A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel Page 11

  When Jake arrived home she watered her plants and then cooked herself a microwave dinner. Then she turned on the television and picked up the evening paper.

  French had been right. The shooting had made the final edition of the Evening Standard, and although there was no mention of the Lombroso Program, the writer was still able to say that the police were working on the assumption that the attack on Mayhew was connected with a number of other recent and unsolved killings.

  Jake took an extra interest in the report, knowing that it contained an important piece of misinformation. At her own order, the Press Office at New Scotland Yard had concealed the fact of Mayhew’s death. Instead they had fed the newspapers the story that a policeman was remaining beside Mayhew’s bed night and day in the hope that he might recover consciousness and offer a description of his assailant. It was Jake’s vague hope that the killer might be moved to try and finish the job. She knew it wasn’t much of a plan, but it was worth a try. If the killer did show his face at the Westminster Hospital, he would find the Tactical Firearms Squad waiting there for him.

  Fat chance, she thought. That sort of thing only ever happened in the movies. Which was why she was at home and not at the hospital, and thinking about a bath and an early night. Professor Gleitmann’s book was on her bedside table and looked like providing her with an effective soporific. But first she turned on the Nicamvision to see if there was anything about Mayhew.

  The TV news didn’t even bother to report it. It was only a shooting after all, and nothing to compare with the stories of war, famine, and human disaster which constituted the greater part of the bulletin. After the news there was a programme which devoted itself to the pros and cons of punitive coma. This was timely, because an IRA terrorist, Declan Fingal, was to have his sentence of irreversible coma carried out at Wandsworth Gaol the following evening.

  Tony Bedford, MP, the opposition spokesman on Crime and Punishment, had joined a number of demonstrators outside the prison to protest against the sentence, and told the cameras of his repugnance at what was being done in the name of the law. He was his usual windy self and while Jake was generally in sympathy with most of what he said about punitive coma, she was left with the impression that if Bedford had been Home Secretary he would have sent Fingal back to Ireland with nothing worse than a stiff lecture.

  There followed a studio interview with Grace Miles. Looking more relaxed than she had been in Frankfurt, Mrs Miles wore a black dress with jewelled buttons that were the size and shape of Viking brooches, and which was cut low on her well-bosomed chest. She looked more glamorous than a rockful of sirens. The camera cut to a wide shot of the Minister sitting in her chair and almost as if she had heard a cue, Mrs Miles crossed her legs to reveal just a fraction too much thigh, and, Jake could hardly believe it, a stocking top. That was one for the tabloids, she found herself thinking. Mrs Miles was the only woman in the Government who could, and did, trade on her own sex appeal.

  While there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that Mrs Miles was an attractive woman, there wasn’t much that was attractive about what Mrs Miles had to say to her interviewer about punishment. And the voice was too hectoring and insistent to make for easy listening. Jake didn’t like to remind herself that she had voted for this woman’s stiff-necked punitive policies. But being a police officer, she reflected, sometimes played havoc with your political inclinations.

  A pictophone-call at three in the morning is not usually a source of much pleasure for a police officer. The best that Jake could normally have hoped for would have been an obscene caller, exposing his genitals to the camera in the hope of outraging some helpless spinster. Blindly thumping the headboard that controlled the lights and the speaking clock — ‘The time is 3 a.m.’ - Jake shook her head clear of sleep and reached out for the remote control handset that worked the pictophone. For a brief moment she thought that it might be the hospital and that the stakeout might have worked. But when she had thumbed one of the buttons to take the call, it was Sergeant Chung’s face that appeared on the small screen on her bedside table.

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ he said with delighted insincerity.

  Jake sneered sleepily. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Do I know what time it is? Of course I know what fucking time it is. Listen, I’ve just had my wife on the box to tell me the fucking time. Wanting to know why I’m still here at the Brain Research Institute instead of at home, fucking her.’

  ‘Yes, well I bet she’s missing that,’ said Jake, adjusting the colour on the screen, turning up the yellow until Chung’s head looked like a large lemon.

  ‘You’re fucking right she is,’ said Chung, oblivious to Jake’s irony.

  Jake reached for her cigarettes and lit one. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘if you’ve got something to report ...’

  ‘I didn’t call just so as I could see you without your make-up,’ he snarled. ‘Or who you’re sleeping with.’

  ‘Sleeping with?’ Jake murmured. ‘Why the sudden coyness?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Forget it. Look just tell me what you’ve got so I can get back to sleep, you little yellow bastard.’

  ‘You want to watch it, you know. I could report you to the Racial Harassment Unit for a remark like that. I’ve solved your problem, white lady.’

  Jake sat up in bed. ‘You mean you can explain the breach of security?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Chung, grinning at the sight of Jake’s suddenly exposed breasts. ‘Not bad at all. Tell you what: give me a quick flash of the rest and we’ll call it quits about the racism, okay?’

  Jake gathered up her sheet and held it up to her neck. She wanted to tell Chung to fuck himself, to put him on a charge. At the same time she didn’t want to risk him becoming even more uncooperative than he was already. She knew him well enough to realise that he was capable of any amount of obstruction. So she gritted her teeth, ignored his sexist remark, and asked him to explain what it was that he had discovered.

  ‘If I were you, I’d get my white arse down here,’ he said. ‘Right now. See, it’s not something that’s easy to explain on the pic and I won’t be here if you come looking for me in the morning. I’ve been working solid on this thing for over twenty hours and as soon as I’ve explained things to you, I’m off home to get some fucking sleep.’

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ Jake growled, and hit the remote to end the call.

  Naturally I was just a little concerned when I saw the evening paper. It only goes to prove what I was saying about encephalisation of function. I knew it was a mistake to shoot him in the anterior as opposed to the posterior of the brain. That’s what you get for being impatient.

  Mind you I didn’t doubt that, at the very least, I would have left Russell visually impaired, the optic nerve and septal and preoptic areas all being located around that part of the brain. (Come to think of it, I might have also damaged his all-important hypothalamus, which is of course, where his, and my trouble started.) So the chances of his being able to identify anything more than the inside of his own eyelids were slim, despite what was written in the Evening Standard. You see how it doesn’t do to believe everything you read in the Evening Standard? All the same, in future I would have to be more careful and always aim for the cerebellum and cortex.

  It’s a fascinating area, brain function. Anyone who doubts me should try and think exactly which part of his brain is doing the thinking at that precise moment. Try it: close your eyes and concentrate on a picture of your own brain. Easier if you have a Reality Approximation machine to help you, but if you don’t, let me try and describe it.

  Viewed from the top, your brain most resembles something from Dante’s Inferno, a pit to which lost souls have been consigned, their fleshy bodies coiled together with hardly a space to separate their desperate agonies of damnation. It is a sight such as might have greeted the liberators of Auschwitz as they stared into the mass piles of naked, unburied corpses. A ghastly, pressed j
elly of humanity, this pâté de foie gras of thought.

  Seen from the side, your brain is a dancer, or an acrobat, impossibly muscled - will you look at those biceps and those pectorals - bent into a foetal position, the arm (temporal lobe) wrapped around the leg, the head (cerebellum) resting on the shins (medulla oblongata).

  From underneath, your brain is something obscenely hermaphrodite. There are the frontal lobes meeting like the labia of a human vagina. And beneath them, the pons and the medulla oblongata that reminds you of a semi-erect penis.

  Dissected, sectioned coronally from ear to ear, the imperfect symmetry of your brain is like a Rorschach inkblot, that diagnostic tool of unstructured personality tests once favoured by psychologists.

  But where, you say, among all these lobes and hemispheres, stalks and tracts, fissures and bulbs - where are the thoughts, these logical pictures of facts? The plain fact is that we must think on an even smaller scale if we are to find their origin. We must come down to a measurement of one thousandth of a millimetre, to the simplest element of nervous action, the neuron.

  Now can you picture them? So quick in their synaptic jumps from one to the other that you could be forgiven for missing it the first ten thousand times. And listen, can you hear the electrical energy that is generated as these synapses take place? You can? Congratulations. You’re thinking.

  So now think of this: if you could lump all the true thoughts together, namely the logical pictures of facts, what you would have would be a picture of the whole world.

  We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.

  6

  SERGEANT CHUNG WAS seated on a triangular stool at a grey perspex table in the main computer room at the Institute. Along one section of the circular table’s circumference was a keypad and, in the centre, a holographic projection of the data he was currently using. In the partly darkened room the machine had the appearance, to Jake’s eyes, of some ancient oracle.

  ‘Holy Priest,’ she said, on seeing Chung, ‘ask it if we will think it worthwhile to have been turfed out of our beds at three o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘You can afford to lose a bit of beauty sleep,’ Chung growled over the lip of his coffee cup.

  ‘Coming from you, Yat, that sounds suspiciously like a compliment.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m tired,’ he said, and yawning, rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s these holograms. I can’t stand them. It’s like hallucinating. I prefer a proper screen myself.’

  Jake drew up another stool and sat down next to him at the operator table. The bulk of the Lombroso computer was underneath their feet, with the information fed through the table legs and onto the projector. Closer to him now, she sensed his smell, which was none too good.

  Chung caught the prickle in her nostrils and snorted derisively.

  ‘If I stink, it’s because I’ve been sitting here for the best part of three days.’

  Jake decided that it was an opportune moment to smooth and flatter Chung.

  ‘And don’t think I haven’t appreciated it,’ she said. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked. I couldn’t have asked for more. Believe me, Yat, if you’ve got a lead which opens this case I’ll see the APC gets to hear about it.’

  Chung’s narrow eyes became even narrower.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he chuckled. ‘I get the picture. No need to go over the top. To be honest, I don’t give a fuck what you tell anyone.’

  But at the same time, Jake could see that he was pleased.

  ‘Please, Yat,’ she said, affecting a sort of girlishness. ‘I’m dying to know what you’ve found out.’ She hammered her fists on both knees and uttered a little squeal of excitement.

  Chung smiled coolly and then stroked a keypad on the table.

  ‘I’ll try to keep it simple.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘First of all, this was an outside job. When you log onto the system the main frame underneath this table records the transaction with a number and identifies which terminal was being used. Of course there are hundreds of such transactions every day, from any one of thirty-nine terminals in this building and the other four Lombroso facilities in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow.’ He pointed at the hologram in front of them. ‘This is one of today’s transactions: number 280213 - that’s the date; then the transaction number - 718393422; TRINITY - that’s yesterday’s password; and lastly 09 — that’s the terminal number. This one, as a matter of fact.

  ‘Now this was the laborious part: I programmed the computer to check back over all the system’s transactions for the last twelve months, to see if there were any made from an unspecified terminal. That is a terminal without an identifying number, and therefore outside any one of the five institute facilities. And what do you know? I found one, dated 221112.’

  Jake nodded. ‘So you’re saying someone broke into the system on November 22nd last year.’

  ‘That’s right. Now this system is part of the ECDN, the European Community Data Network. It means that only someone with access to the ECDN could have broken into Lombroso. In other words, he could only have done it from any one of a dozen systems in the public sector. There’s no other way of doing it. ECDN is a private leased telecommunications line to which the public has no access.’

  ‘Then our suspect is quite probably a public sector employee.’

  Chung nodded. ‘But here’s where he starts to get clever. The very fact that he was using a terminal outside the institute facilities was enough to trigger the system’s back-up security device. This is designed to stop the unauthorised person from going any further.’

  ‘Unauthorised?’ Jake frowned. ‘Didn’t he have an operator code and the day’s password?’

  Chung pressed another key on the flat glass of the table, to reveal a list of transaction numbers. Jake could see one that was short of a couple of digits.

  ‘Yes, he did. The password he used was CHANDLER. But don’t ask me how he got it, I don’t know. Not yet anyway. No, he was unauthorised simply by virtue of his terminal lacking an identifying number on the system.’

  Jake nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘The security device was a holographic of a three-headed dog.’

  ‘Cerberus,’ said Jake.

  ‘You know the program?’

  ‘No, but I know my classical literature.’

  ‘Yeah, well so did our burglar. That’s the trouble with these computer security people. They assume everyone is as ignorant as they are.’

  ‘Does that go for Doctor St Pierre as well?’

  ‘It goes especially for Doctor St Pierre,’ said Chung. ‘We had a lot of his kind in Hong Kong. Bloody stiffneck. Can only think down a straight line.’

  ‘I guess I’m to take it that our burglar managed to evade Cerberus, right?’

  ‘Evade?’ He grinned happily and quickly typed out a series of instructions.

  The numbers disappeared from the air to be replaced by a lifesize graphic of a sleeping three-headed dog. From the look of the brute, Jake was glad it was asleep, hologram or not.

  ‘He drugged it,’ said Chung.

  ‘Drugged a computer-generated dog?’ Jake said incredulously. ‘How does one do that?’

  ‘Take too long to explain, but it’s a technique which goes under the generic name of Trojan Horse. There are lots of different sorts, but you get the general idea.’

  ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, huh? Clever.’

  Chung shook his head. ‘The really clever bit is still to come. You remember you questioned all the psychiatric counsellors? You asked if they might remember the codenames of some of the men who tested VMN-negative and who might have exhibited a greater amount of hostility to the program than others?’

  ‘Yes. There was a list. But it was just codenames. St Pierre said that the computer’s first decretal was to protect the confidentiality of their identities. He was adamant that the computer would not release their names and addresses.’

  �
��Even though the burglar managed to get it to do just that.’

  Jake lit a cigarette. It was too early in the morning for anyone to concern themselves with a no-smoking ban. ‘I was going to get you to try and do the same thing when you’d finished tracking the breach,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’m already ahead of you,’ he said and then added, ‘Mind where you’re blowing that smoke. It interferes with the hologram.’

  Jake held the cigarette behind her at arm’s length.

  ‘There is a separate list of all the codenames kept on another system which is not subject to Lombroso’s first decretal. Unfortunately it’s the codenames, and nothing else. Anyway, what I did was to take that list and use it to ask Lombroso a question.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘Well, you see, I kept thinking to myself, suppose it was my name in the Lombroso system files. Would I trust the system’s security? No way. So I’d want to try and erase my name and address pretty damn smartish. All I did was to confirm each name on my list of codenames as belonging to the primary file, in the suspicion that our man has already erased his identity.’

  ‘All right,’ Jake said expectantly.

  ‘One by one, that’s exactly what I did. And finally I found what I was looking for. Or didn’t find it, if you see what I mean. I typed in a codename which I knew for certain had been issued, and asked for a confirmation, only to be told that as far as the Lombroso system was concerned, no such codename existed.’ He paused for a moment, and then shrugged apologetically. ‘That’s when it happened.’

  ‘When what happened?’

  ‘Fucking logic bomb. Bastard left a booby trap which I triggered when I tried to confirm his codename.’

  Jake frowned. ‘What the hell’s a logic bomb?’

  ‘It’s a fuck of a lot of money, that’s what it is. You see, it’s a program, with a delayed effect.’ He bit his lip. ‘With a delayed destructive effect.’