Sydney - Tuesday: September 28
"What we need, is some sort of computer genius, that can figure this all out for us," Steve said at one point. I think it was between the fourth and the fifth cup of coffee and a number of smokes that would send most tobacconists in ecstasy.
"How would that help us?" I answered my voice hoarse from too much smoking Discouragement and depression were starting to grip my mind with steel claws.
"Well," Steve said, "we would tell him or her all we know about this character, and presto the name would pop out on a little card," he said hopefully.
"Nice plan, Steve, except for two things: one- we know sweet-fuck-all about this character and two - modern computers don't spit out little cards," I answered.
"Shit man it's nearly eight o'clock and we got nothing," he said.
"Maybe even less than that," I agreed, "it cannot be done? let's get drunk instead. We can meet the end of the world suitably fortified," I suggested.
We both started pacing around the small flat, needing to do something but not coming up with anything useful. Roger confused, could not make up his mind which one of us he should follow, so he fluctuated from one to the other in a bizarre figure eight path.
At one point in my mindless perambulations I stopped at the window and saw a father get out of his car, walk around to the curb-side rear passenger seat and help his young daughter get out of the car and walk her to school, hand in hand. Scenes like that had a depressing effect on me - my marriage had finished before we had even started. We had talked about having kids. Lots of kids. The kids we both wanted so badly.
Oh well, what doesn't kill you? makes you wish it had.
I was definitely going down the dark spiral of depression, that black cloud was coming over me, all sufferers of chronic depression recognise immediately.If you let it in it can stay with you for months... even years. By then we would all be dead. I banged my head on the wall to clear it.
"What the fuck? What are you doing?" Steve said gazing over at me in alarm.
"Banging my head on the wall," I answered.
"Why? Are you frigging nuts? I have a bond on this place you know? You damage the wall you pay for it," he warned.
"I'll put my fist through it in a minute," I warned back.
"Go right ahead?it's a double brick wall," he laughed.
"Idiot," I said.
"You are the one banging his head on a brick wall? so, who's the idiot in here, uh? What do you reckon Roger?" he answered, turning to his stinky dog. Roger had collapsed on the floor and was panting; his tongue lay out on the cool tiled floor like a pink, wet carpet. Tired and dizzy from his efforts.
"That dog is very unfit," I said.
"Leave Roger alone and go back to your wall," Steve said crouching down to pet his creature.
I decided to call Henry. Maybe some good news about him and his little boy would cheer me up. I got my mobile out and started to look for the number in my list of contacts.
"What now? Who are you calling?"Asked Steve, looking up, hope in his face. Hope that I must have had some sort of brain wave that would solve our problems.
"Henry," I said.
"What the fuck for?" He exclaimed, angry at his hopes being dashed.
"Because I want to," I said and pressed 'connect' on my phone. I could see Steve in my peripheral vision, shaking his head, probably thinking that I had finally lost it. The sad part of it was that -he was probably right.
"Hi Louie, how are you?" Henry sounded pleased to hear from me.
"I am good, Henry," I lied, "And, how are you? How is Frankie?" I asked.
"Oh man! He is a lot better already. He is at home with me and is getting better and stronger every day. Thanks for all you did for us Louie. I am in your debt for life, mate," he said, emotion cracking his voice.
"Don't worry about it mate. You have just made my day with your good news, believe you me," I assured him, meaning it, feeling some relief from the oppression. There was some good in the world?but for how long?
"So, are you working on something interesting," he asked, after clearing his voice and trying to show a keen interest. Once more diverting my mind from depressing thoughts.
"Well?actually it's all going to the crapper? this new case. We stumped and don't know where to turn," I admitted.
"Can I be of some help?" He offered.
"I don't know, Henry. Shit, I don't even know what help we need. Steve reckons that we need some sort of computer genius? I don't know of any though, or any good enough?" I said.Henry did not say anything, I waited for a while, and then I said,
"Are you still there?"
"Yes I am. I was just startled by what you said. I was not sure whether you were joking or just having me on, Louie," he answered.
"I don't understand, Henry? what do you mean?" I said, now totally confused.
"Well, I did tell you that? I am what you might call a computer nerd, although hacker is a more romantic term. That was my main job in the armed forces, and I was the best they had. How else would I have identified the group of pigs that hurt my son?" He said bitterness in his voice.
"But of course!" I exclaimed a glimmer of hope flooding my brain, "now why didn't I think of that? you are just the person we might need. Listen; are you at home right now? We are running out of time," I urged.
"I will be, in a little while. I am just about to take Frankie to school," he said.
"No problem at all, see you about ten thirty to eleven then?" I suggested.
"Sounds good, Louie, see you then."
Once off the phone, I was feeling that I had finally accomplished something concrete. I smiled at Steve. He looked at me as if he now knew for a fact that I was insane.
"We are going to visit Henry," I said
"Henry? the chauffeur?" He asked.
"The very same," I said
"What the fuck for? We haven't got the time to socialize." He said, ready to argue the point.
"He is the computer whiz that you wished for?just a few minutes ago," I said
"He is? Why didn't you say so?" He exclaimed, enthusiasm returned.
"Just did." I said,
"Let's go!" He said jumping up.
"We are not here," I said, grabbing the car keys and heading for the door.
We rang Henry's doorbell at about ten thirty five.
He lived in a nice bungalow located in a quiet street in a suburb called Castle Hill, which one of the better and leafier suburbs of Sydney. He welcomed us with a smile and hesitated a bit when he shook Steve's hand. But Steve's brilliant smile and attitude reassured him and he showed us into a practical and very cozy looking lounge room.
In one corner were stacked neatly a great number of toys. The television was still set on the Disney channel. His son must have been watching it as he breakfasted.
Without any pre-amble, Henry said, "tell me exactly what you need to know and what you already know."
We told him. We spoke in turn and he watched each one of us as if he were a tennis spectator. He made notes on a small note pad in some sort of short hand. He asked many questions, leaving no detail unturned, examined and re-examined every point. He was a thorough worker.
When we'd finished he thought for a moment, then he said, "when I was looking for that group of arseholes. I had a similar problem. I knew very little, just a few details.I had to develop my own search engine. A very special type, a hacker's search engine. It does not operate like normal engines. You know like yahoo and Google. Those rely on information, which is not only, easy to obtain, but more often than not is placed there by the different site administrators because they want their sites to be to found. My engine, on the other hand, hacks its way into sites and links and computers that don't want their information found, or have password-only access, or that are encrypted" he explained, "how quickly do you need this?" He finished.
"We need it before lunch," I said.
"What?" He exclaimed, "but that's not possible."
"Henry," Steve sai
d looking at him intently, "this is very serious stuff, millions of lives are at stake here, probably including ours and yours and Frankie's. Please believe us. I know it all sounds crazy ? but unfortunately it isn't."
We then told him the rest of the story. All of it.
"Fuck!" He said, "I know all about the effects of EMP. One of my projects was to assess the possible consequences of exactly that type of attack on our country. It would be bad, real bad. Fuck, what a mess!" He said, shaking his head, but that steel nerve that had served him in the Army was not gone for long, "before lunch, uh?" "well? it's insane? fortunately, I like insane!" He said, and he was serious, serious as a heart attack, "we better get started then? you never know, we might get lucky." He added and stood up. He motioned for us to follow him. We went down a short corridor and entered a small room.
Being a detective, I deduced that it was his study: the room was air-conditioned; there were four Mac Pro computers; the computers were set-up on a crescent shaped desk; In front of the desk, there was a chair that you might find on a space ship.
The four computers were obviously networked. Their respective screens were turned on and the screen saver was a slide show of his son. The pictures would build up on one screen and then shift across the other three; to fade away in the last?it was mesmerizing.
He sat himself down and using one main keyboard, he rapidly entered information. His fingers were a blur of movement. Immediately the computer on the far left started scrolling through a database of some type. He moved onto the next computer and repeated the procedure, and then the next, the last he left untouched. The scrolling was very fast, whenever a possible 'hit' was picked up by one computer it was entered into an initially empty database in the fourth computer, which immediately started running computer stuff.
The whole thing was amazing, those Mac Pro's are lightening fast. Steve and I watched the four machines working away, almost outdone by the human dynamo still entering parameters for the search. Finally, Henry stopped and turned around to face us.
"This may take ten minutes or it could go on for days. The more specific you can make the search the shorter and more reliable it will be," he explained, "unfortunately your search has just a few parameters, so it may take longer, a lot longer" he finished.
"A few parameters?" Steve asked." I thought we only had two."
"We know and or can surmise a few more than that. For example, your man is a male, a teacher and probably not a Christian. He has a fake name and has probably entered the country within the last five years. He probably lives and teaches within a 10 km radius of the Eastern suburbs. He is probably not married, has a mobile phone, prefers middle-eastern food, and a few other parameters," he explained.
"Impressive." I said, I was impressed, "but how do you search, for example, food preferences?" I asked, puzzled.
"Well, he would not go to a middle-eastern food supplier, it might be too obvious. He probably shops at Woolies or Coles. If he has paid with a credit card we can track what he has bought," he explained. "Look, simply put, it works like this: say for instance you want to find one individual at a concert or at a football match where there are thousands in the audience.It is a difficult problem. Unless you use a mathematical concept called sets. The population at the concert can be divided into two sets: males and females. Now you have reduced the number of possibilities by about 50%. Say you are only interested in those females wearing shorts, your set has now reduced further, and say that you are only interested in those wearing red t-shirts, this results in another reduction and so on eventually you can arrive at only one possible individual that belongs to all of your defined sets. It's a bit like the classification of living things using a dichotomous key. This is what computer number four is doing, simplified?er?a lot," he concluded. I smiled understanding the basic concept.
"I remember using dichotomous keys at school; we had to devise a key to classify each teacher in the school? that was a lot of fun. Some of our teachers were pretty weird people," I said.
"Exactly," Henry said.
"Ditto," Steve said.
The alarm woke us at about two thirty in the afternoon, we all looked up from our armchairs, where we had been hypnotized into a mindless slumber by the mind bending boredom of watching strings of numbers and words stream down computer screens at the speed of light. Henry, unlike Steve and I, was either instantly awake, or he had been awake all the time.
He was looking at computer number four with an air of satisfaction and pride.
On the screen, there was a name and an address, followed by the number: 58%.
Another four names and addresses were also displayed but all of them had much smaller percentages, the largest being 18%.
"Well, well ? here we are, look at that: there is a 58% chance that this guy," he said pointing at the screen with satisfaction. "Is the man you want?"
He then looked at us, stretching his arms out and yawning.
Steve was busily writing it all down.
"No need to write the information down, Steve, I am going to print it all for you." Henry said.
"Don't worry, Henry, he just writes everything in his little book," I said.
"Yeah, I do that? Henry ?er? 58% does not seem a very high probability to me," Steve commented.
"True enough Steve, it isn't very high. It's the best we are going to get with so few known facts about this man, and in such a short time," Henry nodded agreement, "on the other hand, you can look at it another way; this guy is three times more likely to be your suspect than all the other three," he added.
"And it's a million times more information than we had a few hours ago," I said.
"I suppose so," Steve said, but I could hear in his tone that he wasn't convinced.
"Take my word for it, Steve, no other computer could have come up with this information," Henry assured him.
"Come on, mate. Henry has done his job, now it's our turn," I said slapping him on the back, "anyways ?what else can we do?"
"Right you are. Our other options are: none and nil," he agreed.
We thanked Henry and promised to let him know how things would turn out.On the way back I called Maria. I gave her the names from Henry's list and their address and suggested we get AIA to set up 24/7 complete surveillance on all of them.
She agreed readily. It was a confirmation, in my mind, that the AIA mole had indeed been discovered.
I phoned Robyn.
"Right," she said after listening without asking one question, "full surveillance will be in place within the hour."
"Robyn, please make sure that none are spotted," I said.
"Don't try to teach grandma to suck eggs," she said tersely and hung up.