The Trojan Dog (14 page)

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Communicating illegally in the dark has a special, full-bodied feel to it. Yet the whole point of hacking is that you can't see or hear, or get a whiff of your opponent's shape, let alone their gender. The point is that you're invisible.

Ivan smiled, his head inclined a little to one side.

‘You knew what it would be like, didn't you?' I said. ‘You've been here before.'

I'd told Ivan I wanted to try and log on to Access Computing's bulletin board. Ivan had made a face and asked me why I thought the board would still be up. I had to admit it was unlikely, but I wanted to give it a try.

We were at Ivan's, using a combination of guesswork and cheating to find a user name and password that would get us in. One of my outworkers had given me her user ID. Ivan had written a program that matched every possible combination of the letters of her name with a hundred commonly used passwords.

Pretty soon, much sooner than I'd dared to hope, WELCOME TO ACCESS COMPUTING came up on the screen.

Ivan gave his lion's head a scratch and muttered something about it being too easy. But I was so excited I scarcely paid attention to his ­scepticism.

First, Ivan installed a copy of the Trojan Horse that he'd made when it turned up on my machine at work.

Would I find a reference to Angela Carlishaw? Had any of Access Computing's subscribers been talking to her? Why hadn't Access Computing shut their board down? Was it because
they
were waiting for a message?

There were three messages in the public section of the board, all with that day's date. One was signed Anna D. My eyes jumped down the screen. Anna D's indignation seemed to roll off it in waves.

‘
Has anyone received a CD-ROM from a company called Compic? The day after mine arrived, this woman from the company phoned and tried to talk me into buying a $600 package. She more or less told me that I had to have it! She phoned back the next day even though I'd told her no. Has anything like this happened to anybody else? I want to know how they got my address and most of all, how they knew I've recently gone freelance!
'

‘Jesus,' I said. ‘How did Compic get hold of Access Computing's list of subscribers?'

‘No-one seems to've replied to this Anna D,' Ivan growled, scrolling rapidly forwards then backwards.

‘What d'you think that means?'

‘It might mean anything.'

‘Can we get a private contact number for Anna D?'

‘We can try.'

After the first couple of commands, I stopped being able to follow what Ivan was doing. A list appeared. There were two Annas with a surname beginning with the letter D, Anna Dubowska and Anna Dunlop, both with Melbourne addresses and telephone numbers.

Ivan saved and printed out the list.

‘Try this one first.' He pointed to Anna Dubowska. ‘That's a good solid Polish name.'

My eyes were beginning to cross from staring at the screen. I looked up and caught the blow-up photograph of Alexander Graham Bell, black on white on black.

Ivan grinned at me and said, ‘I haven't been sneaky like this in years.'

‘Oh—when was the last time?'

‘Jesus, Sandy, I don't know. Before I joined the public service?'

‘Really? Don't tell me that's what's made you moral.'

Ivan punched me on the arm and I pretended to fall over.

My chair scraped and I remembered Peter, curled up asleep on the couch in Ivan's living room.

‘We'd better go,' I said.

I drove home and helped my son into bed. Then I phoned Gail Trembath, with the list Ivan had copied unfolded next to me. I asked Gail if she'd ring some of the women on the list for the piece on ­clerical outwork she had promised.

Gail groaned, then said reflectively, ‘Lately they've been spiking all my best stories. Gives me the tom tits, actually.'

‘See if you can bring the conversation round to Compic,' I advised. ‘Something will blow, Gail, and when it does, you might just be the one who's waiting underneath.'

We laughed, and I hung up.

The following night, when Ivan and I logged on again to Access Computing, our Trojan Horse had done its job. We saved Isobel Merewether's password. There was nothing of Angela Carlishaw, though.

Gail rang back with some news. The second woman she'd spoken to had raised the subject of Compic without her having to say anything. ‘Out of the blue,' Gail said excitedly. ‘Compic's been emailing the eyeballs off her, offering her all kinds of fabulous deals. She's not in a position to buy their stuff, or she hasn't been, but she's just landed a contract with this building company, the sort of crowd that might well fork out for smart-looking graphics. Here's the interesting bit. The lady claims Compic knew all this.'

I was holding my breath. ‘Go on,' I said.

‘She saw that message on Access Computing's BBS—the one you told me about? Tried to reply to it and got the bum's rush.'

I thanked Gail, and hung up.

Allison Edgeware was a beautiful and deadly spider. And Isobel Merewether. Another china-doll name for another crooked female. Spinning silk webs with false, gracious smiles. If Compic's web of influence stretched to Access Computing in Brisbane, how far in other directions? And then there were our outworkers and interviewers, a network of threads reaching to every capital city and beyond.

. . .

‘What do you think our Felix is doing right now?' I asked Ivan.

‘Jogging,' Ivan grunted.

It was Saturday afternoon, and Ivan and I were searching Felix Wenborn's office. Ivan had the computers, and I was going through boxes of disks and filing cabinets. The first thing to look for was the file dealing with the Compic tender. I wasn't expecting to find it, and I didn't. I was pretty sure Felix had stolen that file from Rae's office, and if so, he wouldn't leave it sitting round in broad daylight in his own.

Provided no-one interrupted us, we were in for a long afternoon. Peter was at a birthday party. Ivan had planted a small bug in DIR's main operating system late on Friday afternoon. Then he'd volunteered to come in and work on it over the weekend, since the fire had put the IT section behind, like everybody else. If we were challenged, I would say I was keeping Ivan company. A thin excuse, but I was feeling confident that day.

‘The beauty of this little bug, Sandushka,' Ivan said, ‘is that to chase it I have to open all the system programs.'

Ivan moved to another computer and began keying in commands. ‘Adding that zero to the grant money was a one-step job,' he muttered to himself. ‘In and out. Quicker than a ten-dollar fuck. There's no trace. Don't know why the bloody hell I thought there would be.'

‘Ivan,' I said. ‘Look.'

‘What?' He glanced up at me and frowned.

I pushed a box of floppy disks towards him. ‘Email backups.'

The disks had been filed by individual PC. I began going through Jim Wilcox's.

‘Jesus,' I said a few minutes later, unable to believe the words staring at me from the screen.

Scattered through Wilcox's email were abusive messages, calling Rae Evans everything from a tight-arsed bitch to ‘female chauvinist sow' to ‘that Fucking Blue-rinse Femocrat'.There was no doubt that the messages referred to Rae. She was named in nearly every one of them.

A lot of them were to the same address. Someone had told me—was it Ivan?—that email fitted somewhere between a phone conversation and a written memo. Going through those informal notes and conversations, seeing a side of Jim Wilcox I'd never dreamed existed, was the most voyeuristic thing I'd ever done.

Anger was slowly beginning to take hold of me by the hair roots. Had Felix been through the disks? Had he shown them to the police, and if so what had the police done about them? What were they doing sitting in Felix's office? It made more sense to assume that Felix didn't know. There were thousands of messages stored in those boxes, with hundreds more being added every week.

I felt a pang of sympathy for Felix. Here he was, amassing huge amounts of data, building one haystack after another.

When Felix had accused me of carelessness after my worm virus, I'd smarted because he'd never given me a chance. With no evidence at all, except that I'd foolishly let a virus wipe my data, he was convinced I was guilty of something much more sinister.

Even then, it seemed to me, something had cut short Felix's ability to discriminate, to separate small matters from large, to shove his fist into the haystack in just the right place to bring out a drop of blood.

Ivan tracked down the address most of the email messages had been sent to. It belonged to someone called Charles Craven of the accounts section of the Department of Finance. It was Craven who'd counter-signed for Access Computing's grant money.

‘Here's a scenario,' I said to Ivan. ‘Felix knows what's on these disks and he's blackmailing Wilcox. Felix has his own copies, so it doesn't matter if Wilcox gets rid of this lot. He's left them in his office to make Wilcox sweat.'

Ivan groaned and said, ‘Don't give me that cat's-bum smile, Sandy. You like Evans, God help me if I can fathom why, so you're sure she's innocent. You don't like Felix, and if you find anything that sticks to him you'll be happier than a pig in mud.'

‘Felix is like the pig who's built his house of bricks, only it turns out, to his amazement, that the bricks are made of straw.'

Ivan laughed, then grimaced.

‘Scenario number two,' I said. ‘It was
Craven
who changed the figure from a hundred grand to a million. Kerry Arnold had nothing to do with it. What I don't understand is why Wilcox was stupid enough to send those emails in the first place.'

While we were packing up—I took care to replace the boxes in exactly the right order—I asked Ivan, ‘Why are you helping me with all this anyway?'

Ivan drew himself up to his full height and pretended to look down his nose at me.

‘Let's just say it's a matter of public-service pride. I know we're for the chop next year, but I'm buggered if I'll go down with a mess like this still on my hands. It'd just prove everything that Johnnie Howard's mob say about our inefficiency.'

‘And if the crook turns out to be one of us?'

‘Ah—but if I find her, or him, toss the bad apple out, then I'm ­exonerated, aren't I?'

‘So you're doing it for you're own professional advancement.'

‘Aren't you?'

‘And if it is Rae Evans?'

‘That's the difference between us—I'm prepared to accept that.'

‘And I'm not?'

‘No.'

. . .

I listened to Detective Sergeant Hall on the other end of the telephone breathing down my neck, and said, ‘I'm not sure who else knows about this.'

Ivan and I had argued over what to tell the police about the email. In the end I told him to go home, I'd deal with it myself. After being asked to wait for a few minutes, I was put through to Hall, the detective who'd interviewed me at DIR and read the charges against Rae at her committal hearing. I remembered Hall's sculptured chin pressing close to mine.

He asked a few questions and told me he'd arrange to have someone go through the disks as soon as possible. I replaced the receiver with a sense of anticlimax.

My next call was to Rae's lawyer. The impatience under his polite veneer bubbled closer to the surface every time I rang him. I was determined to tell him everything I knew, about the email, Charles Craven in Finance, how easy it would have been for him and Wilcox to have plotted the theft together and pinned it on Rae.

Rae's lawyer didn't interrupt. I hoped he was making notes. But he didn't ask me any questions and, as soon as I'd finished, he thanked me and rang off.

. . .

On Monday afternoon I met Felix in the travel centre, on his way back from a run.

‘What were you and Rae Evans arguing about that day in the lift?' I asked him.

‘Never give up, do you?' Felix stared at me, chest pumping. ‘Listening at keyholes. That's just about your level.'

‘You asked me to listen, remember? Why was Rae Evans asked to deal with that complaint about the tender?'

‘She volunteered.'

‘I've got another idea,' I said. ‘Jim Wilcox told her to because he knew it would mean trouble, and he hates her guts.'

Felix turned away from me without bothering to comment. I watched him go, admiring his supple, athletic stride. I felt strongly connected to Felix, through fear and inadequacy, as though we were bound together by some soft skin that would hurt if I pulled on it. My eyes fixed on the disappearing back of his neck. Maybe Felix had had his hair cut, or the low neck of his T-shirt made it look different. The skin was very pale there. Seen from behind, his head looked thinner, older, without the snub features that gave his face its boy's expression.

Walking back upstairs—I seemed to have developed an aversion to the lift—I thought about how much strife between people could be traced back to first impressions.

The more Felix claimed to be in control, the less he really was. He knew that; he'd as much as admitted it to me. Felix had to be thinking of the future. Where would he go when outsourcing made his job at DIR redundant, or when DIR collapsed beneath him? Who would take him on? Of course, once Rae was found guilty and sentenced, Felix began to look a whole lot better. A man who knew his job and did it. Was he thinking along similar lines to Ivan?

I got the go-ahead to finish the outwork report, but a kind of lethargy soaked into my clothes, my skin, like the smoke from the fire that had soaked into everything. When I was able to concentrate for two, three hours at a stretch, the report was all I thought about. But three hours was the most I could manage. After that I felt exhausted, took the fire stairs to the ground floor, and hunched my shoulders over coffee that tasted of damp soot.