A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel

by Philip Kerr

  Next I told the computer to list all the sub-directories which were contained in the root. First up was the directory containing Lombroso personnel, and then several others which dealt with things like accounts, payroll, counselling procedures, PET scan operating procedures; last of all came the two subs I was particularly interested in accessing, which contained the super operating system and the VMN-negative database.

  My optimistic attempt to immediately view the sub containing the VMN database was, as I had expected it would be, firmly denied with a reminder of the system’s first decretal, which was the confidentiality of this particular information. It seemed logical to assume that if I was going to be able to roam freely through the system as I wished, I would have to do it from the privileged access point of the so-called super operative - which in any system is usually the person who created it. So I accessed the super-op sub, and set about the creation of a trapdoor. I hadn’t been in there very long when I met Cerberus.

  It’s difficult to say exactly how I triggered him. It could have been the very fact of my using an outside keyboard. Or it could have been the fact of my attempting to create a trapdoor from the super-operating sub into the VMN database, but suddenly there he was on-screen, a three-headed black dog graphic with blood-chilling sound effects, and guarding the system from anyone like me who sought to circumvent its first decretal. From the size and number of his teeth I was very glad I had not been wearing my Reality Approximation body suit. It was clear that I wasn’t going any further until I had dealt with him.

  My intoxicated mind was already racing through a number of classically-inspired solutions. Could I drag the monster away, like Hercules, and release it outside of the Lombroso system, somewhere within the BRI’s ordinary administrative program files? Or, like Orpheus, could I lull the brute to sleep with the playing of my cithara or my lyre?

  Well, I have always liked music and, quickly exiting the Lombroso system program, I set about the creation of a simple tune which I hoped might, in Congreve’s phrase, soothe the savage beast.

  Re-typing the day’s password I faced Cerberus once more and played him my little melody, but to my surprise and irritation he shook each of his three heads, and growled, ‘I don’t like music, and what’s more Eurydice isn’t here. There are no women allowed in this particular nether world.’

  Exiting the system once more I tried to remember how dead Greeks and Romans had been able to pass into Pluto’s kingdom without molestation. And wasn’t I forgetting Aeneas and the Sybil who had guided him through the Inferno? What was it that she had given Cerberus? A bone? No, that was not it. Some meat? No. It was a sop: a cake seasoned with poppies and honey with which she drugged the dog. And this was how the Greeks and the Romans had managed it too. A cake placed into the hands of the deceased. The only question was, what sort of cake might seem appetising to a computer-generated guard dog?

  Cerberus was programmed to eat up anyone who attempted to disobey Lombroso’s first decretal which was to protect the confidentiality of its information. Thus the trick would be to create a cake that would enable Cerberus to fulfil a standard legitimate routine, specifically to eat someone or something, but which would hide a piece of unorthodox active instruction, specifically to fall asleep.

  This took rather longer than I thought it would and by the time the cake was baked, so to speak, I could feel the effect of the cocaine beginning to wear off Even so, I was working at a furious pace and I don’t think that I could remember the exact lines of operating system code that I used in my programming recipe. However, the general effect was similar to a computer virus, except that the basic premise was to limit the action of the binary mechanism to Cerberus himself.

  Back in the super-op sub-directory, I offered the shiny black beast the cake and, to my delight, he snapped it up greedily. He even licked his chops. For several seconds I waited to see if the ‘drug’ inside the cake would take effect. Then, almost as quickly as he had appeared, Cerberus fell to the bottom of the screen with a very audible computer SFX thud, and remained motionless.

  With the system-guardian out of the way I returned to the trapdoor I had partially created. It seemed there were no other safeguards for halting unauthorised entry and so all I had to do was locate a set of partially accessible pages of data on how the VMN database was constructed, and then to progress from there. Think of it as like an architect knowing which walls were there to support a ceiling and which were not, and which walls might hide a ventilation shaft, or an inspection tunnel, through which a burglar might be able to pass.

  Once the trapdoor was completed, I simply dropped through into the VMN database and, like some ghastly nouveau riche in an expensive restaurant ordering the waiters around as if he came there every night of the week, I told the computer to go and search for my file. Thus, in only a matter of a few seconds I had it and, in a few seconds more, had deleted it.

  As with reference libraries, most major computer systems have a horror of missing material, and it’s normally one of the cardinal rules of electronic burglary that one leaves the database in the same condition as when one logged in. And so I accompanied my own heretical instruction to delete my file with a command that the computer make a hard copy of the whole VMN-negative database, in order that I should placate the system into permitting this one excision.

  I don’t know that I meant to keep the hard copy I made on disk. As I say, at first it had been my intention merely to delete my own file. But then you don’t get to visit the underworld every day of the week. The more I thought about it, the greater was the temptation to do precisely what I had imagined some other unauthorised user doing, and retain the hard copy I had made of all the other VMN-negatives which Lombroso had recorded. Perhaps it was the drug which overcame whatever scruples I might have had about doing such a thing, but in the end the temptation was too great and I kept it.

  It would be wrong to say that I knew what I was going to do with the list. 1 had certainly no intention of selling it to the News of the World. Money means little to me. Apart from that I had no more idea of what to do with it than I had of ethics or morals. It was something done on impulse, for which I made no apology since I firmly believe that one should be a creature of impulse. Principles and such things seem to me to be nonsense, unless of course they are principles of mathematics.

  All the same, I feel that I must honestly record the fact that not only did I try to cover my tracks within the program itself, but also that I left in place a logic bomb for anyone who would attempt to uncover them. In logic nothing is accidental. Therefore I must believe that subconsciously at least, the real purpose of copying Lombroso’s list of VMN-negatives was already known to me. If at that stage my purpose, in a manner of speaking, could not be consciously imagined, nevertheless it must still have had something in common with the real world.

  One hour later, when I was back in my own apartment, watching a film on the Nicamvision, a new state of affairs began to make itself obvious. To what extent the film itself was responsible, I have no idea, but my own situation seemed somehow to fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own. Perhaps I had better describe the film. It was one of those old-style vigilante movies, a dystopian tale of the 1970s with a man taking a rough and ready concept of Justice straight through the chests and stomachs of evildoers. Stalking the streets and riding the New York subway at night, this terrible simplifier made himself the bait for unwitting muggers and murderers who, revealing their criminal hands, were themselves gunned down. This was a potent image for one such as myself. Because if things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.

  Even if one discounts the depression I was feeling in the wake of my cocaine-use, the proposition which presented itself then still strikes me now as logical. As the only logical extension of the Lombroso Program.

  But here am I reminiscing - I’d quite forgotten that I am supposed to be planning another execution.

  4
r />   ‘HOW WAS FRANKFURT?’

  Detective Inspector Ed Crawshaw closed the door of Jake’s office at New Scotland Yard and sat down.

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about, Ed,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably heard about this multiple who’s killing men?’

  He nodded. ‘Something about it, yes. To do with the Lombroso Program, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. While I was at the conference, the APC asked me to take over the investigation. I’ll still be leading our own inquiry into the Lipstick killings, but there’s pressure from the Home Office to get this other one solved, so I’ll be spending more time on doing just that. It’ll mean that I have to leave you on your own a lot more. You’ll have to make your own initiatives and follow up your own ideas. Just keep me informed of what’s going on. And if you need to come and pick my brains about something, don’t hesitate to walk right in here. I want this bastard caught, Ed, and caught soon.’

  Crawshaw nodded slowly.

  ‘Did you put Mary Woolnoth’s details through the computer?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There was something that came up. Victim number five, Jessie Weston, liked reading murder-mysteries, same as Mary. Her briefcase contained a copy of Burn Marks by Sara Paretsky. I was wondering if she might have bought it at the same shop where Mary bought her Agatha Christie. The Mystery Bookshop in Sackville Street.’

  ‘No reason why not,’ said Jake. ‘She worked in Bond Street. That’s not far from Sackville Street. If you’re right it could be that he’s not just interested in reading about murder ...

  ‘... he’s also interested in doing it too. It’s a thought, isn’t it? Want me to get a man in there, undercover?’

  ‘Like I said, you’ll have to make your own initiatives, Ed,’ said Jake. ‘But I think you’d do a lot better if you tried to find a few women police constables to volunteer for book-browsing duty.’

  ‘A stake-out.’

  Jake winced. ‘I’ve never much liked that term,’ she said. ‘It always seems to imply that whatever is staked out gets devoured. When I was back in the European Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioural Science Unit, we always used to call that kind of operation a golden apple. Psychologically, it’s a lot more encouraging for the volunteer.’

  Jake glanced at her watch and stood up. ‘I have to be downstairs,’ she said and then added: ‘And, Ed. Make sure they wear lots of red lipstick. I think our man could turn out to have a chromatic trigger for his aggression. I wouldn’t want to lose catching this son-of-a-bitch because some little fashion-conscious WPC prefers a different shade of lipstick that suits her skin a lot better. It’s got to be the colour of blood or nothing.’

  The Police Computer Crime Unit occupied an air-conditioned section of the basement at New Scotland Yard. Semi-transparent sliding doors succeeded in hiding the mess, which was that of an electrical repair-shop, without stopping the light.

  Jake picked her way through a large room that was home to a miniature city of redundant monitors, discarded keyboards, and stocking-snagging laser-printers. She cursed loudly at the discovery of this last fact, but continued on to the end of the room where a brightly coloured open iron stairway led straight up to a short gallery of offices. Jake knocked at the crinkled fibreglass that was the door of one of these and went in. She was supposed to meet the head of the CCU there and be introduced to the expert assigned to her investigating team: the best man in the CCU, as had been requested.

  The best man in the CCU, according to its own Chief Inspector, was Detective Sergeant Yat Chung.

  Jake found herself repeating the name with some surprise. ‘Kind of a name is that?’

  Chief Inspector Cormack shrugged. ‘Yat,’ he said again, nodding. ‘He’s a Chink.’

  Jake smiled thinly. ‘Yes, well I didn’t figure he was the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘He’s God as far as I’m concerned,’ Cormack stated. ‘There’s nothing he doesn’t know about artificial intelligence. And quite a lot he could guess at that hasn’t even been invented yet. Gilmour says I’m supposed to lend you my best man. But you people worry me. There’s a psycho involved here, isn’t there? Normally the most dangerous thing Yat has to deal with is a short circuit. So I’ll tell you frankly that if there’s the slightest chance of any physical harm coming to him from your investigation, I’d prefer to tell you to sod off and risk the disciplinary hearing.’

  ‘Relax,’ Jake told him. ‘I won’t so much as let him floss his teeth in case he makes his gums bleed. All I want him to do is a scenes-of-crime on a computer, not talk a gun out of a killer’s hand.’

  Cormack nodded. He was a tall, gruff Scot with a prophet’s beard and a scruffy, unworldly air about him, as if he had grown up on a Petri dish. Behind smudged glasses Cormack’s eyes stared. They followed the ladder in Jake’s black stocking up to her thigh and under the hem of her short skirt. Even though he himself knew he was too long in the tooth for such things, he still found himself breathing heavily like an infatuated sixth-former at the vision of womanhood sitting opposite him. Tall, severely feminine with a knuckle-rapping voice and the kind of stare that could crack a man’s glasses and frost his beard. He had a taste for women like Jake: handsome rather than pretty, athletic as opposed to elegant, intelligent rather than charming. Women who looked as though they knew one end of a soldering-iron from the other. But most of all Cormack liked them to be hard bitches, the type he had often seen in magazines wearing leather and wielding whips.

  ‘What kind of a computer?’ he said swallowing a couple of litres of oxygen.

  ‘A Paradigm Five,’ she answered.

  ‘And the operating system?’

  ‘The European Community Data Network.’

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘Shit,’ he said wearily. ‘They’ve not long finished installing it. Where’s the breach?’

  ‘The Brain Research Institute. The Lombroso computer.’

  ‘Yes, I thought I did hear something about that.’

  ‘Yeah, well keep it under your toupee. The Home Office is pretty touchy about the whole thing. I want your man to tell me whether the breach came from the inside or the outside.’

  ‘Who’s their bod?’

  Jake spread the PC open on her lap and consulted the file.

  ‘Doctor Stephen St Pierre,’ she said. ‘Know him?’

  Cormack grunted. ‘St Pierre was formerly the head of computer security in the British Army,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  Cormack rocked his head from side to side as if deliberating which side to come down on. At the same time Jake crossed her legs. After a few seconds of vacuuming the sight of Jake’s underwear onto his retinas, Cormack pursed his lips and said, ‘Basically he’s all right. If he does have a fault it’s that he’s too literal. Tends to sound as if he writes computer manuals in his spare time. Trouble is that most computer crime these days is committed by people with rather more imagination than you could find evidence for in any system manual.’

  ‘Army security, eh?’ Jake typed a note onto the file. ‘How long?’

  ‘Five years. Went into the army straight from Cambridge.’

  ‘College?’

  ‘I believe it was Trinity. He read classics.’

  ‘So where does the interest in grey goods come from?’

  ‘Computers? Oh, his father worked for IBM.’ Cormack smiled. ‘That’s something we have in common.’

  ‘Your father too?’

  ‘No. Me actually. I used to design business software. Accounts packages, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Jake.

  ‘Not really. That’s why I joined the Met. To catch electronic burglars.’

  ‘The Lombroso people were pretty stiff about the suggestion that anyone could have broken into their system. But they were just as stiff about the idea of an inside job. What do you think? Is it possible, from the outside?’

  ‘Twenty years ago, when the UK Government installed the Government Data Network s
pecification on all departmental computers, they thought it was impregnable. But within five years, the system was revealed to have more holes than a Russian condom. You see, systems are designed by people, and people are sometimes fallible, and sometimes corrupt. If you could eliminate the human element of the equation altogether then you could probably make a system that was completely secure.’ He shrugged. ‘The most probable case-scenario here? Someone was careless. Probably they change the password every day at this Brain Research Institute. Well that’s a double-edged sword. On one level it makes it difficult for someone to work out what the password could be by process of elimination. But it also makes it difficult for the people who work there to remember. Maybe someone writes the word down. Maybe he asks someone else to remind him. In this way an unauthorised person might catch sight of or overhear the password. And then he’s in. It could be that simple.’

  Cormack lit a small cigar. Smoking was forbidden anywhere in the building, but with the door shut, nobody was likely to make a fuss about it except Jake herself and Cormack knew that so long as she was asking favours from his department she would not object to it.

  ‘Of course, having got into the system he then has to understand its language. He’d need a protocol analyser.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A protocol is a set of rules. An analyser is a portable device with its own miniature screen and keyboard. Looks much like that computer on your lap. Bigger maybe. This examines the target system’s telephone line or the port itself and carries out tests to see which of the hundreds of datacomm protocols are in use. A good one, fully digital, will handle asynchronous or synchronous transmissions. Some of them even have dedicated hacker’s software to make the whole process even easier.’