“Then maybe I can access it when she’s already logged in. Or find a way to record her inputting a password. A hotel would obviously create opportunities I’m not going to have if we just keep meeting for coffee and drinks.”
He nodded, looking at her. After a moment, he said, “You’re right, of course. I should have thought of that myself. Tell me what you have in mind.”
She outlined what she’d pitched Fatima — an all-expenses-paid trip for two to French Polynesia.
“Are you mad? MI6 is never going to pay for this. And I doubt your bean counters would go for it, either. I doubt even the Americans would, and they’ve got more money than God. Not to mention, how the hell are we going to get this backstopped on such short notice?”
She liked that he was raising practical objections. Practical objections meant the other side had already agreed in principle. Now it was just a question of negotiating a price.
“You mean to tell me that between MI6 and the CIA, you can’t find even one more malleable editor at the right magazine?”
“I have no idea what might be found. I only know it’s going to be a mad scramble, assuming it happens at all.”
“Well,” she said, enjoying the feeling of holding a winning hand, “it’s what I told her. It will look strange if I come back to her now and say, ‘Sorry, the Polynesia assignment didn’t work out, but I did manage to get something at a budget hotel in Bristol.’”
“You’re damned right it would look strange, and you knew that from the start.”
“What if I did? It’s the right move, Kent, and you’re smart enough to know it. Take her someplace different, someplace far away, someplace where she’ll relax and get swept away and forget about what occupies her mind when she’s in London. Someplace with a lot of activities — yoga, water sports, whatever gets her to forget to close her laptop before getting in the shower or diving into the lagoon or going for a spa treatment.”
“Spa treatments? That’s also part of the package?”
“Look, if your people’s priorities are so fucked up they’d rather risk a sarin attack than the possibility a foreign agent might enjoy certain elements of an op, you’ve already lost this war, and I’m wasting my time trying to help you.”
Kent sipped his drink, watching her. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She also didn’t care. She knew she was right.
“That’s actually a pretty good line,” he said, after a moment. “The ‘risking a sarin attack’ part, I mean. I’ll use that with the zealots in finance. It might even work.”
She didn’t permit any of the satisfaction she felt to rise to the surface. “Whatever hotel reservation you make, remember, it’s just for me. The magazine shouldn’t know I’m bringing a friend — it’s not the kind of thing I’d tell them myself.”
“Yes, if they knew, they’d probably cut your per diem. And we wouldn’t want that.”
She didn’t respond. What mattered was that she’d won. She wouldn’t engage him beyond that.
He drummed his fingers on the table, looking away, obviously considering something, weighing it. Then he said, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll probably get fired for this, but if I do, at least we won’t be colleagues anymore and I’ll be able to ask you out on a proper date.”
She smiled. She didn’t want to like him, but it was hard not to. “All right, it’s good to know you win either way.”
“Here’s the thing. Our tech people have developed an application. It can run from a computer, a tablet, even a smart phone. It’s very sensitive to certain sounds. Particularly the sounds of keystrokes. I’d be surprised if your lab geniuses weren’t working on something similar.”
She waited, intrigued.
“Essentially, it’s a key logger program. Every key on a computer keyboard has an individual sound signature. The differences are far too subtle for the human ear to detect, but the program can make them out clearly enough. If there’s sufficient proximity, if the person isn’t taking care to type very quietly, if there’s not too much background noise, if the acoustics are right overall, if the person is using a mechanical keyboard and not a virtual one—”
“A lot of ifs.”
“Yes. But if I could get you access to the app, you could download it to your laptop or your phone. With just a little bit of luck, you could have it running close to Fatima when she accesses her laptop. If you manage it, you could eavesdrop on her passwords, the websites she visits, the messages she types… everything. If you’re on a Wi-Fi network, the app automatically uploads to a secure site. Or you can do it yourself manually. At a minimum, you’d get her Firevault password and our black bag specialists could do the rest when she’s back in London.”
“You haven’t tried this already?”
“It won’t work in a public place — well, a library, probably, but certainly not the type of coffee shops Fatima favors when she’s out. But a hotel room would be about as good an opportunity as anyone’s ever likely to get.”
“If it works, how will you explain my success to your people?”
“If you succeed, I promise no one will even ask.”
Delilah considered. She had nothing sensitive on her phone. Even if MI6 sent along any key loggers of their own in the downloaded app, they’d get nothing of value. And she’d just toss the phone when the op was done.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
He nodded, his expression oddly grave. “There’s something else I shouldn’t tell you.”
She wondered how much of what he “shouldn’t tell” her was real, and how much artifice, intended to get her to trust him, maybe even to sleep with him. It wasn’t easy to know. She raised her eyebrows.
“According to the Americans,” he went on, “there’s been a lot of chatter just lately. You know, in all the networks their NSA monitors. And we’ve been picking up some quite worrying signals ourselves. The consensus is, some sort of mass-casualty attack is getting uncomfortably close to its launch date. And that Fatima’s brother Imran is at the heart of it. I’m afraid my people are close to implementing… a kind of Plan B.”
Her throat and stomach felt suddenly tight. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, if we can’t find some other way into that laptop, a team is going to acquire Fatima and get all the information they need — her password, everything — by other means. Quite unpleasant means, in fact.”
He was watching her closely. She didn’t know what to show him. Certainly not the distress the thought of Fatima tortured was causing her.
“Why do we become what we hate, Kent?”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know.”
“Do you ever ask?”
“I try not to.”
“Maybe that’s not such a healthy habit.”
“You and I don’t make the decisions, Delilah—”
“No, we only follow orders. Does that sound familiar to you?”
“Look, I don’t want to see that Plan B implemented anymore than you do. Just get the password, all right? And we won’t have to even worry about it.”
She wondered for an instant whether he was worried that Bora Bora was just a boondoggle, or that she’d developed too much of an attachment to Fatima, and had concocted his Plan B as a way to motivate her. If so, he’d certainly succeeded.
“Get me the app,” she said. “And I’ll get you her password.”
She didn’t know what strings Kent had pulled, but in the end it took him only one day to set things up. He left her a thumb drive at one of the dead-drops — the main Waterstones bookstore, at Piccadilly. A little old-fashioned compared to an Internet secure site, but on the other hand the space behind the spine-out volumes in a bookstore’s mystery section left no electronic trail for anyone to follow.