Ivan walked over to the window. He opened the kitchen curtains a crack and stared out through them. His pose struck me as oddly familiar, as though he often stood like that, alone in his own house, spying on the frost.
‘Forget it,’ he said with his back to me. ‘Forget Evans, Sandy. She’s dead meat.’
Impregnated with a Virus
I had just opened an email attachment when all the letter ‘a’s in the last line of the document fell to the bottom of the screen.
I stared at them and thought, not again. I deleted the line and retyped it. The same thing happened. Then every ‘a’ from every line above them. My screen was filled with tumbling ‘a’s that huddled at the bottom. It was like a game on Sesame Street, played with letters that fell and lay side-on and grew arms and legs.
I wanted to crawl inside my monitor and push all those letters back where they belonged.
. . .
Felix was sitting at one of the computers in his office when I knocked. He stood up and walked forward to shake my hand with old-fashioned gravity, as though determined to start this interview on a better footing.
That day he was wearing a fairisle jumper in shades of navy blue. His hair was damp, clinging in yellow curls to his forehead and the back of his neck. It was only ten-thirty in the morning, but I wondered if he’d been out for his run already.
Felix’s office reminded me of the Lego houses Peter still sometimes made, the proportions perfect except for one Escher-like oddity, a row of steps starting halfway up a wall, a window in the floor. I couldn’t spot what it was that had a skewed perspective, but I knew that if I looked long enough I’d find it.
The only personal touches were a photograph of the 1984 ANU athletics team and four gold trophies, two on each side for balance.
Trying to appear relaxed, I walked over and read the gold lettering on the trophies. ‘Were you a sprinter?’ I asked politely.
‘Four hundred metres,’ Felix said. ‘It seems so long ago.’
I decided to risk a smile. ‘Ivan thinks it’s kids who’re responsible for the viruses.’
Felix smiled back, a boy’s smile, asking to be let off lightly. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
He sat down in his swivel chair, legs apart and shoulders back. The grey wool of his trousers stretched tight across his thighs. While I waited for him to speak, I wondered why a man who dressed so carefully and conservatively and went running every day had hired Ivan to work for him. Or maybe, and this struck me as a thought worth pursuing, Ivan had chosen Felix.
Felix gave me a level stare and said, ‘This latest virus came in on your email attachment.’
He couldn’t help lecturing people. I doubted if he was even aware that he was doing it. He held up his hand like a traffic cop and said, ‘In code, it looks like a perfectly ordinary piece of text. But it isn’t.’
He swung his chair close to a whiteboard on the wall opposite the window, picked up a red felt pen and began sketching rapidly. He drew a red square with a whole lot of little squares going off it, like a sunburnt sow with piglets.
‘Server.’ Felix pointed at the mother pig, then her offspring. ‘Evans, you, Trapani, Red Riding Hood. Tell me exactly what you did.’
‘I was checking my mail,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I can’t really remember …’
‘It’s like cars.’ Felix ground his teeth. ‘When your car breaks down, you want it fixed. But you don’t want to be bored by long tedious explanations of what’s under the bonnet.’
I went red. I wished Felix hadn’t started off trying to be friendly. He fixed me with his albumen eyes. ‘With computers, you have to start with the ABC, and believe me, even that’s too sophisticated for some. But it doesn’t stop them treating the Director of Information Technology like a car mechanic.’
Felix’s first-floor office had a clear view of Northbourne Avenue, across to the duty-free shops on the other side, with a glass-fronted tower rising above them. I stared out over the street, at a reflection of our building—concrete and glass, but wavery, fluid, as though I was looking into water.
‘We haven’t been able to determine’—Felix stood up and gave his chair a shove, so that it banged into his desk—‘if this virus is programmed to destroy data. Or just make pretty pictures. There may be a date. If there is, it’s well hidden. It turns out our mail system has a loophole. As well as sending and receiving messages, someone out there has written a program that’s attached itself to an innocuous-looking document and then has had itself executed as a command. In other words, it looks like a document, but it’s fooled the computer into executing it as a command. Probably a message that was sent recently, though it may not have been.’
‘I don’t understand how the virus made all my—all those letters fall down.’
‘My guess is the programmer wants us to think he’s pretty smart, a virtuoso. But it’s just a virus replicating itself.’
‘Do you think whoever sent it also sent those worms? And the stone wall?’
Felix repeated his speech about there being a weakness in the system. I could see that, now he’d admitted this, it niggled away at him. He was like a shop-keeper who every now and again has noticed five dollars missing from his till but has let it go. And suddenly he’s missing a lot more than the odd five dollars.
‘These viruses,’ I said, ‘the missing $900,000—could they be linked? Could the same person be responsible?’
Felix stared at me for a long time, arms folded across his fancy jumper, rehearsing for Armageddon, but with an odd, pouting expression, as if my question could only be described as being in bad taste.
‘It’s a war of nerves,’ he said.
. . .
‘I found the timer,’ Ivan told me at morning-tea time.
He explained that he’d spent the last few hours decoding my latest virus into assembly language.
Between mouthfuls of buttered Sao biscuit and strong black tea, he said the virus had been timed to start at 10 a.m.
‘You mean, kind of like a chain letter?’
‘Letter-bomb more like it. Replicating itself every thirty seconds. There’s a small mistake that made it go much slower. You were incredibly lucky, Sandushka.’
I stared at a heap of used tea-bags on a saucer. They looked like dead mice with bits of cardboard tied to their tails.
Ivan had his look of a hopeful puppy, yet more knowing, a knowledge of what people might get up to. I recalled that picture of my cyclamen and how he’d hoped for praise.
I touched his arm, feeling the wool of his brown jumper give, springy underneath my fingers.
. . .
The Secretary put out a statement. Rae Evans had been suspended pending an inquiry. It was clear that the Secretary, indeed the whole department, was cutting Rae off, unmooring her. She’d become a small dinghy with a faulty outboard motor. And in the way these things become apparent—slow, I’m so slow always to see patterns—it seemed that Rae had never had her anchor firmly fixed.
Bambi swathed herself in her capes and long grey-blue-green skirts. She bumped into desks and swore in a stage whisper, while Di Trapani’s black eyes said I told you so.
You could have cut our small section off at the lifts, and we might have floated out over the city like one of those incredibly expensive balloons that tourists go for rides in. There we would have hung, hundreds of feet in the air, forced at last to co-operate or begin tossing each other out. A balloon basket full of malcontents, pepper falling from a giant’s pot.
There was one Finance busybody—it seemed to be the same guy all the time—as persistent as winter rain. And a staffer from the Minister’s office, even though he didn’t trust any of us to say ‘Have a nice day’, seemed to think he had a perfect right to pester us all day long, us and Kerry Arnold from Admin, the certifier who’d signed for Access Computing’s grant money, and was copping his share of brown stains from the fan.
Kerry Arnold was a slight man nearing fifty, or else he’d passed that milestone
quietly and was holding his looks well. Brown eyes were set well back in a grey-gold, thinning cage of hair. He was neat and quick in all his movements. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he played table tennis and I could imagine him, even now, holding his own against star Chinese opponents.
I’d learnt all I could from Ivan about our department’s electronic payment system before making an excuse to go and see Kerry in his office.
Signing for grant money meant keying YES at the bottom of a page. So far as I understood the procedure, the certifier’s fingers never touched a pen or paper.
‘Do you think someone stole your password?’ I asked him.
Kerry’s dark brown eyes looked directly at me. He said, ‘It was quiet that day. Phone didn’t ring more than about ten times. I remember that, because I got through early. I was pleased. I had a pennant game that night.’
He sighed. I smiled encouragingly, thinking maybe Kerry didn’t mind my questions. Maybe it was a relief for him to talk to someone like me, someone who didn’t matter.
‘I feel like a pilot who’s crashed a plane,’ Kerry said. ‘And the bosses’ve gone through the black box again and again without finding anything.’
I nodded sympathetically. ‘It must be awful.’
‘If that figure was changed before the authorisation went to Finance, it had to have been after I signed for it. If it was changed before I signed, the computer would’ve refused authorisation.’ Kerry’s voice took on the hard, obsessive tone of someone going over the same few worn facts without eliciting anything new from them. ‘The computer wouldn’t’ve let me sign for a million dollars. If I told them that once, I must’ve told them twenty times.’
‘Do you think somebody from DIR changed the figure?’
Kerry didn’t answer, except to give his head the slightest possible shake. ‘I told the cops what could be done and what couldn’t, but they kept on asking the same questions, as though I’d change my mind if they asked me often enough. I could not have signed for a million for Access Computing. The computer wouldn’t let me. It’s got nothing to do with what I can remember, or whether I could have made a mistake.’ Kerry ticked the steps off on his fingers. ‘I signed for the grants on the Thursday afternoon. The disk went to Finance on the Friday. Finance made the payment direct into Access Computing’s bank account. But somewhere along the line the figure got changed. The figure on the disk that went to Finance is a million, and that’s what Finance say they paid. If you ask me can that happen, I’ll tell you it’s impossible. That’s what I told the police, the big one and that po-faced young woman.’
‘So there was twenty-four hours between when you signed for the money and when the disk went across to Finance? I don’t suppose you thought to check back again, some time on the Friday?’
‘Why should I?’ Kerry glanced up at me sharply, as though he’d suddenly recalled who he was talking to, that I had no right to any of this information. I stood up quickly, before the realisation had time to make him angry.
Whoever it was, I said to myself as I hurried along the corridor and up the fire stairs, not wanting to be seen, might have left a trace. Not fingerprints, of course. But something.
. . .
As a result of the viruses I got to know Guy Harmer a little better, and Claire Disraeli, his elegant blonde companion. They often arrived at work together, and though they were quiet and courteous, not loud and obvious like Ivan, I always knew when they were next door. I’d once remarked to Ivan that he and Harmer were IT support staff, Claire was a systems analyst—so what were they doing sharing an office? Ivan had replied with one word—space. There was none of that to spare, I knew, but I also suspected that Claire might have arranged it so she could be with Guy. Or was it the other way around? There were more IT people on the second floor, and Felix, as director, had an office to himself on the first.
Guy had short fair hair that caught and held the winter sun. He wore pure wool calf-length coats and a variety of hand-woven scarves, and fine grey suits with pastel shirts. He swam regularly and exercised in a gym. Claire was an even lighter blonde, with the pale eyebrows and skin that suggested her hair was natural. She wore it long and straight to her shoulders, or else in a ponytail. She was tall and slim, with a careful, detached elegance I’d only ever seen in fashion magazines. People stopped and looked at Guy and Claire when they walked along the corridor together. They shared one of those old-fashioned coat and hat stands, and it too looked like something out of a weekend glossy. No-one else ever hung their coats on it. I don’t know whether Claire would have stopped them if they’d tried. The connection between her and Guy was so strong that when one of them was alone, I kept looking round for the other.
I was often in and out of their room, chatting to Ivan or leaving him a message. I’d watched Claire, sitting within touching distance of Guy’s grey shoulder, listen to the phone on his desk ring twice, then pick it up, and say in her soft voice, ‘Guy Harmer’s phone.’ And then, when Guy shook his head, she’d say with what sounded like genuine regret, ‘He’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?’
I wondered who would cover for me if I chose not to be there. I wondered if she loved him. Claire was so cool, so professional; she did not have the slightest air of being used.
‘I’m sure none of those viruses were your fault,’ Guy told me kindly.
When I asked him who’d been saying they were, he smiled and told me to relax.
It was Dianne Trapani who’d told me Guy was married with a couple of young kids. She said that every department had its Romeo, and he was ours. ‘But he’s harmless, Sandy. Too narcissistic even to dirty his shirt cuffs.’
. . .
I was fumbling with my umbrella at the automatic doors when I bumped into Felix in his brick-red T-shirt and shorts, coming back from a run. His clothes were dripping wet and smelt strongly of new cotton. Water silvered off his blond hair and dimpled chin.
‘A word of warning,’ Felix panted, chest heaving up and down, eyes cold beneath his red sweatband. ‘Not only does departmental policy forbid any of us from talking to the press, but the whole matter is now the subject of a suppression order. If you talk to anyone about it, you’re breaking the law.’
‘What’s a suppression order?’ I asked, feeling as though I’d like to poke his red butt with my umbrella.
‘Just relax and do as you’re told, Sandra, and you’ll be all right.’
Baby-faced men age in special ways, I thought as I headed to the bank through the downpour. Their snub noses don’t change, or their round, dimpled chins. Felix would one day grow drooping, purple pouches under his blue eyes. He was blond, compact, his head was small, and his features were what I thought of as cherubic, baby-faced, though I’ve never yet seen a baby who looks like him, and I hope I never do.
. . .
The legal definition of hacking was a tricky one. Especially in the ACT, as I found out in the university’s law library one rainy Saturday afternoon, while Ivan was taking Peter to lunch at McDonald’s and then to a computer shop. When I’d said goodbye to Peter, he’d had the half-smug, half-worried look he wore when he’d talked me into something. I’d squeezed Ivan’s hand as a thank-you in advance, at the same time reminding him how little money I had to play around with.
I’ve always loved libraries on rainy days. The feeling of being surrounded by books is more comforting when the trees outside are foreshortened by a wet grey curtain. You can smell it through the glass.
For the next couple of hours I sat reading casebooks, trying to pin the act of hacking under one or other of our criminal codes.
The extraction of confidential information from a computer systen was not theft, one book told me. ‘Theft is a concept that can only be applied to property, and intangible information is not classified as property for the purposes of the criminal law.’
Next I tried fraud. ‘There have been several cases in recent years …’
I began to skim down paragraphs rat
her than read each one carefully.
‘It is illogical to talk of deceiving a machine.’ Fair enough too. But not of a machine deceiving a person. That happens all the time.
It seemed the law had not yet made up its mind on fraud.
Malicious damage sounded more promising. Yet here again, in most cases that had been brought to trial, the defence lawyers had argued their way out.
The new offence of ‘dishonest use of computers’ had recently been introduced in the ACT. And there was Commonwealth law to be used as a backup. I photocopied the relevant sections of the Commonwealth Crimes Act and took them home to study.
The Information Game
In the days when the Canberra Times was in Civic, there were a dozen places round about to go for a cup of coffee or a drink with a journalist. But since their offices had moved to Fyshwick, one of Canberra’s light industrial zones, meetings needed to be formally arranged.
Gail Trembath and I agreed to meet at a cafe at the Fyshwick markets. I hoped the shopping crowds would give us cover.
I sat at a scratched white plastic table drinking bitter cappuccino while I waited for Gail to turn up. I thought I’d chosen a seat out of the wind, but it found me easily enough, full and confident, on a downhill run from the Snowy Mountains.
Next door, jonquils from the Daisy Chain climbed above my head in terraced wooden boxes. At another stall, weak sunlight shone through rows of orange juice, squeezed and bottled on the spot, the sign said. Jars of local honey were stacked in a pyramid—huge plastic buckets at the bottom, tiny breakfast pots at the top. Bulk honey, juice—you could come here to shop once every six months and make it do. Maybe there were people who did that, who hated shopping and owned freezers the size of small warehouses.
In spite of the casual coming and going of shoppers minding their own business, a small girl shouting constantly for ice-cream, I felt conspicuous.
Fifteen minutes each way from the Jolimont Centre to Fyshwick didn’t leave much of my lunch hour for talk, and it didn’t help that Gail was late. Just when I’d decided she wasn’t going to show, she suddenly appeared, a bob of scarlet coat and flying hair.
The Trojan Dog Page 7
