The Chaos Code (15 page)

‘So who was he?' Matt wondered.

‘He was an explorer,' Venture said. ‘He disappeared somewhere along the border between Brazil and Bolivia, or so it's thought, in 1925. Am I right?' From his tone, he knew he was.

‘Indeed,' Harper agreed. ‘He was following in the footsteps of other lost explorers. He found an account of an eighteenth-century Portuguese expedition that claimed to have discovered a lost city in the jungle.'

‘He was searching for a lost city?' Matt said.

Harper laughed. ‘For a lost civilisation. He thought the survivors of some ancient cataclysm were scattered across the world and perhaps passed on some of their knowledge.'

‘It's a mystery, for example,' Robin said, ‘how the ancient Egyptians transformed themselves from groups of warring factions into a kingdom with such technology and learning in such a short space of time. There's no evidence for the evolution of the hieroglyphic language. It just appears, fully defined. Maybe it evolved somewhere else. Maybe they had help.'

‘And the Mayans too,' Harper added. ‘Or so Fawcett thought.'

‘He's a hero of yours?' Matt wondered. ‘A romantic explorer chasing a dream?'

‘I suppose so. But more than that.' Harper stood up and tossed his napkin down on the table beside his empty plate and wine glass. He walked slowly over to look at the picture. ‘When we finally opened this pyramid,' he said, ‘when we managed to clear the plants and debris from the entrance way and force open the stone gates that stood there …' He reached up and brushed the back of his fingers gently against the glass over the photograph. ‘We found a skeleton. A human skeleton, trapped inside by a rock fall that jammed the doors closed. Someone who got here before us, got into this building. But he never got out again.'

‘Fawcett?' Robin said.

Harper turned to face them, and his eyes were sad. ‘DNA testing suggests that the skeleton belonged to a European. It was male. It dated from the right period. What was left of the clothing would seem to bear that out. Of course, we can never be absolutely sure, but I like to think it was him. That he succeeded at least in that part of his great treasure hunt.'

He strode back to the table. ‘And speaking of such things,' he said, ‘I think perhaps now is the time for you to tell me how our own treasure hunt is going. Although of course it is not the Treasure as such that I am interested in. It is the knowledge, the wisdom, the information that is contained in the ancient documents that Sir Robert of Lisle rescued from Constantinople all those years ago. Knowledge I can add to what I have already
gleaned from other sources. So many other sources. Perhaps with that we can finish what Colonel Fawcett started.' His eyes were gleaming with enthusiasm as well as sadness now. ‘I believe that when we find the Treasure of St John, we will discover the truth in those scrolls and parchments. We will know at last for certain that such an ancient people existed.'

They left Julius Venture to explain their progress so far. Both Katherine and Harper himself seemed to assume that neither Robin nor Matt were much involved in the investigation. Matt could see that Robin was irritated by this, but although he was anxious to find his father he was happy to leave the discussions to Venture.

‘Can I see this computer facility?' he asked Katherine.

‘Aren't you tired?'

‘Not yet.'

‘All right then.' Katherine turned to Robin. ‘Are you interested in computers?'

‘As a means to an end,' she said. ‘As tools. But not for what they are. Not really, no.' Robin yawned. ‘I think I'll get some sleep, if that's all right.'

Katherine smiled. ‘Fine. It's been a long day for you, I expect.'

She turned back to Matt, so she couldn't see the face that Robin pulled in reply. It wasn't like Robin to be
tired. Matt remembered she had been up all the previous night, but she had slept on the plane. Jet lag perhaps – after all, while it was early evening here, it was the middle of the night back home.

An unobtrusive polished wooden door under the main staircase turned out to be the entrance to a lift. Robin left them at the first floor, and Katherine and Matt continued up to floor six. The lift door opened to reveal a bare stone passageway, lit by electric wall lamps that were in the shape of burning firebrands. The lights flickered, sending shadows eerily back and forth across the pale stone floor and walls. A flight of stone steps emerged next to the lift, continuing up to the next level.

‘He likes to contrast the old and the new, doesn't he?' Matt said, meaning Harper.

‘Mr Harper sees technology as a way of unlocking and utilising the mysteries of the ancients,' Katherine said. She led the way along the passage. ‘A way of illuminating the past – literally so here.' She smiled at her own joke.

Matt wondered if she ever actually dared to laugh. With the shadows and light flashing across her pale face and her platinum hair she might almost have been made of ice.

The passageway ended in a large door of dull metal studded with rivets. There was a keypad beside it, but Matt couldn't see what number Katherine punched in. The door sprang open.

‘Wait here a moment.' She seemed suddenly unsettled,
as if she had thought of something that should have occurred to her earlier. ‘Let me check that …' She hesitated. ‘That the staff aren't busy with something. There shouldn't be anyone here at the moment, not at this time. But I want to check, all right?'

Matt shrugged. ‘OK.' He waited in the passage, staring at one of the fake firebrands and trying to see how the flickering effect worked.

There were half a dozen lights inside, each shining through a different section of the fake wooden stave. They flashed in what seemed to be a random sequence to create the effect of flickering flames, but in fact the pattern was repeated every so often. But since this light was not synchronised with any of the others, the pattern was obscured.

Matt knew that nothing technological was completely random. When a computer program created a random number, it needed a seed number to start from – a number on which it performed some calculation to generate an apparently random result. That seed number was often taken from the computer's clock. So, if you knew the exact time the program instruction was run, then in theory you could work out the result. Which was cheating, so far as Matt was concerned. If you could predict it, then it wasn't truly random. Not like the way the air molecules moved when the wind blew, or the drops in the ocean were affected by the tides and currents …

His thoughts were interrupted by Katherine's return.

‘There's no one about,' she said. ‘So I can give you a quick tour. Come on.'

It was indeed an impressive facility. It was hard to believe that Matt was inside an ancient stone pyramid in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. The computer suite must occupy most of the floor, apart from the narrow passage from the lift to the doors. It stretched almost out of sight – lines and lines of computer system units. Racks of circuit boards and memory arrays.

Matt could not hear any noise from outside, so he guessed it was soundproofed. Certainly, from the blast of cool air as he stepped through the doors, it was air conditioned. The hum of the ventilation added to the sounds of the computers.

Along one wall was a line of desks – plain, pale wooden office furniture – with computer screens on them. A stylised letter H twisted and turned and spun and spiralled on each screen apparently at random, but in fact following the directions of a program which Matt knew was anything but.

‘Impressive,' he said.

‘Yes,' Katherine agreed. ‘Mr Harper likes to do things properly.'

‘So I see. Have you worked for him for long?' Matt wondered.

‘One of his companies sponsored me through university,' Katherine told him. ‘My parents could never have afforded it, and I was lucky enough to get on to the
sponsorship scheme Harper was running. I didn't think Mr Harper would know who I was, but when I got my degree he sent me a personal letter asking me to come and work for him.'

‘Perhaps he does that with all the students he sponsors,' Matt suggested.

She smiled thinly, not amused. ‘They don't all get a double-first. He offered me a job, and here I am.'

‘You owe him a lot then,' Matt said.

‘I suppose he made me what I am.' She started walking down one of the aisles between the rows of equipment, the subject evidently closed. ‘I gather you know something about computers, so let me show you round.'

She led him between banks of servers and disc drives, explaining which machines serviced which of Harper's industries and connected to which continents.

‘Do you have a lot of systems programmers and stuff?' Matt wondered. Even though everything was running smoothly on its own, he knew it was a lot of work to keep systems up to date and install new software and so on.

‘A few. Mostly it's done remotely. Our technical people access the systems from wherever they happen to be on high-speed access lines. There's a microwave link through the rain forest as there are no phone lines. But we have a few hardware engineers here in case of failures. And our chief technical executive is here too, with an office on another floor.'

‘He must have his work cut out for him,' Matt said.

‘I'm sure you're right,' Katherine said. ‘They're new, but settling in well.'

There was a bleeping from somewhere nearby, and Matt assumed it was one of the computer systems they had just passed. But it was Katherine's mobile phone. She flipped open the cover and read the message she'd just received.

‘We have to go now,' she said. ‘Mr Harper is asking for me. It doesn't do to keep him waiting.'

‘Can I stay here for a bit?' Matt asked. ‘It's fascinating. I'd like to look round some more if I may? I won't be long.'

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she considered. ‘All right,' Katherine decided. ‘But just ten minutes. And don't touch anything. You can find your way back to the lift?'

‘Through the doors and down the passage. I don't think I can get very lost.'

She nodded without comment. The click of her heels was still audible long after she was lost to sight behind the racks of servers and computer storage.

Matt waited until he had heard the door close at the far end of the huge room before hurrying back in the same direction. He sat himself at one of the desks, and moved the mouse. The spinning H on the screen was replaced with an administrator's user interface.

But overlaid on it was a window demanding a password. The user's access code was already entered, so at
least he didn't have to guess that. But what could the password be? He tried ‘Harper' but, not surprisingly, it wasn't that simple. It wasn't ‘Atticus' either. Or ‘waterfall.' Probably not a word at all, Matt decided. Probably a jumble of letters and numbers. He drummed his fingers on the desk as he thought about it.

Mum had once told him she used a system for her administrator passwords that was based on the current month, and changed every month. Her own passwords were never so predictable, but it was a system she used if other people had to remember them. It was a pattern on the keyboard starting from the number of the month and preceded by the first letter of the month. So the password for January started j1 and for September it started s9. Maybe it was a system lots of computer administrators used, though that didn't sound very safe and secure. But then who was going to get inside a pyramid in the middle of the jungle to try?

It was July, so Matt typed j7ygvcft6, taking the letters y g v from down the keyboard under the 7 And then c f t back up to the 6.

And the screen bleeped. The window changed to say:

Matt grinned. He could almost believe Mum had set up the systems ready for him. Almost. Amazed at his
good luck, Matt set about finding out how Harper's computer network was arranged. He wasn't really hacking in, he told himself. He wasn't doing anything
wrong
. Just looking, just interested. He was soon absorbed in his work.

There was a whole section – a set of servers and a network of client computers – to do with Harper's archaeological work and ancient research. Matt found a map of the world with ancient sites marked on it. If you hovered the mouse pointer over a site, a set of coordinates popped up giving its longitude and latitude. A pop-up menu from the right mouse button gave him access to data about each site – both archaeological data and details of the state of the site today. It even listed who owned it, and Matt found that many were owned by AH followed by a date. When Atticus Harper had acquired it, he guessed.

He glanced at his watch, and was amazed to find that it was almost half an hour since Katherine Feather had left him. Probably time to log off and head back to his room. He reached for the mouse.

And a shadow fell across the screen.

‘What are you doing?' a soft female voice asked.

‘I nearly died!' Matt told her when he'd recovered from the shock.

‘You might, if Harper finds you,' Robin said. She'd
told him it wasn't difficult to work out the code for the door, and apologised – while grinning – for surprising him. In return, Matt showed her the data he'd found.

‘What do you mean?'

She shrugged. ‘Just that I don't trust him. Or that woman.'

‘Just because she called you a child,' Matt teased.

Robin didn't try to deny it. ‘Not just that,' she said. ‘When she left you here, she actually checked on me. Came to my room and opened the door to see if I was asleep. Probably had some plausible excuse ready and waiting in case I wasn't.'

‘But you weren't,' Matt pointed out.

‘She doesn't know that. The light was out and I was in bed.'