The Exphoria Code by Antony Johnston

Author:Antony Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2017-11-07T16:43:34+00:00

44

At lunchtime she drove to a small café in Agenbeux, and settled in a corner table with the Dell laptop. Not so long ago she might have been frowned at, but even rural France was slowly dragging itself into the modern age, and several other young people had laptops and tablets out on their tables. Being one of the only places in town with free wifi probably had something to do with that, and Bridge connected after ordering a sandwich and coffee. But that was a feint, her natural paranoia kicking in, just in case someone checked the base station logs to see if she really had connected. Sure enough, there would be her laptop, innocently surfing the web.

Meanwhile, she logged into the secure partition, tethered it to her cell signal, and used an encrypted connection to check her real email. Henri Mourad had come through after all, running checks on the shortlist. There was only time to gather their security background checks and any related records; no real digging. But it was enough to make a start.

First there was a junior programmer. Bridge looked up the entry in the spreadsheet, and recalled the woman’s interview. Standard answers, but she was fidgety and nervous. She’d spent most of the session tugging at the hem of her pullover, like a nervous tic, and spilled water in her haste to leave the room when the interview was over. But her background check was fine, and she had no police record or note of interest from security. She seemed clean.

Next, a QA tester: a tall, rangy Bosnian guy that she remembered well. Orphaned, turned up in Strasbourg, adopted at six years old. His questionable origins were a black mark, but he’d spent his entire life since then in France. Good educational records, very respectable adoptive family. Bridge had mainly marked him because of his combative attitude in the interview, a real resentment of the interruption to his work and to all her questions. But again, his check was overall clean.

Two senior coders, one of them a project lead. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but there was something about the woman, a British programmer a couple of years younger than herself, that made Bridge uncomfortable. The woman had been friendly, relaxed, answering the questions with an ease and thoughtfulness that should have made the interview fly by. Instead, Bridge somehow found the experience tense and exhausting. But the only black mark on the woman’s background was her connection to a Polish 8-bit demoscene group while she was a student, and according to Bridge’s own colleagues at SIS she’d ceased communication with them upon graduation.

The man was simpler to figure out. He was a Scot who’d charmed his way through the whole interview, giving Bridge exactly the kind of answers befitting an experienced but still ambitious thirtysomething programmer, never once hesitating or thinking too hard, always smiling except when that would have been inappropriate. Bridge had long been a sucker for a Scots accent, but this was something else, a natural charisma she found fundamentally untrustworthy.

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