Chapter summary
Chidi traces Tobe’s breach toward Oxford, but evidence reveals someone intimate supplied her account password.
TOBECHUKWU
Tuesday Chidi Okoro had left the bank two years earlier to become something called a security engineer, which as far as Tobe could tell meant being paid to be suspicious. He agreed to meet her at a bukka under an almond tree in Yaba at one o’clock, on condition that she paid for the amala.
He ate with one hand and scrolled through her screenshots with the other. For ten minutes the only sounds were the tearing of ewedu and a series of “hmm” that made her want to scream.
“Is it nice?” said Tobe, who had watched him demolish a second wrap of amala.
“It is excellent. Are you sure you won’t eat?”
“I have lost my job, my boyfriend’s phone and my appetite.”
“Then give me your abula,” said Chidi.
“Okay,” he said at last, licking his thumb. “First, the IP address. It points to a Lagos fibre provider, but it is a VPN. Anybody serious would use one, so that’s a dead end. Second.” He turned the phone around. “Look at the device name.” Under the sign-in time, in small grey letters, it said BODLEIAN-7.
“Nobody names a computer that by accident,” Chidi said. “People who build their own machines name them. After a dog, an ex, a football club. Your person named theirs after a library, and a seven after a library means there were six before it. Whoever this is has been at this for years. And they are sentimental.”
Tobe typed the word into her own phone. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
She felt something click inside her. Madame Angelina. The framed certificate in the Managing Director’s office, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, hung where every visitor was forced to pass it. And Madame Angelina’s assistant, Bisola, who ran her diary, her emails and, Tobe now realised, probably her passwords.
“Chidi, there is a woman at work who studied at Oxford.”
“Then maybe it is her. Or maybe it isn’t.” He pushed his plate away. “But Tobe, here is what bothers me. Three minutes. You said the whole thing took three minutes. That is not hacking. Hacking is slow and noisy. This was somebody who walked in through the front door with a key.”
“A key?”
“Your password. Somebody had it. Who had it?”
“Nobody. I changed it in March.”
“Who set up your phone in March?”
She did not answer at once. March. A Sunday. Her flat, a bottle of wine she had not finished, and his hands on her phone, saying, Let me do this properly, Tobe darling, you never back anything up. He had stayed an hour. He had typed the new password in while she watched, and she had thought it the most loving thing anyone had ever done for her.
“A friend,” she said.
“Then ask your friend.”
She called him from the bukka, with Chidi pretending to study the soup.
“The number you have called is switched off.”
Of course it was.
That evening she added to the envelope. Under Bisola and under Kunle from Abuja she wrote Angelina (Oxford), and then, lower down, lightly, in pencil, the way you write a thing you hope to rub out later: Someone close to him.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 18
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Four contextual images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no generated image depicts a real event or named person. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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