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There was a short silence, and then, shockingly loud, a sudden rattling bang as someone—maybe Malik—tried the shutter over the serving hatch, considerably less gently than I had.
“It’s padlocked,” I heard from Jeff. “Any signs of forced entry?”
“I don’t think so.” There was more rattling as someone, probably Malik, examined the edges of the shutter, but I knew they were solid. “Let’s try round the back.”
More scrunching. I felt bile rise in my throat and swallowed it down, hard. I had a sudden, sharp memory of hiding under the sofa at Arden Alliance while the security guards hunted outside, but I had never felt this scared on a job.
“Combination lock,” I heard, more muffled this time; the door was evidently thicker than the shutter. Then a series of clicks as someone did the same as I’d done, jabbing random buttons. I pressed my face even harder into the rucksack, trying to still even my breathing. Please, please don’t notice the worn keys…
“Fuck,” I heard, in Malik’s voice, her tone disgusted. “Well, I can’t see how she could have got in here.”
“I think she’ll have doubled back, gone up to the road to try to hitch a lift. She’s good with people. Persuasive. It’s more her style,” Jeff said a little condescendingly. There was an I know what I’m talking about edge to his tone. Malik gave an exasperated sigh.
“I’m telling you, she didn’t double back. I saw something.”
“Coulda been a rabbit,” Jeff said with a shrug in his voice. Malik made a sound like she was trying not to tell him where to shove the rabbit.
“Well, either way, there’s not much we can do until the mist lifts,” she said tightly. “Let’s fan out, check the road, and then when it gets a bit clearer we can try again.”
Behind the metal door, I let out a shuddering breath.
I waited until the sound of their boots fell silent. Then I pulled myself to my feet, opened the door, and peered out the tiniest crack. I wouldn’t have put it past Malik to have been waiting, silently, to see if I popped up, like Jeff’s rabbit from a hole.
But she was gone. And so was Jeff. There was no one there, just the swirling mist.
I turned up the collar of the coat against the stinging sand, gently closed the door of the shack behind me, and then walked on, into the dark.
It was maybe two, three hours later that I stumbled wearily into the outskirts of Hastings. The sun was only just coming up, and I hadn’t dared to hope for an open cafe, but to my amazement, there was one down by the port—not a fancy place, just a diner serving bacon sandwiches and tea to the fishermen and dockworkers. At the counter was a group of workmen who’d stopped off for a complicated order of hot drinks and breakfast baps.
As I stood behind the foreman in the queue, I felt my legs shaking with what might have been anything from hunger, to tiredness, to just plain shock.
What I was doing definitely wasn’t sensible—I didn’t know what Malik’s next steps might be, but I’d been seen in a town only a few miles up the coast, and I was wanted for murder. It was surely only a matter of time before my picture was in the paper. The big question was whether the police knew about my hair. Had they found footage of me at the train station? Or were they still operating under the assumption that they were looking for a girl with red hair in an anorak?
Either way, I probably didn’t have much time left. But that didn’t matter. For the first time in two days, I had an idea of what to do next. It had been forming as I ran through the dunes, thinking over my realization of the night before, pondering how I could infiltrate Sunsmile without getting caught. Normally for a job like this, a big job, breaking into a company full of sensitive details, Gabe and I would have done weeks of phishing, cracking, and OSINT—gathering both covert and open-source information from all the places we could until we had a clear picture of who to target and how to get in.
I didn’t have weeks. I might not even have days. I didn’t have access to Gabe’s library of hacking tools, password rippers, and Trojan horse programs. And if I got caught, I would have no get-out-of-jail-free card, no head of security to bail me out. But I did have a plan.
A prickle of excitement ran through me—and then I realized that I had reached the head of the line, and the server was standing with her arms crossed, waiting for my order. I bought a cup of tea and a toasted teacake and asked for the Wi-Fi password. Then I found an empty table and fired up my computer.
The first thing I did was what I almost always did when choosing a target. I went to Instagram and searched for any posts geotagged to Sunsmile Insurance Ltd. The head office was in Milton Keynes, and luckily the employees were an Instagram-savvy bunch who loved taking pictures. More importantly, Sunsmile was a big company. Small places, where the security guards knew every single member of every team, were something of a nightmare. But Sunsmile looked to have several hundred employees—and that was just the ones on social media.
I scrolled down the posts, page after page of them, taking down possible names, clicking through to profiles. I was looking for two things: women of about my age, ideally not too physically dissimilar from me, and holiday snaps. There was one more thing I was keeping an eye out for—a picture featuring a security pass—but that seemed like too much to hope for, so I wasn’t holding my breath on that one. Firms had got much better about not letting employees post their passes, in part because of people like me telling them about the risks.
Somewhat to my astonishment, however, it was that which came up first: a man holding up his brand-new employee pass and grinning broadly. “First day nerves LOL!” read the caption.
I clicked through and enlarged the image. Oh, Brian from Finance. You lovely, lovely idiot.
He’d had the sense at least to obscure part of his real name, but that didn’t matter for my purposes. I screenshotted the pass and saved it to my downloads, then went back to looking for likely targets.
Again and again I found people who seemed perfect—right age, right height as far as I could tell; some of them even looked like me—but when I clicked through, their feed showed them safely in the UK. And then I found her. Keeleybab2001, Sunsmile call center operator. Not holiday snaps—but something better: a photo of a baby covered in small red spots. The caption showed a horrified blue-faced scream emoji, and read “Poor lil bubs has chickenpops!!!”
I clicked through. Keeley Winston. Fortunately, she also had a Facebook profile with very slack privacy settings, and a quick scan of it gave me her date of birth, current whereabouts (Milton Keynes), and where she’d been to school (also Milton Keynes).
All I needed now was her phone number. Luckily, I was just getting started.
I took a long gulp of tea as I scrolled down Keeley’s Facebook friends list, then picked a random contact called Katie who had commented on a fair number of Keeley’s posts. It was the work of five minutes to set up a Twitter account using Katie’s name and profile pic. Finding my next target was a little harder. I needed a mutual Facebook friend of both Katie and Keeley—whose Twitter DMs were open. Keeley’s Facebook friends weren’t much for Twitter, and I hit a blank wall again and again—until finally finding Gemma, PR manager for Wilkinstone’s Travel. DMs open with the line “Hit me up for travel tips, tweeps!”
I clicked the little envelope and began composing my DM.
