The Pink And The Grey Part 15

"I have not, I am afraid. Though I do frequent gay bars. I expect there is some overlap."

Once our two infiltrators had tidied up, covered their tracks and gently scarpered we kept a nervous eye on the Brummie for signs of suspicion. I knew that on the previous evening Conor had tried to, as it were, sign the gentleman up, but he had as yet affirmed no decision. It was prudent to proceed with utmost caution.

The Archivist said his elves would keep watch and report. He had adjusted the elf rota to ensure existing coverage was unaffected, and boasted of the procedural changes he had introduced to ensure no repeat of the week's shortcomings.

I left him and his elves to their s.h.i.+fts. I had other business: welcoming Seb once more into college and escorting him to what I publicly called his orientation meeting. He would spend the day locked in a room with various of the Archivist's special operations team, being initiated into his temporary new role.

I had been worried that Amanda, with her camera access, would discover the truth about Seb and alert the newspaper. The Archivist said this would not be a problem: there would be a cover story involving a piece of performance art. The truth would be known only to highly trusted parties, personally vetted by the Archivist.

Seb antic.i.p.ated his day in training with gusto.

"Do you know what it is, Spencer?" he asked me. "Is it something I will enjoy?"

"In good time," I said, sounding suddenly like the Archivist. I did not want to speak of it in public view. "You will be fine."

I checked in regularly with his progress as I dealt with the many race matters that began to pile up and tried to avoid the paint-stripping rays of the purple eye. I knew Amanda would be hankering for the response to my supposed mulling regarding my position. She would have to hanker on. Every half-day's hanker, I estimated, added about a finger of gin to my jolliness. By the end of the week, with a following wind, I hoped I would be utterly hankered.

sixteen.

The Hack "OK, let's have some sort of order," said Geoff, chewing on a lump of curried chicken I could still see far too much of. It was our usual Monday editorial meeting over glorious fragrant Thai food. "It's a big week, boys. You kids could make your names with this one if you keep your noses brown."

I nodded eagerly, playing the part like a pro. Simon was Simon, struggling with some reluctant bean sprouts and wis.h.i.+ng we could be in a greasy spoon. Manish met n.o.body's eye.

Geoff pointed his fork at me. "I know it's early, but what have you got so far?"

"I've spent the morning being blinded by websites that look like s.h.i.+te," I said, which was true, and shovelled in a pepper-hot pineapple and some rice.

Geoff refused to make a website for the Bugle. He claimed it would stop people buying the print edition, but we all knew it was because he didn't want to sh.e.l.l out the pennies for one, and he didn't understand the whole internet fad anyway.

A toxic concoction of liquids escaped his mouth. "Is that what you call research, ginge?"

"I was trying to find out what people are saying about the race. It's sort of like interviewing, but without the exercise. I mean, if you want me to wear out my shoe leather all afternoon I'll do it. It's a decent enough day, I could top up my tan." I was working up a decent sweat from the curry, and the endorphins were kicking the h.e.l.l in.

Simon cut in. "I found a possible lead, in some G.o.dawful student chat room." He spat the words as if they were vice den or crack house or teen-ager. To me chat room sounded as ancient as wireless before it became all modern again. A glance from Manish, a barely perceptible smirk, showed he thought the same. But then, hey, people still said horse power even though n.o.body had ridden a horse in, like, sixty years.

"What was in this chat room?" I asked, making cutlery air quotes. "Hippies on beanbags with the marry-joo-ahna?"

"It was about how these poor old toffs were having such a poor old time in this s.h.i.+t-hole of a city - I'll give 'em that - because there weren't enough stick-up-the-a.r.s.e restaurants to take mater and pater to. And then one fella, no proper name, just some string of letters and numbers, started up about foreigners. The usual gubbins, too many, all the jobs, go home - no offence Twiglet."

Manish put his hand up. "I'm British."

"Whatever. And then he says, there's a foreign student at St Paul's. Big deal, someone says, place is full of 'em, and then he says he's 'unregistered'."

"h.e.l.lo," said Geoff, mouth full again. I think he only spoke with his mouth full. "Does that mean illegal? Or is it one of those la-de-da college words?"

"Dunno. I'm gonna look into it." He hacked away at his bean sprouts like he was forking a hay bale, except he never picked anything up.

"Yeah. Promising," said Geoff. "That'd be a story, illegal immigration funnelled through the college. Back-handers for the left-footers, that sort of thing."

"Or maybe trafficking?" said Manish, plate already empty. "Bound to be a top headline for that. Something about red lights, maybe. You want me to start thinking?"

"Keep your hair on, Twiglet. Flowers piece first."

"I was thinking Spencer De-Flowers for that one."

I laughed, despite myself. I hoped it didn't mean Manish wasn't going to support us. "Have you found anything out?" I asked pointedly, spearing a piece of chicken.

"Nothing since Friday night," he replied equally pointedly.

"What happened Friday night?" said Geoff.

Manish hesitated and I held my breath, which was a bad idea given the mouthful I had.

"Ginge just filled me in, that's all," he said finally.

"Did he now?" Geoff laughed. "Filled you in up the wrong 'un, did he? Told you you should never go to those places. Was it the Rohypnol again, ginge?"

I chewed and swallowed quickly. "For the record, there was no Rohypnol and none of that kind of filling in. It was a perfectly respectable knowledge transfer over a beer or two. I may have innocently brushed against his knee a couple of times. But there was no mad fumble down an alley. I'm not that kind of girl."

"I bet you're not. So, possible illegals, nothing yet on Flowers, and ginge has been surfing the bleedin' internet. Well, I've-"

"Actually, I did find something about the race," I said, putting down my cutlery. "Might be worth a bit of digging."

"Go on then, tell the cla.s.s." Geoff spread his hands grandly and sarcastically. Simon had progressed to lifting his plate to his face. Soon he'd be like a horse with a feed bag, dead-eyed and thinking of f.a.gs.

"What's interesting," I said, "is it wasn't something that Sp- that Flowers mentioned when we spoke last week for the puff piece with all the b.o.o.bs. I've discovered the race has a sponsor, funding all the publicity, the equipment, everything."

"Oh yeah? Who?"

"I don't know."

"That's no b.l.o.o.d.y good. Find out."

"That's it. n.o.body knows. Except Flowers, apparently."

Manish gave me a crafty look, the git, and I wished he hadn't. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"Know what?"

"That only Flowers knows. He might have told someone."

I thought quickly. "Well, that's what people are saying."

"What people?" said Simon, nose up from the bean sprouts, glaring at me.

"The people... on the website I looked at. One of the ones that made me go blind. Not a p.o.r.n one. I don't look at p.o.r.n, of course. Not at work anyway. OK, I have, once or twice, but only accidentally. I clicked when I should have run away. What can I say, he had a decent smile on him. And that wasn't all he had, either." That was better: I tried to drag the subject elsewhere. Jeez, if only there was a squirrel I could point at. Everybody loves looking at squirrels.

"Alright," said Geoff, "enough. Illegal immigrants, secret donor. Query trafficking, query laundering. Very bleedin' queery indeed. Plenty to get your teeth into. Bit like the good old days, ain't it Psych?"

"Next time I'm having chicken and chips," he replied, clattering the half-empty plate onto the table. "You get anywhere with this Archivist?"

Geoff made a face, curling his lip. "Trail's gone cold. I've put the word out, made a few more enquiries. The ones who were going 'yeah, yeah' last week and singing like a canary are now saying they heard about him from each other. Like a bleedin' echo chamber. There's something in it, though, I'm sure. Everybody's keeping zipped up tighter than a kipper's a.r.s.e. No offence, ginge."

"On behalf of all kippers, none taken."

"Right," he said, slapping his hand on the table. "Who wants another beer?"

Just because I made fun of the old man's crazy words like chat room and free education Simon made me stand over him back in the office while he cracked his fingers and attempted some kind of advanced hacking jiu jitsu. He'd been on a course, apparently, but I suspected that actually meant someone with kind eyes had taught him which way round to hold a mouse and that the little x in the corner made the program go bye-byes.

"I didn't realise you were a hacker," I said to him. "What have you broken into? The Pentagon? Number 10 Downing Street? Weight Watchers?"

"You scoff, kid. It's easier than you think." He opened up a new browser window using approximately the slowest means possible. It would almost have been quicker to build my own computer from rock and sand. I already wanted to tear the mouse from his yellow stick fingers and wheel his chair into the lift shaft.

"What are we hacking today?" I said. "I'll make notes."

"No notes, you pillock. That's evidence."

Of course every page he loaded hopped across the network potentially leaving an audit trail at about forty-nine points along the way as well as at the website he was visiting and also by any spooks who might've been watching, but no, I had to put my pen down.

He typed in the web address for St Paul's College, including the http prefix which he got wrong twice, and I tried to imagine what life must have been like for him back in the early part of the twentieth century.

When he finally hit the Go b.u.t.ton the front page popped up quickly enough. It wasn't too bad, as these things go: decent looking, full of links to the usual galleries and fluff and maps. We skimmed through the information for prospective students, including arty photos of the prettiest undergraduates smiling in a library, which I was almost certain had never happened in the history of mankind. We both recoiled at what looked like an artist's impression of some enormous purple gargoyle with deflated Marge Simpson hair and fifties gla.s.ses being surprised in a brothel. Inexplicably it was captioned "Amanda Chatteris, Master" and I was convinced it must have been a student prank for rag week, but Simon said he'd met her and the picture showed her on a good day.

Finally after much slow-motion clicking Simon located the link he was after: the St Paul's staff intranet. Internal college web pages, not supposed to be accessible by Johnny Public, and especially not by Psycho Journalist.

He clicked the link, and a new page appeared. It had the usual logo and s.h.i.+te, and a big box asking for username and pa.s.sword.

"Oh dear," I said like I was talking to a two-year-old. "Never mind, you had a decent go. One house point for trying."

"You think you know everything, don't you, ginge," he said.

He typed in the username admin and a pa.s.sword that showed up as blobs - I couldn't tell what he was typing. He clicked the big OK b.u.t.ton, and it rejected him with a large red error message.

"It's calling you an invalid," I said. "I'd get onto the authorities about that, it's discrimination. I mean, you're old, but you're not infirm. I guess you might be incontinent. Does that count as invalidity?"

He ignored me and tried again, typing whatever he was typing more carefully this time. And on clicking OK, it let him in.

I was genuinely gobsmacked. Not speechless, obviously, but definitely gobsmacked.

"Would you look at that," I said. "What the h.e.l.l pa.s.sword was that?"

His aged mouse trundled over the screen like Stephenson's Rocket off the boil and he picked out a different browser window lurking behind the first. It showed a thread on some Cambridge gossip forum somewhere, apparently more open to the public than its users thought it was. Here someone had blithely pasted the username and pa.s.sword for the St Paul's intranet and gone on their happy way.

I was about to say how much of a fantastic stroke of luck that was. But I knew it wasn't. I reckoned I knew what was going on here: Seb had told me the Archivist had taken unspecified "countermeasures". This was information planted specifically for us to find. It was some kind of honeytrap. Were we supposed to be bees? Bears? I wasn't a bear. More like a kind of ginger otter. But we were definitely being led somewhere.

"Clever," I said finally. "Looks like I underestimated you."

It was just about the least likely phrase I had ever uttered and it made Manish's ears p.r.i.c.k right up. He wheeled his chair over to see what we were doing.

What the St Paul's staff intranet lacked in design, it made up for in... no. It lacked in design and it lacked in everything else. There wasn't a lot to see there. Just a few links to internal policy doc.u.ments and student and staff mugshots and the like. We had a browse around. Curiously, in amongst the photos of students there was the drag star Cody as well as her undressed alter ego Jonathan. Maybe she was more of a permanent fixture in his life than I'd thought. We also discovered a photo of Spencer with more hair and less beard, and that gargoyle again, and other miserable but less frightening specimens.

Manish peered closely as they scrolled slowly by. "Oh, right, I see," he said, and looked at me. "Interesting."

A few links down some kind of rat hole we found a page with big bold blue letters: Foreign Guests. "Aha," said Simon, and clicked it.

The browser popped up another login page, taunting us. Inviting us.

"Try that pa.s.sword from before," I said.

He did. It rejected him. He tried again, just in case. Another rejection.

"Another level of security," said Simon. "Annoying. And suspicious. Why would they hide a page on foreign guests from their staff? Don't staff need to know that kind of thing?"

"Personal details, something like that?" said Manish. "Cleaners don't need to know your bank account number."

That was entirely plausible, so I ridiculed it. "They're not going to put that stuff online. This is Cambridge, they're not that sophisticated. It'll be on six-by-four index cards in a big dusty filing cabinet guarded by a griffin. And in any case-"

"Why doesn't it say students?" asked Simon. "Why foreign guests and not foreign students?"

"Good question." I resolved not to praise him too much, it was getting out of hand.

"Visiting speakers?" said Manish. "Or business people staying in the college during holidays when no students are about - you know, conferences. Or parents popping over to check little Raoul's allowance hasn't been p.i.s.sed up the wall."

"Maybe," said Simon.

"Try some other pa.s.sword," I said. "You can't give up now."

"Ginge, think about it. I can't sit here typing any old rubbish into it, it'll set off an alarm."

I thought he'd been watching too many c.r.a.ppy films. "So you're gonna walk away? The master hacker, defeated by a bunch of stuck-up pansies?"

"No. I'll keep digging. But I'm not doing it with you two breathing on me. Playtime's over, kids."

Twiglet and I were banished back to our desks. I began to worry that I'd been too obvious, too eager to make him push on and find whatever it was we were supposed to find. Or too much of a suck-up.

Manish leaned over: I expected him to confirm one or the other. "Ginge," he whispered. "This college lot. Are you sure they're on the right side?"

I glared at him to keep it down. "What do you mean?"

"Only... those photos, the staff ones. Old guy, bad toupee. Did you see that one?"