“Could you try the same password as earlier?” he said, hopefully.
“If you put a password-protected folder into secure storage, would you use the same password as the storage site?”
“I wish I had something to hide that was that important.”
“And if we try it and fail, it’ll be flagged.” She flicked to the Settings page and opened a tab. She pointed at a partial email address, three-quarters of it replaced by asterisks. “This email address—it’s not a government one. It’s a private server. Has to belong to Hyland—a personal address.”
“Can you break into it?”
“Possibly.” She flicked back to the files. “His contact book is backed up on here.” She opened it, and scrolled. “This email address for his daughter, Laura—it’s a web-based email, easily hacked. I could send Hyland an email that looks like it’s coming from her.”
“How does that help?”
“Just watch.” She smiled, catching her bottom lip between her teeth.
Oh, he was watching, all right—but not the screen. This was the confident, smart Samira who lay under the anxiety and the fear and the grief. Eyes bright and narrowed, fingers scurrying over the keyboard. Like he said, he had a weakness for empowered women. For ten minutes or so, she was so immersed she didn’t notice him shamelessly staring.
“Is there any point in me asking what you’re doing?” he said, eventually.
“I’ve created a virus—well, picked one up off the net that I made a couple of years ago, and updated it—and I’m about to send Hyland an email that looks like it’s come from Laura’s email address. See?”
Jamie leaned over. The email was titled “Whiskey.” He read aloud the body of the message: “‘This one’s got your name on it, Pops. What do you think?’ Is that all you’re saying?”
She pasted in a hyperlink. “Yep.”
“What’s the link?”
“She’s just posted a photo of a bottle of whiskey on her social-media sites, from a store in Edinburgh that’s opened especially for her. According to his itinerary, he should be at the hotel.”
“Pops?”
“There’s some correspondence from her saved onto his cloud server—it seems to be what she calls him in private.” Samira sent the message. “When he clicks on the link it’ll take him to her real social-media post about the whiskey, which will look completely harmless. But it’ll be routed via the virus site, and will embed a virus onto his email on the way through. The email server will probably catch it fairly quickly but it should give me access just long enough to change the password and the backup contact info, so I can lock him out while I run this folder password through a little decoding system I created a few years ago. I’ve just updated that, too. Meanwhile...” She changed screens. “I’ve managed to hack into an add-on on the cloud server’s site to temporarily disable their flagging process. It was as far into the site I could get, but it buys us time for my little password robot to hammer away at this protected folder between now and tomorrow evening. So pretty straightforward, really.”
“I’m needing a lie down.”
“This would be a good time. It’s a waiting game now—we wait until he opens his email and springs the virus, then wait for the robot to break into thetrésor. Let’s hope he checks his email more than once a week.”
“I have no idea what you just said or did, but I’m sure it was pure dead brilliant.”
“Ifit works.”
“You know, you don’t need your four Js to make you confident. You just need a computer.”
She smiled, looking at the same time hyped and relaxed, like she’d been doing hard exercise. Or having sex.
Kill the thought,caporal.
“Maybe that’s my problem,” she said, relaxing back into the seat. “I’ve been without a computer for more than a year. If this works, I can stop living this awful offline life.”
He looked through the windscreen at the cityscape, the lights liquefying as rain approached. “Just awful. Though to be fair, I’d rather be staring at the waters of the Med.”
“Itisawful,” she said. “I live solely in the real world.”
“You poor thing.”
“Okay, I guess you don’t spend much time on social media. But before all this?” She gestured blindly, as if to indicate her entire recent experience. “The internet was my life. I know switching off is supposed to be healthy and good for your brain, but do you know how lonely it is when you’ve lived almost your entire adult life online? Everyone I know lives in here and I can’t contact them.” She ran her hands reverently around the edges of the laptop screen, as if it were her owncoffre autrésor. “My life is right in front of me and I can’t access it. Can you imagine?”
“Honestly, no. I can’t say I have a single online friendship. But you have real friends, right? Like, people you actually see in person—or would, if all this hadn’t happened.”
