The door was a treat all on its own, one of those thick metal jobs with an intercom setup to the left, at about shoulder height, and a metal mesh reinforced window smack dab in the middle. The obligatory ID card reader was set into the wall just to the right of it, mounted about four feet high. We didn't get a chance to use it.
There was a hissing sound as the door opened, an effect of the positive air pressure generated by the big cooling units at work in the computer room.
Fred hung himself out of the doorway as we arrived, smiling for all he was worth. "Miss Kuwabara, it’s always a pleasure to see you, please come in." He held the door open and gestured us inside.
The first thing I noticed was the noise. It had been a while since I'd been inside a room like this but it came back quickly. The dull roar of the cooling machines added to the hundreds of small fans hard at work inside of every piece of equipment in the place. It all added up to a lot of air movement, and that's where the roaring came from.
A prolonged conversation in this environment could give you a sore throat for a day or two, from trying to be heard over the roar. I figured I'd make this short and sweet.
Midori exchanged pleasantries with Fred, and introduced me as someone with special status, endowed by the Man Himself, Marsh. He shook my hand as we walked, and showed us into his little office/hideaway, at the back of the room. There was barely room for us all to sit down, and a third chair had to be fetched from one of the console banks. In the end, we managed to fit into it, and the door cut out about forty percent of the noise when we got it shut. It was an improvement.
Fred was positively beaming as he sat down at his desk. "Well, it's always nice to get visitors, can I offer you folks a coffee?"
Neither Midori or I were in the mood for a coffee, and we both declined. Fred thought nothing of it and continued to show a happy face. It seemed apparent that Midori had an effect on Fred. Like that was a mystery.
There was one of those silent moments when everyone is waiting for the other to start the ball rolling, so I jumped in and did it.
"Fred, I'm interested in researching the files that John Dawson was working with before he died. Miss Kuwabara has explained my special, albeit temporary, status as far as access authority goes. I have a few questions, and it would be very helpful to me if you had the answers." I watched Fred out of one eye, and Midori out of the other. Both were attentive, and everything seemed as normal as it could get.
Fred gestured expansively with open hands, and said, "Whatever I can do to help, just ask."
Midori looked at me expectantly, and I forged ahead. “You had told Miss K. that all of Dawson’s' files were wiped out on the day he was killed, but the files were restored from a backup on the very next day, correct?”
"Exactly, but the backup wasn't up to date." He let that one sit for a second or two before continuing. "John wasn't always attentive to the rules when it came to saving his daily work."
"Wait a minute here, do you mean that he had a local workstation of some sort in his office, one that was capable of retaining files independently of the main system?"
"Oh sure, he had a PC in his office. I think he did most of his work on that, then he would download the files onto the main system through the network when he was done."
"Ok, so he had files on his PC that weren't backed up on the system, right?"
"Exactly, yes."
"How out of sync with the daily backup was he when he died?"
"As far as I can tell, the last time he downloaded his fileset from the hard disk on his PC was about three days before…, well he was three days out of sync."
Fred was starting to get a little bit uncomfortable, it seemed. Well, when someone in your company was murdered on the job, it was disconcerting, no matter how little interaction you may have had with them. I could see that. Forging on, I asked the next obvious question.
"Do you have a set procedure for handling the files on an employees' PC when they… leave the company, for example?"
Fred blinked twice in rapid succession, and shrugged his shoulders back. He answered me indirectly, talking to me, but switching his attention between Midori and me. "Sure, we reallocate the equipment. After reformatting the disk, the system is reloaded from the master software files for the type of applications that the new user needs, then it's turned over. Pretty straightforward, really." Fred turned to me with an expectant air, obviously waiting for the brilliant follow-up to this tack I had taken.
"Which employee would have taken over J.D.'s system?"
Fred relaxed visibly. It seemed as if he had felt a building tension in my questions, maybe related to how easily, as head of computer ops for the entire bank, he had allowed users to flaunt the basic rules. 'THOU SHALT BACKUP DAILY. PERIOD.'
Thinking about it though, with the size of the bank, number of employees etc., it would seem to be one part of the job that wouldn't be held against him should he fall a bit behind. Maybe it was something else. Maybe he thought I was a tough guy. Maybe he just got nervous around tough guys. Maybe the sun rose in the west.
He answered brightly. "That's easy, nobody. We've got an excess of the older machines right now, and all of the new allocations are being made with the newer equipment. We keep a stock of the components down here in ops, and we build to suit. It saves us a bundle I can tell you! So, the couple of requests that have come in since…, well we filled the order with newer machines."
I pondered that for a moment. I was surrounded by the muted hum of the big systems running in the other room. Neither Midori or Fred had anything to say at that moment, and the silence stretched.
I collected my thoughts and struck.
"What you're telling me is that you have J.D.’s PC here somewhere, and that it's not been utilized in any way since his death, am I correct?"
"Um, I believe you're right about that. We must, um, I… " He hesitated for a moment, cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. He turned more decisive without further hesitation. "Let me check with Martin, he'll know exactly how J.D.’s system was handled. He controls that sort of thing for us."
Fred reached for the telephone, and gave me a 'thumbs up' sort of sign with his face. One of those nodding semi-smile sort of looks.
The buttons were punched, and the three of us sat there waiting for the interaction of a fourth party. It didn't happen. I estimated about six rings, during which Fred stared intently at the telephone keypad, as if he were expecting a visual response at any second. Midori was starting to fidget, and I was already framing my next question. I interrupted Fred's telephonic trance.
"Fred, tell me, do you have a record of the system type and serial numbers of the PC's allocated to the various users throughout the bank?"
He pulled the 'phone away from his ear slightly, and nodded in a positive manner.
"Good, since Martin isn't at home just now, let's investigate this avenue of thought on our own, shall we?"
Fred set the receiver back on the hook, somewhat reluctantly, and gave me his full attention.
I stroked his ego a bit. "I would imagine that the access we require would be available to you through your desk terminal, being the one in charge and all. If you could pull up the data, we could just walk through the storage room and see if we could find J.D.’s machine on our own. What do you say?" I leaned forward in my chair a little, giving him one of my best `we're in this together and let's just get it done` looks. I have to practice sometime.
Amazingly, it seemed to work.
He held up his left fist with his index finger pointing straight up, with that smug sort of ‘Eureka’ look on his face. "We'll do just that, and who needs Martin anyway?"
The keyboard work was a short affair, and he output the results to his local LaserJet, all within a minute or two. The smug look remained.
I was wondering why he had been futzing around about in the first place, but I put it off for later consideration.
He swiveled to his right and lifted the paper fr
om the laser as it finished printing, laying it on the desk with a flourish. "There we have it."
I picked up the sheet and scanned the info. It was all there. Date of original allocation by office number, user name and position title, department, machine type, and serial number. Even the date of the de-installation and return to general holding inventory. The only thing missing was why. Murder wasn't like a layoff, or being fired. I wondered idly if there were no field in the database for ‘user murdered, no further use for equipment’.
There was only the one page, which at first seemed a bit strange for the size of the bank and all, but when I had glanced at it for a moment I realized that Fred had called up the info based on the user's last name. The single page was a list of the employees' whose last name was Dawson. There was only the one. I committed the brand and serial number of J.D.’s system to memory and placed the page on the desk in front of Fred.
He was on the telephone again, and when it was picked up on the other end he conveyed instructions for pickup and delivery of J.D.’s unit, reading the serial number from his screen, which presumably still held the information. This call took place with his body turned slightly, as if to shield his call from us. Or maybe from me. I’m suspicious by nature.
By this time, Midori's interest was starting to flag
Standing, I looked at her and asked pointedly, "Shall we?"
Fred caught on quickly, standing himself and answering my question as if it were posed to the group. "Certainly, I'll lead the way." He made his way out from behind the little desk as Midori rose and took a half-step backwards to make room for Fred to go through the doorway first.
I tried not to pay attention to the fact that the half-step backwards had brought her within three inches of touching me, but I caught myself inhaling her scent anyway. She smelled just the way she looked. Natural and beautiful. There was no overpowering perfume, just Midori. The whole moment lasted maybe three seconds, and then Fred was out the door, and Midori was following him. There wasn't much left for me to do but tag along.
I shook off the moment and followed the others out into the main computer room, all of us becoming re-immersed in the muted roar of the air flow.
We walked across the main computer room and down a few steps to a large orange door with an inset window, the kind with wire mesh in it. It was placed at about average eye-height, which meant I had to lean down a bit to see what was on the other side. Fred was busy searching a ring of keys for the right one. Apparently, the overall sense of bank security extended quite thoroughly to the entire computer department. I scanned the room behind me. There was certainly a lot of computer power on tap here. No flashing lights though. Not anymore. There was a time when a person would have had to wear shades just to protect themselves from all the indicator lights, in constant action. Switch registers with LED’s flashing for every bit of information that got processed. But systems became so fast that the last generation of equipment I had seen with lights, they had cycled so fast that they were just constantly on, never off to the human eye. Not much point at that stage. It disappointed the hell out of the top brass, because the light show had been good for VIP tours, and the like. Now the only people who could tell when the computer was working were the people who were paid to tend them. Like our Fred.
Fred’s unlocking of the door broke my reverie, and we all entered the room. It seemed to be a typical ‘Tech’ Centre, with workbenches left and right, four in all. Two on each side. The room was about twenty-five feet long and about twenty feet wide, quite large for this type of room. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been in this very room. It was always the same, despite the personal touches. Or maybe because of them.
The benches were covered. In components, tools, an oscilloscope, a variable frequency generator, a couple of bench-style multimeters, PC’s in various stages of disassembly, and on the first one on the left, the quintessential aged VCR belonging to someone befriended by the technical staff. Someone too cheap to buy a new one. The wall-mount shelving was everywhere, stuffed with electronics reference books, parts catalogues and guides to the myriad versions of operating systems available over the past few years for the PC.
The back wall had another entrance, this door was a nice looking wooden one, probably oak veneer, with no orange paint at all. My guess was that the door opened onto a working office corridor.
Next to the door was a metal factory style desk. The kind that takes about three good men to lift, and lasts until the next coming. The dark beige paint was original, and showed many bare metal spots. It contrasted nicely with the clean white paint on the walls of the room. It was also the tidiest desk I had ever seen in my life with all of the pens, papers and trade magazines were lined up just so. Whoever belonged to this desk was fastidious to an extreme. A white-board with some sort of duty roster printed in red marker was fastened to the wall just above it.
Actually, it reminded me of an engineer I had once known in Switzerland. I had had the good fortune to be taking a product training session there in my early days of high-tech. Urs Freid was his name. There was this thing he had about Fridays where everyone had to put all of their desk clutter in order, much like the desk at the back of this room, prior to being granted permission to leave.
On the first Friday at five o’clock the half dozen of us who had been sentenced to his special little hell were getting ready to leave for the weekend, and glad of it. Urs stopped us all in our tracks by giving an impromptu speech on the deplorable office habits of North Americans in general and us in particular. I took it a little personally, as out of the six of us two were from the Middle East, and one was from Nigeria. The fourth hailed from California which doesn’t really belong to North America at all, in any philosophical sense at least. The fifth guy was alright, but he was from New Jersey, so I didn’t count him either. That left me.
I listened politely, smiled, said something vaguely nasty about his parentage in Arabic—the boys and I had been hanging out a lot the first week—and leaning over the desk I neatly swept everything on it into the waste basket. I recall that I had a particularly good time that weekend, making up greatly for the proceeding week.
All of this passed through my mind in a mere moment, as I wandered to the back of the room, taking it all in.
Fred, ever the gentleman, had pulled out one of the seats from the test bench and offered it to Midori. She was making a polite refusal when the most memorable character of my week came waltzing into the room. The door at the back of the room opened inward, but I couldn’t make out the corridor behind it because the doorway was full of somebody. This guy was bigger than most small groups of people, all by himself. He was coming through at full tilt, backwards, and talking at the same time. I’m not sure who to, because I couldn’t see past him. He had the pale complexion of a guy who never played outdoors, but he radiated energy, like an outdoors person would. He was wearing dark blue shorts, black socks and classic black brogues. He also had on a light blue t-shirt with a slogan of some kind written on it, which was obscured by an armload of computer gear that would have given a hernia to the New York Rangers. I got out of his way before I was run down. As he spun around, the door swung shut and he smiled expectantly in our direction, not making any move to lay down the equipment he was carrying.
I just stood there, waiting for developments.
Fred piped up on cue. “Well Everet, that was fast, thanks for bringing this stuff down for us. Just put it over on the workbench here, will you?” He gestured to the bench on his left, and made introductions. “This is… uh, Mr. Claxton, who’s doing some work for Mr. Marsh. Of course you know Midori.”
Everet beamed a five megawatt smile at Midori, and casually walked over to the workbench and set down his load of gear. It made a precarious tower of metal and silicon, left to rock ever so slightly on the bench-top. He turned my way and stuck out his hand. “It’s very nice to meet you Mr. Claxton.” We shook.
The voice was cultured, a bit high pitched for
the rest of him, but the look of intelligence in his eyes was unavoidable. I could read his t-shirt now, and I started warming up to him right away. Rebels unite.
I let go of the handshake and responded. “Likewise, Everet.” Leaning forward in a conspiratorial stance, I put on a straight face and murmured “Nice shirt.” Everet seemed to think that this was quite the good joke, because the shockwave from the laugh he let out almost bowled me over. When he laughed, he shook all over, the way a person does when they really mean it. I guess this meant we were friends.
At this point, Fred cut in with a question directed at my new pal. He had been standing by the leaning tower of technology, looking it over.
“Everet, which of these components are the ones we’re looking for?”
Everet ignored him completely and looked me straight in the eye.
“So, you’re working for Barry?” He reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out an honest-to-god bikers wallet. The kind that comes with a chain that attaches to the owner and all. Not a little chain either. The incongruities presented by my new pal Everet were already starting to move into the realm of commonplace, put there by the very stable nature of their continuity. He handed me a business card with one hand while tucking away his wallet with the other.
“You might want to give me a call sometime. You never know.”
Just then a beeper went off. Everet dug into one of his front pockets and the chime stopped. He turned towards the door he had entered by, then paused just long enough to answer Fred’s question, but he directed the answer at me, not Fred.
“J.D.’s system is marked with the red dots.”
He opened the door and he was gone.
I slipped Everet’s card into my top jacket pocket and walked over to the workbench where Fred was standing with his arms folded in front of him and a look of irritation building on his face. I gave him a bit of a stern look just for the hell of it, and that seemed to break the mood. He unfolded his arms and turned his attention back to the pile of equipment. All business now.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 9
