‘Where will we stay?’
‘There’s a pub not far from the estate with about eight or nine rooms. We’ve block-booked half a dozen of them for all of this week, with an option for next week as well, just in case the assessment takes longer than we expect. The museum will pay for your food and accommodation, of course, and even your mileage.’
‘I’m not sharing a room with anyone on the team.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to. There are only six of you, so you’ll have one room each.’
Reluctantly Angela bowed to the inevitable. It was only a week, after all, and maybe the house would be interesting. ‘When do I leave?’
Halliwell glanced at the wall clock above the door of his office. ‘The sooner the better. In fact, right now would be a good time.’ He passed a sheet of paper across the desk. ‘Here’s the address of the pub where you’re staying, and of the estate itself. I suggest you go to the house first of all to see how the land lies. Richard Mayhew is in overall charge of the team, but you’re all working as individuals, of course. And remember, if you do find a treasure map, I want to know about it.’
3
Jesse McLeod almost always arrived at work early, typically at about six in the morning, for two good reasons.
Firstly, it meant he could leave early in the afternoon and head for the beach with his surfboard, as long as the sun was shining. If it wasn’t, or if he had a lot to do, he’d climb back on his Harley, track over to his penthouse apartment just south of Carmel, right on the Californian coast, and spend the rest of the day working on one of his computers, using his administrator access to remotely monitor the company’s network. Of course, leaving early only worked if nobody had broken anything or otherwise screwed up the system, which didn’t happen quite as often these days because they’d ditched Vista, which only occasionally did what it was supposed to do, and reverted to XP, which was clunky but usually reliable. He was still evaluating Windows 7.
The second reason was that arriving at work two hours before anyone else allowed him to run his usual checks on the operating system, application software, back-up devices and the various linked databases — getting on with his basic network housekeeping, in other words — without any of the non-geeks interfering or asking the usual idiot questions.
McLeod had been the network manager, database designer and just about anything else to do with the NotJustGenetics Inc. — colloquially known as ‘NoJoGen’ — computer system for over ten years, pretty much since the day the company was formed. He’d done well out of it. Not as well as the guy who’d come up with the idea of genetic research and gene manipulation to attempt to cure or at least help combat specific diseases, but well enough. He had a six-figure salary, could dress just about however he liked, and turn up pretty much whenever he wanted, as long as the network and software were stable. And there were other bonuses as well.
McLeod pressed the code to open his office door, dumped his crash helmet on the table in the corner and peeled off his leather jacket. It was already getting hot outside, but he wore the leather for protection in case he crashed the hog, not for warmth. Under it he wore a faded CalTech T-shirt — unlike most people who affected such garments, he had actually been there — and tight-fitting black jeans that emphasized his height and lean build. They were cinched around his waist with a leather belt which was fastened with a solid silver buckle depicting a fist giving the finger. It was, in many ways, an accurate indication of his outlook on life.
Then he switched on his monitor. Like most commercial operations that relied on computers, which meant almost everybody these days, the NoJoGen system ran 24/7. Only the flat-panel monitors were shut down when the offices were closed.
McLeod sat down in his swivel chair, ran his fingers through his untidy mop of dark curly hair, opened up his master diagnostic program and started it running. He’d designed the software suite himself. It was a management program that executed a series of commercial diagnostic routines one after the other and displayed the results at the end, and it usually took no more than about ten minutes to run to completion. That gave him enough time to plug in his coffee machine and load up the first brew of the day — in McLeod’s opinion, a supply of decent coffee was almost as important to him as good diagnostic software.
Only when the system analysis results popped up on the screen — all showing green — and his first cup of java was sitting on the desk beside him, did he take a look at the search routines his machine had been running overnight. These weren’t normal internet searches. The wide-area search routines McLeod had put in place accessed private databases as well, many of them run by government agencies and commercial organizations, databases whose managers fondly believed were secure against hackers.
But Jesse McLeod wasn’t just any old hacker. He’d narrowly avoided a prison term at the age of fifteen when he’d wormed his way past three separate firewalls and numerous intruder detection systems to get inside a network at the Pentagon. He’d gained administrator access there, given himself a username and password, and used that network as a gateway that had allowed him to jump straight into another network based in Pennsylvania Avenue and operated by the White House. The reason he wasn’t prosecuted was probably largely due to embarrassment that a kid of his age had managed to outwit the best security consultants and computer experts in the American government and military.
He had been ordered to show these experts exactly how he’d managed to effect his intrusion, however, so that those loopholes could be closed, and he’d also been instructed to test all the Pentagon’s and the White House’s access points — under close supervision — to see if he could defeat those as well. He had, twice, which had resulted in four civilian administrators and three senior military officers losing their jobs within the next three weeks.
In the ten years since then, the FBI had watched Jesse McLeod very closely, but the threat of prison had frightened him, and after that episode he had become what was known as a ‘white hat hacker’. That meant he still trawled the internet, and still probed the sites he found, but if he worked his way into a system he announced the fact to the network administrator and suggested ways of closing the loopholes he’d exploited. He never copied data or did any damage inside the networks he cracked, and a handful of times he’d even been paid ‘consultancy fees’ by the target companies for his efforts.
At least, that was what the FBI believed. But like a lot of things the FBI believed, they were wrong. Jesse McLeod was constitutionally incapable of obeying the law, and that was one of the reasons why NoJoGen paid him such a large salary. The company needed access to the kind of data that was unavailable in the public domain — a less mealy-mouthed description of this activity would be industrial espionage — and relied on him to hack his way into whatever system held it, and then retrieve it.
But these days he was a lot more careful, and a lot more secretive. He had set up dozens of fake identities in China and Pakistan and the new states that had emerged following the break-up of the Soviet Union, places where he knew that American law enforcement would find it difficult, or even impossible, to track him, and used those as the apparent origin — the technical term was a ‘zombie server’ — for his probes. He’d even set up an account that purported to be located in North Korea — a country that offered no internet access at all to its population — just to see what the Fibbies would do about it. They hadn’t noticed.
And so, every night, while he slept peacefully in his penthouse, the sound of waves breaking on the shore below him, his untraceable electronic proxies trawled the web, probing systems and networks and looking for any references to whatever subjects the founder and majority shareholder of NoJoGen, John Johnson Donovan — known simply as ‘JJ’ — had asked him to locate.