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
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
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