Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Rob had made such a noise, when they’d been together as students, about not becoming what he called a ‘spamhat’, his blanket term for anyone richer and older than himself whom he suspected of having taken a lucrative job because they had been – deservedly – bullied at school. Rob had been – deservedly – bullied at school.

Alex imagined – no, knew for a certainty – that his text would ping, or zoing, or chirp onto Rob’s BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever he now had as he swayed along on the train, and that Rob would be excited by it, and affect to have had his day ruined.

Alex, even though it was late, waited five minutes before sending his next text. It was as well to affect not having been saving it up – but at the same time taking a few minutes to imply a plausible albeit startling facility of mind.

‘Inexperienced butler? Sounds like an old film. (3, 5, 3, 2, 5).’

He was woken fifteen minutes later by his phone – on silent – burring against the hard surface of the bedside unit. He reached for it, bleary now, and thumbed the unlock sequence. The little square screen was fish-green. New message.

‘Cnut,’ said Rob’s message.

Alex smiled and sighed, replaced the phone on the bedside table and settled back into a happy sleep.

Red Queen’s encryption team worked on the hard drive they’d recovered from MIC – the drive the boy had couriered across the Atlantic for them and dropped off in Atlanta. The drive was exceptionally hard to crack, but – the cryptologists reported – not impossible. Progress was being made by brute-force computing. Red Queen regarded that as somewhat suspicious. So did Porlock. Still, they persevered. Resources were diverted. Compartment by compartment, data started to come off the disk.

It bugged Red Queen, though, that the casino metrics suggested the device itself was still on the move. The data coming off the hard drive didn’t make much sense, as yet – it certainly didn’t resemble, as Red Queen had initially dared to hope, backup blueprints for the machine. So what did it have to do with anything?

Ellis, MIC’s head of security, had been working on the hard drive too, or rather working on its absence. MIC couriered several items of varying sensitivity between its offices in London, Washington and Atlanta every day; to say nothing of the material it moved between narco states in South America and AK-infested government buildings in Lagos, Freetown, Mogadishu and Khartoum. If any of those packages went missing, Ellis was informed.

Commercial competitors – as senior management insisted on calling the private interests, most of them governments rather than companies, and most of them clients rather than competitors, that tended to be interested in ripping MIC off – needed to be discouraged from obtaining sensitive data.

Ellis’s anti-theft policy was twofold. The first side of it was straightforward. They used a dozen or more different courier companies in each country, randomising each job and booking them independently and at late notice. All electronic data that they couriered was encrypted and tagged; and all disappearances were investigated.

The second part of the anti-theft policy was slightly more complicated. In the first place, MIC couriered something in the order of five or six times as many packages as it needed to. Only very select personnel knew which contained the important data and which were heavily encrypted dummies. These were what Ellis liked to call ‘Barium Meal Experiments’: they’d tie up a lot of time and expertise, and once broken would yield complex, useless or deliberately misleading information. Their chief purpose was to cause their interceptors to give themselves away by acting on a red herring – a piece of bogus market-sensitive information that might cause a greedy dictator to tilt at a stock, or a hint that the opposition had bought a surface-to-air missile package for which MIC sold the only effective countermeasure. Sometimes it was more important and more profitable to know who was ripping you off than to prevent them doing so.

They were also, most of them, laden with the sort of high-end Trojan viruses that would install a nice back door, for MIC, in their hosts’ computer systems.

They knew, for instance, that the Atlanta package had travelled by air to New York within a few hours of its disappearance from the courier company. But the signal from its tag had abruptly cut out on arrival. It had either been discovered or encased in concrete, or discovered and then encased in concrete.

In New York, the tag had not been discovered, nor had it had been encased in concrete. But it was deep underground, with the DEI’s cryptographers. And it was nearly a day before those cryptographers fully cracked it. And a bit over a day when they realised what had happened.

‘Like something gift-wrapped in a cartoon,’ Porlock said without a trace of mirth when he made his report. ‘Black on face. Hair sticking up.’

‘Swine,’ said Red Queen.

The quarantined network they’d been using to open the drive had quietly suffered the computer-virus equivalent of Ebola and would take more time and energy to cure than it had taken to break the encryption in the first place. Among the effects of the virus was that every computer in the network was quietly trying to get in contact with a remote ISP – almost certainly one of MIC’s secure nodes – four times per second. They were doing so in vain, since the network wasn’t wired to the outside world. But it made Red Queen think of the magic harp in the fairy story, screaming and screaming from under Jack’s coat that it had been stolen.

The data on the drive had been mud. One programmer speculated irritably that the extensive personnel file for a company named ‘Herring Enterprises’ – they checked: it had no personnel; it was a Cayman Islands shell – was a private joke.

The DEI’s programmer was right. It was a private joke. But it was not a private joke that Ellis was much laughing at. Ellis, too, had missed a trick. When he was first told about the missing package, he had given it little thought. Let his subordinates work it.

He was more preoccupied with trying to find this probability machine, and the routine loss of a BME – as, on checking, he saw it was – was neither here nor there. It was only when it occurred to him that it was Atlanta and that it was about the same time this kid had given those idiotic thugs of his the slip there, that he went back and wondered about a connection.

Could the boy have stolen the package? Could the machine have caused the package to be stolen?

Ellis looked at the loss of the package. It had gone through the airport, routinely, with no problems. The representative of the courier company had picked up the briefcase with the hard drive. But the closure of the Atlanta offices after the incident with the frogs – another thing that had installed the flickering jelly bean of an incipient migraine in the corner of Ellis’s field of vision – had meant that he’d returned with the package to his own company’s offices with a view to putting it in the safe. Where he’d been mugged and relieved of the suitcase. Two muggers – he didn’t get much of a look at them. The loss had been reported to the police, but Ellis didn’t hold out much hope of recovering it. Not with someone flying it instantly to New York, which was not what normal muggers did.

Ellis couldn’t see a way that the boy, even if he had had an accomplice, could have known about this package arriving at the same time as him; nor where it would be going; nor why he would be interested in it in any case.

Ellis found out which courier company MIC had used, and telephoned their UK office. He was rude to a series of dispatchers until a senior manager looked it up on the computer.