‘Holy Priest,’ she said, on seeing Chung, ‘ask it if we will think it worthwhile to have been turfed out of our beds at three o’clock in the morning.’
‘You can afford to lose a bit of beauty sleep,’ Chung growled over the lip of his coffee cup.
‘Coming from you, Yat, that sounds suspiciously like a compliment.’
‘Yeah, well I’m tired,’ he said, and yawning, rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s these holograms. I can’t stand them. It’s like hallucinating. I prefer a proper screen myself.’
Jake drew up another stool and sat down next to him at the operator table. The bulk of the Lombroso computer was underneath their feet, with the information fed through the table legs and onto the projector. Closer to him now, she sensed his smell, which was none too good.
Chung caught the prickle in her nostrils and snorted derisively.
‘If I stink, it’s because I’ve been sitting here for the best part of three days.’
Jake decided that it was an opportune moment to smooth and flatter Chung.
‘And don’t think I haven’t appreciated it,’ she said. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked. I couldn’t have asked for more. Believe me, Yat, if you’ve got a lead which opens this case I’ll see the APC gets to hear about it.’
Chung’s narrow eyes became even narrower.
‘All right, all right,’ he chuckled. ‘I get the picture. No need to go over the top. To be honest, I don’t give a fuck what you tell anyone.’
But at the same time, Jake could see that he was pleased.
‘Please, Yat,’ she said, affecting a sort of girlishness. ‘I’m dying to know what you’ve found out.’ She hammered her fists on both knees and uttered a little squeal of excitement.
Chung smiled coolly and then stroked a keypad on the table.
‘I’ll try to keep it simple.’
‘Please.’
‘First of all, this was an outside job. When you log onto the system the main frame underneath this table records the transaction with a number and identifies which terminal was being used. Of course there are hundreds of such transactions every day, from any one of thirty-nine terminals in this building and the other four Lombroso facilities in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow.’ He pointed at the hologram in front of them. ‘This is one of today’s transactions: number 280213 — that’s the date; then the transaction number — 718393422; TRINITY — that’s yesterday’s password; and lastly 09 — that’s the terminal number. This one, as a matter of fact.
‘Now this was the laborious part: I programmed the computer to check back over all the system’s transactions for the last twelve months, to see if there were any made from an unspecified terminal. That is a terminal without an identifying number, and therefore outside any one of the five institute facilities. And what do you know? I found one, dated 221112.’
Jake nodded. ‘So you’re saying someone broke into the system on November 22nd last year.’
‘That’s right. Now this system is part of the ECDN, the European Community Data Network. It means that only someone with access to the ECDN could have broken into Lombroso. In other words, he could only have done it from any one of a dozen systems in the public sector. There’s no other way of doing it. ECDN is a private leased telecommunications line to which the public has no access.’
‘Then our suspect is quite probably a public sector employee.’
Chung nodded. ‘But here’s where he starts to get clever. The very fact that he was using a terminal outside the institute facilities was enough to trigger the system’s back-up security device. This is designed to stop the unauthorised person from going any further.’
‘Unauthorised?’ Jake frowned. ‘Didn’t he have an operator code and the day’s password?’
Chung pressed another key on the flat glass of the table, to reveal a list of transaction numbers. Jake could see one that was short of a couple of digits.
‘Yes, he did. The password he used was CHANDLER. But don’t ask me how he got it, I don’t know. Not yet anyway. No, he was unauthorised simply by virtue of his terminal lacking an identifying number on the system.’
Jake nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘The security device was a holographic of a three-headed dog.’
‘Cerberus,’ said Jake.
‘You know the program?’
‘No, but I know my classical literature.’
‘Yeah, well so did our burglar. That’s the trouble with these computer security people. They assume everyone is as ignorant as they are.’
‘Does that go for Doctor St Pierre as well?’
‘It goes especially for Doctor St Pierre,’ said Chung. ‘We had a lot of his kind in Hong Kong. Bloody stiffneck. Can only think down a straight line.’
‘I guess I’m to take it that our burglar managed to evade Cerberus, right?’
‘Evade?’ He grinned happily and quickly typed out a series of instructions.
The numbers disappeared from the air to be replaced by a lifesize graphic of a sleeping three-headed dog. From the look of the brute, Jake was glad it was asleep, hologram or not.
‘He drugged it,’ said Chung.
‘Drugged a computer-generated dog?’ Jake said incredulously. ‘How does one do that?’
‘Take too long to explain, but it’s a technique which goes under the generic name of Trojan Horse. There are lots of different sorts, but you get the general idea.’
‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, huh? Clever.’
Chung shook his head. ‘The really clever bit is still to come. You remember you questioned all the psychiatric counsellors? You asked if they might remember the codenames of some of the men who tested VMN-negative and who might have exhibited a greater amount of hostility to the program than others?’
‘Yes. There was a list. But it was just codenames. St Pierre said that the computer’s first decretal was to protect the confidentiality of their identities. He was adamant that the computer would not release their names and addresses.’
‘Even though the burglar managed to get it to do just that.’
Jake lit a cigarette. It was too early in the morning for anyone to concern themselves with a no-smoking ban. ‘I was going to get you to try and do the same thing when you’d finished tracking the breach,’ she said.
‘Then I’m already ahead of you,’ he said and then added, ‘Mind where you’re blowing that smoke. It interferes with the hologram.’
Jake held the cigarette behind her at arm’s length.
‘There is a separate list of all the codenames kept on another system which is not subject to Lombroso’s first decretal. Unfortunately it’s the codenames, and nothing else. Anyway, what I did was to take that list and use it to ask Lombroso a question.’
‘And that was?’
‘Well, you see, I kept thinking to myself, suppose it was my name in the Lombroso system files. Would I trust the system’s security? No way. So I’d want to try and erase my name and address pretty damn smartish. All I did was to confirm each name on my list of codenames as belonging to the primary file, in the suspicion that our man has already erased his identity.’
‘All right,’ Jake said expectantly.
‘One by one, that’s exactly what I did. And finally I found what I was looking for. Or didn’t find it, if you see what I mean. I typed in a codename which I knew for certain had been issued, and asked for a confirmation, only to be told that as far as the Lombroso system was concerned, no such codename existed.’ He paused for a moment, and then shrugged apologetically. ‘That’s when it happened.’
‘When what happened?’