed fitfully inside the cage as I carried it through Mrs. Dhewan’s front door.

  “Oh, Shashti! Did you miss Mummy?” Mrs. Dhewan cooed as she pulled the cat out of the cage and cuddled her.

  I had given the cat a bath and fed her before I brought her back.

  “You are a credit to your profession, Ravi.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dhewan.”

  “You do your parents proud. Now, who was it?”

  “Nobody. You don’t have to worry about them.”

  “That’s not what I asked, Ravi. Out with it.”

  “It was the Sam and Trenesh Achari from two streets over.”

  “The Tamil boys? Those little devils. Were they going to torture my little Shashti?”

  “They hid her in the toolshed and were all set to do it. I brought a couple of my colleagues with me, two ex-policemen. They put the fear of God into them. They’re never going to torture anything again.”