The Genius Wars

  I’ve got to stay calm, he thought. I can’t get too upset, or I won’t be any good to anyone. And aloud he said, ‘If Vee hijacked that wheelchair, then he’s been watching me. And if he’s been doing that, then he’ll find out I’m at Judith’s place. But he won’t try anything if there’s a cybercrime team running in and out. He’s much too smart.’

  There was a long pause. Saul had turned into Judith’s street, and was cruising along at a gentle pace, scanning the dimly lit street numbers. His headlights picked out a parked car here, a letter box there. Most of the fences were big and solid, made of stone or steel or rendered brick.

  ‘So Vee’s your man, is he?’ the detective said at last, in a neutral tone. Cadel gave a nod.

  ‘Either Vee or someone just as good,’ he confirmed.

  ‘If he’s as smart as you say, what makes you think he’ll fall for a honey trap?’ Saul pulled into Judith’s driveway. ‘What makes you think he won’t get suspicious, and stay well clear?’

  ‘He might,’ Cadel had to concede. ‘But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a go. Because we have to get him. We have to. Otherwise he’ll try again.’ Cadel leaned forward, clutching the driver’s headrest. A rising sense of urgency – almost of panic – was making him shrill, so he took a few deep breaths to calm himself. ‘And we can’t keep living like this,’ he concluded. ‘Not any more. It’s got to stop.’

  Fiona clicked her tongue. She had caught the note of desperation in his voice, and understood why it was there. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she said, reaching around to press his hand. Beside her, Saul activated the garage remote. And as the wide, white, automated door in front of them lifted like a portcullis, he guided his car underneath it.

  ‘I’m so tired of the surveillance,’ Cadel went on. ‘I thought I was through with all that.’

  ‘I know,’ Fiona sympathised.

  ‘It won’t stop unless we catch Prosper. We’ll never be safe, otherwise.’ Cadel tried to clear away the lump that was blocking his throat. ‘It could be you next. Or Judith. Or Gazo,’ he quavered. ‘It could be anyone. Anyone who has anything to do with me.’

  ‘Shh.’ Fiona patted his white-knuckled fingers. ‘We still don’t know if this was an accident. And we won’t know until someone has a really good look at that wheelchair.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident.’ Cadel refused to be comforted. ‘It was Prosper.’

  ‘I don’t blame you for thinking that, after what you’ve been through,’ Fiona said earnestly. ‘But you mustn’t let Prosper dominate your life, Cadel.’

  At that precise moment, Saul killed the engine – and a sudden, dense silence enfolded them all. Though Judith’s garage had been designed to accommodate three cars, there were no other vehicles in sight: just a huge collection of junk. Cadel could see old paint tins and curtain rods, a stepladder, a leaf blower, a collection of plastic storage bins, a spool of cable, a broken chair, a golf bag and a whipper snipper. When Saul extinguished the headlights, this array of domestic debris remained clearly visible, thanks to Judith’s sensor-activated lighting system.

  ‘I’m not paranoid,’ Cadel declared, after a brief pause. ‘You think I’m overreacting –’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ Fiona turned in her seat to address him. ‘My concern is that you seem to feel responsible for all this. When you’re not.’

  ‘Of course I am!’ he spluttered. ‘I’m the target, aren’t I? And I’ve got a better chance of tracking down Prosper than anyone else has!’

  All of a sudden, Saul spoke up. ‘You’re probably right.’ He was staring at the exposed brick wall beyond the windscreen, his hands at rest on the steering wheel. ‘And I realise how hard it is for you to trust other people, since it’s not the way you were raised. Apart from anything else, other people screw up, sometimes. Because they aren’t as clever as you are.’ Saul’s gaze shifted to the rear-view mirror. ‘All the same, you can’t win this on your own. Prosper has his cronies; you’re gonna need your own team. You can see that, can’t you? Without help, you’ll be fighting a losing battle.’

  There was an unassailable logic to this argument, which Cadel couldn’t challenge. He didn’t even try. Instead he slumped back against his seat, gathering up his computer bag as he did so. All at once he felt completely drained.

  Saul pushed open the driver’s door.

  ‘Maybe I’d better check this place out, first,’ he proposed. ‘You should probably stay with the car.’

  Cadel sighed.

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he said. ‘If Prosper was using hired guns, he wouldn’t have bothered to hijack Sonja’s wheelchair.’

  Saul, however, was adamant. So while Cadel and Fiona waited, the detective carried out a careful inspection of Judith’s luxurious abode, from the cable-strewn attic space to the wine-storage cabinet under the stairs. It was a good fifteen minutes before Cadel was given an all-clear.

  In the interim, he eavesdropped on a call that Fiona made to the hospital – where Judith had nothing new to report on Sonja’s condition.

  It wasn’t until half-past nine that Cadel and Fiona finally left the garage, emerging into Judith’s enormous, gleaming foyer. Though it boasted a lavish chandelier, this room – like the rest of the house – was almost completely empty; while Judith had spent a great deal on electrical equipment, she wasn’t much interested in things like tables or bookshelves. Marooned on vast expanses of parquet and limestone, her few sticks of furniture looked small and cowed, like squatters in a museum.

  Only Sonja’s ground-floor room was fully furnished. It had originally been designed as a study, and was as well supplied with bookshelves as it was poorly provided with built-in hanging space. Therefore, as well as her special bed, her chest of drawers, her desk, her bedside tables, and her elegant ash-veneer entertainment console (supporting a widescreen TV), Sonja’s room was crammed with several large wardrobes. It had also been decorated with a colourful assortment of posters, eye-puzzles, photographs, patchwork cushions and mathematical-print lampshades.

  Her number-shaped candles, lined up along the windowsill, caught Cadel’s eye as he passed her bedroom. And they affected him so painfully that he had to close the door before proceeding.

  He couldn’t afford to break down – not yet.

  Beyond the former library was an open-plan dining area. Next came the kitchen, beside which was tucked the cramped and windowless box (part pantry, part home office) that Judith used as a panic room. The walls of this room were lined with cupboards. A toilet had been concealed in one cupboard; the other was stocked with a sleeping bag, a first-aid kit, a toolbox, a torch, a microwave oven, a set of cutlery and some plastic dishes. All of this stuff had come with the house, along with the emergency food supply – which Judith had been raiding for a couple of years. Only the tinned food was left, and most of that was past its use-by date.

  A single wheeled typist’s chair sat in front of a built-in desk, flanked on both sides by stacked shelves of technology.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to stay up all night, patrolling the exits,’ Cadel remarked, as he settled in front of The Wife. He was speaking to Saul, who had dragged a kitchen stool into the panic room, and was perched on top of it. ‘Because you don’t have to. If there’s an attack, it’ll come through the Internet. Not through a smashed window.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Saul replied cryptically.

  ‘I doubt that Gazo will be much good to us, either,’ Cadel continued, tapping out codes and passwords. Numbers unrolled across the screen in front of him. Panels blinked on and off. Layer by layer, he worked down into the core of Judith’s network, while he toyed with the idea of tweaking the collision resistance in a cryptographic hash function. Would Vee be tempted to launch a length extension attack? ‘Gazo could fell an army at fifty paces,’ he muttered, ‘but that’s not much good if we’re up against a hacker in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Hong Kong?’ Saul echoed.

  Cadel shrugged.

  ‘Somewhere that’s not
Sydney,’ he amended. ‘Somewhere that’s a long way from here.’ And then he saw it.

  There. Right there, in the back trace.

  ‘That might be true,’ Saul was saying. ‘But until we’ve established that you need protective custody –’ All at once he stopped, having caught sight of Cadel’s expression. ‘What’s up? Cadel?’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Somebody was in here.’ Cadel couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Somebody got past my firewalls!’

  ‘Cadel.’ Saul rose. ‘Leave it. Don’t touch it.’

  ‘This is crazy!’ Cadel cried, ignoring him. ‘How could –? Unless Judith’s to blame.’

  ‘Cadel,’ Saul repeated. He grabbed Cadel’s shoulder, but was shaken off.

  So he moved towards the power supply.

  ‘Don’t!’ Cadel barked. ‘Just let me do this!’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘Yes, it is. He can’t electrocute me. I have to see what’s happened.’ Peering at the screen, Cadel scowled as he began to check Judith’s programs. All of them had been hijacked by a piece of malware designed to reroute commands and disable passwords. It had rummaged through bitmaps and subroutines. It had seized control of the operating system.

  It had turned on the CCTV cameras – and the microphones, as well.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Cadel groaned.

  ‘What?’ By now Saul was gripping the back of Cadel’s chair. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s been eavesdropping.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whoever built this house wanted a sound-recording facility,’ Cadel explained, frantically jabbing at the keyboard. Click-click. Click-click-click-click-click. ‘Judith told me about it. The original owners were paranoid. They liked to know what their cleaners were saying, and whether they were using the phone or the TV … stuff like that.’ He paused for a moment, glancing around at Saul. ‘Judith had the mikes disabled, but they’re on, now. And so are the cameras.’

  The detective hissed. Then he straightened, and yelled ‘Fiona!’ before addressing Cadel in a voice that was barely audible.

  ‘Can you switch them off again?’

  ‘You bet,’ Cadel replied. ‘I’m pulling the plug.’

  ‘Fiona!’

  ‘I might as well, since he’s going to find out I’ve been in here anyway.’ Grimly Cadel began the process of diagnosis and deletion – without backing up. He simply didn’t have the time. ‘I reckon it’s Vee,’ he muttered. ‘Because he’s using a chatroom bot. And I recognise the privilege escalation exploit.’ This fact in itself was infuriating. It meant that all his good work had been overthrown by Judith’s carelessness. ‘I mean, how can I possibly patch something like this when Judith comes along afterwards and stuffs it up?’ he burst out. ‘I told her not to use the same damn password on e-commerce sites!’

  ‘What is it?’ All at once Fiona appeared, framed in the doorway. She was clutching a toothbrush. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘This system’s infested,’ Cadel replied. And Saul said, ‘We have to leave.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Cadel didn’t take his eyes off the data unfolding in front of him. ‘There’s no need to panic. I just disconnected, so we’re not exposed any more. I don’t think.’ (Though that would have to be confirmed to his full satisfaction.) ‘You should call Sid and Steve,’ he added. ‘Tell them there’s an IRC bot that Vee might be accessing any minute. Tell them it’s fresh.’

  ‘Has someone hacked into Judith’s computer?’ Fiona inquired, as Saul picked up the desk-phone.

  Cadel nodded, without looking at her. He knew that Vee’s malware had a tendency to recreate itself when threatened; stopping this process would require some pretty nifty footwork. ‘It’s Vee,’ he revealed, absentmindedly. ‘He’s been in here already.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Which makes a lot of sense,’ Cadel went on, still working away. ‘I couldn’t figure out what might have triggered that wheelchair attack. But if Judith came home, and said something to Sonja about turning the cameras off because I’d told her to …’ Instead of finishing the sentence, he shook his head.

  By now Saul was talking to one of the cybercrime team. As he relayed Cadel’s message, Fiona ducked out of the room. Cadel barely registered her absence, because he had noticed something very interesting. Vee’s malware had been designed to take over a whole range of functions, including some that Judith’s house didn’t have. There was an application for hijacking a networked fountain pump, and a floor-washing iRobot. You could even gain access to a wireless security device specifically tailored to protect firearms. It was as if Vee’s program had been created to infiltrate a super-smart home full of bizarre, breakthrough gadgets.

  Cadel wondered if the malware’s designer was simply being cautious. Perhaps Vee had devised a one-size-fits-all program, with a protocol for every possible contingency. But no: that couldn’t be it. Because no provision had been included for commandeering a Bluetooth-enabled microwave oven – even though there was a facility for hacking into a Bluetooth-enabled washing machine.

  It was clear to Cadel that Vee’s malware had been engineered for another house: an actual, state-of-the-art, computerised house with guns in it. What’s more, the original voltage specifications had been adjusted, from 110 to 240 volts.

  Though Cadel couldn’t be absolutely certain, he was pretty sure that the program had been written for a house in America.

  ‘Okay. They’re on that,’ Saul announced, hanging up. At the same instant, his mobile trilled; he grimaced apologetically before answering it.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  Then Fiona stuck her head into the room.

  ‘I’ve repacked the bags,’ she reported. When Saul turned away, nursing his phone, she mouthed ‘Who’s that?’ at Cadel.

  Cadel shrugged. He was far too busy deleting the web browser cache to worry about Saul’s phone conversation. Besides, he was interested in the American ghost-house. Surely there couldn’t be many homes, even in the US, with a networked, toilet-cleaning iRobot? Or a programmable, sensor-driven showerhead? Or a Bluetooth-enabled washing machine? Cadel knew that, given enough time, he could probably even calculate how many rooms were in this mystery house.

  If Vee had been hacking into another residence, and Cadel could identify it, then maybe – just maybe – it would be possible to work out what Prosper English was up to.

  ‘Uh-huh. Yep. Okay. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, it is. Thanks for that. I really appreciate it.’ Saul’s rumbling commentary was simply background noise for Cadel, who ignored it until he heard the name ‘Richard’. Then he spun around as the detective, nodding gravely, listened to whatever recommendations were being fired at him from the other end of the line.

  ‘We’re onto it. What? Oh, sure. No problem,’ Saul mumbled. ‘Thanks again. You’ve been a big help. Okay. Yeah. Bye.’

  And he broke the connection.

  ‘Well?’ Fiona and Cadel both chorused. Cadel added, ‘Was that Richard Buckland?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Saul looked up. He was frowning. ‘I rang him earlier. From the hospital.’

  ‘Why?’ said Fiona. But it wasn’t her husband who answered.

  ‘To ask him about that Bluetooth project.’ Cadel had forgotten all about it. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he spoke to the fellow who’s been monitoring transmissions,’ Saul replied.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there was a signal outside the computer labs today.’ Saul hesitated, his solemn gaze settling on Cadel like something made of granite. Clearly, the news from Richard Buckland wasn’t going to be good. ‘A transmission was logged in at 2:38 p.m.,’ the detective finally revealed, with obvious reluctance. Then, after another brief pause, he concluded, ‘And it came from your phone, Cadel.’

  EIGHT

  Cadel spent the night under his own roof, after all. But he didn’t sleep much.

  He had cra
wled into bed at half past eleven, after two full hours of feverish activity. The cybercrime team had arrived at Judith’s house while he was still cleaning up her databanks; Cadel had found himself being consulted about passwords and protocols until Saul had finally dragged him out of the place. Back at home, the detective had made a series of flustered phone calls while Cadel was kept busy answering questions, checking window-locks, and helping Fiona to unpack their bags.

  Only later, when he was alone in the dark, with nothing to distract him, did Cadel at last begin to feel the full, jarring impact of what had happened that day.

  Sonja was in hospital. With a head injury.

  And it was all his fault.

  Lying on his back, staring into the shadows, he couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face. His brain kept hitting some kind of internal rewind button; the same scene replayed itself, over and over again. First came the accelerating wheelchair. Then the look on her face. Then the cry. Then the crash. Then the blood …

  Cadel covered his eyes.

  It wasn’t your fault. Fiona had told him this repeatedly. But Cadel knew that he was to blame. Sonja had ended up in hospital because she was his friend. And Prosper English had almost certainly put her there.

  Cadel seemed to hear Prosper’s voice echoing around his head: I’ll happily shoot Sonja if you give me the least bit of trouble. It was a chilling memory – and an instructive one. Had Prosper tried to kill Sonja because Cadel was giving him trouble? Was that it? Or had Sonja simply been the means to an end?

  Perhaps she hadn’t been Prosper’s prime target. Tossing and turning, Cadel forced himself to confront the truth. Chances were good that the attack had been aimed at him. Prosper wants to hurt me, that’s for sure, he decided. But is he trying to do it through Sonja? Or am I the one he wants to kill?

  The threat was certainly there. It had always been there. How many times had Prosper placed a gun to Cadel’s head, in the past? Twice? Three times? Yet the trigger had never been pulled. Always, some kind of warped, possessive, unstable attachment had stayed Prosper’s hand. No matter how much he might have deplored his weakness, he had been incapable of harming his own son.