The Zima Confession - страница 28

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 goannie help us. Society’s stroanger ran nat.”

“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?”

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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 Chennai. No difference at all, unless maybe the sequence numbers weren’t genuine?

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

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 Chennai to be double-checked, it would be obvious it was fake.

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 cunning excuse to have it accepted on-site. The first thing he would have to do was come up with that excuse.

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.