‘Is that yours?’
‘Sun Tzu, Art of War. Written two and a half thousand years ago, and every word is as true as the day it was written. You want to know who’s pulling the strings? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, then. Your charming friend Diane will fish for Norrington’s password, and we’ll have a look around his parlour.’
‘You’re pulling my leg! How is she going to do that?’
‘Why are you asking me?’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘I thought you were the cyber-detective.’
‘And you’re the cyber-dissident.’
‘True,’ she said, unruffled. ‘I’m better than you.’
‘How’s that?’ he asked, stung.
‘Aren’t I? Stop moaning, then, and give me some ideas.’
Jericho glanced around. There was still no one paying them any attention. He might just as well have gone off to sleep somewhere, popping up every couple of hours with more ominous news to set them all scurrying.
‘Right then,’ he hissed. ‘We only have one chance, if that.’
‘We’ll do it, whatever it is.’
Twelve minutes later Norrington left his glassed-in cubicle and joined one of the working groups, which was busy making telescopic observations of the Moon. He talked to them about this and that, and then went to fetch a coffee. Then he went to see Shaw in her office, briefly, and went back to work at his own desk.
Access denied, said the computer.
Baffled, he clicked on the file again, with the same result. It was only then that he realised he wasn’t logged on.
But he hadn’t logged out when he left the room.
Or had he?
He glanced around the control room. Everybody was looking busy, except for the Chinese girl, who was standing not far from one of the workstations as though she didn’t know where to go.
Norrington felt a gnawing doubt. Uneasy, he restarted the system to log himself in.
Yoyo watched him out of the corner of her eye. Nobody had noticed her slip into his office and log him out – it had only taken a few seconds. She pretended to be absorbed by one of the wall monitors, and pressed a button on her phone to send a signal up to the roof.
Jericho gave Diane the command to start recording.
Data coursed through the processors in the Big O. Nobody in the whole building had their own computer in the sense of an autonomous unit. All employees had a standardised hardware kit, a portable version of the boxy lavobots that Tu Technologies used. Everybody could access the Big O central computer from any jack or port, simply by logging in with name, eight-character password and a thumbprint. But not everybody had access to all the drives. Even the powerful sysadmins who managed the superbrain and issued passwords couldn’t access the whole machine. The ebb and flow of data in the Big O was like the roar and hum of traffic in a big city, and of course, the roar was loudest during normal working hours.
If you knew how, you could listen to the roar. Not by listening to every part of it at once. The information that coursed through the network was encoded of course, in bits and bytes. But if you knew the precise moment when a piece of information would be sent from A to B, you could record that transmission and then set to work painstakingly filtering out individual data packets, then you could apply powerful decoder programs to unlock the words and images inside. At the moment the system was fairly quiet, so that it was easy enough to isolate Norrington’s data packet right at the moment when he logged on. And Diane began her calculations.
Six minutes later, she had the eight-character password. It took her another three minutes to crack the software that had carried Norrington’s thumbscan to the central processors, and now she had his print as well.
Jericho stared at the prize. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear. Once logged on, nobody could log in again using the same personal data without raising a flag – no more than you could ring your own front doorbell while you were already inside in the living room.
They had to lock Norrington out again.
The chance came a little while later. Norrington was called to a pow-wow, but he spent a long time lingering near the workstations which gave him a view of his office. Edda Hoff chivvied him along. He hemmed and hawed, but finally gave up his watchpost and went into the room, not without casting one last, mistrustful look behind himself.
Jericho smiled at him.
He and Yoyo had switched places. One of the basic rules of surveillance was not to let the target see the same face the whole time. Now she was upstairs, waiting for his signal. The door to the conference room clicked shut. Unhurriedly, Jericho was on his way across to Norrington’s office when the conference-room door opened again, and Shaw emerged.
‘Owen,’ she called.
He stopped. He was ten, perhaps twelve steps from Norrington’s office. He could be going anywhere.
‘I think perhaps you should join the discussion. We’ve sifted some more data from Vogelaar’s dossier, material which has to do with your friend Xin, and the Zheng Group.’ She glanced about. ‘By the way, where are your colleagues?’
Jericho went over to join her.
‘Yoyo’s on Vic Thorn’s trail.’
Her habitual scowl softened to a smile. ‘Could be that you’ll be quicker about it than MI6 with your enquiries. And Tu Tian?’
‘We’ve given him the day off. He has a business to run.’
‘Splendid. God forbid that the Chinese economy should falter. The American crash was quite enough. Are you coming?’
‘Right away. Give me a minute.’
Shaw went back inside without quite closing the door. Jericho strolled casually back to Norrington’s office. Somebody at one of the workstations looked up at him, then back at the screen. Without stopping, Jericho stepped into the little room, logged Norrington out and then walked purposefully across to the other side, and to the conference rooms. Just before he joined the others, he sent Yoyo the agreed signal.
Straight away, she typed Norrington’s name. The system asked for authorisations. She entered the eight-character password, squirted Norrington’s thumbprint and waited.
The screen filled with icons.
‘There you go,’ Yoyo whispered, and told Diane to download Norrington’s personal data.
‘As you wish, Yoyo.’
Yoyo? How nice. Owen must have stored her voiceprint. She watched eagerly as Diane’s hard drive gulped down one data packet after another, holding her breath for the Download complete message.
Jericho was just as impatient, waiting for the signal that would tell him that the transfer had worked and that the false Norrington was now logged out. Once that happened, there was one more thing for him to do: leave the conference, go across to the office and log the deputy head of security back in, so that Norrington would not notice the theft later.
At that moment, Norrington stood up.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, smiled at the assembled talking heads, and left.
Jericho stared at his empty chair. Yoyo, he thought, what’s going on? Why’s it taking so long?
Should he leave too, and catch up with Norrington? Stop him from going into his office? What would that look like? Norrington was already on edge at the idea that the central computer had simply shut him out, and if Jericho took any action, he would certainly suspect trickery. Ill at ease, he resisted the urge. He sat there hoping for the all-important signal, and tried to look interested.