I rolled my shoulders, stretched my arms, closed my eyes and visualised my plans in neat, serried ranks, lines of soldiers awaiting their orders. I powered up and activated the virtual private network, which was designed to conceal my location from all but the most determined eyes. I opened a browser and found a random site. I checked the IP address I was using, the visible address, and double-checked it wasn’t showing up as related to me or my physical address in any way. The VPN was working. This was the way I started every session, the list of habits I’d taught myself, the routine I’d built as insurance against getting sloppy. There were more details, more things to do, of course, but this was the way it always began.
I logged onto a couple of Instagram accounts and checked for activity. Nothing exciting. I did the same on Twitter. Instagram and Twitter weren’t bad, they helped me build a fully-rounded person who knew the sort of things she was supposed to know if she was the person she said she was, if she liked the Kardashians or Manchester United or soft rock or hard porn. But they weren’t made for getting close to people. I grabbed some images off the web, making sure they weren’t marked and wouldn’t be picked up by crawlers, and posted a handful of updates. Just keeping it real.
The good stuff was all on Facebook, but Simon was growing restless. I sat him on a chair in the kitchen and pulled stupid faces while I buttered some bread and slathered strawberry jam on top. I took the laptop into the kitchen with me and glanced at it from time to time, just to be sure no one had eyes on me and nothing was happening that shouldn’t be. Satisfied, I pulled up Facebook with one hand whilst wiping jam of Simon’s cheek with the other.
Information-gathering, I’d called it, when I’d started hanging around finding out useful things about people I didn’t know. Now I was more honest with myself. It was stalking, plain and simple, and there was no one better at it than me.
I started without logging in, which gave me the basics on half a dozen of my potential victims, the ones who weren’t smart enough to filter their privacy settings. Once I’d checked for significant updates, it was time to interact.
For the Bean-Counter, I was Emily Chatsworth. Emily had piercings in most of the obvious, visible places, and a few that were more commonly kept under wraps. Emily had red hair – this month, at least – and was politically active, but she enjoyed a drink or twelve and she knew how to party. Emily was a London girl, born and bred, who liked to travel but would always come home to the Big Smoke. Emily helped set up major events – concerts, conferences, shows, you name it, she did it, half stage-manager, half producer. The names of celebrities tripped off Emily’s tongue – her fingers, really – like rain in Wales, but she didn’t boast, not really. She was cool, and drop-dead gorgeous, as gorgeous as the software could make her without looking too good to be true. Emily didn’t think she was gay, not permanently, at least, but her recent history said otherwise.
Emily Chatsworth was about as far from me as it was possible to be and live in the same city, but I knew her back to front. I liked Emily Chatsworth. If I’d been that way inclined, Emily Chatsworth was probably just the girl I’d have gone for. I wasn’t. But Jane Ferguson, the mild-mannered junior accountant, the girl from wet and misty Dunfermline who’d discovered a new self in London’s bright nights, Jane Ferguson was very much that way inclined, and I felt she was developing an interest in Emily that might bear fruit.
Jane and Emily were friends. Not in real life, of course – that wasn’t possible because Emily didn’t exist outside my mind and her social media profiles. But I’d spent enough time stalking Jane to learn where she drank, who she partied with when she wasn’t poring over balance sheets and management accounts, the groups she belonged to and the forums she frequented. Emily had joined the same groups and forums, had liked Jane’s comments and disagreed with the people Jane had disagreed with, and in the end it was Jane that had sent Emily the friend request and Emily that had accepted and thanked her. After that, there was the tentative messaging, the hints – no more than hints – that they might meet up in real life, the secrets, small ones, admittedly, but secrets nonetheless. It was easy enough for Emily. She just had to make something up – what a certain well-known singer with a wholesome, child-friendly image had really got up to in her dressing room before a gig, which mobile phone company had a big new launch coming up, that sort of thing. Jane’s secrets weren’t as interesting – she didn’t like her boss and she really didn’t like one of her clients, a man she suspected of using her firm’s good name to launder the proceeds of some serious but unspecified crime. But at least they were real.
Jane had downloaded a couple of apps at Emily’s suggestion – games they could play together online. The first was exactly what it purported to be – one of the million Scrabble variants cluttering up the online stores. The second was a numbers game – perfect for a bean-counter like you, Emily had written, and Jane had shot straight back with Aye, and a Scottish bean-counter, too, so you’re doomed, wild child. The game was real, but the spyware underneath it was real, too, so right now I had access to every message Jane sent or received, her emails, texts, social media, internet history, every last detail on the cheap, leaky, three-year-old smartphone she hadn’t got round to upgrading.
Nothing useful yet, unfortunately. Not so much as a PayPal password. A hint of something that might one day be blackmail material, but blackmail wasn’t my style. Too confrontational. So I was waiting. The Bean-Counter didn’t use that phone for work, but I was confident she’d let something drop eventually, and when she did I’d be ready. Slip in, get the money, slip out again.
There was nothing new in Jane’s world, so I turned to some more recent prospects. Mark was a cop, but he didn’t like to talk about it, and I wouldn’t have known it at all if one of his real friends hadn’t spilled the beans in a post I’d spotted before it was hastily deleted. Mark kept his work life a mile away from his social life, he didn’t seem to have much by way of liquid assets, and he didn’t let anything slip that might have given me a way in to his more private details. But he lived just half a mile away from me, and I liked the idea of having something on a cop, even if that something hadn’t yet turned up. It felt like insurance. For Mark, I was Polly, a friend of a friend of a friend, not yet as close to him as I wanted to be, not yet messaging one another, but commenting on each other’s posts from time to time, and flirting archly as if we were fifteen years younger than we really were. Mark had nothing new to say either. I spent a few more minutes on my other targets – the Stud, who owned a couple of gyms, and was as loud and brash as the brand new Range Rover he used to wheel himself from one end of the Kings Road to the other; the Activist, whose friends didn’t know what I knew about the trust fund that kept her going; the Painter, who professed to be in it for the art alone, but whose search history suggested an interest verging on the obsessive with market values. I spun some lines, posted some photos, commented and liked and loved and laughed and commiserated. There was nothing for me, nothing I could use, but that was fine. All I had to do was keep everything ticking over until something turned up.
My primary source of income these days was the old-fashioned invoice scam, tarted up in its cyber finest for the twenty-first century. The basic premise was simplicity itself. You find out that an invoice is going out, or coming in; you stop it in its tracks; you send your own one, identical in every way, except for the fact that the bank details on it are yours, rather than your victim’s. You wait until the money’s in, you empty the account (which you’d opened in someone else’s name with someone else’s papers in the first place), and you sit back and smile while you count your cash.