Genius Squad

  Cadel found it hard to concentrate. He was restless and couldn't settle, making many trips to the kitchen and bathroom during the course of the morning. On one of these trips, he noticed something that made him do a double take. Frowning, he approached Hazel's computer—and crouched in front of it.

  Had he imagined that flash? Were his eyes playing tricks on him?

  Hazel had taken a phone break. He could hear her chatting to her sister in the kitchen. Her computer, meanwhile, had lapsed into "sleep" mode.

  Yet he could have sworn he'd seen the little light blink on her hard drive.

  For a while he squatted motionless, waiting for another hint. Another clue. It came just as Hazel appeared in the kitchen doorway: The light blinked again.

  "What is it, dear?" Hazel asked.

  "Oh—nothing." Cadel sprang to his feet. "I thought I saw a spider."

  In fact, he'd seen a different kind of bug. An invader. Something running on the system that shouldn't have been there. But he couldn't do much about it—not while Hazel was working. So he wandered back to his room, where he occupied himself with mental arithmetic until the moment of truth arrived. Lying on his bed, he heard Hazel enter Mace's room. She must have seen at once that the dirt-bike magazines were crawling with ants; there was a shriek, followed by a slapping noise that may have been the sound of Hazel hitting the magazines with a dirty sock or a pair of underpants. As Cadel had predicted, she then rushed back out to the laundry, where she grabbed a can of fly spray. The hiss of it was audible in Cadel's bedroom as Hazel covered most of Mace's belongings with a fine layer of insecticide.

  After that, she picked up the magazines and took them out of Mace's room, heading for the garden. Here she was probably planning to shake and swat the infested journals until every ant clinging to them had dropped into an empty flower bed. But she was halfway to the door when the phone rang—at which point she set her burden down on the hall table, so that she could pick up a nearby telephone receiver.

  Cadel, who was watching from behind his bedroom door, heaved a sigh of relief. His calculations so far seemed to be panning out.

  As expected, the caller was from Janan's school. Apparently Janan was throwing a tantrum because Hazel had not packed his chocolate bar. "But I did!" Hazel protested, all in vain. A nougat bar had been substituted for the chocolate one. Hazel would therefore have to replace the unwanted nougat variety with Janan's regular chocolate treat.

  It had happened once before, when Hazel herself had mixed up the packed lunches. This time, though not to blame, she was nevertheless forced to fix the problem. She had to rush off to Janan's school with a new chocolate bar before Janan hurt himself—or someone else. And in all the commotion, she forgot about the pile of magazines left on the hall table.

  Cadel had been counting on this memory lapse.

  Owing to the placement of the telephone, lamp, and address book, Mace's magazines had been dumped directly above a black plastic bin full of old paper and cardboard, destined for recycling. Cadel checked the relative positions of these two bundles with a measuring tape. He was satisfied with what he saw. Then he positioned himself in front of Hazel's computer, from which vantage point he could look down the hallway if he leaned sideways a little and turned his head.

  He was waiting for Leslie to return home from his early shift. Unless this happened while Hazel was out, the whole plan would be ruined. Nervously Cadel glanced at his watch. Absentmindedly he logged on to Hazel's e-mail address, one ear cocked for the noise of Leslie's car engine. For the moment, he had forgotten about the mysterious activity on his foster mother's hard drive. He was far too concerned about the success of his scheme.

  Cadel always made a habit of cleaning out the Donkins' electronic mailbox. He had been shocked—even appalled—to discover how much garbage had accumulated there before his arrival. For months, spam had been piling up among the meager trickle of personal messages, because neither Hazel nor Leslie knew how to filter or erase unwanted mail. It had been like walking into a house and finding that the entire building was piled high with rotten food and old newspapers. Cadel had never seen anything like it before.

  His offer to clean out the trash had been met with heartfelt gratitude. Hazel had even given him her password—apparently without a second thought. This, too, had appalled Cadel. No one knew any of his passwords, and nobody ever would. Not even Sonja.

  Running his eye down the short column of spam that had recently slipped through Hazel's filters, Cadel couldn't help noticing one new message whose tagline promised: "Win a computer!" He hesitated. The sender had a fairly innocuous address, and was probably harmless, but Cadel remembered the blinking light on the hard drive. Would it be wise to proceed cautiously? Perhaps. Perhaps not. He found it hard to believe that there was any connection, but all the same...

  Something wasn't right. He could feel it, instinctively. A submerged drag on the system.

  As if it was ever so slightly preoccupied.

  Cadel didn't trust this particular computer. Like Mace and Janan, it had been badly treated early on—exposed to all sorts of nasty, marauding behaviors—and the results were hard to fix. Cadel had done his best. He'd shaken out a lot of infections and updated a lot of programs. He'd changed passwords and plugged holes. But still he felt uneasy, wandering around behind a wall that had been breached so many times. He couldn't help feeling that he might have missed something; that something might still lurk in the shadows, waiting to pounce.

  That was why he so badly needed a new computer. That was why Mace deserved to be punished for ruining Cadel's precious monitor with lemonade.

  Fortunately, Leslie arrived home right on time. Cadel had just decided that the contents of a spam file were nothing that he couldn't handle; he was in the process of opening the new one when his foster father shuffled through the front door, tired and slightly damp. Leslie was a short man, but he had plenty of bulk. Though mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and middle-aged, he still carried enough muscle to intimidate a boy like Mace. None of Mace's "accidents" ever seemed to happen when Leslie was around.

  The trouble was that Leslie worked such long shifts. And was always so tired at the end of them.

  Cadel sat rigid, watching his foster father's every move. There was a thump as Leslie set down his plastic case. A clunk as his keys hit polished wood.

  "Cadel?" he said. "What are these magazines doing here?"

  "I dunno," Cadel replied.

  "Are they supposed to go out for recycling?"

  "I dunno."

  Leslie paused. He seemed to be thinking. Cadel knew how slow the man's thought processes could be after a nine-hour shift, and tried not to show his impatience. Instead he focused on the screen in front of him, surprised to see that the sales pitch he'd downloaded was for an unfamiliar, online puzzle site. An endless slab of text pleaded with him to sample its wares: Challenging riddles or secret symbols, wordgames or runes—don't shilly-shally about calling round! Our site tops incompetent competitor sites...

  The strange thing was that it didn't include a single website address.

  Suddenly Leslie picked up the pile of dirt-bike magazines, dumped them in the recycling bin, and lifted the bin from the floor. Then he lurched back outside with it, leaving Cadel almost light-headed with relief. So far, so good.

  Cadel scrolled down the rambling advertisement, trying to calm himself. Focus, he thought. Just focus. Why does this text feel so wrong?

  ...Every customer account receives discount specials...

  Moments later, Leslie returned. "Woof!" he said. "That rain's about to come down really hard." And he wiped his balding scalp with a handkerchief. "Where's Hazel? Her car's not here."

  "She's gone to school," Cadel replied, his attention suddenly snagged by the words on the screen.

  Hang on a minute, he thought. And he reached for a pen.

  ...So sample our offering today and download it...

  "Which school?" Leslie wanted to know.

 
"Uh—Janan's."

  Leslie sighed. "Okay," he said. "Well, I'll be in bed if she wants me."

  Cadel nodded, without really listening. He was scribbling down the first letter of every word in what was, he felt certain, a simple acrostic.

  Sure enough, he'd soon uncovered the secret message. It read: Crosswords, acrostics, diagnostics, enigmas, labyrinths, letter-locks, e-cards, tangrams, sotadics, ciphers, anagrams, target, codes, Hackenbush, unending puzzles. Click on mindbenders.com.

  And there, at last, was the address of the site. Cadel wondered what a "sotadic" might be. He was almost tempted to find out. But it would be most unwise to go poking around an unknown website before he had investigated the possibility of a new virus in Hazel's system. Such a virus would mean that her antivirus programs were malfunctioning—or too antiquated. And since Cadel was responsible for writing some of these programs, he found the idea of a breach very alarming indeed. Only an exceedingly nasty little germ could have slipped past his scans.

  Unless the virus had been lying low, disguised as something else?

  Cadel clicked his tongue and shook his head. As he closed the "Mindbenders" file, his glance strayed to the message he'd scrawled on one of Hazel's Post-it notes. Crosswords, acrostics, diagnostics, electronic labyrinths...

  C-a-d-e-l.

  There it was. A double acrostic. Another message hidden in the first. It leaped out at him quite suddenly, as if the letters themselves were glowing.

  Cadel-lets-catch-up-com.

  SIX

  The shock was immense.

  For a while Cadel sat motionless, hardly able to breathe. He couldn't believe his eyes. Cadelletscatchupcom. Was that a Web address? A dot-com site dedicated to catching up with him? Or was it—was it—?

  Feverishly, Cadel entered the message as an address, with a "www." in front of "Cadel" and a full stop inserted between the "up" and the "com." But there was no connection. The address didn't exist.

  Cadel-lets-catch-up-com. Cadel had once known a person named Com. He had been a student at the Axis Institute—a computer hacker. Could he have tracked Cadel down? Was that how the message should read: Cadel, let's catch up. Com.?

  Cadel gnawed at his fingernails, thinking hard. Com had been a very, very peculiar guy. Pudgy and pale, with shiny black hair cut in a straight line all around his head, Com had been more like a machine than a man. In fact, he'd barely been able to communicate with human beings at all, preferring the company of computers. On reflection, Cadel couldn't recall having heard him utter a single, recognizable word in any language—just grunts, squeaks, and hisses. And hardly any of these noises had been directed at Cadel, who was only a distant acquaintance.

  So why would Com want to catch up now?

  It was possible that the answer could be found at www.mindbenders.com. But Cadel wasn't sure that waltzing unprotected into Com's territory would be a very good idea. What if Com had laid an ambush of some kind? It would be much safer if Cadel found a back way in.

  He knew that his most promising lead was the e-mail itself. This probably would have been issued from a false address. Com might have attempted to disguise its origins. However, by working through the encoded route description hidden in front of the message, Cadel would be able to identify any invalid legs in its back trail.

  He was still engaged in this fiddly job when Hazel returned, bringing Janan with her. Cadel glanced at his watch.

  "We decided to come home early," said Hazel. "Didn't we, dear?" And she patted Janan's head.

  The six-year-old—whose dark eyes were bloodshot and whose sallow, skinny face was covered in scratches—wandered over to where Cadel was sitting.

  "Can I play, too?" he asked.

  "This isn't a game," Cadel replied shortly.

  "Can we play Colossus?"

  "No."

  Janan stuck out his bottom lip. Next thing, Cadel felt a hand on his shoulder.

  "Do you think you could swap your computer time with Janan today?" Hazel inquired. "His social worker's coming over at three, so you could get back on then."

  "But—"

  "Just for today. I'm sorry." She lowered her voice. "I think it might calm him down. Things have been a bit tough."

  Cadel toyed with the notion of revealing that her computer had been tampered with. After a moment's thought, however, he decided not to. If word got out that there was something wrong with Hazel's computer, he himself might wear the blame.

  So he grudgingly surrendered his seat, stomped back into his bedroom, and slammed the door. He was sick of being the one who always had to make allowances, just because he wasn't totally screwed-up or abysmally stupid. No one seemed to realize how much he needed a computer. To other people, computers were simply useful tools, or sources of entertainment. But to him, computer access was a human right. Especially now that someone was out there looking for him.

  He wondered if he should tell the police. It was possible that the encoded message actually came from Prosper English, who could be using Com's name to lure Cadel into a secret conversation. On the other hand, if the message was from Com, then Cadel was in luck. Because Com would be able to provide testimony about the Axis Institute.

  Cadel decided that, before calling the police, he would see if he could finish his trace. That would be a start, at least. He might be able to work out whether his old classmate had really sent the message, by identifying its ultimate source.

  At three o'clock, Janan's social worker arrived, shaking rain off her umbrella. She had some difficulty dragging Janan away from his game of Colossus, but finally she and Hazel coaxed the six-year-old into his bedroom with a chocolate bar, shutting the door behind them. Clearly, an important meeting had been scheduled.

  Leslie was still asleep. Mace had not returned home. After checking that Hazel hadn't brought the dirt-bike magazines back inside (she hadn't), Cadel settled down in front of her computer. He was just about to strike a key when something caught his eye.

  The hard drive had blinked its little light again.

  Damn, he thought. Damn, damn, damn.

  He knew that he had to be sensible. To start a trace before disinfecting the computer would expose him to all kinds of threat. No matter how keen he was to locate the source of Com's message, his first task was to ferret out any overlooked virus signatures, or other evidence of infiltration. He didn't want someone eavesdropping on his trace. Nor did he want to infect the computer that he might eventually track down.

  So Cadel started to run sweep checks. And when they turned up nothing, he began to pick through Hazel's programs byte by painstaking byte, searching for clues. At last he found what he was looking for. Someone had been rather ingenious, taking advantage of Hazel's online naïveté. As far as Cadel could make out, a really exceptional programmer had disguised an information probe as an overlarge and slightly deformed cookie from a homewares website. Hazel herself had invited it into her system by obediently carrying out the instructions that were given to her, stamping it "approved." And every time she uploaded her data-entry work, the cookie disgorged its latest cache of encrypted information (gleaned from the bowels of her hard drive) into a waiting chat-room drop box.

  Cadel frowned. It wasn't going to be easy, pinning down the user of this drop box. Even if he could take over the chat-room server, there was every chance that past messages received there hadn't been logged. And the user himself would no doubt have sought anonymity by employing many different computers, in different time zones. That, at least, would have been Cadel's tactic.

  He was just pondering his next move when Mace arrived home and kicked open the front door. Cadel heard him pounding down the hallway, yelling at the top of his voice.

  "Who did it?" Mace bawled. "Who did this to my magazines?!"

  Cadel jumped up. His foster brother was home earlier than usual. Leslie was still sleeping. Hazel was shut up in Janan's bedroom.

  So Cadel was in a very vulnerable position.

  With lightning speed, he calc
ulated his chances. If he took cover in his bedroom, there would be no escape route. If he ran out the back door, he would find himself in the pouring rain. Unless, perhaps, he hid under the house?

  But it was too late. Before he could exit the living room, Mace caught up with him.

  "You did it!" he shrieked, grabbing a handful of Cadel's hair. "I'm going to kill you!"

  "Ow, ow, stop—"

  "Thomas!" Suddenly Hazel was beside them. "Let go! Let go! "

  Cadel's eyes were awash with tears of pain. Nevertheless, he could see that he was lucky. Both of Mace's hands were occupied—one with his dripping magazines and one with a hank of hair. So he didn't have a free fist to punch with.

  "He ruined my magazines!" Mace cried. "Look what he did!"

  "I didn't—ow—"

  "He didn't! Thomas!"

  And then, all at once, Leslie's booming voice thundered in their ears.

  "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

  Mace froze. His grip relaxed slightly, allowing Cadel to break free. As he regained his balance, Cadel saw that his foster brother was crying. Tears were mingling with the raindrops on Mace's puffy cheeks.

  "Look—look what happened!" Mace sobbed. "My magazines ... they're all stuck together..."

  He clutched the soggy bundle to his chest, sniffing and wiping his nose. Across the room, Leslie seemed to deflate.

  "But they were put out for recycling," he protested. "Hazel? Weren't they put out for recycling?"

  "Oh no!" Hazel breathed. Her hands went up to her face. "Oh no, I-I forgot! Oh Thomas, I'm so sorry!"

  "You mean they weren't for the recycling?" asked Leslie.

  "I left them there by accident! They were covered in ants! I was going to shake them out in the garden, but then the school rang..." Hazel looked as if she was about to cry. "Oh Thomas, it was all my fault!"

  "And mine," said her husband heavily.

  "What can we do, dear? Can we dry them out with a hair dryer?"