It would have been quiet if it hadn’t been for Dermot. I’d never been with him while he was sleeping, and I had never known anyone who could make so much noise without being awake. He didn’t merely snore, he also muttered incomprehensibly and sometimes shouted. He continued to fart loudly and scratch furiously even when unconscious. I settled myself into my nest of cushions and tried to make the best of it. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep at all, but the drink did the trick.
I fell into a light sleep riddled with pointless dreams. On the verge of understanding them, I was woken up by Dermot. He was stumbling about, looking for something, making no more noise than a bulldozer going through a row of greenhouses. I was in that gooey stage of wakefulness, where sleep is obviously the best option but is no longer available.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I need a drink,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to be able to sleep without a drink. They must have something in one of these cupboards. If I could see the fucking things that’d help. Can I put the lights on?’
‘There’s no electricity. That’s why it’s dark.’
‘Light me a fucking candle then.’
I remembered Tina putting a lighter on the sideboard. It was still there, and I used it to light a couple of candles. Dermot immediately began to ransack the cupboards.
‘Don’t they drink anything except wine?’ he complained. ‘Where is it?’
He picked something up.
‘Who’s she?’ he asked. He’d found a photograph in a frame. It was a snapshot of the beach at Borth, on a bright day. The tide was out, and there were a lot of people on the beach. Some kites, caught suspended, showed that the usual gale was blowing.
In the foreground, there were three people, arms linked, laughing. I was the middle one of the three. On my left was Tina. The photo must have been taken while we were both at college. Tina was still in her quasi-goth clothes, and I was thinner, not yet larded out by spending all day sitting at my keyboard.
On the other side of me, her arm linked with mine, was a girl I didn’t know.
That is, I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know where she was from or what she did. But I did know her; I knew her face. I’d seen it in a strange waking dream about a car crash, a couple of days ago. A small red car, overturned on a quiet road. The sound of the sea, and the dead girl in the car. This girl.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Well she knows you,’ said Dermot. ‘She’s holding on to you.’
‘Must have been someone who came down for the weekend. A friend of someone.’
‘So you used to have girls on tap then? Shame that stopped. Wonder why they keep it in a cupboard?’
‘You’d better put it back. They’ll know you’ve been snooping.’
I didn’t want them to know we’d seen anything. Something had happened in Borth, and Tina knew something about it. Dermot put the picture away and shut the door on it, as though it would be that simple. As though you could just shut the door on the past. But doors don’t keep it away. Nothing does. It comes with you. When you get wherever you’re going, it’s already there.
Dermot found my nest, and took half of the cushions from it. He fashioned a nest of his own.
‘Sleepy,’ he said. In ten minutes he was back to his symphony of snores and scratches. I didn’t think I’d sleep, but I must have done. The next thing I knew it was morning, and the curtains could barely keep the daylight outside.
THIRTEEN
I
Dermot woke up at about eight in the morning.
‘What’s for breakfast?’ he asked shakily.
‘Water,’ I said.
After he’d spent quite a while in the bathroom, he returned. He looked as though he’d recently been dredged from the river. His skin was slack and white, as though it might slough off under minor pressure. His voice was muddy. His eyes were sunken. His hands shook.
‘Bit of a hangover,’ he said. ‘Mother of God.’
He opened the curtains and looked at the view. I joined him. A significant portion of the view was underwater. The sky was grey and clear, and the river was all over the place. The row of houses on the other side of the river was in the river. There were cars parked along the side of the road beyond those houses, and already there were people standing looking at the flood. The sure way to attract English people is to have a disaster. Sadly, they’d have to make do with damaged property today, but with any luck there might be a drowning later on. The top of the arched bridge was clear of the water, but at either end it fell into the flood. The news crews would turn up later on and get a child or two to sit forlornly in a leaky coracle.
‘How are we going to get home?’ asked Dermot, too ill to put any emphasis on anything.
‘Drive up to the forest road and come back down the bypass. The tricky bit is going to be getting to the car.’
Dermot nodded and picked up the stub of a candle. It was about the same colour and texture as his face.
‘Did we have all that cider?’ he asked. ‘Don’t answer that. If we didn’t, I’ve got fucking malaria.’
Tina and Roger must have heard us talking, because sounds of activity began to come from their room. Roger came out, dressed in a dressing gown. He looked as though he’d already showered, and had the air of a man who might sit thoughtfully smoking a pipe and considering plans for a spiffing new cantilever bridge.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘How’s the ambient water level?’
Tina struggled out of the bedroom, looking extremely tousled. She nodded vaguely in greeting and shut herself in the bathroom. Dermot looked as though he wished he’d stayed in there.
‘Nice evening,’ he said. ‘You did well with the wine there, Roger.’
Roger nodded, managing to get his tiredness to look like aloofness. He joined us at the window and we looked at the river. It was difficult to miss it.
‘We’ll be off about ten,’ he said. ‘We have a holiday cottage in Wales. We go there, watch the rain, and after it stops we come back. I take it you two will be off back to Dudley?’
‘We’ll go round the bypass,’ I said.
‘After breakfast,’ said Dermot, looking as though consumption of any foodstuff would bring on projectile vomiting.
‘We haven’t got anything,’ said Roger. ‘The kitchen has a lake in it.’
‘We can stop and get something on the way,’ I said. ‘There’s a Little Chef in Oldbury.’
Dermot brightened slightly.
‘You paying?’ he asked, a touch of his usual chirpiness in his voice. ‘I’ll have a full breakfast.’
‘We have to get there,’ I said. ‘There’s this flood to walk through first.’
‘Floods don’t worry me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in worse floods than this.’
‘There’ll be ducks,’ I said.
He looked at me.
‘You can go first,’ he said.
II
After we’d washed as well as we could, we went downstairs. Tina and Roger waved us off from the landing. I wondered how they were going to get away. Perhaps Roger would charter a launch.
I reached the last step above water level and stood on it. The river water looked brown and sluggish, and it had an earthy smell. We’d considered going barefoot until we thought of how many sharp objects might be hidden underwater. Roger had loaned us each a pair of his old shoes. They were better than my new shoes, except that they were a size too large. We were carrying our own shoes, plus borrowed socks, again courtesy of Roger. That way we’d have dry feet on the way home. I put Roger’s shoe over the water, took a deep breath, and let my foot plunge down to the next step.
The water was cold and felt gritty. It filled my borrowed shoe and lapped at my ankle. I took another step, and another. The water in their front room was a foot and a half deep. It was in my socks, in my shoes, halfway up my legs. I began to wade to the front door, and heard Dermot splash down the stairs behind me.
‘Fucking hell,
’ he said.
The front door opened too easily. I’d expected that it would need a lot of force to move, due to the added pressure of the water, and I nearly fell backwards. I waded into the street. Once Dermot was out we shouted goodbye to Tina and Roger and shut the door. Outside, the river water seemed to be heading sluggishly downstream. Beneath the surface, stronger currents tugged at me. The entire scene looked wrong, the houses with their lower reaches underwater, the river suddenly a mile wide, the groups of tourists as close to the opposite side as they could get with dry feet. Another reality had burst its banks and imposed itself over the usual one. It was hauling at our feet, wanting to pull us in.
I thought about my hallucinations. Perhaps they were getting stronger. Dermot had got caught up in the last one. Perhaps I had another reality inside me, and it was ready to burst its banks. Perhaps in Borth, what had come from the mountains hadn’t come from the mountains after all.
Perhaps it had come from me.
It wasn’t just that strange, goblin-like figure. There was also the girl in the photograph, and in my memory of a car crash. Something had happened to her, and Roger and Tina had a picture of her squirreled away. Dermot had found it accidentally, so he said.
I didn’t know whether to trust any of them. I didn’t know whether to trust myself.
I waded to the car through my doubts and the river. The Audi was parked high in the car park, which sloped down to the river’s edge when the river’s edge was where it belonged. The water had got as high as the wheel rims. About two inches of grubby water had got inside. I got in and put my own shoes on, leaving Roger’s on the back seat. Cleaning the car wouldn’t do the trick. The inside would smell of stagnant water for ever. I waited for Dermot to get in and then we set off.
I bought him some breakfast on the way home. When we got back to Dudley I said I had things to do, and he took the hint. He drove off in his Meriden 733t, attracting the sort of admiring looks that my Audi never managed.
III
I spent most of the rest of the weekend on the Net trying to find details about Bright Harvest Research Laboratory. It was based in a building in a small compound on the edge of Stourbridge town, and it didn’t encourage visitors. It was involved in both GM crop work and animal experimentation, and was thus surrounded by an ongoing demonstration. Security was high and details were minimal. None of the staff had their names on the Net or anywhere else, for fear of having their houses firebombed. It took me the best part of a day to find that much information. I tried calling but there was only a recorded message telling me that no one was available for comment.
I was trying not to think about the photograph. I had enough problems, what with video-game characters trying to kill me. Being an unknowing pawn in a conspiracy involving a dead girl was more than I could cope with, so I did my best to ignore it. My mother used to tell me that if I ignored bullies, they’d leave me alone. It didn’t work for bullying thoughts either, as it happened.
I searched for the company’s website. There was a blank title page, with the company logo at the top and entry boxes for a user-id and password. I knew enough about systems to know that if I tried random passwords they would scan my machine and get my details.
That would mean a visit from the constabulary. Given the government’s preference for businesses over humans, it might mean an investigation by the Secret Service. I didn’t have any secrets, but I didn’t want to be investigated. There was clearly no way I was going to be able to contact Bright Harvest directly. No one there wanted anything to do with anyone. I’d need to blag my way in, and I couldn’t do blagging. I thought about the team at work. Some of them should be able to at least get through the website security. Perhaps there would be a staff list, or a payroll file with the staff names, that we could get to.
I checked the telephone book for Bettses. There were too many for me to call each one and besides, Betts might not live in the area. People commuted to the West Midlands to work, and then got out as quickly as possible at 5 pm, pausing only to admire the artworks on the islands.
I’d have to enlist the hackers at work. They had always claimed that they could get into anything. They couldn’t get into those pubs with dress codes, but they should be able to crack a password without much trouble.
IV
On Monday morning I got to work early. I was a man with a mission. I was hoping to catch Tim or Andy before Clive turned up. Clive would know how to hack into a site. The trouble was that he’d want to talk me through the theory of his methods. He’d probably want to draw process flow charts for them on the office flipchart. It’d be mid-afternoon before he got started. As it happened, only Tracy was in. She was drinking tea and reading the TV guide. She drank a lot of tea. Her blood must have been three-tenths tannic acid. She also liked to read TV guides. She read all of the normal ones, and also the ones that tell you what happens in Eastenders, Brookside, Hollyoaks et al next week so that you don’t have to waste any time actually watching the programmes.
I said hello to her and asked her how she was, and after a ten-minute rundown on the health of all of the members of her family – plus pets – I sat at my desk.
It was in a mess. I had data-flow diagrams and post-it notes all over the place. Empty pens lay about, along with a pencil with a broken lead. There were a number of styrofoam drinks containers. Some were empty, a couple held a layer of coffee, and one had a layer of thick green fur growing over its interior. This was the normal state of my desk. However, something wasn’t right. It was my mess, but it wasn’t quite where I’d left it. Someone had been sitting at my desk. It must have been on Friday, while I’d been out on my fruitless search for Betts. I switched on my PC. Nothing looked different. I checked the amendment dates on the Boris files.
He’d been recompiled on Friday. Someone had been at Boris.
I double-clicked the executable to start him up.
‘Good morning,’ he said. Out loud, through the speakers. A little window popped up on the screen, with a text box.
‘Hello,’ I typed.
‘Who is this?’ Boris asked. I typed my name.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that,’ he said.
I clicked him off. His window vanished, leaving a rectangular afterimage floating in the middle of the monitor.
Clive must have been checking out my coding. I checked out the amendments. He’d got the voice working by getting the Boris application to call a freeware text-recognition program, and that was outputting to the speakers via the soundcard. He’d added in a few other little fixes, mostly code optimization from what I could see. He’d also added in version numbers and a compilation history. Tidying up work. I’d have done that after I got the application working. Or I wouldn’t have done it at all.
Boris was still an idiot. Clive hadn’t done any work on the AI routines. He’d also used a generic voice. I’d imagined Boris to be cross and English, with a touch of the theatrical. I’d imagined Tom Baker in a bad mood. Still, I could replace the voice. Clive had saved me a lot of time by getting the speech working at all.
I was still annoyed. Boris had been my pet project. I didn’t want anyone else involved. I could restore him from Thursday’s backup, but that would lose the text-recognition. Even worse, Clive would know what I’d done. He’d be upset, and he was my boss. There weren’t as many programming jobs around as there had been a year ago, especially in the West Midlands. You had to commute to Birmingham, and companies there used contractors for a lot of their work. I could do contracting work, but I didn’t like it. The pay was better but there was no guarantee you’d have a job at the end of the week.
I wanted guarantees. I had enough uncertainty in my life.
I checked out my PC. Clive hadn’t been at anything else.
Tim turned up just before 9 am. He was a worried looking man, with an eyelid that twitched. He had sandy hair and went in for tweedy jackets, making him look ten years older than he was.
I asked him what he
knew about cracking passwords. He chewed his thumbnail and did some semaphore with the twitchy eyelid.
‘Depends where it is,’ he said. ‘If it’s on a home PC running any version of Windows, there’ll be a cracker program on the Net that’ll get you in no trouble. The ones out there now just do the work for you. To get into a server, you’d need something a bit better. Where is this password?’
‘On a web page.’
‘Shouldn’t be difficult. Ah,’ he said, sounding relieved. ‘Here’s Andy. He’s the man for this sort of thing.’
Tim didn’t much enjoy social interaction. I let him get back to his desk and asked Andy the same questions. Andy was young and sharp, and dressed in black because that’s how hackers dressed in the sorts of books which featured hackers in lead roles. He had his hair in a grade-two cut, and had Celtic tattoos on his wrists. He had a very quiet, but very serious, voice.
‘You can get into anything,’ he said. ‘Is it a secure site?’
I told him about Bright Harvest.
‘Very serious,’ he said. ‘They’ll be afraid of people getting their home addresses or grabbing the company secrets. That’s going to need some special attention. We’re still waiting for Clive to bring in that job, aren’t we?’
I nodded.
‘I’ll see what I can get. You just want the employee list?’
‘The addresses would help.’ They would. If I had Betts’ address I wouldn’t need to go to Bright Harvest at all. I could find him at home.
‘I’ll have a go,’ said Andy. ‘Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.’
V
He came back to me just before lunchtime.
‘I’ve got half of it,’ he said. ‘I have their employee list, but I can’t get at anything else. They’re keeping almost everything else secure. Which means really secure, otherwise I’d have cracked it. And this only has the surname and initials.’
Execution Plan Page 14