‘Professor Jones, I am going to take over your computer, OK? It will take a couple of minutes.’
I started up Proxy but paused before connecting to his machine. I sat blankly for a moment, watching the clock turn, letting my mind drift. I like to give users a minute or two before connecting, let them clear anything incriminating from their screens. With Proxy I would be able to see and control his whole machine, or any machine on the network. No electronic door was closed to me. The phone was still tucked under my chin and I could hear the professor breathing, but neither of us said anything. My earlier light-headedness was beginning to fade and I could feel the weariness descending. Without conscious thought, I went to my browser and opened the birding website.
I was just about to make the connection to the other PC when I froze, doing a double take as the website finally loaded. Somebody had got into the site again and this time they’d changed the front page. The ‘photo of the week’ spot, right at the top, had been Jenny’s triumphant shot of a bittern crouching in the reeds, almost invisible. A bittern is a tricky thing, perfectly camouflaged, and with the gift of stillness. Even if you know it is there, you can stare for a long time at a reed bed and not see it in the dry shifting patterns of the reeds, forming and re-forming into a hundred different possible shapes. Then the bird can appear like a mirage, perfectly clear where a second before there was nothing but rustling stalks. You can spot it, and then with a soft sight of the wind rearranging the reeds it is gone, leaving you doubting you ever saw it, unable to trust your eyes. The photograph was like that too: the bird was there and then it wasn’t, swimming in and out of view like an optical illusion. I’d put it on the front page the previous night, the last thing before I’d gone out to see the owl, and now it was gone. It had been replaced with a photograph of me, sitting at the cafe at St Margaret’s Bay, completely oblivious to anything around me. As I took in what I was looking at I could feel my heart start pounding, could feel my whole chest moving with it as it hammered against my ribs. The site had been hacked again and everything I had done to protect it had been in vain.
Behind me I became aware of Janet hovering, wondering when she would get her phone back, frowning at the picture on the page. I minimised it quickly, took a deep breath and forced myself to appear calm. The professor was still waiting patiently for me at the other end of the phone. I took another breath to steady my voice.
‘OK, Professor, are you ready? Don’t touch the keyboard or the mouse. Things will start moving of their own accord, this is me. OK?’
‘Yes, thank you, Ms Brooks.’
His screen replaced mine, a jumble of windows. ‘I’m going to close all of these down, OK?’ I cleared the windows one by one. ‘And now I’m just going to check to see if the database has been corrupted.’ I was keeping up a soothing running commentary because the older staff sometimes panic when they see the cursor moving on its own and they try and grab the mouse and fight me for control. And it was calming me, too, just pretending to be calm. My heart rate had returned to normal. I risked a quick glance at Janet. She had lost interest, was checking her own emails.
‘That should be fine now, Professor,’ I said, hearing his thanks distantly in my ears. I hung up on autopilot, my eyes staring at the screen, seeing but not seeing, the details of the photograph in my mind’s eye as though burned onto my retinas. My snatched impression had been of a surveillance-style shot, taken through a long lens or even a telescope. I hadn’t been looking at the camera, but downwards, reading a paper, alone at the table as though abandoned, the hillside looming above me. I had no memory of it being taken, none at all.
I realized with a jolt that things on my screen were moving of their own accord, the cursor moving, windows opening and closing. For a moment I watched in horror. And then I realized I hadn’t disconnected from the professor’s machine, and it was his computer I was looking at through my Proxy session. And suddenly the pattern I had been seeking swum into focus and I could see it clear, the bird standing out from the reeds. I could see what had happened now. I knew how the site had been hacked. And I knew too how David always seemed to know where I was, where I was going, where I would be.
There was a sound at the door and I turned, seeing with no surprise that he was there in the doorway. He had taken up a casual pose, leaning against the door jamb, but the effect was far from casual. His arms were folded as though that was the only way to keep them in one place, one hand clenched over his upper arm, fingers dug in. He was still with the strung stillness of tension. He had lost the high colour that usually flushed his face and he was bone white. When he saw I had seen him, he became if anything more still, all his attention focused upon me. There was no smile now, no greeting.
I closed down the Proxy session, opened up the website. My photograph still there, my face still oblivious, unaware of the threat.
‘I suppose that was your work,’ I said.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about.’ David’s voice was cold and harsh, the usual mock pleading tone he used completely absent.
Janet was pretending to read her email, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Her mouse had stalled over the list in her inbox. In a minute she would turn around and stare. In a minute, the rest of the team would come rolling in. I turned to face him.
‘Yes you do.’
‘You’ve got something of mine, and I want them back.’
He hadn’t moved from the doorway, still holding himself rigid while we spoke. When Janet turned round to have a good look he glared at her hard enough that she turned away suddenly, and started busying herself with the papers on her desk.
‘Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes you do.’ With a sudden lurch he twisted himself upright and strode forward to my desk. As he reached over to pick up the forgotten tyre valves that I’d left on my desk, I found myself flinching, shrinking away from him and his anger. ‘These.’
I said nothing, dropping my head. He leaned towards me, one hand on the back of my chair, one on the desk so that I was trapped. I could feel the rigid tension in his arms transmitted as a tremor through the chair. Unable to stop myself, I looked up, looked right into his glare. He didn’t soften. I wanted to close my eyes, to look away, but I couldn’t.
‘You may not know this, Manda, but you are playing with fire,’ he said.
I remained frozen, caught, unable to respond. He brought his face closer to mine, repelling me backwards like a polar magnet, until I could withdraw no further. Then he smiled, and the smile was worse than anything that had gone before, a thin, crazed smile, cracked and meaningless.
‘I’m warning you.’ And then he was gone, and I was left still frozen, shrunk backwards on my chair, leaning away from the memory of his presence. I breathed out shakily, wanting to laugh it off, unable to find the words. Janet sat almost as stunned as I was, finally lost for words.
‘You OK?’ she asked at last.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
‘What the hell was that about?’
I shook my head. There was no answer to that question. I found my voice, finally, switching off my PC and standing up.
‘Look, Janet, I’m going home. Tell Don I’m ill. Headache.’ It was beginning to be no more than the truth. I barged out past Harry and Mansoor, who were just arriving, and hurried away. As I stumbled down the corridor I could hear their voices, Janet’s quick clack of betrayal and then a burst of laughter, cut off by the closing door.
A bittern has one trick, and it does it well. When it thinks it is threatened it freezes, its head and neck thrust up like a reed stalk, its body lost in the tangle of growth. From there it can see the intruder coming, but it won’t move. It will stay there, quite still, trusting its disguise, however close you come. They say you can take a bittern that way, if you’re swift and decisive, if you can see it in the reeds, and the bird will just sit and wait for you, watching your approach, making no move to escape. I h
ad been still too long, allowing David to get too close. It was time to try another tack. It was time to go on the attack.
I headed for my car but when I got there, I stopped, looking around. The car park was full of cars but deserted of people, the day already well under way. Before I headed home there was something I had to do, something I could only do on the university network. I threaded my way through the cars and dived down a narrow walkway between brutalist concrete blocks, hunting out an empty computer lab. PCs were scattered all around here, always on, usually half knackered and full of stolen music and downloaded games and half-written essays that their owners had forgotten to delete. I found a bank of machines in a side lab occupied only by one lank-haired goth playing a shoot-em-up game with the sound blaring. Finding a PC with a halfway decent keyboard and a working mouse, I tuned out the sound of electronic mayhem and logged in as myself, pulling up a console window and connecting to the web server. All the work I’d done last night had been bypassed with ease by someone who’d taken pleasure in tripping every trap I’d set, prompting the deluge of emails overnight. Someone had had access to enough knowledge, and the new passwords I’d only just set up. I checked the website again, looking at the photograph, checking for other damage, seeing none. Two or three people were logged in already, I could see, making changes, adding information, exchanging comments.
I could see now where and how the intrusion had taken place. Everything had happened from two machines: from my work PC, and my home one. Both of them were connected to the university network almost permanently. I never switched them off. Someone with access to Proxy, someone with a password, could be in there, watching what I did and, when I was asleep, able to access everything I had access to, every machine on the network. Everything I did or looked at would be laid out before them clear as day. Working out where I would be on Wednesday would have been a piece of cake. Breaking into the site would be another. Watching me spend futile hours hardening the security on the server would have been a joke. I smiled a bitter smile.
‘Headache better then?’
I turned, realizing only then that the noise of the game had stopped a while ago. The goth had gone, and been replaced by my boss, Don, looking dapper and out of place among the grey furnishings and harsh light of the lab.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Can’t think this place would help much.’
‘No. I would like to go home, I think.’
‘Of course.’ He cocked his head slightly as though hoping for more. I just nodded. He waited. I didn’t get up.
‘There’s just one thing I need to do here,’ I said. ‘Then I’m gone. It won’t take a second.’
He waited a little longer, realized I was neither going to move nor do what I wanted to do until he left, and then stood up. In the doorway he stopped and looked at me again. ‘If there’s anything I can help with?’
I shook my head and smiled. He stood there for a while, then, with a helpless little motion of his hands, left. I waited for the door to slam shut and turned back to the keyboard. It really wouldn’t take a minute. Then I could go home.
My PC sat mute and unchanged in its usual spot in the spare bedroom, apparently undisturbed. Its screen glowed with a dull light, on standby as always, waiting for the press of a key to wake it up. Beside it the wireless router flashed intermittently, never entirely idle. When I pulled the plug on the computer, it died with a protesting squeak, the room suddenly loud with the silence as its omnipresent background hum disappeared. Booting it up on an emergency CD I started to format the hard drive, sitting and watching the steady work of the progress bar as it destroyed the files and data and work of a lifetime. Every bird I’d seen, every note I had taken, every photograph and every trip report. I sat there staring at the steady progress, listening to the phone ringing downstairs, wondering at what I’d done.
Will had texted me first, as I walked out of the lab, looking at my phone automatically when it beeped.
‘website buggered cant log in pls help will x. PS nice pic but not yr best side!’ Jenny had tried calling, then texted too. ‘Suppose you know the site is down. A. is suffering withdrawals. Help!’ I deleted both messages and switched off the phone. It was the first time Jenny had bothered to contact me for weeks. I’d already removed the email account for the site so any other cries for help would be lost, left to wander around the university server until they were bounced back to their sender.
My PC beeped and flashed up a message. Format complete. It hadn’t taken long to wipe itself clean, back to a blank slate. It hadn’t taken me long to delete the site either. I had told Don it would only take a second and I was right. Just a few keystrokes removed everything, stripping it clean, gone forever.
My computer’s cursor blinked at me hopefully, waiting for me to reinstall its operating system and restore it to useful life. Instead I switched it off again, pulling the plug from the wall. The shelf above it was ranked with CDs – months and years worth of backups. Somewhere in them probably lurked the spyware that had cracked that machine in the first place. How that had got there, I didn’t know, but the university network was full of holes, impossible to keep secure, and my PC was almost permanently connected to it. The backups would have to go. Only then would I be safe, free and clear from anything that might be able to track me down. I would drop them into the gravel pit, into the cold dark depths, and watch them sink like silvery fish beyond the reach even of the grebes.
That night was another sleepless one. I spent it sitting at my kitchen window, listening to the call of the tawny owl, no longer tempted to hunt it down. The owl is a specialist hunter, beautifully adapted to the night, not particularly good at anything else. In Europe we have given it a reputation for wisdom and learning that is ill deserved. But in Africa it is a bird of ill omen. Hearing an owl at night, having it land on your house, prefigures a death, usually that of a child. Their silent flight, their calls, the pale wash of their feathers as they materialized out of the dark, made them seem closer to ghosts than birds. Juma could imitate the grunting calls of the eagle owls and sometimes in the evening he would sit on the kitchen steps and, if I pleaded hard enough, call them and sometimes they would answer. We would sit in the velvety dark and wait, the smoke from Juma’s cigarette harsh and sharp in the air, one ear tuned for the bird, one for the sound of my father. I wasn’t supposed to be out there, out in the servants’ quarters, long past my official bedtime.
We heard them often, but we only ever saw one once. It was a night with a slim moon just rising sharp in the clear dry-season sky. It was back in the days when my parents still went out and the house behind us was quiet, Zannah asleep. I was supposed to be in bed. My mother had come to kiss me goodnight, bringing the scent of her perfume into the room, then shutting off the light so she appeared as a faint shimmer of silver in the doorway, caught in the light from the hall. My father called, impatient, worried they would be late, and she vanished without a sound, leaving only her fragrance behind.
I had waited until I heard the car leave, and the gate swing shut, before slipping out and down to the kitchen, bare feet cool on the floor tiles. I sat on the step with my toes curled up while Juma sent forth a deep call, almost like a groan of pain, and we heard it answered, startlingly close, the closest it had ever been. Then we saw it. It was perched up close on the garden wall, and it was no more than a brief paling of the darkness until it turned its orange eyes upon us so they gleamed in the faint light that spilled from the door. It sat still and silent, its attention upon us, transfixing us. I sensed its endless patience. Juma’s cigarette burned unheeded. Then with a blink it was gone, the wall empty. Juma crossed himself, then ground out the cigarette harshly on the step.
‘Ach, it’s a bad bird that one. It will come and take you away,’ he hissed as he shooed me out of his kitchen. ‘It will steal your soul, and what would the master say then, eh?’
That night I couldn’t sleep as I lay in the dark under the ghostly skein of the mos
quito net. I heard my parents come back, my mother’s laugh, hastily shushed, my father’s low rumble. The thought of the owl haunted me, its eyes, its long considering stare. I didn’t dare close my eyes for the fear of being taken in my sleep. I crept out of my bedroom once more, seeking the warmth of my parents’ bed, willing to pay the cost of their anger. Halfway there, I stopped, hearing a noise coming from down below. My mother’s voice, low and caressing, enchanting, sounding a way I had never heard her before.
All of our windows were opened wide to catch the night breezes, and the house was filled with moonlight. I followed the sound of her voice down the stairs, through the wide space of the sitting room, out onto the veranda. Her dress seemed to catch all the light.
‘Darling,’ she said, and I thought she was speaking to me, that it was me she was smiling at with her face soft and open. But then I saw the stretched phone cord, the phone itself tucked under her chin, just as she looked up and saw me too, watching her from the door. My answering smile froze on my face. She fixed me with a glare, her face hardening into anger. She put down the phone with a clatter that made me jump. I felt suddenly cold, very small and defenceless against her. I thought she might slap me or shake me as she advanced, and I could smell the drink now, mixed in with her perfume, sour on her breath. I shrank backwards towards the shelter of the shadows.
She didn’t say anything, she didn’t have to. Her fingers closed around my arm, encircling it completely. Her eyes were narrowed, shadowed, unreadable. We stood, frozen. Inside I could hear my father moving about, coming down the stairs, calling out for my mother.
‘Darling?’ he said, and he said it with the same inflection, the same caressing tone that she had used on the phone, but she didn’t soften, didn’t turn to him, or call out. Instead she stood, stiller than ever, her fingers compelling me not to betray her.
‘Darling? Are you out there?’
He stood in the doorway, so close, yet unseeing, and his voice sounded sad now and a little uncertain, as though he knew she was there, as though he knew she was telling him a sort of lie just by saying nothing. I longed to call out to him, but she had me locked in complicity, sharing her guilt, holding my tongue.
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