Read Online The Woman Who Stopped Traffic by Daniel Pembrey - Free Book Online Page A

Rémy Martin XO Excellence would do for this one.
    She surprised herself by laughing out loud. What a strange gaggle they made! The whole room was watching. The shy barman poured a triple measure. She glugged it down, the sickly liquor coursing through her, warming her back up a bit.
     
    She opened the laptop again, suddenly realizing how the identity hijacker may have gone about it. “ Don’t – look at that!” Stacey said, reaching to close it, but Natalie told her No, it was OK: she wanted to show them something.
    She opened a separate browser window and pulled up Friendster.com. It had lived on, popular now in Malaysia and the Philippines. Stupidly, she had not closed her account. There she still was, with the same 2003 photo and the same friends: someone had simply opened a Clamor account in her name, copied across the photo and found others, then tracked down as many of the same friends as he (or she) could on Clamor – the maverick Ray Ott being among them. It seemed likely that Ray had accepted ‘her’ request and checked out her profile on Sunday as well – after their Saturday email exchange. Suddenly, his radio silence that afternoon didn’t seem so strange.
    Natalie remembered being sent to an executive course at a business school near Paris, and learning about the ‘sleeper effect’ in corporate communications: how over time, we remember only the message, not the source. It stuck with her because of the male executive colleague she went on the course with, a rising star at the company – whom she got to know a lot better that weekend. She vividly remembered the epiphany in that lecture hall, of why malicious gossip tended to be so effective.
    Her very identity had been violated with the world at large – carefully, calculatedly. And if the perpetrator could do that, what else could he or she do?
    “I need to run,” she told her two friends.
    “Huh?”
    “There’s something I need to do, immediately.”
    “No!” Stacey said, “we’re your family, Natalie!”
    But she was already packed up and half way out the door. “I’ll call you.”

CHAPTER 7
     
    Outside, the rain had let up some. She made her way back to the Public Market. Its red neon sign hovered, reflected in the pools of standing rainwater she fought hard to avoid. Her car was fine, no ticket. Rather than getting in however, she hurried up Pike Street, away from the water. It was only four or five blocks to the big Bon Marché and Nordstrom department stores at the heart of Seattle’s downtown shopping area, but the vicinity of Second and Pike was a sketchy corner, particularly at night. Bums huddled under awnings, talking to themselves, cradling their one or two possessions. It wasn’t a place to loiter. Yet it was a place where she’d once seen an Internet café, just round the corner from Amazon.com’s original building on Second, she recalled. Would it still be there? Did anyone still use an Internet cafe in a city as digital as Seattle? There it was: beneath a cheap noodle bar. She descended the basement steps.
    It was a florescent-lit rabbit hutch of a place where time seemed to have stood still. She prepaid and took a seat in front of a light brown Compaq, looking as old as she felt. She launched the web browser and opened her Clamor page again – unable to recall an Internet connection this slow, even back in the days of dial-up.
    Please wait…  …  …
    She reached into her bag, for what had required her to come to an Internet café. Detection avoidance . She delved into an inner, zipped pocket, emerging with a glossy red memory stick, which she inserted into the Compaq’s updated USB port. Then she clicked open a folder, entered her two-factor authentication password and launched the application. Onto the screen popped:
     
                            LoverSpy, Deluxe
     
     
    Here was the more specific reason why she’d had to leave her job. A Californian company had created the spyware to