16 January 2019Jess’ estimation of the time it would take to find the file turned out to be woefully inaccurate . Whilst getting those initial files had been easy, the specific document they requested had turned out to be both well hidden and well encrypted. It’d taken four months, an astonishing amount of effort and quite a lot of social hacking to get the keys to decrypt it.
The moment she opened it Jess realised that she wasn’t so much in the deep end as kicking back in the Mariana Trench. Jonathan Campbell seemed to have decided that he wasn’t getting quite enough cash from Liberty’s payments, and after a little while of syphoning off what appeared to be bribes intended for others, he clearly hatched a pn to go into business for himself. From the other documents, Jess knew Liberty passed him very specific bits of legistion to get through parliament which he’d done with the aid of some of Liberty’s other bought-and-paid-for ministers. Then rather suddenly he’d received a rge lump of cash from somewhere else and slipped funding for a massive – and extremely dubious – project through using those same ministers. It was pretty clear those politicians didn’t know that this was his own pet project and that the payments they got had come out of his own pocket. Presumably, the right honourable Jonathon Campbell MP would be expecting another juicy payment now the funding was approved.
Unfortunately for him, the fact the project was an obvious grift seemed to have attracted attention both to it, and to other legistion that Liberty clearly had an interest in. But since it looked like Liberty had worked out what he’d done, Jonathon would probably encounter an ‘accident’ before he was publicly accused – and before he got paid. More than a few of the older names listed in the files she’d pulled had died in mysterious ‘accidents’.
But that specific document? That contained a list of more than a few names that she was seriously concerned by, along with links to weird evangelical groups, charities, right-wing politicians and even influencers. Unnerving people were doing terrifying, unpleasant things. And, if anyone followed the paper trail it all led back to this one document. One document which suggested that Jonathon Campbell had decided to go off piste, in the name of money, which was all very unfortunate for Jonathon, but the more Jess stared at it, the more she worried it might be unfortunate for her, too.
Jess re-encrypted the files, along with some other documents she suspected might be useful ter, and copied all the original files onto a selection of memory cards before sending the one requested document along with the final invoice to her client.
She took some quiet deep breaths, then her fingers fluttered over the keyboard and Miles Davis broke out around the ft. She sat, perched on the edge of the chair waiting for the music to carry her away, but her fingers kept being drawn involuntarily to the keyboard.
She unlocked the files and stared at the list of names.
No. This was a bad idea.
She closed the files, stepped away and y on the sofa trying to rex.
‘Thing is, if they think I can get ‘em, does it matter if I can’t? I mean, maybe I should at least try. That way I can demonstrate that I don’t know and couldn’t find out.’ The thought kept repeating in her head over and over. If she got the names, would that actually be some kind of defence? Maybe she could put together some kind of dossier that she could store somewhere for protection.
Maybe. But it definitely wasn’t something she wanted to try and do from here. Jess quickly rifled through Charlie’s far less ostentatious clothing, changing into blue jeans and a jumper. After twenty minutes in front of the mirror with makeup and tucking her hair into a beanie, she was barely recognizable. Another quick look through Charlie’s clothes found her an old bck jacket that didn’t fit too badly. Pausing to disable the CCTV on the block of fts (not that many of the cameras worked), she slipped through the concrete corridors. Pacing rapidly through the scabby estate she headed for the furthest bus stop, making her journey across town to one of the few remaining internet cafés. She really wanted the extra level of anonymity.
Thankfully the café was quiet enough and badly setup enough that she quickly harnessed all the unused computers in her own cluster. Not exactly the amount of processing power she’d like, but just about enough for this. Her fingers knew what was needed and glided across the keyboard seemingly on autopilot. Working through her known access points to servers across the world she hunted for the names and references she’d seen. Each time she found another cache of documents, she grabbed them and slid back out of the system and onto the next. The rain had just started as she’d arrived, spshing down – the first few droplets sneaking past the neck of her borrowed jumper. Now, as she called it a night, rain hammered unremittingly against the window. She quietly fired up shred. As it chuntered away writing and rewriting random data all over the disks, she pulled on the pin bck jacket and drifted into the night.
As she stepped onto the bus Jess gnced back at the crowds of people scurrying for shelter, umbrels raised as shields. The thought crept into the edges of her brain that any of those many people could be watching her. She scratched at the itch the concept provided, and her hand unconsciously tightened on the memory cards stashed in the lining of her gloves. The bus pulled away and she discreetly ducked her head behind a book, wondering how many of her carefully pnned emergency precautions she might end up needing, and hoping against hope that she’d not put Charlie in danger too. The thought left her cmmy with fear.
Jess found it astonishing that, despite her expectations, no one seemed to have noticed her intrusions into the various servers. She’d half expected to arrive home to find a throng of police congregating outside their ft, waiting patiently for the chance to take her to some liminal space. The problem was, it was too interesting. Normally she extracted data on financial transactions that, whilst she could see their value for bckmail or for monetary gain on the part of her various employers, she lost interest in once she solved the puzzle of gaining entry.
This time it was different. She’d found Jonathon Campbell’s presence in the media odious at the best of times but, thanks to her new knowledge of his abhorrent connections, she felt like more people than just him needed to be punished.
“They’re ’rseholes!” she abruptly excimed at Charlie as they sat eating after Jess got home.
Charlie jumped at the sudden interruption. She stopped chewing, and patiently waited for Jess, who was now debating whether this was such a good pn. After a few beats of silence, Charlie continued eating. It wouldn’t be the first time that Jess’d decided to recant a statement having thought better of it. Jess couldn’t start eating again. She sat staring at her food, her fork stuck en-route to the pte, the tines occasionally glinting as she breathed. Finally Jess put her cutlery down cautiously and looked back across at Charlie.
“It’s done. But not. Because…” Jess waved her hands vaguely around her, “Because, uh, fuckit, uh…a conspiracy.” The sentence petered out. Jess waved her hands around some more, vaguely indicating something huge, and finally uttered, “A massive shit-fucking conspiracy.”
Charlie waited while Jess tried to regain some equilibrium. “So, there’s some kind of big conspiracy that you’ve discovered, and you want to – to do something about it?”
“I’ve done wha’ was asked, but I wanna destroy it. Them.” The obvious problem that she’d left unspoken was that it might not only disquiet her employers. If anyone with political or legal power found out before the pn (whatever the pn resolved itself to be) had reached its conclusion, it’d also put her in the sights of ‘the establishment’. Jess internally cursed herself for bringing it up, worrying that Charlie knowing even this much might pce her at more risk. The very thought of it left her fighting back a wave of nausea.
Jess quickly steered the conversation towards the fact she might not have any money coming in for a bit, and did Charlie mind? When Charlie said she could cover things, Jess quickly muttered “I’ll get it done quick as I can.” In her heart Jess suspected that would take much longer than she hoped. And the more she thought about it, the more Jess was concerned that they were already in more danger than she’d like. Yet here she was considering making it a thousand times worse.
After they’d finished eating she grabbed the ptes and wandered over to the sink; it was only as they cttered down she saw how much her hands were trembling.
