Genius Squad (18 page)

According to Trader, Zac’s dislike of GenoME was more specific. In Zac’s opinion, if GenoME really did have a gene-plotting formula, then this knowledge should be shared with the world. And if the formula was a fake, GenoME was undermining the whole science of genetics, and ought to be stopped.

Cliff, on the other hand, was not nearly as selfless.

‘Cliff’s been underemployed,’ said Trader, sounding genuinely sympathetic as he spoke of his colleague’s plight. ‘There’s not a lot of work about for someone with his expertise. Besides, he and Rex Austin go back a bit. He’s done jobs for Rex before.’

Then there was Hamish. Hamish had jumped at the chance to join Genius Squad. He was a born hacker, who wanted to pursue his interests free of the well-meaning interference of concerned parents, prying counsellors and suspicious teachers. Ever since his run-in with the Roads and Traffic Authority, Hamish’s activities had been closely monitored. His access to the Net had been circumscribed. So he had been only too pleased to start throwing temper tantrums, running away from home, and pretending that he was on drugs.

In the end, his parents had allowed him to live at Clearview House because they were at their wits’ end. They didn’t know what else to do with him.

‘Of course, he’s a perfectly reasonable sort of bloke, really,’ Trader insisted. ‘All he wants to do is flex his electronic muscles a bit – and who can blame him? No one with a gift like his should be forced to rein it in. Not when it can be used against a criminal set-up like GenoME.’

The twins, he went on, were neither as stable nor as disciplined as Hamish. Devin seemed to like destroying things: databanks, protocols, networks, infrastructures. And Lexi was a commonplace girl with a curious quirk. While for the most part she was ‘painfully uninteresting’, she had occasional flashes of brilliance in one very specialised field.

‘Cryptanalysis,’ Trader said. ‘It’s her fascination with codes and ciphers that makes her so valuable. Devin’s been putting it to good use. They’re a pretty formidable team.’

‘Why?’ said Cadel. ‘What have they done?’

Trader was taken aback. Clearly he found it odd that Cadel didn’t know about the twins. But he answered Cadel’s question civilly enough.

‘They’ve been launching attacks on the Advanced Encryption Standard, for a start,’ he related. ‘Lexi’s obsessed with the AES. She won’t leave it alone.’ His face dimpled, and he shook his head indulgently. ‘That’s how I met them both. We had a mutual acquaintance who organised a timing attack on the AES through a very large bank.’

Cadel’s eyes widened. Sonja, he knew, was quite attached to the AES – a system that allowed financial data to be encoded and exchanged throughout the world. She had told Cadel that she admired the Rijdael algorithm on which the AES was based because it was such an ‘elegant’ mathematical equation.

Somehow Cadel didn’t think that she would appreciate having Lexi messing about with it.

‘Anyway, I figured that if I could get the twins focused on something a bit more constructive than trashing the global banking system, it would be better for everyone,’ Trader observed. ‘Especially since they were running wild. They’ve had a pretty rough home life, you see. No father. Mum’s a drug addict, so their grandmother’s been looking after’em. But she’s getting too old to crack the whip.’ He gave a soft chuckle. ‘Cliff and I – we know how to handle the twins. In some ways, it’s just a matter of keeping them busy.’

Cadel’s attention was divided. He had been booting up his laptop during Trader’s long lecture, and some of its default settings were far more provocative than Trader’s theories about managing the twins. But when Trader fell silent, Cadel looked up again.

‘What about Dot?’ Cadel asked. ‘Why did Dot join the squad?’

‘She’s searching for her brother. Or so she says.’ Trader shrugged, and lowered his voice. ‘To be honest, I’m not a hundred per cent sure about Dot. She’s a hard person to read. But Hamish vouched for her.’ According to Hamish, Dot had been making contact with as many ‘hacker types’ as she could, in the hope that they might be associating with Com – who had disappeared after the destruction of the Axis Institute. No doubt Com was simply keeping quiet to avoid police interference. Nevertheless, Dot claimed that she was worried about him. ‘Dot thought that you might know where he is,’ Trader said. ‘When she told us about you, and we decided to bring you on board, she agreed to join us.’

‘But I was going to ask
her
about Com!’ Cadel cried in dismay ‘I’ve no idea where he’s got to!’

Trader seemed unconcerned. ‘Yes, you made that pretty clear the other day. So I suggested that maybe you two could put your heads together. Trace him over the Net, or something. And she didn’t have a problem with that.’

Cadel sighed. He had been searching the Net for months, desperately trying to find anyone else who might have been enrolled at the Axis Institute. There had been a handful of Infiltration students who (if they had survived) would surely have popped up on-line somewhere. But if they
were
around, they’d changed their names. And they’d also managed to disguise their signature programming styles.

Cadel wondered if Com had changed his name.

Maybe Dot would know.

‘And you?’ Cadel asked, emboldened enough to question Trader. ‘What brought you here?’

Trader adopted a relaxed pose. He folded his arms and cocked his head.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I suppose I just figured it would be a lot of fun.’ Then he smiled again, as if at a private joke. ‘I have to admit, I get bored very easily.’

He was leading Cadel over to the laser eavesdropping machine when the lift door opened, and several people spilled out: Judith, Devin, Hamish, Cliff and Dot. Suddenly Cadel was in the middle of a small scrum, as Devin and Hamish and Cliff clustered around him. Even Dot displayed a certain amount of interest, hovering in the background.

Before Cadel could ask her anything, he himself was bombarded with questions.

‘What are you going to be working on?’ Hamish demanded. ‘Are you on firewalls with Lexi, or exploits with me, or what are you d-doing?’

‘Has Trader shown you the schedules yet?’ Judith wanted to know. ‘Lunches, dinners, dishwasher and bathrooms. You all take turns.’

‘Have you seen the background files?’ Cliff queried. ‘Before you do anything else, you should have a look at them. They’re under
GenoME/data
. You won’t understand what’s going on if you don’t check them out.’

Cadel shrank from the noisy barrage; he didn’t know what to say. Trader must have seen this, because he started to wave his arms as if flapping away a cloud of insects.

‘Guys, guys!’ he protested. ‘Give the poor kid some space, don’t swamp him! If you carry on like this, he’ll shoot through!’

‘He should go and unpack first,’ Dot declared. Though her voice was weak and rusty, everyone stopped to listen – perhaps because she so rarely spoke up. ‘Before he gets too tired.’

There was a buzz of agreement. The next thing Cadel knew, he was being escorted up to his bedroom by Trader, who insisted on carrying the heavy laptop. On their way upstairs they passed Lexi and Zac in the kitchen; Zac was wiping down surfaces as Lexi sullenly stacked the dishwasher, making far more noise than was necessary. Tony Cheung had taken out the garbage.

‘Where do
you
sleep?’ Cadel asked, and Trader explained that he didn’t live at Clearview House. None of the adults did, though they all spent a lot of time on the premises, and sometimes used the office beds. In fact a shift roster had been instituted.

‘One more thing,’ Trader added, when they reached Cadel’s room. ‘The doorbell is attached to an alarm system that covers the entire house. If you hear the alarm, and you’re down in the War Room,
don’t leave
. Stay where you are. Because anyone who presses the doorbell is an intruder, and the War Room is our little secret. We wouldn’t want the wrong sort of people to find out about it.’

‘Like Mr Greeniaus, you mean?’ said Cadel, studying Trader’s beautifully proportioned face.

‘Like anyone who doesn’t belong to Genius Squad,’ Trader replied. Then he advised Cadel to unpack, told him that bedtime was optional, and left.

Cadel immediately locked the door. It was hard to resist taking advantage of that gleaming new lock, or the privacy it afforded him after so many lockless months. With a deep sense of satisfaction, he then proceeded to inspect his personal domain, opening every drawer and examining every outlet. As far as he could tell, there were no miniature cameras or listening devices secreted anywhere in the room. But he wasn’t an expert; not like Trader Lynch. Cadel sensed that, when it came to spyware, Trader was way ahead of him.

Nevertheless, Cadel felt reasonably secure. Certainly more secure than he had felt at the Donkins’ house.

He didn’t bother unpacking. Instead, when he had finished familiarising himself with the contents of his room, he opened up his new computer. And the first thing he did was to check out the
GenoME/data
file, as Cliff had recommended.

It was quite a hefty file, stuffed with information. Some of this information concerned the now-defunct Darkkon Empire. There was a structural tree incorporating many of Dr Darkkon’s pet projects, such as his fake gene patent company, his faulty vending machine franchise, and – of course – GenoME. Another featured subsidiary was something called NanTex Laboratories Inc., which Cadel recognised as Phineas Darkkon’s old nanotechnology lab. NanTex had been responsible for Dr Darkkon’s various genetic experiments – or so everyone seemed to think. It was generally assumed that most of the money made by Dr Darkkon over the years had actually been channelled back into NanTex, to fund his crazy genetic mutation schemes.

Unfortunately, there was no way of proving this in court. Cadel remembered having a long talk with an FBI agent, who had told him that the notorious laboratory was not yielding any useful evidence. Its exact whereabouts had only been discovered after Prosper’s arrest, and by the time it was raided, the lab was just an empty shell. Most of its equipment and all of its staff had vanished.

That was why no one had ever arrested Chester Cramp, the man thought to have been its chief executive officer.

Cadel saw with interest that, according to the Genius Squad files, Chester was now in charge of a company called Fountain Pharmaceuticals. Even more interesting was the fact that the former head of NanTex was actually married to Carolina Whitehead, the head of GenoME’s new Australian branch. Studying the photographs provided, Cadel saw that Chester Cramp was a pale, slight, balding man wearing very thick spectacles. In contrast, his wife was tall and glamorous. In fact Carolina Whitehead reminded Cadel a bit of Tracey Lane, one of the Axis Institute teachers – except that Tracey had always looked rather vacant. Carolina didn’t look vacant. On the contrary, she wore a cool, shrewd expression in every one of the three photographs that Cliff had obtained. Somehow it was obvious that a very sharp mind lay behind all her shiny lip-gloss and lacquered blonde hair.

Cadel wondered why on earth she had married a shrimp like Chester.

There was a photograph of Prosper English, as well. One look at that beaky nose, enigmatic smile and dark, piercing gaze was enough for Cadel. He scrolled past the familiar face quickly, trying to ignore the sudden chill that ran down his spine. He didn’t want to think about Prosper English. Memories of Prosper would spoil his mood.

So he began to focus on the GenoME data, which had been divided into several sub-sections. One of them concerned the new Australian branch. Cadel was surprised at the amount of material that had already been collected; somehow Cliff had acquired photographs of every staff member. There were snapshots of people caught climbing out of taxis, or eating in cafes, as well as more formal shots from passports or drivers licences. Upon reading the reports attached to every picture, Cadel realised that Cliff had been following the staff home from work, recording their car registration numbers, and eavesdropping on restaurant chats. Internet checks had been run, and mail had been intercepted. Cadel wondered uneasily what Saul Greeniaus would say if he ever found out about these activities.

With any luck, however, Saul never
would
find out.

According to Cliff’s notes, Carolina and her second-in-command, Jerry Reinhard, occupied separate apartments in the same high-security block of flats, while the five potentialisers lived in a single house, like students. These potentialisers seemed to do almost everything together: eating, shopping, commuting – even going to the movies.
It’s like they belong to some kind of religious cult
, Cliff had remarked at the conclusion of his report.

The rest of the staff lived pretty normal lives, judging from Cliff’s observations. In fact Cadel was reading all about the marketing manager’s boring credit history when his eyelids became heavy. Next thing he knew, he was standing in Prosper’s old office, on the top floor of the gloomy terrace house near Sydney Harbour. Cadel recognised the maroon couches, and the array of bogus certificates on the wall. A familiar computer was sitting on Prosper’s desk. Everything was unchanged, except for the photograph of Cadel. That was new. It lay on top of a very thick file, which Cadel was afraid to open. Somehow he understood that this file contained his whole life, carefully labelled and analysed.

He rushed to the door, but it was locked. So were the French windows. He couldn’t get out. And Prosper was coming; he was climbing the stairs. Cadel could hear approaching footsteps. He could see the doorknob jiggling.

And then the door opened.

Like a fox caught in the glare of headlights, Cadel watched as Prosper approached him. Though wearing a set of orange overalls, Prosper was otherwise unchanged; he studied Cadel with a kind of quizzical intensity, his hooded eyes unreadable.

‘So. Cadel.’ It was the same old voice – gentle and precise – with the same old undercurrent of barbed amusement. ‘I see you’ve been rather active.’ And Prosper paused beside the desk to flick at Cadel’s bulging file with one long, bony finger.