The Zima Confession

He sat back and stared in disbelief at what he had decrypted. There should be no need for this message. What was going on? What on earth was this supposed to achieve?

Above all, why would Mitchell ask him to use code words, albeit encrypted, in his message? Perhaps it would be safer, now that he had the software, and now that Mitchell was dead, not to send any more messages at all?

But he had no choice. It was an instruction from his handler. He had to follow whatever instructions he was given. He logged in to his Evening Times account and bought a full-page advert for water-damaged rugs, for sale to trade only.

◆◆◆

Richard remembered Eddie’s prophetic words. He hoped they weren’t true:

“The thing is, push comes to shove, you won’t have the bottle, Richard. It won’t be as easy as you think.”

He was back in Eddie’s kitchen. Back breathing in the smell of chip fat, hearing the bittersweet jingle of a distant ice cream van making its way through the Council Scheme. Just Eddie and him, sitting on greasy wooden chairs either side of a small, fold-down table. It was the first meeting to discuss his plan.

He cringed to remember his lame, though sincere, reply: “What about when we threw the newspapers in the river?”

“Oh sure, that was you. It was all your idea. But that was just opportunistic. If I remember right, you were a bit drunk, staggering down the road with yer pals when suddenly the opportunity presented itself. One in the morning, big pile of Telegraphs, no one around but us.”

“Fair enough. It’s just an example.”

“Here’s ruh hing. What effect did it huv? No effect oan anythin’. Even if you’d stoapped the entire production of the Telegraph fur ivvur, what effect would that huv? Some sort ae sabotage is not goa

“I don’t agree. There’s a thin skin of civilisation. Scratch the surface and things get ugly. Take me for example. You always say that I’m pretty middle-class, and you’re right. But the thing is, I’m not happy. The thing is, there are thousands, maybe millions, of people like me. If someone could trigger something… get the people to wake up… who knows what could happen?”

◆◆◆

He had to be careful. This was all about detail. He checked everything again. The software pack really did look as though it had come from the dev team in Che

Well they wouldn’t be unless they had managed to get fully qualified and capable programmers into Che

There were probably other details that looked correct at first glance but would be fake.

If this pack was referred back to VirtuBank’s team in Che

His task would be to get this into the bank and ensure it didn’t get detected during testing or documentation and referred back for any reason.

The first problem was the software had to just turn up on-site and get installed. It wasn’t a download from the patch site. It bypassed that whole system and he needed a cu

17. Trade Only

Every year, Richard put a large advert in the local newspaper back in Glasgow. The advert was designed so that as few people as possible would be interested: fire-damaged goods; water-damaged furniture; second-hand (and obsolete) electronic goods. For sale to trade only. He put his own phone number as the contact. If anyone did happen to be interested in the advert and rang him, he would apologise and explain that someone had already agreed to buy the whole lot. He never had to apologise to very many disappointed customers.

The adverts were placed on one of these days – January 25th, April 25th, July 25th, October 25th – so they would be easy to track. The method of passing messages was very simple. Richard could write anything he wanted to make the advert look genuine. The messages hidden there were decoded using serial numbers that were part of the advert itself. Therefore, so long as he had all the letters of the alphabet somewhere in the wording, he could send any message just by “pointing” at the letters using his serial numbers. It was that simple in principle. The serial numbers printed on the advert had to be transformed using a mapping algorithm, but it was still a simple technique. It would be easy for an expert to decode. But why would anyone ever suspect these adverts were not genuine? They would surely never come to the attention of any decoding expert.

Starting on July the previous year, he had put adverts in on every possible day. The more often he placed the adverts, the more paranoid he was that he would expose himself. Nevertheless, he was really convinced he was in the right place at the right time by now, and he was surprised no one had reacted yet. His messages had become ever more urgent. His last message read: “Still at VirtuBank. Opportunities with access to main servers at several major financial customers.” His full contact details were there as usual.

He had checked his coding and decoding again and again, wondering if he had made a mistake, so convinced was he that he should have been contacted this time. There was no mistake. He had posted that last message to the paper three months ago but had still been ignored. He had expected an immediate response.

Every time this had happened, he had gone through the same feelings. Elation in placing his advert. Anticipation while waiting for a reply. Disappointment that, yet again, nothing had happened. Each time the disappointment was more numbing, the possibility of ever doing anything more remote.

This time he had been so disappointed that he had not bothered to repeat his message on 25th October, 2013. Yet that was the time when they finally reacted.

18. Risk Analysis

Richard remembered, sometime in the mid-eighties, walking up and down the rows of gravestones looking for his father’s headstone one su

There was something fu

His father had been the last living link to Uncle Bobby, the first real socialist he’d ever heard of.

They were all socialists, of a sort, of course, everyone on that side of the family. Family, friends, neighbours. Almost everyone in and around Glasgow was. The industrialised Central Belt of Scotland, blackened and scarred by heavy industry, had fought back to produce people who wanted to create a cleaner, brighter future – Keir Hardie, Ma

They had all hoped that socialism would be the answer, apart from his dad that is, but their efforts had been absorbed by democracy or deflected by the establishment or blocked by the law. Actually, Richard never knew if his father was a socialist or not. Richard assumed he wasn’t, somehow. He seemed very sceptical of socialism. He was also ambitious. He had got a better job and taken the family down south for a few years until they returned to Glasgow after Richard’s maternal grandmother died.

Stories of Uncle Bobby – in fact his Great Uncle Bobby – were legendary in the family. But Uncle Bobby, for all his good intentions, had ended up dying in prison. An unknown failure.