Ava McCarthy - The Insider

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.’