Bright early morning sunlight beamed in through the window above the sink and disappeared under the kitchen table. Sharon, in a blue silk dressing gown, had her legs twisted round by the side of her chair so her feet could soak up the solar warmth. Many people would have looked awkward in this position. Sharon looked like a basking cat.
The table was pine, as was most of the kitchen furniture. In a world full of fitted
Page
70
Villainous Aspirations
kitchens, Sharon had rebelliously decided to keep the 1930s steel sink and store all the kitchen clutter in freestanding pine units, which meant the layout could be changed whenever she felt like it, including the position of the table, which shifted around the kitchen with the seasons like some ancient sundial, so it always picked up the morning sun.
"How did it go last night?" she asked.
"Not wonderful." Danny didn't intend to discuss the details if he could avoid it, but Sharon would probably spot the discomfort in his body language, so he may as well be half-truthful.
Actually he was feeling far less bothered by the Moorhen fire than he had the night before.
Sleep and dreams had done the business they were supposed to do, filing away the previous day's activities in all the right locations, placing the extremes in a file labelled with somebody else's name, as somebody else's responsibility, and doing it as dreams do, in the most bizarre and fantastic way.
In the dream, he'd been a schoolchild playing football on the field Bradlee had mentioned, on Windsor Meadow, as it might have looked before the industrial estate took over, with uneven grass and daisies, ferns and bracken around the sides. Whether it had ever
Page
71
Villainous Aspirations
looked like that or not, that was the way the dream had it. Bradlee was there too, and Ronnie and Eric, all as children, Ronnie already stooping although he was only six, Eric with freshly cut hair, holding his jaw, Bradlee already bumptious and mischievous. He'd emptied a can of lighter fluid into the football and set fire to it, yet they carried on playing as normal, passing and even heading the ball, ignoring the three foot tail of flame behind it. When it went out of play it set fire to the ferns and bracken, though the smooth white leather surface of the ball somehow remained untouched.
Then along came a teacher. Miss Maybury, the name from the Moorhen desk, with a whistle around her neck and looking glamorous even in sports kit, but sorely intimidating too.
Danny had the ball at his feet when she arrived.
"Danny Mathews!" A distinct American accent. "Did you set fire to the ball?"
Danny didn't know what to say. He didn't want to take the blame, but he didn't dare squeal on Bradlee.
Eric came to his rescue. "It was Bradlee who did it, Miss."
Miss Maybury rounded on Bradlee.
Bradlee, in turn, rounded on Eric. "You can’t."
Page
72
Villainous Aspirations
"Bradlee!" yelled Miss Maybury. Then in a quieter voice, "If you're going to swear, at least do it properly. The word contains a 'u'. You asshole. Go on, say it."
"You can’t," said Bradlee.
"Try again. And keep on trying until you get it right."
"You can’t," repeated Bradlee. "You can’t, you can’t, you can’t…" But he couldn't get it right however hard he tried. The other boys laughed and pointed at him. Miss Maybury smiled at the wit of her punishment. Bradlee's humiliated face turned redder than a baboon's backside.
"Well it certainly tired you out," said Sharon. "You hardly opened your eyes earlier."
He had a vague memory of making love with half-light drifting in through the thin white curtains, but had discounted it as something from a morning before. It had certainly been very dream-like, half in and out of consciousness. All misty and dissociated but very pleasant too. "I knew it," he said. "You do like doing it with robots."
He poured himself a bowl of muesli.
Sharon was crunching toast with honey.
"No milk," said Sharon.
"Yoghurt?"
Page
73
Villainous Aspirations
"Nuh," mumbled Sharon.
Danny trod on the pedal of the white enamel bin and poured the dry muesli inside. "I thought you went shopping yesterday?"
"Didn't make it. If you're not doing anything, I thought we might go today."
She crunched on her thin toast and with her free hand flicked at speed through the pages of a magazine. Danny couldn't see what it was.
She had an eccentric taste in magazines. Usually she bought titles she had absolutely no interest in, anything from coarse fishing to bakers' trade magazines. It gave her, so she said, little insights into other people's lives, what drove them, what passions were out there that she didn't share. The one type of magazine he could guarantee she wasn't reading was a women's magazine. She couldn't deal with the consumer lifestyle thing.
He walked across to the big stainless steel fridge with glass panelled doors - the one item of kitchen furniture he'd chosen - and took out a half litre of Filippo Berio extra virgin olive oil, which he like to keep cool. He put it to his lips and downed it in one long guzzle, while Sharon watched, showing no emotion.
Shopping with Sharon could be quite hard work, though often entertaining, but he didn't want to turn her down. "Sure, let's do that."
Page
74
Villainous Aspirations
He moved across to stand by the sink, taking care not to block the sunlight that warmed Sharon's legs. Through the sash window he could see the bin liner he'd placed outside the back door the night before. Further down the garden was a pink crisp packet. Once or twice a year, youths from the Boxington Estate, a few hundred yards away, raced across these gardens in the small hours, on their way back from a night of drinking, vaulting the fences in their own version of the Grand National and leaving a trail of litter and slightly damaged plants, but judging the frequency just right so nobody ever caught them.
"Any news on Danielle?" he asked.
"Nothing good, no. Her kidney's are in worse shape than they thought. It'll be at least four weeks before she can come off dialysis. I'm going in to see her late this afternoon."
Sharon spent an hour each day by Danielle's hospital bed, talking through the news of her world, hoping the sound of her voice would be good medicine for her sister, who slept and said nothing. This was a sister to sister thing, Danny's role was to do whatever Sharon asked, and while Danielle was still unconscious, she wanted to visit on her own. As she'd explained, it was weird enough talking to somebody who
Page
75
Villainous Aspirations
wasn't even awake, without the distraction of a live audience.
The doorbell rang, a cheesy two-tone chime that had taken them an entire shopping day to track down.
"Expecting anyone?" asked Danny.
"No."
"I'll get it."
***
The gentleman at the front door was exactly that
- an old-fashioned gentleman. Beneath his Mackintosh he wore a tweed suit with a waistcoat and a striped tie, all large and baggy to suit his overweight frame. His watery grey eyes looked over a pair of half-moon spectacles.
"Mr Danny Mathews?"
There was a second man behind and slightly to the right of the first, in a modern suit, well-worn, and with much less presence.
"That's me," said Danny.
The old-fashioned gentleman held up his left palm and opened it to show a police badge.
"Detective Inspector Lewis." He nodded his head to the right. "This is Detective Sergeant Stafford.
We're with the Hi Tech Crime Unit, National
Page
76
Villainous Aspirations
Crime Squad. Do you mind if we come in, Mr Mathews?"
Danny tried to hide the shock. "Please do."
Then he remembered his chat session with Frank the night before, and Frank's final comment that he'd 'send somebody round in the morning'. He hadn't thought for a moment that Frank meant the police.
Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Stafford waited politely in the hall while Danny closed the front door.
"Let's go through to the dining room."
"Anybody else home?" asked Lewis.
"My partner, Sharon. She's not much into hi-tech."
"Good. Wouldn't want the whole world messing about with computers, would we?"
Lewis didn't seat himself immediately. He turned away from the table to study a print hanging on the dining room wall. "Now there's a villain if ever I saw one."
Danny followed Lewis's pointing finger.
It led to the detail of a very old painting that showed a sixteenth century family walking past an inn. The inn had a small window, and through it could be seen two men sharing a pipe of tobacco.
Page
77
Villainous Aspirations
"That's Sir Walter Raleigh! " protested Danny. "With Sir Hugh Myddleton, who built the New River. Hardly a pair of crooks."
Unperturbed, Lewis looked at the next painting along. This too contained an inn, and it was called The Sir Walter Raleigh.
"Passion of yours, is he?" Lewis wasn't big on eye contact. His voice was deep and crackly, very droll, but with an edge that hinted at mental agility. Sometimes he lapsed into a Northern accent, possibly Yorkshire, though Danny wasn't sure. Other times he masked it.
"Local history, not just him. He happened to live nearby. The pub was originally his house.
It's still a pub, but now under a different name, though why anybody should want to change the name when he once lived there is beyond me."
There were many more prints, but the next few Lewis came across were of fat eighteenth century cattle, which clearly didn't interest him. He lowered his broad backside into barely-upholstered dark wooden dining chair.
These were from the early 1950s and uncomfortable, but had once belonged to Sharon's parents, now deceased, so were unlikely to be changed.
It struck Danny that Lewis was a good decade older than the chairs, close to retirement
Page
78
Villainous Aspirations
age. He sat opposite him, where a willing interviewee would be expected to sit. He might not feel willing, but it was probably better to hide that. All Lewis had to do was scratch below the surface and he'd find enough to pull Danny deep into the mire: the smelly clothes in the garden, his conversation with Sharon and saying he was going to the Thames Valley, hacking software CDs still in their plastic pouch upstairs. He couldn't even think of a decent cover story for yesterday evening, or anything close to one.
"Mr Mathews, where were you on the afternoon of Wednesday the fifteenth?"
"You mean, this Wednesday just gone?"
"I do."
"I was in… Scotland."
"And what were you doing in Scotland?"
"I was working at the Motorola semiconductor factory in East Kilbride."
"Your usual line of work?"
"Yes, I work on semiconductor process automation."
Danny wasn't sure what to make of this opening line of questioning. In the circumstances, questions about Wednesday were a relief.
Sergeant Stafford produced a notebook and pen and began to make notes.
Page
79
Villainous Aspirations
"Do you have access to the Internet at the Motorola factory?" asked Lewis.
"Yes I do, but I rarely use it. I probably picked up my email around lunchtime, that would be about it."
"Can you prove this?"
Danny frowned. "That I didn't use the Internet? I suppose it's possible, yes, but you'd have to ask Motorola for their network logs."
"Good."
Lewis had the big jowls of a hound or mastiff - flaps of flesh that superficially look comical but in reality are runoff channels for blood when a dog locks its jaw in prey, so there's no conflict between the biting and the breathing.
Already Danny had him down as a highly effective investigator trying to disguise himself as a bumbling old man. He wore the delicate spectacles of an academic. His grey hair was supposed to be brushed back but often fell across his face. Yet his most outstanding feature, as Danny couldn't help but notice, was his eyebrows, which were truly spectacular.
"From your job," continued Lewis, "I would guess that your programming skills are highly advanced."
"That's correct."
Page
80
Villainous Aspirations
For the first time since his arrival at the doorstep, Lewis made deep eye contact. "Are you a good hacker?"
This was fine. If they could keep off the subject of yesterday, he'd willingly answer questions all day. "Do you mean, can I hack well, or do I hack responsibly?"
"Both, of course."
Danny had a shrewd idea that Lewis already knew the answers, that he was just checking to see if he'd get to hear them.
Proficient hacking wasn't something Danny usually owned up to, but he doubted he could sell any other story to Lewis, so he may as well be up-front about it.
"The answer to both questions is yes. I'm premier league, and I'm an old-fashioned hacker.
I hack to learn, not to destroy."
"Not many of you around, these days."
That was true. Danny counted himself as a hacker in the same way that Bill Gates was once a hacker, and Paul Allen, Microsoft's co-founder, and Steve Jobs, the creator of Apple. In the old days, hacking meant discovering everything you could about computers and their programs - your own, other people's. The aim wasn't to do damage or steal, but to learn.
Destruction didn't creep in until the late eighties
Page
81
Villainous Aspirations
with the development of the first viruses. Then the Internet arrived and all kinds of flakes and crazies joined in.
"Above all else, do no harm," said Danny.
This was the original hackers' ethos, now all but abandoned in the rush for money, fame and technical progress.
Lewis adjusted his glasses and pushed his hair back over his scalp, bringing Danny's attention to his eyebrows again. Did he ever comb them? Or knit them, maybe? Use shampoo on his brow rather than soap? Many ageing men could manage the barn owl look, but Lewis was up there with torn upholstery, bulrushes after a dry and windy summer, hay in a manger, werewolves on Regaine. The longest hairs had to be a good three inches.
"Have you noticed how few viruses are out there on the Internet at the moment?" began Lewis.
"I've heard it mentioned, yes."
"You're into your history, Mr Mathews.
Here's a curious story for you. Early African explorers bought cysts of a stomach worm in Zanzibar before they started their expeditions.
Once they were infested with this special worm, nothing else could happen to their stomachs.
They couldn't get amoebic dysentery and could
Page
82
Villainous Aspirations
barely get diarrhoea, because this relatively harmless worm had its own defences that killed competitors. They had to eat a lot to feed their worms, but they didn't get stomach problems."
It was a curious tale, but Danny failed to see the relevance. "No, I'm not with you."
"Somebody is clearing the field, dominating the networks, wiping out any kind of viral competition. And they're very good at it."
"Is that a bad thing?"
Lewis looked directly into Danny's eyes for the second time. "Do you know who's doing this?"
Danny shook his head. "I really haven't a clue. I'm not part of the hacker community, not…
the way it functions now. I'm not in touch."
Lewis played with his hair again. Perhaps he kept it in an unstable style so he had something to do with his hands. He could equally well have run his fingers through his eyebrows.
The man could have his own little ecosystem running around in there, top-dwellers close to the sunlight, small mammals eking out an existence in the darkness below, scampering around with topiary shears in their paws, carving cockerels and helicopters in the foliage. Surely there was some European law against this - interviews conducted with overwhelming distractions -
Page
83
Villainous Aspirations
some human rights violation. No wonder the man had made it to the rank of inspector. His victims simply hadn't been concentrating.
Lewis took a grip on the table and struggled to rise. Sergeant Stafford followed his lead.
"Is that it?" asked Danny.
"Do you have any travel plans?"
"Only Scotland, with work"
"I'll be in touch."
Lewis stretched to free up his ancient joints, then he looked around the room a little more. He started the other side of the Raleigh painting, with a photograph of ants in their nursery, moving eggs.
"That's one of my partner's," explained Danny.
"Broody, is she?"
"I think she would be if she could lay an egg. But she's slightly put off by the non-egg-laying method."
The next item Lewis glanced at was Sharon's favourite ornament, standing on the sideboard. It was a three-masted sailing ship in a glass bottle - actually a glass ball, with no neck or other means of entry. The piece had been dated by experts at 1790, by Italian craftsman Gioni Bondi. Only two more examples of his
Page
84
Villainous Aspirations
work were known to exist, and both were in museums.
For this one item, Sharon, a woman of usually modest tastes, had paid eighteen thousand pounds.
Danny wondered if Lewis would comment on it, maybe recognise its worth. He didn't, but then nobody ever did, apart from asking the obvious question of how the ship had got inside a sealed glass ball.
Lewis came back to the print showing two knights of the realm in the window of an inn.
"So what happened to Raleigh in the end?" His voice was still droll, but there was mischief in it. "How did he meet his maker?"
"He was beheaded," answered Danny, quietly.
"On what charge?"
"Treason."
Lewis sniffed loudly. "Well how about that?"
***
That was a finely judged show of intimidation by Frank, decided Danny, as he pondered over Lewis's visit. It had been unpleasant to have the police calling round, especially the day after he'd
Page
85
Villainous Aspirations
been involved a major crime. But the crime itself had never come up, and the period they'd been questioning him about was relatively safe, because he had many alibis, the technicians of the Motorola factory.
That was unusual. He did most of his programming in the dining room at home, sometimes in the nude, usually not, and sent his code to headquarters in California via the Internet. Once a week he visited the company office at Worthing in Sussex, an hour and a half by tube and train. Every third day, including weekends, he was on call and could expect to visit a couple of microchip factories, known as MPC’s, to fix bugs or update software in person.
It didn't matter that he couldn't drive, because invariably he had to fly. Some of the MPC’s were in Continental Europe and some were in England, but the two he visited most often were in Scotland.
Last Wednesday he'd been on call and flown to Glasgow, to work on two ion-implanters at East Kilbride. Usually he didn't have much contact with the Motorola technicians, but that day had been an exception, for two reasons. The first was that every computer in the place, from the central processing computer down to the hundreds of smaller computers controlling each
Page
86
Villainous Aspirations
individual process machine, had behaved like a tired two year old. It was almost impossible to keep a machine running for ten minutes. Even the crude wheeled robots that carried microchips from one assembly bay to another had gone on strike, restarting half an hour later as if nothing had happened.
And the second reason was that he'd found a condom wrapper inside one of the ion-implantation machines.
Each machine cost eight million pounds and was the size of a small bungalow, with a maintenance door in the plain metal outside wall.
Inside was a vacuum chamber that glowed blue as the boron gas inside it was ripped apart, electron from atom, to create aggressive ions.
And along the ceiling ran huge electro-magnets, as thick as a human body, accelerating and focusing these dangerous ions. Skull and crossbones symbols decorated the walls and internal features, in case anybody was stupid enough to walk inside while the giant machine was running.
Whoever had dropped the condom wrapper was stupid in some ways but not others.
They'd figured out that almost every part of the massive production floor, the size of an exhibition hall and filled with steppers, etchers,
Page
87
Villainous Aspirations
epitaxy machines, planarisers, deposition equipment and all kinds of physical science kit with strange names, was monitored by CCTV, but nobody had thought to mount a camera inside the ion-implantation machines.
Many of the technicians were in their twenties, and around a third of them were female.
Clearly some young couple had found their hormones getting the better of them during a shift, and decided the most private place to conduct their business was behind the maintenance door of the steel bungalow.
What they hadn't realised was that the condom wasn't strictly necessary. While they were standing close to the vacuum chamber they were being so heavily irradiated that by now they were both probably sterile.
Danny duly reported his find, and it was immediately checked for dust on its internal surfaces. None was found. This c