The Trojan Dog (20 page)

Memory is not abstract, yet in trying to retrieve it we force abstractions on ourselves. Memory is hunger for the taste and smell and heartbeat of a person, rage that they are not there with us now.

Lunch in the Park

The first time Ivan and I tried hacking into Compic, there was only the fledgling light from the screen, as if we were watching some old movie together in the darkness at the drive-in.

I have no recollection of Ivan's face that night, his expression, his physical presence beside me, or the conflicting emotions I felt when he and I were alone together. I can hear Ivan's voice giving me instructions, but even that memory has the quality of a poor recording, flat and lacking resonance.

The air hadn't really been cleared between Ivan and me since I'd stumbled on those printouts. The more I thought about it, the weaker Ivan's explanation seemed. I knew I had reason to distrust him, yet alone, in the dark together, I wasn't frightened.

I had crossed the boundary between quarry and hunter as though I'd known all along that all I had to do was change my costume.

Suddenly, his room seemed even darker. My senses were intently focused on a narrow yellow movement on a screen, yet I was more than ever conscious of the fullness of the air, the warmth, the sweet smells of concealment.

In the end, I'd relented and told Ivan about the Compic boxes in Access Computing's office. We were gambling that Isobel Merewether's password would get us into Compic. If it worked, it would be further evidence that there was a connection between the two companies, and that Isobel Merewether was linked to both.

It was almost too easy. Once we were into Compic, I grabbed the mouse from Ivan. First, to be on the safe side, I installed the Trojan Horse. It was turning out to be quite useful. Then I began opening files. One appeared to contain Compic's accounts for the start of the new financial year. On 15 July there'd been a payment of just under $50,000 from Access Computing to Compic.

‘What do you make of that?' I whispered, as though my enemy might be in the room next door.

Ivan printed out the page. After about five minutes of looking through the accounts, I found a payment to Claire Disraeli. Not a huge amount. A little over $20,000.

‘Why would Compic be paying Claire?' I said. ‘Do you know anything about Claire working for them?

I scrolled back, looking for anything that might explain the payment. I found a record of the program Ivan had written for Compic, and recalled his excitement, and Peter's, that day Ivan had shown the program to him. But no more references to Claire.

The light on Ivan's modem flashed from green to red, his monitor gave a small click, and I was faced with a blank screen. It was exactly as though a hand had reached around and flicked off the power switch.

‘Bugger it,' I said.

Ivan pushed his chair back and got to his feet without looking at me. I watched his big back hump away in its brown jumper. He looked like a sad old dancing bear, and I thought—is it Lauren again? What now?

But within a couple of seconds, my excitement came back doubled. I'd been looking for links between Access Computing and Compic, and I'd found one: money. I knew Compic had been using Access Computing's mailing list. It was reasonable to suppose they'd paid for it. But here was money going the
other
way.

The spatial element of words and numbers, my bits of clues that might not be clues at all, singing out through wires, through space, more solitary than a humpback's song.

From now on, if I wanted some information from someone, I'd sneak in through their computer. I'd play dirty. The decision had been growing, like wattle buds, for weeks.

. . .

A few days later, Ivan and I were facing one another in the Glebe Park Restaurant, two business colleagues sharing an early-morning coffee. Ivan had combed his hair and beard. We were rehearsing for Thursday, casing the joint. Was that the right phrase? It sounded too old-fashioned, trenchcoat pockets deep with guns.

We'd chosen a table with a clear view of an empty billiard table on a raised green dais, circled by green things in pots. It looked like my kind of stage, the setting for a performance that never quite took place.

Someone had sent me an anonymous email.

‘I know you fancy yourself as an investigator.'

I'd sat staring at it on my computer screen. Could I somehow absent-mindedly have typed this sentence to myself? My concentration had been off, but surely not that much.

‘Very funny.' I'd turned round to Ivan. ‘Now get rid of it.'

Ivan had crowed with delight. ‘Sandy! A secret message!
Exactly
like the movies!'

As though, by tinkering, I had called up a genie. I decided on an equally flattering reply But my correspondence with Mr or Ms Anonymous hadn't ended there. He, or she, had invited me to a Thursday lunchtime meeting in Glebe Park.

I licked froth from my cappuccino with a plastic spoon and said to Ivan, ‘Suppose you sit in here while I talk to him outside?'

‘There you go again. The ubiquitous male pronoun. What if
she
recognises me?'

I fidgeted, moving my cup and saucer around in a circle. The tables were white, with a squiggly pattern in yellow, red and green that reminded me of the worms on my screen when the virus struck.

I looked up at Ivan. ‘Suppose
she
spots you, knows who you are. Would that be so surprising? Would
she
expect me to have come alone?'

Ivan pouted. I felt as though I was helping him through it like a toddler. Behind us, counters serving Indian potato pancakes, pizza, Malaysian and Lebanese, gave out their conflicting pre-lunch smells. Cooks were filling the warming trays with noodles, saffron rice and fish and chips, a smorgasbord that made my stomach turn.

I'd heard a male voice behind the invitation on my screen. I couldn't help it.

‘Don't come with me then,' I said to Ivan. ‘I don't give a shit.'

I stood up to go. A pair of flat-faced polished statues guarded the restaurant's sliding doors, a man and woman in simplified wooden dress, the man holding a posy in one hand, the other arm bent across his chest, the woman with one arm stiffly by her side, the other neatly chopped off at the elbow.

Ivan fingered the leaves of a small tree as we walked past it.

He gave me his Yogi Bear grin and winked. ‘D'you think I'm thin enough to hide behind a fern?'

. . .

My powers of description may not be up to telling this story. I've suspected this, I've glimpsed it all along. My raw material is words—as opposed to pictures. How to find words for what is essentially a picture story? Ivan's drawing of my cyclamen, which so startled me on my second day at work, my journey inside the wooden horse, the learning aids Ivan made for Peter, the viruses, our hacker's path—visual journeys these are, journeys of the eyes, other senses struggling to keep up.

Derek now—Derek, my absent husband, has an unmistakable contempt for words. And he hates being made to discuss anything personal. Come to think of it, maybe it's Derek sitting on my shoulder, a censor crow or raven, that makes me doubt my ability to tell my story now. My guilt at not having told Derek the truth, and a kind of desperate misery that, even if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have known what to say.

I needed Ivan. I needed his skills, his wayward, ready hands, his boy's enthusiasm and his bitterness of a rejected husband. Another Ivan, one who'd been able to hang on to his Lauren, who'd stayed in Queensland, raised his own kids, would not have given me a second glance. And Ivan's loggish part, the techie's mindset that he shared with Felix, their assumption that the lies computers tell would eventually be yielded to them, if they set up watching systems, kept complicated logs.

I wasn't quite so optimistic. Or maybe I was in too much of a hurry.

Fancy yourself as an investigator.
I more than half-suspected it was Ivan who'd sent me the message, that no-one would turn up on Thursday.

Since my first day at DIR, Ivan had always kept a close watch on me. Now we were operating according to a truce. In common we were watchers, and we watched each other.

The merry-go-round, the whirligig that Ivan drew me into—not words, but a
space
.

. . .

Alone on Thursday, I chose an outside table with four white moulded plastic chairs, each with a red Coca-Cola logo on its back.

Bare wrist and arm branches of apple trees turned up to the sun, pruned to grow that way. I counted thirty apple trees while I was waiting, arms upraised in a tree prayer. They were young, supple, moulded, the nearest ones close enough for me to smell tight-fisted blossoms, tense and almost ready. In a few days they would all flower at once, become achingly white.

For spring in Canberra there had to be this bare cold, withdrawal of sap and waiting. Yet the park had its share of evergreens as well. A native pine plantation was reflected in a kind of pond, steps flushed with running water leading down to it. I'd hauled Peter out of it once, afraid of broken glass.

I didn't hear the man approach my table and when I glanced around, I caught my breath.

The sun was behind him and he was smiling, his one good eye engaging mine. His other eye was twisted far to the right and cloudy, blind.

‘G'day there.' The man held out his hand for a businesslike shake, then pulled out a chair by its back, saying, ‘You must be Sandra.'

Curly blond hair touched his collar. His seeing eye was blue.

‘And you're—?' I asked.

The man's lips curved in amusement.

‘Suppose we exchange our bona fides, something of that kind,' I went on, seeing he wasn't going to tell me his name. ‘Would you like to see my driver's licence?'

The man smiled again, and gave me a long look, curious and appraising.

‘Let me buy you a coffee instead.'

When he came back with the drinks, I asked him, ‘Do you work for Compic?'

The man's blue eye was bright enough for two. He stirred his coffee slowly. Apparently everything I said amused him. He looked up at me and said, ‘You and I have one thing in common, Sandra. We share a weakness for other people's electronic mail.'

He had the inward but not withdrawn face of a man used to being stared at. ‘Drink up,' he added, nodding at my cup. ‘The wind will make it cold.'

‘Someone framed Rae Evans. She's facing trial for computer theft and fraud. Do you know who that someone is?'

The one-eyed man finished his coffee and leant back in his chair, enjoying upsetting me, making me wait. He wore only a thin jacket over a denim shirt, but the wind didn't seem to bother him.

‘I'll tell you something about computer companies in this town. Mind if I smoke?' He pulled a packet of Alpine from his jacket pocket and bent over cupped hands to light one. ‘There's megabucks to be made selling software to government departments right now.' He spoke with his head down, concentrating on his cigarette, which needed care and attention in the wind. ‘No secret that they're spending every cent of their budgets in expectation of leaner times after the election. IT chiefs are pissing on each other's credit cards to get there first, buy up the latest gadgets. Even a small local outfit can turn over a few million in a year, with a bit of luck and the right connections. That's why there's so many of us. We'd fry each other's balls in butter given half a chance.'

His cigarette finally alight, the one-eyed man lifted his head and studied me thoughtfully. He wore his disability with grace and humour, and I found myself attracted to him.

‘How well do you know Allison Edgeware?' I asked him.

He inclined his head with a slight smile. ‘Who works for the lovely lady?
That's
a more interesting question. Ms Edgeware subcontracts. Hires programmers for one job at a time. Doesn't re-hire. And most of them are newcomers. She's never employed anyone with commercial experience. Public servants moonlighting, bright sparks fresh out of uni—you know the sort of thing.'

‘What do you think she's up to?'

The wind was blowing menthol fumes my way. I waved my hand in front of my face, but the one-eyed man ignored it.

‘Compic's quarantined their developmental programs. No wires in, no wires out. A shame, really. Like gagging a brilliant story-teller.'

‘Do you have a quarantined computer in your office too?'

‘I would, if I had anything to hide. My guess is that, whatever's on that quarantined computer, it isn't tarty graphics.'

The man seemed relaxed and in no hurry. Had he already learnt what he wanted to about me?

‘What does Compic produce?' he went on. ‘Graphics software. Not bad. Actually, some of it's quite cute. But nothing to shoot your granny over. The lovely Allison is perfectly capable of running the legitimate side of the business, as well as various bits of dicky marketing.'

He looked across the thick, wet grass to a curve of flower beds. I followed his single line of sight and spotted Bambi in her red cloak, stooping to pick flowers. Bambi looked incredibly fragile, on the edge of some undreamed-of danger. Her face, as she bent over the soft bed, was mostly hidden by the cloak. I was gripped with fear in case a gardener or some security person reprimanded her, took her flowers away.

I turned back to the one-eyed man and said, ‘So you all spy on each other?'

He was frowning. I sensed in him a certain apprehension where Bambi was concerned. Perhaps he regularly ate his lunch in the park, and knew Bambi by sight, or otherwise.

‘I thought we might do a spot of trading,' he told me. ‘Since we've both been looking up Compic's skirts, you tell me what you saw, and I'll oblige in kind.'

‘What makes you think I've got anything on Compic that you don't?'

‘Can you tell me how much of their software your department's bought, or committed themselves to?'

‘Don't you know?'

‘I could find out, but there's a certain risk attached to snooping, isn't there?'