The Trojan Dog (10 page)

A large man with a bottle of claret approached Ivan demanding loudly, ‘Cheshire or Garfield?'

Ivan shoved his cat's head off his face with the back of his hand and ignored the offered wine, replying rudely, ‘Nothing so boring,
mate
.'

He spotted a pride of lions in a corner by the fireplace, handling a champagne bottle with great care. The big cats, some with manes, greeted him with raised paws.

A little later I heard him declaiming to a bald man, ‘VR systems eat MIPs for breakfast.' The man looked puzzled, but nodded his head with the shiny regularity of a metronome.

Another man was vaguely familiar to me behind a Roman centurion's helmet that hid most of his face. He held out his hand to shake mine, tipping his visor back with his other hand. With a start of surprise, I recognised Lionel Bailey.

‘Oh,' I said. ‘You're just the person I wanted to see.' Plunging on, I told him I'd met Tony Trapani, and that he seemed a likeable sort of kid, and I wondered what the trouble was.

‘I know that girl,' Bailey said with a scowl, his visor slipping back over his eyes. ‘Trapani's sister. Smart kid. They both are. Pity.' He shook his head, his helmet rattling alarmingly.

I was nervous and unsure of my ground. I hadn't bargained on having to talk to Bailey without being able to see his face. I took a deep breath and said, ‘I'm sure it can be sorted out.'

Bailey hissed through his visor, ‘There is a
ring
. A student racket. Don't know if Trapani's at the centre of it, but he's definitely involved.'

‘What exactly did they do?'

‘Believe me, there's no doubt of it! I'm not responsible for the messes these kids get themselves into, and I thank God for that!'

‘But what's Tony done?' I persisted.

‘Computer security's non-existent on campus!' Bailey shouted. I realised too late that he was drunk. ‘Police don't want to know! Even if they did, they haven't got the skills or the resources! Trapani's a miserable little fish who happened to get himself sucked in!'

I was conscious of people staring at us, my grasp on the situation slipping right away.

‘I'll tell you what I have got!' Bailey was yelling. ‘I've got over four hundred students, most of whom have the sense to stay out of trouble, thank Christ! This time I've caught the ringleaders, and I'm giving them the mother of all frights!'

He swung around, performing a complicated manoeuvre with his spear, and called out, ‘Ivan Dimitrich! Silicon jockey of the old school! How are you, you mangy feline!'

Ivan hadn't been anywhere near me when I'd started talking to Bailey, but when I turned round he was just behind us, far too close for Bailey to need to shout.

Startled, I said, ‘I didn't realise you two knew each other.'

Peter came running up, wanting to know where the toilet was.

Ivan offered to take him, while Bailey clasped my hand and pulled me closer. He pushed his helmet back again and shoved his red face right up next to mine, shouting, ‘Caught the little turds red-handed!'

‘Excuse me?' I moved back, wrenching my hand from his grip.

‘Goners! Hoist by their own petards!'

I resisted the impulse to take out my handkerchief and wipe my face.

Bailey thumped his spear on the floor. I noticed that it was made out of an old broom handle. He probably loved the chance to dress up and bang things on the floor.

‘Found them logged on in my name! Hoist by their sweet petards, I'm telling you!'

Defeated, I backed away, saying, ‘I think I'd better check up on my son.'

I found Ivan in the kitchen. A woman in a long white dress had pushed him up against the fridge and was lecturing him in a hissing voice.

‘I hate computers. Horrible soulless things!'

‘Ivan,' I said, pulling him by the arm.

‘Just a minute, Sandy. Your washing machine and your stove, do you hate them too?' Ivan asked the woman in a voice that was dangerously polite. ‘Your fridge?' He reached behind him and calmly patted the one that was holding him up, or preventing his escape.

A small girl in a fairy costume asked if I could pour her a glass of water.

‘That's different,' I heard the woman in white say. ‘People glorify computers.'

When I turned around again, Ivan had his cat skin pushed right to the back of his head. ‘I'll tell you one thing computers are better at than humans,' he said, his politeness turning acid. ‘It's a small thing, but it's important. Once you tell a computer something, it never forgets.'

With a look of disgust, the woman turned her back on him, emptying the remains of a bottle of Jim Beam into her wine glass.

‘Ivan. Did you know Tony Trapani and his friends are up before a university tribunal?'

Beneath a mass of cat hair and his own, Ivan's eyes were blank. I moved him out of the kitchen to a corridor where we were alone except for a man in a crisp new trench coat, felt hat and dark glasses, waiting with apparent nonchalance outside the bathroom door.

‘Go back in there and talk to Bailey,' I said. ‘Man to man. I'm sure you haven't forgotten how. How could you let me front up to him like that without telling me you knew him?'

‘I can explain that.'

I pushed Ivan in the middle of the back. ‘Just go!'

Ivan's cat's head gave a lurch. I watched him walk up to Bailey and begin talking to him. Bailey did a bit more spear thumping then turned his back on Ivan, who was immediately waylaid by a tipsy lion.

The party was spoilt for me. I went into the bedroom to get my coat. As I bent to pick it up from underneath the pile, there was a loud rip and a flash of cold air across my backside. I clasped my hands there and felt torn taffeta, my underwear gaping through it.

I stood in the doorway and looked around for Peter. He was talking excitedly in a circle of his friends. They were getting ready to announce the prizes. I couldn't see Bailey anywhere. Maybe he'd passed out, or maybe the woman in the white dress had got him. Ivan was on his own behind a group of children. I could edge my way towards him. Probably no-one would notice the rip in my pants. Most of the kids were squashed together on the floor, their costumes blending together too, Cinderella into Batman, a clutch of Ninja Turtles.

I caught Ivan's attention and waved him over to me.

In the hallway, Peter giggled at the sight of me and cried, ‘Mum! Y'll havta mend it!'

. . .

As a reward for not complaining about missing out on supper, I gave Peter four chocolate biscuits as soon as we got home. He shoved them into his mouth two at a time while I helped him with his boots.

When Peter was finally in bed, I asked Ivan what he'd managed to get out of Bailey.

‘It's no big deal,' Ivan said.

‘Well, he obviously wants to expel them, so it is for them. And he was talking about some sort of student racket. What did he tell you about that?'

‘The guy was off his face.'

‘How well do you know him?'

‘Well enough to keep my distance.'

Having my costume rip had made me feel dirty. I wanted to have a shower and put on clean pyjamas. I wanted Ivan to go home, but more than that I wanted him to tell me why he'd let me walk into a trap.

‘I keep thinking of Peter needing help and not knowing how to ask for it,' I said.

‘You can't be everybody's fairy godmother. And Tony asked his sister.'

Ivan's cat skin was draped over the back of the sofa. Away from the party lights it looked mangy and moth-eaten. Actually, it had looked pretty mangy at the party too. Its tabby greys and browns were dull, and the fur had thinned in spots to nothing but dry skin. Once Ivan had shed it, along with his coat and boots, he paid no attention to it.

‘Bailey should've just locked Tony and his mates out,' Ivan said. ‘They're
kids
for Christ's sake! Instead of which he dances round like Nellie Melba with ants in her knickers. He was like that when I worked for him.'

‘You used to work for him?'

Ivan nodded and said he'd worked in Bailey's department the first year he'd come back to Canberra. They'd disliked each other intensely from day one, and Bailey had had Ivan replaced as soon as he could.

‘You should have told me all of this before.'

‘I know. It was dumb. I'm sorry.'

I accepted Ivan's apology, but I felt uneasy.

Stories were somehow skewed, off-centre, in the way Ivan told them, passed them on. And the stories he became part of had a habit of turning on their sides. After that party, the original version of Peter and the Wolf, the one I'd known as a child, came back to surprise me, a small nervous hiatus between one heartbeat and the next. It reminded me how far the three of us, Ivan, Peter and myself, had come and what, on the night of the party, marked a turning point.

Stealing Passwords

Felix Wenborn summoned me to his office first thing Monday morning.

When I knocked and walked in, he looked up at me and barked, ‘Why wasn't I informed that you were working this weekend?'

I sat down. I was beginning to get used to Felix.

‘Someone's been using my computer?' I tried for a light tone.

‘And eaten it all up. Ha ha,' said Felix. ‘Very funny.'

Someone had logged on to my computer on Saturday night, he told me, using my password. The log-in was there, as clear as a fingerprint to a police detective.

‘It wasn't me,' I said. ‘Someone must have pinched my password. I haven't got a modem at home. I've got no way of dialling in. As a matter of fact I've only recently bought a home computer.'

Felix's face shrank and tightened in on itself. His golden curls became a helmet, his anger another skin pressing on my own.

‘What's this?' I pointed to two sets of numbers, separated by a colon, in the top right-hand corner of the monitor.

‘The date.'

‘And this?' I pointed again, hoping he wouldn't notice that my finger was shaking.

‘Time of log-in.' Felix's eyes had the fixed look of a dog on a scent.

‘21:38,' I read. I turned to face Felix, breathing deeply with relief. ‘Our hacker's finally outsmarted himself. I was kicking up my heels at a fancy-dress party on Saturday night and I've got about a hundred ­witnesses to prove it.'

I'd only been using my current password for three weeks. Felix ­obviously thought I was sloppy, but I hadn't written it down, and no-one else knew it.

Why would anyone bother with my password? I asked myself once I'd got away from Felix's office. What was there on my computer that could possibly be of interest to a hacker? Lists of interviews about home-based work? But wait. My records of payments to interviewers—what if they'd been tampered with?

Glad for once that I kept a paper copy of every single thing, I unlocked my filing cabinet and took out my printed records. I opened the right computer file, found the list and compared it with them. After about ten minutes, I came across a difference.

I could scarcely believe it when I saw it. I felt as though I'd gone to sleep and woken up a bad actress in a worse movie. There was a new address and record of payment on the computer file. It wasn't on my hard copy. I read it half-a-dozen times before convincing myself that it was really there. I kept staring at the screen, bug-eyed, expecting it to disappear.

That morning I'd planned to transfer the file to Admin. The ­procedure was that they sent a disk to Finance, who then authorised and paid the cheques.

I went back to Felix and explained to him what I thought had ­happened. Felix didn't believe me, and I despaired of ever getting through to him. But at last, after going over and over the same few facts I was certain of, he seemed to come around. It was a Melbourne address. We checked the street name. It did not exist.

I was leaving Felix's office when he called me back. ‘Sandra?' he said in a different voice, ‘I think I'm getting somewhere and then—'

Felix's usually pink cheeks looked greyish white, and there were premature dark pouches underneath his eyes.

‘Can't you—' I began, but he interrupted, ‘I'd never thought about it. No that's not right. You
have
to think about it. You have principles, ­procedures, mechanisms. But not this. I'd never thought about what happens when the whole damn thing goes haywire.'

‘Isn't there someone who can advise you? Someone you can go to?'

Felix gave me a pitying look. ‘The Director of Information Technology is also the head of Internal Security.' He laughed. ‘It's not even in small print.'

I glanced up through the window. A storm was ripping the last dead leaves off the oak trees in Northbourne Avenue. I hadn't even noticed it was raining.

‘You know,' Felix said. ‘I envy them. Semyonov. Harmer. Harmer collects his pay packet every fortnight, does just what he's required to do and not one whit more.'

This didn't strike me as an accurate description of Guy, though in his technical capacity it might well be true. This was apparently what Felix meant, but surely Felix recognised, as I did, that Guy was ambitious, that he was looking far beyond his present job. More than once I'd come upon Guy telling Ivan that they both needed to get out of DIR before it collapsed around their ears.

I'd forgotten about Tony Trapani, but I remembered later that morning when I ran into Dianne, smoking in the corridor.

‘Puffing Billy,' I said. ‘You'll set off the alarm.'

Di took a last drag on her cigarette, squashed the butt and aimed it inaccurately at a bin.

‘I didn't have much luck with Bailey,' I said. ‘He's a real pig. Why didn't you tell me Tony had actually been caught?'

‘I'm sure you did your best, Sandra.' Dianne narrowed her eyes and started walking quickly towards the lifts. I followed her.

‘Did you know Tony has to appear before a university tribunal?'

Dianne pressed the lift button hard with a long, purple nail.

I persisted. ‘What else has he done?'

Dianne glanced at me over her shoulder. She looked as though she couldn't decide whether or not to make a run for it. ‘What the bloody hell is wrong with this lift?'

‘Maybe it broke down.'

‘Stuff it. I'm walking.'

Dianne hurried to the fire stairs, but her spiked heels made it easy for me to keep up with her.

‘You must've known it was a waste of time for me to talk to Bailey.'

‘Well, you offered, Sandra.' Dianne looked at me and smiled. ‘It was nice of you to offer.'

‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?' she asked after a moment.

‘No. But I've a son who doesn't always tell the truth.'

Dianne pushed open the heavy door and began her descent, but after she'd gone about a dozen steps, she stopped and turned around to face me. I must have somehow been expecting this, because I braked as well and didn't hurtle into her. ‘What did you tell Felix Wenborn about me?' she demanded.

‘Nothing.'

‘Then why's the little shit put me through the wringer?'

‘You're not the only one.'

In the dim closeness of the stairwell, Dianne's stove-black dress, with its russet shadows of age around the armpits, was dull and somehow menacing.

‘Felix was downstairs talking to that reporter from the
Canberra Times
.'

‘Which reporter?'

‘I was behind that red drinks thing, waiting for my cappuccino. You know what it's like when you meet someone unexpectedly. You say hi and chat for a coupla seconds and keep going. These two weren't like that. Wenborn didn't even pretend to look surprised.'

Dianne took out her cigarettes and lit one. She seemed to have ­forgotten that she was in a hurry to get away from me. ‘Felix had his jogging gear on,' she said.

‘And?'

‘Pissant wasn't jogging, he was standing still. Sandra, let's just front him with it and see what he says. We've been told not to talk to the press. That includes him.'

‘How do you know it was a reporter?'

Dianne inhaled a lungful of smoke, and turned her head self-consciously to blow it out. ‘That woman who broke the story about Rae—I saw her picture in the paper. It looked like her. Wenborn's the only one with total access. He often works late, he's here on his own. Well? Are you game to front the little prick or not?'

This was meant to goad me further, but it didn't. It wasn't just that I felt differently about Felix after the things he'd said to me. That morning Dianne's voice had a sound like a struck bell, a hard ring of warning. But I was sick of her and her brother. I was sick of myself. All I wanted was to go home, eat junk food, and watch the midday soaps on television.

. . .

I spent my lunch hour in the library, comparing statistics on clerical outwork. At five to two I grabbed a mushy tuna sandwich from the bistro. I was beginning to hate the atmosphere in the travel centre, the hard, shadowless red and blue vinyl, the constant background noise of TV and loudspeakers, the restless, somehow purposeless milling and jostling of travellers.

And there was something else now, a strong undertow of fear, such as those weary or bland-faced passengers might feel about a bus overturning, a plane falling out of the sky. I didn't know who to trust, who to talk to. I didn't have a plan.

I mulled over what Dianne had said; or, more importantly, what she'd refused to say. It had a kind of rebellious finality about it. I felt sad and irritated at the same time. I didn't have the stomach to pester her with questions, and I had no confidence in her answers. Dianne might be a decade younger than I was, but she was tougher than I'd ever be. I supposed that in time I might respect her for that.

She'd never been committed to the outwork project as far as I could see, or to helping outworkers get a fairer deal. When the Opposition leader was interviewed, he'd said things he could only have learnt from inside DIR. Was it too far-fetched to suspect Dianne? But why would she want to get Rae and me into trouble? Nothing added up. Could Di's motive be money? Could somebody be paying her to do it?

When I got back to my office, there was a message telling me Jim Wilcox, our division head, wanted to see me.

Wilcox was one of our department's six First Assistant Secretaries. I'd never spoken to him personally, but I remembered the lecture he'd given us after the story about Rae and Access Computing first appeared.

Wilcox showed me in and asked me to sit down, his plump white face opening in greeting like a fresh bread roll. He said he understood I'd been having some problems with my computer files, and I told him what had happened, leaving out any speculation about whether I was being framed, and for what purpose.

Wilcox warned me to be careful. ‘We can't afford any more ­damaging publicity. And I mean
absolutely cannot
. Is that clear?'

I said it was.

Wilcox carried his weight precisely, envelopes of white flesh neatly contained by shirt collar and cuffs. One day I'd seen him in the corridor staring uncomprehendingly after Felix, who was togged up in his jolly red shorts and T-shirt on his way out for a run.

As if to soften his warning a little, Wilcox asked me a few questions about the outwork report.

‘We'll get it finished on time,' I told him.

‘How close are you?' Wilcox's eyes flickered to his watch and back.

‘Writing-up stage. All we need is the go-ahead to finish on our own.'

‘That shouldn't be a problem. I can sign it off.'

The phone rang and Wilcox turned to it, one hand raised to dismiss me.

I took the stairs to give me time to think. I'd been terrified Wilcox was going to tell me they were scrapping my report. I was damned if I was going to let some crook set me up and get away with it. I made up my mind to talk to Rae Evans, if she'd let me. If the thieves, or hackers, or whoever they were, had planned to frame me in some way, in order to damage DIR's reputation, or for some other reason, then the least I could do was find out what their game was, and hope to stay half a jump ahead.

. . .

Ivan was sitting in front of my computer. He glanced up at me with a grim expression.

‘Boy Wonder asked me to take a squiz. See if there was anything, you know, fishy,' Ivan growled. ‘Whenever you typed in your password, this little filly nabbed it.'

‘What filly? Grabbed what?'

The program Ivan had found in my computer copied my name and password into a file, and told me INCORRECT LOG-IN. TRY AGAIN. Then it disappeared. Thinking I'd mistyped my password, I had another try. But in the process my password had been stolen.

‘I don't remember being told my password was incorrect.'

‘Don't worry, Sands. Your PC's just a way in.'

‘Great,' I said. ‘That makes me feel terrific.'

Ivan said that programs like the one he'd found were called Trojan Horses. He told me about a case in the United States where a group of feminist hackers had used one to steal confidential military data using cheesecake pictures as a lure. While the men ogled, a hidden program was busy copying files.

‘What happened to them?' I asked, frowning at Ivan, wondering if this was his way of trying to cheer me up.

‘Still in jail, so far as I know,' Ivan said, his big hands tying an ­imaginary knot and pulling it. ‘One thing about the Yanks, they get convictions.'