Insecure Read online

  Insecure

  Michael Shevlin

  Copyright © 2012 Michael Shevlin

  All rights and original ideas and all that kind of stuff are mine and mine only. I am not charging a lot for this book so if you nick stuff from it, reproduce it or make it into a multimillion dollar movie and don’t tell me about it…well, there’ll be trouble.

  Lawyer trouble

  Oh, and any resemblance to any persons – living or dead – is total luck.

  ISBN-13: 978-1470055523

  ISBN-10: 147005552X

  To Laura

  Thanks for all the help

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to a bunch of people. To Laura for helping me keep going and giving me the time to do so. Thanks to Seekew for reading, re-reading and being enthusiastic and to anyone who has bought this. Thank you.

  CHAPTER 1

  Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity?

  This has been the question that has been bouncing around my head like a pixilated ball in a game of Pong.

  The problem is that it comes with other questions like: am I betraying my friend? Will I end up in prison? Are you utterly and completely insane?

  Initially, all I thought about was the money. So, so much money. More money than I could make in a lifetime – in two lifetimes. But I’m not so sure that the financial tractor beam is as strong as the allure of doing something crazy. Leaving my comfort zone, as my shrink likes to say.

  I not saying that money wouldn’t be useful, it would. I am middle class poor after all. I have a nice house. I have a nice car. I haven’t paid off the house yet, but I have paid off the car. It’s an Audi. I never thought I’d own an Audi outside of Gran Turismo, but there it is, collecting leaves in the residents parking bay. It’s really just an expensive gadget, like a juicer, that does it’s job perfectly well but is a bugger to clean.

  The house, though, is a red brick girlfriend; a constant drip-drip of my salary, mortgage payments, insurance, tax plus the occasional seasonal gift like a new boiler or roof. So I spend just a tiny little bit more per month than I earn maintaining my middle class symbols. I’m hoping that if I go into the red any further I will go round the colour wheel horn and hit black again.

  I am sitting in a beautiful, hand built kitchen with copper bottomed saucepans dangling seductively from metal runners along the ceiling. It’s not my kitchen.

  My kitchen has flooded and Pat Sullivan, not usually the most charitable of my friends, has decided to help me out by letting me look after his house while he and his family do some early season skiing. So, I look at his kitchen, with it’s beautiful saucepans and handmade cabinets and think again: Are you utterly and completely insane?

  Pat runs an IT consultancy, he does terribly important things with computers helping companies in the city network, communicate and facilitate on budget and on time…that’s the sales pitch. I am normally filtering by this point, so the details of what his company does are, at best, vague.

  Once Pat, Erica and his two daughters had clicked shut the door - after asking for the umpteenth time if I understood how the alarm system worked - I shamelessly began nosing around his house in a way that someone only does if he knows he will not be discovered.

  I peeked in cupboards, looked in his sock draw for a gimp mask (I was quite relieved to find none), I poked around in his cellar and I even looked in the shed at the bottom of the garden. So far I have discovered that his wife has had genital warts; that Pat still reads comics and that they like to do the occasional line of coke.

  The last bastion of his privacy remaining that I had - until this point – not intruded upon was his PC. That was because he told me in no uncertain terms not to touch it because it was expensive and I wouldn’t know how to use it if I did manage to boot it up. Besides, it was password protected.

  Boredom, however, drove me to try a new combination of children’s names and birthdays every day. Erica’s birthday, wedding day – you name it, I tried it. I kept the login screen on all the time and every time I went to the bathroom I’d idly tap in a combination. It became a casual ritual.

  This morning I got it.

  In the end it was simple, so simple I should have guessed it straight away. In college we called him The Saint. He was called that because he was good looking in that suave, Roger Moore way; and he also had a penchant for wearing turtle neck sweaters. It never really stuck as a nickname – they never do - but it became his screen name and he used it on talk-boards, forums and games. The numbers were his birthday.

  Easy.

  I sat there, mouse poised, feeling excited. What was so secret? What possible filth was on his computer? Then I started to worry that he’d turn out to have thousands of child pornography images and I hesitated as I watched the start-up bar inch along.

  In the end my curiosity got the better of me and I dug through his hard drives ruthlessly. I needn’t have worried. I did find some porn – not much – and it consisted entirely of mature women being serviced by young men. Whatever floats his boat.

  I found correspondence from his bank and investment banker but – strangely – It felt intrusive and I hesitated before opening them. There is something so English about keeping one’s finances private that I was almost hardwired to respect it.

  Then I thought fuck it and I read them hungrily and discovered that Pat, after a sticky patch a few years ago, was doing very nicely, thank you very much.

  He had this place – a Georgian terraced house on the edges of Chelsea – which he owned outright. I had to read that again just to make sure that I had understood it the first time.

  He had trust funds, unit trusts and ISAs. He had investments and cash, he had no debts and two cracking motors that gleamed from their weekly valet. He had an interior designer, a cleaner and he only ever dry cleaned his shirts. Everything dry was from Waitrose and everything else from Fresh and Wild. He skied every season, his kids were in preparatory school and his wife’s boob lift was done at the Wellington. His suits were not bespoke - but Saville Row - and his golf club membership was what my car is worth.

  In the end I stopped, not from guilt, but a weird sense of revulsion and inadequacy. My face felt hot from the combined shame of my betrayal and my own lack of achievement.

  The irony is is that I am successful. In my industry I have hit the pinnacle of what is possible for a creative to achieve. I am a creative director and if you don’t know, that is the monkey’s nuts. I wanted to slam the keyboard and shout: I am a success! Look at me! I have business cards, and everything!

  I felt bitter at the inequality of it all. I have talent, a creative dexterity that can promote pull-up nappies or lawn fertiliser; a way with words, a deft touch with imagery, a consumer’s eye. What stuck in the craw was that with a little training I could do Pat’s job, but he could never do mine. The bastard.

  Pat really had it all. He was successful, rich, had a beautiful wife and two daughters who just stepped out of a Gap ad campaign. He was good looking and smart and I think that what I really wanted to find was some kind of flaw to him that I could hold onto.

  I clicked on, navigating through folders and directories but found nothing that piqued my interest. I was about to logout and shut down when I inadvertently clicked on the desktop and highlighted a box.

  I have seen this once or twice before. It’s a very clever, yet simple, way of hiding a folder. Some of the macheads do it at the agency. You merely take a screen shot, cut out an icon sized square of it and use that image as a folder image.

  The folder had no name. I opened it and I was, initially, disappointed by the contents. As far as I could tell, they contained email after email from one of his clients to Pat and back again. The client was a bank in the city, a very big bank in the city. A very
big bank in the city that held assets of companies totalling billions of pounds. A very big bank in the city controlling billions of pounds that Pat’s company had designed the IT, networks and comms for.

  Distilled, what the emails laid out was that the bank (a place called Lebermans) agreed to have an asymmetric ‘back door’ complied in the code so that if the system was compromised or it locked out all users, including admins, then Commcraft (Pat’s company) could use it re-establish security.

  After a bit of Googling, what I understood this all to mean, is that if all else failed Commcraft could gain access to Leberman’s system, outranking all other users, and do whatever was necessary to right the was wrong including installing the system from scratch. They also gained access to all accounts and transfer facilities.

  The last file was labeled, simply, Leberman. I clicked it and a dialogue box says: to de-encrypt enter your hex key. What’s a hex key? I know when I am out of my depth.

  So now I sit in the kitchen, taking sips of coffee that Pat’s Gaggia coffee maker had so expertly produced and thought again: Are you utterly and completely insane?

  If someone could get into the bank, gain access to the mainframe and login using the Commcraft back door then they could steal lots of money. As far as I could tell no one would be any the wiser. They obviously had to get into the bank and sit at the terminal. and I have no idea how they’d transfer money from one account to the other…but these were details.

  But… Are you utterly and completely insane?

  So I sit here, drinking good coffee, shaking my head every time my brain thinks that I could rob a bank. People like me don’t rob banks. Men with scars and clumsy tattoos rob banks; desperate men, crazy men. Men with guns, commitment issues and troubled pasts. Men who need the money or can’t get enough of it. Men who have no choice. Men who have no other option but to rob a bank.

  I’m a long way from that. I am not desperate. But I am bored and it feels like an omen. An omen to start something, to actually do something. To get out of my framed life and do something crazy.

  I try to think of myself as totally in control of my life, but that’s bullshit. I’m not in control of anything. I am a small yacht in a big storm that’s taking me somewhere and I try to look like a guy from a Gillette commercial as I apply random adjustments to the rudder thinking that it doesn’t matter how much I twiddle this wee strip of wood I’m going to get where I’m going because of the storm not the rudder.

  The thing is that I am starting to warm to the idea of trying this on, the idea of seeing if I could do this. I needn’t hurt anyone, or go in with sawn off shotguns shouting: ‘gimme the loot, you slags!’, I’d just tottle along to the bank when no one is looking (the weekend springs to mind) type in a code, safe opens, lob money in a sack marked swag and ever so discreetly fuck off – how hard could it be?

  I’ve seen CSI, I know what the police can do.

  But most banks are robbed by people with the IQ of a koala and are as easy to catch (I don’t know this as fact, for all I know koalas are as fleet footed as a mongoose). I have a degree, common sense and a middle class reticence about doing anything rash. I can apply my intellect to this, see if it sticks and if I get cold feet then I can walk away. It can be a bit of a diversion, like Facebook or an Airfix model.

  What I need to do now, though, is run this by someone who I can trust. Someone who will give an honest appraisal of it’s viability, whether it really is insane and if I could ever become a bank robber. Some who is the tiniest bit dodgy.

  I also needed to find out what that hex key is.

  I needed to speak to my brother.

  CHAPTER 2

  My brother has known me all his life, but I haven’t known him all of mine: he’s younger than me, he’s 28.

  I was seven when he came along and it was very weird when he appeared and has been ever since. He was noisy, attention seeking and even when he was eighteen and I was twenty five - taking the advertising world by storm, I might add - he stole the show, stole the hearts of grown women and just generally stole: cars, money, anything he could get his cheeky little paws on. I was with him a couple of times, and he used to call it ‘sharing other peoples stuff when they’re not using it.’ Well I suppose that it’s a viewpoint.

  I blame our parents – or lack of them. Our parents died in a car accident when I was nineteen and we were both…well, the news was a body blow. When I found out I felt as if all the oxygen in the room had been extracted and I clung to my brother like a mast on a sinking ship. We spent a tough few years living with our fraught aunt getting into trouble. I took more drugs than is necessary to have a good time and my brother found the fraternity of criminals.

  In one of his more sanguine moments he said that biggest influence in his life was a scene from The Cannonball Run. There was a bit in the film when one of the drivers in the race rips the rear view mirror from it’s mounting and throws it out the window, and he thought: what a great attitude to life. He said that life wasn’t about looking at what was going on around you and what was in the past, if you devoted your intelligence to what opportunities and setbacks lay ahead of you then you’d go faster than everyone else. That was the trick, you didn’t have to be smarter or richer, just faster. He said I was like that, except I’d ripped off the mirror and instead of tossing it out the window, I’d slipped it in my shirt pocket for the odd furtive glance. He was right, of course.

  Today, my brother was the owner and manager of an unfeasibly seedy and unfeasibly hip club called the RugClub, that nestled like a burning ember in the basement of an old mill near Liverpool Street. He’d taken it over a year or so ago, bought it in an auction for a snip, got a late license sorted and never looked back. Now it appeared in pop promos and photo shoots and hardly anyone knew where the bloody place was, but that was the pull and Rich was making a packet. I’d seen guns in there, drugs, pop stars, films stars. The only things I hadn’t seen were Lord Lucan and the bloody Loch Ness monster.

  He was regarded as a shrewd businessman, and as being ruggedly charming, sweeping a sizable chunk of London’s night-time society off its feet. He was the same age as everyone and that seemed to make everyone feel right, making a connection, as he put it. He was smart, there was no denying it, but there was a philosophical side to him that I’d grown to love.

  I left home on a whim and a prayer and emerged from Liverpool Street station feeling a little bit foolish. I should have phoned but Rich wouldn’t mind, he never did.

  Office workers, celebrating the weekend, stood outside pubs, holding plastic beakers of lager that precariously sloshed, as the speakers got more expansive with the beer. I ducked down a side street, lined with curry houses and mini cab companies; cheap Japanese cars lined the kerbs, a fleet of opportunists waiting for closing time, and headed towards the RugClub.

  Abruptly, I turning down a flight of stairs that led towards the door of the club and one of the clubs grim bouncers, George.

  ‘Dan Collins! I ‘aven’t seen you in ages,’ he shook my hand firmly and didn’t let go,’ ‘ow are ya?’

  ‘I’m fine, George. How’s things with you? How’s the missus?’

  ‘Aw, ya know, yap, yap yap,’ he had let go of my hand and used his hands to do little glove puppet snaps with his hands, and swayed his considerable bulk from side to side, ‘ but ya still love ‘em, know what I mean?’

  ‘Ah George, you’re just a big softie.’

  ‘Oi,’ he clenched his fists and put them up in front of himself, ‘I not so soft I can’t still give you a few slaps.’

  I walked past him into the club, trying to catch the eyes of any attractive woman within sight; look, I’m on first name terms with the bouncer!. I went down a short set of deep steps that led down a short passageway that was illuminated by small blue globes. The place wasn’t full but it never really kicked off until twelve anyway, and as I walked through into the bar there were only groups of people draped on low, angular sofas chatting intimately below lar
ge hanging lampshades. The music was low and sounded like early Cream; the atmosphere was one of a seventies space film that tried to look futuristic.

  A girl called Carrie was working behind the bar, and squealed when she saw me, ran around the bar and gave me a hug. She was only small and it felt a bit like hugging a child, she pulled away and beamed at me. ‘Dan, where have you been?’

  ‘Oh you know how it is...’ I looked around, ‘I think I’m getting a bit old for this kind of place, I’ll give you a good reputation.’

  She laughed, ’we wouldn’t want that...you want a drink?’

  ‘Sure, could I have a vodka and soda?’ Carrie stepped back behind the bar a expertly tipped Vodka into a glass, whilst poring in crushed ice. Carrie had been working here for as long as I can remember. Rich gave her the job when she came in and asked for something - anything - to do when Rich was opening the place for the first time after he bought it.

  ‘So, what have you been up to?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, this and that. Bought a house.’

  ‘Great! Where?’

  ‘Fulham.’

  ‘Ooh, we are moving up in the world...you come to see Rich?

  ‘Yeah, he about?’

  ‘In his office...’ she tidied up the remainder of the lemon and wiped a cloth across the bar, she squinted a bit and looked at me, ‘so, why haven’t been over for so long?’

  ‘Not much point in me coming here, I suppose,’ I regretted it as soon as I had said it, ‘I mean, you know, Rich seems to come round to mine more often than not...’

  ‘Thanks a lot’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that...’

  ‘So how did you mean it?’ last time I was here was December and I came over on Christmas Eve for the Collins annual hoe down. Carrie and I talked all night and when the night ended she lunged on me - well, not exactly lunged, but certainly leaned towards me in a pre kiss moment.