Genius Squad (19 page)

Cadel couldn’t respond. He had lost the ability.

‘I’m not angry, dear boy. Just disappointed,’ Prosper went on. ‘How many times have we discussed this? You’re being stifled. Reined in. You’re not being allowed to spread your wings, and reach your full potential.’

Cadel still couldn’t talk. But he shook his head frantically, signifying his disagreement.

‘You think that you’re at liberty, but you’re not,’ Prosper insisted. ‘Believe me – I know. I know what you’ve been up to.’ He bared his teeth in a slow, vulpine smile. ‘It seems to me that you’ve forgotten what I always used to say. Trust nobody. Doubt everyone.’ Leaning forward, he reached for Cadel’s shoulder. ‘
Watch your back
, my dear boy, or you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble.’

Cadel retreated from the advancing hand – and woke abruptly. He was slumped at his new desk, his head pillowed in his arms. The overhead light was still blazing. Beside him, the laptop screen announced that it was 1:05 a.m.

He had been asleep for three hours.

Cadel sat up. His mouth was dry. His neck was stiff. His heart was still pounding like a jackhammer, from the shock of his dream. On the whole, however, he felt surprisingly alert.

So he rubbed his eyes, adjusted the position of his computer, and plunged back into
GenoME.org
.
After all, no one was going to stop him.

As Trader had said, bedtime was optional at Clearview House.

SIXTEEN

Cadel wasn’t the first down to breakfast. When he arrived in the kitchen, at about half past six, he discovered Hamish eating burnt fruit toast at one end of the table, and Dot drinking coffee at the other. Both were studying their laptop screens, utterly absorbed.

‘Hi,’ said Cadel. But only Hamish glanced up.

‘Oh. It’s you,’ he said. Then he focused on his computer again.

Feeling slightly snubbed, Cadel wandered over to the nearest cupboard. Upon opening it, however, he saw that it contained pot and pans. So he moved on, checking drawers and shelves and canisters until Hamish finally asked, ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Coffee,’ Cadel replied. Though coffee wasn’t something he normally drank, he wanted to demonstrate that he was a mature kind of person – the kind who had coffee and toast for breakfast, instead of milk and sugary cereal.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Hamish, and leapt to his feet. Startled, Cadel watched him retrieve a plastic container from a high cupboard. It seemed odd that Hamish should have decided to be so helpful all of a sudden. It didn’t make sense. And why keep the coffee up there? In such an inaccessible spot?

Cadel accepted the container hesitantly, bemused by Hamish’s big, metallic grin. Sure enough, as the receptacle changed hands, Dot remarked, ‘That’s not coffee. That’s ground cinnamon.’

Whereupon Hamish made an explosive noise.

‘Oh,
Jeez
!’ he cried, stomping back to his seat in a huff. ‘You’re no fun, Dot!’

‘The coffee’s in the fridge,’ Dot continued, fixing her blank gaze on Cadel. ‘It’s instant, though. The espresso machine is downstairs.’

‘That’s okay.’ Cadel quietly placed the cinnamon on a nearby benchtop, wondering if he had made a mistake. Would Clearview House prove to be full of idiots and bullies after all?

‘Don’t mind Hamish,’ Dot continued dryly. ‘He has a puerile sense of humour, but he’s quite acceptable in other ways.’

‘At least I
have
a sense of humour,’ Hamish retorted, and Dot set down her cup.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my sense of humour,’ she said coolly. ‘For instance, I find your outfit very amusing.’

Cadel had to suppress a smile. Hamish did look rather odd in his oversized Hell’s Angels t-shirt, and his studded leather wrist band. Like a woolly lamb in body armour.

But despite his feeble appearance, he still had enough courage to launch an attack on Dot.

‘Well, what are
you
d-dressed as?’ he demanded scornfully. ‘A 1950s librarian?’

Dot stared at him for a moment, expressionless, before turning back to her computer. Cadel toyed with the idea of asking her about Com. He was trying to think of a good opening line when she abruptly sprang to her feet, snapping her laptop shut. Even Hamish seemed taken aback by this unexpected burst of energy.

‘I’ll be down in the War Room,’ she declared, and made for the lift. She moved so quickly that Cadel had to blurt out the very first thing that came into his head.

‘When did you last see your brother?’

Dot paused on the pantry threshold. Her eyes ran over him in a curiously detached way, as if she were swiping a laser beam across a barcode. At last she said, ‘I’ll send you a report.’

Then she disappeared into the pantry.

‘That’s what she always says,’ Hamish remarked, after a brief silence. ‘
I’ll send you a report.
She prefers emails to conversations.’ Sprawled in his chair, he pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at Cadel through their thick, distorting lenses. ‘So have you worked out what you want to do yet?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Cadel.

‘Well – have you had any good ideas? Or d-do you want to help someone else?’ As Cadel considered this question, Hamish continued impatiently, ‘We’re trying to get into the GenoME system. You know
that
, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We can’t prove that GenoME’s been doing anything illegal unless we get into its system,’ Hamish declared, going on to relate that the squad was hoping to bring down GenoME by doing one of three things: by proving that the company was responsible for killing Rex Austin’s son, or by establishing that its genetic analysis technique was a scam, or by determining that there was a financial connection between GenoME and Fountain Pharmaceuticals. ‘Because if Fountain Pharmaceuticals is really the new NanTex, and GenoME is sending it money, then GenoME is b-breaking the law by funding an illegal corporation,’ said Hamish. Whereupon Cadel thought back to the files he’d been reading the previous night.

So far, there didn’t seem to be much data on Fountain Pharmaceuticals. Except for the fact that Chester Cramp was its chief executive officer.

‘So what do you want to do? We’ve already done all the obvious stuff,’ Hamish continued, counting off various options on his knobbly fingers. ‘They’ve been really careful with their off-the-shelf defaults – they’ve changed every one of them. They’ve got RootKit Revealer. They run tests on the firewall
continuously – ’

‘How do you know?’ Cadel interrupted.

‘Huh?’

‘How do you know all this, if you haven’t got in yet?’

‘They discuss it,’ Hamish replied. He informed Cadel that Trader had picked up conversations between Jerry and his assistant using the laser eavesdropping technology. Trader tended to concentrate on Jerry’s office, because Jerry was ‘the tech guy’, and occasionally talked about subjects other than traffic, football and stocktake sales. ‘The good thing is, they’ve got a webpage,’ Hamish revealed. ‘So I figure that’s how we’ll get in. Unless this thing works with Zac, of course.’

Cadel frowned. ‘What thing?’ he said.

‘The honey-token.’ When Cadel blinked, Hamish added, ‘Didn’t you hear about the honey-token?’

‘No.’

‘Really?’ For some reason, Hamish looked delighted. ‘Well, Zac’s got an appointment with one of the potentialisers at nine-thirty. He’s pretending to be a client. And we know he’ll have to fill in a form, b-because that’s how GenoME manipulates people. By getting hold of their information.’

‘Oh, right.’ Cadel nodded. He had seen a scan of the GenoME application form in the electronic files he’d examined. Apparently, it had been stolen and copied by one of Rex Austin’s contacts in America. ‘Yeah, I saw that form.’

‘D-Did you see question five, by any chance?’ It was obvious that Hamish expected the answer to be ‘no’. When it was ‘yes’, he could hardly conceal his disappointment. ‘Gee,’ he mumbled. ‘You really are on the ball.’

‘Is Zac going to put a fake email address on the application form?’ Cadel hazarded, because that would have been
his
plan. And Hamish grinned.

‘Fake email, fake identity, fake everything,’ he confirmed. ‘Zac won’t be going in as Zac.’ He sighed. ‘I wish it was me going in. I’d love to find out what happens in that place.’

‘You will,’ a familiar voice remarked, and suddenly Trader was standing beside them. ‘There’s a debrief session after lunch, with Zac. I want everyone to attend.’ He studied Cadel. ‘How are you this morning?’

‘Good,’ Cadel replied. He felt very small and creased and grubby next to Trader, who positively gleamed in his freshly ironed clothes. Trader smelled of cologne and toothpaste. His eyes were clear and there was a bounce in his step.

He made the kitchen look dingy.

‘Aren’t you eating?’ he asked Cadel, just as the twins appeared. All at once the room was full of people. It was as if an alarm clock or a starter’s pistol had gone off somewhere, signalling the commencement of a new day. While Hamish continued to pack toast into his mouth, Lexi and Devin started to bicker over the last of the strawberry jam. Tony Cheung sidled in to make coffee. Judith Bashford, laden down with bags of fruit, burst onto the scene like an armoured tank, announcing that she had the perfect cure for Lexi’s constipation. And though Trader confessed that he’d already eaten breakfast, he remained in the room, adding considerably to the noise and bustle.

Cadel didn’t know quite what to do, at first. He retreated to one corner, clutching a teaspoon like a shield. Then he felt Trader’s arm fall across his shoulders, heavy and reassuring.

‘I’m afraid it’s everyone for himself at breakfast,’ Trader said softly. ‘But I’m sure you can handle it, after the Axis Institute.’ With a conspiratorial grin, he placed his mouth to Cadel’s ear and murmured, ‘The good thing about Clearview House is that no one’s going to poison your orange juice.’

No
, thought Cadel.
They’ll just try and trick me into drinking ground cinnamon
. But he didn’t say this aloud. Instead he took a deep breath and plunged into the milling crowd between the sink and the fridge, emerging some time later with a bowl of cornflakes. He didn’t really mind all the confusion. From what he could see, it was simply the product of a general desire to get to work as soon as possible. By the time he had eaten, showered, and cleaned his teeth, everyone else was downstairs in the War Room, beavering away.

Everyone, that is, except Zac and Cliff.

According to Trader, Cliff would be monitoring Zac from a parked car during Zac’s ‘recon of number eleven’. Cliff, in turn, would be sending updates to Trader until the job was done. Zac’s interview was scheduled for half past nine, so someone would have to keep an eye on the honey-token email address from that moment on – just in case it was used by GenoME.

‘If it is, we might be able to capture a return address, at least,’ Dot advised, as the whole Infiltration team clustered around Cadel, bombarding him with information. Cadel had to concentrate hard, or he wouldn’t have been able to absorb everything that was thrown at him. One after the other, Lexi and Hamish and Devin filled him in on what was happening, interrupting each other in their eagerness to describe their overall strategy.

Jerry, they said, had a laptop that he took home with him, but so far Cliff hadn’t picked up any useful wireless transmissions. Dot’s port-scanning software hadn’t turned up a single useful IP address, either. The GenoME webpage had been erected in the no-man’s land between two GenoME firewalls; nevertheless, being a webpage, it had to receive http messages from the outside world. So Hamish hadn’t found it hard to get through the bastion host.

Since then, however, he’d been forced to tread very carefully.

‘I d-don’t want to mangle the webpage, because it’ll warn them we’re here,’ he said. ‘And that inner firewall – it won’t let
anything
in. So I’m trying to fake up a security patch that’ll squeeze through and rewrite their PS.’

‘He might even finish the job by next Christmas,’ Devin sneered. And Hamish flushed.

‘Just ignore D-Devin,’ he told Cadel. ‘Devin’s such a script-kiddie, he couldn’t write a program to save his life.’

‘He is
not
a script-kiddie!’ Lexi protested, firing up. ‘You take that back!’ She seized a handful of Hamish’s t-shirt, almost choking him. But before she could do any more damage, Judith barked, from the other side of the room, ‘Hey! Enough of that!’

Whereupon Lexi grudgingly released Hamish.

‘What if they launch a security probe?’ said Cadel. Seated at his desk, hemmed in by bodies, he had been silently turning data over and over in his mind, assessing it, classifying it, and considering it from every angle. Glancing up, he addressed himself to Dot – who was standing calmly beside him. ‘Suppose they use Zac’s email address for sniffing around?’ he asked. ‘Suppose they have a really good probe, and they get into our system?’

‘They won’t,’ Dot replied. She explained that the squad would be monitoring Zac’s false email address on a ‘discrete’ machine. This machine would be used as a decoy only. It had no links to any of the other machines in the War Room.

‘But what if they do sniff around?’ Cadel pressed. He couldn’t believe that no one had considered this possibility. ‘Is there anything for them to find?’

‘Oh, sure.’ Lexi jumped in to describe how she and Hamish and Cliff had concocted an entire virtual life for Zac’s alias: fake interests, fake friends, fake credit history . . .

‘No, no. That’s not what I’m saying.’ Cadel was conscious that Trader had rejoined their group, after briefly conversing with Tony and Judith. ‘If they send in a probe, and do some sniffing, then you can set up a honey-token
inside
this honey-token. They’ll be wanting to extract information, and download it. We can piggyback on that. They’ll be capturing our probe along with the data.’ Cadel gazed around at a ring of sceptical expressions. ‘I’ve done it before,’ he insisted. ‘I can set it up myself.’

‘We can’t afford to alert them, Cadel.’ It was Trader who spoke. ‘If GenoME find out that we’re interested – ’

‘They won’t. I swear.’