Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [12]
They exchanged a few words, and then took off. Sarah’s camera clicked rapidly as she tried to grab an image of their numberplate. Any number would do – a phone number, a social security number. Once Sarah had it, she had your fingerprints. She could find you, find out anything she wanted to know about you.
Sarah waited a few minutes, but the young couple had had a good scare: they wouldn’t be back. She went downstairs.
‘Back in half an hour, Alice,’ she told the receptionist. ‘I just have to take some film to the lab.’
20
One
Trina told me all about it at the bar that night. She’s an English girl with a fetching lisp and even more fetching hips. We had been dating on and off for a couple of years, ever since I wrote a report on data-diddling by one of Keyworth’s employees.
‘Hey, Chickpea,’ she said on the phone, ‘Buy me a couple of drinks to help celebrate not losing my job, and I’ll tell you all about it. Could be a good story.’
I’d come to the States five years ago after a magazine job in Sydney went sour. Two years in LA, not so far from home.
Then that little incident that sent me running for the east coast.
I’d been in Washington DC ever since, and I liked it there.
Washington is a beautiful bad apple, pretty and fresh on the outside, but when you bite into it, rotten at the core. It’s a cesspool of poverty, crime, and drugs surrounded by green suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the two worlds separated by the giant loop of the Beltway. I’ve seen a grown man nearly panic when a wrong turn took us into a ‘bad area’ of town. When I first moved into a house in Vuginia, my next-door neighbour confided that he kept a shotgun in case –
pardon my language – niggers came from the city to steal his stuff.
I prefer the grid of streets at DC’s core to the Disneyland of strip malls and bloated houses in the burbs. So did Trina, who had grown up in Cowgate. I fell in love with her the night I saw her wallop a Hell’s Angel for making a mess of the bar she was tending. The guy was too dazed and embarrassed to do anything but stumble out to his bike. The next day, Trina applied for the receptionist’s job at Keyworth. ‘I’m getting too old for this shit,’ she told me. She was twenty-two.
We got a couple of steaks and a lot of Fosters and she gave me the story. When the courier didn’t arrive, Trina quickly realised something was wrong, and she called TLA to find out what was going on. Swan checked up on the mystery delivery right away – and insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever happened.
‘The thing I can’t work out’ said Trina, ‘is that I called them right away to make sure the order was legit.’
‘The fakes could have given you any number,’ I said.
‘Even a payphone number.’
She gave me a withering look. ‘I checked the number against my own Rolodex, she said. ‘It was genuine. In fact, I remember calling it a couple of times before.’
‘Are you going to finish those mashed potatoes?’ Trina shrugged. I helped myself to a forkful. ‘They must have re-routed the call. They probably broke into the company’s PBX
and forwarded that number to their own phone.’
‘So what the hell were they trying to do?’ said Trina.
‘Swan thought they wanted to use the drive to hide a program on her systems. She went over it with a fine-tooth comb.’
‘Once they got into the computer centre, they could have done just about anything. Stolen research. Slipped a Doctored backup tape in amongst the real ones so the computer would write them some big fat checks.
Trina shook her head. ‘They checked all of that. They lost like a day’s work making sure everything was the way it should be. Nothing got changed or stolen.’
‘I guess Swan cottoned