Page 57 of Zero Days

But the girl was talking into her headset again, and so I shook my head and moved away, towards the corner she’d indicated. Keeley must have been reasonably senior, because she had a half booth and a window—and when I drew closer, I saw what the girl had meant. The little booth was full of what I supposed must be the “gonks” she had referred to—little troll dolls with fluffy upswept hair and grinning faces. There were girl gonks and boy gonks, baby gonks and granny gonks. The effect was deeply unsettling and somehow also made me want to laugh—but I couldn’t do that right now.

Instead, I sat down in Keeley’s chair, fired up her computer, and looked around. What I’d been hoping for was the lottery win of pen testing—a password written on a Post-it and stuck to the monitor—but if Keeley did write down her passwords, she wasn’t stupid enough to leave them in plain sight. Instead, I picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and dialed the number Gemma had given me. It rang. And rang. And rang…

I was on the point of giving up, sick with disappointment, when there was a click and the phone was picked up. Instantly I heard a baby wailing on the other end, and my heart lifted. The only thing better than someone busy was someone busy and distracted.

“Hello?” Keeley’s voice was brusque and a little worried. “Who is this?”

I took a deep breath. Do not fluff this.

“Hi, Keeley,” I said, making my voice as warm and professional as I could. “Sorry, you’re probably wondering why it’s your own number calling you! This is Kate from IT. There seems to be a problem with some of the computers—bit of malware’s got into the system somehow—so we’re having to do a manual scan on the affected machines. I’ve been trying to catch you all week and it’s getting… well, it’s pretty urgent, to be honest. I’m at your desk right now, is there any chance you could pop up and log me in?”

“Well, I don’t know how it could have been me.” She sounded a little defensive. “I’ve been off all week with Harry. He’s got chickenpops.”

Pox, I thought but didn’t say. Cardinal rule of phishing: Do not piss off your target.

“Oh, what a nightmare!” I said instead, filling my voice with sympathy. “I’ve got twin boys and they both had it a couple of months ago. I swear, I didn’t sleep for a fortnight.”

“Oh my God, tell me about it,” Keeley said ruefully, and I could tell from the change in her tone that I’d succeeded in making a connection. “Bloody nightmare, isn’t it.” The wailing in the background intensified. “Look, Kate, sorry, this isn’t a great—”

“Oh, totally, of course,” I said. “Shit—I hate to drag you into the office for something that’s not your fault, but I have to run this scan. It’s a security issue.”

“I can’t come in!” Keeley sounded alarmed. “There’s no one else who can take him. My mum’s doing chemo; her doctor said she can’t have him until the spots scab over.”

“Look,” I said confidentially, with the air of someone making up their mind. I lowered my voice. “This isn’t completely… I mean, we’re not supposed to do it this way, but I can see you’re in a tricky situation. Do you want to give me your password and I’ll do the scan without you coming in? Just—don’t tell my boss. We’re really not supposed to do this.”

“Oh God, sure,” Keeley said, the relief in her voice palpable. “They’re all on my Rolodex under Harry Winston, but the main one is Harry24Sept. God, thank you so much, Kate. I really appreciate you doing this. I’m sorry, I would have come in if I possibly could, but—you know what it’s like.”

“Yeah, blokes don’t get it, do they? My boss thinks I can just drop anything. I’m like, it doesn’t work that way, dude!”

Keeley gave a shaky laugh and the wailing rose again in the background.

“Look, I’ll let you go,” I said warmly. “Take care, Keeley. Make sure you get some sleep too!”

“Thanks, yeah, I’d better go, Harry’s kicking off World War Three. Take care, Kate. Bye.”

“Bye!” I said brightly, and there was a click and the phone went dead.

I resisted punching the air in triumph, logged into the computer, and while it booted up, turned to the card marked Harry Winston on Keeley’s Rolodex.

It was a treasure trove. Passwords to every single system neatly logged with not even the barest attempt at disguising them.

I closed my eyes, sending up a silent prayer of thanks to overly complex IT systems with unmanageable numbers of passwords and to distracted parents everywhere, and began trying to figure out the call-handling database.

The hard part was working out which icon on Keeley’s very crowded desktop was the relevant one, and I had several false starts with a car insurance database and something that seemed to be some kind of employee intranet—but at last I fired up one that displayed a home screen with the Sunsmile logo and the legend Sunsmile Life Insurance—a friend for life. Pressing the search icon took me to a screen that said Search by customer ID number, policy number, name, postcode.

My heart was thumping as I typed in our postcode.

Three policies came up. Two were for people I’d never heard of—presumably neighbors who happened to have policies under Sunsmile. But the third—the third was the most recent, and it was Gabe’s.

My fingers were shaking as I clicked through and scrolled down the customer record. There were copies of everything. The forms submitted, the payment receipts. I clicked onto the credit card they had stored on file, mentally crossing my fingers for a smoking gun. I’m not sure what I was expecting—a card registered to Jeff Leadbetter seemed like too much to hope for—but my heart sank when I saw the details. It was Gabe’s name, Gabe’s card, in fact; I recognized the number. It didn’t make sense. Gabe was careful about his credit card details. It wasn’t impossible he’d been phished, but that just didn’t seem like Jeff. But then I clicked through to the ID section, and there, right in front of my eyes, was a scan of Gabe’s driving license. And that stumped me. I could not imagine Gabe uploading his license anywhere apart from a real, kosher, secure site with a genuine need for his photo ID. Had I got this all wrong? Had Gabe really taken out this policy after all?

I scrolled down the page, looking for something, anything to give me a clue, but only one thing seemed out of place—the phone number attached to the record. It wasn’t Gabe’s number. But it wasn’t Jeff’s number either—or at least, not the one he’d had when we were together. I didn’t recognize it at all. I wrote it down on a Post-it that Keeley had thoughtfully left beside her monitor and put it in my pocket. A phone number wasn’t much of a lead, but it was something. Maybe I could call it when I got out of here.

I was just about to X out of the database when I saw it, right down at the bottom of the screen—a small icon like a speaker. Call Records said the header. And there was one single date-stamped entry, from just over a week ago—three days before Gabe’s death, in fact.

My heart started thumping again.

A phone call. An actual phone call. With whoever had set this policy up. And I had almost missed it.

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