Host, p.46
Host, page 46
Joe grinned also, pleased to see him smiling again. It had been a grim twenty-four hours, in which Jack had been quiet and morose most of the time. The worst had been when they’d gone to the hospital and Jack had refused to go near Karen. Fortunately she’d been too dosed on painkillers to be aware of his reaction.
One of the nurses explained that it happened sometimes; it was the kid rejecting the possibility that anything could have happened to a parent. He would get over it in a few days, then he would be fine.
Jack’s spirits had not even lifted when Blake dropped by the house late that afternoon with his sultry girlfriend, Nico, whom he had brought along to Karen’s birthday party, and took Jack for a short spin in his new black Ferrari.
After he’d put Jack to bed, Joe poured himself a Jameson’s and went into his study. Earlier he had toyed with the idea of trying to find the home phone number of Tony Smith, the traffic computer engineer, but now he was daunted when he found there were ten pages of ‘Smith’ in the phone book and half of them seemed to be listed under the initial ‘A’ for Anthony or’T’ for Tony.
He sat in his armchair and rattled the ice cubes in his glass. Worrying. Trying to think one step ahead. He knew now that what he was up against was neither condensation nor any ordinary hacker. What he still couldn’t work out, though, was how anyone could have known Karen was going to be breaking her normal schedule and driving over those lights.
Normally, ARCHIVE would have been receiving constant information from the house’s cameras and microphones. But after the obituary notices Joe had reprogrammed ARCHIVE, switching them off.
A new thought sent a jolt through him. He jumped up from his chair, sat at his workstation, logged into ARCHIVE and went straight into the operating-system listings. He keyed in a request for the audio-visual file. After a few moments a list of all the buildings and rooms where ARCHIVE had eyes and ears came up, together with their on-off status.
His eyes ran down it. His office was showing audio-visual ‘on’. The undergrad room was showing audio-visual and olfactory ‘on’. The computer operations room was showing audio-visual ‘on’. There were several other areas in COGS where there were cameras and they all showed as ‘on’. He scrolled down and came to his house:
Location
Visual Audio
MASTER BEDROOM
ON ON
ENSUITE BATHROOM
ON ON
JACK’S BEDROOM
ON ON
SPARE BEDROOM
ON ON
BATHROOM
ON ON
STUDY
ON ON
UPPER LANDING
ON ON
HALL
ON ON
DINING ROOM
ON ON
DRAWING ROOM
ON ON
KITCHEN
ON ON
EXTERIOR FRONT
ON ON
EXTERIOR REAR
ON ON
Something cold and dark burrowed through Joe’s veins and deep into his guts. Off. He had turned them all off. Every single one of them!
Someone had turned them back on.
He picked up his glass, his hand shaking so much that some whiskey slopped over the side. Then he looked back at his computer screen to make sure he was not mistaken. Slowly his eyes rose to the camera above the door. He could almost feel someone laughing at him.
He logged off, went straight down into the cellar, pulled out of its socket the massive boa containing ARCHIVE’S wiring connections into the house, both for the cameras and for operating the lights, curtains and other electronic apparatus. Then he began the arduous task of isolating the individual wires to the cameras, and physically winding black tape around the end of each one.
On Sunday morning, as a bribe, Joe told Jack he would take him fishing on the pier after they’d been to see Karen. But only on the condition that Jack was nice to his mother, gave her a kiss and talked to her. Jack sat at the kitchen table concentrating on a painting, silent and withdrawn, and didn’t reply.
It was a cold, overcast day that promised rain. As they loaded their tackle into the car, Muriel Arkwright, who was washing her car across the road, came over – stopping some yards away as if they had a contagious disease. She was wearing an apron, and holding a soapy sponge in her hand. It took her a moment to pluck up the courage to speak.
‘Oh – er – good morning – er – professor,’ she called out hesitantly.
They had never quite reached first-name terms, Joe because he had always avoided getting caught in conversations with her, and Muriel Arkwright because she was slightly in awe of him. She wasn’t quite sure what he did, but word had it around the neighbourhood that he was very eminent.
Joe nodded and continued loading the boot. Muriel came closer, but kept to the pavement, not actually venturing on to the driveway itself, as if she needed to be invited to do that. She was a rather gawky woman in her late forties and her hair was bunched inside a knotted scarf that looked like a bath hat. Joe was aware of her presence behind him and it irritated him.
‘Er – Professor Messenger – I just wanted to say – I read about the accident in the paper. Derek and I are so sorry. How is your wife?’
Joe turned reluctantly. ‘She’s out of immediate danger, but not too good, thank you.’
She pointed a hand at her house. ‘We’re just across the road. I wanted to say to you that – you know – if there’s anything we could do?’ She went beetroot red. ‘She’s in hospital still?’
‘Yes – she’ll be there a while.’
Jack trotted out of the house carrying the sandwich box, cuts and bruises on his face.
‘Your son’s all right?’
‘Yes, fine, he was lucky, just superficial wounds.’
She noticed the trail of water that was dripping from her sponge and cupped a hand below it, as if not wanting to wet the pavement. ‘If you like I could make you a few meals, pop them in the freezer? Do a bit of housework? Babysit if you need to go out?’
Joe looked at her more brightly. The extent of having to look after Jack – and himself – had begun to dawn on him last night, and he’d been wondering how on earth he was going to cope. Now his irritating neighbour suddenly offered a ray of hope. ‘Well, I – I guess I would be grateful for a little help – that’s very kind.’
As if this was a signal, Muriel took a couple of steps forward. Closer up, Joe could see how nervous she was. And she was studying him as if trying to assess him. She had an expression almost of suspicion, he thought.
‘Did I see an ambulance the week before last, taking your son off?’ she ventured. ‘He’s not been well?’
‘He’s fine now,’ Joe said, not wanting to have to explain.
Her expression changed into a schoolgirlish look of mischief, ‘That head last Sunday, professor! That did give me a shock – particularly when you said it was real! You nearly fooled me for a moment!’
Beneath her smile Joe could see she was probing. She was not a fool and must have seen the police afterwards. He smiled back awkwardly as the scene replayed in his mind and the original guilt over Juliet surged back. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘It – er – did – look – I guess –’ He shrugged, not wanting to elucidate.
She spared him. ‘So would you like some food today? You’re obviously going out. Derek and I are having roast chicken – how about if I pop some over for your evening meal?’
Joe felt quite touched. ‘Thank you. I guess we’ll be back around five.’
‘Well – just knock on the door.’
He wouldn’t need to knock on the door, he knew. She watched every coming and going in the street as if she was working for an intelligence service. Probably logged them in a notebook. He didn’t care; right now he felt warmly grateful to her.
They stopped at a florist on the way to the hospital and Joe let Jack choose the flowers. Jack trotted around the shop, sniffing, and selected an assortment almost entirely of blues and yellows. ‘Mummy’s favourite colours,’ he announced.
‘That right?’ Joe said. He realized, uncomfortably, that he didn’t really know. He determined he would spend as much time as possible with Karen while she was in hospital.
Karen was lying on her back, asleep, her leg encased in plaster and supported by a cord hanging from a pulley. Her face looked a little less waxy than yesterday, and the ghastly rims around her eyes had faded a little, Joe was relieved to see.
Jack ran straight up to her, ignoring Joe’s hushed command not to wake her, laid the bouquet on her chest, put his arms around her neck and kissed her.
She opened her eyes, looking very dopey, but managed a weak smile. Joe kissed her and held her good hand. ‘Brave girl,’ he said.
‘Joe-Joe,’ she managed, giving his hand a tiny squeeze.
‘Daddy burned my omelette. It tasted of cacka! Are you coming home today, Mummy?’
She smiled again; her eyes moved from Jack to Joe and she squeezed Joe’s hand a fraction harder than before. ‘Can you bring me photographs?’ she murmured. ‘Of you both. I’d like to have them on the table.’
Joe found himself fighting back tears. ‘Sure. Bring them later today, OK?’
She gave a single nod. Jack looked at her plastered left arm, then at her leg. He followed the line of the cord upwards to the pulley. ‘Why’ve you got that wheel up there, Mummy?’
‘So she can go roller skating on the ceiling,’ Joe said.
Jack looked at him, puzzled at first, then his face broke out into a grin. ‘You can’t go on the ceiling!’ He turned to his mother. ‘You can’t, can you, Mummy? Daddy’s being stupid!’
Joe kept the banter up. Karen smiled some more, then after a while she slept again.
The next morning, Joe dropped Jack off at playschool and pulled up in the car park behind COGS shortly after ten, feeling exhausted. Just getting his son washed, dressed and breakfasted had worn him out, and he’d been more than grateful when Mrs Arkwright had turned up, as promised, with their supper the night before.
Eileen Peacock’s face was doom-laden as he reached her office. ‘Good morning, professor. How is Mrs Messenger?’
‘A little better, thanks.’ Then he remembered. ‘Oh – she was really pleased with the flowers – that was very nice of you.’
‘From all of us.’
‘Thanks. She was thrilled.’
‘I’ve put all your messages up on your screen.’ She said it as she always did, with a note of triumph, as if in mastering the computer she was showing that her age of close on sixty didn’t matter. Then her expression clouded back into doom. ‘Professor, the vice-chancellor’s on the warpath over something. He wants to speak to you.’
‘Oh?’ He looked at her for more information, but she indicated that she had no idea what it was about. She knew that he and the VC didn’t get on well.
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t seem in a very good mood,’ she said, trying to give him a friendly warning.
‘Yup, well I don’t have much to be in a good mood about either right now,’ Joe replied. He walked into his office, dumped his coat, and sat down. Almost immediately the phone rang.
‘Yup?’ he answered curtly.
‘Could I please speak to Professor Messenger?’
Joe recognized the gravelly voice but for a second couldn’t place it. ‘Speaking.’
‘Oh – Professor Messenger, it’s Bill Pearse, Daily Telegraph.’
‘Right, yes, good morning.’
‘About the obituaries last week?’
‘Yes.’
The man sounded a little embarrassed. ‘We’ve had our computer boys on to this and they’ve just come back to me. It – er, it does appear to have been the work of a hacker.’
Joe stiffened, and asked him to go on.
Well, I’m afraid it – it was traced back to your university. I understand it’s been identified as a computer called ARCHIVE.’
Joe felt sick. It was what he’d expected, and yet he’d been praying for another explanation. ‘ARCHIVE?’ he echoed pointlessly.
‘Perhaps it’s one of your students with a macabre sense of humour, professor?’
Joe’s mind trawled for candidates. Who could have pulled such a sick stunt? ‘There’s no possibility your people could be mistaken?’ He tried to grasp at a straw.
‘I have a hard-copy print-out which you’re welcome to see, professor.’
There was a knock on Joe’s door, but he did not respond to it. ‘Right, OK,’ he said. ‘I guess I have to look into it this end.’
‘It’s someone very clever, professor. We run several anti-hacker and anti-virus systems in tandem. Whoever it was managed to get through them all.’
‘I’m very sorry you’ve been put to this trouble,’ Joe said.
‘No – well – we’re sorry too. Kids these days …’
‘Yup,’ Joe said, without conviction. He heard the knock on the door again, more insistent.
‘Still, it’s made us realize our system isn’t foolproof.’
‘There isn’t any such thing as a hacker-proof computer,’ Joe replied.
The door opened and his secretary peered in. ‘The VC,’ she hissed.
Joe raised a finger of acknowledgement at her, thanked the Telegraph’s ad manager again and hung up. Then he put his Burberry back on and hurried out across the campus towards the admin block.
56
On the architect’s drawing, Admin House had probably looked quite an imposing building, situated behind an ornamental lake on high ground. Now, thirty years later, with the plastic window surrounds stained like urinals, the ugly metal outside staircases that the new Fire Regulations demanded, and general poor weathering, it had more the air of a neglected tenement building than a seat of academe.
The view from inside the vice-chancellor’s office was a lot better. Through the wide picture window Joe could see the whole of the toytown campus spread out below him, apart from the section obscured by the VC’s grandiose rosewood desk.
‘Please sit down, Professor Messenger.’
The vice-chancellor, a retired professor of physics in his early sixties, was a traditionalist who hated change, and above all hated anything that challenged the status quo of his particular subject. Joe sometimes felt he believed that everything there was to be learned about the world, and the universe, had already been learned, and that nothing new of any significance would ever be discovered.
The vice-chancellor’s views were the kind of conceits, in Joe’s opinion, that had retarded the advance of science for centuries. Professor Colin Colinson. Even his name had a kind of smug limitation about it. Joe watched him glide behind his desk, a small, dapper man in a grey suit, slip-on loafers, and immaculate grey hair. He was wearing a vulgar artistic tie, as if to tell the world that in spite of his suit he wasn’t a bank manager. And large, clear plastic glasses which he evidently thought added to his panache but which would have suited a teenager better.
Colin Colinson took his time to sit down, managing to convey an air of disdain in the process. He had never made any secret of the fact that the only reason Joe was there was because of the finance for COGS that came from the Hartman Perpetuity Trust. The Trust had made it plain that without Joe the funding would go elsewhere.
‘Professor Messenger.’ He spoke slowly, drawing the full elasticity from each word. ‘I’m so sorry to hear of your wife’s accident.’
‘Thank you,’ Joe said, surprised at even this modest courtesy.
‘She is all right?’
‘She’s not brilliant.’
‘And your son?’
‘He’s OK.’
‘I’m so pleased to hear it.’ The VC’s expression darkened. ‘I have been contacted this morning by a Detective Inspector Reeves of Brighton Police. He tells me that the Highways Department of Brighton Council have been investigating the fault with the traffic lights that was responsible for your wife’s accident.’ He paused and rearranged the position of a pencil on his desk. ‘Detective Inspector Reeves explained to me that these are computerized lights and they believed the problem might have been caused by a hacker, and accordingly the computer engineers called in a specialist security firm to investigate.’
The VC leaned forward and pressed his knuckles together. ‘I have a faxed copy of the report this company gave to the Highways computer engineer on Friday afternoon. They established that it was indeed a hacker, professor, and they traced the computer that the hacker was using.’ The VC’s thin lips pursed together into an expression that managed, simultaneously, to convey both anger and triumph. ‘It was your computer, ARCHIVE.’
Joe sat motionless. Yes, and it was my wife and child, he was thinking.
Colin Colinson frowned. ‘You don’t seem surprised, professor. I suppose after hacking into an American warship, a set of traffic lights is small beer – is that it?’
The wounds of the warship incident still hadn’t healed after nearly three years. Joe swallowed, but fear instantly replaced the lump in his throat with another. ‘It’s not that,’ he said, solemnly. ‘It’s –’
The VC raised his eyebrows in expectation.
‘There’ve been other problems. But not involving the police,’ he added quickly. ‘I – don’t think it’s anyone inside the university.’
‘Oh?’ The vice-chancellor began massaging his hands as if he were soaping them. ‘So who is it? A phantom?’
Joe felt his skin tightening. ‘Someone hacking into ARCHIVE from outside,’ he said without conviction.
‘But I’ve been led to understand ARCHIVE was such a smart computer that it could keep hackers out.’
‘Maybe it’s not as smart as we believe,’ Joe said.
‘Just smart enough to harm the name of this university, is that it?’
’ More concerned with the harm to his own family, Joe did not rise to the remark. ‘I need to have an urgent look and see if I can find out exactly what’s going on.’
