‘Fucking logic bomb. Bastard left a booby trap which I triggered when I tried to confirm his codename.’
Jake frowned. ‘What the hell’s a logic bomb?’
‘It’s a fuck of a lot of money, that’s what it is. You see, it’s a program, with a delayed effect.’ He bit his lip. ‘With a delayed destructive effect.’
‘Oh Christ,’ breathed Jake. ‘You’re not telling me that this logic bomb, or whatever you call it, has trashed the whole system?’
‘Not exactly, no. I tried all my own special software. But by the time I found the right one and stopped the program replicating itself, one particular area of the system was badly damaged.’
‘Which particular area of the system?’
‘The VMN database.’
‘Shit.’
‘Not the whole thing. Just a percentage.’
‘How big a percentage?’
Chung shrugged. ‘Hard to say exactly. Maybe 30 to 40 per cent.’
‘What am I going to tell Gleitmann?’
‘It was bound to go off sooner or later,’ said Chung, with an uncomfortable sort of laugh. ‘The logic bomb was just sitting there, in the root memory, waiting for the trigger. Had it been anyone else who tripped it, the bomb would have trashed the whole disk. Lucky for them that I had the right software with me: a program I wrote myself, as a matter of fact. Sort of a vaccine if you like. It works against about 200 different types of virus.’ He nodded with some satisfaction. ‘Too right, lady. But for me the whole Lombroso Program would be forensic history. Think about that for a minute.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ he instructed her. ‘You know the date on which our burglar broke into the system. You know he must work in the public sector. You know he’s a smart boy where computers are concerned: maybe even got a record for other unauthorised system entries. You got his codename. You even got a counsellor who remembers him.’
‘Yes, just what was that codename?’
Chung consulted a sheet of paper. ‘Wittgenstein,’ he said. ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein.’ He pronounced the surname with the accent on the second syllable and shook his head, grimacing. ‘If they gave me a codename like that I wouldn’t be surprised if I wanted to kill a few people myself.’
Jake wondered if Chung could be anti-Semitic and looked forward to the possibility of reminding him that she herself was Jewish. Not that it meant all that much to her, but she felt it might be fun to accuse him of racism.
‘And what’s wrong with it?’ she asked.
Chung looked away, trying to hide his grin. He seemed about to say one thing but then apparently changed his mind, laughed and said another: ‘Bit of a bloody mouthful, that’s all.’
So that was it, she thought. He had never heard of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was embarrassed at his own ignorance. Not that she knew much about him herself, beyond a few basic items of biographical information of the kind that counts as good general knowledge. But she had a feeling that before this case was ended she was going to know a great deal more.
Is the classification of things into names always truly arbitrary? Or is there not some meaning to how something is named? While a name itself is a primitive sign and cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition, at the same time there are names which, when given, seem to be replete with mystical significance.
Names have power. The name of Jehovah, considered too sacred even to utter. Or Macbeth, never mentioned by superstitious, luvvy-duvvy theatre folk. At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. The name of the slough was Despond. Keats’s name was writ in water.
And some are written in blood.
Names have numerological significance, too. Readers of Tolstoy’s War and Peace will recall that Pierre Bezukhov, under the influence of his brother Freemasons, manages to turn the name of l’empereur Napoleon into numbers, the sum of which equals 666. The name of the Beast, or the number of his name. Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid.
Never ever tell anyone a baby’s Christian name until after it is christened, or the pixies may hear it and charm the child away. There are names to conjure with. Names that liveth for evermore. And the naming of cats is a difficult matter.
Some names must be blotted out of the book, and others cannot be cured. My name is Legion, for we are many.
I am become a name.
Tell me honestly, do you like your name? Are you not bored with it? As a child didn’t you hanker to be called something else, a name with more of a ring to it — a name with more dash, more spirit? You wondered how ever your dim-witted parents could have been so lacking in imagination as to have named you as they named you. To say nothing of the surname they, or at least one of them, inherited. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. But Philip Larkin (a good name) omits to mention in his poem, the most crucial aspect of that parental act of sabotage which is, of course, your name. It’s not just misery that man hands on to man, but a name. That’s what really fucks you up.
You wear your name like a hidden shirt. But once it is revealed to someone, it can never again be properly hidden. That person can never then forget that you are wearing it. Having explained to your friends that you are ‘x’ they will for ever after think of you in terms that may simply be expressed as ‘x’. It is a pure sign of you, of who, and why, and what you are and where you come from. The Sign of Four.
A name means an object. The object is its meaning. I can only speak about names. I cannot put them into words. But to live your whole life with a meaning that is not of your own choosing would seem to me to be quite unbearable.
‘My name is for my friends,’ says T.E. in the film Lawrence of Arabia. How right, how very right. Once given out, your name may be used against you. But there is power in the unspoken name, in The Man with No Name. The Outsider. L’Etranger. He rides into town, shoots a few people and then rides away again. Anonymous. The best name of all. If I could have taken my own name, if I did not now have my Lombroso-given name, I would take that name: Anonymous. Think of all the quotations, the poems, the stories that could now be attributed to you.
In truth, this is more of a tract than a story, more of a journal than a piece of prose. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomme, nomina nuda tenemus.
7
When Jake had finished making her report to the Assistant Police Commissioner, Gilmour chewed his finger absently for a few seconds before uttering a profound sigh.
‘Does Professor Gleitmann know about this yet?’ he said wearily.
‘Yes, sir.’
Gilmour’s bushy eyebrows moved in to ask a silent question.
‘He wasn’t very pleased, sir,’ said Jake.
‘I can imagine. But you’re satisfied that it wasn’t Sergeant Chung’s fault, this logic bomb?’
‘Wholly satisfied, sir. Chung’s boss from the Computer Crime Unit has been over to the Institute to investigate exactly what happened. He has already confirmed Sergeant Chung’s account.’
‘Good. The last thing we want is the Home Office trying to post the blame for this one through our door.’
Gilmour leaned back in his chair and swivelled around to stare out of the window of his New Scotland Yard office. They were only a kilometre away from the Tate Gallery, the site of the last Lombroso murder. Somewhere overhead could be heard the sound of a police helicopter as it constantly patrolled the rooftops around the Home Office and the Houses of Parliament, looking out for terrorists or lone crackpots. Jake knew that aboard it were cameras powerful enough to have photographed the comb in her hair and quite possibly the string on her tampon, not to mention the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment the helicopter carried. The temptation to use this equipment was obvious and sometimes the Police Airborne Surveillance teams went too far. The newspapers were still full of the political scandal that had been the result of one airborne team having recorded the compromising conversation of two homosexual Members of Parliament as they sat eating their sandwiches in Parliament Square.