Cheryl, what’s all this between Roger and Collins, anyway?” I asked.
“Roger and I know Laird Collins from back in the day,” Cheryl said. “The CIA recruited him out of the military, and he was born again then, too.”
“So he actually believes he’s doing God’s work?” I asked. “All that stuff he says in interviews about bringing about the Apocalypse and the Rapture?”
“Absolutely sincere,” she said. “That means everyone he kills, everyone he sells out, is all perfectly justified in the name of the Greater Good. He truly believes he’ll be welcomed by God into the Kingdom of Heaven when his Time comes, that his accounts will be balanced.”
“But he had a soft spot for you didn’t he, Cheryl love?” boomed Roger from his office. “Still does, I reckon.”
Cheryl stared daggers at Roger from her desk.
“Collins’s nickname for her was Cheryl the Wild.”
She knew from my look that I would ask, so she preempted me.
“All because I stole a car so that the three of us could escape a riot in Brixton.”
“Riot—? How long ago was that?”
“This firm was barely a thought then,” Roger said. “We were practically still kids. I was just getting an inkling there was money to be made from private eye work. Cheryl sort of fell in with me.”
“Roger was hired to find some posh girl who’d run off with her Jamaican musician–drug dealer boyfriend. I knew who he was. We ran into Collins because he’d been sent after him for some black bag work he did back in Jamaica. He was on a reconnaissance mission and was green as us then.”
“And it was more than you nickin’ that motor, Cheryl. There was the Molotov cocktail you chucked, that drug den you blew up with the gas explosion, and that toerag you kicked several shades of shit out of. That’s right, Ravi. Our Cheryl wasn’t always the prim office manager you see before you. She was a full-on punk with a Mohawk and rough leather jacket and all, one of the few half-English, half-black punks we had in London.”
Cheryl continued to glare at Roger as he wistfully recounted their salad days.
“That was when Collins took a shine to her. He wanted to ‘save’ her. I think he really wanted to save her marvelous bum as encased in those leather trousers. But she was mine. And she wasn’t havin’ none of that.”
“Collins left the CIA around 2000 and set up Steerbridge. After September 11, the War on Terror was a boom time for him. He has contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, all from the CIA, various governments and corporations.”
“That’s why you don’t ever want to end up on his radar, Ravi lad,” Roger said, bitterness rising in his voice. “That bastard’s fucked me over on more jobs than I can count in the last ten years. One day I’m going to fucking destroy him. And I’m going to enjoy every second of rubbing that into his sanctimonious mug, and show him what useless bollocks his beliefs are. The Torah trumps his born-again fantasy bullshit.”
“Damn you, Ravi,” Cheryl muttered. “For dredging all that up today.”
She turned away, the topic closed, and went back to typing up their meeting with Collins. I was about to protest that I wasn’t the one who brought it up when it all came flooding into my head: the sad, failed love story of Roger and Cheryl. For a long time, she loved him. He might have loved her, too, but his lust for power and prestige proved stronger. All that was over now, with his trophy wife and their relationship now strictly business but filled with the disappointments of their shared history. How much and how often he must have let her down over decades. All they had now was this firm.
Looking back, I should be grateful now that Marcie took me by the arm and led me back to my desk.
“You still need to crack Sandra’s drive,” she said.
Olivia was still sulking at her desk.
“Any luck cracking the password?” I asked.
“What do you bloody think?”
“You didn’t even try, did you?”
“Why bother? It’s finding the right haystack before we can even look for the bloody needle.”
“Can’t you feed it through a program to run the combinations?”
“You’re talking about trillions upon trillions of numbers, letters, and special character combinations, never mind words. If it’s a string of two or three randomly combined words, that’s even more infinite. I’m better off doing sod-all than to try to guess or run it through any program.”
“Look, Darren Cowley wasn’t a genius. He had a punter’s grasp of security. At best he might have been slightly above average when it came to encrypting that drive with a password.”
“Then this is on you, Ravi. You’re the one who talked to him. Didn’t he leave you some sort of clue?”
“I barely heard ten sentences to Darren before they killed him.”
“Did Sandra say anything? Something about the two of them or their relationship that might have stood out? He would have chosen something simple and personal for him as a password. Perhaps something unique that brings her to his mind? One word? Two words? Perhaps three, tops?”
I thought back to everything I heard Darren say. We only had the two conversations, not enough to get any real insights beyond his resentment at Sandra and fear for his life. Nothing the last time I spoke to him on the phone. That left the first time I met him, outside Sandra’s door. Again he was all gak-fueled rage and panic. Didn’t really say anything memorable except . . .
except . . .
“Try ‘manicpixiebitch,’ ” I said.
Olivia’s fingers finished typing that before I even finished the sentence.
Presto.
“Huh, no special characters, not even numbers. Typical,” Olivia said.
And the contents of the drive opened themselves up to us. Her fingers typed faster than we could follow as she opened up file after file of emails, account details, transactions, charts, proposals, prospectuses. Figures danced down the screen, currencies shifted from pounds to euros to dollars and back again.
“Interesting,” Olivia said. “We’re looking at a self-sustaining investment portfolio, driven by bots to generate a self-driven and growing income pool.”
“So what is it, exactly?” I asked. “Some kind of slush fund? Whose accounts are these?”
“It belongs to one client.” Marcie said. “All these companies listed as the account holders? If you run a trace on them, you’re going to find they’re all dummy corporations with letterheads, a couple of offices and PO boxes but hardly any staff.”
“So who is it?”
“Do I have to spell it out, Ravi?” sighed Marcie. “There’s only one client that could possibly have the funds and resources to set all this up in this much secrecy.”
That sinking feeling, back again.
“The CIA.”
“You win the prize.”
“Did you know about this slush fund?” I asked Marcie.
She didn’t answer.
“I see the elegance of this,” Olivia said. “Take some black funds, set up a large, rotating investment portfolio that accrued interest to create a fund to pay for various outsourced, off-books operations, and take the burden off the American taxpayer. Conscientious, in their own way.”
“That fund,” Roger said, suddenly appearing behind us every time a result was met. “Would be the coffers that would pay us, if the Company should hire us to do some freelance intelligence gathering, and pay Interzone for a security operation, an extraordinary rendition, or eliminating certain problems.”
“The Company can’t be seen anywhere near this fund, since it’s not supposed to exist,” Marcie said. “So of course they outsource it to a favored contractor to get the leaked documents back.”
“Yeah, I can see people getting killed to keep this secret,” I said. “And professional courtesy is what’s keeping them from knocking us off? That’s what Jarrod meant earlier?”
Roger laughed.
“Don’t you get it yet, old son? We’re expected to cooperate. And you’ve given me—er, us—a nice bit of leverage over them. We know the details of these accounts, more than they do.”
“And that’s how we’ll get Sandra back in one piece,” I said.