The Genius Wars

  ‘Of course he does,’ Lexi spat, offending her brother greatly.

  ‘That’s a lie!’ he exclaimed, flushing. ‘You always act like I’m some kinda monster, and I’m not!’

  ‘Then get into those clothes and make yourself scarce for a few hours.’ Cadel gestured at Lexi’s disguise. ‘The wig, as well. You can come back as soon as it gets dark, and then Lexi can go.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ Devin whined.

  ‘How should I know? Whatever you normally do. Shoplift. Wardrive. Whatever.’ Struck by a sudden, disturbing thought, Cadel appealed to Lexi. ‘You can fit into his clothes, can’t you?’

  Thankfully, she could. Devin’s clothes had always been several sizes too big for him, even before he’d lost weight; Lexi was able to squeeze into his sweatshirt and camouflage pants without too much trouble, while her twin brother donned her Sandra disguise. Then she plastered Devin with make-up, gave him her keys, and told him to leave via the front door. ‘That’s how I came in,’ she said, as he tottered towards the lift in her conservative brown shoes. ‘I just used my old keys – it’s weird they didn’t change the locks after Genius Squad tanked. Too cheap, I suppose.’

  Cadel didn’t comment. He was already plugged into the Net, trawling through hospital computer systems. Sonja’s records showed that she had been discharged that very morning. Saul’s details, though scanty, were reassuring; at least he wasn’t dead. Cadel, on the other hand, was still as dead as a dodo. That’s what it said online, at any rate.

  He wondered if Vee would believe it.

  ‘So aren’t you going to have lunch?’ Lexi inquired, after the lift doors had closed on her brother. ‘I brought a whole bunch of salad rolls. You can have ham salad, chicken salad or egg salad.’

  ‘Whatever you prefer,’ said Cadel, absentmindedly. He was staring at the screen of his laptop, which he’d placed on Devin’s desk. Not that Devin had actually moved any furniture into the basement. His desk was an old wooden door supported by four plastic milk crates, and for a chair he was using another milk crate, topped by two silk cushions. ‘Do you want to have a look at this?’ Cadel asked. ‘It’s the encoded stuff I was talking about. I’m pretty sure it’s email-related, but it’s got me stumped.’

  ‘Where’d it come from?’ said Lexi, moving over to peer at the screen.

  Cadel told her. He gave her a quick summary of the past week’s events as he consumed a chicken salad sandwich. Then, having transferred the relevant files to Lexi’s machine, he left her to tackle the salvaged mystery texts while he explored Com’s CCTV bug. Somewhere, buried deep inside it, there had to be a clue. A mistake. A chink in Vee’s armour. Cadel was determined to pin down his cyber-nemesis, even if it took days and days. He promised himself that he wouldn’t leave Clearview House until he had a real-world location for Dr Vee.

  But Vee was clever when it came to covering his tracks. By early evening, Cadel was still floundering about in dense thickets of computer code, with no promising pathway in sight. He had nothing to show for nearly five solid hours of work. It was unbearably frustrating – and mortifying, too. Was he that inept? Had he met his match? Did Vee really outclass him?

  I have to start thinking more like Vee, he decided. Vee doesn’t recognise any restraints or boundaries, so it gives him an edge. His thinking might be messy, but it’s also left-field and lateral.

  Then Lexi cried, ‘Gotcha!’, and Cadel jumped in his seat.

  He’d been concentrating so hard that he had forgotten about Lexi, despite the fact that she was noisy and restless even when focused on an absorbing task. She would shift and mutter and sigh, sometimes cursing under her breath, sometimes twanging a rubber band between her fingers. Having made no secret of the fact that she would have preferred a more comfortable place to sit than Devin’s beanbag, she’d been wiggling about like a worm on a hook. The crunch of beans had become so annoying that Cadel blocked it out, using his extremely efficient mental earplugs.

  But this sudden yell pierced the cone of silence he’d constructed for himself.

  ‘God, Lexi!’ he remonstrated. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack!’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ She thrust her computer at him. ‘I’ve got the key.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Wasn’t too hard,’ she crowed. ‘Guy’s an amateur.’

  Cadel ignored this veiled attack on his own competence.

  ‘If you’ve got the key,’ he said, ‘I can set up a decoding program. It wouldn’t take too long.’

  ‘Wouldn’t take too long to do it manually, either,’ Lexi rejoined, with a shrug. ‘It’s that basic.’

  Cadel grunted. He told himself that Lexi was entitled to feel self-satisfied, and that he shouldn’t take it personally. Instead, he should be glad that she was such an expert decoder.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, for all the world as if she wanted to rub it in. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, well. Maybe his emails will tell us something.’

  Cadel blinked. ‘You mean these are emails?’ he exclaimed, and Lexi looked confused.

  ‘I thought you knew that?’ she said.

  ‘I thought they could be.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Best thing we can do is find out,’ Cadel decided.

  So they did. By half past six, Lexi and Cadel had tweezered some two hundred email messages out of all the corrupted lines of computer code that had been rescued from Com’s dying laptop. These messages proved to be a mixed bunch. Some had been sent by members of what looked like a hackers’ club; Cadel recognised several tags from his own days as an active, uncontrolled hacker, before he’d decided that most of the phishers, spoofers and other online con artists weren’t really worth knowing. There were also a few ads and alerts in Com’s inbox, together with one or two cryptically worded questions from a former member of Cadel’s Infiltration class. (Cadel made a mental note to pass this information on to Saul as soon as possible, since the police hadn’t so far been able to locate many students of the Axis Institute.)

  A large number of the messages related to the fact that Com seemed to be a botmaster, controlling hundreds of personal computers all over the world. He had been collecting these machines by emailing naive users, who’d often emailed back. Saul was bound to be interested in this material, too, and Cadel filed it away for future reference. But he hunted in vain for any hint that Vee or Prosper had been in touch with Com – unless their input was disguised as something else. Perhaps the ads were fake ads, with messages hidden inside them. Perhaps Vee was pretending to be one of the gormless bots, or the sneaky hackers. It was impossible to say, without further investigation. And Cadel didn’t know if he had enough time for that.

  Only Dot had been communicating under her own name. For the most part her messages were unrevealing, concerned with inconsequential things like integer values or the price of computer cables. Sparse and succinct, these blunt little texts were clustered in three distinct timeframes, suggesting that she had never emailed Com when she was able to make contact with him by some other means. (In person, perhaps?) Twice, however, she had let her guard down. On one occasion she’d remarked that she was living ‘just a ten-minute walk from the nearest Borders bookshop’, thereby giving Cadel some fairly useful search parameters. And on the second occasion she had stupidly neglected to use an alias or codename when referring to Raimo Zapp the Third.

  Zapp fell into a honey trap, her message ran, set by a psycho Axis graduate who killed her twin sister. She made one attempt on P last year, and is trying again, using dumb associate to get to him. Zapp’s been warned, and has backed off. Question is: how did she find out about association in the first place? Hope you haven’t been chasing toxic blondes.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Cadel breathed. A psycho Axis graduate who had killed her twin sister? Only one person in the world fitted that description. ‘It’s Niobe.’

  ‘What?’ Lexi looked up; she had been poring over another piece of te
xt. ‘Have you got something?’

  ‘Niobe’s still around. I can’t believe it.’ Cadel noted that the email had been sent two months previously. ‘Unless she’s already dead,’ he added, in a brittle tone. ‘If Prosper caught up with her, he would have killed her. At least, he would have had someone else kill her. He normally doesn’t do it himself.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Lexi demanded. ‘Who’s Niobe?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ Cadel turned away from his laptop screen. ‘Niobe was in my class at the Axis Institute. She and her twin sister were supposed to be psychic. Niobe ended up fracturing her sister’s skull, and then blamed Prosper for what happened. She tried to kill him with a poisoned envelope, only she killed someone else by accident –’

  ‘Oh,’ Lexi interrupted. ‘You mean that prison guard business? I remember that.’

  ‘Well, the same girl’s been making a play for someone called Raimo Zapp the Third,’ Cadel went on. ‘And she’s done it to get close to Prosper.’

  ‘Raimo Zapp the Third?’ Lexi repeated, with an incredulous snort. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

  It was typical, Cadel thought, that Lexi should have fastened on the most minor detail of the whole scenario.

  ‘Are you listening?’ he growled. ‘I said that she was trying to get close to Prosper English. Through Raimo. Do you understand what that means?’

  ‘Of course I do! I’m not stupid.’ She glared at him. ‘It means you should be looking for Raimo Zapp the Third. Which shouldn’t be hard – I bet he’s the only Raimo Zapp in the entire universe.’

  But Cadel was shaking his head. ‘I don’t have to look for Raimo Zapp,’ he muttered. ‘I already know where he is.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Lexi sounded impressed, despite herself. ‘Then why don’t you go visit him?’

  ‘Because he’s in America,’ Cadel replied, just as Devin appeared in the doorway.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Cadel said goodbye to Lexi at eight o’clock. Four hours later he was still hunched over his laptop, while Devin snored away in a tangle of bedlinen. It wasn’t until half past three that Cadel finally began to flag – and by then he had done almost everything he needed to do.

  He had checked on Saul’s condition, not once but several times. He had mounted a full-scale search for Dr Vee, exploring every possible online avenue. He had scanned certain Los Angeles utility databases, to find out whether Raimo Zapp was still paying his Canoga Park water and power bills. And then, having secured Raimo’s email address from one of these databases, he had booked himself a ticket to the United States – after hacking into various airline and bank systems. I can’t help it, was his rationale. It’s an emergency. And I’ll pay them back later.

  His quest to locate Dr Vee had so far turned up nothing useful. But he wasn’t disheartened, because he felt very strongly that Raimo Zapp would lead him straight to Prosper English. As long as Raimo hadn’t moved from his old address (and it didn’t appear that he had), then Cadel felt confident about being able to trick the American into revealing Prosper’s whereabouts.

  All it required was a lot of barefaced lying, a forged passport, and a plane ticket to Los Angeles.

  Cadel already had the passport. Creating a false identity had been part of his coursework at the Axis Institute; his false-identity kit included a phoney birth certificate, a forged passport, and a complete, thoroughly tested disguise – all of which were packed into his old green bag. He intended to leave Australia in his old ‘Ariel’ disguise, though not before running some online checks. He wanted to make sure that the girl ‘Ariel’ wasn’t flagged as a person of interest in any official database. It was possible (though highly unlikely) that someone might have warned Australia’s Department of Immigration, or the US Customs and Border Protection Service, that Ariel was really Cadel.

  On the whole, however, Cadel thought that he would probably be safe. The police knew that he had disguised himself as a girl on several occasions, but they didn’t know about his false identity. And although this identity had been constructed at the Axis Institute, under the supervision of Cadel’s Fraud and Disguise teachers, there was no reason to think that Prosper had been alerted to Ariel’s existence. The forged passport had been one small project among many; what’s more, Cadel had been told to destroy the document as soon as he’d received a mark for it. But he’d been far too proud of his work to set it alight or stick it through a shredder. So he’d hidden it away, and now (as far as he could tell) no one else in the whole world was aware that he had it.

  Because his Fraud teacher, of course, was long dead.

  As he snuggled into Devin’s beanbag, Cadel reviewed the coming day’s schedule. His flight to Los Angeles would be leaving at 2:30 p.m. He would therefore have to be at the airport by one o’clock, at the latest. Before that, he would have to run his checks on Ariel, as well as modifying a particular Trojan Horse program that he’d developed at the Axis Institute. This program would then have to be loaded onto a USB drive – which he would have to borrow from Devin.

  But everything can be done before twelve, he concluded, as long as I wake up early enough. Devin had left one of his monitors switched on, so that its screen would provide a nightlight; in its blueish glow Cadel scanned the disarray that surrounded him: the empty cans, the knots of cable, the upended milk crates, the discarded clothes. Somewhere in that mess he’d seen a cardboard box full of USB drives – at least two dozen of them. Surely Devin would be able to spare one?

  Cadel’s own possessions were neatly stacked on the table. It wasn’t a big stack, but he was wondering about airline luggage restrictions when his eyelids began to flutter, and his head to droop. I’m so tired, he thought, before nodding off.

  Next thing he knew, there was a loud noise. A very loud noise.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he was dragged towards consciousness.

  ‘Hello?’ he muttered. Although his eyes were now open, he couldn’t see anything. The basement was pitch black. What on earth had happened to Devin’s computer screen?

  ‘What’s going on?’ That was Devin’s voice. Cadel recognised it, despite the fact that it sounded rough and groggy. He didn’t, however, recognise the loud noise. It was a kind of harsh, grinding roar, with an underlying rumble to it. An engine, perhaps? (Mechanical, certainly.) And there was a smell, too. An odd, swampy smell. The whole floor seemed to be vibrating.

  Cadel glanced at his digital watch, which had a glow-in-the-dark function. It was 7:32 a.m.

  ‘Cadel?’ said Devin, raising his voice above the chugging drone of machinery. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. I just woke up.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s that smell?’

  Cadel didn’t answer. Instead he heaved himself out of the beanbag, heading for the light switch near the elevator doors. He had to grope his way along a wall to do it.

  ‘Did you turn off my monitor?’ Devin loudly demanded. ‘I left that on for a reason, Cadel! I always leave it on, because I don’t have a bed lamp!’

  ‘I didn’t touch your monitor,’ Cadel rejoined. But he spoke too quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I didn’t touch your monitor.’ In the dark, Cadel tripped over a piece of Devin’s equipment. ‘Ow!’

  ‘Where’s my phone? Have you seen my phone? I left it just over here …’

  Cadel ignored Devin, who couldn’t seriously have been expecting a reply. (Since Cadel could hardly see his own hand in front of his face, his chances of spotting a tiny mobile phone were negligible.) Doggedly he picked himself up and continued to feel his way towards the elevator, until he finally encountered a light switch.

  With a sigh of relief he flicked it on.

  But nothing happened.

  ‘The power’s off!’ he cried, just as Devin found his phone. A tiny square of light suddenly became vi
sible; unfortunately, however, it wasn’t strong enough to illuminate much more than the fingers holding it.

  ‘Whatever that noise is, it’s coming from outside!’ Devin squawked. Cadel, meanwhile, had determined that the elevator wasn’t working. Though he’d found the ‘up’ button and pressed it repeatedly, there was no response.

  So he made for his laptop, clumsily sidling back along the wall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked Devin, who was up and about at last. Cadel could see the mobile phone’s luminous screen bobbing in midair, as Devin moved towards the fire exit. ‘Wait! Not yet! We can’t go out ’til we know what’s happening!’

  The response was a creak of hinges, faintly audible beneath the other, louder noise. Devin had obviously pulled open the fire door, oblivious to whatever threat might be lurking behind it. Half a dozen possibilities had already flitted through Cadel’s head: a ride-on mower, for example. Or a garbage truck parked outside the kitchen. Or a gang of bikies, gunning their engines in preparation for a race around the enormous yard.

  As long as it wasn’t a bulldozer. As long as no one had decided to demolish the building because it was unsafe.

  ‘I can’t open this trapdoor!’ Devin called, from the top of the stairs. At precisely the same moment, Cadel found his laptop’s ‘on’ button.

  ‘Come and help me!’ Devin cried.

  Cadel picked up his laptop. Its screen was already aglow, shedding enough light for him to make out everything that was blocking his path to the fire exit: Devin’s mattress, the bar fridge, the TV, the DVD player. But as Cadel threaded his way between all these obstacles, he happened to glance off to his right. And what he glimpsed was so shocking – so unbelievable – that for a few seconds he froze in his tracks, unable even to catch his breath.

  ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Devin.

  Cadel turned his laptop towards an air vent set high in the concrete wall. Some kind of tube or trough had been pushed through this vent. And from the end of the spout poured a stream of wet concrete, which clumped together heavily as it fell.