System Shock Part 9

'Johanna tells me the Bugs have so far executed perfectly,'

Stabfield said to Lewis. Lewis was not surprised they were relatively simple systems. Stabfield knew that too, and was only telling him to show that Johanna had reported in first.

Lewis told Stabfield what he had discovered at the library.

He tried not to inject any emotion into the report, and he kept it as objective as possible.

'And your recommendation?' Stabfield asked when he had finished.

'I would give her credentials a high veracity weighting and proceed accordingly.'

Stabfield nodded. 'That would seem to be a pragmatic scenario, I agree.'

Lewis was surprised. Usually Stabfield chastised him for some overlooked technicality, or a subjective evaluation. He turned to go. But Stabfield stopped him at the door.

'Wait.'

'Yes?'

'You signed in three safety officers yesterday.'

'Yes. Their credentials were in order. I rang their office to double-check.'

Stabfield crossed the room and stood close in front of Lewis.

'Nonetheless,' he said quietly, 'one of them failed to leave the building.'

'Failed to I'm sorry, you're off my wavelength.'

82.'I found him in your office, and escorted him to the stationery store. We need a projected containment scenario.'

Stabfield turned away.

Lewis hesitated. He sensed that Stabfield had not finished.

Sure enough, as he sat behind the desk Stabfield added: 'We also need to understand what he was doing in your your office. We need to understand how he bypa.s.sed the encryption procedures on the hardware configuration.' office. We need to understand how he bypa.s.sed the encryption procedures on the hardware configuration.'

Lewis caught the implication. 'I know nothing about this.'

'Of course not.'

'What would I have to gain?'

Stabfield leaned back in his chair, twisting a bent paperclip between his fingers. He seemed to be considering, although Lewis was sure he already had an answer. But before he could articulate it, the office door opened and Johanna Slake came in.

She glanced from Stabfield to Lewis.

Stabfield waved Johanna to a seat more than he had offered Lewis. Then he said: 'It is something of a coincidence, however. You sign in an infiltrator; I find him in your office; he manages to access your computer.'

'He?' Johanna asked.

Lewis was still confused by the situation. Stabfield frowned.

'I thought you meant the woman.' Johanna smiled at them both, but did not elaborate.

'What woman?'

'She arrived just now. Installed at workstation E142. That's what I came to discuss.'

'It's the journalist, Smith,' Lewis explained.

'Lewis checked her out. Her background is verifiable.'

'Another coincidence, then,' Johanna said lightly. 'She was at the pub where I found Sutcliffe.'

There was silence for a while. Lewis looked from Johanna to Stabfield. He had an uncomfortable feeling he was about to be blamed for something else.

'Coincidence strains my credibility threshold,' Stabfield said slowly. His eyes narrowed slightly as he turned towards Lewis.

'You think Sutcliffe was in contact with her?' Lewis asked.

'He apparently arranged her time here,' Johanna pointed out.

'And they were both at the same geographical location when 83 we know he was trying to align a physical contact. What do you think?'

Stabfield was staring down at the polished wooden surface of his desk, tracing the grain with the end of his paperclip. 'Or would you still give her credentials a high veracity weighting?'

he asked, his head swaying slightly as he brought his intense gaze to bear on Lewis.

Harry arrived at Hubway first thing in the morning. He had arranged to see Bill Westwood at nine and he liked to be punctual. He was greeted, at exactly nine, by a security guard and an electronic map mounted on a stand just inside the main foyer. It reminded Harry of the large maps of seaside towns from his childhood days. They had a giant You Are Here You Are Here arrow, and you pressed a b.u.t.ton for some facility or other (railway stations, ice cream parlours, toilets) and tiny lights indicated their whereabouts. The Hubway map was an electronic-age descendant of the same system. You typed in the name of the person you wanted to see, and it indicated on a schematic of the building where they were. Or rather where their computerized, on-line diary suggested they should be. arrow, and you pressed a b.u.t.ton for some facility or other (railway stations, ice cream parlours, toilets) and tiny lights indicated their whereabouts. The Hubway map was an electronic-age descendant of the same system. You typed in the name of the person you wanted to see, and it indicated on a schematic of the building where they were. Or rather where their computerized, on-line diary suggested they should be.

According to the map, Westwood was in his office.

'You don't want to pay any attention to that thing.'

Harry turned from the map to find a tall, red-haired, red-bearded man standing behind him. His voice was loud, with a trace of Yorks.h.i.+re in it. He was dressed like a mad college professor or eccentric medical consultant baggy trousers, crumpled tweed jacket, and a loud cravat which was presumably supposed to add a daring touch of style. He grabbed Harry's hand enthusiastically. 'Bill Westwood. You're Sullivan. Pleased to meet you Harold.'

'It's Harry, actually.' Harry retrieved his hand.

Westwood seemed not to notice Harry's interruption of his loud monologue. 'Great. Now, what can we do for you then, Harold?' He gestured for Harry to follow him and they set off into the house.

Harry explained. As he did so, he wondered, given the evidence so far, whether it much mattered what he said.

84.When Harry had finished, Westwood clapped him on the shoulder, and said: 'We'll see what we can do then, eh?'

As he followed the tall red-headed director of Hubway through the Queen Anne house towards one of the computer suites, Harry reflected that punctuality was a quality he had acquired since the first time he and the Doctor and Sarah had met. In fact a lot of things had happened to him since then.

Twenty years, or nearly. G.o.d, how time flew he thought, with a wry smile at the turn of phrase.

Harry's relatively short period travelling with the Doctor and Sarah had been the most eventful time of his life, even considering some of the more exciting moments of his time in weapons research and now with the Security Service. And it looked as if, with the most recent reappearance of the Doctor and Sarah, the pace was picking up again.

'You chaps in security keeping busy then, Harold?'

Westwood asked as he opened yet another oak-panelled door and waved Harry through ahead of him. His voice was uncommonly loud, even when he was talking to someone right next to him, as if he needed to emphasize the importance of everything he said.

Harry winced again at the use of his full name and answered automatically.

The room they entered had been a drawing room. They were on the first floor and the main bay window afforded a view out over the grounds behind the house. A large lawn stretched away from the building, sloping off into terraced gardens and herbaceous borders at the end. Off to one side were the outbuildings. There were several barns and a coach house.

Beyond them was the gravelled car park, which was virtually empty. Between the house and the outbuildings was a newer block, built, Harry a.s.sumed, to provide extra s.p.a.ce for the Hubway complex. It was connected to the main house by a first-floor bridge over the gravelled driveway which went right round the main house. The other side of the house was bordered by woodland.

'My garden,' Westwood commented loudly. 'Impressive, isn't it?'

85.'Yes indeed. Lots of room for croquet.' Harry turned from the window to survey the room itself. The original furniture had been taken out, replaced with square wooden tables along each wall. They were part.i.tioned into individual work areas, each with a desk lamp and a personal computer connected in with snakes of cable which disappeared out of sight beneath the desks, into the floor and the walls. In the centre of the room was a round conference table with four office chairs. The walls were papered in the original style of the house, the lined pastel blue matching the painting on the plaster rose round the ceiling light. The other original feature was a large fireplace occupying about a third of one wall. Above the mantle was a huge mirror.

Reflected in the mirror Harry could see the director standing at the window, surveying his domain as he rubbed his fierce red beard. From this angle Harry could see that the man's hair was thinning at the side, and wondered if he knew.

There was another man in the mirror with greying hair and features just beginning to sag. It seemed to Harry that he looked older today. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep. Or perhaps it was the fact that Sarah appeared not to have aged at all since they last met. He pushed a stray hair back into place and pulled his blazer into shape.

He read through the morning operational report a third time.

Hubway that was significant, but he couldn't remember why.

He was having trouble remembering lots of things recently.

Still, he did know what to do. He must ring Lewis. He would want to know.

Ten minutes later he put down the phone and returned to his morning's mail. He had taken to going through it on the computer the last few days. His secretary had been surprised had reminded him he had sworn he would never use the d.a.m.n thing, and that he demanded every single message be printed out for him to 'read properly'. But doing the work on-line was so much more efficient.

As he checked through the next report he noticed the telephone was at a slight angle, not squared off into its usual precise position. It looked as if he had just taken a call. Or 86 made one. Had he? He half remembered lifting the receiver.

Half remembered that there had been something important he had to relay to someone.

He frowned, struggling for a moment to remember. But even his half-memory was evaporating. Never mind. The switchboard listing was a.n.a.lysed each day and all calls in and out were checked and the relevant departments charged accordingly.

But somehow he felt sure that whatever call he might just have made would not have been logged by the computer.

The main systems at Euston controlled the signalling systems for all of BritTrack. They also provided service for a fee, naturally to some of the other private rail carriers. The human element had been slowly eroded from the systems following the signal workers' strike four years previously, and now the computer controlled everything. Its sensors reported the speed and position of every train on the lines, and its linear programming and scheduler algorithms calculated the best routes and kept the trains to their timetables.

The next step was to eliminate the train drivers. But that would take a while yet. The computer systems were up to the task, but the personnel managers were not sure that the employees were.

The microchip introduced into the system by the Voracian who called itself Johanna Slake monitored the rail network, biding its time. During the morning rush hour it decided that the current situation matched its trigger-criteria and began to talk to the central processor.

The central processor read the OffNet messages from the chip and reacted accordingly.

Within forty minutes pa.s.sengers on most trains had concluded they were not going anywhere. The drivers had been frantically trying to get through to their supervisors on the telephones in the train cabs for a while. But the computer-controlled phone system seemed to be completely dead.

One by one drivers breathed a sigh of relief when red lights went green. But by then the points and signals had been reprogrammed to a new timetable and traffic-flow.

87.The first crashes were reported within minutes.

Westwood led Harry to one of the desk cubicles. 'This system is a fairly typical set-up. Most recent hardware and software of course.' He ran his hand respectfully along the top of the thin LCD monitor standing upright on the desk. 'If you slot the CD in, we can check that the drive recognizes it. We can be sure that it's a ROM, even if we don't explicitly open the file structures.'

Harry considered this. It was probably just as well to check they weren't wasting their time before the Doctor arrived.

Westwood took the CD and pushed it into a slot in the front of the desktop processing unit. 'It'll check the attached drives for integrity in a minute. If it can't read the CD, it'll push it back out again.'

'And if it can read it?'

Westwood pointed to a small dark square set next to the CD slot on the machine's facia. 'That light will flash as it reads the drive.'

After a while, the light flashed once, almost tentatively.

Then after a short pause it flashed again, a burst of luminous activity.

The CD drive opened the signature file on the compact disc, checked the format, then closed it again. But that was enough.

Within the bit patterns on the disc, something stirred into life.

It thrashed for a few microseconds, exploring its environment; adjusting; calculating; reasoning ...

Then the drive spun the disc to a halt, the data stream stopped, and the bit patterns settled into pa.s.sivity.

'Seems a normal enough CD-ROM,' Westwood commented.

Harry did not reply.

Stabfield, Lewis and Johanna were still debating what to do both with their intruder and the infiltrator.

'Enough,' said Stabfield at last, tapping his pen on the top of the desk. 'The proactive approach I suggest is this '

But before he could elaborate, there was a single knock at the door, after which it immediately opened.

88.Carlson, the Voracian who had gone with Johanna to Hubway, stood in the doorway. 'I'm sorry to bother you, sir,' he said.

Stabfield's eyes narrowed and his head swayed gently. 'I imagine you have good reason for initiating this interrupt,' he said.

'We've been monitoring the highway, particularly the Hubway systems. We have a hook into the local area networks there.'

Stabfield nodded. 'And?' he asked.

'The signature file just showed up on their LAN. It's at Hubway.'

'What's at Hubway?' asked Johanna.

'The CD,' said Carlson. 'And Voractyll is waking.'

89.