A. N. T. I. D. O. T. E.

by Malorie Blackman

  ‘Where did you see that?’ Mum’s voice was suddenly sharp, alert.

  ‘At the ANTIDOTE office. They got sent one anonymously,’ I began.

  ‘Elliot, keep away from that place. D’you hear me?’

  ‘But Mum …’

  Click … There it was again.

  ‘What’s that funny clicking noise?’ I asked, irritated. ‘Is that something where you are?’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘Elliot, the phone’s been bugged. I can’t stay on the line much longer or they’ll trace the call and find me.’

  ‘The phone’s bugged?’ I pulled the receiver away from my face and stared at it. I couldn’t have been more stunned and shocked than if it’d just turned into a spitting cobra.

  ‘Who bugged the phone? Was it Shelby’s? And why? Why do they want to get you into trouble with the police? I don’t understand. Why you?’ I was choking up again.

  ‘Elliot, listen. We don’t have much time left. Visit your favourite spot in the park any time on Monday. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  ‘But Mum …’ I started. This made no sense at all. What was she doing? If the phone really was bugged then the heavies from Shelby’s would have heard every word and would surely be waiting, too?

  ‘Don’t argue with me, Elliot,’ she cut me off. ‘And don’t ask questions. Your favourite spot in the park!’

  Click …

  ‘It’s OK, Elliot. I know what I’m doing,’ Mum told me. ‘Just make sure you don’t bring anything with you.’

  I instantly knew what Mum meant by the way she stressed anything. She didn’t want me to bring her phone.

  Click …

  ‘Mum, are you … are you really just a secretary?’ I whispered.

  Pause.

  ‘Elliot, I’ve only got a few more seconds. They’ll be able to trace the call …’

  ‘Are you?’ I insisted.

  ‘No.’

  The phone clicked again, then went dead with a different kind of click. But my ears, my entire brain reverberated with Mum’s answer to my question.

  No …

  I put down the phone, then picked up the whole thing and put it on the floor. I don’t know what I expected it to do. Maybe I expected it to morph into one of those two men who’d been outside Uncle Robert’s house. All I knew was, I was afraid of it. Afraid of it for the things I learned over it.

  ‘Did you say the phone has been bugged?’ Nosh asked with breathless horror.

  I turned to him and nodded, my fingers over my lips. I pointed to the phone and shook my head. Nosh got what I was trying to say at once. But even if the phone was bugged, that was nothing compared to Mum’s other revelation.

  She wasn’t a secretary. And she was involved in something that had others interested enough in her to bug our phone.

  So if Mum wasn’t a secretary, what was she? I replayed the conversation I’d overheard between Mum and Uncle Robert again in my head, trying to work it out. What job was it that Mum gave up when I was born? The job that made Uncle Robert ask for her help in getting evidence of Shelby’s illegal animal experiments?

  It was then that I remembered the last Thursday of term in Mr Oakley’s class when he’d asked us what our mothers did for a living. Hadn’t I wished that Mum did something a bit more exciting than just being a secretary? Well, now I’d got my wish – only now I wished I hadn’t! All this trouble had started from the time I’d made that wish in the classroom. It was almost as if I’d asked for all this chaos to descend over our heads.

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ I muttered to myself. ‘I really didn’t. I don’t mind if Mum’s a secretary. In fact, I’d prefer it.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Nosh asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I sighed.

  But it was too late. Mum wasn’t a secretary. She’d said so herself and confirmed what I’d suspected over the last few days. I took a deep breath, then another which I cut off abruptly. Could the people who’d bugged our phone hear me – even now? Could they hear my breathing? Had they heard what I’d said about Mum? Did they know Nosh and I were alone in the house? I picked up the phone and looked all over the handset and the underside of it. I don’t know what I expected to find. Maybe a small button-sized object with the word ‘BUG’ written on it in capitals!

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Nosh called out.

  ‘If the phone’s bugged, they might be listening to us right now,’ I replied. ‘Or they could be outside, watching the house …’

  ‘I don’t like this …’ Nosh’s tone was an echo of my own.

  I beckoned to Nosh with my finger and we made our way into the front room. I looked through the window.

  ‘I can’t see anyone …’ I began. ‘But if they’re not already outside, maybe they’re on their way here now …?’

  ‘Thank you for sharing that with me,’ Nosh said. ‘As if I wasn’t scared enough already.’

  We went back to the hall. I don’t know about Nosh but my heart was thumping fit to bust in my chest.

  ‘Elliot, let’s get out of here,’ Nosh stage-whispered.

  ‘Good idea,’ I agreed.

  I opened the front door and we left the house, slamming the door shut behind us. The road was deserted. We looked around, our heads jerking every which way until we were safely back in Nosh’s house. And all the time I remembered something Mum was always saying to me – be careful what you wish for, or you just might get it!

  Now for the first time, I could see exactly what she meant by that.

  Sunday

  Chapter Thirteen

  Progress

  I WOKE UP just after seven o’clock Sunday morning – which was unheard of for me. To be honest I was surprised I got to sleep at all. In the half light of the dawn, I could see that Nosh was still fast asleep. I envied him. I lay perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling. In a strange way, I was calmer and more together than I’d felt in a long, long time. Only one more day and then I’d see Mum again. Only one more day and then I’d learn exactly what was going on and what all this was about. How I wished it was Monday already. But half an hour of wishing seemed to make Sunday morning pass even more slowly. I couldn’t spend Sunday doing nothing.

  Come on, I told myself. Get up and do something!

  The trouble was, I spent at least an hour in bed doing exactly nothing as I tried to make up my mind what I should do with the rest of the day. Luckily, Nosh’s mum came to my rescue soon afterwards. I heard her up and about and reckoned that in less than an hour she’d be calling Nosh and me downstairs for our breakfast. I wasn’t wrong.

  As soon as I’d wolfed down my breakfast I wanted to go back to my own house for a while. Nosh’s mum wasn’t too happy about me going home by myself, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

  ‘Why don’t you wait for Nosh? Then you can go over together,’ she suggested.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s my house. I don’t want to feel that it’s not safe unless I’ve got someone with me,’ I told her.

  She sighed, but gave in after that.

  ‘HELLO?’ I shouted once I’d got home, even though I knew that no one was there. The silence in the house echoed back at me. ‘MUM?’ I shouted again.

  After a deep breath, I told myself not to be such a coward. There was no one in the house. No Mum and no burglars. All I was doing was whistling in the dark in the vain hope that if there was someone in the house – apart from Mum – then they would leg it out the back at the sound of my voice. With determined heavy footsteps, I made my way up the stairs and into the back bedroom. I switched on Mum’s PC, then dug out Uncle Robert’s back-up disk. But first I had to load up all the utility software, like the operating system and all the software required to make the CD player, the scanner, the printer and all the other devices attached to Mum’s PC work. Only after that did I load Uncle’s disk, typing in the necessary command, before sitting back and waiting.

  But I couldn’t sit still. The house was too quiet. I went
into my bedroom to get my MP3 player and took it into the back bedroom with me. I pressed the play button and Tinie Tempah’s song Written In The Stars started. I turned up the volume, feeling slightly silly at being so nervous, but doing it nonetheless. More than half the tracks on the album had finished playing before the disk had finished downloading. It was ridiculously slow! With impatient fingers I began to hunt through Uncle Robert’s system, unsure of what I was looking for but hoping that something would jump out at me. There were a number of ANTIDOTE directories, full of memos, letters and documents written by various people in the ANTIDOTE office, but nothing that looked out of the ordinary. Searching through the hard disk was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Harder in fact, because I had no idea what the needle looked like or even if it was there at all.

  Two hours later, I was burning with frustration at my lack of success. I’d learnt more about ANTIDOTE than I’d ever wanted. I knew who was due for a pay rise, all about the office furniture re-shuffle and had read proposal documents on the previous day’s march to Shelby’s. But there was nothing about the mole in the company, nor anything else that could help me. There were two memos – from Uncle Robert to Sarah Irving and vice versa – listing dates, times and ports where ANTIDOTE were sure Shelby’s had illegally smuggled in animals for their experiments – but even that didn’t help much because the dates were all in the past. Then an idea hit me. There was still one place I hadn’t searched.

  Uncle’s Internet account … I had his user ID and password, so why not? Uncle wouldn’t mind – not once he knew why I’d done it. I fished out the piece of paper I’d found with the CD and then logged on to Uncle’s email account. After selecting the option, the screen cleared and then:

  ‘Yes!’ I grinned.

  At last – progress!

  But when I checked through the e-mail messages, they were all as dry as stale biscuits. I sat back and frowned at the screen. There had to be something else I could do. I was on the right track. I could feel it, but now what? I decided to check through the log of all Uncle’s incoming e-mail messages – all the ones he’d received from other people. I expected to see a list of about a dozen or so messages but it looked like Uncle had kept every message he’d ever been sent from the time the Internet had started! I searched down through his list, starting with the most recent message first. I checked each subject heading carefully but nothing jumped out at me. I only went back over the last month. I reckoned Uncle must have found out about the mole at ANTIDOTE quite recently so there was no point in going back beyond that date. He and the others at ANTIDOTE wouldn’t want to hang around doing nothing once they knew that one of them was a traitor. I went back to the beginning and checked both the subject heading and the sender details in case I’d missed something.

  Nothing.

  I was about to give up and load Mum’s back-up when it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked down the list of messages that Uncle Robert had sent out. I frowned as I considered. Was it even worth doing this? I really was clutching at straws now. Deciding that I might as well, just to be thorough, I called up the list and glanced down it.

  I noticed it at once because it wasn’t there.

  There was a list of all the e-mail messages Uncle Robert had sent out in the last month and he’d carefully kept copies of each of them – except one. The e-mail message number was still listed but there was no heading and no recipient details. Why would Uncle have deleted the details of just that one message?

  I made a note of the e-mail message number on the back of my hand, then downloaded Mum’s back-up. I went straight into her Internet account to check her incoming e-mail messages. Like Uncle, she had a list of all her incoming messages going back over the last three months. But there was one message which had no sender or subject heading details. I checked the message number – 183404292. It was the same message that Uncle Robert had sent out. I tried to call up the message by double-clicking on the right line but the warning,

  ERROR. E-MAIL MESSAGE NUMBER 183404292, NOT AVAILABLE

  appeared. I had a quick scan through all Mum’s other directories and likely-looking files on the hard disk but again, nothing else leapt out at me.

  So where was this missing e-mail message? After a moment’s thought, I checked the history log for 11th April. The history log was a log of all the commands Mum had typed in on that day and the log filled at least five screens. I searched through it carefully, until I came to the line that explained what had happened to the file.

  COPY/DEL MAIL MESSAGE=183404292 H:183404292.TXT

  Mum had copied the mail message off her computer, and probably onto her phone, making sure that the message was deleted once it’d been copied. And that would certainly explain why both Mum and Uncle Robert’s hard disks had been trashed and why Smiler and his friend were so keen to get hold of Mum’s mobile.

  But what did this mail message say? Was it to do with ANTIDOTE-CONFIDENTIAL, the file that Marcus Pardela had sent to his colleague in Geneva? I dismissed the idea at once. I couldn’t believe Marcus Pardela and his cronies would go to all this trouble over that memo.

  So it had to be something else. If it was important before, it was even more urgent now that I break Mum’s VAULT password and find the message. I was going to spend the rest of Sunday trying to crack the password and I was going to do it – I had to believe that.

  But first things first. I had to write the program to search each of the PCs at the ANTIDOTE office. I’d probably only get one shot at this so I had to get it right.

  I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon writing and testing my program. I tested it using Uncle Robert’s back-up disk as well as Mum’s. My program searched through all the text files on the hard disk looking for certain words. Any file with those words in it was copied to the memory stick. When I was happy it was working, I loaded the program onto a memory key that I could give to Halle.

  I switched off the PC and headed back to Nosh’s house, taking a good look around me once I was outside. The chills tingling up and down my spine like icy fingers made me hurry. Once I was at Nosh’s door, I had another look around. There was no one in sight – but I knew, just as surely as I knew my own name – that I was being watched.

  Monday

  Chapter Fourteen

  Julian

  SUNDAY TURNED INTO Monday and I think I had Mum’s phone out of my hands for all of about ten minutes. I even slept with it in my hand, with my hand under my pillow. I wouldn’t let the thing out of my sight. I reckoned that with me at all times was the safest place for it. I tried everything I could think of but I still had no luck cracking Mum’s code. The only other way of getting into the mobile was to reset it. That would wipe out Mum’s password all right. The only trouble was, it would wipe out all the other data on the phone as well, which was the last thing I wanted.

  And I had an even bigger concern. Today was the day when I was meant to meet Mum in the park. And – if Mum was right about our phone being bugged – she wouldn’t be the only one waiting for me.

  Throughout breakfast, I hardly said a word. I forced myself to eat and try to appear normal, but my bacon could’ve been gravel for all the pleasure I got from eating it.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Nosh’s mum asked me more than once.

  I just nodded.

  Halle’s boyfriend, Julian, came round at about half-nine. I was the one who was unlucky enough to open the door for him. He was gangly and skinny and spotty and had a really fake grin plastered over his face. He was what Uncle Robert would call a tall glass of warm water! His hair must have had a whole can of mousse sprayed into it, as each thin section of hair was carefully combed back and defined and it was a colour I’d never seen before, a strange kind of charcoal grey. His eyes were the same colour too, which made me suspect his hair colour was out of a bottle.

  ‘Hi!’ he smiled. ‘You must be one of Nosh’s little friends.’

  I didn’t say a word. One
of Nosh’s little friends, indeed! What a bloomin’ cheek!

  ‘Is Halle in?’ he asked, still grinning at me.

  ‘Halle, your boyfriend, Hadrian, is here,’ I shouted.

  ‘The name is Julian,’ he corrected.

  ‘Whatever!’ I dismissed and walked off leaving him at the door.

  What a numpty! Nosh was absolutely right about him. Halle dashed down the stairs, almost knocking me over in her hurry to get to ‘Julian’.

  ‘Elliot, his name is Julian, not Hadrian – as I’m sure you know. You won’t be so cute if you start picking up Nosh’s bad habits,’ frowned Halle.

  ‘I don’t have to pick up anyone’s bad habits. I’ve got enough of my own,’ I told her.

  She flounced past me, unimpressed, and started kissing Julian on the doorstep. I thought they were trying to swallow each other. It was disgusting! Leaving them to it, I started up the stairs. With a sudden start, I turned back.

  ‘Halle, you are still going to help me, aren’t you?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘I said so, didn’t I?’ Halle replied. ‘Don’t nag me. I hate to be nagged.’

  Me? Nag? I felt like telling her that only grown-ups nagged, but I didn’t push it. Today was definitely a day when things were going to happen. But I’d given up trying to predict if they were good things or bad things. My gut feelings had let me down before – and in a big way. I dug the memory stick out of my pocket and went back downstairs, followed by Nosh who suddenly appeared. Halle and Julian were holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. If they knew how drippy they looked, they wouldn’t have done it!

  ‘Halle, here’s the thing I was telling you about,’ I said pointedly.

  Puzzled, Halle frowned at me, then her expression cleared. ‘Oh, yes! So what do I do with it?’ she asked.