So upon returning to the disco, the offered consolation from a pal that ‘Alison Gifford’s got nae tits anyway’ was very much redundant.
Parlabane had stayed in shape, retaining a proportionately light frame past adolescence and all throughout his twenties, assisted by an extremely understanding metabolism that was prepared to forgive his appetites for hamburgers and Guinness. Contrary to his friends’ warnings and possibly hopes, his pituitary gland had not packed in and allowed a ten-stone fat backlog to catch up on him. Consequently, he could still support his hanging bodyweight on a few fingers of one hand; he’d rather not if he could possibly avoid it, but it remained reassuring to know it was an option, especially on a rockface or the side of a building.
However, it was not a talent he was going to need on a cakewalk like tonight. The RVI, in its Victorian quasi-gothic austerity, was a helpfully chunky building, designed, it seemed, with the needs of wall-scaling and burglary in mind. Parlabane had first ascended to the slate roof then made his way along the edge of it from above the on-call accommodation to the admin block, via two hundred-yard stretches either side of the entrance to the A&E department, which was at the centre of the main trunk of the building.
He identified the window he had left slightly open two floors below him, and pulled the climbing cord out from under his polo-neck, then secured it to a disused but sturdy chimney pot, and lowered himself down to the wide stone platform of the window ledge. Parlabane had been pleased to see that all of the admin block had been double-glazed – presumably the rest of the hospital would follow in no time – as that meant the frame should slide up quietly and easily, which it did.
Parlabane rolled inside and shut the window, then crawled on his stomach across the carpet to a spot directly underneath the security camera. From a pouch in his ‘utility bra’ he produced the photograph he had shot from that spot earlier in the day, taken without a flash so that it produced a dark and shadowy image, much like the room looked in the middle of the night with all the lights off. He took out a length of heavy, insulated copper wire and fashioned a small stand for the photo, then attached the whole thing to the bracket below the camera and swung it swiftly around in front of the lens.
The effect on the image appearing on a monitor, somewhere else in the building, would be simply for the picture to suddenly go out of focus, but to still appear to be the same thing. And in the unlikely event that someone was paying enough attention to the monitors to notice that one was out of focus, their first action would be to remote-adjust the camera until the familiar image of the dark, deserted room became clear again.
His activities screened off from prying eyes, Parlabane took a seat in front of the nearest computer and began to lovingly and conscientiously trespass through the system.
He took a deep breath and keyed in the user name ‘jackp’ and the password ‘hack’, then breathed out when the alarms didn’t start ringing and no message appeared on his screen to the effect that Matt Dempsey had double crossed him and that the cops were already on their way. He accessed the programme menu and launched Hijack, as his friend in Van Nuys had amused himself to call the keystroke application. Dempsey had set it up to record all six of the senior staff’s activities, as although Lime’s password would grant the highest access privileges, it wouldn’t open documents encrypted by the other five, which required individual codes.
Parlabane pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, on which he had noted down the serial numbers of the machines each exec had been sitting at – Hijack listed these numbers instead of user names, as obviously it would be recording a terminal’s keystrokes before it knew the name of the user logging on. Might as well begin at the top, he thought, and pulled up the listings recorded on the terminal in Lime’s office.
stephenlime¶ tebbit¶ 1y5→→→ [del] [del] [del] [del] [del] memo to . . . it began.
‘Backstage pass,’ Parlabane muttered. ‘Access all areas. Thank you.’
He shut down and re-started, logging on with Lime’s user name and its attendant access privileges, and began looking, familiarly undeterred by the thought that he had no idea what he was specifically looking for.
Partly remembering Dempsey and partly just out of habit, he scanned the purchasing records to find out which company the computers had been bought from, then repeated the drill on office furniture, stationery and decor etc, copying the appropriate documents on to one of the disks he had brought along.
Then he launched Loud Labelling and had a look at what the senior suits were pro-actively saying to each other. Nursing ‘efficiency’ was going to be ‘improved’ on several wards, by which Parlabane understood that a number of P45s were in the post. Auxiliary staff were going to be ‘streamlined’, and the number of geriatric beds was going to be ‘rationalised’. However, it wasn’t all bad news – the Trust’s increasingly healthy balance sheet meant big pay rises were in the offing for the people who had worked hardest to achieve that success.
But the biggest buzz was to do with the George Romanes Hospital. Memos referred to how the ‘GRH plans are a vital plank in consolidating the Trust’s financial stability’, by which Parlabane understood it was somehow up for sale, and the ‘importance of discretion with regard to the GRH situation’, by which he understood that the clinical staff would probably freak if they knew about it.
He reached for the phone and dialled four numbers, then put the receiver down and waited.
After a couple of minutes it rang.
‘You said Jeremy was working at the George Romanes Hospital, didn’t you?’ he asked as soon as he picked it up.
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘In fact he was covering it until his death.’
‘Just confirming. That’s all. Thank you.’
Now he had an angle. The next task was to find out what the furtive memos were actually referring to, information which he correctly guessed would be held in encrypted files. He called up a list of all documents stored in Lime’s personal folders; if anyone knew the full picture about this, it would be the big boss. The list was huge, so he altered the settings to arrange the items by document type. Sure enough, below the vast bank of ‘Wordsmith’ wp files were a number marked ‘Cryptlock document’ next to their dates of most recent use.
He double-clicked on the first one and was asked for a password, but ‘Tebbit’ didn’t score. This was one of the problems with encryption systems: they allowed the user to assign a different password to every document; indeed they required the user to assign one every time he or she wished to re-encrypt, rather than encrypting automatically with the same one when the user closed the file. On the bright side, however, there was the practical reality that no one wanted to be juggling too many passwords, and most people tended to stick to the same one or two. Parlabane toggled back into Hijack and looked again at Lime’s keystrokes, worrying about the other problem with encryption systems, which was that if Lime hadn’t encrypted or decrypted anything that day, Hijack was useless, as no password would have been keyed in.
Fortunately, the word ‘thatcher’ appeared, sandwiched between a bunch of cursor strokes and function key numbers. Goal.
‘I’m Mr Bad Example,’ Parlabane sang quietly to himself, scanning the files, ‘take a look at me. I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy. Oh Mr Lime, you have been a busy boy.’
ATTN: Timothy Winton (Eyes only).
It is my consideration that we accept the Capital Properties offer. I believe you are quite right in estimating the value to be nearer the £5m mark than the bid £3m, but I feel that the bird in the hand factor should come into play.
Firstly, having a closed deal on the table at the time of the announcement will go some way towards staving off the inevitable protests. If we merely announce that the GRH is closing and we intend selling the property, we’ll be drowning in a sea of placards, as well as having to listen to countless hare-brained suggestions from the Butlins white coats for alternative usage of the site.
Secondly, t
he immediate injection of £3m in cash would bring the Trust’s finances well into the black before the end of our financial year, and I don’t need to tell you how useful that would be politically, for us as well as the Scottish Office. The new NHS badly needs success stories and we have the opportunity to be a very big one.
And on an earlier file:
ATTN: Timothy Winton
Toby Childs
Cedric Baker
Penelope Gainsborough
Elliot Michaels
It has been brought to all of our attention that the bed-usage situation at the George Romanes Hospital has altered, with a steady reduction in the number of long-term patients through placement and natural wastage.
It seems plausible, now, that the GRH’s geriatric care facilities could be absorbed by the RVI, albeit with a reduction in the overall number of geriatric beds in the Trust. This would free up the GRH site for alternative and more cost-effective use, suggestions for which I will be welcoming at our meeting this afternoon.
Hmmm, thought Parlabane.
He copied these and several other files on the same subject to his own disk. It was at that point that he came across a file which would not respond to ‘thatcher’, and saw that the file had not been updated for some months, meaning Hijack could offer no assistance.
Parlabane’s eyes narrowed. People changed their favoured password from time to time, sure, but what was suspicious was that there were several earlier files which had been encrypted with ‘thatcher’.
A one-off, separate password meant top secret, no question. And Parlabane was pretty sure that whatever it contained would be headline news.
He knew the password could be absolutely anything, but figured that if he had a chance it was to follow the pattern and hope Lime had too. He keyed in ‘major’, and was met with a loud bleep and a screen message: Incorrect password. Attempts remaining: 2. Cancel. Retry.
‘Fuck,’ he said, angry at his political stupidity. Someone with a hard-on for Tebbit and Thatcher would probably not want to put Major in the same bracket.
He hit C for Cancel, in the hope that if his next attempt was wrong, it would start back at three guesses.
Suddenly remembering who had played the starring role in this fiasco, and who Lime might therefore be grateful to, he keyed in ‘bottomley’.
Beep. Incorrect password. Attempts remaining: 1. Cancel. Retry.
‘Arse.’
The cancel option was only for getting out of the loop, back into the main network environment. To get three more guesses, he’d have to shut right down and re-boot, but it was a laborious pain in the arse, and could take him all night if he had to make his way through all the cabinet ministers who were ‘one of us’ until he got lucky. There was also the danger that a third wrong guess might have further security consequences, such as freezing the system or setting off some kind of alarm. He knew he could little afford that, but he could even less afford to remain ignorant of what was in that file.
He paused, took a deep breath and composed his thoughts.
Thatcher. Tebbit. Who would be third in that sequence? Who was equally nauseating, xenophobic, frighteningly right-wing and likely to be lionised by a prick like Lime?
Yes.
‘portillo’.
David Forbes
Four-Square Developments
Brewery Road
Romford
Dear David,
All systems go. I can now confidently predict that the site will become available inside a year. However, I must stress that this information is of the utmost secrecy, and must be kept strictly between ourselves at this stage. While a few rumours about the future of the place being in doubt could be trouble enough at my end, the discovery that anyone outside the Trust knew about this would be politically uncomfortable, to say the least . . .
Parlabane had seen enough. He copied the file and closed the machine down, then tucked the disk into his utility bra, removed the photo and its holder from in front of the video camera, and crawled to the window. He wiped his footprints from the sill, nimbly climbed out, shut the window with his foot, got hold of the cord and hauled himself back up to the roof.
No one had seen him, no one had heard him, and he had left no traces.
Except for forgetting to re-encrypt all of Lime’s files.
TWENTY-TWO
‘And all because, the lady loves . . .’ Sarah sighed, watching Parlabane climb back in through the on-call room window.
‘Fuck, I forgot the chocolates,’ he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He pulled the polo-neck off and unclipped the utility bra, removing the vital disk from it before folding it in two and stuffing it into his duffle bag.
He wiped at his back and chest with the discarded polo-neck. ‘I’m always amazed that I can get this sweaty when it’s so fucking cold out there. I’m manky as well. You’d think people would show burglars a wee bit more consideration and give their roofs a wipe down now and again. Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a shower?’
Sarah pulled a towel out from inside the wounded-looking chest of drawers and threw it to him.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
‘What, you’re supposed to use this place?’ he asked, surveying the fetidly grotty bathroom. ‘I’ll need to have a wash after being in here. Not quite in the same class as the executive bathroom facilities over in that nice admin block.’
‘You are not telling me they’ve got showers in there,’ Sarah said gravely.
‘Of course,’ Parlabane continued. ‘Possibly for washing Clive off you when he’s finished showing you round. Shiny new Royal Doulton stuff. In case you’re feeling in need of a freshen-up after strenuously sitting on your arse in a meeting for a few hours.’
He looked at the ceiling above the shower cubicle.
‘Jesus. Look at that mould. Another fortnight and that thing’ll have evolved into a higher life-form. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to have a shower in here. How do you manage?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘It seems the lesser of two evils when you’ve just been up to your elbows in puke, blood and God knows what else trying to intubate some poor sod. It’s still close, though.’
Parlabane looked again at the cubicle’s interior, the cracks and lines running through it making it look like an Ordnance Survey map of the Himalayas. ‘Well, I suppose it’s also the lesser of two evils when you’ve got those tell-tale “just been up on the roof, breaking into the building” streaks of soot and grime on your face and hair. Have a seat and I’ll tell you the latest while I’m at it. And I want you to jump in if the thing on the ceiling goes for me.’
Sarah locked the door then pulled down the lid of the toilet seat and sat down, while Parlabane started the water running and got undressed. She made great play of looking in the other direction while he was facing her, but stole a glance and smiled bashfully to herself when he turned his back to climb into the cubicle before pulling the plastic curtain across.
‘So what’s the story?’ she asked.
‘It’s your George Romero’s place,’ he said, over the sound of the water on the ceramic. ‘They’re closing it.’
‘The bastards. The fucking bastards. Well, it’s not a huge surprise. They’ve always wanted to, but I didn’t think they’d have the nerve just to go ahead and . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Bastards.’
‘That’s only the start. They’re not just closing it, either – they’re flogging it. They’ve got a buyer lined up, Capital Properties. I saw a memo from Stephen Lime to Timothy Winton – he’s the chairman of the Trust but I think it’s kind of a sinecure thing. Lime’s the one with all the real clout.
‘Anyway, they figure the site is worth about five mill, but Lime’s recommending they accept a bid of three. This is because one, a done deal would take the steam out of closure protests, and two, the cash would put the Trust instantly into the black and make heroes out of the suits. And to those I think we can probably add three, Capital Properties will be
making it well worth Lime’s while to accept their bid. Maybe Winton’s too. But it goes without saying that all the suits are being pretty furtive about the whole thing.’
‘And well they might,’ Sarah said. ‘When they were seeking Trust status they gave assurances that they weren’t going to close it, but we all knew that they’d find their way round to it soon enough.’
‘Why would they want to? Is it always half-empty?’
‘Quite the opposite. It’s always completely full. Full of expensive geriatrics who can take up beds for months or even years at a time, and whose only financial contribution to this long-term care has been paying tax and National Insurance for the best part of fifty years on the understanding that they’d be looked after in precisely these circumstances.
‘You see, Jack, no matter what they get their PR people to say, or whatever slogans they put under their logos, the Trusts don’t give a shit about patient care. They only care about pounds, shillings and pence, and that’s why they were set up in the first place, and filled with accountants and bankers and a whole legion of grey zeroes in suits. It was illustrated by that arsehole chief exec down south who said a doctor’s first duty is to his Trust, then to himself, then to his patients. The name “Hippocrates” obviously never meant a great deal to this bloke. They see patients as commodities to be managed. Do it right and you turn them into cash cows. Do it wrong and they’re financial liabilities.’
‘How so?’ asked Parlabane, spitting water.
‘Well, ideally, what every trust in the UK would like is to have no geriatric patients, no medical patients, no one suffering from anything chronic and complicated, no one dying very slowly and expensively, no intensive care unit – just wards and wards full of young, fit patients awaiting elective surgery. Varicose vein ops. Palinoidal sinuses. Hernias. Quick, efficient, elective procedures with very little chance of post-op complication; easy to cost, easy to budget for. Elective procedures behave themselves on the balance sheets. Elective procedures make money. Geriatric admissions don’t do either. Poor old crumbles with no relatives willing or able to look after them, whose condition is something as incurable as its symptoms are irreversible: old age.
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