The Genius Wars Page 2

‘Okay – well – I’ll call you,’ Cadel assured Sonja, before Hamish could make one of his sour remarks about Judith’s busy schedule. ‘Some time after lunch, say? Around two? And we can work out who should go where.’

  ‘All-right,’ Sonja agreed, her calm, metallic delivery undermined by her eager expression. ‘See-you-later, then.’

  ‘Bye.’ Cadel began to edge away. ‘Bye, Judith.’

  ‘Bye, boys. Have fun.’

  Hamish snorted. He didn’t respond to Judith’s cheerful wave. And on his way downstairs, he accused her of ‘taking the piss’.

  ‘Like we could possibly have any fun in Paediatric Programming,’ he complained. ‘Do you know what she told me last week? She told me she was chasing after money that Prosper English has tucked away in some tax haven, somewhere. Can you b-believe that? The police are going after Prosper English, and they haven’t come to you for help!’

  ‘Because I don’t want to help.’ Cadel slammed through a fire door. ‘I wouldn’t help even if they asked me.’

  ‘Yeah, but they d-didn’t ask you. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like they think you’re useless, when you probably know more about Prosper English than anyone.’ Hamish then launched into his usual rant about the criminal stupidity of disbanding Genius Squad: how it wouldn’t have cost too much to run, no matter what the accountants said; how its teenaged members had not been the least bit ‘unreliable’, no matter what the police commissioner claimed; and how, if Genius Squad had been permitted to survive, Prosper English would have been caught within weeks of his escape from prison. ‘Instead of which, we’re all given a slap on the wrist and told to go home! And nine months later Prosper’s still at large, free as a bird and breathing down our necks!’

  ‘He’s not breathing down our necks,’ Cadel said shortly. ‘He’s gone to ground.’

  ‘Yeah, b-but he’s still out there, isn’t he? And you know him better than anyone. The police should be begging you to help.’

  ‘No they shouldn’t, Hamish! Because it wouldn’t do any good!’ Cadel suddenly became aware of how loud his voice was, as it echoed around the concrete walls of the stairwell. So he continued more quietly. ‘I don’t want Prosper English in my life any more. If I leave him alone, he’ll leave me alone. It’s a trade-off.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that.’

  ‘Yes I can.’ Cadel was sure of it. He had calculated the probabilities. There could be no other explanation for the nine months of perfect peace that he’d enjoyed – unless, of course, Prosper English was dead and buried. ‘If he saw me as a threat, he would have got to me by now,’ Cadel went on. ‘He could have killed me the minute I left the safe house. But he didn’t. So I’m going to be fine, as long as I keep my nose out of his business.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll go after Judith, then?’ Hamish queried, following Cadel down another flight of stairs. ‘Since she’s sticking her nose into his b-business?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was a good question. It had certainly crossed Cadel’s mind. Saul Greeniaus, however, had assured him that Judith was just a very small part of a large, long-term, ongoing pursuit of Prosper English, whose criminal empire was slowly being taken apart, piece by piece, all over the world.

  According to Saul, police from half a dozen different countries had so far failed to uncover any evidence that Prosper was trying to undermine their investigations. There had been no attempts to bribe or kill or intimidate any members of the task force. And this meant that Judith would probably be safe as well.

  Because they’re nowhere near Prosper, Cadel had decided, upon hearing this news. If they were getting close to where he is, they’d find out soon enough. But he had said nothing. Not even to Saul.

  He wasn’t going to make himself a target by offering up any unsolicited advice.

  ‘Anyway, I’m happy as I am,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get involved in stuff like that. I like things the way they are.’

  ‘You must be joking.’ Hamish sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Aren’t you b-bored to death?’

  ‘No.’ Cadel pushed through another fire door, emerging into a wide, sloping hallway near the Rex Vowels lecture theatre. ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘How can you be? In this place? It’s so dull.’

  ‘It’s not dull. It’s normal. It’s a normal life.’ It was, in fact, Cadel’s first taste of a normal life, and he’d been savouring every moment. Things were so easy. So free. He could go anywhere he wanted, without having a surveillance team tagging along. He could say anything he wanted, without wondering if the people who were listening to him had some kind of hidden agenda. He could stroll around campus secure in the knowledge that none of his fellow students was going to explode.

  For fifteen years, he had lived under constant scrutiny. He’d grown accustomed to being closely monitored, first by Prosper English, then by the police – who had been afraid of what Prosper might do to him. As heir to a criminal empire, Cadel had been brought up in an atmosphere of invasive scrutiny, subtle manipulation and unending lies. Even his education had been an exercise in duplicity. At the age of thirteen, he’d been enrolled in a college known as the Axis Institute, which had been established for the express purpose of turning him into the world’s greatest thief, liar and con-artist. What’s more, he had escaped that particular trap only to fall into another one – which, like the Institute, had been the work of Prosper English. As far as Cadel was concerned, Genius Squad hadn’t been a fearless team of brilliant crusaders, secretly working to bring down the world’s most evil corporation. It had been a naive group of opinionated suckers, who had become more and more entangled in one of Prosper’s cunning schemes. Cadel didn’t mourn the loss of Genius Squad. Not one little bit. He didn’t need Genius Squad to give his life meaning.

  Now that he had a real home, and real parents, and real friends – now that he had enough room to move, and talk, and make his own decisions about his own future – why would he want anything else?

  ‘Hey, Cadel.’ Hamish wouldn’t let up. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cadel wasn’t keen to continue their discussion. A crowd was gathering outside the lecture theatre, drifting in from every point on the compass, and he didn’t want to be overheard. ‘As long as it’s not about Prosper English.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t know?’ Hamish demanded, blithely ignoring Cadel’s request. ‘What if that’s why he hasn’t tried to kill you – b-because he still thinks you’re his son? What do you think will happen when he finds out you’re not?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Hamish,’ Cadel said crossly. Then he darted forward, swerved past a press of unwashed students, and plunged through the open door beyond them.

  TWO

  Introductory Programming was divided into two classes: basic and advanced. ‘Advanced’ students didn’t have to fight for a place in the Rex Vowels lecture theatre, which was big enough to accommodate every one of them. Scattered thinly across three hundred or so brightly upholstered seats, the advanced class could afford to spread out a little.

  At times, however, Cadel almost wished that he belonged to the larger group. There were so many ‘basic’ students that they were never asked to ‘move down the front, please’. Cadel would have felt less conspicuous in a crowd like that. He would have found it easier to keep a low profile. And he could have chosen a seat up the back without attracting any kind of attention.

  Not that he was intimidated, or scared of being caught out. He didn’t find the coursework especially hard. But he preferred to keep a low profile, because he wasn’t sure how much his teacher actually knew about him. Although the campus admissions office knew everything there was to know, Saul Greeniaus had insisted that certain aspects of his foster son’s background remain completely confidential. Cadel had even enrolled under Saul’s name – Greeniaus – despite the fact that the adoption process was taking a long, long time.

  ‘You’re my son, now,’ Saul had declared, when Cadel was asked about his paren
tage. ‘Mine and Fiona’s. You don’t have to worry about Chester Cramp any more. Chester Cramp is irrelevant.’

  Chester Cramp was, in fact, Cadel’s biological father. But since Chester was sitting in an American gaol, charged with all kinds of offences (including conspiracy to commit murder), Cadel could only conclude that he was irrelevant – in the legal sense, at any rate. And since Cadel had never even met Chester Cramp, there wasn’t much of an emotional connection between them. In fact, of all the various ‘fathers’ who had cluttered up Cadel’s life over the years, Chester was probably the least important.

  Phineas Darkkon had been important; he had tried to mould Cadel into a criminal mastermind. Prosper English, Darkkon’s right-hand man, had also been very important; he had engineered the death of Cadel’s mother, before proceeding to mess with her infant son’s head. Saul Greeniaus had been the most important of the lot, kindly rescuing a lonely, mixed-up, homeless kid from a life full of social workers and group homes. All three men had viewed themselves as father figures, and had behaved accordingly.

  Only Chester Cramp had displayed a complete lack of interest in his own flesh and blood. Though a brilliant scientist, he was also (in Saul’s opinion) ‘a totally deficient human being’.

  ‘He’s done you a favour,’ Saul had once remarked. ‘You can ignore Chester Cramp, because he’s ignored you. Unlike Prosper English.’ Prosper, unfortunately, had always treated Cadel as his personal possession – until a few months ago. Perhaps news of Cadel’s true paternity had filtered down to him, at long last. Perhaps that was why Prosper had gone to ground.

  Perhaps he wasn’t interested in Cadel, now that he knew they weren’t blood relations.

  Whatever the reason, he had suddenly withdrawn from Cadel’s life. So had Phineas Darkkon – who was long dead – and Chester Cramp, who had never been a big part of it to begin with. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, Cadel was now just a policeman’s son. An ordinary kid. And although he might have been a little younger than his classmates, with slightly more memorable features, he was careful not to dress or behave in a manner that was going to get him singled out. If anything, he was one of the quieter students.

  Nevertheless, he had a funny feeling that his teacher knew something about him – something more than just his name and student number. Richard Buckland was in charge of Introductory Programming; he had been given the tricky job of coaxing several hundred budding computer engineers through the first year of their degrees. Despite the size of his class, however, he always seemed to remember who Cadel was. And occasionally, when Cadel asked a question, Richard’s benign regard would become rather more intent than usual.

  Had Richard been told the full story? Or was he simply impressed by the insightful nature of Cadel’s questions?

  It was hard to decide.

  ‘What was all that stuff about traffic lights?’ Hamish queried, as he sat down beside Cadel in one of the middle rows. ‘Why d-didn’t you mention it to me?’

  Cadel sighed. Hamish saw himself as an expert on all things traffic-related, because he had once hacked into the Digital Image Department of the Roads and Traffic Authority. His aim had been to tamper with various speed camera photographs.

  ‘It’s just an idea I had,’ Cadel muttered, glancing uneasily over his shoulder. But no one was listening. ‘If Sonja’s wheelchair could get a signal through to the regional computer that runs all the controller boxes around here –’

  ‘– then she wouldn’t have to press a “walk” button,’ Hamish concluded. ‘Yeah, I get it. Hack the loop detector input, somehow.’

  ‘It depends what’s in there.’ Cadel cast his mind back to his former infiltration of the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System. He’d been in primary school at the time, and his approach had been a little heavy-handed. ‘It’s a while since I poked around in SCATS,’ he confessed, almost sheepishly. ‘I don’t really know what’s been happening. I don’t know if they’ve got any kind of new strobe pre-emption program for emergency vehicles. Or how many microwave detectors have been installed.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ said Hamish, in a condescending tone. But all at once Richard Buckland appeared, laden with technology, and Hamish couldn’t risk uttering another word.

  Even a whisper would have been audible in the sudden hush.

  Richard dumped his laptop on the podium, where various plugs and cables allowed him to connect his computer to the theatre’s audio-visual system. He was tall and bespectacled, with neatly trimmed brown hair and an open, genial, squared-off face; he wore a baggy old t-shirt over jeans and sneakers. For a minute or so he flicked switches and pushed buttons, peering back at the big white screen on the wall behind him. Then he addressed his audience, delivering information in explosively rapid, breathlessly excited bursts like machine-gun fire.

  Words and ideas seemed to erupt out of Richard, as effervescent as a carbonated soft drink.

  ‘Today we’ll be looking at stack frames and buffer overflows,’ he observed, getting straight to the point. ‘I used to save this one for my third-year course, but buffer overflows arise from poor programming practice, and by the time you’re in third year, it’s too late to fix that up.’ With a fleeting smile, he added, ‘The problem is that if your data is stored next to your program, and your users are allowed to put in as much information as they like, then the data can become part of your program.’

  None of this was news to Cadel. He’d launched quite a number of buffer overflow attacks, in the past. But he was interested to hear Richard’s thoughts on programming solutions. As a matter of fact, he was interested in everything that Richard had to say about programming – because it completely contradicted what the Axis Institute had taught.

  There, the emphasis had been on infiltration. Cadel’s Infiltration teacher, Dr Ulysses Vee (aka The Virus), had delighted in loopholes, weaknesses, vulnerabilities. And Prosper English had been the same. ‘You can only tell whether you’ve mastered a system if you isolate and identify its weakest point,’ he had once advised Cadel. ‘If you knock that out and the whole system collapses, then you know you’ve got a handle on it.’ This opinion had been endorsed by Dr Vee, who had created only to destroy. He’d created computer viruses and malware. He’d constructed labyrinthine security programs with built-in flaws, which had given him free access to many a company’s databanks. He’d been a consummate hacker, with a hacker’s mind-set.

  In other words, he had been deficient in what Richard liked to call ‘style’.

  Cadel was still coming to terms with this concept. It had something to do with simplicity, and something to do with practicality. It was a measure of how you approached a problem – of how well you understood the fundamentals of programming. But it was also an attitude: a kind of inherent appreciation of all things clean, clear and beautiful. Cadel couldn’t help thinking that Sonja would have grasped what Richard was talking about. Her love of numbers was almost aesthetic; she would go into raptures over an exquisitely balanced algorithm. For Sonja, it wasn’t just getting there that mattered. It was the way you got there.

  Apparently, Richard felt the same. He wouldn’t have liked Genius Squad’s scrambling, headlong, piecemeal approach to solving problems. And he would have deplored the Axis Institute’s choice of problems to solve. ‘When you’re really young,’ he had pointed out, during his very first lecture, ‘it’s all about puzzles – about unlocking secrets and cracking codes. But as you mature, you come to realise that none of this means anything unless it helps people, and makes the world a better place.’ Trashing networks or sabotaging software clearly weren’t stylish goals, in Richard’s view.

  Cadel sometimes wondered if he himself was making the world a better place, by helping Sonja to push buttons. He certainly hoped so.

  ‘Psst.’ Suddenly Hamish jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Look who’s here.’

  Cadel hadn’t been watching the door. He’d been staring at a stack-frame diagram projected onto the screen behind Ri
chard – who abruptly broke off in the middle of his lecture. ‘Can I help you?’ asked Richard. ‘Are you lost?’

  He was addressing the new arrival: a neat, wiry, dark-haired man wearing a suit and tie that looked bizarrely out of place among so many hoodies and cargo pants. It was painfully obvious that this man didn’t belong in Richard’s class.

  Cadel’s stomach did a backflip.

  ‘I’m here for Cadel,’ said the newcomer, so quietly that his Canadian accent was barely perceptible. Cadel stared at him, paralysed.

  Only something very, very urgent would have prompted Saul Greeniaus to interrupt an Introductory Programming class.

  ‘Oh … well. Okay.’ Richard seemed hesitant. He glanced at Cadel, who was slowly shutting his laptop. ‘Are you all right with that, or …? I take it you know each other?’

  Cadel nodded, flushing. He pushed his computer into its bag, uncomfortably aware that almost every single person in the auditorium was studying him with intense curiosity.

  Only Hamish appeared to be more interested in Saul.

  ‘Do you want me as well?’ asked Hamish. But the detective shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he rejoined. ‘You can stay.’ Then he turned to Richard. ‘Sorry about this. If it wasn’t important …’

  ‘Oh – look.’ With a wave of his hand, Richard signified complete understanding. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘Yes. They do. Unfortunately.’ Saul’s tone was grim. He watched Cadel sidle past eight pairs of denim-clad knees, while Richard adjusted his glasses. The strained silence was broken only by the pad of Cadel’s rubber soles, and a muffled cough from the back of the hall. Cadel tried not to look at anyone. On his way to the exit, he kept his head down and his pace rapid.

  He was mortified.

  As a schoolkid, he had always been a detached little weirdo, isolated from the rest of the herd. Since then he’d adopted a kind of camouflage, having learned how to dress and talk and conduct himself like other people. But at this precise moment, he felt as if he were twelve all over again.