The Messiah Secret cb-3 Read online

  Only when the system analysis results popped up on the screen — all showing green — and his first cup of java was sitting on the desk beside him, did he take a look at the search routines his machine had been running overnight. These weren’t normal internet searches. The wide-area search routines McLeod had put in place accessed private databases as well, many of them run by government agencies and commercial organizations, databases whose managers fondly believed were secure against hackers.

  But Jesse McLeod wasn’t just any old hacker. He’d narrowly avoided a prison term at the age of fifteen when he’d wormed his way past three separate firewalls and numerous intruder detection systems to get inside a network at the Pentagon. He’d gained administrator access there, given himself a username and password, and used that network as a gateway that had allowed him to jump straight into another network based in Pennsylvania Avenue and operated by the White House. The reason he wasn’t prosecuted was probably largely due to embarrassment that a kid of his age had managed to outwit the best security consultants and computer experts in the American government and military.

  He had been ordered to show these experts exactly how he’d managed to effect his intrusion, however, so that those loopholes could be closed, and he’d also been instructed to test all the Pentagon’s and the White House’s access points — under close supervision — to see if he could defeat those as well. He had, twice, which had resulted in four civilian administrators and three senior military officers losing their jobs within the next three weeks.

  In the ten years since then, the FBI had watched Jesse McLeod very closely, but the threat of prison had frightened him, and after that episode he had become what was known as a ‘white hat hacker’. That meant he still trawled the internet, and still probed the sites he found, but if he worked his way into a system he announced the fact to the network administrator and suggested ways of closing the loopholes he’d exploited. He never copied data or did any damage inside the networks he cracked, and a handful of times he’d even been paid ‘consultancy fees’ by the target companies for his efforts.

  At least, that was what the FBI believed. But like a lot of things the FBI believed, they were wrong. Jesse McLeod was constitutionally incapable of obeying the law, and that was one of the reasons why NoJoGen paid him such a large salary. The company needed access to the kind of data that was unavailable in the public domain — a less mealy-mouthed description of this activity would be industrial espionage — and relied on him to hack his way into whatever system held it, and then retrieve it.

  But these days he was a lot more careful, and a lot more secretive. He had set up dozens of fake identities in China and Pakistan and the new states that had emerged following the break-up of the Soviet Union, places where he knew that American law enforcement would find it difficult, or even impossible, to track him, and used those as the apparent origin — the technical term was a ‘zombie server’ — for his probes. He’d even set up an account that purported to be located in North Korea — a country that offered no internet access at all to its population — just to see what the Fibbies would do about it. They hadn’t noticed.

  And so, every night, while he slept peacefully in his penthouse, the sound of waves breaking on the shore below him, his untraceable electronic proxies trawled the web, probing systems and networks and looking for any references to whatever subjects the founder and majority shareholder of NoJoGen, John Johnson Donovan — known simply as ‘JJ’ — had asked him to locate.

  His proxies never left any evidence of their intrusion, and merely copied whatever data they could find that related to the search string McLeod had loaded into their programs. When they’d completed their mission, each proxy automatically accessed one of several web-based email accounts and pasted the results into email messages. But these messages would never be sent, because all emails leave an electronic trail across the internet. Instead, all the messages were left on the servers as drafts, and McLeod was then able to access each email account, copy the contents of the draft messages and afterwards delete them, which left no trace at all.

  The whole process was automated, and McLeod would only get personally involved if the hacking software he’d designed failed to breach the defences of a particular network. Then he’d flex his hacking muscles and spend a pleasant few hours working out how to get inside that system. But normally, he just scanned the results when they were displayed on his monitor, weeded out the obvious rubbish, and sent the rest up to Donovan’s workstation on the top floor of the building.

  Because it was a Monday and the offices had been closed since Saturday morning, there were dozens of results to analyse. As usual, most of them were of neither interest nor relevance, but when McLeod looked at the nineteenth search result he sat back in his seat and whistled.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he muttered to himself.

  He checked the source of the data, but that turned out to be no surprise at all. He’d seen immediately that the information had been posted on the front page of a small local newspaper, and the version his proxy had located had been in the on-line version of the journal, hosted on an entirely unprotected server.

  McLeod read the article in its entirety, and one short paragraph caught and then held his attention. He sat in thought for a minute or so, then clicked his mouse button a couple of times to bring up an internet search engine. He entered a simple search term and looked at the results, which gave him the name of the website he was interested in. He opened up one of the hacking programs he’d written himself and started probing the distant server, looking for a way inside. There was something there he definitely needed to get a look at.

  In less than fifteen minutes he was looking at a list of police case files, listed by number. Then he changed the parameters and generated an alphabetical list of the names of the claimants or victims. Most of the files were small, the incidents fairly pedestrian — muggings, car thefts, burglaries, and so on. And then he saw something big. There were numerous statements, reports by the attending officers, forensic analyses and the like, and a whole sheaf of crime-scene photographs, all neatly labelled and catalogued.

  He flicked through the forensic stuff until he found the one that related to the paragraph in the newspaper story, and made a copy of it on his hard drive. Then he glanced through everything else he’d found, and despatched the original newspaper report up to Donovan’s computer with the rest of the stuff. When his boss got in, he guessed he’d get a call.

  But he had a completely different recipient in mind for the forensic report he’d copied from the police database.

  4

  Two hours later, Angela had turned off the M25, where the traffic was actually moving, for a change, and was heading up the A10, the old London Road. Her satnav had protested when she made the turn, but she’d decided to take the scenic route because she had two ulterior motives. First, she wanted to treat herself to lunch in a country pub somewhere, and there were no such facilities on the M11. And, second, she wanted to be able to stop somewhere and ring her ex-husband, Chris Bronson, to explain why she’d be out of town for the rest of the week. She’d called his mobile from her flat in Ealing before she left, but it had gone straight to voicemail. Knowing Chris as well as she did, she knew she’d be able to reach him at lunchtime.

  Nearing the village of Wendens Ambo, she spotted an old pub and parked her Mini in one of the few remaining spaces in the front car park.

  She ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of Perrier, and carried the drink over to a seat right beside a window that overlooked the main road outside. While she waited for her food to be served, she pulled out her mobile. This time, Bronson answered almost immediately.

  ‘Hi, Angela. Where are you?’

  ‘How do you know I’m not in my office, slaving away over a broken pot?’ she said, a little annoyed with herself for feeling pleased to hear his voice.

  ‘I’m a detective, remember. Actually, I called your office. So where are you?’
r />   ‘Suffolk, I think.’ She looked up and nodded her thanks as the barman placed an enormous bowl of salad on the table in front of her.

  ‘Suffolk?’ Bronson was clearly surprised.

  ‘Yes. I’ve just stopped for lunch in a pub near a village called Wendens Ambo, and I’m heading for a country house somewhere near Stoke by Clare. Wonderful names, don’t you think?’

  ‘A country house party, is it?’

  ‘Sadly not. Actually, I’ve been sent up here to work. An elderly minor aristocrat named Oliver Wendell-Carfax was murdered in his home near here about two weeks ago-’

  ‘I know about that,’ Bronson interrupted, sounding concerned. ‘I saw one of the reports. Somebody strung him up from the staircase and then beat him, but the autopsy showed that he actually died of a heart attack. I think the local police have drawn a blank on the case so far — no obvious suspects and no apparent motive, though somebody had searched the house. It’s a nasty business. But what’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Well, the museum has now become involved — not because of who Wendell-Carfax was, or how he died, but because of what he did. He was pretty much the last of a long line of avid collectors of antiques and ancient relics. Apparently his country house is full of the things. He was also, according to Roger Halliwell, a typical grumpy old bastard. Over the last ten years or so he managed to alienate just about every member of his family, and almost everybody else who knew him. When he died, the firms of solicitors he’d used opened up his last will and testament and had a bit of a shock.’

  ‘ “Firms of solicitors”?’ Bronson asked. ‘In the plural?’

  Angela sighed. ‘Yes. Over the last year Wendell-Carfax visited four different solicitors in Suffolk and deposited his last will and testament with each of them.’

  ‘Different wills, I suppose?’

  ‘All completely different, and each cutting out one or more different family members. The trouble was, each time he made a new will, he never bothered telling the new solicitor acting for him about the earlier ones, although he made sure he told the beneficiaries of the new will.’

  ‘But not the people he’d just disinherited?’

  ‘Of course not. That wouldn’t have been any fun, would it? So as soon as he was found dead, various family members crawled out of the woodwork, each of them expecting to inherit about two hundred acres of prime Suffolk real estate and a country house stuffed full of antiques.’

  ‘So who is the beneficiary?’ Bronson asked, sounding puzzled.

  ‘For the house and land, I’ve no idea — but in his final will, or at least the last one that’s turned up so far, the old man gave everything inside the house — the entire contents, that is — to the British Museum.’

  ‘So you’re up there to assess the bequest?’

  ‘Yep.’ Angela drove her fork into the salad and took a mouthful. ‘The Suffolk Police have finally allowed museum staff to go into the house. Until now, it’s been out of bounds as a crime scene.’

  ‘So you’ll be away all week, then?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Hopefully no longer than that. Until I get there, I really don’t know how much there is to do.’ Angela paused and crossed her fingers surreptitiously under the table. She hoped her next question didn’t make her sound too desperate. ‘We’re staying in a local pub, if you fancy popping up one evening?’

  5

  As befitted the founder and major shareholder of NotJustGenetics Inc., JJ Donovan’s office was on the top floor of the building. It occupied most of the top floor, in fact. Two of the walls were almost entirely glass, offering spectacular views of Monterey and the ocean beyond, but these days Donovan rarely bothered looking out in that direction. He’d even had his desk moved closer to one of the inner walls and positioned a couple of couches and several armchairs by the picture windows in its place.

  His desk was a wide expanse of bird’s-eye maple supported by a stainless-steel frame and legs, his chair a futuristic combination of chrome, steel and leather. Opposite the desk, about half of one wall was entirely given over to video displays. Eight digital plasma screens displayed a selection of domestic and international news feeds. In the centre of the desk, a smaller digital screen displayed exactly the same feeds, but was touch-sensitive, so Donovan could simply press the tip of his finger on any of the video pictures to select the sound for that particular channel.

  Also on the desk were three telephones and two computer screens, one displaying the logo and the status of the NoJoGen network, and which showed the progress of any of the development programmes being run by the company’s scientists. The other was just a regular PC hitched to a broadband router, which allowed him to surf the web or do anything else he wanted. This machine was an obvious area of vulnerability, so it was separated from the company network, which was shielded behind a physical firewall, and the most powerful software firewall, antivirus and anti-intrusion programs money could buy. Jesse McLeod had stated that even he couldn’t hack his way inside the system and if he couldn’t do it, he’d added modestly, nobody else could.

  The only incongruous note in Donovan’s hi-tech office was a large display cabinet positioned beside the door, containing a collection of old books. Really old books. Or, to be absolutely accurate, old copies of really old books. And in a locked safe set into the same wall, a safe that incorporated sophisticated thermostatic controls and devices to regulate the humidity, lay his most prized possession. It was little more than a scrap of papyrus that he’d privately named the Hyrcania Codex, based upon the single name he’d found in the text.

  In complete contrast to the work his company did, which was arguably beyond the cutting edge of the science of genetics, Donovan had long had a fascination with ancient manuscripts and codices. As his business had blossomed, he’d had the finance to indulge his passion, and he’d bought relics at auction and from specialist dealers. He’d even learned a little Hebrew and Aramaic along the way, though he usually employed specialists to produce translations of the works he had purchased.

  Over two years earlier, a single phrase he’d read in the translation of one part of the Hyrcania Codex had electrified him, and it was this discovery that had driven the non-medical searches that he’d tasked Jesse McLeod with.

  That morning, Donovan arrived early at the building and followed his usual routine. He slid his Porsche 911 into his named slot in the underground car park and took the stairs to his office. He never used the lift because he got little enough exercise during the day, and he had never seen the point of sweating away pointlessly on some machine in a gym. Climbing six flights of stairs non-stop every day would, he hoped, give him a short but regular cardio-vascular workout.

  Anyone looking at him would probably agree that it was working. Donovan was tall, just over six two, and slim, with thick black hair that he kept trimmed close to his scalp — not a crew cut, but not far off. Dark brown, almost black, eyes and a large straight nose dominated his face, and even when he’d just shaved he still seemed to sport a five o’clock shadow. When he smiled, which he did often, because JJ Donovan was a man with a lot to be happy about, he showed two rows of brilliant white teeth, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘forty-grand smile’, because this was exactly what they’d cost.

  He put his briefcase down on his desk and switched on both of his monitors. On the PC connected to the internet, he pulled up a classical music broadcast and pumped the sound through the desktop’s built-in speaker system. Then he flicked the switch that powered up the wall-mounted monitors and watched CNN for a few seconds. Finally, he looked at his network computer and checked the internal message system.

  The note from Jesse McLeod was the third one he read. He read the text twice, then reached for the internal telephone.

  6

  The Mini bounced down the drive, which curved around to the right behind a low hill. As she straightened up the car, Angela could see the hall itself for the first time. She knew from what Roger Halliwell had told her th
at it dated from the late nineteenth century, a Gothic-revival structure built on the remains of a much older building.

  From a distance, the house looked mellow and comfortable in the landscape. Set on a slight rise and overlooking a small ornamental lake, which was a somewhat bilious green in the mid-afternoon sunlight, it featured spires on the corners and a profusion of arched windows, the whole building constructed of what looked like the same type of grey stone as the pillars at the end of the drive.

  ‘Nice,’ Angela murmured.

  Three cars were parked on the oval gravel area in front of the house, so she assumed the other members of the British Museum team had already arrived. These cars were some distance from the house, which at first puzzled her, but when she pulled up next to one of them and switched off the engine, she saw why.

  Along the facade of the property was a temporary fence, just a line of steel posts driven into the gravel surface of the drive and linked by plastic-coated wire, and behind that were several quite substantial lumps of masonry. And when she looked up at the old house itself, she realized that it was in a very poor condition indeed, with large gaps in the stonework where pieces had fallen out over the years. Several of the window panes were broken, and what paint there was had flaked badly.

  She left her overnight bag in the boot of the car, but took her laptop case with her, and walked across to the main door of the house which was standing wide open.

  She stepped into a large square wood-panelled hall filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests. On one side stood a mounted suit of armour, that to Angela’s inexpert eyes looked genuinely medieval, and on the other a life-size wooden carving of an erect bear, one paw raised high, the other held out at about waist height, a wooden plate clutched in its claws, possibly intended to be a receptacle for mail or perhaps keys. Avoiding the bear’s glassy eyes, she looked around. At the far end of the hall, beyond the bear and the suit of armour, a massive stone staircase ascended to the first floor of the house. On both sides of the hall were large double doors, open wide.