Cyber Cinderella (14 page)

“Read it.”

There, among the technical nonsense, was a sentence in plain English, perhaps a Rosetta Stone that would unlock the meaning of the hieroglyphics. But it might as well have been in Ancient Egyptian for all it meant to me.

“‘Said tree in distress,’” I read out. “Stupid site, what does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Does it not mean anything to you?”

“Trees? Ash, oak, sycamore… do I know anybody called those names? Or a tree surgeon? No, I don’t.”

“I don’t think it’s someone who shares a name with a tree, actually. It looks more like a crossword clue.”

Damn, I never could get my head around cryptic crosswords. “You don’t by any chance know how to do them?”

“‘In distress’ implies that it’s an anagram. Of, I suppose, ‘said tree.’” He wrote out the eight letters in capitals in a circle on a Post-it note. “Sid someone, do you know anyone called Sid?”

I shook my head. “Or could it not be a crossword clue but a hint that there’s somebody called Said? You know, the Arabic name Sa-eeed.”

“Do you know anybody called that?”

“No, but…” My desk phone made the sound of an internal call. Once ordinary people could recognize birdsong; now they just know the difference between mobile with message, mobile with call, internal and external office tones and the home phone. Not that the latter rings much anymore.

“Izobel speaking.” Each trill had a different response.

“Sorry, Ivan, got to go.” I made my way, as requested, into my boss’s office, which was enclosed. Open-plan only went so far.

“Come in,” said Tracy. Or “Tracy, as in Katharine Hepburn in
The Philadelphia Story
and Grace Kelly in
High Society,
” as she was wont to introduce herself. She modeled her clothes on such epitomes of restrained good taste too, never straying too far from black trousers, kitten-heeled boots and a pastel-colored cashmere top. She was my age.

“Izobel Brannigan,” she began. “Who are you?”

“Sorry?” I had enough trouble with identities without Tracy adding to the load.

She leaned back and put her muscled arms behind her head. I should go to Body Pump at the gym more often. “You’re smart Izobel, who was hired for her way with words. You’re lots-of-experience Izobel. You’re a-creative-approach-to-PR Izobel.” She then switched positions and put her elbows on her desk.

I nodded and mumbled some acknowledgment of gratitude.

“But at the moment, you’re distracted-and-unproductive Izobel.”

The further forward she came, the more I slunk back, maintaining that force field of distance between us.

“Clients have been complaining,” she continued. “Every time I walk by your desk you’re surfing the Net. You disappear for hours on end. You miss deadlines. You fail to follow up leads. You haven’t placed anything in weeks.”

How humiliating that in a profession famed for shirking, I should have been caught out.

“I took the trouble of checking on your Internet usage. Well, my little helper did.” Tracy thrust a printout of my Internet history at me. It was like looking at an extended bank statement, a humiliating roll call of your existence that you never thought to see. It was the Turin Shroud of my office life, a negative imprint based on hours on izobel brannigan.com, interrupted only briefly by forays into media sites and gossip boards. “It seems like you spend many hours of company time working on your personal Web site, or blogging as I believe it’s called these days. We don’t pay you to create your own home page. Though we’re clearly paying you too much if you can afford to have all those photos of yourself taken. It’s the vanity of it that I find so extraordinary. I don’t even have a photo of myself on the company Web site. And this”—she pointed at my sheet of shame—“isn’t company business. Have you got something you’d like to say?”

I was silent.

“Take this as a verbal warning.” She avoided my gaze. “In the current climate we can’t be carrying slackers. See this.” She pointed at a pile of papers on her desk. “These are CVs from Oxbridge graduates begging to be allowed to come and work for us for free. Just remember that. And if you’ve got a problem, then please talk to someone about it. Don’t allow it to affect your professional conduct. If you want, you can leave work now.” It was almost five anyway. “Use the time to think.”

I would think, I resolved quickly as I bustled through the office. I went to my computer and pulled the server support line number off the list of central resources. We had to sort this out once and for all.

As I walked out into the street, the pap caption might have read, “A good day’s work: Izobel leaves the West End offices of the thriving PR business.”

Chapter Ten

I
rang my technical consultant Ivan, who readily agreed for me to come round to his offices just north of Oxford Street, despite having seen me only half an hour before. George was disengaged, Maggie disgruntled and I was disappointed. At least my technical friend still seemed to retain the last vestiges of patience about finding out who was behind the site.

I made my way to an unfamiliar area of the West End, but ten minutes’ walk from my office. Its streets were lined with wholesale clothes shops selling the sort of outfits only worn by girl bands: one-shouldered tops, spray-on trousers and six-inch-wide belts, all in fawn colorways. The rest of the area had a vaguely holiday feel, culminating in a crossroads of cafés with outdoor tables, complete with a mariachi band singing “Guantanamera” on repeat, and throngs of people enjoying not being in an office at just after five on a partially sunny afternoon.

I made my way up steep stairs, having waded through the mail almost blocking the door of Ivan’s building, letters addressed to fake-sounding businesses with names like “Flair International Fashion” and “ERM Elegant Models.” I was stuck in an optical illusion; the stairs went on forever, up and up and up. By the time I reached the top floor, I was doubled up and panting like a pervert.

I almost fell in as Ivan opened the door. He was wearing non-office gear and he wore it well.

“Hello again.” He smiled. “I’ve got a terrible advantage over anyone visiting me. They always look like they’ve completed a decathlon.” He was pressed and fresh. Even his hair looked like it had been steam-cleaned, especially in comparison to mine, which was held up with a rubber band garnished with the strands that it had already ripped from my scalp.

He ushered me into a mezzanine room that was as small as the two computers it contained were outsize. I felt like a twenty-first-century Alice in Wonderland, facing a machine that would be labeled “use me.” I could still hear the grating sounds of the band playing from the street, although it seemed as though I had crossed into another world. A world where it was acceptable to have a hand-made poster bearing the legend: “Systems Administrators do it with their hardware.”

“Is this your office?”

“Yes.”

“Where do all the people sit? I thought you had a team of employees. Is it a team of one?”

“Five people actually. They all work on-site or from home.” He shrugged. “There’s no point me shelling out for an expensive office when they wouldn’t be there most of the time and I’ve set them up with powerful computers at home.”

I frowned. “But how can you tell that they’re not slacking?”

“I don’t care if they are. They all get their work done, so what does it matter how long it takes them? I trust them and they trust me. No clients ever complain.”

I sat down on one of the two swivel chairs placed in front of the computers that were raised on 1,000-page-thick manuals. The two screens faced coyly toward each other and their keyboards jostled for space on the desk. I spread out a hand on each of them and mimicked plinky-plonky electronic music sounds.

“Hey, I’m Jean-Michel Jarre.”

“I thought you wanted to get down to business.”

“I do. But I’d love a cup of tea. I’ve just had a bit of a stressful time with Tracy.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Did you not get the Choo account? Or you forgot to order the giant penis ice sculpture and mini fish-and-chip canapés for the next launch?”

“Actually, if you must know, I’m about to get sacked as I apparently spend so much time surfing my own site. If only they knew.”

“I knew something was up,” he said. “Tracy asked me for a server printout of the Internet activity from your computer.”

“And you gave it to her? Oh man,” I elongated the word. “Couldn’t you have faked it or something?”

“No, because that would have been both illegal and unprofessional.”

He sat down, fired up both the monsters on his desk and then went to the corner of the room where an ancient plastic kettle sat among mini cartons of UHT milk and café packets of sugar. He made us our teas, black with sugar, without my prompting.

He looked intently at the screens before bringing up a black box with pale script. The box floated listlessly in the middle of one of the vast screens while he drummed his fingers in the one clear space left on the desk.

“What do you want to do? Work on that anagram or see if we can find more clues in the code?”

“I’m not sure. You said something about being able to get the name of the person who owns Izobel Brannigan, I mean, owns the name izobelbrannigan dot com. Can you do that for starters?”

“Find the domain name? I could give it a shot. It’s fascinating,” he continued. “I can find out so much about the servers izo-belbrannigan dot com is using.”

“But can you find out who’s responsible for it?”

“Possibly.” He had become distracted, as if his world had turned into something black and white with strange prompt commands. “If I ping it,” he said, typing “ping
www.izobelbrannigan.com
” onto his screen, “we can see if the packet comes back from a remote server and how quickly it does. Look, nought point six milliseconds. These packets will keep spewing out until I press Control C.” Which he duly did.

“Yes, but who owns the site? Who owns izobelbrannigan?” I felt hot and speckled. I had that sense of expectation that can only lead to acute disappointment.

“If I do a traceroute, I can find out the quickest route between the server I use here and the server it uses. Probably via LINX at Telehouse.”

I made the face he must have been tired of seeing. I was tired of making it. I felt like I should just keep my hand permanently raised with the words “But
miss,
I don’t understand” tattooed across my forehead.

“London Internet Exchange,” he said patiently if patronizingly. “It’s the largest Internet Exchange point in Europe. Anyway, back to the traceroute.” He looked at my blank face and filled in the metaphor. “Like six degrees of separation. It will find the most direct links between servers and sites.”

“But what about the owner of the domain name?”

“I’ll do a whoislookup.”

I liked the sound of that. At last computer language I could understand.

“Let’s try on the co dot uk one first.” He typed “#who is izobel [email protected]” into that strange little black and white box on the screen. These computer commands were contradictory, in some ways so opaque and in others so insultingly simplistic. “Who is” indeed.

“Who’s Nic?” I asked.

He looked like I’d asked him who was top of the hit parade. “It’s Nominet, the registry for all dot co dot uk Internet names.” He shook his head.

“And who owns my site?” I asked as information clattered onto the screen.

He pointed at the information with his pen. “Domain name: izobelbrannigan dot co dot uk.”

“We know that. What I don’t know is why they call it a domain name and not a URL.”

He couldn’t be bothered to explain. “And here’s the registrant, World Web Worshippers UK.”

“And they are?”

“Search me.”

“Search-engine me.”

He continued. “Here’s the registrant’s agent, that’s the people who host the site, and whoever it is behind the site bought the domain name through them: e-z-webbysolutions dot com. Never heard of them.”

“E-z-webbysolutions sell domain names?”

“Yes and more importantly they sold the domain name izobelbrannigan dot com to World Web Worshippers UK.”

“And they’re our site perp?”

“Yes. Or at least a pseudonym for them.”

I felt like I had a squash ball stuck in my throat. Whoever e-z-webbysolutions were, they had been contacted by the person who had made this site. They knew who it was. They had carelessly, thoughtlessly, nonchalantly registered a name for the person whose actions had dominated my recent weeks. I felt suddenly close to knowing. The screen in front blurred as if I were at the optician’s and the examiner were varying the lens and focus of the light box. Ivan gave me a sympathetic smile and touched me lightly on the arm.

“Here’s when they bought it,” he said. It was over six months ago. “All that time, it was sitting there, waiting to be brought to life. And here”—he said, pointing at a date less than a month ago—“was when it was last updated.”

“I don’t understand, it was updated with new pap shots yesterday.”

“This is when something to do with the domain name registrant was changed, not the site itself.”

“I see.” Not really.

“And look,” he said. “Here are the DNS servers.”

“But who is it? I don’t care about the DNS servers, I want to know who’s behind the site. Other than Webhead Worship UK or whatever they call themselves. Can we find out who they are? Through company registrars or whatever? You say it’s the pseudonym of whoever’s behind the site. Can’t we find them?” Now, now, now, I wanted to scream.

“We’re trying. Let’s see if we can get more information out of the other address, the dot com one. I think you may be forced to give an address on those.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t get excited anymore. The squash ball in my throat was now even bigger. A tennis ball, perhaps.

“It’s a two-stage lookup. First I’ve got to ask interNIC, you know, Nominet, the UK registry, in order to find out which dot com registrar it’s registered with. There are hundreds of them.”

I was reminded of Irene Handl, who had it explained to her how all the lighting was going to be set up by a director and had responded, “I think you’ve mistaken me for one of those actresses who gives a fuck.”