The Power of One

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Nothing is networked? I don’t understand.’

  ‘It means that it’s a closed system, doesn’t it?’ Andy contributed. ‘You’ve probably got an airlock system. No one goes in and out without being checked for hidden …’ He lost inspiration then. ‘Stuff,’ he finished rather lamely.

  Amelia rewarded him with an ironic handclap. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘You see,’ she went on, ‘Paul’s lab is right at the centre of the building. Tightest security. Anyone wanting to get in there has to know the codes, come through this office, get through the airlock system and be let in by whoever is in the lab.’

  ‘What about fire?’ Mac asked. The description made him feel claustrophobic even before he went in.

  ‘It has its own fire control systems and a system override if anyone did have to get out in a hurry. There’s a second airlock, but it’s only opened up if you hit the panic button. Oh, don’t worry, we had it all inspected.’

  A light tap on the door preceded a young man with almost white blond hair, followed by a woman with dark-brown curls she had tried to tie back in a rather severe chignon. Piercing blue eyes were a surprise in a pale oval face. She should have been pretty, Mac thought, if she hadn’t been so busy trying to look businesslike. He’d met this attitude before; woman in a perceived man’s world. He had seen it in so many female police officers when he’d first joined the force. Now, most of the women officers he knew were decidedly, blatantly feminine and, he felt, all the better for it; Mac was a great believer in diversity bringing strength to any situation but a few years back the prevalent attitude had been very different.

  ‘This is Ray Fowler,’ Amelia said. ‘And this is Lyndsey Barnes. They worked most closely with Paul. Edward thought they’d be the people you wanted to speak to.’

  ‘Though we have already made statements,’ Lyndsey said. ‘I don’t know what else you want to know.’

  ‘Well, to start with, we’d like to inspect Paul’s office and lab,’ Abe Jackson said.

  Mac frowned. ‘And it would help to know exactly what he was working on.’

  Lyndsey and Ray exchanged a look. ‘Well, we’ll tell you what we can,’ Ray said. ‘But the truth is, we don’t know for sure. Paul was on one of his outside jobs and none of us were really allowed in his inner sanctum.’

  ‘He’d call one of us in sometimes, if he needed an extra pair of hands or something, but that was about it. We had access to all the in-house stuff,’ she added, trying to be helpful.

  ‘But not whatever he was working on before he died. Do you know who he was working for?’

  Again Paul’s assistants exchanged that same look. ‘We assumed it was MOD or something,’ Ray admitted. ‘We know he’d been involved in research for them before, but with all the anti-terrorist legislation that’s been brought in, Paul was even more tight-lipped.’

  ‘He took it all very seriously,’ Lyndsey added rather earnestly. Rather enviously too, Mac thought.

  ‘Well,’ Kendal said cheerfully. ‘I don’t think I could recognise a secret device if I fell over it.’

  ‘And we have authorisation to go into the lab,’ Abe said quickly as though feeling left out of the conversation.

  The two assistants looked doubtfully at Amelia. ‘Edward did say full cooperation,’ she said anxiously. ‘And it is a murder investigation. Right. Follow me.’

  She led the way down the short corridor and keyed a code into the door. ‘How many people have that code, Amelia?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Well.’ She stood back, and ushered them through the open door. ‘There’s me and Lyndsey and Ray. Paul, of course. That’s all.’

  ‘Not Edward or Lydia?’

  ‘No, they had no need. Edward left this side of things to Paul and Lydia … well if she wanted to go in, Paul opened the lock from the inside, but that was almost never. She hates it in here, says it’s so closed in. No windows or natural light.’

  Mac was inclined to agree.

  ‘This is Paul’s office. His desk, his diary, his filing cabinet. Not that he ever filed anything.’ She rolled her eyes.

  ‘You did that?’

  ‘Ordinary stuff, yes. Anything else, he kept in the inner sanctum.’

  Mac leafed through his diary while Kendal inspected the filing cabinet. The diary was almost empty.

  ‘I kept his appointments,’ Amelia said. ‘That diary is for any personal reminders.’

  Mac bagged it. Abe Jackson was watching him. ‘Anything relevant?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mac shrugged. ‘Kendal?’

  ‘Mostly computer games, development ideas and drawings, I think.’ Lyndsey came over and looked in the drawers. ‘Mostly,’ she said. ‘He was a real magpie. See this news clipping.’ She pulled out a full-page advert for women’s shoes. ‘He kept this because he thought the background colour was great. So far as I know he was still looking for a place to use it. And this, he just liked the way the dancers were moving. He wanted to emulate that in one of the cut scenes for something Edward was working on.’

  ‘Cut scenes?’

  ‘Oh,’ Andy said. ‘They’re the filmic bits you get between sections of game play.’

  ‘I thought I told you to wait in the office,’ Mac said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘And through that door there?’

  ‘Is where we work.’ She keyed the code. ‘Just Paul, Ray and I have the code here.’ She pressed her thumb against a smaller pad that emerged from the doorframe.

  ‘Thumbprint recognition?’ Abe Jackson asked.

  ‘Yeah. It’s all nonsense, of course. You should have heard Paul go on about biometrics.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Kendal was looking at the reader. ‘What would happen if I put my thumb here?’

  ‘The door would slam and poisoned gas would flood the room,’ Ray said, deadpan. ‘Actually, the door would close, but the rest is just Hollywood. No, what he meant was that biometrics can be conned. For instance, a student in Germany just broke a secure system using a fingerprint he’d made out of superglue.’

  ‘How did he get it off the thumb?’

  ‘Ah that was the clever part. He used a releasing agent on the thumb, though if the owner of the thumb had been less fussy, he could have released it with a very sharp scalpel or just taken the whole thumb along, provided it was fresh. Now the clever part is the releasing agent. Most of the commercial ones dissolve the glue and the top layer of skin. This particular one is now an industrial secret in its own right and the kid has a job waiting for him with one of the top chemical companies.’

  ‘When he gets out of jail,’ Lyndsey said sardonically, ‘but even iris recognition can be fooled. A lot of US companies are using RF ID. Basically, tiny implants like you put in your pet dog. Much more reliable, but still not foolproof.’

  ‘Sounds like an infringement of human rights,’ Kendal said.

  Lyndsey shrugged. ‘Some clubs and health spas in California use them. They’re almost a fashion accessory, ’cept of course you can’t see them. It’s the new must have for the moneyed classes. Through here is where Ray and I work.’

  Mac wandered into the office and glanced around. Two desks and two benches packed with computer equipment and electronic gizmos he could only guess the purpose of.

  One desk was almost scrupulously tidy, one stationery tray and a pen pot on the right-hand corner. The second a clutter of files and folders and photographs. He was faintly surprised to find an image of Ray and what was obviously a group of friends in one. Then thrown completely as he recognised Lyndsey in another.

  Ray laughed. ‘We use that desk for brainstorming,’ he said. ‘The other when one or other of us has some serious work to do.’ He shrugged. ‘I know it sounds a bit weird but it works for us.’

  ‘And what would you be brainstorming?’ Abe asked. His frown told Mac that he did not approve of such frivolity.

  Ray picked up another of the pictures. This depicted the two young members of the team and Paul, an arm around each shoulder.
They all smiled out at the camera, all looked happy. Lyndsey’s hair was let out of its tight restraints and blossomed in rich curls around her head.

  ‘We both worked on the games development for part of the week,’ he said. ‘The rest of the time we were involved in whatever project Paul had on the go. This last month or so, we were refining an electronic surveillance system we’d designed for a client last year. It wasn’t difficult work, but there was a lot of complexity. Paul believed we were fresher, more creative, if we could switch hats from time to time.’

  Lyndsey had come over, she touched the picture with something close to tenderness and laid a hand on Ray’s arm. ‘Who the hell shot him?’ she asked, her voice suddenly thick with tears. ‘He was a good man, he was an alive sort of man, not like so many people. You know what, Inspector. You look out there and you see all the people just sleepwalking through life, just spending their days griping and moaning and you tell me what’s fair. Why couldn’t the bastard have shot one of them instead of Paul?’

  There was no good response to that one. Mac was silent for a moment, then he asked if they ever saw Paul outside of working hours and got the same response as he had been given by Amelia. Paul met people for a drink sometimes. They liked him, as a person and as a boss, and Mac got the odd feeling that Paul knew where the line was drawn between friendly employer and out-and-out friend and knew how and when not to overstep it.

  ‘You’ll want to see the lab now,’ Ray said. ‘This is the airlock bit, so it might be a bit of a crush.’

  He pressed something on the wall and a portion of it slid back to reveal a door. Another fingerprint lock and then a narrow lobby. Mac, Kendal, Ray and Abe Jackson crowded inside and Ray closed the first door before opening the second. They moved past him into the lab. Ray stood beside the doorway, frowning.

  ‘There should be stuff laid out on that bench,’ he said. ‘It was here before Paul died. No one’s been in here since.’

  ‘Could it have been put away?’ Kendal asked. He was circling the room examining the mass of silver-cased equipment and looking mystified.

  ‘No, see he’d got everything in a specific order.’ Ray crossed to the bench. Tiny labels had been affixed to the wooden surface. Numbers and letters written on them meant nothing to Mac, but were clearly meant to denote a sequence of some sort.

  Ray looked truly disturbed. He opened cupboards, drawers, checked all available spaces. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘Whatever he was working on. But how? Like I say, no one came in here.’

  ‘And you don’t know what he was doing?’

  Ray shook his head emphatically. ‘I told you, he’d work in here on his own most of the time. I mean, when it was an outside job. We all worked on our in-house projects in here but …’

  ‘And if you had to guess,’ Mac asked. ‘Could you hazard anything?’

  Ray shook his head again then said, ‘Look, long shot, random guess just on what I saw, but I’d say it might have been some kind of jamming system, or some kind of advanced sonar.’

  ‘Which?’ Abe Jackson insisted.

  Ray looked puzzled at his tone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But if you’re pushing me for an opinion, I’d have said both.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  On the way out of Iconograph Mac contrived to slip behind the rest of the group, pausing to examine one of the more unusual photographs. Lyndsey, just behind him and Ray, to whom he’d been chatting about the images, paused beside him.

  ‘I have something more to ask,’ Mac asked quietly.

  ‘Sure. Anything we can do.’ Ray glanced at the rest of the group who were now in the lobby. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Does the phrase The Power of One mean anything to either of you?’

  Ray laughed. ‘Sure. It was a sort of in-joke. You know, Binary code, all ones and zeros. One way of thinking about it is like a switch, either off or on. Zero is off, one is on. Paul always joked that once you’d switched something on, anything was possible. You should never underestimate the power of one.’

  ‘He meant it like individuals too,’ Lyndsey added. ‘Like, one person can make a difference. You do nothing, you’re a zero.’

  That made a kind of sense, Mac thought but didn’t get him any further. ‘What about Payne 23?’

  Puzzled looks. ‘No,’ Ray said. ‘Where did you see it? If I knew the context …’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ Mac said. ‘Just something scribbled in a margin. I found it kind of intriguing.’ He smiled. ‘Occupational hazard. Seeing significance in everything.’

  Ray laughed. Lyndsey, Mac noted, had said nothing.

  ‘Edward and Lydia, are they OK?’ Ray asked as they moved on. ‘Amelia said they’d gone away for a few days.’ Mac was aware that Abe Jackson watched, eyes narrowed.

  Mac nodded. ‘They’re staying with friends,’ he said. ‘We thought it might be best for them to get away. I think Mrs de Freitas was finding the media interest a little too much to handle.’

  ‘Where have they gone?’ Abe asked as they left. ‘We should make sure they have adequate protection.’

  ‘Oh, they do,’ Mac told him. ‘But they have asked their solicitor not to reveal their address for now. He’s acting as go-between for any messages. I can give you his number?’

  Abe frowned. ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate,’ he said. ‘We need to know where they are.’

  ‘They are not accused of any crime, Abe,’ Mac said gently. ‘I can’t order them not to leave town. Now, how about you tell us what Paul was up to?’

  For a moment Mac thought Abe was going to match his own intransigence, but he did not. He sighed. ‘Paul was a revenger,’ he said. ‘Apparently one of the best in the business.’

  The use of the word rang bells for Mac. Some obscure discussion he’d had with Tim on the history of magical illusion and the engineers who had … ‘reverse engineering’. He said, ‘You take an object; a … a piece of finished technology and you take it apart, find out how it’s made.’

  Abe nodded. ‘Technology, or code or both.’

  ‘Wasn’t that what they did at Bletchley Park during the war?’ Andy asked, surprising them all. ‘They needed to know how the enigma coding thingys worked. Ian Fleming, you know, the James Bond man? Well he or someone managed to capture one and then the boffins at Bletchley had to figure out how it worked and how they could fool it.’ He shrugged. ‘I read a book,’ he said. ‘It was really exciting. Science, like, but really good.’

  Mac was a little taken aback. Andy could be surprising. ‘And what was Paul “revenging”?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Abe told him. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘And wouldn’t tell us if you did,’ Kendal surmised.

  ‘Not if you didn’t need to know,’ Abe Jackson confirmed.

  Tim ached. Not only that, he kept discovering bruises that he could not recall deserving. True, he had thrown himself from a moving car, hidden in undergrowth from armed men and run further and faster than he had since his school days, but he was still taken aback by what a toll this had taken on his body.

  Rina fussed over him. Then got bored with fussing and left the task to the Peters sisters. By midday, Tim had tired of feeling sorry for himself – and being the focus of Bethany and Eliza’s attention – and was recovered enough to want to see what Rina was doing.

  ‘I’ve come to tell you it’s lunchtime,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, good. How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Do you really want to know? No, forget that. I’m aching all over and bruised to hell, but I’m still here and that’s what matters.’

  ‘It is indeed. You’ve called work?’

  ‘Yes. I told Blake I’d had a bit of an accident on the way home. That my car was damaged and I’d hurt my hand. I don’t like lying to them but …’

  ‘Not a lie, Tim. Just a half-truth. And a magician with an injured hand is not likely to put on a good show.’

  ‘I’ll be fine tomorrow but he’s told me to take the da
y anyway. I’ll lose pay, of course. But then I’ve got my normal couple of days off to recover properly. I said I’d still go up and meet the engineer; we’ve still got the illusion to set up.’

  ‘You’ll need a car,’ Rina said. ‘You’ll have to go up to DeBarr’s garage and see if you can hire one and just hope yours has been dumped somewhere.’

  He came over to examine the scatter of newspapers and printouts on Rina’s desk. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Well, I’ve isolated the newspaper and the edition that Mac’s clipping came from and I’ve found this other advert. Look.’

  ‘Funeral delayed,’ Tim mused. ‘I suppose there really isn’t an Arthur Payne born in 1923?’

  ‘Not that I can find. I’ve called all the local funeral directors and none have an Arthur Payne born on that date. One had a Ronald Payne, but I found his obit and I don’t think there’s any even remote connection. No, Paul put this in as a message to someone.’

  ‘Where did Mac find the clipping?’

  ‘In a book in Paul’s flat. He didn’t tell me what book and I didn’t think to ask. I must be slipping in my old age.’

  ‘Which advert came first?’

  ‘The one delaying the funeral. Then this one, see. Arthur Payne. Born 1923. Funeral at Great Marham Church. Phone Paul for details. I called the Echo, no one really remembers taking the advert. I’d have thought the odd wording might have attracted attention.’

  ‘Um, yes, if it had been phoned in,’ Tim said. ‘But for the last six months or so, you’ve been able to do it online and pay by card. I’d guess the advertising department just checks the copy to make sure it’s not offensive and that’s about it.’

  Rina nodded. ‘Tim, I’d forgotten that. You could be right and Mac will be able to confirm that Paul placed the advert.’