But tonight the office was dark. Mariel made her way aided by the light filtering in the long row of windows from the street, and the glow from half a dozen computer screens. At her own desk she tossed her bag down. First she opened the bottom drawer and pulled a few items out at random, setting them on the desk. This was set decoration. If Michel happened to come in, she hoped it would look as if she had been searching for her key.
Then she slipped into the chair and grabbed her computer mouse with one hand. The screen saver was a shot of moving clouds and sea, and was another thread in the fabricated character of Michel Verdun’s wuss of an employee. Mariel’s screen saver of choice would have been something closer to the wild starbursts on the desk next to hers—or perhaps a series of morphing faces. She liked colour and wackiness and excitement.
The serene sky dissolved, and her desktop appeared.
For a few moments Mariel typed and clicked until the window she wanted appeared. Then she grabbed up a pen and, on a bright pink Post-it note, copied the short list of letters and numbers that appeared. She carefully double-checked them, then deleted the file and exited. After a few moments the desktop would dissolve and her screen saver would reappear, leaving no evidence that she had touched the computer.
Mariel pulled a zip disk from a drawer, stood and, armed with the little pink square of paper, moved through the shadows and paused before an internal door.
Noting the first figure she had scribbled down, she keyed the code into the security keypad. She waited till she heard the click, then opened the door and slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her before reaching for the light switch. It was just possible someone in a building opposite might phone the police if they saw lights.
A few feet away, two bright squares of light showed two identical images of a naked couple deriving a great deal of apparent mutual satisfaction from the close conjunction of their rather improbably endowed bodies. After a moment the fluorescent lights flickered and settled into a bright glow.
Against the wall were two computers on a long desk. Beside it were several tall black filing cabinets. These and a chair made up the entire contents of the room. These were Michel’s top secret, dedicated computers. The room was off limits to everyone save Michel himself.
Mariel crossed to one of the computers. She dragged the wheeled chair over and sank down, dropping the pink note beside the keyboard, reaching for the mouse. The pornographic movie loop disappeared as the desktop came up on one screen, but on the other the couple moved tirelessly through their paces.
It was Michel’s favourite screen saver. Mariel hardly saw it anymore. She knew Michel did it to annoy, and it was annoying if she thought about it. Under ordinary circumstances she would have taken a stand, but these were very far from ordinary circumstances. Michel was a man whose guard went down around women whom he was successfully sexually harassing, and it was no part of Mariel’s plan to figure in his mind as a woman to reckon with. Mariel the Mouse was her role.
The real Mariel de Vouvray would have mentioned twice that she found his screen saver offensive and then would probably have kicked the screen out of the monitor the third time to make her point. The Mariel Michel knew lowered her eyes and bit her lip whenever he summoned her to some discussion while the screen saver was on. Which was something he did to all the women staff—too regularly for chance.
But that was okay. If she did her job right, she would have all the revenge she could want on Michel Verdun. And Mariel intended to do her job right.
Mariel was a corporate spy. She had ostensibly been working for Michel Verdun et Associés for four months—but in fact she was working for her American cousin, Hal Ward, of Ward Energy Systems in California.
Hal was the inventor of the world’s most efficient fuel cell technology, but he hadn’t stopped there. His work now involved research and development into a variety of energy alternatives to fossil fuel and the combustion engine.
And someone was carefully and consistently stealing the results of that research and passing it on to foreign-based companies and governments. The pipeline for the stolen material had finally been tracked last year. Michel Verdun et Associés was a “détective privé”—detective agency—based in Paris, with links all over the Middle East and, most importantly, with the country of Bagestan. It was Bagestan, and Bagestan’s unpleasant dictator, Ghasib, who benefited most from the stolen industrial secrets.
Hal wanted the leak stopped. But Michel Verdun—as might be expected—had some of the best data protection software in the world on his computers. Hal had decided to put someone right inside Michel Verdun’s organization, not only to discover the source of the leak in his own corporation, but to unravel Michel Verdun’s entire operation, from leak to end user.
Mariel de Vouvray’s father was French, and a not too distant cousin of Hal’s father. Her mother was American, and the sister of Hal’s mother. Mariel had spent every summer in California almost since she was born, many of them on Hal’s family estate. She was fluently bilingual. She had taken her university degree in computer intelligence and then had gone to work full-time for Hal. She was a natural for this job.
It had been a relatively simple matter to get her into Michel’s organization. Through one of his friends in Silicon Valley, Hal had engineered the head hunting and abrupt departure of one of Michel’s key computer people. Mariel’s fluent English and glowing references from her mythical former job (courtesy of another good friend of Hal’s), added to her willingness to start immediately, had nailed her the post left vacant by the departure.
Since then, slowly and carefully, because time was not the most important factor, Mariel had wormed her way into the most secret parts of Verdun’s organization. She had placed “moles” into his computer programming so that her own computer was e-mailed a copy of all his new passwords and codes every week. She had reconnoitred the building and found the old disused fire escape, and the hotel.
Every Friday night before she left the building at the end of the day she went up to the fourth-floor toilets, unlocked the window and opened it a crack. Then she went home, changed into her disguise and returned as Emma.
And then she checked the computers in this room for data files that had arrived during the week and sent them on to Hal Ward’s own safe computer. Even if Michel did discover that he was being spied on, he would not find out where the information had gone.
Mot de passe? demanded the screen, and Mariel consulted the little paper and keyed in that week’s password. Then she summoned up the list of everything that had arrived during the past week. Michel routinely deleted the files as he dealt with them, but Mariel had installed a mole on the computer that saved all files to a second, hidden folder. Since she had been inside his firewall when she did it, the program remained undetected.
Michel had a finger in lots of pies, most of which were rotten. He had agents, moles and hackers everywhere, stealing data and sending it to these two computers anonymously. He then sold it to his many clients.
One of the things for which she most despised him was the work he did for a Swiss bank. Michel investigated the lives of the people who were fighting to get back the money that had been deposited before the Second World War by relatives who had afterwards died in German concentration camps. The bank was hoping to blackmail vulnerable people into dropping their claims. He did the same for a multinational pharmaceutical giant, investigating the backgrounds of anyone—politicians included—who challenged them.
That was Michel Verdun. Very, very choosy about his clients—he wouldn’t touch anyone who didn’t have money.
Mariel scanned the list of received data with practised skill. Michel’s system worked on a number code. Agents sent data signed with a code. In return he paid money into anonymous bank accounts. Anyone trying to sort out his little empire would have one hell of a time.
It