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Back A Shadow Intelligence
Chapters (58)
  1. Cover
  2. Also by Oliver Harris
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. NINE
  12. TEN
  13. ELEVEN
  14. TWELVE
  15. THIRTEEN
  16. FOURTEEN
  17. FIFTEEN
  18. SIXTEEN
  19. SEVENTEEN
  20. EIGHTEEN
  21. NINETEEN
  22. TWENTY
  23. TWENTY-ONE
  24. TWENTY-TWO
  25. TWENTY-THREE
  26. TWENTY-FOUR
  27. TWENTY-FIVE
  28. TWENTY-SIX
  29. TWENTY-SEVEN
  30. TWENTY-EIGHT
  31. TWENTY-NINE
  32. THIRTY
  33. THIRTY-ONE
  34. THIRTY-TWO
  35. THIRTY-THREE
  36. THIRTY-FOUR
  37. THIRTY-FIVE
  38. THIRTY-SIX
  39. THIRTY-SEVEN
  40. THIRTY-EIGHT
  41. THIRTY-NINE
  42. FORTY
  43. FORTY-ONE
  44. FORTY-TWO
  45. FORTY-THREE
  46. FORTY-FOUR
  47. FORTY-FIVE
  48. FORTY-SIX
  49. FORTY-SEVEN
  50. FORTY-EIGHT
  51. FORTY-NINE
  52. FIFTY
  53. FIFTY-ONE
  54. FIFTY-TWO
  55. FIFTY-THREE
  56. FIFTY-FOUR
  57. FIFTY-FIVE
  58. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

‘His messages stop. Rumours start a few days later: he’s either been killed or arrested. Someone says they think he was in Astana, but there’s nothing on the news. Someone knows his family and they say he’s disappeared. A few friends drop into the forum to say he’s not contactable in the real world either. The last they heard, he’d stumbled across something crazy, something way bigger than he expected. The whole thing’s become news in the community, people circulating the pictures he posted, trying to figure out what he was on to. There are rumours that maybe the British intelligence services were involved, then CIA, Mossad, FSB.’ Stefan turned to me. ‘Now I’ve just tried to hack the same organisation.’

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Nomad9 is a guy called Ruslan Batur. Pretty shit-hot, worked for the Kazakh government on cybersecurity between 2012 and 2014, but fell out over some of the things he was asked to do. He’s got a history of using his skills for political ends: hacktivism, connections with human-rights groups.’

‘Got a picture of him?’

‘Mugshot, from an arrest in 2015.’ Stefan clicked the mouse and brought up Ruslan Batur’s mugshot. Batur was twenty-two in the photo: with shoulder-length dark hair, large eyes and a wispy attempt at a beard. ‘According to people online, at least ten individuals have been questioned about him over the last few days, in six different countries.’

I showed Stefan the CCTV footage of Batur in the Mega Mall on his way to pass what he’d found to Joanna, and then the shots I’d taken of his corpse.

‘You knew it,’ Stefan said. ‘You knew he’d been killed and still sent me in.’

‘I didn’t know who he was or what he’d done. I’ve been trying to find those out.’

‘Jesus Christ. You said Joanna Lake was working for Vectis. Now she’s spying on them. So who was she actually working for? I’m trying to figure out who’s most likely to kill me.’

‘No one’s going to kill you.’

‘This is something big, isn’t it?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘There have been attempts to wipe even talk of the hack from message boards,’ Stefan said. ‘Look.’ He brought up a page of code. ‘One hacker site, Black Hat, published a report, nine a.m. US time, connecting the disappearance of Batur to the conversations on Abysm, suggesting he may have stumbled into information to do with an intelligence service. It gets blown offline an hour later. By their own account they were hit by a DDoS attack – they posted a grab of their server log.’

DDoS: Distributed Denial of Service – a technique used by criminals, bored teenagers and intelligence services alike to derail a target website by bombarding it with communication requests until it goes into meltdown.