Steven Savile - Silver

Konstantin pulled the brim of his new cap down over his eyes as the car swept past him.

The rain started to fall in earnest.

He needed to find out what was on the thumb drive.

“All right Koni, talke,” Jude Lethe said into the headset. He wiped his lips with the back of his left hand and put the empty drink can down beside the rickety pyramid of other empty cans.

Half a world away, Konstantin Khavin sat in a dingy Internet cafe nursing a straight black coffee. He looked over his shoulder three times in as many minutes. Jude could see the stern-faced Russian through the blurry pixilation of the webcam. He enjoyed watching other people while they sat in front of computers, especially when it was so obvious that they were lost in space.

“What do you need me to do?” Konstantin asked, eying the screen as he would a viper.

“I’ll need the IP address of the terminal you’re using,” Lethe explained, knowing it was going to sound like double-dutch to the big man.

“And in a language I understand?”

“I’m going to take over your computer from here. It’ll be just like magic,” he said, grinning.

“You can be a complete ass, Lethe. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“If you’re going to do anything, do it all the way, eh? What say we hack this computer, then, shall we?” He talked Konstantin through the process, directing him through the control panel into the network settings until he found the computer’s unique Internet address. In less than a minute Konstantin read him a string of numbers.

“Perfect,” he said. He tapped in the digits and triggered a string of commands that allowed him to take remote control of Konstantin’s machine. He didn’t use the operating system’s built-in helper. His code was much more invasive. “I’m sending you a piece of code, Koni. All I want you to do is execute it, and we’ll be cooking with gas.”

“Just tell me what to do.”

“Click on the smiley face when it pops up. It’s as easy as that.”

Konstantin did as he was told. A second terminal window opened up on the bank of monitors in front of Lethe. In it he saw exactly what Konstantin saw. “Fantastic. Okay, plug the USB stick in. I’ll take it from here.” A few seconds later he was moving the cursor and launching a browser to explore the contents of the thumb drive Konstantin had recovered.

Of course it was never going to be that easy.

In the digital heart of Nonesuch Jude Lethe stared at the encryption key that froze his screen. His grin turned feral as the image on the screen shivered and broke up. The terminal window closed, the connection severed. This was his world. He’d built an entire ghost network that allowed him to come and go through the mainframe corridors of power at will. The ghost network data-mined Ministry computers. If he so chose, he could fire up webcams from hundreds of the laptops used by politicians and high ranking civil servants just to see what they were doing then and there. An eleven-digit encryption key wouldn’t take long to break through, no matter who built it. People were predictable; they used family pets, nicknames, favorite books, things that were memorable. Some tried to be clever and used random number strings. Either way, it didn’t matter to Lethe.

He reestablished the connection.

This time he didn’t try to crack the encryption over the remote connection. He ran a cloning program, making a perfect copy of the small memory stick, encryption and all.

“Got it.”

“So what does it say?” Konstantin asked.

Lethe had been so focused on the screen he had forgotten the Russian was on the line. “No idea, but I’ll find out.”

“Do you need anything else from me?”

Just give me two seconds,” Lethe said, punching in the command that would erase the memory stick. Most people didn’t realize that erasing something on a computer was pretty much the same as using an eraser on a block of legal paper: you could pull off the top sheet and use the edge of the pencil to highlight the impression left on the page beneath. Or, in other words, deleting a document didn’t take it away. Not if you knew how to go snooping through digital files. Of course if Lethe wanted something gone, he could make it happen. He had designed his own data shredder. It wasn’t perfect, but without the restructuring code he didn’t believe there was a programmer in the world who could put Humpty together again.

To finish the job he uploaded a virulent piece of code that would inflict a whole world of hurt on the first machine that tried to unravel it. It was his parting gift.

“Okay,” he muttered, “it’s all rs, Koni.” He didn’t tell the Russian the drive in his pocket was now worse than useless. He figured it was better for the big man to think he was protecting untold secrets in case someone over there picked him up. The less he knew the better. Lethe’s grin was fierce as he kicked the chair back. It twisted slightly as it glided on its small wheels. He killed the connection and pulled the Bluetooth set out of his ear.

The room was floor to ceiling with server racks and drives, ribbon connectors, USBs, and trailing wires that seemed to have fused together into some sort of grotesque Transformer.

Lethe reached over for the remote and cranked up the volume on his iPod. It was hooked into an expensive speaker rig. Even at quarter volume the speakers had enough power to deafen every living thing within one hundred yards of Nonesuch. Musically, Jude Lethe was born out of his time. The jazz refrain of Hue and Cry’s “I Refuse” faded into Stuart Adamson’s powerful Dunfermline burr as it came up screaming “In a Big Country.” The entire playlist was all mid-80s but avoided nerve-jarring pop jingles and focused on iconic tunes like “Love is a Wonderful Color” and “Sixty Eight Guns.” These were the songs that defined a generation.

He cracked his knuckles and stretched back in the chair, enjoying the dead singer’s voice as he sounded his battle cry. He leaned across for the alarm clock on the shelf above the computer, checked it against his watch, and set it for forty-five minutes time to make things interesting. He put the clock back on the shelf and turned his full attention back to the screen.

Lethe triggered a string of commands, his fingers moving with staccato-grace across the keyboard. Without knowing anything about the woman who had built the encryption he was running in an algorithmic darkness like a blind mouse.

That was just how he liked it.

It didn’t takehim anywhere near the full forty-five minutes to unlock the cloned disc. The encryption wasn’t meant to deter a stubborn investigator, only to put off prying eyes.

The woman’s codename was Ghost Walker. Her real name was Grace Weller. All of the documents were signed GW. There was enough information hardcoded into the file system for Lethe to know as much about the woman as her own mother by the time he’d finished digging. Even his cursory scan revealed enough for him to know Grace was anything but an unfortunate girlfriend in the wrong place at the wrong time. Asar as Lethe could tell she’d engineered herself into exactly where she wanted to be. Her machine was registered as property of Her Majesty’s Government, which meant she was almost certainly with MI6. The fact that the tech boys still insisted on properly registering their bulk licenses for various software was mildly amusing. There had been a time back in the ’90s where the core government offices developed their own database, accounting and word processing software rather than buy in services. Now, like the rest of the known world, they paid the Great God Microsoft a small fortune for the privilege of keeping the nation’s secrets electronically.