Chapter One
Sometimes the most important part of stealing something is not letting the victim know someone stole it—particularly when it comes to stealing information from a computer. It’s a task that requires a thief of immense subtlety.
Or someone like me.
I chained my bicycle to a lamppost in front of the London headquarters of Jamshidi Oil, Ltd. The glass doors parted before me and I strode to the reception desk. I held up a courier envelope and said, “Package for a Mr. Kazem Jamshidi.”
The blonde receptionist looked me over. I’d like to think that she was appreciating my physique in my skin-tight cycling outfit, but realistically, I’m a little on the scrawny side. I do a lot of running in my job, and I can’t afford any extra pounds.
She reached out for the package but I pulled it back.
“Sorry,” I said. “Mr. Jamshidi has to sign for this personally.”
“I’ll see if he’s in.” She picked up a phone.
I knew he was in: his bald head and fat face had been visible through the window of the chauffeured Mercedes-Benz sedan that had pulled into the underground parking garage ten minutes ago.
After a brief conversation, the receptionist said, “Someone will be here shortly to escort you up.”
A door at the far end of the lobby opened and a stocky black man in a gray security guard’s uniform emerged. Based on the personnel files I’d reviewed while prepping for this job, I recognized him as George Vance, a former amateur middleweight boxer. Hopefully I could pull this off without resorting to fisticuffs, or else things might get a bit painful.
“Thanks,” I said to the receptionist before walking over to meet the guard. “Package that has to be signed for by Mr. Jamshidi himself.”
“Hold out your arms,” George said in a bored voice, holding up a metal-detector wand. I complied, and he ran the wand cursorily around my body. It squealed a bit next to the specially modified iPhone clipped to my belt and the metal on the clipboard I held in my left hand, but didn’t make a sound as he checked the package in my right. That made sense, since I hadn’t put any metal in it.
He made me take off my knapsack and show him that it was empty, except for a PowerBar and a water bottle in the side pockets.
Satisfied, he said, “Follow me.” We entered one of the elevators at the back of the lobby, and he inserted a keycard into a slot before pushing the button for the fourteenth-floor penthouse.
As we ascended, I surreptitiously slid a penny-sized transmitter off the metal of my clipboard and into my left hand.
An olive-skinned, black-haired young man sitting at a desk looked up when we stepped off the elevator. Behrouz Salehi, according to the personnel records, was Mr. Jamshidi’s personal assistant. The reception area was furnished in opulent fashion, with thick shag carpeting, overstuffed leather couches, and incomprehensible—and probably expensive—abstract sculptures on white pillars. A floor-to-ceiling glass wall looked out over smaller buildings toward the Thames.
I walked over to Behrouz’s desk, fumbling with my clipboard while reciting my line about Mr. Jamshidi. When I was close enough to the desk, I dropped the clipboard. I bent over to pick it up, using the desk as support—and pressing the sticky side of the transmitter to the underside of the desk’s surface.
“I have authority to sign for him,” Behrouz said, with an English accent that, to my ear at least, betrayed no evidence of his Iranian birth. Jamshidi hired lots of people of many nationalities, but his inner circle was exclusively Iranian.
Having already planted the bug, I could technically accomplish what I needed to by delivering the package to anyone on this floor. But I’d never met a multi-billionaire before, so I said, “Sorry. My instructions are that he must sign for it personally.”
“Who is it from?” Behrouz asked.
“HM Revenue and Customs.” I figured this was the most important possible sender, because no business can afford to get on the bad side of the Tax Man.
He picked up a phone and spoke briefly in Farsi. After listening to a reply, he nodded to me and said, “Mr. Jamshidi will be right out.”
I counted off seconds in my head. If I reached sixty, I would just let Behrouz sign for it. But at forty-three, the wooden door behind him opened and a man in a blue pinstripe suit came through. If he was wearing the pinstripes to make himself look thinner, they weren’t working. Or maybe they made him look only three hundred and fifty pounds instead of his actual four hundred.
I hurried over to him, holding out my clipboard. He took it from me, signed, and handed it back. I gave him the package and, without having said a word to me, he returned to his office and closed the door.
Now I just needed to get out of there. I headed for the elevator as quickly as I could without seeming suspicious. I couldn’t be sure if Jamshidi would open the package immediately or—
An incoherent yell from the office made me suspect he had. I would probably yell in much the same way if I opened a package full of live cockroaches. So a calm trip down the elevator with George was out of the question. I sprinted for the door with the green exit sign over it, next to the elevator, and banged the bar to open it.
Descending the stairs three steps at a time, I could hear George’s footsteps following me. And I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like he was gaining on me. Why’d I have to get stuck with a security guard who was in better shape than I was?
As I passed a door with the number 10 painted on it, I pulled my water bottle from my knapsack, opened the top, and emptied it behind me as I ran. “Don’t slip on the water at the tenth floor,” I shouted. Just because he was chasing me didn’t mean I wanted him to break his neck. I just wanted him to slow down a bit.
It worked. The footsteps behind me stopped, and I heard him talking to someone, presumably on his radio, telling them to block the exits. A few moments later, his footsteps resumed, but a bit more cautiously.
I exited the stairwell at the seventh floor. If the building schematics were right, a large janitorial closet was located to my right. It was there, but locked. I slipped my carbon-composite lockpicks out of my waistband and had the door open in less than ten seconds—but that was long enough for George to come in from the stairwell and spot me.
Giving him a friendly wave, I stepped into the closet and closed the door behind me. It locked with a click.
It was pitch dark inside, but the schematics had shown a light switch by the door. I fumbled around until I found it.
The doorknob rattled, then George yelled, “Come on out of there. You can’t escape.”
I used my knapsack straps to lash the doorknob to a shelf of cleaning supplies, just in case someone with a key arrived within the next minute. Then I sat on a stepladder, caught my breath, and started counting off the seconds.
George stopped pounding and started talking on his radio. “I’ve trapped him in the cleaners’ closet on seven.” A pause. “No, there’s no way out from there.” Pause again. “He’s a quick little guy, but now that he’s cornered, I should be able to handle him. You check on the boss. He did something to him.”
I made a silent objection to being described as a “little guy.” Granted, George outweighed me, but we were both about six feet tall.
My count reached forty.
“Cockroaches?” George’s voice was astonished. After a pause, it grew even more astonished as he said, “What do you mean he doesn’t know who brought them? It was the guy I’ve got locked up here. I saw him give the boss the package with my own two—”
And then, just as if someone had switched to another channel showing a completely different episode of the George Vance Show, he continued, “—secure here on seven. I’ll come up and help you look.”
That was it—he’d forgotten me. No one ever remembered me after not seeing or hearing me for a minute. Call it a talent, call it a curse, call it whatever—I didn’t know why I couldn’t be remembered, but that’s what let me do my job.
Even after living for twenty-five years with my talent, I didn’t understand why it worked, but I had figured out most of its effects and limitations.
Solid, physical evidence of what I did always remained, like the cockroaches, or the electronic bug I’d planted on the desk. But it seemed that any evidence of my presence that directly relied on electrons or photons always vanished within a minute after I was gone. That meant I disappeared from videotapes and undeveloped photographs. No computer could hold onto any information about me. And, since the neurons in the brain used electrical signals, it meant no brain could remember me.
The only way to store any information about me was to put it in permanent physical form while I was still around—printing a digital picture, for example. Even then, if I wasn’t around, people’s memories of that information would disappear a minute after seeing it. Not only that, but anyone they told about me would forget me, too.
I allowed some time for George to walk away, then I left the closet, took an elevator down to the lobby, and walked out of the building.
Phase One of my plan was complete. Now for Phase Two.
I walked around the corner to the white van I’d rented yesterday. This morning I’d painted a logo on the side, consisting of a black silhouette of a cockroach in the center of a red circle with a slash through it. I hopped into the back of the van and pulled on a workman’s jumpsuit with the name Larry embroidered on the lapel.
Then I had to pull it partway off to get to my modified iPhone. I activated a special app that allowed me to play the recording from the bug I’d planted in the penthouse. I was pretty sure they would call an exterminator to deal with the dozens of cockroaches that would now be scurrying around Jamshidi’s office, but it would be kind of awkward if I showed up before they called one.
Hearing Jamshidi’s yell of surprise again was satisfying. Angry shouting in Farsi was interspersed with Behrouz speaking in an apologetic tone. The elevator dinged, and a few moments later Jamshidi switched to English, saying, “You are supposed to check all packages. How did all these insects get through?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we just check for weapons,” said a new voice, presumably a guard. “Company policy is we’re not supposed to look at confidential documents.”
Jamshidi let out an exasperated sigh. “As of now, company policy has changed. It seems we are being targeted by environmentalists.”
Good—that meant he had seen the manifesto I had included in the package, calling Jamshidi Oil, Ltd., “an infestation of vermin that must be exterminated from the face of Mother Earth.”
After some more instructions to the guard about tightening up security, Jamshidi said, “Call someone to kill these things. I don’t want them laying eggs in my office.”
I smiled.
A few minutes later in the recording, Behrouz was on the phone with an extermination company, and from his side of the conversation it sounded like it would be at least an hour before they could get anyone out. So I hung out in the van for forty minutes, then drove it around the corner and parked right in front of Jamshidi Oil, Ltd, so my artwork on the van would be clearly visible.
For the second time today, the glass doors parted before me and I strode to the reception desk. The same blonde receptionist looked me over, but of course she didn’t recognize me as the courier from before. She wouldn’t even remember that courier—I was completely gone from her memory.
“Somebody called for an exterminator?” I said.
“I’ll have someone take you up,” she said, then called someone.
George emerged from the same door as before, and we went through a similar security routine. The metal detector whined about my keyring, which George demanded I remove from my pocket. He inspected it carefully and found a bunch of keys. He inspected my iPhone. Then he examined the contents of my backpack: a gas mask, various spray bottles, and a canister labeled “Roach Bomb.”
“Gas mask?” he asked.
“I work with some pretty toxic chemicals. Trust me, you do not want to breathe them in.”
He nodded. “Will we need to evacuate the whole floor?”
That would make my job easier. But it was no good telling him to evacuate the floor. The moment he forgot me, he would forget telling people to evacuate. People’s memories would change to give them a reason why they were no longer on the fourteenth floor, but nothing would prevent them from returning. So there was no point.
“Let me evaluate the situation first,” I said.
George took me up in the elevator, and we emerged into the waiting area outside Jamshidi’s office. Jamshidi was there, talking on a cell phone, and he waved me toward his office door.
As I brushed past Behrouz’s desk, I retrieved the bug I’d planted—no sense in leaving any traces, and I could re-use it on a future job.
Inside Jamshidi’s office, a couple of smushed cockroaches showed up against the deep-pile beige carpet. The corner office had magnificent views of the London skyline out the two walls made entirely of glass. Jamshidi’s desk, made of intricately carved wood, faced at an angle toward the glass corner so he could sit in his massive brown leather chair and look over the city. Behind the chair was a series of shelves filled with assorted books.
On the desk were two computers. One of them was my target, but I did my best to not look at it.
“Hmm,” I said, making a show of peering around the room. “Looks like the bugs have already scurried into whatever nooks and crannies they could find.”
Out in the waiting area, the elevator dinged.
“Only way to be sure of getting them all,” I said, pulling the canister out of my backpack, “is to use this. So you’ll need to clear the room.”
George headed for the door while I brought out my gas mask. I was about to put it on when I noticed George had stopped in the doorway. I looked past him to see a second security guard and a man in coveralls with BugBanishers written across the front.
Against all odds, the real exterminator had showed up early.
I lunged forward and shoved George in the back. He went sprawling onto the carpet of the waiting area. I slammed the door shut, locked it, and started counting seconds.
My plan was still the same, just on a slightly faster timeframe. With a few twists, the cap came off the canister.
I had to take a moment to psych myself up for the next step: setting off the smoke bomb. When I was a kid, I was caught in a fire. Even without flames, smoke tended to make me anxious.
Someone pounded on the door.
Taking a deep breath, I activated the smoke bomb, then tossed it into the middle of the room.
As thick smoke billowed out of the canister, I put on my gas mask. Then I made my way to the desk and hid under it. If they managed to break through the door before the sixty seconds was up, that might give me the few extra seconds I needed for them to forget why they were breaking down the door.
The pounding continued, but fortunately the door still held.
The smoke in the room quickly became thick enough that I could barely see the chair three feet away. Even though I had the gas mask on, my breathing became labored. I knew it was psychological, so I tried to breathe evenly and concentrate on my counting.
Just as I reached twenty-seven seconds, the building’s fire alarm blared to life. Good. That would give them reason to evacuate the floor as soon as they forgot about me.
At forty-three seconds, there was a splintering crash, followed by the thud of a body hitting the floor. Someone groaned, then coughed.
“Find him,” said Jamshidi, shouting to be heard over the fire alarm.
Through coughs, George said, “He has a gas mask.”
A male voice I didn’t recognize said, “There’s no way out of—”
Sixty seconds.
“—too thick, sir,” continued the voice. “It’s too risky. Let’s get you safely out of the building.”
I waited another thirty seconds to give them time to be on their way downstairs, then came out from under the desk. Jamshidi’s brown leather chair was comfortable, although the armrests were set too wide apart for me to use. But I wasn’t there to relax.
After pulling the keychain out of my pocket, I flipped through the keys until I found the one I wanted. With a strong tug, the blade of the key separated from the rest. The part that had been concealed served as a USB drive. I plugged it into the computer on the left, then leaned forward so I could see the screen through the smoke.
An antivirus program popped up a warning screen, which I clicked to cancel. The specially designed worm on the USB drive activated, automatically bypassing the login.
When I saw that his browser was open to a web page, I knew this was the wrong computer. My target was the computer that was inaccessible to remote hackers because it was not connected to the internet.
I removed the USB drive and plugged it into the other computer. The worm again bypassed the login, and I had access to Jamshidi’s secret files. Of course, they were mostly written in Farsi, but the drive had an automatic translation system on it.
Jamshidi was liquidating billions of dollars in assets—even the financial papers had noticed that—but no one seemed to know what he was doing with the money. My job was to find out.
My big advantage on a job like this was that I didn’t need to erase the tracks of what I did on the computer—because computers forgot me, sixty seconds after my last interaction with it, all trace of what I had done would be gone. Jamshidi would never know his computer had been accessed.
My big disadvantage was that I couldn’t just copy the files onto the USB drive, because after a minute it would forget I had copied them. Printing files would work—because getting them into physical form put them beyond the reach of my talent—but Jamshidi did not have a printer connected to this computer. And lugging up a printer full of paper might have raised a few questions from George.
So that left one other way of getting the information out: my memory. I would need to locate the key data and remember it. The problem was, I didn’t really know exactly what I was looking for.
I brought up a list of translated document names and sorted them by most recent. A document with “Shipping Manifest” in the name caught my eye, and I opened it. It listed tons of computer equipment—three hundred and seventy-four tons, to be exact. Departure from the Port of London. Destination: Bushehr, Iran.
There were other shipping manifests with similar information. Whatever Jamshidi was doing required a lot of computing power.
I almost skipped over a document titled “Prophet,” because I thought it would just turn out to be something to do with Islam, but then I wondered why Jamshidi would keep religious stuff on his protected computer.
The document popped open. I had just enough time to see the words “quantum supercomputer” before I heard someone cough behind me.
I whirled in the chair. Partially obscured by smoke, the vague shape of a man stood inside a lit rectangle. This was something completely unexpected: the building plans had not shown a secret door at the back of Jamshidi’s office.
“Who are you?” the man demanded.
I whirled back to face the computer, then kicked the leather chair backward toward the intruder, hoping it would block him temporarily. The USB drive was still plugged in, so I yanked it out. There couldn’t be any physical evidence of my hacking or it wouldn’t matter that no one remembered me.
As I rounded the corner of the desk and headed for the door, someone grabbed my right arm. I twisted out of his grip and lunged for the door. By the time I got to the stairwell, despite the fire alarm’s shriek I could hear his footsteps close behind, punctuated by coughs as he tried to clear his lungs of smoke. For the second time that day, I ran down the steps.
As the stairs turned at the thirteenth floor, I looked up and saw my pursuer. He looked around fifty, with a fit, muscular build and a full head of black hair graying at the temples. He wore a white shirt, no tie. There hadn’t been anyone like him in the personnel files.
I lost sight of him as I looped down the stairs. But his footsteps didn’t slow. Just before reaching the tenth floor landing, I remembered that it was probably still wet from my water bottle. I slowed to a walk, stepping carefully, and took advantage of the moment to pull off my backpack. Since the smoke hadn’t spread down here, I took off my gas mask, shoved it into the pack, and pulled out two spray bottles.
Breathing easier as I continued down toward the ninth floor, I shouted, “Watch out for the—”
A yell and a thud told me my warning had been too late.
“—water!” I finished.
I had to slow him down even more if I wanted to put a minute’s distance between us. I unscrewed the top of one spray bottle and poured oil over the ninth floor landing. “It’s slippery down here,” I shouted. “Slow down!”
His footsteps didn’t resume immediately, so my pace was more leisurely. As I reached the seventh floor, I decided there was no need to detour to the janitorial closet.
When I reached the fifth floor, I could faintly hear his footsteps again, but I estimated he was still about three floors behind me.
As I turned toward the third floor landing, the footsteps were louder, but I thought they were still far off.
Then I saw him less than a half-flight of stairs behind me. He had taken off his shoes, and in his socks he made so much less noise I had misjudged the distance.
With a burst of speed, I raced toward the ground floor. The man was in fantastic shape, especially for someone about thirty years older than me, and he continued to gain.
My second spray bottle—filled with concentrated capsaicin—was still in my hand. Pepper spray was always my last resort, because I hated to leave people temporarily blinded without any idea of what had happened to cause it once they forgot about me. But this guy wasn’t giving me much choice.
I turned suddenly, aimed the nozzle at his face, then squirted.
He dodged to the left and mostly avoided the spray, but he stumbled and had to catch himself on the railing to keep from sprawling onto the landing.
I ran. If I could make it to my van parked right outside, I was sure I could get a minute head start before he could get a vehicle to follow me.
Bursting into the lobby, I headed straight for the glass doors.
As he exited the stairwell only about ten seconds behind, he yelled, “Guards! Get him!”
There weren’t any guards between me and the doors. There was no one in the lobby. The fire alarm was still sounding, so people must have evacuated.
But my van was gone—they must have towed it.
A moment of panic subsided when I spotted my messenger bicycle still chained to the lamppost. I dug into my left pocket for my keys while using my right hand to spray capsaicin randomly behind me, hoping that would slow him long enough to get my bike lock open.
Fortunately, the automatic doors were stuck open, maybe because of the evacuation. As I passed through, I dropped the spray bottle, switched my key to my right hand, and ran to my bike.
It took me only a couple of seconds to unlock the chain. Pushing the handlebars, I sprinted alongside the bike before hopping on and beginning to pedal.
I chanced a look over my shoulder. The man was still running after me, but he was falling behind. I wove through pedestrians on the sidewalk until I got into the street, then pedaled away.
Once I was sure I had left him more than a minute behind, I pulled over to catch my breath. I got out my iPhone and checked the time. It would be a little after eight a.m. on the East Coast of the United States. Perfect. I don’t have any contacts listed in the phone—not because storing phone numbers would be a security problem but because it would forget them after I entered them. So I dialed a number I had memorized.
A computer-generated female voice on the other end answered, “How may I direct your call?”
“Edward Strong,” I said.
The phone rang a few times, then someone picked up. “Strong here.”
“Mr. Strong,” I said, “in the lower drawer on the right side of your desk, there is a manila file folder labeled ‘CODE NAME LETHE.’ I need you to pull it out and read the cover letter. There should also be an authentication protocol sheet in there.”
Having to go through this sort of rigmarole every time I reported in was an inconvenience. But what else could I do?
My name is Nat Morgan. And even though they don’t remember me, I work for the CIA.