# The Insider

Ava McCarthy

A cutting-edge international debut thriller set in the world of hackers, techno-thieves and inside traders, for fans of John Grisham.Henrietta 'Harry' Martinez lost her investment banker father, Sal, at a young age. He taught her everything he knew – about taking risks and calculating odds. But Sal made a bad gamble when he went into business with 'The Prophet', an anonymous trader who claims Harry owes him, now her father's jailed for fraud.It's twelve million euros. Or her life.With no money and little time, Harry must track down Sal's crooked partners and escape the people on her trail – journalists, police and hired killers. But Harry has her own skills, honed by her father, skills her enemies haven't anticipated. Now, from the London Stock Exchange to the casinos of the Bahamas, the chase is on. The stakes are high. And the bets are off…

AVA McCARTHY

### The Insider


For my parents, Jim and Marie Halpenny, who sadly passed away while I was writing this book. Thank you for your unquestioning love and support always.

## Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

[1]

Harry was about to do something that could put her in jail. This wasn’t unusual in her line of business, but it still made her palms sweat.

She pushed her coffee away and stared at the glass doors of the building across the street. Her eyes watered in the April glare. The first time she’d tried anything like this had been sixteen years ago when she was just thirteen, and she’d almost been arrested. This was different. This time she was going to get away with it.

The doors across the street swung open and she jerked upright in her chair. It was just the motorbike courier coming back out. He’d been the only visitor in the last twenty minutes. Harry shifted on the hard aluminium seat, certain she’d be left with stripes like Venetian blinds chiselled across her backside.

‘D’you want anything else?’

The café manager stood in front of her, squat like a bulldog, his arms folded across a stained apron. The message was clear. It was lunchtime, and she had occupied the pavement table for almost an hour. Time to go.

‘Yes I do.’ She flashed him her best winsome smile. ‘A sparkling water, please.’

He dumped her cup and saucer on a tray and slouched back inside. The doors across the street swung open again and five young women stepped out in a bunch, all wearing the same navy-and-green uniform. They strolled along the pavement, passing around a single cigarette, sucking on it like deep-sea divers sharing out their last canister of air. Harry squinted at their faces. They were all too young.

She sat back and uncrossed her legs. Her tights prickled under her navy suit and her feet had started to cramp. It had been a toss-up that morning between plain flat shoes and the kitten heels with gold buckles, but as always she’d been a sucker for anything shiny. She hoped she wouldn’t have to make a run for it any time in the next forty-five minutes.

Harry flexed her feet and listened to the clang of beer barrels being unloaded down a nearby laneway. She could smell the stale lager from the open pub doors, musty like decaying fruit. A bus lurched to a halt right in front of her and blocked her view of the doors.

Shit, she should have noticed the bus stop before she sat down. The engine throbbed as one by one the passengers spilled out. The air quivered with hot diesel fumes, the bus and the building beyond it rippling like a mirage. She drummed her fingers on the table.

Jesus, was the whole of Dublin on this bus?

She tried to see past its dusty windows to the office building beyond, but could only make out the top of the doorframes. Sunlight flashed off metal as the doors opened again, but Harry couldn’t see who had come out.

She scraped back her chair and sprinted a few yards up the street until she had a clear view of the entrance again. The pavement was deserted.

Harry checked her watch. It was getting late, but she couldn’t risk making her next move. Not yet.

The bus revved up its engine and barged back into the traffic. Harry clenched her fists, waiting for it to move on. Then her view cleared, and she spotted a woman halfway down the street, marching in the opposite direction to the other girls. She was older than they were, in her late forties maybe, and she was alone. She stopped to cross at the kerb, and glanced back up the street.

Harry’s fingers relaxed. The woman’s blonde streaks were new, but otherwise she looked just like her photograph on the website.

She waited till the woman had disappeared. Then she flung some coins on the table and crossed the street.

It was cooler and quieter on this side of the glass doors. Harry strode up to the receptionist, checking out her surroundings as she went. A low table with business magazines stood against one wall. To her left was a set of large double doors, and another to her right. Her only escape route, should she need one, was back out the way she’d come in.

Harry selected another smile from her repertoire, the grimace of an uptight businesswoman with no time for fooling around.

‘Hi, I’m Catalina Diego,’ she said to the girl behind the desk. ‘I’m here to see Sandra Nagle.’

The girl kept her gaze fixed to the computer screen in front of her. ‘She’s just gone to lunch.’

‘But I’ve an appointment with her for twelve thirty.’

The girl chewed on the end of a pencil and shrugged. Her lips were a sticky mess of pink lip-gloss, and some of it had strayed on to the pencil.

Harry leaned in closer over the desk. ‘I’m here to run the training course for the helpdesk. Just how long is she going to be?’

The girl shrugged again and clicked the mouse on her computer. Harry wanted to snatch it out of her hands and rap her on the knuckles with it.

‘Well, I can’t hang around,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll have to start without her.’

She turned towards the doors on her left, as though she knew where she was going. The receptionist half stood from her chair, her pencil clattering to the desk.

‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in there without Mrs Nagle’s permission.’

‘Look –’ Harry turned back and peered at the girl’s name badge ‘– Melanie, this course has taken a month to arrange. If I leave now, it’ll be another month before I come back. Do you want me to explain to Sandra just why I couldn’t get started?’

Harry held her breath and braced herself. If someone had tried to bully her like that there’d have been quite a backlash. But Melanie just blinked and sank back in her chair. Harry didn’t blame her. She’d talked to Sandra Nagle for the first time that morning when she’d called the bank with a bogus customer complaint. She’d found her name and photograph on the bank’s corporate website, in the section that boasted of its unrivalled customer service. After two minutes’ conversation with her, Harry had the woman pegged as a complete bitch, and it looked as though Melanie agreed with her.

Melanie swallowed and shoved a visitor’s book across the desk. ‘Okay, but you’ll have to fill this out first. Name and date here, sign there.’

Something flickered in the pit of Harry’s stomach as she scribbled in the details. Melanie handed her an identity badge and pointed to the doors on Harry’s left.

‘Through there. I’ll buzz you in.’

Harry thanked her and gave herself a mental high five. She remembered the high fives her father used to give her whenever her poker bluffs paid off. ‘Nothing like the rush that comes from winning with an empty hand,’ he’d say, winking at her.

Empty hand was right. She clipped the badge to her lapel and stepped over to the doors. The safety lock clicked and a green light blinked on the wall panel. She straightened her shoulders and pushed open the heavy doors. She was in.

[2]

Leon Ritch hadn’t heard from the Prophet in over eight years, and had hoped to Christ he’d never hear from him again. He scratched his two-day-old stubble and read the email again.

Maybe it was a hoax. After all, anyone could sign himself ‘The Prophet’. He checked the sender’s address. It was different from the last time, but just as obscure: an763398@anon.obfusc.com. He thought about trying to trace it but knew it wouldn’t do any good. They’d tracked the Prophet’s last address to some anonymous re-mailer system. A dead end. Whoever he was, he knew how to conceal his identity.

Apart from himself, only three other people knew about the Prophet. One of those was in prison and another was dead. That just left Ralph.

Leon dialled a number he hadn’t used in a long time.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Sorry, who’s this?’

Leon could hear the rumble of men’s voices in the background. Ralph was probably in a meeting with the bank VIPs, fighting for elbowroom at the corporate party. It was a world he’d once thrived in himself.

‘Don’t be a prick, Ralphy.’

The men’s laughter roared in his ear, and then grew gradually fainter until there was just an echoing hollowness. Sounded like Ralphy-Boy had moved into the gents.

‘Comfy now?’ Leon said.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Just looking up old pals. Seems to be a day for calls from the past.’

‘What are you talking about? I told you never to call me.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Listen Ralphy-Boy, are you near your office?’

‘I’m in the middle of a board meeting and I don’t –’

‘Good. I’m sending an email to your private account. Go and read it.’

‘What? Are you out of your mind?’

‘Just do it. I’ll call back in five minutes.’

Leon hung up and turned back to his PC. He brought up the email again and forwarded it to Ralph’s alias address.

He swivelled his chair to stare out the window at the bottle banks and wheelie bins that lined the small car park behind his office. Directly opposite him was the grimy back wall of the local Chinese takeaway, the Golden Tigress. A classy name for a seedy health hazard.

A young Chinese man in white overalls trudged out of the back door and flung a bag of God knew what kind of crap into the wheelie bin beneath Leon’s window. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of garlic and his gut clenched. Most of the shopkeepers around here gave off the same rank smell, filling Leon’s tiny office with it when they came in with their accounts. His ulcer bit into him.

‘Leon-the-Ritch’, people used to call him. He’d worked sixteen-hour days and managed all the big deals. He’d been a real player then, with millions in the bank and a glitzy wife on his arm. Now his twenty-year-old marriage was down the toilet, right there alongside his reputation and his bank balance.

Leon squeezed his eyes shut. Thinking about his marriage made him think about his son, and that was worse than the ulcer. He focused on the searing pain in his belly, trying to obliterate the image of Richard at the train station that morning. It was the first time he’d seen his son in almost a year.

He’d been up all night at a poker game and had travelled to his office on the train, vacuum-packed with the city’s commuters. Their looks of disgust had told him what he already knew: that his eyes were red-rimmed, his breath stank, and the bacteria in his armpits had metabolized up a storm.

His carriage had pulled up alongside a knot of schoolboys on the platform at Blackrock. He’d stared idly at them through the window. Then his breath had caught in his throat. Dark hair, round eyes, freckles like mud splats. Richard. Passengers pushed in front of Leon, but he elbowed them out of his way, straining for another glimpse of his son. A head taller than the other boys, Richard was easy to spot. He’d grown. Leon felt his chest swell. The boy would be tall like his mother, not squat like him.

Leon had pressed closer to the door. The first of Richard’s friends pushed through into the carriage, and up close Leon recognized the crest of Blackrock College on his jumper. He frowned. Maura hadn’t said anything about changing schools. But then they hadn’t talked in a long time. He wondered who was paying the fees.

Richard was at the door. Leon half raised his arm, ready to catch his attention. He heard the well-bred accents of Richard’s friends. At the same time, he became aware of the sourness of his own clothes, of his stained anorak and unshaven face. His hand faltered, suspended in mid air.

‘Richard!’

The boy snapped his head around to look back at the station platform. Leon yanked his arm down and peered out the window. A blond man in his forties was jogging towards the train. He wore a dark wool overcoat and carried a red sports bag in one hand. He held the bag out to Richard, and ruffled the boy’s hair. Leon saw the wide grin that spread across his son’s face, and felt a jagged twinge in his stomach, as though he’d swallowed broken glass. Slowly, Leon had turned and shuffled through the crowd until he’d reached the other end of the carriage. And there he’d stayed, hidden, until he was sure his son was gone.

The clink of bottles made Leon jump. Outside in the car park, the young Chinese man was back, this time firing glass jars into the bottle bank. Leon rubbed his face again and took a deep breath, trying to clear the curdling in his stomach. Maybe tomorrow he’d get cleaned up. Maybe he’d go and see Richard.

He checked his watch. Time to call Ralphy-Boy again. He cleared his throat and dialled.

‘Did you read it?’ he said, when Ralph picked up.

‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’

‘Took the words right out of my mouth.’

‘You think I sent this? I don’t want anything to do with it.’ Ralph’s mouth sounded dry.

‘What’s wrong, Ralphy? You scared?’

‘Of course I’m bloody scared. I’ve a lot to lose, even if you haven’t.’

Leon tightened his grip on the phone. ‘It’s down to me you didn’t lose it all eight years ago, let’s not forget that, okay?’

Ralph sighed. ‘What exactly do you want, Leon? More money?’

Good question. At first he’d just wanted to make sure Ralph hadn’t sent the email, but now another idea was uncurling itself.

‘You read the email, didn’t you?’ Leon said.

‘Yes, he says the girl has it. So what?’

‘Well, maybe I want it back.’

‘You think she’s just going to hand it over? And what if he’s wrong?’

‘The Prophet’s never been wrong about anything before,’ Leon said. ‘Says he has proof.’

‘What’s the matter with you? Do you want us both to go to jail?’

Leon gazed out the window again. Maybe hearing from the Prophet wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. Maybe this was his way back.

‘There’s this fella I know,’ Leon said. ‘I’ve used him before. He’ll take care of it.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘You don’t have to, Ralphy.’

Leon slammed the phone down and looked out the window again. This time he didn’t see the graffiti on the walls or the overflowing wheelie bins. He saw himself clean-shaven and twenty pounds lighter, wearing an Italian suit and seated at the head of a boardroom table. He saw himself dressed in a smart wool overcoat, cheering Richard on as he played rugby for his school. Leon ground his teeth and curled his fingers into fists.

This girl had something that belonged to him and he wanted it back.

[3]

‘Good afternoon, Sheridan Bank –’

‘– it isn’t showing up in your transactions, Mr Cooke. Would you like me to try another account for you?’

The drone of about thirty different conversations buzzed through the air. The voices were mostly female, filling the room like polite bumblebees. Harry moved between the desks, each one screened by blue padded partitions, and half-listened to the girls on the phones. She had an account with Sheridan herself. Maybe after this, she’d need to switch banks.

There were plenty of empty desks, but Harry wanted one at the back. She reached the end of the room and snagged an empty desk in the corner. She dumped her bag on the chair and waited for the round-faced girl at the next workstation to finish her call.

‘Apologies again about that, Mrs Hayes. Bye now.’ The girl typed something on her keyboard and winked at Harry. ‘Another unsatisfied customer.’

Harry smiled. ‘Is there any other kind?’

‘Not around here.’

Harry stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Catalina. I start work here this afternoon.’

‘Oh, great. I’m Nadia.’ She grasped Harry’s hand. Her nails were long and crimson, and she wore a silver ring on every plump finger, including her thumb.

Harry gestured to the empty desk. ‘Okay if I sit here?’

‘Sure, no one’s using it.’

Harry sat down and switched on the PC. ‘I don’t think I’ve been set up on the system yet. Any chance you could log me in?’

Nadia hesitated. ‘I’m not really supposed to do that.’

Keep it casual. ‘Oh, right. I just wanted another peek at the helpdesk system before Mrs Nagle gets back from lunch.’

Nadia chewed her bottom lip, and then smiled. ‘Why not? Don’t want her to catch you out on your first day, do we?’

She pulled off her headset and walked over, leaning across to type in her username and password. Harry could smell a mixture of Calvin Klein and peppermints.

‘There you go,’ Nadia said.

‘Thanks, I owe you one.’

Harry waited until Nadia was back at her desk, busy with another call. She adjusted the angle of her screen so that no one could see what she was doing, and went to work.

With a few keystrokes, she broke out of the helpdesk application into the computer’s operating system. Harry shook her head and almost tutted. It should have been better protected.

She poked around inside the PC, dipping into its files and directories, but it was a standard desktop and had no secrets to tell. She clicked her mouse and soon had a view of all her network connections:

F: \\Jupiter\shared

G: \\Pluto\users

H: \\Mars\system

L: \\Mercury\backup

S: \\Saturn\admin

This was more like it. This was her way into the bank’s central computers.

Harry stepped through the list of networked machines, trying to gain access. Some she could drop right into and view their files, but most of them blocked her at the first keystroke. She dug a little more, searching for something she could use. And then she found it: the system password file. Stored inside were the usernames and passwords of everyone on the network. It was her key into the system. She double-clicked with her mouse and tried to open the file. Locked.

Harry frowned and checked the time. Her heartbeat cranked up a notch. She’d been here twenty minutes already, and still had a lot of ground to cover. She discarded the password file and began ransacking the network, burrowing deep into its file system and sniffing every corner. She knew what she was looking for, and it had to be here somewhere. And sure enough, there it was, tucked away on a shared drive available for anyone to read: the unprotected backup copy of the password file.

The back of Harry’s neck tingled. It was always the same whenever she hacked into a system that was supposed to be secure. She wanted to beat a drum roll on the desk, but there was a time and a place for everything.

She opened the backup file and scanned its contents. The usernames were in clear text, but the passwords were all encrypted. Harry glanced over her shoulder. Nadia was chatting with a customer on the phone, her nails clacking on the keyboard.

Harry slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and drew out a CD which she slotted into the computer. It contained a password-cracker program, and she fed the backup file into it. She hunched over a computer manual and pretended to leaf through it as she waited for the cracker to do its job.

It could take a while. Dictionary attacks often did. The program was stepping through the entire dictionary, encrypting each word and trying to match it against the encrypted passwords in the file. After that, it would try letter and number combinations. By the end of it, she’d have all the passwords she needed.

Harry peeked at her watch again. Gooseflesh broke out on the back of her neck and she massaged it with her fingers. She had maybe ten minutes before the supervisor got back, and the cracker could take fifteen. It was going to be tight. But then, breaking and entering always was. That was what made it so irresistible.

Her father had always said she’d end up a burglar, ever since the day she’d hurled a brick through the kitchen window and climbed inside. She’d got locked out after school, but all she could think about was the port scan she’d launched from her computer that morning and what it might have found. She tried to explain this to her father later, as he crunched about in the broken glass, his face incredulous. She was sure he’d confiscate her PC, but instead, he upgraded its processor and presented her with her own set of house keys. To eleven-year-old Harry, he’d acquired some serious kudos that day.

And she had acquired a new name, because that was when her father had first started calling her Harry. There were times when she longed for an exotic Spanish name, like the one her sister had been given. Amaranta was tall with ash-blonde hair. She’d been born while Harry’s mother was still infatuated with her husband’s half-Irish, half-Spanish charm. But by the time Harry was born, her father’s financial disasters had forced them out of their mansion to a cramped terraced house, and her mother’s taste in names had dulled. Harry was the one who inherited her father’s sooty Spanish eyes and blue-black curls, but her mother had been unimpressed. Rejecting anything faintly Spanish, she had christened her daughter Henrietta after her own mother, a prim woman from the north of England.

‘But whoever heard of a burglar called Henrietta?’ her father had declared after the incident with the window, and had insisted on calling her Harry ever since. Now she never answered to anything else.

Harry checked the cracker program. It was almost finished. She scanned the list of passwords broken into clear text so far. There was Nadia’s. Username ‘nadiamc’, password ‘diamonds’. And Sandra Nagle’s: ‘sandran’, password ‘fortitude’. She shook her head. No good. She needed a heavy-hitter account, one with privileged access.

And there it was, at the bottom of the list. The network administrator’s password: asteroid27. Her toes wriggled inside her shoes. Now she was like a security guard with the master key to the building: she could go anywhere. She owned the network.

She logged in under her new privileged status, and immediately disabled the network’s auditing program. Now her activities couldn’t be recorded in the audit logs. She was invisible.

Harry prowled the servers and plunged into any file that looked interesting. Her eyes widened at some of the data she could access: customer credit ratings, bank revenues, employee salaries. She could view everyone’s emails, including those belonging to the chairman of the bank.

She hopped into another database and tried to make sense of the numbers in front of her. Her fingers froze on the mouse when she realized that she was looking at some of the bank’s most confidential customer information: account numbers, PIN codes, credit-card details, usernames and passwords. The stuff of hackers’ dreams, and most of it wasn’t even encrypted.

Harry scrolled through the data. It would be so easy to lift money out of these accounts. No one would even know it had happened. She was a ghost on the system, and left no footprints.

‘She’s back early.’

Harry looked across at Nadia, who was nodding towards the other end of the room. Sandra Nagle was standing by the double doors, consulting a clipboard.

Shit. Time to move.

Harry’s fingers jitterbugged over the keys. She copied the list of cracked passwords on to her CD, and dumped some customer account data and security PINs on to it for good measure.

The copy was slow to execute, and she looked up to check on Sandra Nagle. She was working her way down the room, stopping every few paces to check in with a helpdesk operator.

Harry knew she should wrap it up, knew she was taking a risk, but she still had one thing left to do. Manipulating the mouse, she disguised one of her own files and stashed it in a corner of the network. She always liked to leave a calling card.

The woman strolled in her direction, making notes on her clipboard. She stopped to interrogate a girl sitting a few feet away from Harry.

Harry cleared the system event logs to obliterate any possibility that she could be traced. She re-enabled the auditing facility and then glanced up.

Sandra Nagle was looking right at her.

Moisture trickled from Harry’s armpits. She heard the swish of nylon mashing against nylon as the woman marched towards her. She closed down her access to the network and flipped the helpdesk application back into view just as Sandra Nagle reached her desk.

The woman was breathing hard. She was so close that Harry could see the pale hairs on her upper lip.

‘Just who are you, and what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Are you Sandra Nagle?’ Harry stood up and flung her bag across her shoulder, snatching out the CD and slipping it back into her pocket. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘What –’

Harry brushed past her and marched towards the doors, trying to ignore the trembling in her knees.

‘I’ve been sent in by IT to check the health of your systems,’ she said. ‘You’ve got serious virus problems here.’

Sandra Nagle was close behind her. ‘How –’

‘You don’t need to cease operations right away, but I hope for your own sake you’ve been following the bank’s anti-virus procedures.’

The woman’s step faltered. Harry looked back over her shoulder.

‘I see. No doubt you’ll be hearing from IT in due course.’

She pushed against one of the double doors, but it wouldn’t open. She tried the other one. Locked.

‘Hang on, who did you say you were?’ Sandra Nagle was stomping after her.

Fuck it.

Harry spotted the door-release button on the wall. She pressed it and heard a click. She shoved open the doors and raced across the reception area. Melanie stared at her, her mouth wide open.

Harry burst through the glass doors into the sunlight and raced down the street.

Electrified by adrenaline, Harry sprinted alongside the canal, her shoes smacking against the pavement and the blood drumming through her body. When she was sure no one was following her, she slowed to a walk and then perched on the canal wall to cool down.

Water hissed through the tall rushes by the banks and a light breeze buffeted her face. When the thumping in her chest had eased off, she fished her phone out of her bag and dialled.

‘Hi, Ian? Harry Martinez here, from Lúbra Security. I’ve just finished the penetration test on your systems.’

‘Already?’

‘Yeah, I hacked in and got all I needed.’

‘Jesus. Hey, lads, have we had any IDS alarms?’

Harry could hear some commotion in the background. ‘Relax, Ian, your Intrusion Detection System is fine. I didn’t come through from the outside.’

‘You didn’t? But we were expecting a perimeter attack.’

‘Yeah, I know you were.’ Harry winced. ‘Sorry.’

‘Ah Jesus, Harry.’

‘Listen, a huge number of hacker exploits are inside jobs. You need to protect yourselves.’

‘No kidding.’

‘So I came in through the bank’s own network, and got admin access –’

‘You what?’

‘– and found the customer bank accounts and PIN numbers.’

‘Ah fuck it.’

‘Let’s just say your internal security doesn’t look too good. But a few simple precautions should sort it out. I’ll make some recommendations in the report.’

‘But how the hell did you get in?’

‘A bit of social engineering, and some hard neck. If it makes you feel any better, I nearly got caught.’

‘It doesn’t. What a mess.’

‘Sorry, Ian. Just thought I’d give you some warning before your management gets wind of it.’

‘Well, thanks, I appreciate that. But I’m still dog meat.’

‘It’s not as bad as it sounds.’ Harry’s phone beeped. ‘I left a stash of hacker tools behind, just to test your anti-virus software. But we can go through that later when we do a clean-up.’ Her phone beeped again. ‘Sorry, Ian, got to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

She took the incoming call.

‘Hey there, Harry, how’s the break-in going?’

Harry smiled. It was Imogen Brady, a support engineer from the Lúbra Security office. She pictured her friend sitting at her desk, her feet not quite reaching the floor. Imogen looked like a Chihuahua, with huge eyes in a gamine face. She was one of the best hackers Harry had ever worked with.

‘I’m just finished,’ Harry said. ‘What’s going on back there?’

‘Mister Loads-a-dosh is looking for you.’

She was referring to their boss, Dillon Fitzroy. Rumour had it that he’d become a multi-millionaire at the age of twenty-eight during the dot.com boom. That was nine years ago. He’d founded Lúbra Security shortly afterwards, expanding it by merging with other software companies until it was now one of the biggest in the business.

‘What does he want?’ Harry said.

‘Who knows? Maybe a date?’

Harry rolled her eyes. Imogen may have looked as though a breeze could blow her away, but when it came to digging for gossip she was a terrier.

‘Why don’t you just put me through to him?’ Harry said.

‘Okey-dokey.’

A few seconds later, Dillon’s voice came on the line.

‘Harry? You finished over at Sheridan?’

Judging from the background acoustics, he was yelling into a conference phone from several feet away.

‘I’m done,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the paperwork.’

‘Ditch it. I’ve another job for you.’

‘Right now?’ She was starving and could smell the coffee and bacon rolls from the sandwich bars in Baggot Street. She stood up and strolled towards the canal bridge.

‘Yeah, right now. Send me on the Sheridan details, I’ll get Imogen to compile the report. I want you on another vulnerability assessment.’

Harry could hear the click of his keyboard in the background. Trust Dillon not to waste an opportunity to multi-task. His left hand was probably flexed across his laptop like a pianist’s, while his right hand made notes on a pad.

‘So where to this time?’ Harry said.

‘The IFSC, and the client has asked especially for you. I told them you’re the best.’

‘Thanks, Dillon, you’re a gent.’ Now she was glad of the kitten heels. The International Financial Services Centre was definitely upmarket.

‘Call me when you’ve finished,’ Dillon said. ‘We’ll grab some dinner and you can fill me in.’

She felt her eyes widen. Doubly glad of the kitten heels. ‘Okay.’ Before she could let herself wonder what dinner might mean, she said, ‘So tell me more about the IFSC job. Do we know what kind of systems they have?’

‘Nope, you’ll find all that out when you meet them …’ Dillon paused. ‘If you ask me, I think they want to look you over first.’

Harry stopped in the middle of the pavement. ‘Why would they want to do that?’

Dillon hesitated for just a second too long. ‘Look, maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe I’ll put Imogen on to it.’

Harry stuck a hand over her ear to block out the din of traffic. ‘Okay, what’s going on here? Who’s the client?’

She heard him suck in air through his teeth as he thought about his answer.

‘All right, it was a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘It’s KWC.’

The adrenaline shot out of Harry’s system like water from a burst main. She stumbled over to the canal wall and sank back on to the cold stone.

KWC. Klein, Webberly and Caulfield, one of the most prestigious investment banks in the city, servicing some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in Europe. It was headquartered in New York, with offices in London, Frankfurt and Tokyo, as well as here in Dublin.

It was also the company her father had worked for before they sent him to prison.

[4]

‘Give me your worst-case scenario,’ Harry said.

The man across the boardroom table looked at her through half-closed eyes. He was in his forties, with bristly grey hair cut like a US Marine’s.

He shrugged. ‘Someone getting access to our investment accounts.’

‘Worse than that.’

He leaned back and folded his arms, flesh straining against his shirt. ‘What could be worse than some hacker getting hold of our clients’ money?’

‘You tell me.’ Harry sneaked a look at the business card he’d given her. Felix Roche, IT Procurement, KWC. She scribbled a note on the back: hostile.

Her gaze strayed to the window behind Felix. It wasn’t just a window, it was an entire wall of glass that made the quays along the Liffey seem like part of the room. In the distance, she could see the peppermint green dome of the Custom House and the corrugated cap of Liberty Hall tower. Business must be good for KWC.

Felix leaned forward across the table. ‘Okay, I’ll give you a worst case,’ he said. Harry could smell the onions he’d had for lunch. ‘How about someone getting a look at our confidential M&A deals? That bad enough for you?’

M&A. Mergers and Acquisitions. The department her father had worked for before he was arrested. Harry swallowed and fiddled with her notepad. Then she flicked a glance at Felix. His pasty face looked unhealthy, like the underbelly of a dead fish. She was used to antagonism from the technical guys, but this was something different. She’d told Dillon she could handle this assignment, that KWC was just another client. Now she wasn’t so sure.

The door swept open and a man in his thirties strode into the room. He was well-built, with light brown hair and shoulders that belonged on a rugby pitch.

Felix scowled at the interruption.

‘Hi, Felix, I’m sitting in.’ The man frowned at Harry as he pulled up a chair.

Her cheeks tingled under his gaze. What was up with these guys? She squared her shoulders and stood up.

‘Harry Martinez.’ She held out her hand.

His brow cleared and he grinned. ‘Sorry, I was expecting a man. Probably happens all the time, right?’ He returned her handshake. ‘Jude Tiernan. I’m an investment banker here.’

His hand was warm and his citrus aftershave perked up the room. What was an investment banker doing at an IT meeting? Then she remembered Felix’s barbed comment about M&A deals.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You work for M&A?’

‘Let’s say M&A work for me.’

Harry sank back down and worked it out. So he was Head of M&A, just like her father had been. One man’s prison sentence was another man’s career break. She felt their eyes on her, invading her. Her father was a legend in this bank. Had they made the connection and come to look her over? She chewed her lip, unable to meet their gaze.

Jude set his mobile phone on the desk and took a silver pen from his breast pocket. He twirled it between the fingers of one hand and gestured towards Harry with the other. ‘Please continue.’

‘I was really expecting someone from IT Security to be here,’ said Harry. ‘Someone who knows the systems.’

Felix snorted. ‘IT Security. I know these systems better than anyone. I practically built the damn machines myself.’

‘I see.’ Harry checked the card again. ‘And now you’re in IT Procurement?’

He glared at her. ‘The career move came up. Security were more than happy to let me handle this initial meeting, believe me. Saves them the trouble.’

Harry took a deep breath. She looked at her pad, although she’d written nothing down.

‘Okay, well, I don’t know how much Dillon covered with you on this,’ she said. Not much, from the looks of things. ‘We need to scope the penetration test, see which approach suits you best.’

Know the players at the table, her father had taught her. Adjust your style accordingly. Trouble was, she didn’t know these guys at all, and they weren’t giving her any clues.

‘A pen test is a waste of time,’ said Felix. ‘Our systems are secure, I can personally guarantee it.’ He glowered at Harry. ‘Anyone who says otherwise is challenging my professional competence.’

Jude ignored him. ‘What exactly happens in this pen test, Ms Martinez?’

Felix sighed. ‘Ah, come on, Jude, I’ve been through this with her already. Besides, we both know she’s only here because her boss is an old friend of yours and he wants the account.’

Harry looked back down at her pad. No wonder she was being fobbed off with someone from Procurement. They weren’t even serious about the business.

Jude raised a hand to shut Felix up and smiled at Harry. ‘Humour me. Tell me about this pen test.’

Harry suspected he was conducting some test of his own. She didn’t smile back.

‘A penetration test is when I use every dirty trick in the book to try and break into your computer systems,’ she said. ‘And once I’m in, I sniff around to see what kind of damage I can do.’

Jude stopped twirling his pen. ‘In other words, you pretend to be a hacker.’

‘Right.’

Felix leaned forward. ‘And just what kind of hacker are you, Ms Martinez? A black hat or a white hat?’

Harry stiffened, and glared at him.

Jude looked from one to the other. ‘Anyone care to fill me in?’

Harry cut in before Felix could take another swipe at her. ‘Black hats are malicious hackers intent on causing damage. White hats aren’t destructive. They’re only interested in the technology and how far they can push it.’

She turned to Felix. ‘To answer your question, Mr Roche, I’m a security professional, not a hacker.’

‘Well, well, a hacker with ethics,’ Felix said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

Jude scribbled something on his pad and shoved it across to Felix. Harry watched Felix’s jaw tighten as he read the note, and she wondered if she’d passed the test.

‘I’m intrigued,’ Jude said. ‘So how do we do this?’

‘For a straight pen test, we can either do it as a black-box or a white-box scenario.’

‘Everything’s black and white with you, isn’t it?’

Harry looked him in the eye. ‘Pretty much.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Okay, I’m listening.’

‘Black-box testing is the closest thing to a real hack from the outside. I start with nothing except your corporate name. I use outside sources of information to snoop around your network, and then I break in.’

She paused to make sure he was getting it. He nodded and smiled.

‘For a white-box test, I know everything about your internal systems right from the start. Your firewalls, your network infrastructure, your databases, the works,’ Harry said. ‘In other words, I’m attacking from the inside.’

The door creaked opened and a man in his late fifties eased into the room. His grey hair fluffed out like a pair of wings on his balding head.

Coco the Clown, Harry thought.

‘Please carry on,’ the newcomer said and slid into a chair against the wall behind Harry.

God, how many more people were coming to gawp at her? She eyed up the conference table that could seat twenty people and feared the worst.

Jude watched the older man for a moment. Then he turned his attention back to Harry. ‘So which approach would you recommend, Ms Martinez?’

Harry tried to concentrate. ‘White box. In my experience, insiders are far more of a threat than external attackers.’

‘And I guess you’d know all about insiders, wouldn’t you?’ Felix said.

Every muscle in her body went still. ‘Just what are you getting at, Mr Roche?’

‘Come on, let’s put it on the table here. We’re all thinking it.’ He spread his arms as though the whole room was full of people on his side. ‘Your daddy was the master of all insiders, wasn’t he?’

Harry blinked. Then she dropped her gaze and fiddled with her pad, willing her voice to be steady. ‘What my father may have done is not part of this discussion.’

‘May have done?’ Felix said. ‘He was found guilty of insider trading, wasn’t he? Put away for eight years.’

Harry took in his clenched fists and the angry splotches on his cheeks. She stared at him. ‘You’re taking it all rather personally, aren’t you?’

‘Damn right, I am. Salvador Martinez nearly brought this company to its knees.’

‘Felix, you’re out of order.’ Coco the Clown’s voice behind her made her jump.

Jude shifted in his chair. Felix glared at Harry; it looked as if he had more to say.

Harry didn’t bother turning to acknowledge the unexpected support. To hell with it. She’d had enough. She placed her palms on the lacquered boardroom table. It was smooth and cold, like a mirror. She pushed herself up and stood to face them.

‘Mr Roche, I came here to talk about the security of your IT systems, and that’s all I’m prepared to discuss with you.’

She grabbed her bag and turned for the door. Then a thought struck her. She knew she shouldn’t say it out loud, but she was going to anyway. She swung round and faced them.

‘Who knows, maybe my father wasn’t the only insider trader around here. Maybe his arrest just spoiled the party.’

Felix’s jaw fell slack. Jude drew himself up in his chair, his lips disappearing into a tight line.

Coco the Clown stood and held up his hand. ‘Gentlemen, please –’

Jude cut in. ‘Don’t make accusations you can’t back up, Ms Martinez.’ He clenched the silver pen in his fist. ‘Some of us still believe in the integrity of our profession, even if your father didn’t.’

‘Well, well, an investment banker with ethics,’ Harry said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

She marched to the door as fast as she could without actually breaking into a run. The damn room was longer than a tennis court. She yanked open the door and slammed it behind her.

She was halfway down the corridor before she realized she was shaking. She blundered around a corner, searching for the way out. Dammit, the lifts must be back the other way. Her sense of direction was dyslexic at the best of times, but this was no time to get lost and call for help.

She doubled back, retracing her steps past the boardroom, and found the lifts. She punched the button, pacing up and down while she waited.

The boardroom door opened, and voices growled from inside the room. She checked the lift. Two floors to go. She scoured the corridor for somewhere to hide. No doors, no closets. Nothing but polished marble floors.

Someone came out. Coco the Clown. He saw her, and bowed his head.

‘Ms Martinez, please accept my apologies.’

He walked towards her and held out his hand. His eyebrows were tilted upwards into his high domed forehead, his expression mournful.

‘Ashford is the name,’ he said. ‘Chief Executive of KWC. You were treated very badly in there and I assure you the individuals in question will be reprimanded for their lack of professionalism.’

Harry ignored his outstretched hand. ‘Since when does the Chief Executive sit in on routine IT meetings?’

Ashford dropped his hand. ‘Good point. Very well, I admit it: I was curious. I wanted to meet you.’

The lift pinged and the doors opened. Harry stepped in and jabbed at the button for the ground floor.

‘I’ve known your father for over thirty years,’ Ashford said. ‘Salvador’s a great personal friend and a fine man.’ He smiled. ‘You’re very like him.’

The lift doors started to close. Harry glared at him through the shrinking gap.

‘I’ve known my father all my life,’ she said. ‘And I can assure you, I’m nothing like him at all.’

[5]

Cameron knew he didn’t blend in well with his surroundings. It was the colour of his hair that did it. Half a shade short of albino, a girl had once called it, as he’d rammed himself into her scrawny body. Afterwards he’d tightened his fingers round her throat and squeezed till she’d stopped moving.

He pulled the black woolly hat further down over his eyebrows and looked at his watch. He needed to get going before someone noticed him, but his instructions had been to wait for another hour.

He’d never been to the International Financial Services Centre before. As far as he was concerned, it was a place where rich people came to get richer. He could remember this part of the city before it had been redeveloped, when it was still the old Custom House docks. He’d preferred it then; vast faceless warehouses spread across bleak tracts of land. Now it was a landscaped city within a city, playing host to banks from all over the world.

Cameron stared up at the multi-storey office buildings, all made from the same green glass blocks that sparkled in the sunlight. Like the fucking Emerald City of Oz.

He leaned against the steel barrier near the edge of George’s Dock. It used to be a real dock that smelled of tar and dead fish. Now they’d transformed it into an ornamental lake. Jets of water crashed down on its surface from five spurting fountains. The noise was deafening, but it was the perfect position for observing the building opposite.

Cameron straightened up as a young woman stumbled through the revolving doors. He checked her out against the description of the Martinez girl. Five foot three, slim, with dark curly hair. Face kind of heart-shaped. She was clutching a black satchel with some kind of silver logo on it. It was her all right. She reminded him of the Spanish waitress he’d had in Madrid last year. He felt himself harden.

Cameron fell into step behind her. It was late on Friday afternoon and the city was clogged with people. He stared at her without blinking, fixing her in his sights.

He’d received his instructions by phone, his bowels clenching as he’d listened to the familiar voice. It was a voice he’d taken orders from many times before. He told himself he did it for the money, but he knew it was more than that. The blood had pounded through his body as he’d listened to the voice on the phone, anticipating the hunt.

The girl moved as if she was on the dodgems, slamming shoulders with other pedestrians, but she seemed not to notice. She walked out of the IFSC grounds and back on to the city streets. The crowd pressed in closer and he burrowed through, closing the gap between them.

‘Will I do it like last time?’ he’d asked on the phone. He’d savoured the memory of last time; the squeal of brakes, the smell of scorched rubber, the sickening crunch of metal and shattered bone. But the voice had cut into his thoughts.

‘Not yet. I need her terrified, but I need her alive.’ As if sensing Cameron’s disappointment, he’d continued, ‘But don’t worry. Next time, you can kill her.’

Next time. Cameron swallowed hard as he gained on the dark-haired girl. Why did he always have to obey orders? He risked a lot to carry out his instructions. He needed gratification, and he needed it now.

The girl picked up the pace, and he lengthened his stride to keep up with her. His first chance would come at the busy intersection marked by the Eternal Flame sculpture, where the cars wheeled past the Custom House at top speed, heedless of pedestrians. It was less than twenty yards away, and she was headed straight for it.

Suddenly, she stopped and swung around. She stared straight at him, and then retraced her steps back towards him. What the fuck was she doing? She couldn’t have seen him. He kept on walking.

She was face to face with him. Her breasts brushed against his arm, and he could feel her warmth.

‘Sorry,’ she said, without looking up, and swept on past.

He ran his tongue over his lips as he watched her walk away.

Cameron waited till she had put ten yards between them and then set off after her again. She headed back towards the river and crossed over the bridge. He followed her as she turned left along the cobbled quays. He could smell the rotting seaweed that hung like a fringe of oily hair along the river walls.

The girl turned down a narrow street lined with poky cottages and grimy blocks of flats. Cameron dropped back. There were fewer people here, less cover. He kept his distance until he heard the familiar whine of speeding traffic. They had reached the intersection with Pearse Street, where cars thundered in and out of the city centre.

The girl joined the knot of pedestrians by the kerb and he slipped in close behind her.

An old woman in a raincoat swayed in front of him. She was carrying a plastic bag full of old tennis shoes, and smelled like a urinal. He elbowed her out of his way and edged into position behind the girl. He could see the logo on her satchel more clearly now. The word DefCon was engraved in silver, the letter ‘O’ framing a black skull and crossbones.

It meant nothing to him, nor did he care.

He shot a glance at the lights and then back at the whirling traffic. Cars and motorbikes sped along Pearse Street. The lights changed from green to amber. A red truck barrelled on through. Behind it, a black BMW gunned its engine and prepared to make a run for it.

Cameron’s scalp prickled. He raised his hand.

Now.

An elbow jabbed at his arm and threw him off balance.

‘Look at that speed. Should be locked up.’ The old woman shoved her face into his. He could smell the stale wine on her breath.

The BMW roared past. The pedestrian lights bip-bip-bipped as the crowd spilled out on to the road.

Cameron glared at the stinking bag lady who had robbed him of his climax. The old woman widened her watery eyes and took a step back from him. He jerked away and strode across the street, squinting through the crowds.

There was no sign of the dark-haired girl anywhere.

He weaved his way through the bodies, straining for a glimpse of her. Then he stood still and dug his nails into his palms, ignoring the crush as he watched the flow of commuters, looking for patterns. They were scurrying past like rats, flooding from different directions. But they surged as one into the cavernous entrance on the left.

Cameron smiled and relaxed his fingers. Of course: Pearse Station.

What could be better?

He barged through the queue of people blocking the entrance and scoured the area. She had to be here. Trains rattled overhead and the air was a mixture of dust and sweat. Then he spotted her, on the other side of the ticket barriers. She was stepping on to the escalator for the southbound platform.

He checked the ticket queue. Ten bodies deep and it wasn’t moving. He could vault over the ticket barrier, but that would get him noticed. He had to get to her before she boarded the next train.

Narrowing his eyes, he inspected the ticket barriers more closely. They were automatic turnstiles, all except for the one on the end. Passengers poured through it past a middle-aged man in a sloppy blue uniform, who flicked a glance at every second ticket.

It was Cameron’s only chance.

He searched the crowd, looking for cover. Two Japanese students strolled past him, heading towards the barrier on the end. The taller boy held a large map of Dublin out at arm’s length, as if he was reading a newspaper. Cameron ducked in behind them. They stopped in front of the ticket collector and wrestled with the folds of the map as they fumbled for their tickets. Cameron slipped unnoticed behind them through the open barrier.

He raced up to the southbound platform, taking the escalator steps two at a time. He reached the top and held his breath.

The station was huge, like an aircraft hangar. People were lined up on both sides of the tracks, staring into the open mouths of daylight at either end.

The girl was near the edge of the platform, twenty yards to his left. He exhaled, and a familiar ripple of heat licked up his body. He basked in it.

He slunk over towards her, glancing up at the display that counted down the time until the next train.

Two minutes.

He sidled up behind her. Other commuters staked out their space on the platform beside him. He edged forward so that no one could get between them.

He was close now. Close enough to touch her. He could smell her flowery scent. He inhaled deeply, and was aware of his own musty sourness mixed in with her fragrance. He longed to press himself against her. He thought about what he’d whisper to her, just before she went over the edge.

The air moved. The rails clacked. Something small scuttled across them.

He looked up at the display. One minute. He raised his hand.

Any second now.

[6]

Keep behind the line. Harry never bothered much with rules, but this was one she paid attention to. She stiffened against the bodies that packed in behind her, nudging her forward.

A pigeon curled its toes over the edge of the platform, dipping its head for a look at the three-foot drop to the tracks below. Her own toes curled just watching it. She checked the display: Dun Laoghaire, one minute.

She thought about the KWC meeting again and winced. Damn Dillon and his pop psychology.

‘I thought it could help if you went down there,’ he’d said to her over the phone, as she’d picked at the moss on the canal wall. ‘You know, confront things.’

‘If you use the word “cathartic”, I’ll scream,’ she said.

‘Come on, you never talk about your father. You haven’t seen him since before he went to prison. What’s that, five years?’

‘Actually, it’s six.’

‘There you go, you see? You need catharsis.’

She laughed. ‘Look, I appreciate the concern, but I’ll sort it through in my own way.’

‘You mean you’ll put a lid on it and bury it alive.’

‘Maybe.’ She flicked a piece of velvety moss on to the canal bank. ‘Look, my father comes and goes a lot in my life. Now he’s just gone again. It’s no big deal.’

‘I’ll put someone else on the pen test.’

‘No, Dillon, I’ll handle it. You just took me by surprise, that’s all. Seriously, I’m fine.’

But she hadn’t been fine. She’d been touchy and, worst of all, mouthy. Not an unusual combination for her, she’d be the first to admit, but she hated to let herself down like that. She’d tried to walk it off, turning away from the train station near the IFSC and choosing instead to march along the Liffey. She’d given up after ten minutes. Kitten heels just weren’t built for cleansing power-walks.

Harry looked at the display again. The minute was up. A draught sliced at her cheek. The pigeon flapped into the air as though it had just seen a cat. People crushed in around her. Someone pressed against the length of her body and catapulted her six inches forward.

‘Hey!’ She made to turn her head, but felt herself rammed forward again, forced out on to the edge of the platform. She caught sight of the black tracks below and squeezed her eyes shut. Digging her heels in, she leaned backwards and drove her elbows into the crowd.

A shout came from behind her. ‘Stop pushing!’

Hot breath whispered against her ear. A hard fist shoved her in the small of her back, and she pitched forward, weightless. Her eyes widened, transfixed. Steel rails accelerated towards her. She thrust out her hands and braced herself for the fall.

Her body slammed into the ground. Sharp stones pierced the palms of her hands, and her knee crunched against the concrete crossbar of the track. Somebody screamed.

Harry lifted her head and gaped at the winding tracks ahead. Her limbs were paralysed. The rails click-clacked.

Move!

She grasped the rails and tried to heave herself up. Hot pain shot through her knee as it gave way beneath her. She collapsed back on to the track, stretched across it.

The rails vibrated against her hands. A horn shrieked. She snapped her head up. A train roared round the bend into the station, blinding her with its headlights. Sweat flashed over her.

Harry dropped to the ground and rolled. Her shoulders hammered against iron and stone. Something yanked her back. She looked over her shoulder. Her bag had snagged on a bolt in the rail. The train thundered towards her. She whipped the strap off over her head and threw herself clear of the track.

She lay face down, breathing in the smell of dust and metal and gripping on to the northbound track. Her whole body trembled. The first carriage crashed past. People screamed at her, but she couldn’t move. Not yet.

Then there was another sound. Tick-tack, tick-tack. The rails buzzed beneath her fingers. She forced her eyes open, and her heart raced. Another train was screeching into the far end of the station and she was right in its path.

A yell froze in her throat. No time. She shot a glance at the northbound platform. She’d never make it. Behind her, the southbound train was still hurtling past.

There was nowhere to go.

She looked at the space between the two sets of tracks. It was only a few feet wide, but she had no choice. She flung herself down on to the stones separating the north and southbound rails. She knew she had to stay level with the ground. Any mistakes and the trains would slice her in two.

Harry turned her face to one side and stared at the black stones, waiting. Her breathing had almost stopped.

The two trains screamed past each other, catching her in their crossfire as together they blocked out the light. Gusts of air whipped her face. The huge roar of the engines filled her body and made her want to hunch her shoulders and cover her ears. But she had to stay still.

The joint in the rails beside her crick-cracked as each giant wheel pressed down on it. She focused on the undercarriage of the train, a mess of iron blocks and corrugated tubes charging by, inches from her face.

Brakes scraped against the tracks and the carriages hissed, until finally the trains squealed to a halt. Harry lay there trembling. The engines rumbled alongside her, like two old lorries. Her mouth was dry and tasted of iron and coal dust.

Doors slammed. People were screaming. Feet crunched over the stones towards her.

‘Jesus! Miss? You all right?’

Harry closed her eyes. Bad idea. She snapped them open again. The back of her neck felt clammy and the world roared in her ears.

God, she couldn’t faint now.

Strong arms lifted her to her feet, half-carried her across the tracks. More hands grabbed at her, heaving her on to the platform.

‘Get back! Give her room!’

‘Someone call an ambulance!’

Slowly, Harry eased herself up on to her hands and knees. She stayed there on all fours, swaying, as the blood drizzled back into her head. On the ground beside her was her battered satchel. Someone must have retrieved it from the track. She reached out for it, her fingers touching the silver DefCon logo.

Someone put a hand on her arm. ‘Are you okay? Did you … was it an accident?’

Harry swallowed, and thought back to the fist in the small of her back, and the words someone had whispered in her ear before she fell.

The Sorohan money … The ring …

She shivered, looking up into the sea of strangers’ faces. She couldn’t deal with their questions. Not now.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident.’

[7]

‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

Harry shivered and shook her head. ‘I’m not sure of anything right now.’

She closed her eyes and sank lower into the seat of Dillon’s car, trying not to mark the upholstery. Her suit was streaked with grime and black dust, like something that belonged in a skip, and she guessed her face must be the same. Her whole body ached, and her right knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

She peeked at Dillon’s profile. His nose always reminded her of Julius Caesar’s, strong and straight with a high, aristocratic bridge. He was dark, almost as dark as she was, and his six-foot frame slotted easily into the driver’s seat of his Lexus.

‘So come on, tell me again,’ he said. ‘What exactly did this guy say?’

‘It was more of a whisper, really. Sort of rough and sandpapery.’

Dillon turned to look at her. He had a habit of setting his mouth in a straight line, with an upward tuck in one corner as if he was holding back a smile. ‘Okay then, what did he whisper?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it was something like: “The Sorohan money, give it back to the ring.”’

‘But what the hell does it mean?’

Harry shrugged, and examined the palms of her hands. They still stung where the gravel from the railway tracks had dug into her flesh.

‘And he didn’t say anything else?’ Dillon said.

‘There wasn’t time to say anything else. I was falling, remember?’

‘I can’t believe someone tried to push you under a bloody train.’

‘I’m finding it kind of hard to deal with myself. Not sure the police believed me, either.’

A tall young police officer with a bobbing Adam’s apple had arrived at the train station to question her. Someone had wrapped her in a scratchy blanket, and she’d told her story between sips of hot sugary tea. All except for the words that she’d heard before she fell. That would have to keep for a while. When Dillon had phoned and insisted on coming to get her, she’d been glad for once to let someone else take charge.

Dillon swerved to avoid a cyclist and Harry’s stomach flipped, taking a moment to catch up with the rest of her insides. So far, it had been a jerky ride. Dillon alternated between pumping the accelerator and slamming on the brakes, with no real let-up in between. At this rate, she’d be lucky not to get whiplash.

She’d worked for Dillon for less than a year. He’d head-hunted her the previous summer from another software firm, hounding her with the same restless energy he seemed to apply to everything. It was the second time their paths had crossed in the last sixteen years. The first time, she’d only been thirteen.

That seemed so long ago. She leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes, flashing on an image of herself at thirteen: fists clenched, wild hair, caught up in a kind of double life. Come to think of it, maybe she hadn’t changed all that much.

She’d figured out early on in her childhood that she’d need a means of escape to survive her home life. Her solution had been to live two lives: one as the girl she called Harry the Drudge, whose mother opened her letters and read her diaries, and whose father wasn’t around enough to be much of an ally; the other she lived as Pirata, an insomniac who sat in the dark and prowled the electronic underground where she was both powerful and respected.

That was in the late eighties, before the internet had taken off. Pirata spent her time dialling out over slow modem connections to bulletin-board systems, electronic message centres where people shared ideas and downloaded hacker tools. By the time she was eleven, she’d taught herself how to penetrate almost any kind of system. She trespassed lightly, never pilfering, never causing harm. But by the time she was thirteen, she was ready to take things to the next level.

Harry could still remember the night she did it. The room had been dark, the only light a greenish glow from her computer screen. It was two o’clock in the morning and she was war dialling, programming her computer to make continuous phone calls until it found a number that allowed it to connect. She sat curled up in her chair, hugging her knees for warmth, listening to the thin screech of the modem as it dialled and disconnected. She wasn’t worried about her parents waking up to find her. They were too busy with their own problems to pay much attention to her.

Suddenly she’d had a hit. The caterwaul of chatty modems was unmistakable. Another computer out there had answered her. She straightened up, tapped out a command on the keyboard and hit Enter. Almost immediately the other computer spat back a message that made her clap a hand over her mouth.

WARNING! You have accessed a Dublin Stock Exchange computer system. Unauthorized access is prohibited and can result in disciplinary proceedings.

Harry had curled her feet back up under her and chewed her fingernail. Up until now, the highest profile network she’d ever invaded belonged to the University College of Dublin. Security there was lax, mainly because there was no confidential data lying around. The Stock Exchange, on the other hand, had to be crackling with sensitive information. She knew she should disconnect. Instead, she swung her feet to the ground and yanked her chair in closer to the keyboard.

She could tell by the characteristic ‘Username:’ prompt that the operating system was VMS. This was both good and bad. On the one hand, there were many ways to circumvent VMS security once she was logged in. On the other hand, logging in without a valid username and password wasn’t going to be easy. And to make matters worse, she’d be disconnected after three bad attempts.

Her fingers hovered over the keys while she considered some likely account names and passwords. Best to stick to the obvious. She typed in ‘system’. At the ‘Password:’ prompt, she typed ‘manager’, and hit Enter. Immediately the ‘Username:’ prompt re-appeared, challenging her to try again.

Strike one.

Next she tried ‘system’ and ‘operator’.

Strike two.

She had one shot left. She flexed her fingers and in her mind ran through the passwords that had worked for her in the past: ‘syslib’, ‘sysmaint’, ‘operator’. All were good bets, but there were no guarantees. Even the username ‘system’ might be wrong.

Then another possibility struck her; she shook her head – no chance. But it was so unlikely, she decided to give it a try. She typed in the username ‘guest’, left the password blank and hit Enter. A message unravelled on the screen:

Welcome to the Dublin Stock Exchange VAX server.

And there on the next line, waiting politely for her instructions, was the coveted VMS $ prompt. She was logged in.

She sat back and grinned. Administrators would sometimes create an unprotected ‘Guest’ account for new or infrequent users, but the practice was highly insecure. She was beginning to realize that the weakest point in any system was a lazy administrator.

She rolled up the sleeves of her pyjamas and started to type, sidestepping security blocks and dodging her way further into the system. Every time one of her commands outwitted the other computer, she bounced up and down in her chair.

When she figured out that she was inside a database server, she wiggled a thumbs-up sign at the screen. Goody. Databases were full of interesting information. She rummaged through the files. The records seemed to represent financial transactions of some kind, but the details made little sense to her. Then she found a list of vaguely familiar acronyms: NLD, CHF, DEM, HKD. It wasn’t until she saw ESP in the list and recognized it as the symbol for the Spanish peseta that she understood what she was looking at. Foreign currency symbols. She must have stumbled on records of foreign exchange trades.

Harry scanned the data and blinked when she saw the sums of money involved. So many zeros. She itched to leave her mark, to let them know she’d been there. What harm could it do? With a flurry of fingers, she added a couple of zeros to some of the smaller trades.

Then she backtracked out of the system, shut down her modem connection and scampered into bed. But she couldn’t sleep. She’d slipped a little further into the black-hat world, and now she wondered what she’d started.

She didn’t have long to wait before she found out. The Stock Exchange discovered the security breach and recruited the services of an independent consultant to trace the source. The expert they hired was a twenty-one-year-old graduate who was a crackerjack in software security. It took him just a week to track her down.

His name was Dillon Fitzroy.

[8]

‘Tell me about KWC.’

Harry dragged her gaze away from the traffic and saw that Dillon was looking at her. KWC. Had that only been today?

She squirmed and made a face. ‘I screwed up.’

Dillon frowned. ‘What happened?’

‘In my defence, they were a bunch of jerks.’ Then she thought of Jude Tiernan, and something pecked at her conscience. Maybe she’d given him an unnecessarily hard time. ‘One of them had a go at me about my father. I got a bit, well …’

‘Don’t tell me. Mouthy?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shit, Harry, that could have been an important account. I had to pull favours to get that meeting.’

‘Hey, you’re the one who prescribed the cathartic therapy, remember?’

He sighed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll call them, see if I can patch things up.’

Harry didn’t answer. She let her head sink back against the seat and closed her eyes again. Her neck had started to ache and she guessed her body was covered in livid bruises that would hurt like hell in the morning.

‘You shouldn’t be alone tonight,’ Dillon said. ‘You’re still in shock.’

She kept her eyes closed. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Come back to my house. I’ve got brandy, food and a change of clothes, strictly in that order.’

Harry shot him a quick look. She’d never been to his home, but, according to Imogen’s sources, he lived in a gracious mansion in the Enniskerry countryside. Her sources also had him pegged as resolutely single, so Harry wondered where the change of women’s clothes would come from.

Under other circumstances, she might have allowed her curiosity to get the better of her, but right now, all she wanted was to close her apartment door behind her and think.

‘Thanks, but I’d be bad company,’ she said. ‘I just need to sleep.’

She felt his eyes scrutinize her face.

‘You know what he meant, don’t you?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The guy in the train station, the Sorohan money, all that stuff.’ He flicked her a look in between watching the road. ‘It means something to you, doesn’t it?’

She shook her head and forced a shrug. ‘It was just some nutter.’

He regarded her for a moment, and then snapped his attention back to the traffic. ‘Suit yourself.’

His face had shut down on her. Hell. But she couldn’t do anything about it now. There were some aspects of her life she just wasn’t ready to open up about yet. At least not until she understood them better herself.

Dillon swung right into Raglan Road. Harry’s tension began to melt as they drove down the familiar tree-lined avenue. Victorian red-bricks stood guard on either side, some of them restored to elegant family homes but most converted into apartments. You could tell which ones were rented by the cracked paint on the sash windows.

Dillon peered out at them. ‘Which one is yours?’

Harry pointed to a corner house with a canary-yellow door. She’d smartened it up herself with a fresh coat of paint the week before. One of these days she’d buy her landlord out. Her profession paid well, and she’d accumulated enough savings now to start thinking about a mortgage.

Dillon slammed to a dead stop, scuffing the kerb. Harry hauled herself up out of the car and led the way through the front door.

The building had a basement and three floors, and Harry lived in an apartment at ground level. It had once been an elegant drawing room where butlers served tea. Now it was a place where Harry ate breakfast in bed any time she felt like it.

She trudged down the hall, aware of Dillon’s presence like a stalker behind her. They reached her apartment, and Harry froze. The door was open.

She edged up to the threshold, hesitating. Dillon stood behind her, looking in over her shoulder.

‘Oh my God,’ he said.

Her apartment looked as though a pack of wild dogs had been cooped up in it for ten days. Her sofa had been slashed, the black leather ripped apart to expose chunks of yellow sponge. All her paperbacks had been swept from the shelves and lay in slippery piles on the floor.

Harry took a deep breath. She stepped inside and picked her way through the carnage in the room. It was like wandering amongst the bodies of old friends. The mirror from over the fireplace had been hurled to the floor, the glass smashed. Her only picture, a playful print of dogs playing poker, had been wrenched away from the wall, splitting the plaster where the nail had been. The print lay propped up against the mutilated sofa, its brown-paper seal gouged out at the back. Harry stared at it, her arms hugging her chest.

Dillon’s voice called out from the kitchen: ‘Take a look at this.’

She dragged herself over to join him, her shoes making a crunching sound on the flagstones. It turned out to be sugar from a bag that had been dumped upside down on the floor, along with everything else from her kitchen cupboards.

Harry gaped. The entire contents of her kitchen – tins, saucepans, jars, food from the fridge – had been piled in the centre of the floor. The cutlery drawers had been upturned and chucked on to the heap. The cupboard doors stood wide open, empty shelves exposed. It was like a crazed attack of spring-cleaning.

Harry sank back against the doorframe. Jesus, who would do this? Dillon circled the mound of food, shaking his head. She sighed and trudged back along the corridor to check her bedroom. It was in the same disarray as the rest of the apartment; drawers ransacked, clothes strewn about. She’d never wear any of them again.

The red light blinked on her bedside phone, a mute demand for attention. She noticed a familiar, well-worn book that had landed face down on her bed. It was spread open so wide that its spine had cracked, and it lay there like a broken bird. She picked it up and some of the pages fluttered out. It was a book her father had given her when she was twelve: How to Play Poker and Win. On the inside covers, front and back, was a series of annotations written in blue marker. They recorded some of the poker games she’d played with her father. It was a habit she’d learned from him. After every hand, he’d make detailed notes, jotting down the cards that had been played. He never forgot a hand, and he never got beaten by the same bluff twice.

She’d been six or seven years old when her father first started taking her to his poker games, often staying out till three or four in the morning. She’d picked up some of her best swear words at those games. Usually she’d end up asleep on a sofa, her eyes smarting from cigarette smoke. Later, as a teenager, he’d brought her to London to visit the casinos in Soho and Piccadilly. At the time it had all seemed grown-up and exciting, but in retrospect it was just bad parenting.

She turned over the flyleaf of the poker book in her hand. The inscription was still there, as she’d known it would be.

A mi queridísima Harry,

Never be predictable. Play a random game and keep ’em guessing, but always fold on a 7-2 offsuit.

Un abrazo muy fuerte,

Papá

She smoothed her thumb along the broad handwriting. Then she closed the covers and cradled the book with both hands so that the pages wouldn’t split.

Dillon poked his head round the door. ‘Your office and bathroom are both trashed.’

Harry swore. She’d seen enough. She slapped the book on her bedside locker and marched back out to the living room, ignoring her throbbing knee.

Dillon followed her. ‘I’ll call the police.’

‘It’s okay, I’ll do it.’

Dillon paced up and down the room while she phoned her local police station. She reported the details to a sympathetic sergeant who said they’d send someone round. Then she snapped the phone shut and burrowed under the pile of books on the floor till she found the Golden Pages directory.

Dillon stopped his pacing to watch her. ‘Now what?’

‘Locksmith.’ She flipped her phone open again and had a businesslike conversation with Express Locksmiths, who assured her that an engineer would be out in ten minutes. Harry could feel her energy levels pick up. Absurd how a burst of activity could fool you into thinking you were in control.

She perched against the sofa and massaged her neck and shoulders. They felt stiff and bruised, as though she was headed for a bout of flu. Then she remembered the blinking light in her bedroom, and went back to listen to her messages. There was only one. She recognized her mother’s throaty voice, made low and fruity from years of heavy smoking.

‘Harry, it’s Miriam.’

There was a pause as she heard her mother pull on a cigarette. Harry had been addressing her mother by her Christian name since the day she’d left school. It was as though by unspoken mutual agreement the mother–daughter dynamic had dissolved once she’d turned eighteen.

‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day, and all I get is this wretched machine,’ Miriam continued. ‘Could you please take a minute to pick up the phone and call me.’

Harry closed her eyes and fixed her lips in a tight line. Then she jabbed at the delete button and returned to the living room, where Dillon was still on patrol.

She looked at her watch. ‘It’s late. You head on home, there’s no need to stay.’

Dillon waved a hand at her. ‘I’m staying.’

She felt a tiny squeezing sensation in her chest and realized she was glad to have him there. Then she looked at the destruction all around her, and dared herself to cross a line.

‘Is that offer of brandy still open?’ Her voice had come out a little louder than she’d planned.

Dillon turned to look at her with his tucked-in smile. ‘’Course it is. Let’s make it a double. You’ve had a rough day.’

He came to a sudden stop next to the damaged painting, and bent down to examine it. He poked his hand through the rent in the backing board. ‘Why would anyone do this?’

Harry shrugged and shook her head.

Dillon scanned the room. ‘This whole place – it’s like they were looking for something.’

Harry threw him a sharp look. ‘It strikes you that way, does it?’

‘Doesn’t it seem like that to you?’

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. They felt gritty. ‘Yeah, but I was hoping I was wrong.’

She eased herself off the arm of the sofa and made her way over to the kitchen, keeping the weight off her bad knee. She leaned against the door jamb and stared at the incongruous heap on the floor.

What the hell were they after?

Then she thought of the man in the train station, of his hot breath against her ear, and shuddered.

[9]

‘So what did you find?’ Leon said.

He swallowed and ran a finger along the inside of his collar. He was leaning against the back door of O’Dowd’s pub, hunched over his phone as if he had cramps.

‘Nothing,’ came the reply. ‘I told you it’d be a waste of fuckin’ time.’

Voices roared from the bar at the other end of the passageway. In spite of the draught seeping in from the street outside, Leon was sweating.

‘Are you sure?’ Leon said.

‘Course I’m fuckin’ sure. I tore the whole place up, just for the crack, but there’s nothing there.’ There was a pause. ‘So when do I get paid?’

‘Stop worrying about your money, okay? You’ll get paid.’

Someone opened the door of the nearby Gents’ toilet, and Leon caught a whiff of disinfectant and stale urine. He turned his face to the wall and lowered his voice.

‘Just stick with her. I want to know everything she does. But don’t get too close. Blow your cover, and the deal’s off.’

He disconnected the call and moved over to a door marked private. He stood in front of it, rubbing his hands along his trouser legs. Then he eased open the door and stepped inside.

The room was the size of a prison cell and just about as well decorated. Light from a single overhead bulb bleached the walls and carpet of any colour. The door closed behind him with a thunk, blocking out all sound as though he’d been sucked into a vacuum. He stepped over to the green baize table where four other people were seated.

‘Come on, Leon, are you in or what?’ The dealer scowled at him, his sun-damaged skin corrugated with wrinkles. His name was Mattie, and Leon heard he spent most of his life crewing other people’s yachts in the Mediterranean. The rest of the time he played poker.

Leon nodded and resumed his seat on Mattie’s right. He slumped in the chair and closed his eyes, squeezing the bridge of his nose. The only sound was the slick-slick of the cards being dealt.

He hadn’t expected the girl’s apartment to be clean. There had to be a record of the money somewhere. Where the hell was she hiding it?

Mattie slapped the deck on the table beside him. Leon straightened up and tried to concentrate on the game. Being distracted was no way to play high-stakes poker.

They were playing no-limit Texas Hold ’Em. Each player was dealt two cards face down, which he had to combine with five communal cards to make a poker hand. Usually it was Leon’s favourite game, every betting round another opportunity to coax money out of some loser’s pocket. But tonight it felt as though he was the loser. And if he didn’t win the next hand, he was fucked.

He slid his two cards towards him, lining up their edges, one on top of the other. He peeked at the bottom card. King of spades. He glanced around the table but no one was paying him any attention. He squeezed the top card out from behind the first, just enough to see one corner of it. Another king. His heartbeat broke into a little canter and he worked hard not to let it show.

The player on Leon’s right tossed a handful of chips into the centre of the table. ‘Raise a grand.’

Leon threw him a sharp look. The guy was built like a professional wrestler, with grey hair scraped back into a ponytail that reached halfway down his back. His face was unreadable.

Leon made a show of playing with his chips, but he didn’t stall for long. With kings back to back in the hole, he intended to hit them hard. ‘Yours plus another thousand.’

Mattie shook his head and flung his cards on the table. The old bald guy to his left consulted his hole cards and consigned them to the muck along with Mattie’s.

Next up was Adele, the only woman at the table. Leon had played with her before. Blonde and in her forties, she always dressed in a smart business suit and played a tight game. She studied Leon’s face for a moment and called his raise.

Leon waited for the Wrestler to decide if he was in or out. What the hell did he have? Leon was in no mood to work it out. Sal Martinez could have done the maths in an instant, but that kind of stuff made Leon’s head hurt. All he knew was the pot was now over eight thousand euros, and he needed to win it badly.

It didn’t help that he was playing almost entirely with his clients’ money. A couple of businesses whose accounts he’d audited had sent him cheques for owed income tax, cheques that Leon was supposed to submit to the Revenue Commissioners. Somehow the money had made an unplanned pit-stop in his own pocket. Just for a few days.

The Wrestler’s chips clattered into the centre of the table. ‘Call.’

Leon took a deep breath and flexed his shoulders. He could hear the bones cracking at the base of his neck. Mattie flicked the three flop cards face up on the table, the first of the five communal cards. A king, a three and a five, all different suits. Electricity surged through Leon’s veins. Now he had three kings.

Adele checked, and didn’t look happy about it. The Wrestler was up next. With hands the size of baseball gloves, he grabbed a fistful of chips and raised by two thousand euros.

Leon examined the other man’s face. The features were immobile, all apart from a tiny pulse in one eyelid that jumped like a sand flea. It was all Leon needed. He knew that at best the guy was holding a three and a five, giving him two pair. It didn’t beat trip kings.

There were two more cards to come. Should he call or risk another raise? Play the man, not the cards, Martinez would’ve said. But then Martinez was a pretty loose player. Leon had seen him win half a million in a single pot, only to lose it minutes later on a bluff with a pair of threes.

Fuck it, self-confidence was half the game. Leon raised another three grand.

Adele chucked her cards on the table and settled in to watch the rest of the hand. The Wrestler took his time. He riffled his chips, separating them into tall stacks and then splicing them back together with a flick of his jumbo-sized fingers.

‘Call,’ he said finally, challenging Leon with a long stare. ‘Just you and me now.’

Leon didn’t like the smug look on his face. By now there was nearly twenty thousand euros in the pot, and eight thousand of it belonged to him. Or more precisely, to his clients.

Leon’s stomach curdled. Christ. Reduced to pilfering funds from lousy shopkeepers. What the fuck happened? Nine years ago he was making millions, trading on nuggets of inside information. Between them, he and the rest of the trading ring had made over twenty-five million euros in a single year. Sweet deals, every one of them. Until the Sorohan deal, of course. That fucking Martinez.

He took a deep breath, trying to focus on the game. He still hadn’t shaved and he could smell the sourness of his own body. Time for the turn, the fourth communal card. Mattie flipped it over on the table. Another five. Leon sat still. The table now showed a king, a three and two fives. It gave Leon a full house of kings and fives.

The Wrestler pushed a stack of chips into the pot. ‘Five thousand.’

Leon saw the tightening around the other man’s mouth and knew he was still ahead. The Wrestler could be making trip fives, maybe filling a house with threes, but not much else. He called.

Now for the river, the fifth and final card. Leon watched as Mattie rolled a five.

Shit. Now there were three fives on the table. He searched the Wrestler’s face, looking for tells. Could he possibly be holding the last five?

The Wrestler’s forehead glistened in the overhead light. He looked like a melting waxwork. He shoved out the biggest stack yet. Six thousand euros. The middle of the table was beginning to look like a model tower-block city.

Leon gazed at the pot. There was now over thirty-five thousand in there. He almost whimpered out loud. He knew that the thirteen thousand he had contributed was no longer his. It belonged to the pot, and to defend it with more of his own money would be downright stupid. The wise man would fold and walk away.

Leon scooped up his last remaining chips and piled them high in the pot. ‘Call.’

He locked eyes with the Wrestler. Time to reveal their hole cards. The Wrestler went first. Almost in slow motion, he turned over his top card. The three of clubs. So far, that just gave him a house of fives and threes. Leon’s back was drenched in sweat. He stared, transfixed by the second card. The Wrestler rolled it over. The five of diamonds. The only card in the deck that could beat him.

Leon sank back into his chair. Four unbeatable fucking fives. Nausea roiled like an eel in his stomach. His head started to pound, and his vision turned blurry at the edges. That fucking Martinez prick – he’d brought him to this. He’d ruined everything. Leon ground his teeth and choked back a howl of rage. That girl of his deserved everything that was coming to her.

[10]

‘ETA fifteen minutes,’ Dillon said.

From the way he gunned the engine, Harry could well believe it. He swerved into the outside lane and she gripped the door handle with both hands. If he noticed she was bracing herself for impact, he didn’t mention it.

The Lexus coasted along the open motorway and soon she felt her limbs relax. The car was warm, the murmur of the engine hypnotic. Harry closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest.

She’d spent over an hour with the police in her apartment. Two officers had arrived, one the same young Garda who’d spoken to her in Pearse Station, the other a plainclothes detective who hadn’t been introduced. The younger one did all the talking. The other had just watched her with quiet grey eyes as she answered questions about the break-in and explained again how she fell in front of a train.

Harry shifted in the passenger seat. Her legs grew heavy and she felt herself drifting. By the time she opened her eyes again it was pitch-dark, and the motorway had turned into a narrow country road lined with thick hedges.

Dillon slowed the car and rolled in through a pair of wrought-iron gates. ‘We’re here.’

Harry peered out the window. Electric lanterns lined the driveway up to the front door. Light splashed upwards along trees and bushes, illuminating everything from below like theatre footlights.

Dillon crunched to a halt and Harry hoisted herself out of the car, gazing at the house that took centre stage in front of them. It was shaped like a gigantic L, with a steeply pitched roof and dormer windows perched along the top like eyes. She could smell the fragrant cedar incense from the conifers that stood on sentry duty by the front door.

‘Like it?’ Dillon said.

Harry looked back at him. He was watching her with a self-satisfied smile, clearly enjoying her reaction to his magnificent home.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you showing off?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. What can I say? No point in having money if you don’t know how to spend it.’ Then he guided her towards the door, his palm brushing against the small of her back. ‘Come on, let’s get you that brandy.’

The entrance hall was the size of her entire apartment. Dillon led the way to a room at the back of the house. Harry hesitated, suddenly aware of how she must look.

‘Maybe I should take that bath first. I feel sort of grubby.’

Dillon’s phone rang before he could reply. He checked the caller ID.

‘It’s Ashford, from KWC. You’d better hang on.’ He took the call. ‘Dillon Fitzroy.’

He stared at the floor, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone. Harry tried to read his face, and something squirmed inside her as she imagined what Ashford had to say. Then she remembered Felix’s belligerence and stuck her chin in the air.

‘Thanks, that’s very understanding of you.’ Dillon threw her a wry look. ‘Unfortunately, Harry’s been in a bit of an accident, but I’ll put another engineer on to it first thing Monday morning.’

Dillon winced at the response on the other end of the phone. Harry flapped her hands to object. Dammit, she could finish the job. But Dillon ignored her.

‘No, no, she’s fine, nothing serious.’ He shot a look in her direction, his expression puzzled. ‘Yes, I’m sure. No, she’s not in hospital. She’ll be available to hand things over to Imogen Brady on Monday.’

Dillon began to wind up the call and finally disconnected. He stared at her.

Harry kept her chin in the air. ‘I can do the pen test.’

‘Let’s not push it, okay?’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was full of apologies for today, said none of it was your fault.’ He folded his arms and considered her for a moment. ‘He seemed very concerned for your welfare. Quite shocked to hear you were in an accident. Do you two know each other?’

Harry frowned and shook her head. Then her brow cleared. ‘He knew my father. Old pals, apparently.’

‘Ah.’ Dillon checked his watch. ‘I need to make some calls. You take that bath. Upstairs, second room on the left. The wardrobe has plenty of clothes.’ He stepped into the room behind him and was gone.

Harry made her way up the stairs, checking out her appearance in the mirrors that lined the walls. Bed-hair, black streaks on her face and crumpled clothes. She looked like a teenage runaway up to no good.

Harry found the bedroom and closed the door behind her. Her eyes swept the room and she whistled. She’d stayed in five-star hotels that weren’t as plush as this. She flung her satchel on the queen-sized bed, and was about to stretch out alongside it when her phone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, this is Sandra Nagle from Sheridan Bank Customer Services. Am I speaking with Ms Harry Martinez?’

Harry yanked the phone away from her ear as though she’d been scorched. Shit. The helpdesk supervisor she’d tangled with that afternoon. Had she tracked her down and called her to bawl her out? Then she remembered the woman couldn’t see her and put the phone back to her ear.

‘Ms Martinez?’

‘Sorry, yeah, that’s me.’ Harry perched on the edge of the bed.

‘Our reports have shown up a slight anomaly on your current account. I need to check some of the details with you, if I may?’

Harry blinked. ‘Anomaly?’

‘I just need to confirm the size of the lodgement you made today.’

‘What lodgement?’

There was a pause. ‘Our records show that twelve million euros was lodged into your current account this afternoon.’

Harry’s eyes widened. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Is the amount incorrect?’

Was she out of her mind? ‘Of course it’s incorrect. I didn’t make any lodgements.’

‘Perhaps it was lodged by a third party.’

A third party. Something cold dropped into Harry’s stomach. ‘I don’t know anything about that money. Surely your records must show where it came from?’

Sandra cleared her throat. ‘Well, that’s the slight anomaly, I’m afraid.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Our records seem to be incomplete. Your recent transactions are on the screen here in front of me, and the lodgement is there, but it’s not coming up with any other information. Usually we can tell whether it’s a cheque, an online transfer and so on, but that part is blank.’

‘Doesn’t it tell you anything? A branch number? A name?’

‘No, just the amount. Twelve million.’

Harry flopped back down on to the bed. What the hell was going on?

‘That twelve million euros doesn’t belong to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it in my bank account.’

She could almost hear the other woman draw herself up.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do anything about that,’ Sandra said. ‘The money has been credited to your account.’

‘This is ridiculous.’ Harry closed her eyes and massaged the bridge of her nose. ‘People don’t just lodge twelve million euros without leaving some kind of record. Don’t you have any limit checks on what goes in and out of your bank? Wouldn’t someone query an amount like this?’

‘Normally, yes, which is why I’m on the phone to you now.’ Sandra’s teeth sounded clenched. ‘There’s obviously some problem with these transaction details. I’ll put the system-support team on it straight away. But in the meantime, the money stays in your account.’

‘Can you send me out a bank statement? I’d like to see a record of this.’

‘Of course.’ The woman was all service.

Harry hung up. Then she grabbed her satchel and whipped out her laptop, hooking it into a phone jack in the wall. Within minutes she was online, logged into her Sheridan bank account. She clicked the balance option and stared at the screen. Then she refreshed the web page, checking it again. Same answer.

€12,000,120.42

Harry sank back on to the velvety bed. It had to be a mistake, a hitch in the bank’s paperwork. These things happened, didn’t they?

She examined the palms of her hands. The cuts from the gravel were like a row of teeth marks. She sighed and sat up. Who the hell was she fooling? She may not want to face it, but everything that had happened today just had to be connected. And her gut told her the connection was her father. If she was honest with herself, she’d known it from the minute the guy in the station had whispered in her ear. Sorohan was a name that had resonated with significance for her ever since her father’s arrest.

She remembered the newspaper headlines: Insider Trading Ring Exposed Over Sorohan Fraud; KWC Ring Leader Charged by Stock Exchange. A hard knot burned inside her chest. That was almost eight years ago: 7th June 2001, to be precise. The day the shutters had slammed down for good between herself and her father.

But who the hell would lodge twelve million euros into her account? Not her father, surely. He was locked up in Arbour Hill prison, and she doubted that online banking was a facility the inmates enjoyed. She slammed her laptop shut. Not only had someone stashed a chunk of money in her account, but somehow they’d done it without leaving any tracks. It didn’t make sense.

She pushed herself up off the bed and trudged into the en-suite bathroom. Too tired to deal with a complicated-looking Jacuzzi shower, she made straight for the sunken bath in the corner and spun the taps on to full blast.

Harry stripped off her clothes and surveyed herself in the full-length mirror. Her legs were splotched with dark bruises, like blackening bananas. Her sooty face was hollow-eyed and anxious, with grazes along the cheeks. She looked like one of those waifs they used to send up chimneys.

She lowered herself into the steaming water an inch at a time. Then she closed her eyes and let her mind drift. She found herself thinking, not of her father nor of the twelve million euros, but of Dillon. And not the Dillon who was downstairs on the phone cutting a deal, but the boy of twenty-one who had once sat in her bedroom and held her by the hand.

[11]

‘Why do you want to hack?’

Thirteen-year-old Harry groped for an answer that would impress this dark, good-looking boy with the half-smile. She couldn’t think of one, so she just told the truth.

‘Because I can.’

She waited for his reaction, but there was none. Instead he seemed absorbed by the collection of soldering irons and screwdrivers that littered her bedroom shelves. He was dressed all in black, like a young priest, and his hair fell in a heavy fringe over thick brows. If only she wasn’t wearing her brown school uniform and ugly lace-up shoes.

Her mother had shown him up to her room, acting as though the FBI had landed on their doorstep. When he’d introduced himself as Dillon Fitzroy, an investigator with the Dublin Stock Exchange, a whisper of fear had tickled Harry’s spine.

She watched as he picked up one of the screwdrivers and tapped the business end against one hand.

‘So tell me, why Pirata?’ he said, referring to her hacker pseudonym.

‘Pi-rrata,’ corrected Harry, pronouncing the word with a rolling ‘r’ and rapid-fire delivery. ‘It’s Spanish for pirate.’

It suddenly sounded childish, but he nodded as though this were a sensible choice. He held her gaze, compressing his mouth into a neat smile. ‘Is it okay if I ask you these questions?’

She nodded and felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She sat down on the bed and glared at her chunky shoes, willing her fiery colour to subside. She was acutely aware of her mother standing on the other side of the door, listening to every word.

Dillon’s eyes swept the room, taking in the jumble of dismantled computer hardware and gutted radios. ‘Are you building something?’

She attempted a casual shrug. ‘Put me in a room with a box that has wires in it and I’ll take it apart.’ Then she bit her lip, regretting the flippant attitude. She was in trouble here, and she knew it.

Dillon wheeled out the chair from under her desk. There was a large red parcel on the seat. Harry snatched it out of his way and cradled it on her lap. He sat down facing her, arms folded.

‘You understand why I’m here, don’t you?’ he said.

Now they were getting to it. She stared at the floor. ‘Yeah.’

‘Mind if I take a look?’ He gestured towards her PC.

She shook her head, but he’d already turned round to face the screen. His fingers sped across the keyboard. Harry edged further along the bed until she was close enough to see what he was doing. Text flew up the screen as he browsed through her files and checked out her hacking tools.

‘Nice house you live in,’ he said, without looking at her.

Harry raised her eyebrows. ‘I suppose. We’ve only been here a year.’ She looked at the frothy white curtains and the lacy bed linen. It was a princess’s room. Absurd that she should still miss the poky converted attic she’d shared with Amaranta, with its narrow divans and the skipping rope her sister had stretched along the floor to demarcate her territory. But her dad had got this new job. Her mother harped on about how badly the Schrodinger job had ended, but her dad said this time everything would be different. He was right about that.

She turned back to Dillon to find him watching her. His gaze flicked over her school uniform and came to rest on the shoes that made her look like she had club feet. She closed her eyes in mortification.

‘Did you move schools too?’ he said, turning his attention back to her files.

Something gnawed at her insides the minute she thought about school. She shrugged, and made the kind of face that said it was no big deal.

‘Yeah, but I can handle it. Except all they talk about are skiing holidays and designer clothes.’ She lowered her voice and nodded towards the door. ‘Mum thinks I should be making more friends.’

‘Mums are hard to please.’

She darted a quick look at him. There was no hint of mockery in his dark eyes.

He indicated the package on her lap. ‘Christmas present?’

She shoved the parcel to one side. ‘It’s for my dad. Haven’t given it to him yet.’

‘He’s away?’

‘He played poker on Christmas Eve. He’ll probably turn up in a day or two.’

Dillon stopped what he was doing. ‘He missed Christmas?’

Harry shrugged. ‘He misses most Christmases.’

Dillon was silent for a moment. She shoved the parcel on to the bed, the contents rattling. She’d bought her father a full poker set: six hundred plastic chips, two decks of cards and a thick rule book, all stored in their own shiny black case. She’d saved up for it for months.

Dillon turned his attention back to the screen. His eyes narrowed as he worked through one of her files, and Harry peered at the screen to see what had caught his interest. It was the code for one of the hacker tools she had designed herself.

With a staccato flick of the keys, Dillon snapped the file shut and opened up another one. He scrolled down through it, and then stopped to examine it line by line. He gave a low whistle, his eyes riveted to the screen.

He pointed to a line in the code. ‘What’s this bit doing?’

Harry read through it and then started to explain her design, the words tumbling over each other in her impatience to communicate her ideas. She had to lean across him to reach the keyboard, and she became aware of the warmth of his body and the light spicy soap that he used.

When she finished, he looked at her for a long moment, his eyes searching her face. ‘Did you do all this yourself?’

‘Yes.’ Harry took a deep breath. ‘Can I ask you a question now?’

‘Sure.’ His eyes never left hers.

‘How did you find me?’

‘That was easy. You posted too many details of your exploit on the bulletin boards. Security guys monitor those things all the time, you know. Stay online long enough and we can track you down, too.’

Harry felt like an idiot. So simple. She’d been careless. But then, she wasn’t used to hiding.

Dillon tapped a few keys and closed down her files. Then he spun the chair so that he was facing her. He picked up the screwdriver again and began turning it end over end on the desk.

‘You interfered with trading records belonging to the Dublin Stock Exchange,’ he said. ‘Do you know what happened when they found the error?’

‘No.’

‘The database administrator almost lost his job.’ Dillon leaned forward, his face stern. ‘He’s only twenty-four and his wife is pregnant.’

Harry hung her head. Her skin crawled as though she had a nasty rash. ‘I didn’t think. It seemed such a small thing to do.’

Dillon shook his head. ‘You’re not just messing with computers here, you’re screwing up people’s lives.’

She couldn’t look at him. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So tell me about the other systems you’ve damaged.’

She jerked her head up. ‘But I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t damage things, I just look around.’

He watched her for a moment. She couldn’t tell if he believed her. Then he tossed the screwdriver on to the desk with a clatter and folded his arms, as though he’d made up his mind.

‘Okay, I’ve seen how you hack,’ he said. ‘Now I want to know why.’

‘But I’ve told you why.’

‘No, you haven’t. Your answer was a cop-out. Tell me again. Why do you want to hack?’

Harry’s mind went blank. What kind of answer was he looking for? She felt as if she was back at school, with the teacher asking a series of questions designed to lead her to a single answer. But what was it?

She tried to analyse how she felt when she started an exploit. ‘Okay, well, maybe I love to break into things and be somewhere I shouldn’t.’

‘So you like taking risks. Why? Does it make you feel powerful?’

Harry thought of the way the hairs stood to attention on the back of her neck whenever she felt close to cracking a system. She thought of the exhilaration that pumped into her bloodstream like a drug as she unlocked the final door into someone’s network. He was right. Hacking made her feel powerful in a way no other part of her life ever could. But there was something else.

She shook her head. ‘That’s part of it, I suppose. But mostly I just don’t believe people when they tell me I can’t break into a system. Just because it says it in the manual doesn’t make it true.’ She rubbed her nose, as if that would unscramble her thoughts. ‘I know there’s always a way in, if I stick at it long enough.’

‘So it’s about the technology? You want to find out what makes it tick?’

‘Yeah, in a way. It’s like … I dunno.’ She looked into his face. ‘It’s like finding the truth.’

Dillon’s eyes glowed and he sat very still. ‘That’s exactly what hacking is all about. The search for truth.’

Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him. His face was inches from hers.

‘People think hacking is all about destruction, but nothing could be wider of the mark. It’s about exploring the technology, about pushing it to its limits and sharing the knowledge. A true hacker expands his mind beyond what’s in the books or what he’s been taught. He finds a way to do things when conventional thinking fails.’ Dillon locked eyes with hers. ‘Hacking is good. It’s people that are bad.’

He grasped her hands in his. A flash of heat shot through her and something jolted inside her chest.

‘Think of hacking as an attitude,’ he said. ‘We don’t just hack computers, we hack our whole lives.’ He squeezed her hands, pumping them for emphasis, and his eyes burned into hers. ‘Never let yourself be limited by what other people tell you. Never accept their version of how things have to be.’

Harry listened, mesmerized. Limited. That described how she felt every minute of her day. Boxed in by her mother, who was always so disappointed in her; labelled at school where she failed to measure up. With a flash of insight, Harry realized he was telling her how to cope with her life.

Without warning, Dillon dropped her hands and sat back, as though suddenly embarrassed at his own intensity. ‘End of lecture. Thanks for talking to me.’ He jumped to his feet and headed for the door. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

Harry stood up, dizzy at the sudden change. ‘But wait – what happens now?’

Dillon shrugged. ‘Probably nothing. I’ll need to inform your parents about everything you’ve been doing, but no one’s going to prosecute a thirteen-year-old girl. Do it again though, and you’ll be in trouble.’

He stood with his hand on the doorknob and looked over at her, his eyes still slightly feverish. ‘Someday I’ll have my own company, with the best engineers in the country.’ His lips twitched, and he winked at her. ‘Stay out of jail long enough and maybe I’ll hire you.’

[12]

Cameron stood outside the wrought-iron gates. The girl was inside the house, and had been there for almost an hour. He pressed himself up against the bars. He badly needed to finish what he’d started.

He dug his fingernails into his palms. The train station had been such a fuck-up. She’d been so light, like a child. But the instant he’d broken contact with her, the mob of commuters had barged in front of him, blocking his view. He’d heard the shrieking trains, seen them crashing by. But the crowd had robbed him of the sight of her fear.

Without that, it wasn’t finished.

He peered through the gate. The driveway looked like a landing strip with all those fucking lights. He made out the shape of the house ahead, two lit windows glowing in the dark. He leaned his face against the cold metal and imagined the girl in one of those rooms. Heat filled his groin.

But he’d been told to back off.

He shook the railings, testing their strength. They stretched at least twelve feet into the air, welded on either side to a concrete wall that rolled away into the shadowy road. A pole-mounted surveillance camera rotated above him, panning its way down the driveway back towards the gate. Cameron ducked to one side, out of its line of sight. Houses like this were all the same. Prison walls, fence-mounted sensors, infra-red cameras. Maximum perimeter protection. For all the good it did them. There was always a way inside.

He began to circle the property wall, trailing his hand against the ivy that had stitched itself into the brickwork. He could smell the damp woodiness of the forest around him. Something rustled in the undergrowth, a small mammal on the move. Cameron reached a side gate and gazed again at the long L-shaped house. How spectacular it would look swallowed up in flames.

But he’d been told no fire. Not yet.

Not many people understood fire the way Cameron did. Mostly they were afraid of it. But Cameron had spent time getting close to flames, so close that he could almost touch their trembling colours and slender tongues.

He moved further along the wall, caressing the ivy leaves. Trapping someone in fire was so much more satisfying than shoving them in front of a truck. You got to stay in the shadows and watch the effects of what you’d done. Not like a road accident, where everything was over in a single scream. With fires, the build-up of euphoria was gradual, ending in a trance-like state that sated his need to see things burn.

He’d heard that many serial killers were fire-setters in their adolescence. Son of Sam, for instance. He’d started thousands of fires. Cameron smiled. He wasn’t in that league yet. One day, maybe.

He tried the latch on the side gate. It was locked, but the steel bars felt crumbly, the paint peeling away in his hands. He took a closer look. The gate was older and rustier than the other one, the welding not so secure. Cameron’s breathing quickened.

He might have been told to back off for a while, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get close to her.

[13]

The wardrobe turned out to be a walk-in closet bigger than Harry’s own bedroom.

She padded over to the rail that ran the length of one wall and browsed through the hangers. The clothes seemed to come in a variety of sizes, but all bore the same designer labels and glitzy evening style. Harry sighed. With her bruised face and battered shoes, it wouldn’t be a good look.

She turned to rummage in the shelves behind her and found a pair of men’s jeans, a wide belt and some crisp white shirts still in their cellophane wrapping. A few minutes later she was dressed, the shirt tucked in and the belt cinched tight over the loose-fitting jeans. She made her way downstairs, wondering about the women who’d left their clothes behind.

Harry found the room at the back of the house where she had left Dillon, and pushed open the door. There was no sign of him.

She peered around the room and guessed this was where he did most of his living. It was a combination of office and bachelor’s den, and smelled of leather and grilled cheese. In front of the television was an oversized armchair complete with footrest and beer holder. Harry had a hard time picturing Dillon with his feet up watching TV.

Dominating one wall was a large black-and-white photograph, maybe five foot by four. It was a recent shot of Dillon, taken from an aerial viewpoint. He was sitting cross-legged on a deserted beach, and all around him were a series of lines and spirals traced in the sand. The pattern was Celtic in effect, and formed an ornate grid that took up half the beach.

‘It’s a simply connected maze.’

Harry spun round to find Dillon standing in the doorway watching her. He’d changed into smart chinos and a blue rugby shirt, and he carried a silver tray in his hands. He nodded towards the photograph as he moved into the room.

‘I used to carve them out everywhere I went. In the grass, in the snow. Once I even built one with mirrors.’

Harry turned back to the photograph. The confusing swirls reassembled themselves into paths and dead-ends, and she recognized it as the sort of maze she used to do as a child.

‘What does simply connected mean?’ she said.

‘Every path you choose leads either to another path or to a dead-end.’ The tray rattled as he set it down on the coffee table. ‘The paths never re-connect with one another, so it’s the simplest kind of maze to solve.’

Harry squinted at the maze and tried to follow one of its paths, but her eyes started to cross and she gave it up.

‘I never knew you were so hooked on mazes,’ she said.

‘Didn’t you ever wonder how I named my company?’

She threw him a questioning look.

‘Lúbra is the Irish for labyrinth,’ he said.

Harry smiled. ‘Nice.’

She eyed up the tray. He’d brought a bottle of brandy, two crystal balloon glasses and a plate piled high with sandwiches. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten all day.

Helping herself to a sandwich, she sank into one of the chairs. Dillon handed her a brandy. He raised his eyebrows at the men’s shirt and jeans, but made no comment.

Harry slugged down a mouthful of brandy. ‘Look, I’m sorry about all that stuff with Ashford.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And I’m sorry about earlier, too. When I clammed up on you. I do that sometimes.’

Dillon busied himself with a sandwich. ‘That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’

Harry sighed. She may as well come right out with it. ‘It’s because of my father. I think he’s involved.’

Dillon frowned. ‘In what? The break-in?’

‘All of it.’

‘The guy at the train station as well? But that’s crazy. Why?’

‘Because of what that guy said. The Sorohan deal, the ring – it all points to my father.’

‘I don’t get it.’

She held his gaze. ‘The Sorohan deal was the one that blew up in my father’s face and got him arrested.’

Dillon’s expression cleared. ‘Oh. I see. But what –’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t ask me any more, I haven’t worked it all out yet. The point is, you know how I get about my father.’

Dillon rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah. Prickly.’

She smiled and shrugged. ‘Yeah, well.’

‘Have you mentioned any of this to the police?’

Harry flashed on an image of the silent detective who’d come to her apartment that evening. She shook her head. ‘I can’t. They might start investigating him again.’

‘Well, he’s already in prison. What else can they do to him?’

Harry put her sandwich down. Suddenly she wasn’t hungry any more. ‘He’s getting out.’

‘I thought he got eight years.’

‘Remission.’ Harry’s throat seemed to be closing up. ‘He could be out any time.’

Dillon seemed to work it out. ‘So if he gets investigated for any of this, his remission will be on hold?’

‘Or thrown out altogether.’

There was a pause. She could feel Dillon’s eyes on her.

‘Look, you need to talk to your father,’ he said. ‘I’ve been telling you that for months.’

She shook her head and stared at her glass. She cupped it in one hand and swirled the golden liquid around in it. ‘When I was a kid, I thought he was wonderful. He made all these marvellous promises, and the ones he kept were magical.’ She traced a nail through the grooves in the diamond-cut crystal. ‘Almost worth the disappointment of the ones that he forgot.’

‘Sounds like you and he had quite a bond.’

She smiled. ‘My sister Amaranta had a hand in that. When I was five, she told me our parents had found me on the street as a baby. She said they were going to keep me for a while, but that later, they planned to sell me on to the neighbours.’

Dillon laughed. ‘Typical big sister stunt.’

‘Trouble was, I believed her. For months I felt like an outsider in my own home. My mother was distant with me anyway, for reasons of her own, so that didn’t help. I finally blurted it all out to my father, and he cleared things up for me. I suppose from then on, I saw him as some kind of ally.’

Dillon sipped his brandy. ‘And that all changed when he was arrested?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d already had enough long before that. Living with constant let-downs gets to you after a while. When he got sent to jail, that was kind of the end.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘We don’t get to choose our parents, do we?’

‘I suppose not. Although you could say my parents chose me.’

Harry raised her eyebrows.

‘I was adopted,’ he explained. ‘My adoptive parents couldn’t have children so they took me in when I was a baby. But by the time I was two, my mother was miraculously pregnant.’

‘Don’t tell me, you got overlooked in favour of the natural child and it gave you a mass of complexes.’

Dillon paused. ‘For a while, maybe. I certainly know what it’s like to feel you’re an outsider in your own home.’ He shrugged. ‘But then they tried to make amends and ended up over-compensating. I got all the attention, and it was my brother who got the complexes. He went right off the rails in the end. Drugs, prison – the works.’

She sucked down her brandy, not sure what to say. ‘So we both have families with murky pasts?’

‘Looks like it.’

Harry waved her arm around the room. ‘Well, it hasn’t done you any harm. Look at this house. It’s amazing.’ Her ears started to buzz and she wondered was she getting a bit drunk.

‘It’s not bad.’ Dillon looked pleased with himself.

Harry scanned the room. ‘Mind you, you seem to do most of your living in here.’

His smile slipped a little. ‘Not when I have guests, which is most of the time. And when I don’t, I can shut the world away. High walls, electronic gates – if there’s one thing money can buy you, it’s privacy.’

‘Or isolation,’ Harry said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Dillon frowned, and stood up.

‘Come on, you look exhausted. You should get some rest.’

He grasped her hand and helped her to her feet. She stood facing him for a moment, only inches away from him, their body heat mingling. Then he turned away and strolled over to the French doors on the other side of the room, beckoning for her to follow. ‘But first I want to show you something.’

[14]

The first thing Harry noticed when she stepped outside the door was a pungent scent that reminded her of Christmas trees. It hung in the air like eucalyptus, and instantly cleared her head.

She peered into the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then she saw it. Inky black, looming up from the centre of the lawn, was a gigantic wall of hedge maybe twelve feet high and wider than a football pitch.

‘My God,’ Harry said. ‘Is that a maze?’

As she spoke, the moon broke through the clouds and she could see that the dense evergreen had been planted in the shape of an enormous enclosed rectangle, extending as far back as it did across. There must have been over an acre of hedge out there.

‘Awesome, isn’t it?’ Dillon said. ‘The previous owners planted it about twenty years ago. I just had to have it. Come on, let me take you in.’

He strode across the lawn, his trainers making whispering noises against the dry grass. Harry followed, stopping in front of a red triangular flag that marked the entrance to the maze. She felt her brain dissolve into pulp, the way it always did when confronted with a navigational challenge.

‘I feel like I need to throw a six to start,’ she said.

Dillon laughed. ‘Come on, before the moonlight goes. I want to show you what I built in the centre.’

She followed him in. The spicy pine fragrance was more intense inside the maze. All around her were curved, towering hedges. The rough clay path was only a few feet wide, so they were forced to walk in single file.

Dillon took a sharp left, and Harry trotted to keep up. The path followed a tight arc, and suddenly Dillon disappeared. The moonlight waned, and Harry’s skin prickled. She quickened her pace.

‘What do you do if someone gets lost in here?’ she called out.

‘We talk them in from the viewing deck.’ He sounded close by, only a few feet ahead. ‘It overlooks the whole thing. But if you do get lost, just follow the left-hand rule.’

‘The what?’ She clung to the main path, refusing to be tempted by left or right turns.

‘Put your left hand on the hedge, follow the wall and keep walking. You’ll get out eventually.’

By now, the moonlight had completely vanished, turning the hedges into black walls. Harry stretched her hands out in front of her, feeling her way around the blind bends.

‘Don’t worry, it looks worse than it is,’ Dillon said. ‘A lot of it’s just an optical illusion.’

Harry’s step faltered. Optical illusion. The phrase triggered a snap of electricity in her brain, and an image of her bank account showing €12,000,000 flashed into her head.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The paths are designed to lead people down the wrong turns. Psychological trickery.’ He sounded ten or fifteen feet away, but whether to her left or right, she couldn’t tell. ‘For instance, people tend to avoid paths that seem to go back the way they came. Stuff like that.’

Harry tried to see how this could have anything to do with her bank account. Could it have been some kind of trick? She shook her head. Some part of her brain had made a connecting leap, but she’d no idea why.

Feet scuffed against the clay behind her. She frowned. Had Dillon circled behind her? She checked over her shoulder, but all she could see was solid hedge. Her back tingled, and she geared up to a power-walk.

‘Ever hear the story of King Minos and the Labyrinth?’ Dillon’s voice was growing fainter.

‘King who?’

‘Old Greek legend. King Minos of Crete built this huge mazelike building called the Labyrinth. He used it as a prison for the Minotaur.’

Harsh breaths cut through the darkness behind her. She whipped her gaze around, stumbling against the hedge. Where the hell was Dillon?

‘What’s a Minotaur?’ she called out, not liking the note of panic in her voice.

‘A man-eating monster, half man, half bull.’

She jogged along the narrow path. The scuffing sounds behind her grew louder, more urgent, the breathing laboured. Harry spun round again and stared at the dark empty path.

‘Dillon? Is that you?’

Silence. A wood pigeon cooed overhead. The footsteps had stopped. Had she imagined them?

‘Harry?’

She whirled round at the sound of Dillon’s voice, straining to locate him. Somewhere far to her left.

‘Wait there!’ She lurched round a bend. ‘And keep talking so I can find you.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Just keep talking!’ She broke into a run, her heart thudding. ‘Go on about the Minotaur.’

‘Right. Well, the king locked the Minotaur up in the middle of the labyrinth and every year he sacrificed seven youths and seven maidens into the maze.’ His voice sounded stronger; she had to be nearly there. ‘They’d get lost, and eventually the Minotaur would eat them.’

Feet pounded on the track behind her. Harry gasped. She wheeled around a corner, the disorientation making her head spin. The sound of ragged panting tore after her through the dark. The path began to spiral, the bends so severe she could only see one step ahead. Something warm and damp tagged her shoulder from behind. Harry screamed and shook it off, sprinting deeper into the maze.

‘Harry! Are you okay?’ Dillon sounded somewhere up ahead. ‘Stay where you are, I’ll find you!’

Harry blundered out of her spiral and came up against a T-junction. Left or right? The scuffling behind her was like an animal sound. Man-eating monster, half man, half bull. She blanked the image out, and tore down the left-hand fork. The maze flung her into another twisting vortex.

She scrambled along the path, clutching on to the hedges. Rough branches cut into her palms. The firs snapped and she stumbled, her weak knee giving way. Someone thrashed through the hedges behind her, grunting. She clawed back to her feet, her head reeling.

Averting her eyes from the swirling path, she focused on the hedge. She grasped the woody stems, hauling herself round the tortuous bends. Suddenly, the twisting stopped, and she staggered into a wider stretch of path. She picked up speed, and crashed around the next corner. She slammed straight into someone’s chest and screamed.

‘Harry!’ Dillon grabbed her by the shoulders.

Her heart banged against her chest. She clutched on to him. ‘Someone’s there, someone’s running.’

He shot his gaze to the path behind her. The panting and crashing was closer than ever. Then suddenly the sounds died away.

‘What the hell –’ Dillon shoved her behind him and took a step towards the noise.

Harry yanked his arm. ‘No!’

Who knew what lay behind those hedges?

He looked at her, then back at the maze, hesitating. Then he grabbed her by the hand. ‘This way.’

He dragged her down a narrow path and plunged them both into a series of random turns, or that’s how it seemed to Harry. She raced after him as he zigzagged through the maze, his navigation never faltering. Branches scraped her arms and face as she ricocheted against the hedges. Then the path straightened out and a gap opened up in front of them. Together they burst through it, emerging at the side of the maze.

Dillon hauled her across the lawn. She flashed a backward glance at the massive hedge. It loomed above her like a black fortress. Then she tore after Dillon around the side of the house, to where his Lexus was waiting.

[15]

Leon turned the envelope over in his hands and studied it. It was slim and white, with the word personal printed above the cellophane window that framed his address. It was the type of envelope he’d normally toss into a corner with all his other unpaid bills, except for one important difference. This one was addressed to Harry Martinez.

He sank down on to the shabby sofa and tapped the envelope against one hand. The curtains of his bedsit were closed, even though it was almost noon, and the air smelled of stale sheets and chips from a brown paper bag.

How the hell had a letter meant for Harry Martinez ended up with his address on it?

Leon scratched his chest through his T-shirt. He needed to shower, but the thought of the vile bathroom across the hall made his bowels bunch up. He’d only got up so that he could call his wife, and after that he’d planned on crawling back to bed. But then the post had arrived.

Leon closed his eyes. Ever since he’d woken up, the enormity of last night’s poker losses had been pressing down on him like a ton of wet sand. He’d left O’Dowd’s pub with his wallet lighter by more than eighty thousand euros. Add that to the rest of his poker debts and his bill was now running close to a quarter of a million. Worst of all, he knew he’d be back in O’Dowd’s again tonight.

He squinted at the envelope in his hand. He reached over to the faded drapes and dragged them back a few inches, the curtain rings rattling like chains. A wedge of sunlight pierced his eyes, and he held the envelope up towards it. All he could see were wavy blue-and-white lines, the contents of the letter totally obscured.

The Prophet was responsible, no doubt about that. This was how he operated. Inexplicable letters, anonymous emails. Leon turned the envelope over again. He should just go ahead and open it. Nothing left to lose.

He set the letter down on the coffee table and stared at it. He didn’t like it that the Prophet knew where he lived.

The first contact Leon ever had from the Prophet had been through the post, ten years earlier in 1999. A thick brown envelope had arrived at his home in Killiney, and Maura had brought it up to him in his study, along with a glass of champagne.

‘Time you changed into your tux,’ she’d said, setting the glass by his elbow. They’d been invited to dinner by the chairman of Merrion & Bernstein, the firm of investment bankers where Leon worked.

‘Yeah, in a minute.’ He took the brown envelope from her and ripped it open. Inside was an official-looking document with a cover note attached.

‘How do I look?’ Maura’s voice was as seductive as honey, as she swirled the layers of her silver dress around her tanned legs. Ignoring her, Leon read the note and frowned.

Maura fidgeted. ‘Leon?’

‘You go on downstairs,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

She sighed. ‘Richard wants you to say goodnight to him before you go.’

Leon shook his head. ‘Tell him I won’t have time.’

Maura stood still for a moment. Then she turned and marched out of the room. Leon read the note again. It was brief and to the point.

Buy Serbio stock. TelTech bid has been accepted and will be announced next week. It was signed The Prophet.

Leon flicked through the document, but had only to scan the first few paragraphs to know what he was looking at. It was a highly confidential proposal for a hostile takeover bid. A ripple of illicit fascination stirred in his groin, and he felt like a teenager with his first porn magazine.

He leafed through the pages, checking the details. The takeover was being launched by a company called TelTech Internet Solutions. Leon raised his eyebrows. He’d heard of them. Who hadn’t? The Dublin-based software company had floated on the NASDAQ a couple of months earlier, its founders making fortunes in a matter of hours.

The target for the takeover was an American company called Serbio Software, a well-established outfit with the misfortune to be operating in the same e-commerce space as TelTech. Leon sifted through the finances of the deal, and gave a low whistle. These TelTech guys had more money than God. Jesus, what was it about the word ‘internet’ that justified such crazy economics? He could remember when software start-ups meant a collection of techie nerds in need of a bath. Now they were breeding grounds for multi-millionaires. The fact that none of them had yet to rack up a profit just didn’t seem to matter.

Leon set the document down on his desk as though it might explode in his face. Who the hell was this Prophet guy that he could access such a confidential document? And why had he sent it to him?

He checked to see which investment bank was managing the bid, hoping to Christ it wasn’t his own. Being in possession of information leaked from Merrion & Bernstein would really drop him in the shit. But he needn’t have worried. The document had been prepared by JX Warner. He’d worked for them a few years back, but they’d turned prissy about his ethics and fired him after three months.

Leon turned to his PC and checked the Serbio stock price on the NASDAQ. Just under eight dollars a share, low enough to make them vulnerable to a takeover. He read the note again. Whoever this Prophet was, he was obviously expecting the price to go up when the announcement of the takeover deal came through. If the announcement came through.

He tapped his fingers on the desk. Anyone buying Serbio shares now, before the price soared, would make a killing later on. The notion teased him with its simplicity. He picked up the document and peeped at the numbers again. Then he flung it back on the desk. It was too big a risk. His personal trading activities were closely watched by Merrion & Bernstein’s compliance department. Insider trading was a professional hazard that the investment banks worked hard to avoid.

He ground his teeth and locked the document away. He tried to forget about it, but every day for the next week he scoured the financial papers for any hint of the takeover. There was nothing. After two weeks he concluded that it had all been an elaborate hoax, and a curious mix of relief and disappointment washed through him.

And then, almost three weeks after the arrival of the brown envelope, Leon spotted a headline in the business press that made him clench his fists.

NASDAQ Darling TelTech in bid for Serbio.

He locked himself in his office and checked out the Serbio share price from his PC. Ten dollars and rising. He poured himself a large whiskey, loosened his tie and settled in for a long wait. For the next few hours he sat transfixed by the NASDAQ ticker prices. By the end of the New York business day, at 9.30 p.m. Irish time, the Serbio share price had closed at nearly twenty-five dollars. Leon did the sums, and glowered at the numbers in front of him. On a 30,000-share trade, he would have netted over half a million dollars.

Two weeks later, Leon received a second brown envelope from the Prophet and this time he didn’t hesitate. He set up a new trading account without disclosing it to Merrion & Bernstein, and made over $700,000. With the third envelope, the Prophet sent a demand for a cut of the takings and instructions on how the money was to be paid. That was how it had been ever since.

Someone retched in the communal bathroom across the hall and, not for the first time, Leon wanted to burn his bedsit to the ground. His hand shot out towards the white envelope on the table, but at the last second he snatched up the phone instead. Maybe things would be better this time when he talked to Maura. Maybe he could find a way back. Without the white envelope.

He wiped the palm of his hand on his T-shirt and dialled his old home number. He pictured Maura hurrying to answer the phone, her heels snapping against the black-and-white marble tiles that were laid out like a chessboard in the hall. Then he heard her voice.

‘Hello?’

Leon straightened his shoulders and focused on the meagre fireplace across the room. ‘It’s me.’

There was a short silence. ‘Leon. I’m on my way out.’

‘Oh, sorry. I just wanted a quick word.’

‘I really haven’t much time.’

He heaved himself up and began pacing the few steps over and back between the fireplace and the sofa, like a demented bear in a zoo. ‘Just thought I’d call round. You know, to see Richard.’

‘What, now? I have a lunch appointment.’

‘No, no of course not now, I know you’re busy. Maybe later this afternoon?’

‘Richard has rugby practice.’

‘Well, how about this evening, then?’ he said. ‘I could come over for tea.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘You want me to cook your tea?’

He stopped in front of the fireplace and squeezed his eyes shut, his fingers gripping the mantelpiece. ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. After tea, then. I’ll come after tea.’

‘That’s not going to work either, he’s got studying to do. He’s doing the Junior Cert this year, in case you’d forgotten.’

Leon opened his eyes and stared into the empty grate. It was cold and black. ‘Of course I hadn’t forgotten.’ Shit, why hadn’t he remembered that? ‘I won’t stay long. Just a quick chat.’

‘Look, I really don’t want him upset.’

Leon trudged over to his unmade bed and sank down on it. ‘Come on, be fair, it’s been months since I saw him.’

‘It’s been longer than that, Leon.’

He could see the kitchenette at the far end of the room, with its stacks of dirty dishes and takeaway cartons. ‘Yes, well, things have been hectic here.’

‘I can imagine.’ Her voice was flat, with no hint of sarcasm.

‘Does he ask about me?’ Leon gripped his knee with one hand.

‘Not often.’

Something strangled his throat, and for a minute he couldn’t speak.

‘I don’t encourage it, tell you the truth,’ Maura said. ‘What am I supposed to say? “Your father’s doing great, apart from the white-collar crime and that little gambling problem he has?” You’re not an easy topic of conversation.’

Shit. Things were slipping away from him, sliding out of control the way they always did. He dragged his fingers through his sparse hair. ‘But that’s all changing Maura, I swear.’ He flicked a glance at the envelope on the table. ‘I’m sorting it all out. Soon I’ll be right back where I was. Leon-the-Ritch.’

‘I really have to go.’

‘But I mean it. Everything’s going to be okay.’

‘Can we do this another time?’

Leon took a couple of deep breaths. ‘Of course. Sorry. Didn’t mean to delay you. I’ll call again later in the week.’

‘Let’s leave it till after the exams.’

‘Oh.’ Jesus, another two whole months. ‘Right. Well, if you think that’s best. Say hello to Richard for me.’

But she had already hung up.

Leon leaned his elbows on his knees and hung his head low between them. Hot tears stung his eyes, and he shook his head. Every time he talked to her it ended up the same way. No wonder he gambled, she drove him to it. Better to feel the gambler’s rush than the pain of failure with his son. He lifted his head and took in the squalid bedsit, furnished from pieces of crap hauled out of a skip. He could never bring Richard here.

His gaze settled on the white envelope. He clenched his fists and moved back over to the sofa. He traced the finger and thumb of one hand around his mouth as though trying to make up his mind, but he knew the decision was already made. He picked up the envelope and opened it.

Inside were two sheets of pale blue paper. Leon stared at them for a moment, and then he understood. This was the Prophet’s proof. Adrenaline sparked through him like a lit fuse. So the girl really did have the money. Well, not for long. Wait till he told Ralphy-Boy about this.

But first, he had another call to make. He grabbed the phone again and punched in a by now familiar number.

The call was picked up after two rings. ‘Mr Ritch. I was about to phone you.’

‘What’s happening? Where’s the girl now?’ Something about this fucker made Leon’s skin crawl, but right now he was the only option he had.

‘Back at her apartment.’

‘Look, we need to make a move. There’s been a development at this end.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s something funny going on here too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean whatever your next move is, you’d better make it fast.’ There was a pause. ‘We’re not the only ones following her.’

[16]

Harry huddled over a mug of tea and thought about optical illusions. Now you see me, now you don’t.

An image of the maze reared up inside her head, and her chest tightened. She shoved her tea away and scurried down the hall to check her apartment door. It was still locked. Then she prowled through the rest of the rooms, testing the windows, listening for unfamiliar sounds. It was the fourth patrol she’d made that morning.

Dillon had driven her back to the apartment the night before and stayed with her till she fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, she found a quilt pulled up to her shoulders and signs that he’d slept on the floor. He was already up, on his way to the office. He’d knelt beside her and stroked her hair, ordering her to take some time off.

She cast an eye over the empty apartment and shuddered. She’d spent the last few hours cleaning the place up, but it still didn’t feel like home.

Dillon had called the police from his car soon after they’d fled the maze, but by the time they got there, the intruder was long gone. The only trace the police had found was a rusty gate buckled at the hinges.

Harry reached out to check the window lock on the living-room sash, but at the last minute she clenched her fist. Goddammit, enough of the neurotic rituals. She marched back to the kitchen and brewed some coffee strong enough to juice up her brain. She paced the kitchen floor, gulping the coffee down. Her swollen knee felt stronger, her body less tender. The need for action jerked through her limbs like an electric current.

What she needed was hard information. What had happened with the Sorohan deal? Who were the other members of the ring? How had her father operated? If she understood the mechanics of her father’s insider trades, maybe she could work out where the twelve million euros had come from. And who the hell was after it.

As for optical illusions, she dealt in science and technology, not smoke and mirrors. The twelve million was no illusion. She’d seen it on the screen with her own eyes, and the bank had confirmed it. No Houdini tricks there.

Unless someone had tampered with her account records.

Harry’s pace slowed. But how would anyone do that? And why? Rigging the bank’s database to show a false lodgement wouldn’t make the money real. Sure, it would show up temporarily on a snapshot of her transactions, but the bank’s reconciliation procedures would soon catch the error. No one could ever access the money, not a sum of that size. Harry shook her head. It made no sense. The money had to be real. The question was, who put it there?

She hauled her satchel up on to the kitchen table and rummaged through it. Dillon had told her to talk to her father. He was right. She needed explanations, and what better place to start? But she couldn’t face it, not yet. There had to be another way.

She pulled a fistful of business cards out of the satchel and thumbed through them till she found the one she was looking for. She scrutinized it, chewing at her bottom lip. She’d already had a run-in with this guy and didn’t feel like asking him for any favours. But she had no choice. Apart from her father, he was the only investment banker she knew.

She dialled the number on the card and waited. He was bound to be there, even on a Saturday. Weekends didn’t mean much to investment bankers.

‘Hello, Jude Tiernan speaking.’ His voice was deep, like a woodwind instrument.

Too late Harry realized she hadn’t prepared her story. She’d have to play this out cold. ‘Oh, hi, this is Harry Martinez.’

The silence at the other end went on a shade too long. She prompted him. ‘I met you yesterday?’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I remember you all right,’ he said. ‘I just can’t believe I’ve got to have another conversation with you.’

Harry shut her eyes. Maybe she deserved that one. She decided to stick with the truth. ‘Look, I owe you an apology. I was probably out of line yesterday.’

‘You were more than out of line, you were downright slanderous.’

Harry’s eyes flared open. ‘Hey, I was seriously provoked, remember? Your colleague wasn’t exactly mincing his words.’

‘Felix Roche is a dickhead, I’ll give you that much. But, as I recall, your accusations seemed to include the entire room.’

Harry flopped down on a chair and sighed. ‘Look, can we start again? I’d really like to talk to you about something else.’ She picked at the corner of his business card. ‘It’s about my father.’

There was a pause. ‘Go on.’

‘I’d like to ask you some questions about what he did.’

‘Why can’t you ask him?’

Harry winced. ‘That’s a bit tricky. If I could meet with you this afternoon, I could explain.’

‘That’s not going to happen. I’m tied up all day and then I leave for the airport. So if that’s all –’

‘Yesterday someone tried to push me under a train.’ Damn, she hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. She aimed for a more businesslike tone. ‘The guy who pushed me said something about the Sorohan money.’

Another pause. ‘The takeover deal that got your father arrested?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand. And I certainly don’t see what you want from me. Have you told the police?’

‘Of course I have.’ She crossed her fingers at the lie. ‘But if I could just ask you a few questions, it would really help. I promise I won’t take up much of your time.’

He hesitated, and she knew she had only one last chance to hook him. He was an investment banker. He may not care about her, but he had to be interested in the money. She took a deep breath.