Zero Days
Ruth Ware
For my dad, who was paranoid about online security before it was fashionable
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4 MINUS EIGHT DAYS
The wall around the perimeter was child’s play. Six feet, but no spikes or barbed wire on the top. Barbed wire is my nemesis. There’s a reason they use it in war zones.
At five foot two I couldn’t quite reach to pull myself up, so I scaled a nearby tree with a sturdy branch overhanging the car park, lowered myself until my feet made contact with the top of the wall, and then ran softly along it to a place where I could drop down out of sight of the CCTV cameras that circled the building at intervals.
On the other side of the car park was the fire door Gabe had described, and it looked promising. A standard half-glazed door with a horizontal release bar on the inside. I saw with satisfaction that it was poorly fitted, with a gap at the bottom that you could practically get your hand through. It was the work of about thirty seconds to slip my long metal slider underneath, swing it up so the hook caught on the bar, and pull firmly down. The door opened and I held my breath, waiting for the alarm—fire doors are always risky like that—but none came.
Inside, the lights flicked on automatically—big fluorescent squares in a tiled ceiling that stretched away into the darkness like a chessboard. The far end of the corridor was still pitch-black, the sensors there not yet picking up my movement, but the section I was in was bright as day, and I stood, letting my eyes adjust to the glare.
Lights are a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they’re a huge red flag to anyone monitoring the security cameras. There’s nothing like a screen lighting up like Christmas to catch a security guard’s eye and make them glance up from their phone. But you can sometimes style it out if you’re caught walking confidently around a building at night when the lights are on. It’s much harder to explain your presence if you’re creeping along an unlit corridor with a torch. You might as well be wearing a striped T-shirt and carrying a bag marked Loot.
Right now it was 10:20 p.m. and I was wearing my “office” clothes—black trousers which looked like they could be the bottom half of a suit but were actually stretchier and more breathable than any regular office wear, a dark blue blouse, and a black blazer that was standard, off-the-rack from Gap. On my feet were black Converse, and I had a gray Fj?llr?ven backpack slung over my shoulder.
Only my hair was out of place. This month it was dyed a fluorescent scarlet that wasn’t close to any natural shade and didn’t really fit in with the slightly stuffy atmosphere of this company—an insurance group called Arden Alliance. Gabe had suggested a wig, but wigs were always a risk, and besides, I was getting into character. Jen—I had decided my imaginary office worker was called Jen—worked in customer services but had fond memories of her gap year after university and still thought she was a little bit cool. Jen might have buckled down to achieve promotion, but her hair was the last flicker of a personality she hadn’t quite abandoned to the nine-to-five. That, and perhaps a touch too much liquid eyeliner, plus a tattoo on her shoulder blade that said stick ’em with the pointy end.
The eyeliner was real—I didn’t feel properly dressed without a smooth flick of Nyx Epic Ink. The university degree was imaginary. So was the tattoo. I wasn’t sufficiently into Game of Thrones to ink it, though admittedly if I had been, Arya was the best character.
Jen had been working late, lost track of time, and was heading hurriedly home for the weekend. Hence the comfortable shoes. The backpack was for her office heels—although that was where my role play broke down. Jen might keep heels in her backpack. Mine was full of housebreaking tools and computer equipment loaded with some deeply shady software Gabe had downloaded from the dark web.
I walked softly down the corridor, my rubber soles silent on the carpet, trying to look as though I belonged here. On either side were the doors of empty offices, just the occasional LED glowing in the darkness where people had failed to turn their computers off properly for the weekend.
A photocopier in an alcove blinked hypnotically and I stopped, glancing up and down the hallway. It was illuminated behind me but dark around the corner up ahead, the motion sensors not yet detecting my presence. So much the better—the lights might alert security, but that worked both ways. The guards were unlikely to be coming from behind me; that corridor was a dead end out to the car park. If they came from up ahead, the lights flickering on would give me enough warning to double back or duck into one of the offices. Gabe would probably tell me to get on with finding the server room—but the chance was too good to miss.
Behind the copier were, as I’d hoped, a tangle of wires and two LAN ports for hooking up devices to the main company network. One was in use, connected to the copier. The other was empty. Heart beating, I glanced up and down the corridor and took one of the little Raspberry Pi computers out of my backpack.
The Pi was smaller than a paperback book, and I slid it down behind the copier, nesting it snugly into the mass of abandoned pages that had fallen off the back of the document feeder. I plugged it into a power socket and snaked the LAN cable into the empty port. Seconds later my Bluetooth earpiece crackled and my husband’s deep voice came into my ear, strangely intimate in the hush of the deserted building.
“Hey, babe… your Pi just came online. How’s it going?”
“Okay.” I spoke quietly, not quite a whisper but not much more. “I’m just trying to get my bearings.” I tugged a stray photocopy over the Pi, hiding it from view, then shouldered my bag and continued up the corridor, rounding the corner. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know.” Gabe’s tone was dry. “Just a little Dark Souls on the PS. Not much I can do until you get me into the server room.”
I laughed, but he was only half joking. The part about Dark Souls might not be true—I knew full well there was no way he’d be gaming; on the contrary, he was undoubtedly hunched at his monitor anxiously tracing my progress on the blueprints we’d obtained from the planning department—but the bit about the server room was. This was always the hardest part of any job for Gabe—where he had to just sit back and listen, powerless to help if I ran into any trouble.
“Where are you?” he asked now.
“In a corridor running east-west from that fire door you found. This building is—Oh, shoot.”
I stopped dead.
“What?” Gabe’s voice was alert but not overly alarmed. Oh, shoot wasn’t what I would have said if I’d just stumbled into a guard. That would have been something a lot stronger.
“There’s a security door up ahead. Was that on the plans?”
“No,” Gabe said a little grimly. “They must have updated.” I could hear his fingers racing across the keyboard. “Hold up, I’m trying to get into the security system via your Pi. What can you see?”
“There’s a PIR sensor.” I looked up at the blinking infrared oval mounted above the door. I was just out of range.
“Okay, then wait, the sensor might trigger an alarm.”
“Well, duh,” I said. I knew that, of course. I wasn’t worried about the door itself—between us, Gabe and I could get through most things. But a PIR sensor usually meant a motion detector—and activating it after hours risked some kind of alert to the guards. Still, the fire door hadn’t been alarmed, which was a good sign. I began walking closer.
“Jack?” Gabe said. His fingers stopped clicking. “Jack, honey, talk to me, what are you doing? We don’t want another Zanatech.”
Zanatech. Ugh. One word: dogs. I’ve got nothing against them as pets, but I hate security dogs. Those things can really do damage. And they can run. Fast.
I ignored Gabe and took another step, holding my breath.
The sensor lit, registering my presence, and I shut my eyes, bracing myself for the sound of alarms, running feet… but the only thing that happened was the door swinging smoothly open.
“Jack?” Gabe’s voice came into my ear more urgently as he heard my exhalation. “What just happened?”
“It’s fine. The door’s open. Don’t think it’s set anything off.”
I could literally hear Gabe clenching his teeth on the other end of the line, trying not to snap the retort he wanted to make, but I knew the words he was holding back. He’d wanted me to wait while he tried to access the security system via the Pi and figure out if the door was alarmed. But that could take hours, and in this job, doing nothing was a risk in itself. Sometimes you just had to go on your gut—act on impulse.