Luke Jennings - Codename Villanelle

There’s the faint sound of the closing front door, and of a male voice. Eve presses herself even harder into the ground. Her face is inches from Lance’s shoe.

“Look, I’m sorry, OK.” The man’s voice, much closer now. “But I honestly don’t see…”

“You don’t see? Well for a start, you condescending shit , you don’t ever tell me to calm down in front of our friends.”

“Penny, please. Don’t shout.”

“I’ll shout as loud as I fucking well like.”

“Fine, but not in the garden, OK? We’ve got neighbours.”

“Fuck the neighbours.” Her voice drops. “And fuck you, too.”

A brief silence, then something flips over the fence, and lands in Eve’s hair with a tiny scorching hiss. The kitchen door clicks shut, and Eve claws at the half-smoked cigarette, melting the latex glove and burning her fingers before she finally tears it loose.

“Go,” whispers Lance.

Wincing with pain, Eve follows him down the lane to the road. No one seems to be watching as they climb into the car, but she’s glad they’ve got false number plates.

“What’s that smell?” asks Billy, letting out the clutch.

“My hair,” says Eve, pulling off the half-melted glove.

“Crikey, I won’t ask. I’m assuming we’re all going back to Goodge Street?”

“Billy, we don’t have to go through all this stuff tonight,” Eve says.

“Maybe, but let’s do it anyway. There’s bugger-all on TV.”

“Lance?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Everyone good with pizza?” Billy asks. “We passed a place on the Archway Road.”

It’s nearly midnight when Eve rings Niko. He’s at home, and the two other teachers who have come to dinner are still there.

“Niko, look, I’m really sorry about tonight, and I’ll make it up to you, but I need to ask you something. Something important.”

Niko grunts non-committally.

“I need your help. Can you come to the office?”

“Now?”

“Yes, I’m afraid now.”

“Jesus, Eve.” He pauses. “So what do I do with Zbig and Claudia?”

She considers. “How good are they?”

“What do you mean, good?”

“IT stuff. Security protocols. Cracking.”

“They’re very clever people. But right now, they’re shit-faced.”

“You trust them?”

“Yeah, I trust them.” He sounds weary. Resigned.

“Niko, I’m sorry. I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

“Yes, you will. Tell me.”

“Call a cab, and get over here. All of you.”

“Eve, you’re forgetting. I don’t know where ‘here’ is. I don’t know where anything is any more.”

“Niko…”

“Just tell me, OK?”

When she puts down the phone the others are looking at her. Billy’s hands are poised, unmoving, above his keyboard. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Lance asks.

She meets his gaze. “We’ve looked at everything on the external drive and the memory sticks, and everything we downloaded from his hard drive, and it’s all squeaky-clean. We’ve just got this one locked file, and I’m afraid that if we don’t crack it, everything else we did tonight counts for fuck all. Dennis Cradle is old-school MI5. He’s not a techie, but he knows how to create a high-entropy password. Billy’s brute force attack isn’t working. We need more heads on this one, and I’ve got clearance from Richard to use outside consultants if necessary.”

“So who are these people?” Lance asks.

“My husband’s Polish, and an ex-chess champion. He teaches maths, but he’s a pretty damn good hacker. Zbigniew is his friend, a classics scholar, and Claudia is Zbig’s girlfriend. She’s an educational psychologist. They’re smart people.”

“What about Official Secrets?”

“We’re just asking them to help us crack a password. Nothing more. We’re not going to name any names, give them context, or show them what we find in the file.”

Lance shrugs. “OK by me, I guess.”

“Billy?”

“Yeah. What he said.”

“So would you have killed me?” Villanelle asks.

“Those were my orders,” says Lara. “If you didn’t finish Konstantin off, I was to shoot you, and then him. He was compromised.”

“He wouldn’t have told them anything.”

“You know that, and I know that. But it’s not theoretically impossible, so he had to die, and you had to kill him, and I was the back-up. That’s how they operate, our employers.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Would you have killed me?”

“Yes.”

They’re lying, naked, on the Learjet’s foldaway bed. They smell of sweat, sex and gunshot residue. In forty minutes they will land at Vnukovo airport, south-west of Moscow. Lara will leave, and Villanelle will continue to Paris via Annecy Mont Blanc and Issy-les-Moulineaux. There will be no official record of her entering France, just as there was no record of her leaving.

She strokes the nape of Lara’s neck. Feels the prickle of her cropped hair. “You were good tonight. That running head-shot was perfection.”

“Thank you.”

“You practically decapitated him.”

“I know. That Lobaev’s a dream to shoot.” Gently, she takes Villanelle’s upper lip between her teeth, and explores it with her tongue. “I love your scar. How did you get it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to know,” says Lara, reaching between Villanelle’s legs. “Tell me.”

Villanelle begins to answer, but feeling the slippery flutter of Lara’s fingers inside her, arches her back and sighs, her body’s pulse becoming one with the engine-note of the Learjet. She pictures the aircraft racing through the night, and the dark Russian forests far below. Taking Lara’s other hand in hers, she sucks the trigger finger into her mouth. It tastes metallic and sulphurous, like death.

Eve meets Niko and his friends outside Goodge Street tube station. Niko touches a hand to her arm, the gesture stiff and self-conscious, and she smells plum brandy on his breath. Zbig is wild and bear-like and visibly drunk, and Claudia is glacial and avoids Eve’s eye. Looking at them, Eve feels her optimism fade.

In the office Lance has made tea, and noting Claudia’s expression, has slipped outside for a roll-up. The temperature is dropping. Eve finds everyone chairs.

“So how can we help?” asks Claudia, her face expressionless, her hands taut at the collar of her coat.

Eve looks at the assembled faces. “We have a password to break.”

Niko looks at Billy. “Life or death, I understand.”

“You could say.”

“So what are you trying?”

“Right now, a series of dictionary attacks. If that doesn’t do it, I’m going to try a rainbow table. But that’ll take time.”

“Which we don’t have,” says Eve.

Claudia frowns, still holding her collar tightly closed. “How much do you know about the password-holder?”

“A bit.”

“You think we can possibly guess the password?”

“I think we can have a bloody good try.”

Claudia looks at Zbig, who shrugs, and blows the steam off his tea.

“Tell us about this guy,” says Niko.

“Smart, middle-aged, well educated…” Eve begins. “Computer-literate, but not a full-on geek. He would have people to take care of issues like computer and network security at work. But the file we need to crack was hidden on his home computer, so probably password-locked by himself.”

“How well was it hidden?” asks Claudia.

“Billy?”

“Executable .bat file. Not completely entry-level.”

“My instinct about this guy,” Eve says, “is that he would consider himself clever enough to create an uncrackable password. He’ll have informed himself about things like information entropy…”