The Messiah Secret (4 page)

Jesse McLeod almost always arrived at work early, typically at about six in the morning, for two good reasons.

Firstly, it meant he could leave early in the afternoon and head for the beach with his surfboard, as long as the sun was shining. If it wasn’t, or if he had a lot to do, he’d climb back on his Harley, track over to his penthouse apartment just south of Carmel, right on the Californian coast, and spend the rest of the day working on one of his computers, using his administrator access to remotely monitor the company’s network. Of course, leaving early only worked if nobody had broken anything or otherwise screwed up the system, which didn’t happen quite as often these days because they’d ditched Vista, which only occasionally did what it was supposed to do, and reverted to XP, which was clunky but usually reliable. He was still evaluating Windows 7.

The second reason was that arriving at work two hours before anyone else allowed him to run his usual checks on the operating system, application software, back-up devices and the various linked databases – getting on with his basic network housekeeping, in other words – without any of the non-geeks interfering or asking the usual idiot questions.

McLeod had been the network manager, database designer and just about anything else to do with the NotJustGenetics Inc. – colloquially known as ‘NoJoGen’ – computer system for over ten years, pretty much since the day the company was formed. He’d done well out of it. Not as well as the guy who’d come up with the idea of genetic research and gene manipulation to attempt to cure or at least help combat specific diseases, but well enough. He had a six-figure salary, could dress just about however he liked, and turn up pretty much whenever he wanted, as long as the network and software were stable. And there were other bonuses as well.

McLeod pressed the code to open his office door, dumped his crash helmet on the table in the corner and peeled off his leather jacket. It was already getting hot outside, but he wore the leather for protection in case he crashed the hog, not for warmth. Under it he wore a faded CalTech T-shirt – unlike most people who affected such garments, he had actually been there – and tight-fitting black jeans that emphasized his height and lean build. They were cinched around his waist with a leather belt
which was fastened with a solid silver buckle depicting a fist giving the finger. It was, in many ways, an accurate indication of his outlook on life.

Then he switched on his monitor. Like most commercial operations that relied on computers, which meant almost everybody these days, the NoJoGen system ran 24/7. Only the flat-panel monitors were shut down when the offices were closed.

McLeod sat down in his swivel chair, ran his fingers through his untidy mop of dark curly hair, opened up his master diagnostic program and started it running. He’d designed the software suite himself. It was a management program that executed a series of commercial diagnostic routines one after the other and displayed the results at the end, and it usually took no more than about ten minutes to run to completion. That gave him enough time to plug in his coffee machine and load up the first brew of the day – in McLeod’s opinion, a supply of decent coffee was almost as important to him as good diagnostic software.

Only when the system analysis results popped up on the screen – all showing green – and his first cup of java was sitting on the desk beside him, did he take a look at the search routines his machine had been running overnight. These weren’t normal internet searches. The wide-area search routines McLeod had put in place accessed private databases as well, many of them run by government agencies and commercial organizations, databases whose managers fondly believed were secure against hackers.

But Jesse McLeod wasn’t just any old hacker. He’d narrowly avoided a prison term at the age of fifteen when he’d wormed his way past three separate firewalls and numerous intruder detection systems to get inside a network at the Pentagon. He’d gained administrator access there, given himself a username and password, and used that network as a gateway that had allowed him to jump straight into another network based in Pennsylvania Avenue and operated by the White House. The reason he wasn’t prosecuted was probably largely due to embarrassment that a kid of his age had managed to outwit the best security consultants and computer experts in the American government and military.

He had been ordered to show these experts exactly how he’d managed to effect his intrusion, however, so that those loopholes could be closed, and he’d also been instructed to test all the Pentagon’s and the White House’s access points – under close supervision – to see if he could defeat those as well. He had, twice, which had resulted in four civilian administrators and three senior military officers losing their jobs within the next three weeks.

In the ten years since then, the FBI had watched Jesse McLeod very closely, but the threat of prison had frightened him, and after that episode he had become what was known as a ‘white hat hacker’. That meant he still trawled the internet, and still probed the sites he found, but if he worked his way into a system he announced the fact to the network administrator and suggested ways of
closing the loopholes he’d exploited. He never copied data or did any damage inside the networks he cracked, and a handful of times he’d even been paid ‘consultancy fees’ by the target companies for his efforts.

At least, that was what the FBI believed. But like a lot of things the FBI believed, they were wrong. Jesse McLeod was constitutionally incapable of obeying the law, and that was one of the reasons why NoJoGen paid him such a large salary. The company needed access to the kind of data that was unavailable in the public domain – a less mealy-mouthed description of this activity would be industrial espionage – and relied on him to hack his way into whatever system held it, and then retrieve it.

But these days he was a lot more careful, and a lot more secretive. He had set up dozens of fake identities in China and Pakistan and the new states that had emerged following the break-up of the Soviet Union, places where he knew that American law enforcement would find it difficult, or even impossible, to track him, and used those as the apparent origin – the technical term was a ‘zombie server’ – for his probes. He’d even set up an account that purported to be located in North Korea – a country that offered no internet access at all to its population – just to see what the Fibbies would do about it. They hadn’t noticed.

And so, every night, while he slept peacefully in his penthouse, the sound of waves breaking on the shore below him, his untraceable electronic proxies trawled the
web, probing systems and networks and looking for any references to whatever subjects the founder and majority shareholder of NoJoGen, John Johnson Donovan – known simply as ‘JJ’ – had asked him to locate.

His proxies never left any evidence of their intrusion, and merely copied whatever data they could find that related to the search string McLeod had loaded into their programs. When they’d completed their mission, each proxy automatically accessed one of several web-based email accounts and pasted the results into email messages. But these messages would never be sent, because all emails leave an electronic trail across the internet. Instead, all the messages were left on the servers as drafts, and McLeod was then able to access each email account, copy the contents of the draft messages and afterwards delete them, which left no trace at all.

The whole process was automated, and McLeod would only get personally involved if the hacking software he’d designed failed to breach the defences of a particular network. Then he’d flex his hacking muscles and spend a pleasant few hours working out how to get inside that system. But normally, he just scanned the results when they were displayed on his monitor, weeded out the obvious rubbish, and sent the rest up to Donovan’s workstation on the top floor of the building.

Because it was a Monday and the offices had been closed since Saturday morning, there were dozens of results to analyse. As usual, most of them were of neither
interest nor relevance, but when McLeod looked at the nineteenth search result he sat back in his seat and whistled.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he muttered to himself.

He checked the source of the data, but that turned out to be no surprise at all. He’d seen immediately that the information had been posted on the front page of a small local newspaper, and the version his proxy had located had been in the on-line version of the journal, hosted on an entirely unprotected server.

McLeod read the article in its entirety, and one short paragraph caught and then held his attention. He sat in thought for a minute or so, then clicked his mouse button a couple of times to bring up an internet search engine. He entered a simple search term and looked at the results, which gave him the name of the website he was interested in. He opened up one of the hacking programs he’d written himself and started probing the distant server, looking for a way inside. There was something there he definitely needed to get a look at.

In less than fifteen minutes he was looking at a list of police case files, listed by number. Then he changed the parameters and generated an alphabetical list of the names of the claimants or victims. Most of the files were small, the incidents fairly pedestrian – muggings, car thefts, burglaries, and so on. And then he saw something big. There were numerous statements, reports by the attending officers, forensic analyses and the like, and a whole sheaf
of crime-scene photographs, all neatly labelled and catalogued.

He flicked through the forensic stuff until he found the one that related to the paragraph in the newspaper story, and made a copy of it on his hard drive. Then he glanced through everything else he’d found, and despatched the original newspaper report up to Donovan’s computer with the rest of the stuff. When his boss got in, he guessed he’d get a call.

But he had a completely different recipient in mind for the forensic report he’d copied from the police database.

Two hours later, Angela had turned off the M25, where the traffic was actually moving, for a change, and was heading up the A10, the old London Road. Her satnav had protested when she made the turn, but she’d decided to take the scenic route because she had two ulterior motives. First, she wanted to treat herself to lunch in a country pub somewhere, and there were no such facilities on the M11. And, second, she wanted to be able to stop somewhere and ring her ex-husband, Chris Bronson, to explain why she’d be out of town for the rest of the week. She’d called his mobile from her flat in Ealing before she left, but it had gone straight to voicemail. Knowing Chris as well as she did, she knew she’d be able to reach him at lunchtime.

Nearing the village of Wendens Ambo, she spotted an old pub and parked her Mini in one of the few remaining spaces in the front car park.

She ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of Perrier, and
carried the drink over to a seat right beside a window that overlooked the main road outside. While she waited for her food to be served, she pulled out her mobile. This time, Bronson answered almost immediately.

‘Hi, Angela. Where are you?’

‘How do you know I’m not in my office, slaving away over a broken pot?’ she said, a little annoyed with herself for feeling pleased to hear his voice.

‘I’m a detective, remember. Actually, I called your office. So where are you?’

‘Suffolk, I think.’ She looked up and nodded her thanks as the barman placed an enormous bowl of salad on the table in front of her.

‘Suffolk?’ Bronson was clearly surprised.

‘Yes. I’ve just stopped for lunch in a pub near a village called Wendens Ambo, and I’m heading for a country house somewhere near Stoke by Clare. Wonderful names, don’t you think?’

‘A country house party, is it?’

‘Sadly not. Actually, I’ve been sent up here to work. An elderly minor aristocrat named Oliver Wendell-Carfax was murdered in his home near here about two weeks ago—’

‘I know about that,’ Bronson interrupted, sounding concerned. ‘I saw one of the reports. Somebody strung him up from the staircase and then beat him, but the autopsy showed that he actually died of a heart attack. I think the local police have drawn a blank on the case so far – no
obvious suspects and no apparent motive, though somebody had searched the house. It’s a nasty business. But what’s it got to do with you?’

‘Well, the museum has now become involved – not because of who Wendell-Carfax was, or how he died, but because of what he did. He was pretty much the last of a long line of avid collectors of antiques and ancient relics. Apparently his country house is full of the things. He was also, according to Roger Halliwell, a typical grumpy old bastard. Over the last ten years or so he managed to alienate just about every member of his family, and almost everybody else who knew him. When he died, the firms of solicitors he’d used opened up his last will and testament and had a bit of a shock.’

‘ “Firms of solicitors”?’ Bronson asked. ‘In the plural?’

Angela sighed. ‘Yes. Over the last year Wendell-Carfax visited four different solicitors in Suffolk and deposited his last will and testament with each of them.’