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I shouldn’t have worried. This was London. If anyone in the flats and offices round about heard a woman sobbing in the night, they didn’t come out to ask what was wrong. But then again, these were expensive places, with triple glazing, soundproofed against the London nightlife and the foghorns of passing boats. Maybe they just didn’t hear at all.
There wasn’t much I could do against the pain, apart from pop two more painkillers from the fast-emptying packet in my bag, and I wasn’t sure that anything over the counter would do much against the throbbing that was starting to engulf my chest. Still, it was better than nothing. I crunched them dry, and the taste of the ibuprofen was sour on my lips as I steeled myself to straighten and walk the final few yards to Cole’s flat.
As I drew closer to the beautiful old warehouse, I found myself marveling afresh at the difference between this place and my modest little two-up, two-down in South London, and wondering how Gabe and I had never questioned it before. On one level it was a mark of how much Cole’s and Gabe’s lives had diverged since their childhood, afternoons coding and gaming together in Gabe’s bedroom. Cole had chosen the tried and tested route of an Oxbridge university, then the corporate ladder, with everything that meant in terms of share options, corner offices, and bonus rewards. Gabe, by contrast, had made his own path, following his principles and the anarchic curiosity that had been his hallmark all his life.
For the most part, it hadn’t seemed to matter. Gabe had made cracks about Cole selling out to the man; Cole had responded with jibes about how principles didn’t pay the bills. But it was all good-natured, two friends whose shared love of code had taken them on different paths to the same goal—making the world better through technology.
Still, I knew the kind of offers Gabe had turned down from software companies bigger than Cerberus—and somehow the sums had never quite added up. Now, of course, it made perfect sense. How long had Cole been taking money to build back doors into Cerberus products? Five years? More?
As I reached the front door of Cole’s building, I realized that I hadn’t actually planned this far, hadn’t thought about what I would do if he refused to let me in. What would happen if I pressed the buzzer and he told me to piss off, or called the police? Would he risk that? Or would he do something even more drastic? He had let his best friend get killed to protect this exploit. I didn’t flatter myself that he valued my life any higher than Gabe’s.
I needed an insurance policy for if this all went south.
Pausing in the shadow of the porch, I pulled the laptop out of my bag, fired up a hotspot on my burner phone, and began logging into Gabe’s Twitter, Discord, and Instagram accounts. They all wanted two-factor authentication, and I felt a tremor as I dug the SIM-swapped phone out of the rucksack. My finger hovered over the power button. This was it. As soon as I turned on this phone, Malik would know. How long had it taken them to find me in the service station? Thirty minutes? Maybe forty at a stretch. And this time—in central London, surrounded by police stations—they would be faster, I was sure of it.
But I needed Gabe’s accounts, not mine. His were connected to the people who would understand what all this meant—for whom the code would be not a screed of gobbledegook but a map of what Cole had done, and why.
I had no choice.
I pressed the power button, and waited.
Then I logged into Gabe’s accounts and began to upload the files from his drive, one after another.
“Attention all hackers, OPSEC, infosec, cybersecurity experts,” I wrote. “I’m Gabe’s wife, Jack. I need you to see something that Gabe was working on before he died—something connected with his death. I believe it’s a serious unpatched vulnerability that affects one—maybe several—of the most popular security apps on the market. Please check out these files, and for your own safety, forward them to everyone you know. Demand that Cerberus fix this exploit. You are not safe. Your phones are not safe. I believe that my husband was killed to keep him quiet, so please—be as loud as you can.”
I pressed post. My hands were shaking.
Then I picked up the phone, shouldered my bag, and walked over to Cole’s door. I had done all I could. I had maybe fifteen minutes of freedom left. Now all I had to do was face Cole.
Hello?” The woman’s voice was croaky, and more than a little alarmed. “Who is this?”
“Yeah, hi.” I put my face close to the camera, so the person watching the screen couldn’t see what I was holding, and made my voice sound tired and bored, like someone at the end of a long shift. “I’ve got your pizza.”
“Are you joking?” The alarm was gone, replaced by a flash of irritation. “It’s midnight! I didn’t order a pizza.”
“I’ve got the ticket right here, pizza for a… Cole Garrick, flat four.”
“He’s in flat fourteen, for Christ’s sake. I was asleep. Can’t you lot take an order right? Ugh, look—” There was a buzzing noise and my heart jumped in my chest, full of hope. “Just—go on up. And tell him from me, e-nun-ciate.”
She slammed the phone down and I leapt forward, pushing at the heavy metal front door with an alacrity that made the wound in my side shriek and then grumble with pain as the door closed behind me.
For the first time in hours, I didn’t care. My exhaustion was gone, the pain dulled beneath the buzz of a dopamine high. My nerves felt like they were singing, and for the first time in a long time I knew that I was back in my rightful place—predator, not prey.
The foyer was full of touches that looked like they might be industrial leftovers from the building’s past but might equally have been expensive commissioned props to make the prospective purchasers feel like they were in touch with history. Either way, the lift was a giant metal box with a sliding grille, and now I stepped inside and pulled the door across, my heart thumping with a mix of fear and excitement.
It clanked and groaned as it rose up through the floors, until at last it stopped right at the top, and I pulled back the grille and stepped out.
Now, I had to get inside Cole’s flat—and this would be the hard part. But I was a pen tester, even sick and wounded. Getting into places I wasn’t supposed to be was what I did.
I considered my choices.
Option one was simply ringing the bell and hoping—but even if he was stupid enough to answer the door without peering through the peephole, I didn’t think I could force my way inside. Maybe I could have done before all this. I wasn’t a match for Cole in size and strength, but I was wiry and quick and trained in self-defense in a way that he almost certainly wasn’t. But now, shaking with a mix of nerves and fever, and with a weeping hole in my side—not a chance. If it wasn’t for the huge adrenaline high I was coasting on, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stand. And at some point that high was going to run out.
Option two was breaking in—and that felt like a better bet. I had my picks in my bag. The problem was, the door facing me was solid metal and expertly fitted, not so much as a crack anywhere. And the lock was a Bramah, notoriously difficult to pick. Given enough time, I might be able to manage it—but I didn’t fancy sitting out here waiting for someone to hear the telltale clicking of my picks.
As I looked around the hallway, searching for inspiration, my eyes fell on another door—the only other one on the landing. It was marked Fire Exit, and, more out of curiosity than anything, I pushed it open and peered through.
It took a moment for the security lights inside to pick up my presence and flicker on, but when they did I saw a staircase—two flights, one leading up to an unmarked door, the other down into darkness. Cole’s flat was the penthouse, which meant that the door almost certainly led to the roof.
