CHAPTER 7 SEPTEMBER                                              ‘Once and for all Jack Thornley, I am not playing a part in your stupid games.’          Alison spoke softly through clenched teeth. There was a pause between each word.          ‘Ok. Ok’ Jack held up his hands as though submitting to a bank robbery. ‘I give in. Say no more about it.’          ‘You're damned right we'll say no more about it.’ She lifted a soapy hand out of the sink and pointed with her whole arm at the kitchen door. ‘One more word about tapes or chips or secret passages and I am walking out of that door.’          ‘Cross my heart,’ said Jack. She had turned back to the sink. He came up behind her and put his arms round her waist. She flounced her hair and caught him a crack on the nose with the back of her head.          ‘Ouch!’          ‘Serves you right you smarmy weasel.’          She tipped the teapot into the vegetable strainer and banged it down on the draining board.          Jack rubbed his nose and lifted the local evening paper.          ‘So what's it to be tonight then - pictures?’          ‘I'm going to wash my hair.’          He dropped the newspaper on to a chair and brought a pile of dirty crockery over from the table to where Alison was washing up.          ‘You're still angry then.’ He lifted some food scraps from the top plate of the pile and dropped it into the pedal-bin. ‘It wasn't a big deal you know. Just a switch of tapes for a few minutes.’          Alison with both hands in the sink shut her eyes and dropped her head as though waiting in submission for an axe to fall on her neck.          Jack went on, ‘I would have given you all the right codes to recognise the boards and you would only have needed to do the switch and press a button and then repeat the operation a few seconds later. And it was only a test. One way or another we would have known whether it was really possible to put a secret passage into a chip.’          Alison opened her eye again and sighed deeply. Then she took her hands out of the water and dried them. Without a word she went over to the kitchen door and removed her jacket from the hook, put it on, opened the door and went out. A second later he heard the outside door slam.          *      *      *      *      *          Allan steadied the tray on the glide-rail with one hand and tried to tuck his shirt tail into his waist-band with the other. He caught sight of his own reflection in a glass display case. Hair awry. He patted it ineffectually with the spare hand.          ‘Sorry.’          The man behind him was trying to get past. Allan gripped his tray in both hands and made his way hesitantly towards the table.          It was now or never.          ‘Can I join you?’          Jenny was at the table. Alison was with her. They sat facing each other, deep in conversation. Alison pulled a chair back for him. Jenny smiled. It was a nice smile but not a very interested smile. He sat down and arranged his plate.          ‘Would you pass the salt please?’          Alison handed him the salt cellar without looking at him. She said to Jenny, ‘You know I don't think he should have done that. It was rude of him to butt in.’          Allan's knife and fork paused in mid air, then slowly and with ears burning, he detached a piece of meat.          Jenny said. ‘He's like that. It's just his way. He doesn't realise he's being rude.’          Allan cut more meat.          Alison said ‘No girl would put up with a man who behaved like that.’          Jenny said, ‘She would if she loved him.’          His hand shook. He went on cutting.          ‘More fool her.’          He drew his knife through the lettuce several times.          ‘So what do you think will happen next?’ said Jenny.          Alison said ‘Well, we'll see what happens in tonight's episode.’          Jenny turned to him. ‘Do you watch `Neighbours' Allan?’          Alison looked at Allan's plate. ‘Do you always cut your food up like that? It looks like mince. Would you like help with your spoon and pusher?’          Jenny said suddenly, ‘Why don't you ask Allan to speak to Jack?’ Alison looked dubious but she didn't say anything.          Jenny turned to Allan. ‘Alison's having trouble with Jack. He keeps asking her to help him with some silly hacking thing he wants to do and he won't take *No* for an answer. Do you think you could tell him to stop it?’          ‘I think it would need someone with a crowbar to get sense into his head,’ said Alison.          Jenny said, ‘He might listen to you Allan.’          ‘I'll try.’          *      *      *      *      *          Later that evening, in his digs, he lay in bed looking at the keystoned blocks of light projected by the window panes on to the dark ceiling and thought about Jenny. A lost cause. The conversation had gone all wrong.          Holidays. She flew on package tours to Benedorm. He hitch-hiked to Chamonix. She said where was that? What was the night life like? His most exciting night at Chamonix had been spent in a bivouac-bag suspended from a steel peg on the West Face of the Dru, thousands of feet above the surface of the Mer de Glace.          Music. She liked James Last and Richard Clayderman!          Films. She liked - thingamy and whatsit - names he had never heard of. She went to the pictures by car and he couldn't even drive.          But she was nice. She was bloody lovely. What malicious Cupid had arrowed him with desire for a woman so nice but so ... so ... disappointingly normal?          The promise to speak to Jack had been a mistake too. He tried it when they were having a pizza together at Alfonso's. He had known as he started to speak that it was a bad move. Jack shovelled in another forkful of pasta, stabbed his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger and grinned horribly, showing lots of teeth, his eyes enlarged to wet moons by the lenses. Allan had made his day.          What was it with people like Jack? Their sense of right and wrong switched itself off when it came to *systems*. Hooked on being bloody smart-Alexs. To them computer files were not personal property, they were were a challenge - coconuts in a fairground stall sitting there just waiting to be knocked off.          Anyway. What the hell? Climbing and computing defined the axis of his life and currently he was not getting enough of either, not real climbing and not real computing. Withdrawal symptoms. Time to pull his finger out. A woman would appear from somewhere, though just at that moment he couldn't see from where exactly.          *      *      *      *      *          He bought a bike. There was a sports centre on the outskirts of the town, an uncompromisingly ugly building of pebble-dashed concrete halfway up a narrow country road which was used by council garbage lorries on their way to a landfill site. The sports centre had a climbing wall and that solved the problem of keeping in shape for the weekends. Perhaps, he thought, he would also find a suitable female there.          What he did find was a troop of boy scouts. They were all over the surface of the climbing wall, weaving a network of multicoloured climbing ropes. It looked like a garish tartan on the loom. The scout master strode up and down shouting encouragement and checking rope-handling technique. Afterwards he gave Allan a ticking off for climbing without protection and showing his boys a bad example. ‘We come here every Thursday,’ he added. ‘Would you like to give me a hand?’          ‘Aye. Maybe. If I'm here.’                   *      *      *      *      *          They were in Rosa's office. She said, ‘I got this out of stores for you.’ She reached behind her desk and brought up a cream and brown metal-bound suitcase. She laid it on the desk-top, flicked the catches and lifted the lid. It was a portable microcomputer. ‘Every research worker is entitled to one of these on a more or less permanent loan,’ she said, ‘I thought you might find it useful.’ Her eyes opened wide and her eyebrows lifted high and twitched. He whistled and ran his hand over it. An MCI machine of course, but more raw power than the machine which had been shared by everyone at his old university department.          ‘And you can probably make use of this,’ she waved a floppy disc. She switched the machine on. ‘It runs on batteries as well as mains power. Look.’ When the operating system had booted she slipped the disc in and showed him how it worked. ‘I've got the same machine at home,’ she said.          The software did logical transformations. Type an expression and the name of the operation you wanted and hey-presto the transformed expression was displayed. No more writing out expressions by hand. No more transcription mistakes, no dropped indices or primes overlooked. Just point it in the right direction and press the trigger. ZAP! A Kalashnikov instead of a bow-and-arrow.          Rosa said, ‘You have to bring it back every six months for a service but otherwise there is no restriction on use. I thought you might like to dabble with that idea we discussed. In your own time of course. Here are some of my ideas.’ She handed him a brown envelop with more floppy discs.          That's how it started. In the evenings they both worked away at their respective keyboards and in the morning they exchanged the brown envelopes furtively, like pornographers, bundling the contraband with legitimate correspondence. During the working day Allan had the greatest difficulty in wrenching his thoughts away from the project and focusing his attention on to the work he was supposed to do and Rosa seemed to be affected the same way. She left the day to day running of the department to others. She came in later in the mornings and looked sleepy all day but supremely happy. The others commented on it. What's happened to her? I think she's got a lover. Rosa? Never! Well how do you explain the far away smile. She doesn't care about this place anymore.          She sat at her desk writing in her small neat script and when anyone came in to her office the page was always quickly buried under others.          I tell you she's writing to her lover. I don't blame her. Maurice is a pain in the arse.          Allan tried to organise his time the way he had done when exams were looming. In the early evening he went to the sports centre. Once per week he had supper with Jack at Alphonso's Pizza Parlour in the High Street, talked shop and argued about the ethics of hacking.          After supper at his digs he would settle down to the micro. Often he sat up half the night trying to meet the schedule dictated by Rosa's fertile imagination. Her brain fizzed like soda water. At one point he did three nights in a row and felt he was beginning to hallucinate. His weekends in the mountains more or less stopped. Ian phoned occasionally and told him what he was missing.          *      *      *      *      *          The assembly line. Silence except for the hum of machinery and the puffing and wheezing of the robots.          Alison Crawford was thinking colours. She had decided on black. Bright colours did not suit her skin. A one-piece swim-suit rather than a bikini. It would make her look slimmer. She had seen the very thing on a display model in the window of the big department store which she passed every evening. It had a little bit of red trimming along the top edge and had a daring plunge of the neckline which made her tingle with a mixture of apprehension and excitement.          She lifted the next board from the batch in her ‘in-bin’ trolley and did the required eye-ball check. She could do the work on auto-pilot while much of her mind was free to roam on more interesting topics. The board with its array of black components and gold connections slotted smoothly into the rack like a book between book-ends. She pressed it home with a firm click. The other boards followed until she had exhausted the batch. Next she keyed in the serial number of the batch on to her console, called up the display of test procedures and selected one on a small touch pad. While the computer program read the stored number of each board and probed the innards with a pattern of instructions, her mind wandered back to the holiday she had planned along with Jenny. Jenny of course would wear her white bikini. She had such a good figure with no worries about slimness and white went so well with her honey-blonde hair. Together on the beach at Ibiza they would swivel more than a few heads. Eat your heart out Jack Thornley.          The printer began to chatter as it spewed test results. She tore off the printout and scanned them. All clear. She removed the boards one by one from the rack, placed them on her out-bin trolley, initialled the control chart and clipped the test results to it.          Next batch.          ‘Psst’          She wondered whether she could afford the towelling beach coat which went with the one-piece suit in the window.          ‘Psst’          She looked up. Jack was leaning over the partition of her work-place cell. For a moment she just looked at him blankly unable to believe he would have the gall. Then she returned to her work trying to concentrate staring at the next board without seeing it, slotting it into the rack. Next board. A voice inside her was shouting ‘go away’ over and over again. She was looking at the codes, punching in numbers. She looked up.          ‘I need your help.’          She looked at him but not at him. The printer began to chatter. Ignore him! Pull the boards out of the rack. Put them in the out-bin. Sign the control chart.          Next batch. Look at the board. Ignore him! Look at it!          ‘I'm in trouble Alison. I need your help.’          Slot it in to the rack. And the next. Select the codes. What code? What code? She looked at him. He had a small piece of paper in his hand which he dropped over the partition on to her bench.          ‘That's the number of a board. Fail it. You must or I'm for the high jump.’          ‘Start jumping,’ she growled.          Next board. She remembered with a shock that she had signed the control chart of the previous batch without checking the test results.          ‘Put this one in its place. When it fails put the original one back in its right place.’          He had a board in his hand now. Where had that come from? He lowered his arm over the partition and put it on the bench in front of her, then turned and walked away. It lay there like an accusation.          Next batch - No! Finish off the previous one. Pull the boards. Check the results. Load the out-bin. Then she reached up to the level above and checked belatedly the results of the previous batch but one. Ok! Thank goodness! But the board was still there and the slip of paper with the board number.          Jack was no longer in sight but she could see Peter Humble coming down the assembly line pushing a miniature train of in/out-bins before him, having a word with each operative as he passed. She lifted the scrap of paper. The batch and board numbers were both there. It was in the next batch. She lifted the first one out of the in-bin. Not that one. Check it. Check it! She had almost placed it in the rack without scanning it for obvious physical defects especially on the pin connections. Slot it in. Next board. Not that one either. Peter Humble was one cell closer. Jack you bastard! Great holiday Jenny! My ex-boy friend? He got the sack because of me. Now he can't get a job anywhere. Next board. Not that one either. Slot it in. Next board. That was the one!          Alison took the board in her right hand and Jack's board in her left. She looked up the line. Peter Humble was still three cells away and chatting to Jill Watt. He was collecting her out-bin, still chatting as he moved away to the next cell. Alison closed her eyes for a moment and then slotted Jack's board into the rack. The original board she placed on a shelf under her bench by her knees. Punch in the batch number. Select the codes. Press to start. Wait while the electronics did their job. Wait with hands clasped in her lap while Peter Humble came to the cell next to hers. Wait while he chatted to Petra Lambert about some TV programme.          The board would fail the batch, of course, but how could she swap the original one back into the batch with Peter standing next to her? The printer was chattering.          ‘See you Petra.’          Peter was alongside her cell. Delivering a fresh in-bin, holding out the control chart for her to sign. She initialled it.          ‘Did you see 'That's Life' last night?’          Alison shook her head.          ‘My niece was on it. She was interviewed by Esther Rantzen.’          Alison smiled at him while wondering if she could chat to him and get him to wheel away the out-bin before she unloaded the faulty batch. Then she could do then swap when he was gone.          Peter said, ‘That batch finished? I'll just take it too.’          Alison tore off the printout and scanned it for the error messages and then realised with a shock that there were none. With Peter watching she removed each board, placed them in the out-bin and initialled the control chart. He wheeled the bin with its shelved layers of batches away. And Jack's substitute board was still in the batch. The real one was beside her right knee on a shelf beside her handbag. And there had been no errors in the printout. The board had passed unrecognised. Alison sat back in her chair and wiped her hands over her face pressing her finger tips into her eye sockets. You wait Jack Thornley. You bastard. I'll get even yet. *      *      *      *      *          Jack opened the door with a smoking sauce-pan in one hand. It was black acrid smoke and when he took the lid off it belched. He lead the way back into the kitchen where he placed the smoking pot in the sink. On a shelf close by were two other blackened objects which had once been saucepans. Allan poked the contents of one with a finger.          ‘Hmm. That looks interesting - black meringue. So what was it you wanted to talk about?’          ‘Plan B,’ said Jack. ‘There's a fish and chipper round the corner.’                   They took their carry-outs into the park where the swing chains dangled. Some enterprising child had tied an old tyre on to the end of one of them with a piece of plastic coated clothes rope so Jack insisted on having a swing before joining Allan on the bench nearby and tucking in to his chicken supper.          ‘So what's the matter?’          ‘Nothing,’ said Jack and put another chip in his mouth.          ‘You seemed anxious enough in the car park this evening. Is it about Tommy Harkness's files? Here they are.’ He pulled the floppy disc out of his pocket. ‘It is just a program - no secret messages or diaries or political jookery-pokery. Just a program like the others.’          ‘Is it really like the others?’          ‘I won't know that until I've decoded it will I?’          ‘So what's stopping you?’          ‘It's not very important to me Jack. Is that all it's about then. Do you want to take the file yourself?’          He offered it but Jack shook his head. Allan looked at him with a level gaze, drew in a deep breath and then let it out again. He turn his attention back to his chicken supper.          ‘It's nothing - really,’ said Jack again. ‘Well. It's just something funny that happened the other day.’          ‘Funny peculiar?’          ‘Aye.’          Allan was determined not to make it easy for him. Not to rise to the bait. Not to break the silence. They sat munching. The street was wet and the sodium lights were repeated upside down the length of the street. The trees dripped. Jack popped the last chip into his mouth screwed up the packaging and dropped it into the little bin beside him.          ‘You remember that idea I had. The one about putting a security by-pass into a chip.’ He took a sip of coke from his can. ‘Well. Well it sort of worked.’          Allan tried not to react but the last sentence was uttered as he was drinking from a can of orange juice. It went down the wrong way and he spluttered. Jack slapped him on the back.          ‘Sorry,’ said Jack. ‘I didn't mean to startle you.’          ‘I don't want to hear this Jack.’          ‘Yes you do. It's fascinating.’ He said the word slowly, drawing out and separating the syllables. ‘You're all burned up about proving programs correct and here am I telling you that no matter how good your programs are, it is possible to slide round any security protection you care to devise.’          Allan said nothing but Jack was determined to get an answer. ‘Don't you think that's fascinating?’          ‘In principle yes.’          ‘Ok. Lets talk in principle. In principle the idea sort of works.’          ‘And how, in principle, do you know that?’          ‘Because, in principle, I did it.’          ‘You spiked a chip.’          ‘Yes.’          ‘How?’          ‘What do you mean how?’          ‘How did you, in principle, do the trick.’          ‘I modified one of the programs which customizes a communications chip so that when you type my name instead of a password it does not check the password at all.’          ‘Your name! You used your own name!’          ‘Yes. 'jackthornley' all one word, all in lower case. It goes straight through the security protection like a dose of castor oil - in principle.’          ‘Jesus! You used your own name! And where is this wonder chip.’          ‘Ah now. That is the really funny part.’          ‘Do tell - in principle.’          ‘I don't know. That's the laugh. It's out there.’          ‘Where is out there?’          ‘Out in the world. On a board made by MCI, in a computer somewhere. It may not even be an MCI computer. It could be any machine made by anyone who uses MCI boards.’          ‘You mean really?’          ‘Yes really - in principle of course.’          ‘How did you get it there?’          ‘I didn't actually. Alison did.’          ‘What!’          ‘Alison did. She didn't know what she was doing exactly. You see I made up the chip. Then I nicked a board and swapped my chip for the one that was already there. Then I told Alison that one of the boards in her in-bin had been modified by me and please would she stop it going on down the assembly line. I gave her my board and told her to swap it. But you see the one she took out was ok. It was the one I gave her that was spiked and so she really put the spiked board into the assembly line.’          ‘You're a bastard Jack!’          ‘I know. But listen. The really really funny bit is this. I thought that the testing program would find the bad chip and throw it out. The idea was to see what error messages it would print. Just to see you understand. I was testing their security.’          ‘Doing them a good turn I suppose - in principle.’          ‘Yes - in principle. But you see it didn't.’          ‘Didn't what?’          ‘It didn't detect the spiked chip. And the board went on down the assembly line and now it's God knows where.’          Allan was speechless. He gasped and then lowered his forehead on to his hands with elbows propped on his knees.          ‘Have you got no conscience at all Jack? Doesn't it worry you at all? Your telling me that somewhere there is a computer that thinks 'jackthornley' is its best friend and that if you type your name to it it will let you through its protection mechanisms. It could be in a bank or a government security database and you've built a secret passage straight through into its innermost secrets. You could write yourself a cheque for a million pounds or get yourself promoted to be the head of MI5.’          ‘Yes. Well. Yes it does worry me a bit.’          ‘Only a bit? Which bit?’          ‘The bit that says I don't know where the bloody computer is.’          ‘Oh for God's sake!’          Allan screwed up the packaging of his fish supper and made as though to hit Jack with it. Then he tamely shied it at the litter bin, and missed.          ‘Now look what you've done,’ said Jack. He giggled and wagged a finger in mock censure. ‘Destroying the environment.’ He picked up the bundle and placed it in the bin with exaggerated care. They sat side by side staring at the dangling chains.          ‘That's where you'll end up Jack,’ said Alan pointing. ‘Hanging in chains.’          ‘You don't see it do you? You don't see the really funny thing about it.’          ‘I'm not laughing - much,’ said Allan.          ‘The thing is,’ said Jack. ‘WHY didn't it find the fault in the bloody chip?’          They stared some more at the seatless swing. Allan shivered. A fine drizzle was falling again, but still they sat. Down Fetterburn road at a distant corner a neon sign had gone wrong and was flashing the message          ‘King sized ....gers’.          ‘Your local Celtic supporters won't like that,’ Jack said pointing.          Jack was right. That was the really funny peculiar thing. The implications were ... He couldn't express it properly. 'important' was too tame a word. If Jack's chip had not been trapped there was nothing to say that all of the chips were not spiked.          ‘How could it be checked?’ said Jack.          ‘In principle,’ he checked himself. ‘I mean, you could check the testing program itself. It may just be a bug. The proper check may never have been programmed into it. But it could be that the checks have been overridden by a modification. It should be possible to check that.’          ‘That's the cock-up versus conspiracy theory again,’ said Jack. ‘How exactly could it be checked?’          ‘It could be put through a dis-assembler to get it into a form which is readable. Then it would just be a case of going though it carefully line by line and working out what it was supposed to be doing.’          ‘I thought that's what you would say. That's what you said could be done with those files we found in Tommy Harkness's directory, isn't it?’          Allan nodded but didn't take his eyes of the neon sign.          ‘Here.’          He looked round. Jack was offering him a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was the size and shape of a paperback book.          ‘What's that?’ The hair on the back of his neck began to tingle. He knew what it was but he didn't want to believe it.          ‘Here,’ said Jack again, and dropped the package on to Allan's lap. ‘It's a quarter inch tape cartridge. It's the testing program. I stole it and I can't think of a better person to check it out.’