‘I’ve come in to get a jump on the weekly figures, before the meeting with Lothar.’ His voice, bouncing back off the metal walls, sounded sincere. It was good to practise; this was something he always did, when he had a lie he knew he was likely to have to telclass="underline" say it out loud, to check how it sounded. ‘Got to get ready for the meeting,’ he said. ‘It’s like they say in the SAS. The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance.’
He was fine. There would in all probability be no one in before six o’clock or so. Certainly no one was in yet; he had checked the out-of-hours sign-in sheet when he came through security.
Mark liked being on his own in the trading room. There was something creepy about the empty space, the blank monitors and the dark outside, the uncanny stillness in a room designed for a crowd, for noise, for shouting and anxiety and action and looking at three screens while talking on two phones while juggling a dozen trades; but that unsettlingness was what he liked about it. Most people could not do this. They would be too freaked out. But he was not most people. That was the whole point.
He dropped his briefcase at his desk, took his jacket off, and stretched. Today’s mission was passwords. About a year before, Pinker Lloyd had called in a team of outside consultants to assess its levels of risk in relation to computer fraud and hacking attacks. One of the main recommendations had been that the bank was too lax in the security level of its passwords, in particular because it allowed employees to set their own. In too many cases people used passwords that they used on other computers; in some of the most egregious cases, people even had the same password on all their accounts, for work and home. This was flagrantly unsafe: any third party getting hold of someone’s private email password, or eBay account password, or any password set up on any internet shopping site, would have access straight into Pinker Lloyd’s systems. Not acceptable. So the recommendation was for the company to adopt new protocols for anything that allowed access to its systems, unguessable chains of letters and numbers with rAnd0m caPItalisåtiºn. The new passwords would change weekly. The logic was impeccable. But it was also mistaken, because the new passwords had a flaw: they might be unguessable, but they were also unmemorisable. Since no one could keep the passwords in their heads, everybody wrote them down. So all you had to do to get access to someone’s account was to find where they had written down their password.
Mark first went into Roger’s office. His undeserved corner office, with the view of Canary Wharf and the river, the family photos on the desk; the office which was going to be his. He woke Roger’s computer up from sleep, then navigated to the file called ‘Passwords’. If he had to sum up his boss’s stupidity in one detail, it would be the fact that he hid his passwords in a file marked ‘Passwords’. The file was itself protected by a password, but Mark had seen Roger type the first few letters of it, and because Mark was not an ordinary man, with only a little thought he had been able to deduce the rest. The first letters typed were c o n so it had been easy to work out that the password was conradjoshua, his horrible children’s names run together. He opened the file to see Roger’s bank passwords. They were the usual strings of letters and numbers. Mark took a note of them in his little Moleskine book.
He went back on the trading floor. He began with the passwords whose hiding places he knew: on a piece of paper; in a locked drawer, whose key was in turn left in a jar of pencils; on the bottom slip of a set of Post-it notes (the bottom slip chucked away when a new password was set); on notepads left beside monitors. He collected five passwords in as many minutes. His dream was to find his way into another department, Compliance, and unlock some of their passwords. Compliance’s job was to make sure that the bank was obeying all the idiotic legislation designed to make the City safe for the timid and the frightened and the conventional and the weak, all the pathetic little bits of string with which governments tried to tie down the giant. Access to Compliance’s systems would be useful for the things he had under way. Root access and administrator privileges for the bank’s mainframe would be even better; but that would not be easy, and it would be silly to focus on something likely to be unachievable.
A few more passwords in this room, however, would be very easy to achieve. All he had done so far was gather the low-hanging fruit. Jez, the room’s most successful trader, moved more money than anyone else, and dealt with more accounts, and so access to his systems would be very handy. Jez was someone Mark greatly disliked, not least because he could sense in him a real competitor, someone whose view of life was very similar to his own. Jez liked to win. Well, they would see who would win. Mark went to Jez’s desk. He switched on the monitor and was greeted by a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s arse in pink knickers, freeze-framed from the opening shot of Lost in Translation. Despite himself, Mark smiled for a moment. He ran a search for ‘Password’ but nothing came up. He hadn’t expected it to. Then he stepped back and had a look around Jez’s desktop. A rule of thumb was that things were always in the most obvious place. Arsenal mug, blank yellow legal pad, copy of Mountain Bike Monthly, Casio calculator in its plastic case. Mark peeked inside the mug, flicked through the magazine, riffled the legal pad, checked the underside of the keyboard, and opened the two desk drawers, both of which were empty apart from stationery and a Caffè Nero loyalty card. Jez might have been forceful and noisy but he kept nothing personal at work; interesting. As he was putting the office junk back, though, Mark felt something else, a piece of paper lying flat pressed against the back of the lower drawer – and had the secretive person’s instinctive feeling for when he might have come across a secret. But the piece of paper was hard to get a good hold on, it seemed to have stuck to the metal at the end of the compartment, so Mark was stretching and reaching and trying to get his fingers around the piece of paper to pull it out without crumpling it too much, which would give away that it had been taken out and looked at, when he heard a voice loudly say,
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Oh no. Jez. He stood at the entrance of the room, his hair wet from a shower, a bag of sports kit over his shoulder. This can’t be, thought Mark – it’s only two minutes past six – and then he thought, oh no, he must be here to get something done in Tokyo, and at the same time how useless that thought was since here he was up to the neck in shit and sinking fast. And then Mark realised he had a big problem: he had turned on Jez’s computer monitor. There was no possible, no conceivable, innocent reason to do that. If Jez moved three or four steps into the room he would be graced with a look at Scarlett Johansson’s bum-cheeks, and Mark would be out of a job. Even while the thoughts were running through his mind, Mark was moving: he jerked backwards from the drawer and pushed it shut. It would not be possible to look more like a man with a guilty conscience. He felt complicated, nauseating things happen in his stomach.
‘Stationery. Legal pad… couldn’t find mine. I know you used them, thought I’d take one, didn’t think you’d mind.’
Jez just stared at him. He hadn’t moved and he looked angry, suspicious, hostile.
‘Been to the gym?’ Mark said.
Jez started chewing gum. He must have had a piece on the go and then suddenly stopped when he came into the room and saw Mark. But other than that he didn’t move or speak.