Egress Point

Chapter 3

On the way back to the hotel Arebecca was buzzing. Her heels clicked fast along the pavement, and she was taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly. Was the money the main cause of the buzz? Or was it Nick? He was so young, but passionate about what Hanger's End were doing. She felt foolish that she hadn't even asked about the company at all. They were IT analysts who did assessments of organisation's security. They didn't try to actually break in, but instead reviewed policies and technical documents to see if they would protect their client's data.

She had asked about Nick's role. Although he was young, Nick had studied computer science and actually set up the company while he was at university. He was used to comments about his age and appearance. He said it didn't matter, as long as he produced the goods. She decided she liked his confidence about the work, even if his dress sense was non-existent. He had managed to get to where she wanted to be: independent of parents and free to do anything he liked.

Back in the hotel suite, she slipped out of the dress and heels, and pulled on her version of Nick's jeans and a t-shirt. The jeans were tight fitting, as was the top, and they were both designer labelled and very expensive and they looked great on her. Not a bad company uniform, she decided.

Her personal laptop was still on the sofa from Friday night. She sat down next to it with her new work goodies. The thin laptop was smaller than her MacBook. She opened it up and it whirred to life and she pulled her legs up and sat cross legged waiting for the desktop to load.

A prompt appeared asking for her to enter a password. She thought for a moment and decided to use her Gmail password and typed it in and hit enter. A message told her to think of another, better, password please. She typed in her Facebook password, which she had recently changed after her account was hacked. The same message, another better password please. After trying a few more existing passwords, she cursed the machine and made up a new one. This time the message asked her to hold a finger firmly on the touchpad. She got it right first time, and was rewarded with a simple home screen with two links, one labeled 'Email' and the other 'Secure System'. She chose email first.

The contract details and secure system instructions were already in her inbox. Linguistic Analyst was her new job title, according to the first page of the contract. Without reading any of the rest of it, she scrolled to the last page and put a tick in a box and sent it back to Nick. Now she was committed to the work. And to getting paid on Friday. And to shopping on Saturday. A plan formed in her mind: if she could finish her workload early in the week, then she could go out and party on Friday night. Maybe even Thursday too. This job could be even better than she'd hoped for.

The email with the secure system instructions was straightforward. It told her to hold down Ctrl and D and then click on the secure system link. She held the keys and was taken back to the simple home screen. From there she clicked on the Secure System link. Nothing happened. She waited a few seconds and then tried it again. Then she clicked the email link and re-read the instructions. It still didn't work.

She grabbed for her phone, then put it down and picked up the new work phone. It had a button below the screen and she pushed it. A prompt appeared above a touch keyboard that asked for her to choose a PIN. She entered the same one as her personal phone, and was asked for another better PIN please. She cursed the phone and made up a new PIN. Then she had to hold a finger on the button below the screen. Then she was in. The home screen was even simpler than the laptop. It was blank except for a small square picture of Nick Thomas. She pushed it and a phone application appeared and started to dial his number. Then she remembered about the crypt stick and quickly canceled the call.

The crypt stick was still in her clutch, she got up and dug it out and took it back over to sofa. There were only two ports in the work laptop, one for the power cable, and one for the crypt stick. She plugged it in and tried the link to the secure system again. This time a new application appeared and showed two folder icons. One labeled 'For Translation' and one 'Complete'. She opened the 'For Translation' folder. Inside were three files named 1, 2, and 3. She opened file number 1. French.