“Do you want to go and find her?” I asked him. “I’ll manage on my own for a while.”
“In your dreams,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder.
That was a good sign, I thought.
“Do you want to go anyway?” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “She’ll come back if she wants to. I’m not going to go running after her. To tell you the truth, I don’t really care if she comes back or not.”
I cared. Luca was much more fun without her.
“Are you staying on after?” he said.
“If you mean am I waiting to listen to the concert, then, no, I’m not.”
“Are you going straight home?” he asked.
“Why?” I had intended going to see Sophie if it wasn’t too late.
“I was hoping for a lift. We came in Betsy’s car, and she’s probably gone home now without me. We were going to stay for the concert, but I don’t want to anymore.” He paused. “At least I’ve missed the little horrors at the electronics club.”
Was it really only a week since I had given the microcoder to Luca to take to the club? It seemed like a month.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll give you a lift, but you might need to get the train the last bit. I was hoping to go and see Sophie if we’re not too late.”
“Ned, it’s fine,” he said. “I’ll get the train home from here. It’s no problem.”
I tried to think of the stations on the line to High Wycombe.
“I could drop you at Beaconsfield,” I said. “That’s on my way.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “And it would take you ages to get to the station. I’ll go on the train from here. Honestly, it’s no problem.”
“OK,” I said, somewhat relieved. I would be pushed to get to the hospital for the end of the news anyway.
The last race of the evening was a five-furlong sprint for two-year-old maidens.“Maiden” didn’t imply the sex of the animal, there were male maidens too. A maiden was a horse that had yet to win a race. Many of these maidens had never even been on a racetrack before, let alone won a race on one. Only one horse in the field had good previous form, finishing second twice, on one occasion just a neck behind the blossoming two-year-old star of the year. Naturally, the horse, East Imperial, was a short-priced favorite when the betting opened.
“Don’t even think of disrupting the Internet tonight,” I said seriously to Luca.
He didn’t deny it but stood there looking at me with his jaw hanging open.
“You’ll catch flies like that,” I said.
He snapped his mouth shut.
“How did you know?” he said.
“It didn’t take rocket science,” I said. But, in truth, I hadn’t known for sure. It had been a guess. And, it seemed, the guess had been bang on target. “You are a wizard at electronics. And you and Larry have been up to all sorts of stuff. It seemed an obvious connection. Who else was in on it?”
“Only one or two others,” he said. “Norman Joyner was. He was the only other bookie. It’s only a bit of fun.”
My stomach didn’t think it was funny, and I bet Larry’s ribs didn’t either, not anymore.
“So were you going to do it again here tonight?” I asked him.
“That was the plan,” he said. “But Larry has the kit with him, and he didn’t make it.”
We both knew why he hadn’t.
“Was it this race?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course,” he said. “Red-hot favorite and all that.”
“But why?” I said. “Where’s the gain? Are you betting on it elsewhere?”
“No,” he replied. “That’s the beauty of it. There’s no trail for them to chase. No one does well out of it that has anything to do with us. It just produces a chance windfall for everyone who happens to back the favorite in a betting shop at the starting price. And there will be masses of those. It’s a ruse to make the big outfits lose a bit and also to give them a fit that someone else is playing them at their own game.”
“But it cost you money for the bets in the ring at Ascot to change the odds,” I said. “I saw the cash in my hand.” And I remembered clearly the man at Ascot who had bet a thousand pounds, two monkeys on a loser. The man in the open-neck white shirt and the fawn chinos.
“Not really,” he said. “A friend of Larry’s started the betting with a grand of readies. Then the same money went round and round, with Larry and me backing with Norman and him doing the same with us. The odds changed all over the ring, but not much cash actually changed hands with anyone else, and that which did was covered by a little wager on the favorite at home by Larry’s wife.”
Very organized, I thought.
“Was that also what you were up to at Stratford?” I said.
“Yeah, sort of,” he said. “But, I grant you, that was a bit silly. It was too obvious. We hadn’t really planned to do anything there, so we didn’t have the kit with us, but there were so few bookies and the weather was so bloody awful we decided there and then to have some fun just by changing the odds on the boards.”
“Well, don’t ever do it again,” I said. “If you are seriously interested in a partnership in the business, there’s no place for messing about with the prices. Not only would you quickly destroy our reputation, you could put our livelihoods in jeopardy. Do you understand?”
He looked like a scolded schoolboy. The truth was that he had not been malicious, just bored. He had thought of it all as a game, but I had the bruises to prove it wasn’t.
“I mean it,” I said. “Never again.”
“Oh all right,” he said, clearly fed up but accepting the inevitable.
East Imperial, the favorite, won the race easily and was returned at a starting price of eleven-to-ten on, which was about right.
Overall, Betsy apart, it had been a good night for us, and Luca and I packed up our stuff in good spirits. Normally the betting on the last race can be a little sparse, and the crowd usually disappears rapidly when it is over. However, on this occasion, the crowd built during the evening, and more so after the last as everyone jostled for a good spot to watch and listen to the band. Consequently, we had an audience as we packed up the trolley, and we had to force our way through the masses around the grandstand and out to the parking lot behind.
“Tell me about the equipment you use,” I said to Luca as we pulled the trolley down towards my car.
“What equipment?” he said innocently.
“You know what I mean. The kit you use to take down the Internet and the telephones.”
“The Internet’s easy,” he said, almost bragging. “It’s the phones that are more testing.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“You don’t actually make the Internet go down,” he said, “you just make the access to it work very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that it takes forever to do anything.”
“And how do you do that?” I asked him.
“I make the racetrack server extremely busy doing something else,” he said, smiling. “I use our computer Wi-Fi connection to give it a virus that causes it to chase round and round making useless calculations of prime numbers. That uses up all its RAM, its random-access memory, so leaves it no space to do what it should be doing. Then, when I want, I turn the virus program off and, hey, presto, the calculations stop, and the Internet access is back to its rightful speed.”
It sounded all too easy.
“And the phones?” I said.
“Simple, in principle,” he said. “Emit a mass of white noise-that’s a random radio signal-at the right frequency. It simply overwhelms the weaker signals from the telephone transmitters. Smothers them completely. Not very subtle, but effective over a smallish area like the betting ring. It’s basically the same system the army employs in Afghanistan to block mobile telephone transmissions being used to remotely set off bombs.”