The Insider

AVA McCARTHY

The Insider

For my parents, Jim and Marie Halpenny, who sadly passed away while I was writing this book. Thank you for your unquestioning love and support always.

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

1

Harry was about to do something that could put her in jail. This wasn’t unusual in her line of business, but it still made her palms sweat.

She pushed her coffee away and stared at the glass doors of the building across the street. Her eyes watered in the April glare. The first time she’d tried anything like this had been sixteen years ago when she was just thirteen, and she’d almost been arrested. This was different. This time she was going to get away with it.

The doors across the street swung open and she jerked upright in her chair. It was just the motorbike courier coming back out. He’d been the only visitor in the last twenty minutes. Harry shifted on the hard aluminium seat, certain she’d be left with stripes like Venetian blinds chiselled across her backside.

‘D’you want anything else?’

The café manager stood in front of her, squat like a bulldog, his arms folded across a stained apron. The message was clear. It was lunchtime, and she had occupied the pavement table for almost an hour. Time to go.

‘Yes I do.’ She flashed him her best winsome smile. ‘A sparkling water, please.’

He dumped her cup and saucer on a tray and slouched back inside. The doors across the street swung open again and five young women stepped out in a bunch, all wearing the same navy-and-green uniform. They strolled along the pavement, passing around a single cigarette, sucking on it like deep-sea divers sharing out their last canister of air. Harry squinted at their faces. They were all too young.

She sat back and uncrossed her legs. Her tights prickled under her navy suit and her feet had started to cramp. It had been a toss-up that morning between plain flat shoes and the kitten heels with gold buckles, but as always she’d been a sucker for anything shiny. She hoped she wouldn’t have to make a run for it any time in the next forty-five minutes.

Harry flexed her feet and listened to the clang of beer barrels being unloaded down a nearby laneway. She could smell the stale lager from the open pub doors, musty like decaying fruit. A bus lurched to a halt right in front of her and blocked her view of the doors.

Shit, she should have noticed the bus stop before she sat down. The engine throbbed as one by one the passengers spilled out. The air quivered with hot diesel fumes, the bus and the building beyond it rippling like a mirage. She drummed her fingers on the table.

Jesus, was the whole of Dublin on this bus?

She tried to see past its dusty windows to the office building beyond, but could only make out the top of the doorframes. Sunlight flashed off metal as the doors opened again, but Harry couldn’t see who had come out.

She scraped back her chair and sprinted a few yards up the street until she had a clear view of the entrance again. The pavement was deserted.

Harry checked her watch. It was getting late, but she couldn’t risk making her next move. Not yet.

The bus revved up its engine and barged back into the traffic. Harry clenched her fists, waiting for it to move on. Then her view cleared, and she spotted a woman halfway down the street, marching in the opposite direction to the other girls. She was older than they were, in her late forties maybe, and she was alone. She stopped to cross at the kerb, and glanced back up the street.

Harry’s fingers relaxed. The woman’s blonde streaks were new, but otherwise she looked just like her photograph on the website.

She waited till the woman had disappeared. Then she flung some coins on the table and crossed the street.

It was cooler and quieter on this side of the glass doors. Harry strode up to the receptionist, checking out her surroundings as she went. A low table with business magazines stood against one wall. To her left was a set of large double doors, and another to her right. Her only escape route, should she need one, was back out the way she’d come in.

Harry selected another smile from her repertoire, the grimace of an uptight businesswoman with no time for fooling around.

‘Hi, I’m Catalina Diego,’ she said to the girl behind the desk. ‘I’m here to see Sandra Nagle.’

The girl kept her gaze fixed to the computer screen in front of her. ‘She’s just gone to lunch.’

‘But I’ve an appointment with her for twelve thirty.’

The girl chewed on the end of a pencil and shrugged. Her lips were a sticky mess of pink lip-gloss, and some of it had strayed on to the pencil.

Harry leaned in closer over the desk. ‘I’m here to run the training course for the helpdesk. Just how long is she going to be?’

The girl shrugged again and clicked the mouse on her computer. Harry wanted to snatch it out of her hands and rap her on the knuckles with it.

‘Well, I can’t hang around,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll have to start without her.’

She turned towards the doors on her left, as though she knew where she was going. The receptionist half stood from her chair, her pencil clattering to the desk.

‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in there without Mrs Nagle’s permission.’

‘Look –’ Harry turned back and peered at the girl’s name badge ‘– Melanie, this course has taken a month to arrange. If I leave now, it’ll be another month before I come back. Do you want me to explain to Sandra just why I couldn’t get started?’

Harry held her breath and braced herself. If someone had tried to bully her like that there’d have been quite a backlash. But Melanie just blinked and sank back in her chair. Harry didn’t blame her. She’d talked to Sandra Nagle for the first time that morning when she’d called the bank with a bogus customer complaint. She’d found her name and photograph on the bank’s corporate website, in the section that boasted of its unrivalled customer service. After two minutes’ conversation with her, Harry had the woman pegged as a complete bitch, and it looked as though Melanie agreed with her.

Melanie swallowed and shoved a visitor’s book across the desk. ‘Okay, but you’ll have to fill this out first. Name and date here, sign there.’

Something flickered in the pit of Harry’s stomach as she scribbled in the details. Melanie handed her an identity badge and pointed to the doors on Harry’s left.

‘Through there. I’ll buzz you in.’

Harry thanked her and gave herself a mental high five. She remembered the high fives her father used to give her whenever her poker bluffs paid off. ‘Nothing like the rush that comes from winning with an empty hand,’ he’d say, winking at her.

Empty hand was right. She clipped the badge to her lapel and stepped over to the doors. The safety lock clicked and a green light blinked on the wall panel. She straightened her shoulders and pushed open the heavy doors. She was in.

2

Leon Ritch hadn’t heard from the Prophet in over eight years, and had hoped to Christ he’d never hear from him again. He scratched his two-day-old stubble and read the email again.

Maybe it was a hoax. After all, anyone could sign himself ‘The Prophet’. He checked the sender’s address. It was different from the last time, but just as obscure: [e-mail]. He thought about trying to trace it but knew it wouldn’t do any good. They’d tracked the Prophet’s last address to some anonymous re-mailer system. A dead end. Whoever he was, he knew how to conceal his identity.

Apart from himself, only three other people knew about the Prophet. One of those was in prison and another was dead. That just left Ralph.

Leon dialled a number he hadn’t used in a long time.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Sorry, who’s this?’

Leon could hear the rumble of men’s voices in the background. Ralph was probably in a meeting with the bank VIPs, fighting for elbowroom at the corporate party. It was a world he’d once thrived in himself.

‘Don’t be a prick, Ralphy.’

The men’s laughter roared in his ear, and then grew gradually fainter until there was just an echoing hollowness. Sounded like Ralphy-Boy had moved into the gents.

‘Comfy now?’ Leon said.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Just looking up old pals. Seems to be a day for calls from the past.’

‘What are you talking about? I told you never to call me.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Listen Ralphy-Boy, are you near your office?’

‘I’m in the middle of a board meeting and I don’t –’

‘Good. I’m sending an email to your private account. Go and read it.’

‘What? Are you out of your mind?’

‘Just do it. I’ll call back in five minutes.’

Leon hung up and turned back to his PC. He brought up the email again and forwarded it to Ralph’s alias address.

He swivelled his chair to stare out the window at the bottle banks and wheelie bins that lined the small car park behind his office. Directly opposite him was the grimy back wall of the local Chinese takeaway, the Golden Tigress. A classy name for a seedy health hazard.

A young Chinese man in white overalls trudged out of the back door and flung a bag of God knew what kind of crap into the wheelie bin beneath Leon’s window. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of garlic and his gut clenched. Most of the shopkeepers around here gave off the same rank smell, filling Leon’s tiny office with it when they came in with their accounts. His ulcer bit into him.

‘Leon-the-Ritch’, people used to call him. He’d worked sixteen-hour days and managed all the big deals. He’d been a real player then, with millions in the bank and a glitzy wife on his arm. Now his twenty-year-old marriage was down the toilet, right there alongside his reputation and his bank balance.

Leon squeezed his eyes shut. Thinking about his marriage made him think about his son, and that was worse than the ulcer. He focused on the searing pain in his belly, trying to obliterate the image of Richard at the train station that morning. It was the first time he’d seen his son in almost a year.

He’d been up all night at a poker game and had travelled to his office on the train, vacuum-packed with the city’s commuters. Their looks of disgust had told him what he already knew: that his eyes were red-rimmed, his breath stank, and the bacteria in his armpits had metabolized up a storm.

His carriage had pulled up alongside a knot of schoolboys on the platform at Blackrock. He’d stared idly at them through the window. Then his breath had caught in his throat. Dark hair, round eyes, freckles like mud splats. Richard. Passengers pushed in front of Leon, but he elbowed them out of his way, straining for another glimpse of his son. A head taller than the other boys, Richard was easy to spot. He’d grown. Leon felt his chest swell. The boy would be tall like his mother, not squat like him.

Leon had pressed closer to the door. The first of Richard’s friends pushed through into the carriage, and up close Leon recognized the crest of Blackrock College on his jumper. He frowned. Maura hadn’t said anything about changing schools. But then they hadn’t talked in a long time. He wondered who was paying the fees.

Richard was at the door. Leon half raised his arm, ready to catch his attention. He heard the well-bred accents of Richard’s friends. At the same time, he became aware of the sourness of his own clothes, of his stained anorak and unshaven face. His hand faltered, suspended in mid air.

‘Richard!’

The boy snapped his head around to look back at the station platform. Leon yanked his arm down and peered out the window. A blond man in his forties was jogging towards the train. He wore a dark wool overcoat and carried a red sports bag in one hand. He held the bag out to Richard, and ruffled the boy’s hair. Leon saw the wide grin that spread across his son’s face, and felt a jagged twinge in his stomach, as though he’d swallowed broken glass. Slowly, Leon had turned and shuffled through the crowd until he’d reached the other end of the carriage. And there he’d stayed, hidden, until he was sure his son was gone.

The clink of bottles made Leon jump. Outside in the car park, the young Chinese man was back, this time firing glass jars into the bottle bank. Leon rubbed his face again and took a deep breath, trying to clear the curdling in his stomach. Maybe tomorrow he’d get cleaned up. Maybe he’d go and see Richard.

He checked his watch. Time to call Ralphy-Boy again. He cleared his throat and dialled.

‘Did you read it?’ he said, when Ralph picked up.

‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’

‘Took the words right out of my mouth.’

‘You think I sent this? I don’t want anything to do with it.’ Ralph’s mouth sounded dry.

‘What’s wrong, Ralphy? You scared?’

‘Of course I’m bloody scared. I’ve a lot to lose, even if you haven’t.’

Leon tightened his grip on the phone. ‘It’s down to me you didn’t lose it all eight years ago, let’s not forget that, okay?’

Ralph sighed. ‘What exactly do you want, Leon? More money?’

Good question. At first he’d just wanted to make sure Ralph hadn’t sent the email, but now another idea was uncurling itself.

‘You read the email, didn’t you?’ Leon said.

‘Yes, he says the girl has it. So what?’

‘Well, maybe I want it back.’

‘You think she’s just going to hand it over? And what if he’s wrong?’

‘The Prophet’s never been wrong about anything before,’ Leon said. ‘Says he has proof.’

‘What’s the matter with you? Do you want us both to go to jail?’

Leon gazed out the window again. Maybe hearing from the Prophet wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. Maybe this was his way back.

‘There’s this fella I know,’ Leon said. ‘I’ve used him before. He’ll take care of it.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘You don’t have to, Ralphy.’

Leon slammed the phone down and looked out the window again. This time he didn’t see the graffiti on the walls or the overflowing wheelie bins. He saw himself clean-shaven and twenty pounds lighter, wearing an Italian suit and seated at the head of a boardroom table. He saw himself dressed in a smart wool overcoat, cheering Richard on as he played rugby for his school. Leon ground his teeth and curled his fingers into fists.

This girl had something that belonged to him and he wanted it back.

3

‘Good afternoon, Sheridan Bank –’

‘– it isn’t showing up in your transactions, Mr Cooke. Would you like me to try another account for you?’

The drone of about thirty different conversations buzzed through the air. The voices were mostly female, filling the room like polite bumblebees. Harry moved between the desks, each one screened by blue padded partitions, and half-listened to the girls on the phones. She had an account with Sheridan herself. Maybe after this, she’d need to switch banks.

There were plenty of empty desks, but Harry wanted one at the back. She reached the end of the room and snagged an empty desk in the corner. She dumped her bag on the chair and waited for the round-faced girl at the next workstation to finish her call.

‘Apologies again about that, Mrs Hayes. Bye now.’ The girl typed something on her keyboard and winked at Harry. ‘Another unsatisfied customer.’

Harry smiled. ‘Is there any other kind?’

‘Not around here.’

Harry stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Catalina. I start work here this afternoon.’

‘Oh, great. I’m Nadia.’ She grasped Harry’s hand. Her nails were long and crimson, and she wore a silver ring on every plump finger, including her thumb.

Harry gestured to the empty desk. ‘Okay if I sit here?’

‘Sure, no one’s using it.’

Harry sat down and switched on the PC. ‘I don’t think I’ve been set up on the system yet. Any chance you could log me in?’

Nadia hesitated. ‘I’m not really supposed to do that.’

Keep it casual. ‘Oh, right. I just wanted another peek at the helpdesk system before Mrs Nagle gets back from lunch.’

Nadia chewed her bottom lip, and then smiled. ‘Why not? Don’t want her to catch you out on your first day, do we?’

She pulled off her headset and walked over, leaning across to type in her username and password. Harry could smell a mixture of Calvin Klein and peppermints.

‘There you go,’ Nadia said.

‘Thanks, I owe you one.’

Harry waited until Nadia was back at her desk, busy with another call. She adjusted the angle of her screen so that no one could see what she was doing, and went to work.

With a few keystrokes, she broke out of the helpdesk application into the computer’s operating system. Harry shook her head and almost tutted. It should have been better protected.

She poked around inside the PC, dipping into its files and directories, but it was a standard desktop and had no secrets to tell. She clicked her mouse and soon had a view of all her network connections:

F: \\Jupiter\shared

G: \\Pluto\users

H: \\Mars\system

L: \\Mercury\backup

S: \\Saturn\admin

This was more like it. This was her way into the bank’s central computers.

Harry stepped through the list of networked machines, trying to gain access. Some she could drop right into and view their files, but most of them blocked her at the first keystroke. She dug a little more, searching for something she could use. And then she found it: the system password file. Stored inside were the usernames and passwords of everyone on the network. It was her key into the system. She double-clicked with her mouse and tried to open the file. Locked.

Harry frowned and checked the time. Her heartbeat cranked up a notch. She’d been here twenty minutes already, and still had a lot of ground to cover. She discarded the password file and began ransacking the network, burrowing deep into its file system and sniffing every corner. She knew what she was looking for, and it had to be here somewhere. And sure enough, there it was, tucked away on a shared drive available for anyone to read: the unprotected backup copy of the password file.

The back of Harry’s neck tingled. It was always the same whenever she hacked into a system that was supposed to be secure. She wanted to beat a drum roll on the desk, but there was a time and a place for everything.

She opened the backup file and scanned its contents. The usernames were in clear text, but the passwords were all encrypted. Harry glanced over her shoulder. Nadia was chatting with a customer on the phone, her nails clacking on the keyboard.

Harry slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and drew out a CD which she slotted into the computer. It contained a password-cracker program, and she fed the backup file into it. She hunched over a computer manual and pretended to leaf through it as she waited for the cracker to do its job.

It could take a while. Dictionary attacks often did. The program was stepping through the entire dictionary, encrypting each word and trying to match it against the encrypted passwords in the file. After that, it would try letter and number combinations. By the end of it, she’d have all the passwords she needed.

Harry peeked at her watch again. Gooseflesh broke out on the back of her neck and she massaged it with her fingers. She had maybe ten minutes before the supervisor got back, and the cracker could take fifteen. It was going to be tight. But then, breaking and entering always was. That was what made it so irresistible.

Her father had always said she’d end up a burglar, ever since the day she’d hurled a brick through the kitchen window and climbed inside. She’d got locked out after school, but all she could think about was the port scan she’d launched from her computer that morning and what it might have found. She tried to explain this to her father later, as he crunched about in the broken glass, his face incredulous. She was sure he’d confiscate her PC, but instead, he upgraded its processor and presented her with her own set of house keys. To eleven-year-old Harry, he’d acquired some serious kudos that day.

And she had acquired a new name, because that was when her father had first started calling her Harry. There were times when she longed for an exotic Spanish name, like the one her sister had been given. Amaranta was tall with ash-blonde hair. She’d been born while Harry’s mother was still infatuated with her husband’s half-Irish, half-Spanish charm. But by the time Harry was born, her father’s financial disasters had forced them out of their mansion to a cramped terraced house, and her mother’s taste in names had dulled. Harry was the one who inherited her father’s sooty Spanish eyes and blue-black curls, but her mother had been unimpressed. Rejecting anything faintly Spanish, she had christened her daughter Henrietta after her own mother, a prim woman from the north of England.

‘But whoever heard of a burglar called Henrietta?’ her father had declared after the incident with the window, and had insisted on calling her Harry ever since. Now she never answered to anything else.

Harry checked the cracker program. It was almost finished. She scanned the list of passwords broken into clear text so far. There was Nadia’s. Username ‘nadiamc’, password ‘diamonds’. And Sandra Nagle’s: ‘sandran’, password ‘fortitude’. She shook her head. No good. She needed a heavy-hitter account, one with privileged access.

And there it was, at the bottom of the list. The network administrator’s password: asteroid27. Her toes wriggled inside her shoes. Now she was like a security guard with the master key to the building: she could go anywhere. She owned the network.

She logged in under her new privileged status, and immediately disabled the network’s auditing program. Now her activities couldn’t be recorded in the audit logs. She was invisible.

Harry prowled the servers and plunged into any file that looked interesting. Her eyes widened at some of the data she could access: customer credit ratings, bank revenues, employee salaries. She could view everyone’s emails, including those belonging to the chairman of the bank.

She hopped into another database and tried to make sense of the numbers in front of her. Her fingers froze on the mouse when she realized that she was looking at some of the bank’s most confidential customer information: account numbers, PIN codes, credit-card details, usernames and passwords. The stuff of hackers’ dreams, and most of it wasn’t even encrypted.

Harry scrolled through the data. It would be so easy to lift money out of these accounts. No one would even know it had happened. She was a ghost on the system, and left no footprints.