Alchemist (35 page)

Monty was so distracted she barely registered Conor Molloy's breach of company protocol in using her Christian name. ‘The powdered milk – the real ethics are horrific – but Bendix probably argue that there's a high mortality rate among Third World babies anyway, and I imagine they can produce statistics proving their powdered milk actually saves lives.'

‘That's exactly what they do. But the fact remains that they've never dared sue.'

Monty wondered what exactly drove this man. She glanced disinterestedly at her menu. Maybe his tale was right, but it sounded to her more like student militant rhetoric, the little people versus the Big Institution paranoia that used to be rife on campuses throughout the sixties and seventies.

‘If that's how you feel about Bendix Schere,' she probed, ‘why are you working for them?'

‘I can't give you that answer right now,' he said.

‘Oh?'

‘You'll understand one day – I hope.'

She smiled. ‘You're very mysterious.'

He parried the remark with a fleeting raise of his eyebrows, and leant back in his chair. ‘Tell me more about this Jake Seals character.'

‘I know very little. He was – I suppose – rather cocky. Definitely didn't fit the Bendix mould.'

‘So he might have upset some guys?'

‘I'm sure he did. He upset me – I found him difficult at first. But I came to respect him, he was professional and very, very thorough.'

‘Do you buy the theory that he came to work drunk?'

‘I was sold it by a senior police officer – he wouldn't have made it up.'

‘Was Seals conscious when you got to him?'

‘Yes – but delirious.' She remembered something, suddenly. ‘Is there someone called Wolf in the company?'

‘Wolf? As in the animal?'

‘Yes.'

‘I dunno,' he said. ‘I guess it would be easy enough to find out. Why?'

She recalled the pitifully incoherent cry that had come from Seals' melting face, before his voice had faded into moans.
Wolf. Woooolllfff
.

The memory made her shudder. ‘He was trying to tell me something.
Wolf
. It was the only thing he said to me.'

The American's eyes narrowed with acute interest. ‘Just
wolf
?

‘Yes.'

Without relaxing his eyes, he said, ‘Interesting. Very interesting.'

‘Why?' she asked.

‘They do one helluva good pasta here,' he said, ignoring her query. ‘If you even half like pasta it's worth having.'

‘
I
s it a person, someone you know of?'

‘It's no big deal,' he said.

For the first time since she had met him, Conor Molloy was looking awkward.
Wolf
very clearly did mean something to him, but whatever it was he evidently wasn't about to tell her.

London. Thursday 17 November, 1994

Conor pulled into the Bendix Building a few minutes before seven. He was an hour earlier than normal this morning, and it was still dark. As he opened his door, he scanned the almost deserted car park that was floodlit as brightly as a tennis court, looking for Charley Rowley's coupé BMW, and was relieved not to see it.

He hurried in through the lobby, slipped his card into a turnstile, nodding at the guard, the one with the grizzle of grey hair who looked sick, and walked across to the lifts. Moments later he stepped out into the Group Patents and Agreements twentieth-floor reception. A surly security guard with a boxer's face and a crew cut checked his ID in silence, then Conor slid his smart-card into the door and pushed it open.

He was greeted by a dull whine, and down the far end of the corridor saw a Filipino woman hoovering the green carpet. As policy, the cleaning staff had only a minimal grasp of English, and were illiterate. Cleaners were a common tool of industrial espionage.

He walked past the woman, turning right just past a row of notice boards which, apart from a list of statutory regulations, were virtually bare; most notices were posted by eMail. He walked on a few yards past his own office, stopped outside Charley Rowley's slightly larger one, and peered in through the window. The room was dark, the desk bare. Rowley was definitely not in yet.
Good
, he thought.
Excellent!

He slipped his smart-card into his own office door and the light automatically came on as he went in. The room smelled of polish and looked freshly cleaned. One single night away from the office always seemed much longer, somehow. He hung his Crombie and jacket up, unlocked the metal cupboards and began the first chore of each day, which was to remove the bundles of documents he had put away the previous night, and lay them out, some on the floor and some on his desk. Normally, the next thing would be to switch on his computer terminal and log in, then read his eMail, but today he deliberately left the machine off. Instead, he opened a folder marked ‘Acute Pustular Psoriasis Application' and began to read through one of the seven papers Dr Bannerman had published on identifying the genes for this disease.

At half past seven he heard footsteps coming down the corridor and eyed the window. A bespectacled man walked past without looking in. He was an English patent agent, Charley Rowley had told him, who worked in an office next to the vending machines; they had nodded a couple of times but never actually spoken. Conor resumed his reading.

The booming sound of Charley Rowley's voice, greeting someone further down the corridor, interrupted him after about twenty minutes, and he braced himself. A moment later Rowley stopped in his doorway, holding a bulging briefcase.

‘Morning, Mr Molloy, how are we today?' he said with the breeziness of a surgeon doing his ward rounds.

‘Yup, fine. How about you?'

‘Yah. Never better!' Despite the brightness of his voice, Rowley looked, as usual, half dead, as if he had been up partying most of the night. His complexion was white and his eyes bloodshot. ‘How did the move go?'

‘Good. You must come round – have a drink.'

‘Like to.' Rowley twiddled his little finger in his ear. ‘Was it this weekend I suggested you come down to the country?'

‘Uh huh.'

‘Mind mucking in a bit? I'd forgotten we're meant to be doing a spot of paintwork.'

‘Sure, no problem.'

‘Great.' Rowley eyed the piles of documents. ‘Getting on all right? Need help with anything?'

‘One minor thing.' Conor stood up and sidled round his desk towards him. ‘I have a problem with my terminal – not functioning. I've put a call into Maintenance, but it's going to be a while before they get anyone over. There's an urgent eMail I'm expecting – mind if I take a quick look at my mailbox on your screen?'

Rowley yawned. ‘Better do it right now – I'm going to be on my machine all morning. It's just your terminal – the network's not down, is it?'

‘No. There's just some glitch in mine.'

‘Happens sometimes, affected mine about a year ago.'

Conor accompanied him the few yards along the corridor. He waited as his colleague slipped in his smart-card, then followed him in, manoeuvring himself quickly behind Rowley's desk and to the left of him, so that he had an unobstructed view of the keyboard.

Rowley sat down and switched on the terminal's power button. On the screen appeared the command:
ENTER USER NAME
.

Conor watched the screen carefully as Rowley tapped out, with one finger:
Chrowley.

Then the command appeared:
ENTER PASSWORD.

Like most systems, the password itself would not actually appear on the screen when typed, to prevent anyone else from reading it. Conor was no longer looking at the screen, but at the keyboard, glad that Rowley could only type with two fingers, and that he was only using one of them now.

He scrutinized each key in turn as Rowley struck them:
1u
1
u/

Conor repeated the sequence silently to himself, committing it to memory. It was a good password, simple, and hard to hack. Rowley had used his girlfriend's nickname as the basis. But he had replaced the middle ‘I' with a numerical ‘1', placed an asterisk either side of it, and for good measure added a slash on to the end. No hacker using a program to scan names, dates or dictionary words would be able to crack it in a hurry.

On the screen appeared:
WELCOME TO THE BENDIX SCHERE ELECTRONIC SERVICE. AUTHORIZATION LEVEL 3. ENTER SERVICE YOU REQUIRE
.

There were five authorization levels on the Bendix system, which Rowley had explained to him a while back. Level One was restricted exclusively to Main Board Directors. Level Two was for senior management. Level Three was for junior management. Level Four, which was Conor's level, and Level Five, were very limited. Conor could send and receive electronic mail, plus he could access the corporate research library which was on-line, and the company's patents records as well as the Internet, but very little else. Level Five existed principally for the security staff to verify personnel.

Rowley typed:
MAILBOX REGISTER.

On the screen appeared the words:
WHICH MAILBOX DO YOU WISH TO OPEN

He typed: C. Molloy.

On the screen appeared:
SORRY, ACCESS TO THIS MAILBOX IS RESTRICTED TO MR MOLLOY. PLEASE ASK MR MOLLOY TO ENTER HIS PASSWORD
.

Rowley stood up and indicated for Conor to take his chair. ‘OK, Mr Molloy, fill your boots.'

Conor sat down and typed in his own password:
stea

Instantly his mailbox came up. He had twenty-three messages waiting.

‘Just get myself a coffee,' Rowley said. ‘Want one?'

‘Sure – black, no sugar, thanks. I won't take a couple of minutes.'

‘No worries.'

When Rowley had gone, Conor quickly wrote down his password in the back of his diary, then scanned through the sender names in his mailbox. A couple were from Rowley himself, setting dates for meetings; there was one from Montana Bannerman and a couple from her father responding to queries, and one, which he knew would be encoded, from his mother. He would read that one later.

Rowley came back in, yawning again. ‘Fucking good club went to last night. Must take you there. Real head-banger of a place.'

‘Is that right?' Conor said, trying to mask his lack of enthusiasm. He had never been into clubbing.

‘They do some cocktail you get seriously stonkoed on. Bright purple. Absolute killer.'

‘What's in it?'

Rowley pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers for a moment, then gave a conspiratorial wink. ‘Oh – I wouldn't know, I didn't drink any myself.'

Conor looked at him oddly for a moment, then twigged: company regulations forbade consumption of alcohol less than twenty-four hours before coming to work. ‘Of course not.'

‘OK, all finished – get what you wanted?'

‘Yup, thanks, appreciate it.' Conor stood up and Rowley took over.

‘Right, let's see what the day has to offer. A little dickeybird tells me it's going to be a bummer.'

Conor worked through lunch, taking only a ten-minute break when he left the Bendix Building to make a call from a pay phone down the road. At three o'clock he told Charley Rowley that he had to go early, because he was expecting a furniture delivery at his new apartment.

He drove south out of London, down on to the M25 ring road, then turned south again off that on to the M23, past Gatwick Airport and on towards the coast. It was a fine afternoon but the light was beginning to fade rapidly as the car swept up through a deep cut in the South Downs, the sky turning a dark metallic blue. He put on the lights, bathing the dashboard instruments in a crisp orange glow, driving swiftly, keeping an eye on the time.