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‘He sounded pissed off about something,’ she said.
Harry’s pulse raced. Baseball cap, tanned face, the barrel of a gun. Had he started to track her down already? She turned back to the office safe to hide her panic.
‘Probably a recruitment agency.’ She swiped her keycard and punched in her access code with trembling fingers. ‘Do me a favour, next time he calls, tell him I’ve gone away for a while.’
Imogen came to stand beside her, her head barely reaching Harry’s shoulder. ‘Is that the laptop from the new client?’
Harry bit her lip. She’d told Imogen about the call-out to Monkstown before she’d left, but now she wished she hadn’t. Her next move was definitely the wrong side of legal, and the less Imogen knew about it the better. She shoved Garvin’s laptop to the back of the safe, then snapped the door shut.
‘It’s just routine stuff.’
Imogen blocked her path. Her eyes were huge in her pixie face, but she still managed to look stern.
‘You look terrible.’ Imogen glanced at the safe, then back again. ‘What’s up?’
‘Just tired.’ Harry tried to keep her voice light. ‘Not sleeping well lately.’
That much was true, at least. For the past few months she’d been plagued by nightmares that slashed like hatchets through her sleep. Recurring flashes of betrayal and death. She suppressed a shudder.
‘It’s that house of yours, if you ask me.’ Imogen plonked a hand on one hip. ‘Cooped up in the middle of nowhere, it’s enough to depress anyone. Why don’t you get a place in town, somewhere closer to the office?’
Harry’s gaze drifted around the small, open-plan space where Blackjack did its business. The walls were a mix of exposed brick and pipes, the high domed ceiling a mess of ancient plumbing from the original Guinness Brewery warehouse.
The office was located in the Digital Hub, a cluster of technology companies based in the old Liberties area of inner-city Dublin. Harry had chosen it as the home for her new company a few months before, funding it with money left over from her exploits in the Bahamas. The location had an edginess that had appealed to her: state-of-the-art technology tucked in between the bargain stores of Thomas Street and the chimney stacks of Guinness with its yeasty, Bovril smells.
Harry shivered. Normally, the Blackjack office filled her with pride, but not today. Today it was a place where a man with a gun might find her.
‘Here –’ Imogen thrust her untouched coffee into Harry’s hands. ‘You look like you could do with this more than me.’
Before Harry could reply, the phone rang and Imogen bustled off to answer it. Harry took the opportunity to slip away to her own desk, where she’d hooked up her office computer to the copy of Garvin’s hard drive. She pulled up a chair and sat hunched over the keyboard.
Given the choice, this was the last place she’d be. But she needed to do some snooping, and this was where she stashed her burglar’s tools.
She stared at the screen and wondered where to start.
You could tell a lot about a person just by digging through his computer: what internet sites he browsed, what files he opened, what photographs he downloaded. In fact, you could unearth more information than there was time to analyse, and that was the problem.
Harry drummed her fingers on the desk. Normally, she’d have some context, some obvious starting point. If a client hired her as a computer forensics investigator, her mandate would be clear: find evidence to show an employee was downloading pornography on company time; prove the new sales guy was passing information to a competitor. But what was she looking for on Garvin’s laptop? Some clue to ‘Beth’? Or to the man in the baseball cap? Suddenly, the idea seemed far-fetched.
She checked on Imogen. Still on the phone. She’d jammed the receiver into the crook of her neck, her hands free to fiddle with her rings. Harry turned back to her screen and launched her forensic toolkit program.
Small hairs rose on the back of her neck. She was about to cross a line. Garvin’s hard drive was evidence in a murder investigation, and she’d no business trespassing on its data. Whatever way you looked at it, she was probably about to commit a crime.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She thought of the trouble she was already in: of Detective Inspector Lynne, still stalking her past; of Hunter, who’d pegged her as guilty of theft, or maybe even murder; of the killer on her tail, and Hunter’s indifference to the danger she was in. She balled her fingers into fists. Was she supposed to clock up brownie points before she qualified for police protection?
To hell with it. Maybe it was time she protected herself. She jabbed at the keys and leapfrogged into Garvin’s files.
She took a few moments to scout out the landscape, eyeballing the installed programs, skimming through the logs and noting the most recently used files. It was like nosing around someone’s house while they were away, and it took effort not to look furtive. She picked her way around, until gradually she’d built a picture of how Garvin had used his laptop.
It was standard stuff. Mostly he switched between spreadsheets, a word processor and the internet. The everyday tools of the ordinary user. And with them, he’d produced thousands of files.
Harry leaned back in her chair, hands in her pockets. Analysing files was as much instinct as science, but right now she was all out of hunches. Her fingers touched the rounded pebble she’d found inside her bag. It still felt cold. She worried at it for a moment, then let it drop, leaning back into the keyboard. Sometimes the most obvious was worth a try.
She keyed in a search for the word ‘diamonds’.
Thousands of filenames rolled up the screen, and Harry groaned. She refined her search, filtering by date stamp, concentrating on files that Garvin had accessed in the week before his death. The list shrank to seventeen. That was more like it.
Harry flipped open the first file and scanned through it. It was an invoice from a company called Safari Diamond Corporation for ‘twelve rough 1.5 carat whites’. The invoice was addressed to Garvin Oliver Trading Limited and amounted to $90,000.
Harry skipped into the next file. Another invoice, this one originating from Garvin Oliver Trading Limited to a Dutch company called Staal Precision Cutters. Garvin was charging them €30,000 for a shipment of eight uncut yellows, ranging from 0.75 to 1 carat.
Harry flicked a glance at Imogen. She was winding up her call, pushing away from her desk. Harry skimmed through the next few files. More invoices and orders, and a handful of spreadsheets that looked like profit-and-loss accounts. Garvin was clearly in the diamond-trading business, and her eyes widened at his bottom-line numbers. ‘Beth’ was right. Garvin had been making money.
‘Want another coffee?’
Harry jumped, and snapped the files shut. Imogen stood behind her, yawning and stretching like a cat.
‘Thanks.’ Harry scrambled for another errand to keep her friend out of the way. ‘I skipped lunch, so maybe a doughnut, too?’
‘Good idea. You need the calories.’
Harry waited till Imogen had left the room, then poked through the rest of the files. More invoices, orders and correspondence with suppliers. Garvin had been busy the week before he died.
Finally, she opened the last file, a spreadsheet called ‘Stock Inventory October 2009’. It had been accessed earlier that morning.
Rows of data flashed on the screen. Harry blinked, trying to make sense of them. It looked like a list of stones that Garvin had bought and sold. He’d recorded the quantity and colour of the stones, along with their weight in carats, noting suppliers and customers against each entry. The largest stones weighed up to four carats, and a few of them even had names: Apollo, The African Star, Egyptian Sunrise.
Some of the entries had digital photos embedded in the data. Harry zoomed in. Images of smooth, crystal-like stones filled the screen. Some were foggy white, like the one in her pocket; others a duller yellow or brown. One photo showed a cluster of six misty whites, set beside a matchstick for scale. Each stone was listed as 0.25 carats, no bigger than the match’s head.
‘Here you go.’
Imogen plonked a mug down on the desk, along with a creamy doughnut. Harry spun round to face her, obscuring her view of the screen.
‘That was ChemCal on the phone,’ Imogen said. ‘They’ve decided to prosecute.’
Harry raised her eyebrows. Imogen had been working on a forensics investigation for ChemCal Labs. The MD had suspected his chief accountant of embezzlement, and had hired Blackjack to scour his laptop for any tell-tale signs.
‘Do they want you to testify?’ she said.
‘They’re talking it over with their lawyers.’ Imogen fiddled with her ring. ‘I’ll pencil in some time, just in case.’
Harry sipped her coffee, willing her screensaver to kick in behind her. She nodded at Imogen’s fidgeting fingers. ‘How’re you doing with that ring?’
Imogen made a face, then splayed out the fingers of her left hand. ‘It’s making me grumpy.’
‘I’d noticed.’
Imogen had announced her engagement the week before to an architect she’d been dating for six months. From the outset, she’d declared it was only an experiment to see how getting married would feel. Harry had been sceptical. In her view, it was long-term commitment that probably made marriage such a chore. Treating it like a new dress you could take back if it didn’t fit seemed to be missing the point.
Not that Harry felt up to long-term commitments, either. She couldn’t imagine herself taking that leap, plummeting into a world where wills clashed and two lives were locked together. Just thinking about it made her feel short of air.
Imogen wiggled her fingers, appraising her ring. ‘I’ll probably give it back today.’
Harry glanced at the twinkling stone, her awareness of diamonds heightened. It was a small solitaire, about the size of a peppercorn. From the little she’d learned, she put it at less than half a carat.
‘What about Shane?’
‘He’ll get over it.’ Imogen smiled and put her head to one side, her long ponytail springing out from her crown like an S-hook. ‘He’s looking a little twitchy himself. The word “hasty” keeps coming up.’
Then she flapped her hand, dismissing the subject. ‘I’ll send you the ChemCal report.’
‘Any surprises?’
‘Not really.’ Imogen headed back to her desk. ‘He’d tried to cover his tracks with some hidden files, but it didn’t take long to sniff them out.’
Harry stared after her for a moment, then snapped her eyes back to the screen. Hidden files. She could almost feel her brain shifting.
She’d taken Garvin’s files at face value up to now, only considering those in plain view. And why not? After all, he’d been killed during the course of a burglary, hadn’t he? Wrong place, wrong time. Just like her.
But what if there was more to it than that? Gooseflesh buzzed along her arms. What if he was killed because he had something to hide?
10 (#ulink_427cc448-7dd5-5455-941b-5a8460dd4780)
There were plenty of ways to make a file disappear. The question was, which would Garvin have used?
Harry hitched her chair in closer to the desk, her fingertips tingling. There were lots of commercial tools out there that kept your secrets safe, camouflaging your files till they melted out of sight. You couldn’t view them, delete them or modify them. As far as the operating system was concerned, the files just didn’t exist.
Harry plunged back into her forensic toolkit. The operating system may have been gullible, but her box of tricks wasn’t. She rattled her fingers across the keys, setting up a search. Her copy of Garvin’s hard drive was more than just a replica of recognizable files. It was a bit-by-bit image, and that included deleted data, unused memory and hidden information. She wouldn’t be fooled by a bunch of skulking files claiming to be invisible.
She launched her search for camouflaged files, then sat back in her chair and waited.
Her eyes roamed the room, coming to rest on the office safe. It was smaller than Garvin’s, about the size of a filing cabinet, and she used it to store evidence from Blackjack’s investigations.
Security and privacy.
Harry shook her head. Technology was supposed to safeguard your secrets, but did it really? She thought of Garvin’s vault, protected by his own fingerprint.
Something you know, something you have, something you are.
The security mantra ran through her head. Something you know: a password. Something you have: a keycard. Something you are: your fingerprint.
Harry shuddered, picturing Garvin’s killer scrabbling at the dead man’s fingers. Biometric security had its uses, but there was nothing she wanted hidden badly enough to put her own body parts on the line.
The computer beeped, and her eyes shot back to the screen. The search had come up empty.
Harry frowned. No covert files. Most likely it meant that Garvin had nothing to hide, but she shoved the thought away. Right now, hidden files were all she had.
‘Harry?’
Imogen was holding the phone out to one side, her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It’s him again, you sure you don’t want to take it?’
Harry’s skin prickled. She shook her head, registering Imogen’s frown as she turned to make excuses into the phone. It was probably a legitimate caller, but disclosing her whereabouts to anyone right now seemed like a bad idea. Harry tried to ignore her drumming heartbeat, and dragged her gaze back to the screen.
She chewed on a fingernail. Maybe Garvin had used a less sophisticated approach than commercial privacy products. Her mind drifted back to her first Blackjack case. Her client had been an angry, middle-aged woman who’d wanted evidence that her husband was cheating. It hadn’t taken long. His laptop had yielded a slam-dunk photo of himself with his nineteen-year-old secretary. To hide it, he’d simply renamed it from susie.jpg to su.123. Without the .jpg extension, the picture viewer didn’t pick it up. And trying to open it with anything else just spewed gibberish on to the screen. Either way, Susie stayed incognito.
Bogus file extensions were quick and easy, and people used them all the time. Harry rummaged through her toolkit and fired off an extension checker search. In less than a minute, two filenames flashed up on the screen:
VW-Stock.got
VW-Cargo.got
Harry stiffened. Two phony extensions. It looked as though Garvin had tried some sleight of hand. She stared at the doctored file types. ‘GOT’ for Garvin Oliver Trading?
Normally her toolkit could figure out the true file type, but this time it played dumb. She checked the file locations. They were stored alongside dozens of spreadsheet files, including the stock inventory she’d opened earlier. Chances were, she’d unearthed two more spreadsheets, but it was hard to find an innocent explanation for their disguise.
She opened the first file, VW-Stock. A blizzard of symbols filled the screen: Russian and Greek script, hashes and squiggles, all of it densely packed. The familiar gobbledy-gook of unreadable data.
She opened the second file. More hieroglyphics.
Harry squinted at the screen. Had she got the file extension wrong?
She shook her head. This time she was throwing in with her instincts, and that left her with one explanation: the files had been encrypted.
A shiver scampered down her spine. She felt like she was grappling with one of those nested Russian dolls. Data inside encryption, inside hidden files, inside a vault. What the hell had Garvin needed to hide so badly?
She frowned at the illegible garbage on the screen. To unscramble it, she’d need the encryption key and that could be just about anywhere. Maybe it wasn’t even on the hard drive. She was beginning to think Garvin was more technically savvy than she’d given him credit for.
Harry drummed her fingers on the desk, glaring at the filenames on the screen. What the hell were they hiding?
She checked the timestamps on each of the files. They’d been encrypted eight days ago, locked into riddles that no one else could read. And once a file morphed into ciphertext, its plaintext version was deleted.
Or was it?
Harry scooted in closer to the desk and kicked off a search for deleted files. What were the chances that Garvin’s plaintext still lurked in the cracks of the hard drive?
A list of recovered files unravelled up the screen. One by one, she sifted through them, looking for a match.
Nothing.
She slumped back in her chair. No plaintext, no deleted data, no encryption keys. Garvin’s files were locked down tight, and her chances of cracking them open didn’t look good.
Her phone trilled from deep inside her bag. She fished it out and checked the caller ID. Private number. Harry licked her lips, but her mouth was dry. The man with the baseball cap had her number from her card, but that didn’t mean it had to be him. She hit the silence key and stuffed the phone deep into her bag.
She hunched back over the keyboard. There had to be something else she could try. She thought for a minute, then straightened up. It was an outside chance, but worth a shot. Her fingers flew across the keys as she set up her final search. This time her target was temporary files.
Hard drives were riddled with them. Conscientious programs created them as backups, saving temporary copies of your files while you worked on the originals. They came in handy if the program crashed before you’d saved your data.
Garvin would have worked on his files in plaintext before he eventually encrypted them. It was the backup of those plaintext files that Harry needed to find.
