On with the tale, and thank you to my dear faithful reviewers for the encouragement :)
xxx
In retrospect, it was the picklock that threw her.
As soon as their visitor steps into the room and the shady outline resolves itself into the familiar – and unwelcome – figure of her Sydney acquaintance Jamie Harper, Selina's momentary panic gives way to a flash of anger. And seeing the equally familiar marker-like gadget in Jamie's hand, together with her companions' insufficiently-angry expressions, gives her an instant suspicion that Jamie is there without her prior knowledge, but not without theirs.
"What's this bitch doing here?" she mouths furiously, glaring at the two men, who only shrug in response.
As it turns out, Jamie is too good at lip-reading for Selina's liking.
"This bitch is helping your ungrateful arses," she answers without missing a beat as she shuts the door behind her.
Cool as a cucumber, as Alfred would say. The British inflection of a familiar swearword makes Selina's mouth twitch up in a half-grin in spite of itself.
"Apologies for the intrusion, I wasn't so sure you'd let me in if I asked nicely."
That much is true.
"I'm not leading anyone to you, in case you're wondering," she continues, holding up her other hand to show her reluctant hosts a disembowelled phone. And before Selina can say that this may be the only visible phone or tracking device she is carrying, Jamie walks up to the three of them and concludes, in the same casual, matter-of-fact tone, a far cry from her icy demeanour in Sydney, "feel free to sweep me."
Maybe she is betting on us not having a sweeper, Selina muses as she walks over to the metal carry-ons holding their gadgetry. But Jamie's reaction when Selina smugly holds aloft the paddle is one of relief, not concern, and it is soon corroborated when the sweep comes up clean.
"I take it you're not the White Tigress," Jamie ventures when Selina is done.
"What do you think?" Selina does her best to sound sarcastic. Standing as she is in a black catsuit and sporting a loose ponytail, she is sure that the woman she has been impersonating would never let herself be seen looking like this; a certainty Jamie shares, if her smirk is an indication.
"I think we need to talk," Jamie says by way of an answer. "I think we may have been deceived by each other's appearances."
Makes sense, sort of. And sounds almost like an apology. But there are other matters to be cleared before Selina is willing to give the other woman the benefit of the doubt.
"How did you find us?" Selina presses on.
"Followed you." Jamie sounds as if Selina was asking a silly question. "Saw which floor you went to on the lobby lift panel and eavesdropped until I heard you in here." Seeing Selina's raised eyebrows, she explains, "I'm renting an office on the top floor of Suntec Two, facing Mitchum's."
So she also knows the man's identity.
"Watched you two get in there."
And she has night vision gear.
"And figured you probably weren't a bona fide buyer." She keeps her gaze on Selina before shifting it to Bruce. "You almost fried my camera when you set off that EMP," she goes on accusingly. "You must've fried his laptop for sure. Don't worry, there's nothing on it."
"How do you know?" Selina jumps in, unwilling to be too trusting – or rather, to let Bruce get too trusting, seeing his relieved expression.
"As I'm saying," Jamie continues, a touch too sarcastically for Selina's taste, "I've been keeping an eye on Mitchum's office. I have a video camera hooked up to a set of binoculars trained on his office window, among other things, and normally fast-forward through the footage every few hours, but I happened to be around to see you two in real time. And if you play nice, I'll tell you what else I know."
The girl's cocky attitude makes Selina want to punch her and give her a hi-five in equal measure.
"Why are you watching him?"
"Just as you're not a terrorist's wife, though I'll admit you pulled off a convincing performance," Jamie begins, "I'm not Mitchum's accomplice, regardless of what you may think and of what I told you in Sydney. I gained his trust by bringing the Syrian to him, your CIA superiors are on to that man anyway so he'll be easy to catch if he wins – "
Both Selina and Bruce bristle at the implied subordination. But Bruce probably thinks his sour face is eloquent enough, so it is left to Selina to keep up the verbal parrying.
"The fact that we may be working with the CIA on this issue doesn't make them our superiors." She does her best to match Jamie's sarcasm. I'm getting rusty. I used to do this in my sleep.
"Your inferiors, then," Jamie offers, and Selina laughs despite herself. She is used to verbal sparring matches – quite likes them, as a matter of fact – but more often than not, her counterparts have literal rather than figurative balls. This one looks like she could be an exception… if they are lucky. "But if you folks aren't Langley – "
"We're not," Bruce assures her. Finally, a bit of help. "We're independent contractors. Let's say they had a way of… persuading us to cooperate."
This makes Jamie scowl in what looks, surprisingly, like sympathy. Isn't she herself a spy?
"What about you?" Selina jumps in.
She recalls what their CIA contacts told them: senior analyst at GCHQ, the UK's version of the NSA… got transferred to Hong Kong earlier this year… was allegedly pursuing a possible contact before being taken off the case, under an internal inquest into her involvement in the murder of a civilian, not conclusive enough to have put her under arrest, but enough for an indefinite admin leave pending the outcome. Now is her chance to see how much of this Jamie owns up to.
"I'm – " Jamie cuts herself off. "I suppose by now I should say I'm ex-GCHQ. It's a matter of time before they either fire me or put me in prison. Or both."
So far, so true.
"What did you do?"
Jamie's face falls, and Selina's cold-blooded bitch theory is suddenly looking shaky.
"I got someone killed."
Of all the things to get Bruce to sympathise, this is it. He is not saying it out loud, but his expression speaks volumes. Jamie is apparently encouraged by this to continue, though it takes her a couple of seconds to collect her thoughts, the rapid-fire sarcasm all gone.
"A month ago Mitchum put up an anonymous Silk Road listing for a global defence asset database for three days before deleting it. One of my GCHQ tasks was trawling the Silk Road for exactly this sort of thing, the major deals, not small-time arseholes selling sawed-off shotguns. I told my boss but he thought it was a red herring, that was days and days before your CIA… partners found out about the theft. He said if I wanted to go after it, it was my call, meaning he wouldn't stop me but he wouldn't give me additional resources or backup, either. Our top priority is monitoring sigint from the Middle East and all that. Bloody budget cuts. But I still had access to all sorts of data and surveillance software thanks to my position, so I kept digging. Pretended to be an interested intermediary, then put the Syrian in touch with Mitchum and when he swallowed the bait, promised to bring him more interested buyers. I never met him in person, but tried retracing the commission he paid me even though we dealt with each other using Tor." The allegedly untraceable anonymous browser. "It was only twenty coin but it wasn't the point."
About five thousand dollars, Selina figures. Not a lot but OK for pocket money. She remembers Bruce saying something about the electronic currency preserving traces of holder identities as part of its constituent code.
"Didn't get me far so I kept stalling for time with promises of buyer contacts, and then I got really lucky. I told him my next client communicated by email and gave him my Lavabit address to write to. He made a stupid move and used a less secure service when he wrote to me, and I pieced together enough metadata on the message to get his temp IP address, here in Singapore."
Selina is not enough of a hacker to know what exactly this involves, but sees Bruce nodding his approval.
"And then I saw that my new best friend from Syria, whose iPhone we'd hacked weeks ago, had just received an anonymous message telling him to go to Suntec. I flew over here from Hong Kong, and once I'd checked the building lease records, I finally got a visual, and his real name once I'd run facial recognition, so I could monitor him under both names."
Both names? Presumably she means his Perry alias and his Mitchum real name. How come she did not catch his Burlington identity? He must have used a different disposable alias every time he re-entered Singapore, Selina muses, and Jamie must have missed them, or at least the latest one. But she is impressed with what the other woman managed to find out, virtually on her own, though admittedly using vast resources within her reach and with a two- or three-week head start on them. Most importantly, her story sounds pretty damn plausible. It would take a better liar than even Selina herself to consistently spin a lie as intricate as this, and deliberately pepper it with minor missteps on her part.
"I rented the office at Two Suntec and set up the binoculars and camera there, but it was no help in seeing his laptop password as he typed it on the keyboard, or in reading whatever he had on his desk, the angle was wrong no matter how good the resolution, so I bribed a cleaning maid at One Suntec to help me bug his office. There's a lamp on his desk, you've seen it."
Selina does not recall seeing it, but then, they were too busy getting disappointed to notice minor office fixtures.
"I got the girl, Yanisa, to bring me an identical lamp, they have standard fixtures throughout the tower and she found one sitting in a storage cabinet on another floor. I stuck a mini-camera into it looking like a bolt head facing down, and swapped the regular lightbulb for one with a built-in wi-fi transmitter to relay the image to me through a router. Yanisa smuggled it back into storage together with the router, then she pushed the old lamp close to the edge of the desk, as if by accident, when she was cleaning; he let her come in, empty the garbage and all, every three days, but only when he was there to watch her. And when the lamp fell over and the bulb assembly broke, she brought in my identical-looking rigged lamp as a replacement and switched on the router back in the pantry. Mitchum had his laptop wi-fi connection permanently disabled, and he uses very basic burner phones, the pre-wi-fi variety, so he wasn't watching out for active networks in the vicinity. He didn't suspect anything then, she said he only told her off for being clumsy. That way I got the password to his laptop from the camera feed, plus I had a fingerprint scan from a plastic cup he'd thrown out that Yanisa pinched, and I used them to crack his laptop with an infected apparently-blank email claiming to come from the Syrian, temporarily re-enable the wifi when he wasn't looking, install a keylogger and see what was on the hard drive, but it was no use. He keeps no data on it, all he's ever used it for is checking emails - he only gets a handful on the account I've seen and deletes them at once after reading, and the ones I did see were pretty useless - and doing the Matrix demo off a thumb drive."
"You've never seen him run the real thing?" Selina blurts out.
Jamie flicks her a sharp glance. "No, I haven't, and I don't think he has it. Back then I thought he might have kept it in the safe, but when I tried to get into it, I got Yanisa killed."
"What happened?" Selina prompts when Jamie has been silent for a few seconds.
"Mitchum used to put the laptop and the thumb drive into the safe at night before... all this happened, and until I knew better I thought he might be keeping the real database in there as well, it's more secure than a hotel room, after all. He's been too scared since… to leave the thumb drive with the demo in the office, so I suspect he never parts with it now, but he'd never keep the full version on his person. As it is, he practically craps himself whenever he's outside with just the demo on him."
Selina remembers watching Mitchum nervously trotting into and out of Suntec; Jamie's assessment sounds spot-on.
"Anyway, at that point I still thought Mitchum was running the show, so I figured my best shot at finding the Matrix was inside that safe. And if all else failed and I only had a day or two before the final sale, I planned to pose as an office temp on a weekday to get in, wait on the fire escape stairs until Mitchum got out to go to the loo, I hoped he wouldn't set the alarm if it was only for a minute, then ambush him before he'd locked the door, knock him out with a hammer and drag him back in. I'd leeched enough CCTV footage from outside Mitchum's office to fool the guards and get around the bloody clock."
Out of the corner of her eye, Selina sees Bruce suppress a sigh.
"It's one hell of a crazy-ass plan," she comments wryly.
"Didn't have many options left," Jamie replies. "But I knew the surveillance stuff Mitchum had inside the office was most likely independently powered, I'd tried cutting off the power to that floor and sure enough, I saw the alarm was still on. I hadn't seen evidence of any accomplices but couldn't rule them out either, and for all I knew they were keeping an eye on his office equipment from somewhere nearby. Even if I was really fast, with a mask on and whatnot, I still risked being caught, especially without the sort of EMP blackout device you used… and that's assuming I could open the safe at once. If I had to actually crack it by brute force or by dialler, there was no chance at all. I'd asked Yanisa to memorise the model name, that way I knew that it took an eight-digit code and fingerprint scan to open. I already had the fingerprint, but needed the code, and without a line of sight at the safe keypad through the office window, I had no way of getting it on my own. So I gave Yanisa a minicam to stick on the wall next to the safe, it looked like a glob of dried white paint the size of a match head, should have been practically invisible on the white wall, and would relay data via my wi-fi lightbulb. All she had to do was press her palm against the wall, it could be made to look accidental, and I thought I wouldn't need to bother her again. But she got nervous and dropped it when she tried to stick it on, and then picked it up and tried again. Silly girl, should've just swept it up with the dust or left it lying there. I saw it all through the window." Jamie falls silent again.
"And Mitchum caught her?" Selina prompts.
Jamie nods. "She panicked and swallowed it but he figured she'd been trying to plant a bug. He dragged her to security, insisting she be fired at once. I figured he was too worried about his cover being blown to take her to the police. She ran out in tears and I wanted to go after her but had to stay put to avoid drawing attention to myself… I was about to go find her parents' flat after midnight and take her to a safehouse, but they announced on the 11 o'clock news that they'd found her body under the Rochor flyover, right across the road from Suntec, she had an ID on her… It isn't a sort of thing that happens here often so there was extensive coverage. And then the police saw my number in her phone memory and tagged me as a person of interest. She didn't have that many contacts, and mine stood out as the odd one among local friends and family."
"What did she die of?"
"The files I saw before my access was revoked talked of a possible heroin overdose. You should have seen the girl, she couldn't have been older than eighteen or nineteen and I'm positive she's never touched drugs in her life. But you know what the laws are like here, I'm sure her family were too afraid of the drug angle to press for an investigation. In the end it was quickly swept under the carpet as a hit-and-run."
Theo, who has been watching from the sidelines up to this point, greets this with a knowing scowl. "And with heroin there's almost no way to tell murder or suicide from an accidental overdose, especially in non-habitual users who have a low tolerance. All the autopsy can show is that the subject died of severe respiratory depression, their breath just gives out."
Jamie sighs. "And of course the syringe was never found, so there was no way to prove I didn't do it."
"So much for presumption of innocence," Selina mutters. Not that she herself hasn't followed the CIA's lead in presuming Jamie's guilt.
"The police didn't really believe it, they had me in for questioning as a person of interest, but didn't arrest me or even order me to stay in the country. I used a fake ID to go to Sydney just in case, but it wasn't to run from them."
"From whom, then?" Selina asks.
"I wasn't running," Jamie snaps. "My boss ordered me to get the hell out of Singapore until the internal inquest was over."
And look where you are now. "Did he hold you responsible for not recovering the Matrix?"
"No. Considering he'd hung me out to dry from the outset, it would have been flagrant hypocrisy even coming from a spymaster. But he did revoke all my access privileges so I couldn't use GCHQ resources and had to keep on snooping on my own. When I met you in Sydney I took you for the real thing, I still had old offline archives on a few thousand targets including the Sivaparan couple and your prints were a match, and thought I could follow you to pick up more dirt on Mitchum. Well, good luck with that, without real-time access to immigration records, you lost me before you even boarded the flight to Bangkok."
Selina cannot help a smug half-smile, though their easy escape was really Theo's doing. This explains why Jamie never mentioned Mitchum's Charles Burlington alias; she no longer had a way of knowing.
"I could be wrong," Jamie goes on, "but I think the inquest was the CIA's idea more than the GCHQ's, seeing how they woke up and saw this whole situation as a major intel fuck-up that they wanted to handle directly. At which point, I suppose, they brought you in."
Selina sidesteps the implied question. "If you aren't blamed for the theft, why are you still looking for it? You think the GCHQ will thank you for disobeying orders?"
"I no longer give a flying fuck about the GCHQ." Not a prudent tactic by any measure, but on reflection, Jamie's anger is understandable. "And the Matrix is your job by now. I'm after Mitchum."
"You're after a bit of vigilante justice," Bruce suggests, with more than a hint of disapproval.
Jamie shakes her head. "I got an eighteen-year-old girl killed. I paid her, but she trusted me enough to keep her safe. It doesn't matter that it isn't a formal charge, I know I'm guilty. But I want to know who did it and I want Yanisa's family to know who did it. I want that cocksucker behind bars, that's the only way they'll get any closure... I don't think it was Mitchum himself, he's too much of a coward for that, but he is my best lead to find whoever's pulling his strings."
"In which case we're looking for the same things," is Bruce's verdict – and Selina sees no reason to disagree. "So we might as well keep looking together."
"I was hoping you'd see it that way," Jamie replies, her eagerness only thinly disguised. "Even though I still know fuck all about who you really are."
For someone with a posh accent, she has a peculiar tendency to swear like a drunken sailor when she gets upset – or excited, as she seems now.
"We're security consultants," Selina tells her before tipping her head at Theo. "He's my boss."
"They're security consultants," Bruce puts in, not quite helpfully. "I'm the toyboy. What are you two giggling at?"
By now they are not so much giggling as wiping their eyes with laughter; the giggling is left to Jamie, a sea change from her habitual dour expression.
"Well… you sure do have… interesting toys," she blurts out in between.
.
TBC
.
Notes
Keylogger software is relatively well/known (http en*wikipedia*org/wiki/Keystroke_logging); the wi-fi lightbulb is more recent and more exotic, but also real (http www independent*co*uk/news/science/lifi-revolution-internet-connections-using-light-bulbs-are-250-times-faster-than-broadband-8909320*html ).
Sigint = signal intelligence = electronic data (including phone records and emails) in spy lingo