Felix’s usually pink cheeks looked greyish white, and there were premature dark pouches underneath his eyes.
‘Can’t you—’ I began, but he interrupted, ‘I’d never thought about it. No that’s not right. You have to think about it. You have principles, procedures, mechanisms. But not this. I’d never thought about what happens when the whole damn thing goes haywire.’
‘Isn’t there someone who can advise you? Someone you can go to?’
Felix gave me a pitying look. ‘The Director of Information Technology is also the head of Internal Security.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not even in small print.’
I glanced up through the window. A storm was ripping the last dead leaves off the oak trees in Northbourne Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed it was raining.
‘You know,’ Felix said. ‘I envy them. Semyonov. Harmer. Harmer collects his pay packet every fortnight, does just what he’s required to do and not one whit more.’
This didn’t strike me as an accurate description of Guy, though in his technical capacity it might well be true. This was apparently what Felix meant, but surely Felix recognised, as I did, that Guy was ambitious, that he was looking far beyond his present job. More than once I’d come upon Guy telling Ivan that they both needed to get out of DIR before it collapsed around their ears.
I’d forgotten about Tony Trapani, but I remembered later that morning when I ran into Dianne, smoking in the corridor.
‘Puffing Billy,’ I said. ‘You’ll set off the alarm.’
Di took a last drag on her cigarette, squashed the butt and aimed it inaccurately at a bin.
‘I didn’t have much luck with Bailey,’ I said. ‘He’s a real pig. Why didn’t you tell me Tony had actually been caught?’
‘I’m sure you did your best, Sandra.’ Dianne narrowed her eyes and started walking quickly towards the lifts. I followed her.
‘Did you know Tony has to appear before a university tribunal?’
Dianne pressed the lift button hard with a long, purple nail.
I persisted. ‘What else has he done?’
Dianne glanced at me over her shoulder. She looked as though she couldn’t decide whether or not to make a run for it. ‘What the bloody hell is wrong with this lift?’
‘Maybe it broke down.’
‘Stuff it. I’m walking.’
Dianne hurried to the fire stairs, but her spiked heels made it easy for me to keep up with her.
‘You must’ve known it was a waste of time for me to talk to Bailey.’
‘Well, you offered, Sandra.’ Dianne looked at me and smiled. ‘It was nice of you to offer.’
‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ she asked after a moment.
‘No. But I’ve a son who doesn’t always tell the truth.’
Dianne pushed open the heavy door and began her descent, but after she’d gone about a dozen steps, she stopped and turned around to face me. I must have somehow been expecting this, because I braked as well and didn’t hurtle into her. ‘What did you tell Felix Wenborn about me?’ she demanded.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why’s the little shit put me through the wringer?’
‘You’re not the only one.’
In the dim closeness of the stairwell, Dianne’s stove-black dress, with its russet shadows of age around the armpits, was dull and somehow menacing.
‘Felix was downstairs talking to that reporter from the Canberra Times.’
‘Which reporter?’
‘I was behind that red drinks thing, waiting for my cappuccino. You know what it’s like when you meet someone unexpectedly. You say hi and chat for a coupla seconds and keep going. These two weren’t like that. Wenborn didn’t even pretend to look surprised.’
Dianne took out her cigarettes and lit one. She seemed to have forgotten that she was in a hurry to get away from me. ‘Felix had his jogging gear on,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘Pissant wasn’t jogging, he was standing still. Sandra, let’s just front him with it and see what he says. We’ve been told not to talk to the press. That includes him.’
‘How do you know it was a reporter?’
Dianne inhaled a lungful of smoke, and turned her head self-consciously to blow it out. ‘That woman who broke the story about Rae—I saw her picture in the paper. It looked like her. Wenborn’s the only one with total access. He often works late, he’s here on his own. Well? Are you game to front the little prick or not?’
This was meant to goad me further, but it didn’t. It wasn’t just that I felt differently about Felix after the things he’d said to me. That morning Dianne’s voice had a sound like a struck bell, a hard ring of warning. But I was sick of her and her brother. I was sick of myself. All I wanted was to go home, eat junk food, and watch the midday soaps on television.
. . .
I spent my lunch hour in the library, comparing statistics on clerical outwork. At five to two I grabbed a mushy tuna sandwich from the bistro. I was beginning to hate the atmosphere in the travel centre, the hard, shadowless red and blue vinyl, the constant background noise of TV and loudspeakers, the restless, somehow purposeless milling and jostling of travellers.
And there was something else now, a strong undertow of fear, such as those weary or bland-faced passengers might feel about a bus overturning, a plane falling out of the sky. I didn’t know who to trust, who to talk to. I didn’t have a plan.
I mulled over what Dianne had said; or, more importantly, what she’d refused to say. It had a kind of rebellious finality about it. I felt sad and irritated at the same time. I didn’t have the stomach to pester her with questions, and I had no confidence in her answers. Dianne might be a decade younger than I was, but she was tougher than I’d ever be. I supposed that in time I might respect her for that.
She’d never been committed to the outwork project as far as I could see, or to helping outworkers get a fairer deal. When the Opposition leader was interviewed, he’d said things he could only have learnt from inside DIR. Was it too far-fetched to suspect Dianne? But why would she want to get Rae and me into trouble? Nothing added up. Could Di’s motive be money? Could somebody be paying her to do it?
When I got back to my office, there was a message telling me Jim Wilcox, our division head, wanted to see me.
Wilcox was one of our department’s six First Assistant Secretaries. I’d never spoken to him personally, but I remembered the lecture he’d given us after the story about Rae and Access Computing first appeared.
Wilcox showed me in and asked me to sit down, his plump white face opening in greeting like a fresh bread roll. He said he understood I’d been having some problems with my computer files, and I told him what had happened, leaving out any speculation about whether I was being framed, and for what purpose.
Wilcox warned me to be careful. ‘We can’t afford any more damaging publicity. And I mean absolutely cannot. Is that clear?’
I said it was.
Wilcox carried his weight precisely, envelopes of white flesh neatly contained by shirt collar and cuffs. One day I’d seen him in the corridor staring uncomprehendingly after Felix, who was togged up in his jolly red shorts and T-shirt on his way out for a run.
As if to soften his warning a little, Wilcox asked me a few questions about the outwork report.
‘We’ll get it finished on time,’ I told him.
‘How close are you?’ Wilcox’s eyes flickered to his watch and back.
‘Writing-up stage. All we need is the go-ahead to finish on our own.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem. I can sign it off.’
The phone rang and Wilcox turned to it, one hand raised to dismiss me.
I took the stairs to give me time to think. I’d been terrified Wilcox was going to tell me they were scrapping my report. I was damned if I was going to let some crook set me up and get away with it. I made up my mind to talk to Rae Evans, if she’d let me. If the thieves, or hackers, or whoever they were, had pla
nned to frame me in some way, in order to damage DIR’s reputation, or for some other reason, then the least I could do was find out what their game was, and hope to stay half a jump ahead.
. . .
Ivan was sitting in front of my computer. He glanced up at me with a grim expression.
‘Boy Wonder asked me to take a squiz. See if there was anything, you know, fishy,’ Ivan growled. ‘Whenever you typed in your password, this little filly nabbed it.’
‘What filly? Grabbed what?’
The program Ivan had found in my computer copied my name and password into a file, and told me INCORRECT LOG-IN. TRY AGAIN. Then it disappeared. Thinking I’d mistyped my password, I had another try. But in the process my password had been stolen.
‘I don’t remember being told my password was incorrect.’
‘Don’t worry, Sands. Your PC’s just a way in.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘That makes me feel terrific.’
Ivan said that programs like the one he’d found were called Trojan Horses. He told me about a case in the United States where a group of feminist hackers had used one to steal confidential military data using cheesecake pictures as a lure. While the men ogled, a hidden program was busy copying files.
‘What happened to them?’ I asked, frowning at Ivan, wondering if this was his way of trying to cheer me up.
‘Still in jail, so far as I know,’ Ivan said, his big hands tying an imaginary knot and pulling it. ‘One thing about the Yanks, they get convictions.’
Invisible Connections
The first-aid room on the second floor of our building was long enough for a couch, almost wide enough for a double bed, though there wasn’t one, of course, just a brown squeaky leather couch that Ivan covered with two towels, a small white chest of drawers where Ivan put his glasses, and an even smaller overhead cupboard, which was locked.
I never saw the room being used by a sick person. The leather was wrinkled, patched by a lay upholsterer’s hand in one place, but the couch was made to last. You had to put the towels down because otherwise your bum stuck to the leather. You had to come quietly. I took a big bite out of Ivan’s jumper once. His smell of a wet dog.
Ivan’s large uncomfortable body, which for so much of the time seemed to shriek out against his surroundings, fitted the whole of that tiny room, so that I felt myself filled up with nerves, and that rush up the spine, and the smells of winter skin and sex.
‘Why risk getting caught, when we can go to bed together at my place?’ I asked Ivan once.
‘Trust me, Sand,’ was all he replied.
I wasn’t sure whether I trusted Ivan or not, but I supposed that this was one way to find out.
One afternoon, I was about to lift the white towels from their place on top of the cupboard when I saw something unusual.
‘What is this? Look.’
‘Shhh!’ Ivan whispered. ‘I think there’s someone out there.’
I heard Claire Disraeli’s low, clear voice just outside the door say, ‘Only half-an-hour ago.’
A man’s voice replied.
Did Claire and Guy Harmer have the same idea? Maybe they’d discovered the first-aid room years ago. A good place, a compact cosy space with a door that locked. Was it only luck that our timing hadn’t clashed before?
Ivan winked at me. My eyes were on the door and then the key, glinting like a semi-precious stone on the cupboard top beside his glasses.
There was silence outside. They might have moved away. On the other hand, they might have tried the door, softly so we didn’t hear them, and be waiting for us to come out.
I gave Ivan what I’d found on top of the towels, a plain manilla folder. He opened it and pulled out a floppy disk with no label, no name, or number, or identifying mark of any kind.
When we opened the door a few minutes later, Claire stared at us stiffly and said, ‘You two look like the cats that ate the fish fingers.’
Ivan flicked a towel across his head and shoulders and smiled seraphically at Claire, who looked cross enough to spit.
. . .
‘Surely you can find out,’ I said to Felix. ‘Maybe someone saw them.’
‘For all I know you left the disk in there yourself, Sandra.’
Felix crossed and re-crossed his arms over his chest. He was wearing a dark grey jumper, and looked smaller. Worry was making him more compact by the day.
I was angry with Ivan for taking the disk straight to Felix. Ivan should have realised Felix would make it another black mark to tot up against me.
‘What’s on it?’ I asked, moving a few steps towards the windows, careful to keep my voice neutral, feeling a brush of warm air from the air-conditioning ducts.
‘It’s simply a matter of knowing where to draw the line.’ Felix said. ‘If you lose your handbag, you don’t expect twenty police officers to work day and night until they find it. Unless you’re Prince Charles. But even he’d be pushing it—’
I wondered what on earth Felix was talking about.
‘Someone left a floppy disk inside a manilla folder in the first-aid room,’ I said. ‘I swear to you it wasn’t me. Can you tell me what was on it?’
‘At the moment, no,’ Felix smirked. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
He turned to me and spread both of his hands, palms downwards, out in front of him, an odd gesture, rather like a nervous preacher about to begin a sermon. ‘Sandra,’ he said. ‘Just watch—and listen.’
‘Listen for what?’
‘For the unexpected.’
‘Do you really think Rae Evans stole that money?’
The thing is, for a few seconds I believed Felix was going to answer me, tell me what he did believe. There was one of those gaps of time that are impossible to measure, because they have been chilled by memory, and are recalled as the original sensation, as though preserved in ice.
‘All I want is to get the matter dealt with internally,’ Felix said, ‘without any more harm than’s already been done.’
‘Calling in the cops? That’s your idea of internally?’
‘That wasn’t my decision.’
‘Getting Rae Evans charged with fraud and computer theft?’
‘The police did that.’
Why ask me to spy for him? As soon as I got away from Felix, I felt like shouting it. Why ask the one person he knew was on Rae’s side? I could watch people sitting at their work-stations. I could listen to what they said to each other. But they could be hacking into our computers for all they were worth, and I wouldn’t be able to tell. It was like trying to investigate a jewel robbery by standing outside the shop window and admiring its empty shelves.
Maybe Felix had asked others. Maybe his idea was to get half the department spying on the other half, and vice versa, the whole damn building looking up each other’s skirts. Maybe this was his idea of solving the matter internally.
. . .
The magistrate’s court had an extra floor, a mezzanine, with the stuck-on look mezzanine floors have, a child’s afterthought when making a playhouse. I blinked and shook my head, trying and again failing to adjust to the fact that I was there, at Rae’s committal hearing. Until it happened, I hadn’t believed Rae would be charged with a criminal offence, and even after I heard the news, it wasn’t real to me until the moment I stepped inside the courtroom and looked round for her, immobilised by a contrary, hopeless feeling.
The courtroom was square and self-enclosed, with no windows to the outside. Though I was early, it was already crowded. Overheated air played musical chairs with yawning early-morning occupants. Lawyers and detectives stood around in suits. A few uniformed police angled themselves against the wall at forty-five degrees to accommodate their guns and mobile phones. The defendants were a mixed bunch, some in jeans and sweatshirts, some in suits as good as or better than the lawyers’. My eyes searched everywhere for a proud grey head, back of military straightness. Rae wasn’t there.
The walls, carpet and furniture were a dank
plum, a colour with no depth. I spotted an empty chair by the far wall, but it took all my concentration to walk across and claim it. The furniture and all the people using it seemed like blow-ups, made to look lifelike by the obsessive attention to detail of a bored and lonely child.
A woman whom I felt I ought to know, but didn’t, leant out over the railing of the mezzanine. I dropped my bag and, fumbling, bent to pick it up.
Rae must have entered the courtroom in those few seconds while my head was lowered. I turned, and there she was. It was as though a candle glowed through her pale blouse, paler skin, shining from within each thread of silk. I tried to catch her eye, but she was walking with her head down, looking at the floor.
At the table where Rae took her place, lawyers sat so close together, leaning forward, that they appeared to be chewing on the microphones. More policemen and women were bowing in the doorway, taking up lumpy positions against the wall. The detective sergeant who’d interviewed me was in the front row. I caught him looking round in my direction, but, like Rae, he did not meet my eye.
The woman in the black gown was surely too young to be a magistrate. Long silver earrings swayed when she moved her head, and she pushed her black wavy hair back from her forehead with a ringless left hand. I wondered if she had any children, and who she called on when they were sick.
I understood that the custody cases were all heard first, those who’d been held in custody the night before. The magistrate spoke naturally, and I thought kindly, to each of the accused. But every case was called up only to be adjourned. No-one was even listing charges, and I began to think that nothing would be dealt with that day at all.
It was more than an hour before Rae was summoned to the microphone. The detective sergeant I’d recognised read the charges. I was glad he had his back to me so I didn’t have to look at his square jaw moving up and down.
I had no idea there were so many things you could do with a computer that were against the law. I gripped my chair with clammy hands.
Rae didn’t speak. When she was asked to enter a plea, her barrister said ‘not guilty’ in a clear, judicious voice.
The Trojan Dog Page 12
