The Genius Wars

  ‘I still don’t see why we have to wear idiot disguises,’ Hamish complained. (Clearly, the detective’s warning had fallen on deaf ears.) ‘Why not just sit in the back of a van, or something? No one would see us then.’

  ‘Unless you had to get out!’ Saul bluntly swatted this suggestion aside. ‘Besides, I’ve been told that you’ll do a better job of tracking signals if you can pinpoint locations visually, as well.’

  He paused for a moment as Gazo slunk back into the room. Had Snezana not been present, Gazo’s return might have occasioned nothing more than a few careless glances. But when Gazo saw Snezana, he flushed, hesitated, then made a rapid withdrawal. Within seconds he was gone.

  After a moment, the front door slammed.

  ‘Gazo?’ Saul yelled after him. Everyone else stared in amazement.

  ‘Where’s he off to?’ Egon finally growled.

  Nobody answered. Thi turned to Saul.

  ‘Shall I go and see what’s wrong?’ he asked.

  Again, there was no reply. The detective’s startled gaze flickered towards his foster son, who suddenly realised what had happened. Snezana must have been too big a shock for Gazo to absorb. He must have ducked outside, just in case he lost control of himself.

  He had been trying to protect them all from his unfortunate stress response.

  ‘Just leave him alone,’ said Cadel. ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Snezana’s tone was mildly concerned. ‘If he’s feeling sick, he’s welcome to lie down upstairs.’

  ‘No.’ Cadel was adamant. ‘Gazo has these funny spells. We can always brief him when … um … when he’s a bit calmer.’

  ‘Oh! Right.’ Hamish wasn’t stupid; as the penny dropped, he began to smirk. And something about this smirk enlightened Saul. With a start, the detective finally grasped what was going on.

  ‘Oh. Ah. I see.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well … as I was saying, it’s vital that we take certain precautions. For example, some of us will have to change our appearance slightly, just in case we’re being monitored.’ Anticipating the protest that was almost certainly forming on Egon’s tongue (to judge from his outraged expression), Saul added, ‘This of course applies only to people who’ve had extended dealings with Cadel in the past. People like Hamish and Gazo –’

  ‘And me?’ Thi interjected. ‘We’ve talked in the labs, once or twice.’

  ‘No.’ Saul shook his head. ‘Passing acquaintances don’t count. They wouldn’t be subject to the kind of surveillance that we’re trying to dodge, here.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Which brings me to my next point. I don’t know some of the people in this room, and that’s a security risk. So every one of you will be teaming up with a stranger. That way, if anybody feels like deviating from the official plan, it’s gonna be reported.’ Studying the array of astonished and confused faces in front of him, he finished with a firm, ‘I hope you can all see the sense in this arrangement.’

  Hamish immediately stuck his hand in the air. ‘Bags I get a lift with Snezana!’ he chirruped, eliciting a giggle from Boyd, a groan from Duke, and a grimace from Egon. Mr Naidoo, however, ignored Hamish completely, addressing Saul with an air of concern.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the troubled parent remarked, ‘but will I not be permitted to drive my own son?’

  ‘No.’ Saul didn’t beat around the bush. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure Ms Zivanovic will be happy to drive Vijay, though. And I’m sure your son will be happy to let Ms Zivanovic do the driving.’

  Glancing at Vijay, Cadel decided that ‘happy’ wasn’t really the right word. Vijay looked stunned, and just a little lost; when Snezana smiled at him, his gaze fell. He stood rooted to the spot, staring at his feet, while Duke heaved a noisy sigh.

  ‘Man,’ said Duke, ‘that is so unfair.’

  ‘Duke, you’ll be driving Thi,’ Saul went on.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Hamish, you’ll be going with Mr Naidoo. And I don’t want to hear that you’ve been playing up.’ Ignoring Hamish’s pout, Saul applied to Richard Buckland for input. ‘Do you have any preferences?’ the detective wanted to know, glancing from Boyd to Egon. ‘This one or that one?’

  ‘Oh … whatever you think,’ Richard replied. He seemed reluctant to express any kind of preference when it came to his own students.

  Saul grunted.

  ‘All right. Then you can take that one,’ he decided, jerking his chin at Boyd, ‘and this one over here can come with me.’

  He was referring, not to Cadel, but to Egon. Cadel blinked. Egon muttered, ‘Terrific,’ but not as if he really meant it.

  Seeing Cadel frown, Saul did his best to explain.

  ‘You’ll be with Gazo, because he knows you,’ the detective pointed out. ‘I’d be worried about his stress levels if he went with a stranger. And he can defend you better than I can, when all’s said and done.’ As Cadel absorbed this oblique reference to Gazo’s peculiar problem, Saul proceeded. ‘He won’t be driving his own car. I’ll put you both in Thi’s, for extra protection.’

  ‘Has it got GPS?’ asked Cadel. ‘Because we can’t use it if it does.’

  ‘I only wish it did,’ Thi said ruefully, just as Cadel became aware of a general shift in the atmosphere. Boyd and Egon and Vijay all exchanged glances. Then Egon said, ‘What do you mean, we can’t use GPS? How are we going to do this without GPS?’

  ‘We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way,’ said Richard, coming to Saul’s rescue. ‘With a street directory.’

  ‘But why?’ Obviously, Egon wasn’t about to take ‘no’ for an answer. So Cadel stepped in.

  ‘Because the person we’re looking for could hack into anything,’ he explained. ‘That’s why we can’t use our phones, either.’

  ‘What?’ cried Duke. Even Snezana gawked at Cadel in disbelief. And Egon spluttered, ‘For God’s sake …!’

  ‘No phones.’ Saul was firm. ‘They can be tracked.’

  ‘But I’m a stranger. You just said so,’ Snezana protested. ‘Why should anyone be tracking my phone, if we’ve never even met before?’

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ Saul had to concede. ‘But we can’t be too careful. No phones.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Egon complained. And the detective smiled a mirthless smile.

  ‘You’re just lucky you’re not wearing a false nose,’ he retorted. Then his gaze swept the entire group as he declared that Richard Buckland would now brief everyone on the proposed scanning grid. ‘Each driver will have an individual route to cover in a specific timeframe,’ Saul announced. ‘It’s important that you don’t deviate from your routes, so listen carefully. Once Mr Buckland is finished, Ms Zivanovic will be attending to Hamish and Cadel and …’ He hesitated for a split second, before glancing at Hamish. ‘Will you go and fetch Gazo, please? He’ll need to hear this.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hamish, sliding off his stool.

  ‘We should try to be on the road by two, and back here by four,’ Saul added. ‘If there’s any kind of problem, don’t call me. I’ll hear about it at the debrief. And if you pass each other at an intersection – which is bound to happen – try not to yell or point or do anything else that might draw attention to yourselves, because this isn’t a college prank. Okay? This is a police operation.’ After quelling Duke with a stony glare, he nodded at Richard. ‘Right. That’s it from me. Now I’ll hand you over to Mr Buckland …’

  THIRTEEN

  When Cadel and Gazo finally climbed into Thi’s car, they had both been transformed by Snezana’s skilled hand. Gazo was wearing a fake nose, a pair of slip-on elf ears, and a set of false front teeth that lifted his top lip, distorting his mouth. Cadel had been given false eyebrows, a prosthetic chin (which kept falling off) and a silvery theatrical wig that had changed his hairline, giving him a touch of male pattern baldness around the temples.

  ‘It’s an old-man wig, and you don’t look much like an old man,’ Snezana had admitted, upon stepping back to survey her handiwork. ‘The important thin
g is that your measurements have changed. I mean, your forehead’s a lot higher, for a start.’

  Cadel had acquiesced to the wig, though it was no cooler than four layers of beanie, and made his scalp itch. He had also agreed to pad his upper arms. But he’d refused to don a set of acrylic nails, despite the fact that they made his own nails look wider than they really were. ‘I’ll be using a laptop,’ he’d pointed out, ‘and I want to be able to reach the keys.’

  Of course, he wasn’t using his own laptop. For safety’s sake, he had borrowed one from Thi, who had a couple to spare. This laptop was now linked to a wireless network antenna that Cadel had built himself, quite cheaply, with components donated by Hamish. Boyd had supplied Cadel with various sniffing and scanning programs, while Saul had slipped his foster son a mobile phone.

  Despite the ‘no phone’ rule, Saul had quietly insisted that Cadel was a special case.

  ‘No one else is taking the same kind of risk,’ the detective observed, while loading Cadel into the back of Thi’s car. ‘Just keep it turned off, and if there’s any kind of trouble, dial Reggie. He’s on standby, in case you need help.’

  Cadel sighed. He was well and truly sick of taking precautions, though he knew how necessary they were. ‘Turning the phone off won’t help much,’ he said. ‘A roving bug could easily turn it back on.’ But he promised to remove the phone’s battery, and to keep his head down whenever Gazo hit a red light, or passed a speed camera.

  Not that there would be many speed cameras in the back-streets of suburban Dulwich Hill.

  As Gazo pulled away from the kerb, Cadel tried to tell himself that things were looking up. Sonja’s condition was steadily improving. The wardriving team also seemed surprisingly competent – though Duke was, without doubt, a weak link in the chain. (Cadel was convinced that Duke would get lost, or stop for a smoke, or run into a tree.) Then there were all the other leads currently being followed: the American smart-house lead, for instance. The chatroom-site lead. The Raimo Zapp lead. Though Andrew Hellen still hadn’t called with any contact details for Raimo, it was bound to happen soon.

  All the same, Cadel couldn’t help feeling depressed. His wardriving scheme was a long shot, for one thing; it was unlikely that he’d be able to identify any of the signals collected during the next few hours. What were the chances that Vee or Dot or Com would be using their former access-point IDs? Or that they’d decided to steal an old one of Sonja’s, or Judith’s, or Cadel’s? What were the chances that anyone with any sense would be so criminally careless?

  ‘Minimal,’ Cadel muttered, causing Gazo to squint up at the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Whad’s thad?’ said Gazo. His voice sounded slightly snubbed, because of his false nose and teeth.

  ‘Nothing.’ Surveying the streetscape outside, Cadel calculated that the Dulwich Hill border was approximately five minutes away. ‘Thanks for doing this, Gazo. It’s really nice of you to bother.’

  Gazo shrugged. ‘I could be nexd on the lisd, afder Sonja,’ he replied. ‘Especially if id’s Prosper we’re talking aboud. Besides, I god the week off. Ain’d no big deal.’ After a brief pause, he added, ‘Anyway, I like helping people.’

  ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted to do,’ Cadel acknowledged. He was busy with his range settings. ‘I remember you told me that.’

  ‘Yeah. I did.’ Gazo cleared his throat. ‘I told your dad, an’ all. I asked ’im if I could join the police.’

  ‘You did?’ Cadel’s head jerked up; this was wholly unexpected. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he’d make some inquiries.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Problem is …’ Gazo began, then trailed off. It was Cadel who finally broke the ensuing silence.

  ‘You’re worried about your condition?’ he hazarded.

  ‘No. I’m nod. I mean – well, how many girls look like thad Snezana chick, eh? Nod many.’ Gazo sighed as he spun the wheel. ‘Bud now your dad will fink I’ve god no self-condrol. He’ll fink I’m always messing up, when id was jusd thad one girl. I swear, I ain’d been worried for months. Nod for months. And then she comes along.’

  His voice was so gloomy that Cadel began to wonder. Was this merely a case of bad timing? Or had Snezana done more than simply jeopardise Gazo’s future career?

  Had she left him moonstruck?

  ‘Snezana’s very nice looking,’ Cadel said at last, ‘but there are lots of beautiful girls out there. If you were a policeman, you’d have to be sure they wouldn’t all affect you like that –’

  ‘They don’d,’ Gazo interrupted. ‘Id’s jusd her.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Cadel wasn’t. ‘How much time do you spend with pretty girls, anyway?’ The words were barely out of his mouth when he began to regret them. Gazo, however, didn’t take offence.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he replied. ‘I spend ’alf me life on a universidy campus. Thad place is crawling wiv lookers.’ Suddenly his tone shifted; it became rather concerned. ‘Ain’d you seen’em, Cadel? All them babes everywhere?’

  ‘Of course.’ As a matter of fact, Cadel never saw many girls when he was on campus, because Computer Engineering wasn’t too popular with female students. There were only four of them in his Advanced Programming class, and one was so quiet and shy, with so much hair, that he hadn’t really seen her face, yet.

  As for all the girls studying law, and business, and medicine … well, he had certainly glimpsed them from time to time, on his way to and from building K17. But he hadn’t really given them much thought, since most of them were quite a bit older than he was – and taller, too. If they’d noticed him at all, it was probably as a freakish little prodigy with no sense of style.

  ‘I was ad a pardy, lasd week, and id were fulla girls,’ Gazo continued. ‘Small rooms. Big crowds.’

  ‘Really?’ Cadel tried not to sound as forlorn as he felt. ‘How did you get invited?’

  ‘Like I said – I spend ’alf me life on campus. There’s always pardies if you keep your eyes open, eh? Even when you’re mowing lawns.’

  Cadel didn’t say anything. Instead he flushed. And Gazo must have spotted this, because he hastily added, ‘I never seen no young kids, mind you. Maybe there’s so much booze ad these gigs, people are scared of asking kids who ain’d sixdeen yed.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘If I join the police, them kids won’d be askin’ me no more,’ Gazo observed, with a touch of satisfaction, before his mood soured again. ‘Thad’s if I do join the police,’ he said mournfully. ‘Thad’s if they’ll led me in.’

  ‘I’m sure they will.’

  ‘I dunno. I really blew id, back there.’ Braking at a set of traffic lights, Gazo glanced down at the street directory that lay open on the seat beside him. Clearly, however, he wasn’t thinking about his planned route, because he suddenly remarked, ‘If I do join the police, I’ll ged paid more. I could buy a car like this one. And maybe a house like Snezana’s …’

  ‘That’s not her house,’ Cadel interposed. ‘That house belongs to Thi. His family’s rich.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Gazo’s shoulders slumped. ‘Figures.’

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ said Cadel, who had suddenly noticed a street sign. And Gazo grunted as Duke whizzed across the intersection in front of them.

  ‘There’s thad bloke wiv the dreadlocks,’ Gazo pointed out. ‘He’ll be heading for Marrickville Road, I guess.’

  Let’s just hope he finds it, Cadel thought, but didn’t air his doubts about Duke. Instead he focused his attention on the task he’d set himself, logging every access-point ID that they encountered on their journey through Dulwich Hill. Slowly they crawled across a grid of little streets, past rows of Edwardian houses and clusters of ageing apartment blocks. Now and then, a speed bump or a siren or an angry car-horn made Cadel look up from his laptop. For the most part, however, he was too preoccupied to absorb much of the scenery, which dissolved into a kind of background blur.

  Nothing untoward happened during that ninety
-minute trip. Electronic data flowed in without hindrance. Thi’s car purred along, untroubled by mechanical failure. Gazo reached the correct map references at the correct times, commenting briefly whenever he passed a familiar face. ‘There’s your dad,’ he’d mumble; or ‘Whad’s thad hippy doing here?’ But he was careful not to disturb his preoccupied passenger, and barely spoke at all until he arrived at the designated ‘exit junction’, just seventy-eight seconds ahead of schedule. Then he turned to Cadel and said, ‘I’ve godda head back, now. Unless there’s somefink else you need?’

  ‘No.’ In fact, there was something else that Cadel needed. He would have liked a recognisable serial ID signature, safely captured in his computer files. The trouble was, Gazo couldn’t give it to him. ‘That’s okay. I’m finished.’

  ‘Did id work?’

  Cadel shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he answered. ‘I won’t know until I’ve checked the other logs.’

  ‘Ride,’ said Gazo. But he waited a minute or so, until it was precisely half past three, before setting off towards Thi’s house.

  Here Richard Buckland was already waiting, having arrived just ahead of Gazo. Soon, however, they were joined by the other wardrivers, reporting back to base. Hopes were high, initially; it was felt that the team had acquitted itself well, despite a few minor hiccups. (Duke had taken a wrong turn, Vijay had suffered a mild bout of car sickness, and Hamish’s laptop battery had run out.) At first, Saul’s debriefing session was just a noisy exchange of self-satisfied whoops and congratulatory back-slaps. Even Duke received a few compliments, for not giving up after he’d lost his way. Then an argument broke out as to who might have racked up the largest number of access points. As Boyd and Hamish and Egon squabbled over the final tally, comparing data from six different laptops, Richard pieced together a near-perfect wireless network map of Dulwich Hill, using exactly the same information.