Chapter 17: Oxford, October 20, 9:30 a.m.
A blustery autumnal shower sent the last withered horse chestnut leaves cascading onto Dave Cohen’s expensive raincoat. He was hurrying across the University Parks, walking towards the Nuffield Institute. Well-groomed and fastidious in appearance, Cohen was several showers and a Kenzo suit away from the computer nerd of popular mythology. The morning walk was a daily fad he indulged despite the myriad risks of physical contamination that could ruin the venture: an unnoticed dog turd; an impromptu shower to sully his unprotected, sculptured hair; an inadvertent collision with a sweaty jogger.
Cohen had been back at Oxford for a year, a city he had left too many years ago with a poor history degree. But this time round, things were very different. Receiving a fantastic grant, funded partly by an anonymous government department, partly by a computer giant, he was able to afford the lifestyle he had missed as a student. There were lavish opera nights in London, meals and drinks for friends in Oxford’s trendiest cocktail bars and restaurants, all at his expense. A large mortgage on a period house in Jericho completed the transition.
Despite the good life he now enjoyed, Cohen was still full of recent memories as stark and bleak as the touch of autumn on the manicured nature of the Parks. This was where they had first met he and Marie, all those years ago, innocent first-time lovers in the romance of misted November quads, summer punts and Pimm’s.
In their final year, Marie turned political, ultra-green and he had quickly followed. Then the years in London, the protests, the activists’ camps, until that the policeman’s truncheon struck her skull when they were trying to break out of a police kettle on an anti-capitalism demo.
Without Marie, there was nothing to go on for. Either in the movement or in life in general. He quit the movement and drifted. With Marie to live for, a cashless life had been cool, often literally, but always fun. After her death, languishing in the misery and squalor just gave him too much time to wallow in his grief. He decided to try for a job. At first he got a few interviews, but by the middle of the next winter, they froze up like the taps in his squat. In the meantime, the fat girls with pink hair at the dole office were telling him to do some temping. Temping? If only he could! If only there had been one less volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and someone at Oxford had taught him skills he could use in the twenty-first century capitalist marketplace.
As winter wheeled into spring, confusion turned to abject depression. He couldn’t bear to keep in touch with anyone, either his former friends from the movement or his successful old college friends; job failure cordoned him off into a private world of bitterness and squalor. In the winter darkness, Cohen started to lose the will to keep trying. For what could he do? Emigrate, all the traffic was coming the other way. Drugs? He didn’t have enough cash to fund a habit. Suicide? It sounded best and cheapest. On long walks around grey North London suburbia, he studied bridge overhangs—too messy, calculated canal depths—too cold, forged Diazepam prescriptions—too obvious. If he wanted to join Marie, he would have to think of something exceptionally gruesome.
Education! The path to salvation suddenly came to him one afternoon as he was watching an old black-and-white of Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, while getting pissed on plastic cartons of Sainsbury’s cheapest and most amalgamated vin de table. In a rare bout of inebriate concentration, Cohen instantly bonded with Edmond Dantès’ struggle to escape the misery of his dark prison cell. That was it! With an iron self-discipline born out of utter desperation, Dantès had chiselled night and day to escape his misery, conquering the darkness of his cell and the darkness in his mind with the enlightenment of knowledge.
Cohen took a long pull of wine and vowed to copy Dumas' character. With or without a government grant, he would raid the public libraries and the YouTube self-help tutorials and work every hour of every day to acquire such formidable knowledge that one day the scum who no longer even bothered to glance at his CVs would be forced to employ an unrecognized genius. What would he study? By chance, the next programme on his unlicensed TV had been an open university course on computer programming. And that was where it had all begun, on a cold February afternoon, five years ago in a Tottenham squat.
If they had known of his background, Dave Cohen often thought, his colleagues at the Nuffield might have been more forgiving of the secretive, debonair young man they watched logging on at his terminal. Most instinctively avoided the chic whiz kid with the hottest reputation and largest grant in the IT research world, who listened to loud opera music all day and smelt of expensive aftershave. But in a way, Cohen was glad they did so. It would have been inconceivable to the hero of that old black-and-white film to forgive those who had wronged him once he had found his island full of treasure. And there was Marie’s death too with its unpaid bill of revenge.
Then Mr Hasan had turned up one day at his Jericho flat and had explained about Omar. It had not taken Hasan long to persuade him to meet Omar, nor had it taken Omar any longer to win him over to the cause, to convince him to get involved in something which would have made Marie truly proud. If only she could have lived long enough to join herself in Omar’s project.
Turning up the volume of Puccini’s La Bohème, Cohen keyed in the last elaborate log in password. This would give the other three researchers working on his project access to all his files and codes. To prevent them doing so, he had added a final password, without which not only his own machine, but all the computers in the Nuffield and the university mainframes would also crash.
Cohen smiled to the Puccini. He had less than twenty seconds to type in the password: NOVEMBER 1
Having done so, he clicked on e-mail. He had some good news to forward to another Oxford address.