Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

major.’
    ‘OK, so it’s just groceries and the air fare,’ said Erika. ‘We can get by for a few days, at least until we publish the video. That should crank up the
donations.’
    ‘Not quite,’ said Dieter.
    ‘What’s the problem?’
    ‘The Swedish ISP who are hosting our site. They know there is going to be a surge of traffic, and possibly denial-of-service attacks when we go live and they want payment before then. They
are sending through an invoice to me today. Nico was going to do a bank transfer as soon as we received it.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘Fifteen thousand euros.’
    ‘Can’t they wait a week? Don’t they trust us?’
    ‘They trust our ideals,’ Apex said. ‘I’m not sure they trust our finances.’
    ‘Damn!’ Erika put her head in her hands. She knew none of the three of them had fifteen thousand euros. Dieter was maxed out on his credit cards. It was years since any card company
had allowed her credit, and Apex didn’t cough up money however hard one pleaded.
    But . . . She had an idea.
    ‘Apex. Can you hack into Nico’s account? Transfer the money across?’
    ‘No.’ Apex’s voice was firm.
    ‘You mean no, you can’t do it, or no, you won’t do it?’
    ‘Of course I can do it. But I’m not going to. It’s stealing and you know I don’t do that. I’ve never done it. And I know what you’re thinking, Erika, but
don’t you dare ask Dieter to do it either.’
    Dieter flinched next to her. Dieter and Apex were old friends, and old enemies. As teenagers in the late eighties on different continents they had met up on a West German chat channel called
Altos, where they discussed their hacking exploits. Apex had hacked into NASA, the US Air Force Strategic Command and British Aerospace; Dieter into the US Department of Defense’s Network
Information Computer, Deutsche Telekom and the French Commissariat of Atomic Energy. But they all played by some straightforward rules: leave a system the way you found it, don’t change it,
don’t damage it and don’t steal from it.
    Nevertheless, Dieter had been prosecuted in 1991 and spent two years in a German prison, where he met some people who persuaded him to use his skills to download credit card details, which he
did by the thousand once he was released. He was caught again, and spent some more time in jail. Apex had felt personally betrayed by Dieter’s time on the dark side, as he saw it, and when
Dieter was released for the second time, Apex persuaded him to go straight. Since then, the two of them had developed freelance jobs as computer security consultants, testing supposedly secure
websites for vulnerabilities.
    For both of them, Apex especially, their integrity as defined by their own code was everything. Erika knew that.
    So she gave up.
    ‘OK. Well, I’m just going to have to find fifteen thousand euros. Dieter, you had better get to work on everyone’s laptop before the police get here. Apex, are you happy our
system is secure now?’
    ‘Yes, but I’d better work on backing everything up with Dieter before we download the video.’
    ‘OK, guys,’ said Erika. ‘Let’s get to it.’
    Outside, in the dining area, the others were waiting for Erika with cups of coffee and bowls of Cheerios, which seemed to be Iceland’s cereal of choice.
    Erika noticed the priest, her clerical collar firmly attached. Viktor was there as well. ‘Are you back already?’ she asked Ásta.
    ‘Yes, I got here about an hour ago.’
    ‘Did you go up the mountain?’
    ‘I did. With the snow last night, it’s going to be difficult for the police to find anything. I saw Nico.’
    ‘Hadn’t they taken him away?’ Erika couldn’t bear to think of her friend left lying up there on the glacier all night, in the cold and the dark, all alone. She
shuddered.
    ‘No,’ said Ásta. ‘Forensics people are crawling over everything. What is happening about Nico’s family? Do you know them?’
    Erika sighed. ‘I’ve met his wife once when I stayed with him in Milan, but I don’t know her really well.’
    ‘Who is going to tell her?’
    Erika felt a pang of guilt. ‘The police said they would, but I never got around to giving them her number last night.’
    ‘Do you want me to handle that?’
    ‘Yes please,’ said Erika. ‘Did you tell that American anything about the Gaza video, the CIA guy?’
    ‘No, I didn’t.’
    Erika noticed that Viktor was smiling, proud of his niece. And so he should be. Ásta had been