Quite Ugly One Morning (13 page)

‘I’m a doctor, so I’ve seen plenty of balls in my time, but this? You asked the systems manager to help you hack his own
system
?
He could have had you thrown out then and there. He could have had you
arrested.
’

For appearances’ sake, Parlabane had followed Sarah around the wards and theatres for a while after nipping out to the nearest chemist’s to pick up his ready-in-one-hour prints, and this was the first time they had been alone together with a chance to talk. He had watched her interview patients who were going to be anaesthetised later, and sat in on a minor operation, at the head end, behind the ‘blood/brain barrier’. This consisted of a screen obscuring the surgeon and his ‘guddling about’, as Sarah described it, from the conscious patient’s view. However, from what Parlabane had heard of Sarah and her anaesthetist colleagues discussing their relationships with surgeons, he understood that the brain referred to in the term was not that of the patient, nor of the sawbones.

Parlabane figured that as the intended purpose of the screen was to prevent the patient from seeing parts of his body being abused, then its subsidiary function – of preventing the surgeon from seeing the anaesthetists and ODAs making obscene gestures in response to his arrogant remarks – was merely a useful bonus.

Sarah was leaning against a small chest of drawers, its yellow plastic veneer peeled away from the cheap chipboard on all surfaces. She looked like she would be pacing the floor if there had been enough space in the on-call room to pace in. That utterly remorseless and even vaguely proud look in Parlabane’s eye wasn’t helping her humour.

‘Calculated risk,’ he said, standing with his back against the paint-blistered door. ‘Computer experts fall into two categories: meticulous, anal-looking bastards with something extremely uncomfortable stuck up their arses, or shambolic, haggard individuals who look like they could use about a fortnight’s sleep. The former type will steep the keyboard
in disinfectant if you so much as breathe on his computers, while the latter can always do with talking to someone who understands about how he’s pissing into the wind trying to run a fucked system against the odds etcetera etcetera, blah blah blah. Also, that Medway prick was very keen for me not to talk to him, which circled him as a possible ally right away.’

‘OK,
very cute. But what if the systems manager had been one of the anal types?’

‘I’d have made out I didn’t even know how to switch a computer on, so that he wouldn’t be keeping an eye on me. Then I’d have popped my disk into an up-and-running terminal as soon as he was out of sight. I didn’t need the systems manager to get it running. I just told him that. The programme is written to automatically load itself into the system and launch immediately. After you’ve put the disk in, you’ve got roughly five minutes to access the programme and tell it specifically what machines to look at, otherwise it just goes ahead and records every machine on the network. That slows the network down slightly, which won’t be noticed by any of the workers but might make the systems manager jumpy.’

‘And where did you get this magic disk? I don’t imagine it’s on sale next to “Sonic the Hedgehog Meets the Monopolies Commission”.’

‘I came up with the idea and got a guy in Van Nuys to code it. Two years ago he was just a scuzzball coding freak at a firm in Silicone Valley. Now he’s senior VP in charge of something or other. Information is power and all that.’

‘So why did you bring Dempsey into it if you didn’t need him?’

‘Fair exchange. He’d given me some good information. Also, I knew he’d be grateful for what I was giving him, and you never know when a bit of gratitude might come in handy.’

Sarah looked away and shook her head. Then she stared back at Parlabane. ‘You know, Jack, I’m beginning to understand why someone tried to kill you.’ She walked to the bed, kicked off her shoes and slumped down on it, propping her back up against the headboard with a pook-ridden pillow.

‘So what else did you learn?’ she asked. ‘Did you meet our glorious leader, the big boss?’

‘Stephen Lime? But of course. He was the highlight of the tour – as far as Clive was concerned anyway. I got a privileged five minutes with the great one, during which he talked a lot and said nothing, a very valuable talent in both senior management and politics. Lots of press-release jargon, phrases like ‘meeting the challenges head-on’, plus plenty of mission statements and pro-activity.

‘To tell you the truth, I once got caught in gridlock in LA for six hours, day after the last earthquake, and that day was more interesting than this one. I’ve never had to listen to quite so many suits talking bollocks to me over such a sustained period. I did pick up a few valuable snippets, but the ratio of useful information to corporate wanking was not exactly satisfactory. What about you – did you get to talk to the Prof yet?’

Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Eventually. He wasn’t being evasive, it’s just you’ve no idea how hard it can be for two doctors to be free at the same time for even ten minutes. I managed to get someone else to hold my bleep for a while and cornered him in Coronary Care. He told me the whole thing over Jeremy’s wages was organised between him and someone called Moira Gallagher in payroll. The only other person who was told anything would have been her boss, as she had to clear it with him. The Prof didn’t know his name, but he’ll be head of that department, presumably. But Gallagher was the only one he told about the reason for the debt, and he asked her not to divulge it.’

‘Was the Prof suspicious?’ Parlabane asked.

‘Obviously. I didn’t lie to him, I just said I needed to know but I couldn’t tell him why. I don’t think he wants to think about it too much, to be honest – he still looks pretty glazed – so he answered my questions and let it go.’

Parlabane walked over and leaned against the chest of drawers, staring blankly for a second as he processed the information.

‘Right, I think that gives us eight people who could have known about it, then. Gallagher, her boss and the six suits with the Loud Labelling crap who could have intercepted a memo from her to the boss about the wages arrangement. Obviously this memo wouldn’t mention Jeremy’s wee problem with the gee-gees, and it might not have mentioned that he was in debt. But the revelation that a sizable slice of Ponsonby Junior’s wages were being transferred to Ponsonby Senior would have
been enough on its own to attract some curiosity, and it wouldn’t be too difficult after that to work out the young doc owed Daddy money. Now, my guess of there being only eight does discount the possibility of gossip, but I don’t imagine the Prof would have approached this particular woman unless he thought he could trust her to keep her mouth shut. She could still have told her husband, for instance, but I’m convinced that this is all within the hospital. Whoever acted on that information had to know enough about doctors to have figured out a way to use a bent one.

‘Now, we don’t know what that use was, but as we found nearly two K and chances are Jeremy spent Christ knows how much more, then the return for the bad guy must be huge. Especially considering the risk in approaching a doctor to get involved in some kind of scam, however much debt he was in. This has to be big money or big politics, and maybe even both.’

Sarah had a look of concentrated consternation on her face, wincing as she struggled to comprehend something.

‘What I don’t get, Jack, is why you’re so keen to get into the computer system, why you brought that disk along. I mean, if one of these suits or Moira Gallagher’s boss or even Moira Gallagher’s up to no good, they’re not going to write it all down on the office wp, are they?’

Parlabane lifted his feet from the floor, letting the chest of drawers take his full weight. It gave a distraught creak and lurched drunkenly to one side, threatening to collapse completely if he didn’t remove himself. He stood off it, righted it and leaned against the wall.

‘It’s because computers don’t understand politics,’ he said, trying to thump a wooden bail back into its awl on the teetering construction beside him. ‘If you want to know what’s going on in a company, an office, get into the computers. They don’t always tell you secrets, but they do give you straight answers. From a trawl through the system you can find out what’s really going on as opposed to what people will tell you is going on: the power structure, who’s working on what, who’s likely to know about what, and who’s saying what to whom. The computer can be an instrument of politics within an office, but the computer itself is not political. It just calculates, computes, and most importantly, records. I’ll find out more in twenty minutes on that network than I did from
today’s hours of guarded bullshit, where every statement had a motive.

‘But most importantly, when you ask a computer a question, it doesn’t wonder why you want to know that information and then go and tell the boss that someone is snooping around. I can personally vouch for the advantages of that, with specific regard to the ensuing lack of men with guns – or in this case knives – visiting your house later on.’

‘Yes, I can appreciate the benefits of that myself,’ Sarah admitted. ‘But you said the terminals off the wards were no good, yeah?’

‘Afraid not. They’re running off the central server, but they’re only linked to the medical records database. Even if I booted up with Stephen Lime’s user name and password, I couldn’t get into the general system.’

‘So how are you going to get your twenty minutes on the network?’

‘Well, once I’ve broken into the admin block I’ll have all night, if I need it.’

Sarah sighed. ‘You know, it worries me that I didn’t find that surprising,’ she said. ‘It means I must be getting used to you, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.’

She pulled her legs up underneath her on the bed and adjusted the pillows at her back.

‘So how are you going to break in? Admin’s the one place in the RVI where they’ve spent money on security.’

‘I’ve already broken in,’ Parlabane replied. ‘At least, I’ve done all the difficult bits. All I really need to do now is show up. Their security is abysmal anyway. The only threat they’ve properly guarded against is someone actually making off with their expensive computers and trendy furniture. And to be honest, apart from one very guilty party, they’ve very little else to fear from a break-in.’

He reached down and picked up the duffle bag he had given Sarah that morning before going to meet the lovely Clive.

‘I’ve been waiting all day to find out what was in there, but I’m not so sure I want to know now.’

‘Just the tools of my trade,’ Parlabane said, with a grin of near-satanic misanthropy.

He took off his boring blue tie and unbuttoned the white shirt that he had worn to present a respectable and unsuspicious image to the admin staff, then quickly hopped
out of his navy trousers and into a pair of black jeans which he produced from the duffle bag. Then he dipped into the bag again and laid out a number of small items on Sarah’s bed.

She looked with minor curiosity at the mysterious pieces of hardware arrayed before her, but her attention was massively distracted by Parlabane’s enjoyably prolonged state of partial undress. His skin looked weathered by the sun rather than tanned, muckily dark patches around the neck and shoulders giving way to a more consistent hue about his back and chest, where the hairs appeared blonder than on his head due to their being shorter and finer. She had half-expected to find him rakishly skinny under his clothes, but although he was far from muscular, his arms and torso had a sinewy, taut look of fitness about them.

From the bed he picked up an article of black canvas, punctuated with pockets and sections of elasticated loop, with two sturdy straps situated at equal distances in from each end. He picked up the one item Sarah recognised – the wallet of lock-picking utensils – and shoved it through two of the elasticated loops. Then he repeated the drill with a transparent plastic bag of computer disks and what looked like an extremely compact camera.

‘For interesting documents when the people you’re visiting haven’t been considerate enough to leave the photocopier on overnight,’ he explained.

He put his arms through the loops and pulled the strapping around his back and chest like a bra, which he fastened with a plastic clip at the sternum, then attached a neatly folded length of climbing cord across the front. Finally, he reached back into the duffle bag and produced a black polo-neck, which he stuck his neck through and pulled over the whole affair.

‘Why can I hear the
Mission Impossible
music in my head?’ Sarah remarked. ‘Look, Jack, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘Hey,’ he said, opening the window and standing up on the bed, ‘Parlabane’s back.’

Parlabane was twelve years old, staying the September weekend at his cousin Moray’s in Nairn. All day Saturday they had been alternately playing and fighting with Heather and Stephanie, Moray’s wee sisters, in the house and round the garden while their mums drank coffee and blethered in the kitchen and their dads hit into a force eight on the links.

In the evening, they were packed off to the living room to watch TV while their parents demolished four courses and plenty of dry red in the dining room, and hostilities had inevitably ensued when the girls’ choice of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
clashed with Parlabane and Moray’s preferred Ian Fleming adaptation on the other channel. Parental mediation was sought and produced the kind of compromise that illustrated why none of them ever got a job with ACAS: the girls could watch the first half of their film and the boys the second half of theirs.

The boys elected to back down from this Mexican stand-off and retreated to Moray’s bedroom for the remainder of the evening, where they played the Escape From Colditz board game and at some point came up with an idea to even the score.

Around one in the morning, half-an-hour after the last adult sound had been heard, they made their way downstairs and through the house silently. They used two pillows each, placing them in front of themselves, stepping on to the first and then taking the one from behind and bringing it to the front. There were no footfalls, and they could barely hear the sound of each other’s breathing.

Moray opened the girls’ bedroom door. They both knew it squeaked, so it was a very slow and patient process, pushing it centimetre by centimetre, stopping and pausing awhile after each hint of a noise, until it was open just wide enough to squeeze through. Once inside, they stood perfectly still on the floor for a short while, thrilling to the silence and the sight of the girls obliviously asleep on the bunk beds. Thrilling to the feeling of being where they weren’t supposed to.

Having steadied their breathing and recovered from the threat of giggling, they went to work. Moray had a rubber skull that glowed in the dark, and he attached it to the bedsprings of the top bunk, so that it dangled in front of Stephanie’s face where she lay on the bottom one. Parlabane quietly set about placing every object in the room upside down – apart from, obviously, the goldfish bowl – and arranging all of the girls’ dolls doing handstands along the wall.

The next day, the girls quite victoriously got their own back by saying absolutely nothing about it, but that didn’t matter.

They had a new game. The best game.

That night he and Moray left their bedroom window open, crept downstairs and out the front door, went around the house and climbed back in via the extension roof and a sturdy black drainpipe. All told it took less than ten minutes, but the excitement kept them awake and talking about it for half the night afterwards.

School disco a few months later, three days before the Christmas holidays. Parlabane had retreated to the first floor toilets to recover from the broken heart and devastating embarrassment of Alison Gifford knocking him back for a dance. All the other cubicles were full of second years drinking Woodpecker and smoking menthols, so he had to settle for the one at the end that no one liked to use because it had a frosted window above the cistern, and ‘folk might be able to see in’.

He was hiding, really. Didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to be seen. It was stuffy in the gym hall where the disco was, but he didn’t want to go out to the playground for air because it was full of lucky bastards getting a snog. With all the illicit smoking going on, the toilets were even more oppressively smelly than usual, and as he wasn’t in there to properly use the facilities, he stood on the seat, opened the window and stuck his head out. There was a drainpipe running up the wall just outside, the west wing’s flat roof a few feet above.

Guess what.

Parlabane scurried along the roof, looking down through the plastic-domed skylights at the empty desks and chairs in the semi-darkness below. He was in a fairly distressed and nihilistic frame of mind, he would in later years tell himself
to explain what he did next. It was as much to do with simply being twelve as being knocked back by Alison Gifford.

He dreeped down backwards, stretching his legs below him and placing his toes at either side of the bottom frame of a window, then pulled himself back up. His trainers scraped along the wood of the frame for a second and then the window came unstuck and slid upwards. He lowered himself back down until his feet were on the sill, then with one instep pulled the window up as far as it would go, and climbed in.

He found himself in the English Base, where all the textbooks were kept and where the head of the department, Mrs Innes, had a small office, partitioned off by shelves and cabinets. Parlabane wandered around for a few moments, his heart still racing from the fear of falling, and now dealing with the fear of getting caught.

But there would be no one to catch him. The half-dozen or so teachers mad enough to volunteer to assist with the disco were too busy policing the gym hall to even notice the various illegalities taking place in the toilets, so
nobody
was going to come up here.

He had a seat behind Mrs Innes’ desk, just catching his breath, enjoying the silence and the thrill. Then he noticed that the pile of sheets on her desk were the first year pre-Christmas exam papers, with the marks circled on the top-right corners. He flicked through them until he found his own, which had earned him 88%, and a quick scan of the rest revealed him to be top of the year-group.

There were no big secrets, no scandals, no revelations. These papers would be getting handed out the next day anyway. But as he climbed back out of the window, on to the roof, down the drainpipe and into the toilets, he felt invincible, knowing he had been where he should not have been, seen what he should not have seen, and knew something everyone around him didn’t.

So upon returning to the disco, the offered consolation from a pal that ‘Alison Gifford’s got nae tits anyway’ was very much redundant.

Parlabane had stayed in shape, retaining a proportionately light frame past adolescence and all throughout his twenties, assisted by an extremely understanding metabolism that was prepared to forgive his appetites for hamburgers and
Guinness. Contrary to his friends’ warnings and possibly hopes, his pituitary gland had not packed in and allowed a ten-stone fat backlog to catch up on him. Consequently, he could still support his hanging bodyweight on a few fingers of one hand; he’d rather not if he could possibly avoid it, but it remained reassuring to know it was an option, especially on a rockface or the side of a building.

However, it was not a talent he was going to need on a cakewalk like tonight. The RVI, in its Victorian quasi-gothic austerity, was a helpfully chunky building, designed, it seemed, with the needs of wall-scaling and burglary in mind. Parlabane had first ascended to the slate roof then made his way along the edge of it from above the on-call accommodation to the admin block, via two hundred-yard stretches either side of the entrance to the A&E department, which was at the centre of the main trunk of the building.

He identified the window he had left slightly open two floors below him, and pulled the climbing cord out from under his polo-neck, then secured it to a disused but sturdy chimney pot, and lowered himself down to the wide stone platform of the window ledge. Parlabane had been pleased to see that all of the admin block had been double-glazed – presumably the rest of the hospital would follow in no time – as that meant the frame should slide up quietly and easily, which it did.

Parlabane rolled inside and shut the window, then crawled on his stomach across the carpet to a spot directly underneath the security camera. From a pouch in his ‘utility bra’ he produced the photograph he had shot from that spot earlier in the day, taken without a flash so that it produced a dark and shadowy image, much like the room looked in the middle of the night with all the lights off. He took out a length of heavy, insulated copper wire and fashioned a small stand for the photo, then attached the whole thing to the bracket below the camera and swung it swiftly around in front of the lens.

The effect on the image appearing on a monitor, somewhere else in the building, would be simply for the picture to suddenly go out of focus, but to still appear to be the same thing. And in the unlikely event that someone was paying enough attention to the monitors to notice that one was out of focus, their first action would be to remote-adjust the camera
until the familiar image of the dark, deserted room became clear again.

His activities screened off from prying eyes, Parlabane took a seat in front of the nearest computer and began to lovingly and conscientiously trespass through the system.

He took a deep breath and keyed in the user name ‘jackp’ and the password ‘hack’, then breathed out when the alarms didn’t start ringing and no message appeared on his screen to the effect that Matt Dempsey had double crossed him and that the cops were already on their way. He accessed the programme menu and launched Hijack, as his friend in Van Nuys had amused himself to call the keystroke application. Dempsey had set it up to record all six of the senior staff’s activities, as although Lime’s password would grant the highest access privileges, it wouldn’t open documents encrypted by the other five, which required individual codes.

Parlabane pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, on which he had noted down the serial numbers of the machines each exec had been sitting at – Hijack listed these numbers instead of user names, as obviously it would be recording a terminal’s keystrokes before it knew the name of the user logging on. Might as well begin at the top, he thought, and pulled up the listings recorded on the terminal in Lime’s office.

stephenlime¶ tebbit¶ 1y5→→→ [del] [del] [del] [del] [del] memo to . . . it began.

‘Backstage pass,’ Parlabane muttered. ‘Access all areas. Thank you.’

He shut down and re-started, logging on with Lime’s user name and its attendant access privileges, and began looking, familiarly undeterred by the thought that he had no idea what he was specifically looking
for.

Partly remembering Dempsey and partly just out of habit, he scanned the purchasing records to find out which company the computers had been bought from, then repeated the drill on office furniture, stationery and decor etc, copying the appropriate documents on to one of the disks he had brought along.

Then he launched Loud Labelling and had a look at what the senior suits were pro-actively saying to each other. Nursing ‘efficiency’ was going to be ‘improved’ on several wards, by which Parlabane understood that a number of P45s were in the post. Auxiliary staff were going to be ‘streamlined’, and
the number of geriatric beds was going to be ‘rationalised’. However, it wasn’t all bad news – the Trust’s increasingly healthy balance sheet meant big pay rises were in the offing for the people who had worked hardest to achieve that success.

But the biggest buzz was to do with the George Romanes Hospital. Memos referred to how the ‘GRH plans are a vital plank in consolidating the Trust’s financial stability’, by which Parlabane understood it was somehow up for sale, and the ‘importance of discretion with regard to the GRH situation’, by which he understood that the clinical staff would probably freak if they knew about it.

He reached for the phone and dialled four numbers, then put the receiver down and waited.

After a couple of minutes it rang.

‘You said Jeremy was working at the George Romanes Hospital, didn’t you?’ he asked as soon as he picked it up.

‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘In fact he was covering it until his death.’

‘Just confirming. That’s all. Thank you.’

Now he had an angle. The next task was to find out what the furtive memos were actually referring to, information which he correctly guessed would be held in encrypted files. He called up a list of all documents stored in Lime’s personal folders; if anyone knew the full picture about this, it would be the big boss. The list was huge, so he altered the settings to arrange the items by document type. Sure enough, below the vast bank of ‘Wordsmith’ wp files were a number marked ‘Cryptlock document’ next to their dates of most recent use.

He double-clicked on the first one and was asked for a password, but ‘Tebbit’ didn’t score. This was one of the problems with encryption systems: they allowed the user to assign a different password to every document; indeed they required the user to assign one every time he or she wished to re-encrypt, rather than encrypting automatically with the same one when the user closed the file. On the bright side, however, there was the practical reality that no one wanted to be juggling too many passwords, and most people tended to stick to the same one or two. Parlabane toggled back into Hijack and looked again at Lime’s keystrokes, worrying about the other problem with encryption systems, which was that if Lime hadn’t encrypted or decrypted anything that day, Hijack was useless, as no password would have been keyed in.

Fortunately, the word ‘thatcher’ appeared, sandwiched between a bunch of cursor strokes and function key numbers. Goal.

‘I’m Mr Bad Example,’ Parlabane sang quietly to himself, scanning the files, ‘take a look at me. I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy. Oh Mr Lime, you
have
been a busy boy.’

ATTN: Timothy Winton (Eyes only).

It is my consideration that we accept the Capital Properties offer. I believe you are quite right in estimating the value to be nearer the £5m mark than the bid £3m, but I feel that the bird in the hand factor should come into play.

Firstly, having a closed deal on the table at the time of the announcement will go some way towards staving off the inevitable protests. If we merely announce that the GRH is closing and we intend selling the property, we’ll be drowning in a sea of placards, as well as having to listen to countless hare-brained suggestions from the Butlins white coats for alternative usage of the site.

Secondly, the immediate injection of £3m in cash would bring the Trust’s finances well into the black before the end of our financial year, and I don’t need to tell you how useful that would be politically, for us as well as the Scottish Office. The new NHS badly needs success stories and we have the opportunity to be a very big one.

And on an earlier file:

ATTN:	Timothy Winton
Toby Childs
Cedric Baker
Penelope Gainsborough
Elliot Michaels

It has been brought to all of our attention that the bed-usage situation at the George Romanes Hospital has altered, with a steady reduction in the
number of long-term patients through placement and natural wastage.

It seems plausible, now, that the GRH’s geriatric care facilities could be absorbed by the RVI, albeit with a reduction in the overall number of geriatric beds in the Trust. This would free up the GRH site for alternative and more cost-effective use, suggestions for which I will be welcoming at our meeting this afternoon.