The Genius Wars (9 page)

Saul pondered. Judith sniffed.

‘Good luck,’ she said, her voice laced with sarcasm. ‘Have you seen the state of that wheelchair? It’s a write-off.’

‘Where is it?’ Saul asked. Judith, however, didn’t seem to know. She hesitated, her rancorous expression yielding to one of uncertainty.

‘Roy’s got it,’ said Gazo. When everyone stared at him, he gave a little shrug. ‘Roy’s one of them campus security guards. He showed up when the ambulance came. Don’t you remember?’

This time it was Cadel who shook his head.

‘No,’ said Judith.

‘Well, he did,’ Gazo assured her. ‘And then everybody rushed off, and the wheelchair was all over the floor, and he didn’t know what to do wiv it.’

‘So you told him to keep it?’ Saul wanted to know.

‘Yeah.’ Gazo hesitated. ‘It’s pretty smashed up,’ he said at last.

‘And I’m not sure where the neckband is, either,’ Judith admitted. ‘I took it off – it was on the floor – it could be anywhere, now.’

‘It could be wiv Roy,’ was Gazo’s suggestion. ‘Or maybe you left it in the ambulance.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Despite her creased forehead and puffy eyes, Fiona sounded confident. Confident and reassuring. ‘We’ll find the neckband. It won’t have been thrown away. I’ll track it down myself.’

‘No.
I
will,’ her husband decreed. ‘If this was an assault, then it’s a police matter. And Sonja’s neckband will be part of a crime scene.’ His focus shifted from Fiona’s face to Cadel’s. ‘Are you sure about this, Cadel? Are you really convinced that it wasn’t an accident?’

Cadel swallowed. Beneath the pressure of that grave, dispassionate regard, he was assailed by doubts. How
could
he be sure, when he didn’t know what had happened? Or why? Even if Prosper was capable of remote-control sabotage, there was no obvious reason why he should suddenly have decided to attack Sonja.

Unless he was trying to warn them off?

Prosper knows me better than that
, Cadel thought.
If he wants me to stay out of his way, this is the
last
thing he should be doing. It’s counterproductive. It’s dumb
.

And Prosper English wasn’t dumb.

On the other hand, Cadel had seen the wheelchair. It had spun around and headed straight for him. It had virtually locked onto his position, like … like …

He sucked in his breath.

‘What is it?’ Saul queried, as Cadel rummaged among the textbooks in his bag. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I just have to check …’ Cadel mumbled. Not that he was really concerned; he knew better than to walk around with the Bluetooth connection on his mobile set to ‘discoverable’ mode. As a seasoned hacker, he had always distrusted Bluetooth, which he regarded as being like a cat-flap in a locked door.

Sure enough, when he checked his phone’s display screen, Cadel could detect no tell-tale Bluetooth symbol.

There was, however, a new message.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Fiona, who must have seen him blanch.

Cadel looked up.

‘I …’ He had to lick his lips before proceeding. ‘There’s a message,’ he rasped. ‘I had it on mute, for the lecture – it didn’t ring …’

‘What kind of message?’

‘A text message.’ Cadel read it aloud, unsteadily. ‘
She’s got tonsillitis
.
Bev XX
.’

‘Who’s Bev?’ said Gazo. And Judith clicked her tongue.

‘It’s a wrong number,’ was her impatient conclusion. But Cadel wasn’t so sure.

‘It came in at 2:38,’ he faltered. ‘That was … I mean …’ His shell-shocked gaze was fixed on the detective. ‘Could it really be a coincidence?’

Saul was slow to respond. After a long silence, during which he appeared to be deliberating, he finally answered Cadel with another question.

‘How could a call to your phone have affected Sonja’s wheelchair?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Cadel tried to concentrate. ‘If my Bluetooth had been working, it could have sent a transmission. Sonja’s neckband has a Bluetooth interface, so the wheelchair could have fixed on my signal. There could have been a trigger word – like “tonsillitis”. But my Bluetooth’s disabled. It has been since I first got my phone.’

‘Are you certain of that?’ Saul reached for the device. ‘How can you tell?’

‘There’s nothing on the display screen.’ Even as he spoke,
Cadel was visited by a sudden misgiving. And he remembered a conversation he’d had, only a few days before, in one of the K17 computer labs. ‘I could check,’ he went on, thinking aloud. ‘Some of the second-year students have been monitoring Blue-tooth transmissions as part of an assignment. They’ve got multiple receivers around the department, for some kind of interactive gaming project.’ Seeing that Saul was none the wiser, Cadel tried to simplify things. ‘They might have been logging transmissions. I could ask Richard,’ he said.

‘No. I’ll ask him. I’ll do it tonight.’ Instead of passing the phone back to Cadel, Saul began to punch out a number on its keypad. For a moment Cadel thought that the detective must be trying to communicate with Richard Buckland. But when Gazo opened his mouth, Saul shushed him so fiercely that Cadel realised what was going on.

Saul had decided to return Bev’s call.

Everyone waited. Cadel held his breath as the detective put the phone to his ear. But gradually Saul’s expression soured.

‘Damn,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’ Cadel inquired, without much hope.

Saul shook his head. Then he switched off the phone and slipped it into his pocket. ‘All I can do is keep trying,’ he remarked. ‘It’s a mobile number, but I can put a trace on it. You never know – the SIM card might not be stolen.’

‘Even if it was, that doesn’t … I mean, I can’t understand how this could have been done,’ Cadel fretted. At which point Fiona weighed in.

‘Let’s not talk about it now,’ she recommended. ‘We’re all tired, and it’s getting late. What we need to do is work out who’ll be staying here, and who’ll be going home.’

‘I’ll stay.’ Cadel was determined to see Sonja, no matter how long it took. ‘I can stay here all night, if I have to.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Saul countered. And Fiona agreed with him. There was no need to stay all night, she said, because Sonja probably wouldn’t be awake until morning. And even if she did wake up, she wouldn’t be alone.

‘If anything happens, Judith will call us,’ Fiona added, smiling at Cadel. ‘We’re not that far away. I can bring you back first thing tomorrow, because I’ve taken the day off.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘I suppose you’ll be working?’

Saul gave a nod. ‘I need to get hold of that wheelchair,’ he said.

‘And the neckband,’ Judith reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’

‘I won’t,’ he answered shortly, then turned to Gazo. ‘If this was an attack, it changes things. Cadel might find himself back in the safe house. But until that happens, we’ll still be needing you. So it might be best if you came straight to our place in the morning …’

Cadel sat in stony silence as plans were laid and options were discussed without any attempt being made to seek his input. He felt left out. Even worse, he felt
relegated
, as if he were just some ineffectual, messed-up kid, instead of Sonja’s best and closest friend.

He was tired. He understood that. He was also deeply traumatised by the events he’d witnessed earlier that day. But he wasn’t too shattered to think deductively, or to work out what should be done.

If they
were
under attack, then Prosper English was almost certainly the culprit. And Dr Vee, or someone like him, must be helping Prosper – because only an infiltration expert could have pulled off either the CCTV hack or the wheelchair hijacking. Cadel knew that the police had been trying to catch Dr Vee. They had been hanging out in a particular Internet chatroom, waiting for Vee to make contact with one of his own pieces of malware: namely, the program he’d planted in the Corrective Services System, almost a year before. Vee liked chatrooms. He liked the way they allowed him to communicate with his malware anonymously, by sending encoded messages. No doubt the CCTV bug had a similar command function. No doubt the police would soon be monitoring that chatroom, as well.

But Cadel doubted very much that Vee would be turning up at either site. The Corrective Services bug had been planted for a specific purpose: to get Prosper out of gaol. Now that this goal had been accomplished, why would Vee want to revisit a program that might very well be under surveillance? As for the CCTV malware, it was imperfect. There had been a glitch. And the chances that Vee hadn’t registered this mistake, before abandoning the whole exercise … well, they were remote, to say the least.

No; if Vee was their man, he wouldn’t be caught in any chatroom. Cadel knew that the best way to catch an infiltration expert was with a honey trap.

A honey trap containing live bait.

‘I want to stay at Judith’s,’ he suddenly announced.

The whole table fell silent. Everyone stared at him. Finally, Saul spoke up.

‘What on earth for?’

Cadel hesitated. He wanted to explain that he was trying to lure Vee into Judith’s Smart Home network.

But he couldn’t. Not with so many strangers around.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ he promised, before appealing to Judith. ‘Can I please sleep at your house, tonight?
Please
?’ he begged.

Judith didn’t answer immediately. She sat for a moment, her highly coloured face a study in confusion. At last she looked to Saul for guidance.

The detective, however, seemed just as perplexed as she was.

‘I thought you had a problem with fully wired infrastructures like Judith’s place,’ he remarked, pitching his voice very low. ‘Isn’t that why you wanted to leave the safe house?’

‘Yeah!’ Unlike Saul, Judith seemed oblivious to the surrounding diners. She leaned back, folded her beefy arms, and boomed, ‘What if you’re right, Cadel? What if some hacker’s out there gunning for you? Wouldn’t it be better to stay away from computerised environments?’

Cadel clutched the edge of the table. For the first time in a very long while, he experienced a sizzling flash of fury that
sprang from some deep and poisonous source. It was an ancient anger, and it had the usual effect: his muscles tightened, his eyes narrowed, and his face turned salt-white.

‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ he hissed. ‘Do you think I don’t know
exactly
what I’m doing? Just because I’m worried about Sonja doesn’t mean that I’m brain-dead!’ All at once, as the red cloud of rage began to recede from his peripheral vision, he became aware of how unnerved everyone looked. Even Gazo was gawking at him in dismay. And Cadel recognised their reaction; he had seen it before.
You start glaring at people like that, my friend, and you’re going to get in trouble
, a policeman had warned him, long ago.

So he took a deep, calming breath and laced his fingers together tightly. ‘You don’t understand what we’re dealing with,’ he went on, enunciating each word as carefully as possible. His voice creaked with the effort. ‘But I do understand, because I’ve dealt with it all my life. If I want to sleep at Judith’s, it’s because I
have
to sleep at Judith’s. For a very good reason that I’ve thought through. And I won’t be sleeping anywhere else.’

Having delivered this ultimatum, he sat back and waited – for what seemed like hours. At first no one spoke. Gazo just stared at him, drop-jawed. Judith shifted uneasily. Fiona bit her lip.

At last the detective said, ‘You might not be safe at Judith’s house.’

‘I won’t be safe
anywhere
,’ Cadel snapped. ‘Not if Prosper’s got his eye on me. There’ll be
nowhere
to hide until he’s scared off. Don’t you understand that?’

Saul blinked. Then he frowned. Then he spent a few moments deep in thought, after which – having reached some kind of decision – he addressed Judith.

‘Do you mind if we stay at your house, tonight?’ he asked.

Judith was slumped low in her chair, her face weary and disgruntled. When Saul made his request, she gave a defeated shrug.

‘No,’ she growled. ‘I guess not.’

‘In that case, we might have to impose on your hospitality. After I’ve made a couple of calls.’

As the detective stood up and moved away, he didn’t even glance in Cadel’s direction.

Judith’s house stood two streets back from Maroubra Beach. It was an oversized, two-storeyed building on a very small block of land, with six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, three living areas, and a room fitted up like a private cinema – all black velvet curtains and red plush recliner chairs. There was a chandelier in the vestibule. There was a triple garage. There was a limestone fireplace with a gas fire controlled by the home automation system. And there was the fancy automation system itself, which had always made Cadel slightly uneasy.

He’d never liked the idea of living in a house with a brain.

This brain, of course, was the central computer. Judith called it ‘The Wife’, because it ran her media hub, security network, climate control, lighting, window-shades, and Bluetooth-enabled appliances. Her smart fridge could alert The Wife when its contents had to be replenished. Her air-conditioning system could adapt itself to the outside temperature by checking a website that monitored local weather conditions.

‘Every woman needs a wife,’ she’d once said, when Cadel had aired his doubts about the wisdom of plugging your whole domestic environment into an Internet gateway. ‘If I didn’t have The Wife, I’d spend half my day drawing blinds, and turning lights on.’ Many of the lights in Judith’s house were activated by movement – and for Sonja, this had proved to be a blessing. Freed from the stress of wall-mounted switches, Sonja was able to scoot around at night, in her wheelchair, on her own. She
could also activate the television, DVD player and stereo system without pressing buttons, because Cadel had reprogrammed The Wife to accept commands from Sonja’s wireless communication interface. Through The Wife, Sonja could even send Judith text messages.

Judith’s house was the ideal place for Sonja, in all kinds of ways. And for that reason Cadel had decided to ignore his own misgivings. Instead, he had tried to make Judith’s place as secure as possible by installing a lot of beefed-up firewalls. He had worked with Sonja to improve The Wife’s encryption codes, and had done his best to convince Judith that she should make a point of changing her passwords once in a while.