The Insider

‘Sorry,’ she said, without looking up, and swept on past.

He ran his tongue over his lips as he watched her walk away.

Cameron waited till she had put ten yards between them and then set off after her again. She headed back towards the river and crossed over the bridge. He followed her as she turned left along the cobbled quays. He could smell the rotting seaweed that hung like a fringe of oily hair along the river walls.

The girl turned down a narrow street lined with poky cottages and grimy blocks of flats. Cameron dropped back. There were fewer people here, less cover. He kept his distance until he heard the familiar whine of speeding traffic. They had reached the intersection with Pearse Street, where cars thundered in and out of the city centre.

The girl joined the knot of pedestrians by the kerb and he slipped in close behind her.

An old woman in a raincoat swayed in front of him. She was carrying a plastic bag full of old tennis shoes, and smelled like a urinal. He elbowed her out of his way and edged into position behind the girl. He could see the logo on her satchel more clearly now. The word DefCon was engraved in silver, the letter ‘O’ framing a black skull and crossbones.

It meant nothing to him, nor did he care.

He shot a glance at the lights and then back at the whirling traffic. Cars and motorbikes sped along Pearse Street. The lights changed from green to amber. A red truck barrelled on through. Behind it, a black BMW gunned its engine and prepared to make a run for it.

Cameron’s scalp prickled. He raised his hand.

Now.

An elbow jabbed at his arm and threw him off balance.

‘Look at that speed. Should be locked up.’ The old woman shoved her face into his. He could smell the stale wine on her breath.

The BMW roared past. The pedestrian lights bip-bip-bipped as the crowd spilled out on to the road.

Cameron glared at the stinking bag lady who had robbed him of his climax. The old woman widened her watery eyes and took a step back from him. He jerked away and strode across the street, squinting through the crowds.

There was no sign of the dark-haired girl anywhere.

He weaved his way through the bodies, straining for a glimpse of her. Then he stood still and dug his nails into his palms, ignoring the crush as he watched the flow of commuters, looking for patterns. They were scurrying past like rats, flooding from different directions. But they surged as one into the cavernous entrance on the left.

Cameron smiled and relaxed his fingers. Of course: Pearse Station.

What could be better?

He barged through the queue of people blocking the entrance and scoured the area. She had to be here. Trains rattled overhead and the air was a mixture of dust and sweat. Then he spotted her, on the other side of the ticket barriers. She was stepping on to the escalator for the southbound platform.

He checked the ticket queue. Ten bodies deep and it wasn’t moving. He could vault over the ticket barrier, but that would get him noticed. He had to get to her before she boarded the next train.

Narrowing his eyes, he inspected the ticket barriers more closely. They were automatic turnstiles, all except for the one on the end. Passengers poured through it past a middle-aged man in a sloppy blue uniform, who flicked a glance at every second ticket.

It was Cameron’s only chance.

He searched the crowd, looking for cover. Two Japanese students strolled past him, heading towards the barrier on the end. The taller boy held a large map of Dublin out at arm’s length, as if he was reading a newspaper. Cameron ducked in behind them. They stopped in front of the ticket collector and wrestled with the folds of the map as they fumbled for their tickets. Cameron slipped unnoticed behind them through the open barrier.

He raced up to the southbound platform, taking the escalator steps two at a time. He reached the top and held his breath.

The station was huge, like an aircraft hangar. People were lined up on both sides of the tracks, staring into the open mouths of daylight at either end.

The girl was near the edge of the platform, twenty yards to his left. He exhaled, and a familiar ripple of heat licked up his body. He basked in it.

He slunk over towards her, glancing up at the display that counted down the time until the next train.

Two minutes.

He sidled up behind her. Other commuters staked out their space on the platform beside him. He edged forward so that no one could get between them.

He was close now. Close enough to touch her. He could smell her flowery scent. He inhaled deeply, and was aware of his own musty sourness mixed in with her fragrance. He longed to press himself against her. He thought about what he’d whisper to her, just before she went over the edge.

The air moved. The rails clacked. Something small scuttled across them.

He looked up at the display. One minute. He raised his hand.

Any second now.

6

Keep behind the line. Harry never bothered much with rules, but this was one she paid attention to. She stiffened against the bodies that packed in behind her, nudging her forward.

A pigeon curled its toes over the edge of the platform, dipping its head for a look at the three-foot drop to the tracks below. Her own toes curled just watching it. She checked the display: Dun Laoghaire, one minute.

She thought about the KWC meeting again and winced. Damn Dillon and his pop psychology.

‘I thought it could help if you went down there,’ he’d said to her over the phone, as she’d picked at the moss on the canal wall. ‘You know, confront things.’

‘If you use the word “cathartic”, I’ll scream,’ she said.

‘Come on, you never talk about your father. You haven’t seen him since before he went to prison. What’s that, five years?’

‘Actually, it’s six.’

‘There you go, you see? You need catharsis.’

She laughed. ‘Look, I appreciate the concern, but I’ll sort it through in my own way.’

‘You mean you’ll put a lid on it and bury it alive.’

‘Maybe.’ She flicked a piece of velvety moss on to the canal bank. ‘Look, my father comes and goes a lot in my life. Now he’s just gone again. It’s no big deal.’

‘I’ll put someone else on the pen test.’

‘No, Dillon, I’ll handle it. You just took me by surprise, that’s all. Seriously, I’m fine.’

But she hadn’t been fine. She’d been touchy and, worst of all, mouthy. Not an unusual combination for her, she’d be the first to admit, but she hated to let herself down like that. She’d tried to walk it off, turning away from the train station near the IFSC and choosing instead to march along the Liffey. She’d given up after ten minutes. Kitten heels just weren’t built for cleansing power-walks.

Harry looked at the display again. The minute was up. A draught sliced at her cheek. The pigeon flapped into the air as though it had just seen a cat. People crushed in around her. Someone pressed against the length of her body and catapulted her six inches forward.

‘Hey!’ She made to turn her head, but felt herself rammed forward again, forced out on to the edge of the platform. She caught sight of the black tracks below and squeezed her eyes shut. Digging her heels in, she leaned backwards and drove her elbows into the crowd.

A shout came from behind her. ‘Stop pushing!’

Hot breath whispered against her ear. A hard fist shoved her in the small of her back, and she pitched forward, weightless. Her eyes widened, transfixed. Steel rails accelerated towards her. She thrust out her hands and braced herself for the fall.

Her body slammed into the ground. Sharp stones pierced the palms of her hands, and her knee crunched against the concrete crossbar of the track. Somebody screamed.

Harry lifted her head and gaped at the winding tracks ahead. Her limbs were paralysed. The rails click-clacked.

Move!

She grasped the rails and tried to heave herself up. Hot pain shot through her knee as it gave way beneath her. She collapsed back on to the track, stretched across it.

The rails vibrated against her hands. A horn shrieked. She snapped her head up. A train roared round the bend into the station, blinding her with its headlights. Sweat flashed over her.

Harry dropped to the ground and rolled. Her shoulders hammered against iron and stone. Something yanked her back. She looked over her shoulder. Her bag had snagged on a bolt in the rail. The train thundered towards her. She whipped the strap off over her head and threw herself clear of the track.

She lay face down, breathing in the smell of dust and metal and gripping on to the northbound track. Her whole body trembled. The first carriage crashed past. People screamed at her, but she couldn’t move. Not yet.

Then there was another sound. Tick-tack, tick-tack. The rails buzzed beneath her fingers. She forced her eyes open, and her heart raced. Another train was screeching into the far end of the station and she was right in its path.

A yell froze in her throat. No time. She shot a glance at the northbound platform. She’d never make it. Behind her, the southbound train was still hurtling past.

There was nowhere to go.

She looked at the space between the two sets of tracks. It was only a few feet wide, but she had no choice. She flung herself down on to the stones separating the north and southbound rails. She knew she had to stay level with the ground. Any mistakes and the trains would slice her in two.

Harry turned her face to one side and stared at the black stones, waiting. Her breathing had almost stopped.

The two trains screamed past each other, catching her in their crossfire as together they blocked out the light. Gusts of air whipped her face. The huge roar of the engines filled her body and made her want to hunch her shoulders and cover her ears. But she had to stay still.

The joint in the rails beside her crick-cracked as each giant wheel pressed down on it. She focused on the undercarriage of the train, a mess of iron blocks and corrugated tubes charging by, inches from her face.

Brakes scraped against the tracks and the carriages hissed, until finally the trains squealed to a halt. Harry lay there trembling. The engines rumbled alongside her, like two old lorries. Her mouth was dry and tasted of iron and coal dust.

Doors slammed. People were screaming. Feet crunched over the stones towards her.

‘Jesus! Miss? You all right?’

Harry closed her eyes. Bad idea. She snapped them open again. The back of her neck felt clammy and the world roared in her ears.

God, she couldn’t faint now.

Strong arms lifted her to her feet, half-carried her across the tracks. More hands grabbed at her, heaving her on to the platform.

‘Get back! Give her room!’

‘Someone call an ambulance!’

Slowly, Harry eased herself up on to her hands and knees. She stayed there on all fours, swaying, as the blood drizzled back into her head. On the ground beside her was her battered satchel. Someone must have retrieved it from the track. She reached out for it, her fingers touching the silver DefCon logo.

Someone put a hand on her arm. ‘Are you okay? Did you … was it an accident?’

Harry swallowed, and thought back to the fist in the small of her back, and the words someone had whispered in her ear before she fell.

The Sorohan money … The ring …

She shivered, looking up into the sea of strangers’ faces. She couldn’t deal with their questions. Not now.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident.’

7

‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

Harry shivered and shook her head. ‘I’m not sure of anything right now.’

She closed her eyes and sank lower into the seat of Dillon’s car, trying not to mark the upholstery. Her suit was streaked with grime and black dust, like something that belonged in a skip, and she guessed her face must be the same. Her whole body ached, and her right knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

She peeked at Dillon’s profile. His nose always reminded her of Julius Caesar’s, strong and straight with a high, aristocratic bridge. He was dark, almost as dark as she was, and his six-foot frame slotted easily into the driver’s seat of his Lexus.

‘So come on, tell me again,’ he said. ‘What exactly did this guy say?’

‘It was more of a whisper, really. Sort of rough and sandpapery.’

Dillon turned to look at her. He had a habit of setting his mouth in a straight line, with an upward tuck in one corner as if he was holding back a smile. ‘Okay then, what did he whisper?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it was something like: “The Sorohan money, give it back to the ring.”’

‘But what the hell does it mean?’

Harry shrugged, and examined the palms of her hands. They still stung where the gravel from the railway tracks had dug into her flesh.

‘And he didn’t say anything else?’ Dillon said.

‘There wasn’t time to say anything else. I was falling, remember?’

‘I can’t believe someone tried to push you under a bloody train.’

‘I’m finding it kind of hard to deal with myself. Not sure the police believed me, either.’

A tall young police officer with a bobbing Adam’s apple had arrived at the train station to question her. Someone had wrapped her in a scratchy blanket, and she’d told her story between sips of hot sugary tea. All except for the words that she’d heard before she fell. That would have to keep for a while. When Dillon had phoned and insisted on coming to get her, she’d been glad for once to let someone else take charge.

Dillon swerved to avoid a cyclist and Harry’s stomach flipped, taking a moment to catch up with the rest of her insides. So far, it had been a jerky ride. Dillon alternated between pumping the accelerator and slamming on the brakes, with no real let-up in between. At this rate, she’d be lucky not to get whiplash.

She’d worked for Dillon for less than a year. He’d head-hunted her the previous summer from another software firm, hounding her with the same restless energy he seemed to apply to everything. It was the second time their paths had crossed in the last sixteen years. The first time, she’d only been thirteen.

That seemed so long ago. She leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes, flashing on an image of herself at thirteen: fists clenched, wild hair, caught up in a kind of double life. Come to think of it, maybe she hadn’t changed all that much.

She’d figured out early on in her childhood that she’d need a means of escape to survive her home life. Her solution had been to live two lives: one as the girl she called Harry the Drudge, whose mother opened her letters and read her diaries, and whose father wasn’t around enough to be much of an ally; the other she lived as Pirata, an insomniac who sat in the dark and prowled the electronic underground where she was both powerful and respected.

That was in the late eighties, before the internet had taken off. Pirata spent her time dialling out over slow modem connections to bulletin-board systems, electronic message centres where people shared ideas and downloaded hacker tools. By the time she was eleven, she’d taught herself how to penetrate almost any kind of system. She trespassed lightly, never pilfering, never causing harm. But by the time she was thirteen, she was ready to take things to the next level.

Harry could still remember the night she did it. The room had been dark, the only light a greenish glow from her computer screen. It was two o’clock in the morning and she was war dialling, programming her computer to make continuous phone calls until it found a number that allowed it to connect. She sat curled up in her chair, hugging her knees for warmth, listening to the thin screech of the modem as it dialled and disconnected. She wasn’t worried about her parents waking up to find her. They were too busy with their own problems to pay much attention to her.

Suddenly she’d had a hit. The caterwaul of chatty modems was unmistakable. Another computer out there had answered her. She straightened up, tapped out a command on the keyboard and hit Enter. Almost immediately the other computer spat back a message that made her clap a hand over her mouth.

WARNING! You have accessed a Dublin Stock Exchange computer system. Unauthorized access is prohibited and can result in disciplinary proceedings.

Harry had curled her feet back up under her and chewed her fingernail. Up until now, the highest profile network she’d ever invaded belonged to the University College of Dublin. Security there was lax, mainly because there was no confidential data lying around. The Stock Exchange, on the other hand, had to be crackling with sensitive information. She knew she should disconnect. Instead, she swung her feet to the ground and yanked her chair in closer to the keyboard.

She could tell by the characteristic ‘Username:’ prompt that the operating system was VMS. This was both good and bad. On the one hand, there were many ways to circumvent VMS security once she was logged in. On the other hand, logging in without a valid username and password wasn’t going to be easy. And to make matters worse, she’d be disconnected after three bad attempts.

Her fingers hovered over the keys while she considered some likely account names and passwords. Best to stick to the obvious. She typed in ‘system’. At the ‘Password:’ prompt, she typed ‘manager’, and hit Enter. Immediately the ‘Username:’ prompt re-appeared, challenging her to try again.

Strike one.

Next she tried ‘system’ and ‘operator’.

Strike two.

She had one shot left. She flexed her fingers and in her mind ran through the passwords that had worked for her in the past: ‘syslib’, ‘sysmaint’, ‘operator’. All were good bets, but there were no guarantees. Even the username ‘system’ might be wrong.

Then another possibility struck her; she shook her head – no chance. But it was so unlikely, she decided to give it a try. She typed in the username ‘guest’, left the password blank and hit Enter. A message unravelled on the screen:

Welcome to the Dublin Stock Exchange VAX server.

And there on the next line, waiting politely for her instructions, was the coveted VMS $ prompt. She was logged in.

She sat back and grinned. Administrators would sometimes create an unprotected ‘Guest’ account for new or infrequent users, but the practice was highly insecure. She was beginning to realize that the weakest point in any system was a lazy administrator.

She rolled up the sleeves of her pyjamas and started to type, sidestepping security blocks and dodging her way further into the system. Every time one of her commands outwitted the other computer, she bounced up and down in her chair.

When she figured out that she was inside a database server, she wiggled a thumbs-up sign at the screen. Goody. Databases were full of interesting information. She rummaged through the files. The records seemed to represent financial transactions of some kind, but the details made little sense to her. Then she found a list of vaguely familiar acronyms: NLD, CHF, DEM, HKD. It wasn’t until she saw ESP in the list and recognized it as the symbol for the Spanish peseta that she understood what she was looking at. Foreign currency symbols. She must have stumbled on records of foreign exchange trades.

Harry scanned the data and blinked when she saw the sums of money involved. So many zeros. She itched to leave her mark, to let them know she’d been there. What harm could it do? With a flurry of fingers, she added a couple of zeros to some of the smaller trades.

Then she backtracked out of the system, shut down her modem connection and scampered into bed. But she couldn’t sleep. She’d slipped a little further into the black-hat world, and now she wondered what she’d started.

She didn’t have long to wait before she found out. The Stock Exchange discovered the security breach and recruited the services of an independent consultant to trace the source. The expert they hired was a twenty-one-year-old graduate who was a crackerjack in software security. It took him just a week to track her down.

His name was Dillon Fitzroy.

8

‘Tell me about KWC.’

Harry dragged her gaze away from the traffic and saw that Dillon was looking at her. KWC. Had that only been today?

She squirmed and made a face. ‘I screwed up.’

Dillon frowned. ‘What happened?’

‘In my defence, they were a bunch of jerks.’ Then she thought of Jude Tiernan, and something pecked at her conscience. Maybe she’d given him an unnecessarily hard time. ‘One of them had a go at me about my father. I got a bit, well …’

‘Don’t tell me. Mouthy?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shit, Harry, that could have been an important account. I had to pull favours to get that meeting.’

‘Hey, you’re the one who prescribed the cathartic therapy, remember?’

He sighed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll call them, see if I can patch things up.’

Harry didn’t answer. She let her head sink back against the seat and closed her eyes again. Her neck had started to ache and she guessed her body was covered in livid bruises that would hurt like hell in the morning.

‘You shouldn’t be alone tonight,’ Dillon said. ‘You’re still in shock.’

She kept her eyes closed. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Come back to my house. I’ve got brandy, food and a change of clothes, strictly in that order.’

Harry shot him a quick look. She’d never been to his home, but, according to Imogen’s sources, he lived in a gracious mansion in the Enniskerry countryside. Her sources also had him pegged as resolutely single, so Harry wondered where the change of women’s clothes would come from.

Under other circumstances, she might have allowed her curiosity to get the better of her, but right now, all she wanted was to close her apartment door behind her and think.

‘Thanks, but I’d be bad company,’ she said. ‘I just need to sleep.’

She felt his eyes scrutinize her face.

‘You know what he meant, don’t you?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The guy in the train station, the Sorohan money, all that stuff.’ He flicked her a look in between watching the road. ‘It means something to you, doesn’t it?’

She shook her head and forced a shrug. ‘It was just some nutter.’

He regarded her for a moment, and then snapped his attention back to the traffic. ‘Suit yourself.’

His face had shut down on her. Hell. But she couldn’t do anything about it now. There were some aspects of her life she just wasn’t ready to open up about yet. At least not until she understood them better herself.

Dillon swung right into Raglan Road. Harry’s tension began to melt as they drove down the familiar tree-lined avenue. Victorian red-bricks stood guard on either side, some of them restored to elegant family homes but most converted into apartments. You could tell which ones were rented by the cracked paint on the sash windows.

Dillon peered out at them. ‘Which one is yours?’

Harry pointed to a corner house with a canary-yellow door. She’d smartened it up herself with a fresh coat of paint the week before. One of these days she’d buy her landlord out. Her profession paid well, and she’d accumulated enough savings now to start thinking about a mortgage.

Dillon slammed to a dead stop, scuffing the kerb. Harry hauled herself up out of the car and led the way through the front door.

The building had a basement and three floors, and Harry lived in an apartment at ground level. It had once been an elegant drawing room where butlers served tea. Now it was a place where Harry ate breakfast in bed any time she felt like it.

She trudged down the hall, aware of Dillon’s presence like a stalker behind her. They reached her apartment, and Harry froze. The door was open.

She edged up to the threshold, hesitating. Dillon stood behind her, looking in over her shoulder.