“Claudia?”
“Yes, Dillon?”
Sitting directly opposite her, their knees were almost touching, Claudia was an attractive woman, and Dillon glanced admiringly at her.
“You know Chimera intimately, don’t you?”
“I helped create the programme; so you could say that I know it a little more than intimately…”
“Flippancy is something I can do without. So if you don’t want to be left at whatever airfield we’re heading for…”
“Okay. I concede — you are doing me an immense service, by letting me tag along with you all. Although, I’m a little concerned as to how I ended up sitting opposite a lecherous old pervert who keeps looking at my tits. Not that I mind, at all…”
“Lecherous old pervert?”
Claudia smiled, crossed her legs and slowly ran the toe of her shoe up the back of Dillon’s calf.
Tatiana had heard, looked round the edge of her seat laughing. It was not a laugh of support.
Dillon flushed red. “Old?”
“Well, middle-aged, then.” Her eyes sparkled mischievously.
“Middle-aged?” Dillon sounded aghast. “Do you really think I look that old? Jesus, I knew we should have left you up that mountain…”
“Dillon, do you have a question for the poor girl or what?”
“Okay. If we could load your programme onto a computer — would it conflict with the copy that Ramus is planning to launch?
Claudia shook her head, her main of red hair tousling around her face. “It’s a virus, Dillon, not something you can simply load up onto any old processor, and then let loose globally. But change the little bitch’s script slightly, and bingo, I can create the ultimate anti-virus. This would be more powerful than the Kirill version and would hack and crack anything…” Tatiana’s eyes lit up at that. Claudia continued: “Point it at the global computer highway and it’ll worm its way through the original code in under a second. The Kirill version won’t be able to detect its presence because it will have the same Chameleon cloaking ability, but with one subtle difference. My version will have only one objective — to destroy the original code… Nothing is untouchable; nothing is hidden from it.”
“Will your code be left inside the processors, mainframes, and servers that it cleans up?”
Claudia shrugged. “Any machine that it comes into contact with will benefit from a full hardrive scan. It will also be tweaked-up, and yes my version of Chimera will remain hidden on the hardrive. But, only as protection, nothing else…”
“What would be the reason for it to remain hidden on the hardrive?” Tatiana asked bluntly.
“Like many pieces of software, Tatiana, certain elements are always there, left behind on the hardrive even if the programme is deleted.”
“I get the picture,” said Tatiana softly.
“But do you? Chimera was originally developed to assist the Government in their fight against organised crime and terrorism. The main brief was to come up with the most powerful programme ever developed to retrieve encrypted information on targeted hardrives, and then destroy the hardrive. But what Kirill actually came up with, was a viral programme that could self replicate itself a trillion times in the blink of an eye, and be controlled to do whatever was asked of it by the main source.”
“Main source?” Dillon asked.
“The server that the programme is initially loaded onto. Well, find that and we’re in business to stop a global computer catastrophe…”
“Really? You mean you can actually stop this thing?”
“Oh yes. I can stop it, alright. The Chimera Programme that Ramus stole was running at around 94 % perfect, but it was getting better by the day when…” Claudia trailed off. She coughed, gazing out at the passing countryside below the helicopter. “We had almost finished our work at the facility, the glitches in Chimera were being worked out, and the programme was almost ready to go operational. We were about to run a series of trials in the lab.”
“So it was feasible to destroy the mountain facility? Because it had served its purpose?”
“I suppose,” nodded Claudia. “But I don’t understand why. There was no reason to destroy the facility. What a waste of a valuable resource!”
“Unless you didn’t want anyone to get at the state-of-the-art hardware located in the main lab. You were lucky, that you weren’t blown from here to kingdom come.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah, lucky. But, I’ll give this to you — you’ve got balls, missy. And brains, you had the foresight to make a second master copy… Although, that begs the question of whydid you make it? No matter. Hiding it right under their noses was pure genius.”
“What are you insinuating, Dillon?”
“I’m not insinuating anything, Claudia. You made a copy, because as a former hacker, you know that with it, you’re in a position of domination, if that tickles your fancy. But re-write certain elements of the script to create the anti-virus, and bingo, every major power on the planet would pay a king’s ransom to get their hands on it. In fact, you would have the world at your fingertips!”
“You would need to know which scripts to alter… Which means you would need to understand the programme intimately, really intimately.” Said Claudia.
“And of course, Ezra would have the right codes, Kirill would have had them, and this character Ramus no doubt has them. Seeing as they all had something to do with designing it.” Dillon snapped.
“Ramus,” said Tatiana softly.
Their gazes met; it all sounded too fantastic, but then, sometimes fantastic could happen. Take a terrorist; who makes it his business to acquaint himself with a government scientist who is working on a top-secret ground breaking project. The terrorist then sets about persuading him to join his cause, or whatever it is. He realises that he could make a mountain of money; blackmail the world’s richest super-powers; cause a global cyber war; whatever. And he wants his five minutes of fame, to establish his own immortality; to further his own ends. To play at being God…
“This is beginning to sound like a megalomaniac’s fantasy playground,” said Tatiana coldly. “I don’t think the world is ready for it.”
“You’re probably right,” said Dillon.
“Perhaps that was why they destroyed the facility?” said Claudia.
“No. The effort required in planting such an explosive device and the unnecessary risk that Kirill appeared to undertake in overseeing it himself, indicates to me that he was ordered to stay behind, because someone knew that he would not survive. I’d say that our friend Ramus wanted him dead,” said Dillon. “But I’m sure that when we come face to face with Ezra once more — then he’ll no doubt have some answers for us.”
The Sea-King banked round to the left and then levelled out over the glistening mountain peaks, rotors thrashing the air, its two Rolls Royce Gnome engines humming with reined-in torque and power; it banked to the south-west, heading for the coast and the airfield just north of Edinburgh…
And as they moved at speed over small villages, towns and open countryside. Dillon mused about their imminent meeting with Ezra…
Chapter 21
The Learjet 85 cruised at an altitude of thirty-three thousand feet across a cloudless sky of brilliant blue; flying in the black and gold corporate livery of Ferran & Cardini International, at an average speed of 500 mph over the Atlantic Ocean far below.