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“You forgot your tea!” the woman said. She was smiling. In her outstretched hand she held a paper cup with a plastic lid.
Blankly I looked down at my tray. No tea.
“Sugar?” the woman asked.
“Oh. Oh God, I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot.” You can say that again. “You shouldn’t have come over.” My heart had restarted, shallow with relief. I felt a stupid, giddy grin, a real one this time, spread over my face. “Honestly, you didn’t have to.” Then, realizing she was still waiting for an answer, “N-no, no sugar. Thank you. I mean, no thanks.”
“No probs!” the woman trilled. She set the tea down on the table, and then turned on her heel and left.
I tried not to slump too obviously.
And when I looked down at my phone—the code was there.
I typed it in. There was a brief pause as the screen hung blank for a moment, thinking about its response, and then Gabe’s backup drive opened up in front of me.
My first feeling was triumph. The second, following very closely, was despair.
Not because the drive had been wiped, as I’d half feared, but the opposite. It was utterly stuffed. Folder after folder, file after file. How on earth was I supposed to find a needle in this programming haystack?
A bunch of the folders seemed to be personal—pictures, scans, useful documents relating to the house. Another set related to our company. There were files of VAT returns, invoices, bank statements and spreadsheets. For the love of Mike, had Gabe ever just saved something, without backing it up?
However, by far the largest section of files seemed to relate to ongoing projects. Glancing down the As, I saw Arden Alliance, but it was just one of many, starting with Aardvark Inc—a company we’d never worked for, as far as I knew, but when I clicked through there were notes on some responsible disclosure reports Gabe had made, flagging up a vulnerability in their online email portal. Below Aardvark were folders labeled Abel Inc, Ace Electric, Adelaide Systems, Adelphi-Core, Ajax & Cline, Anoraxis, Apex Finance, Arcturus Publishing… and that was just the As. The list went on and on, through the whole alphabet, and I had no idea where to start.
I scrolled down to C. A file named Cole seemed like too much to hope for—but Cerberus Security was the name of Cole’s company, and it didn’t seem impossible that Gabe would have labeled the folder that way. But there was nothing. I felt like crying.
My side was hurting, along with my head and my joints, which ached like I had the flu, and now I shifted in my chair, feeling the clamminess on my back sticking my T-shirt to my spine and then peeling away as I moved. Under my clothes the new dressing felt stiff, the adhesive pulling at my skin in a way that somehow seemed to aggravate the wound. I had probably been bending when I put it on, and now it was too tight, but I knew I couldn’t start repositioning it now. If I unpeeled it, there was a good chance it wouldn’t stick down again, and it was the last one.
Instead I popped a couple of ibuprofen and scrolled further down the list, trying to ignore the pain. Past C to D, E, F, and then further through the Ls, Ms, Ns and on. There was nothing, or nothing that meant anything to me, at any rate. There were names of companies, names of programs, some unfamiliar, some recognizable from projects we’d worked on together—but nothing I saw seemed to relate to Cole. Had I got this all wrong?
And then I saw it. Right at the bottom, below Unrivalled Software and above Upside Down Design. A folder labeled Unsubmitted.
That was it. Not Unsubmitted Inc., or Unsubmitted Software. It could have been a company name—but something about it, and the size of the folder, made me pause and click through.
Inside were a bunch more folders, these much less tidy, mostly labeled with names relating to website URLs, apps, or programs. And right at the bottom of the list was a name I knew well. Really well. Watchdog. It was the name of Cerberus’s flagship security app.
I clicked on the folder.
I don’t know what I expected. A ticking bomb, a bunch of warnings to flash up. Instead, what I got was a load of files I didn’t recognize, some text, some in what appeared to be computer code. I had no idea what half of them were.
Mentally crossing my fingers that I wasn’t going to make anything explode, I opened one of the files. It was a long string of code—and I had no idea what any of it did. But at the top were a series of what I assumed were Gabe’s notes to himself. I had seen them often enough, a kind of to-do list for that specific project, filled with reminders of loose ends and tasks left unfinished. This one was no exception—there were half a dozen items listed at the top, most of which seemed to be programming related and made little sense to me. But the last few… they made my heart stutter.
# THIS HAS NOT BEEN PATCHED YET
# TODO: Notify Cerberus next week
# TODO: Check Puppydog concerns w Cole
There it was. Cole’s name—in a document Gabe had been working on right before his death—alongside a clear implication that he was about to go over Cole’s head, direct to Cerberus. The “last modified” date on the file was Friday—the day before we’d done the Arden Alliance pen test. The day, according to Cole’s own account, that the two of them had spoken by phone.
What Cole had presented as a routine catch-up must, in reality, have been something quite different—Gabe, following up the warning he’d given Cole with a polite heads-up that he’d be filing an official report with Cerberus on Monday. It was the kind of routine disclosure he’d done many times before as an ethical hacker—one following a tried and tested process. But that friendly warning, I’m sorry, mate, but there’s a problem with your code, had cost Gabe his life—and here was the evidence.
Maybe it wasn’t quite a smoking gun—but it was a whole lot more plausible than the Sunsmile theory Malik and Miles were working on right now.
But it was the reference to Puppydog that really made me shiver. Because Watchdog was bad enough. Watchdog was the home security app that Cerberus made most of their money from—a 360-degree monitoring system that hooked up everything from your home hub to your doorbell to a single app. But Puppydog—Puppydog was the parental monitoring app that was fast coming up the charts to beat it in popularity. Puppydog gave parents complete access to everything on their child’s phone—their contact list, their browsing history, and most importantly of all, it tracked the physical location of both parent and children, so they could always find each other.
If someone could hack Puppydog, they could monitor not just you—but your kids. What kind of money would someone give for that? Access to a celebrity’s child? A political dissident’s family? A chill ran down my spine that was nothing to do with the fever burning through me. And as it did, as I stared at the screen trying to process this and wondering exactly what Cole had got himself involved in, Gabe’s phone began to ring.
For a long moment I just stared at the screen wondering, stupidly, what was happening. The number was a landline, a London one, and I had no idea who it could be. Although Gabe’s number had been SIM-swapped to this phone, nothing else had been transferred, which meant his contact list was blank. It could be anyone from Gabe’s gym, to his parents, to… well, anyone. The question was, should I pick up?
