THE ORANGE MOON AFFAIR (6 page)

Julie's face lit up with excitement. “Okay. Give it a go.”

I spun the top dial left to the 2, right to the 2, left to the 0 and right to the 5 and then entered the lower digits, grasped the spokes of the unlock wheel and turned. Almost silently the locks clicked and I pulled open the door.

“How about that,” Julie exclaimed.

Inside were some files, a few loose papers and rather oddly, a box containing a small pot of
'Orange Moon Body Butter by Crèma'
. There was nothing else. We took the files and papers over to the desk, made ourselves comfortable, and started to go through them.

The files were the personnel dossiers on every member of the Board. The information was comprehensive and included comments made in my father’s handwriting. Fascinating reading though it was, there was nothing to arouse any suspicion. Julie had been going through the odd papers.

"Found anything?" I asked her after about twenty minutes of silence.

"Well, these are just some odd jottings about personnel. One of them is typed, but has been written over. Here look." She passed me the sheet. It was standard company report, but I didn't recognise the name. He certainly was not a Board member.

"What about the others?" I said and Julie passed me the other sheets. They were hand written.

Again I did not recognise any of the names. As with the typed sheets there were no comments except a note attached to one, where my father had written what looked like crossword puzzle clues. The name on the document was Des Ascot.

"Hey, wait a minute, these loose hand written documents could well be a provisional list of possible members of the management team for Rathborne. My guess is that this guy, Mr Des Ascot, maybe the one we're looking for. But then again his name sounds more like a supermarket chain."

"Is there an address?"

"No. Just says he is
a
'Top American'
. Presumably the old man was going to import him to run the business. Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything else around. Let's pack up and go home." We put the files back in the safe except for the loose hand written sheets, which I kept. I tossed the box containing the small pot of body butter to Julie.

"Here, you might as well have that."

She caught the pack. "I don't use this stuff, but Mary does, I saw a similar jar in her bedroom."

“Julie, I know this might be asking a lot, but do you think your father could help me with the Gunn computer system?”

She took out her iPhone, dialled and then tossed it to me. “Ask him.”

“Professor, it's Thomas Gunn.”

“Is Julie okay?”

“Of course. Actually I'd like a favour. I need an analysis of the Gunn Group computer system.”

“Presumably you are asking me to carry out an appraisal without anyone knowing?"

“Yes.”

“Does Julie approve?”

“Yes.”

“And I think your father probably would have approved.” There was a slight pause. “I was sorry to hear of his death Thomas. Truly,” he finished awkwardly.

"Thank you.”

“Fill me in on the details.”

After I recounted everything I knew and explained how the system seemed to work, he was silent for a moment and then fired questions at me. I was taken aback by the incisiveness of his mind and the speed with which he grasped my dilemma.

"Give me a few hours to do some investigating. I'll call you back."

FOUR

Listening to the mobile phone
ringing loudly reminded me that I had to change the annoying musical tone. “I need hands on access to the mainframe,” Professor Oldfield said in his usual abrupt manner.

“Okay. How about tonight.”

“What time?”

“Twenty one thirty, I don't want the staff here.”

“Nine thirty tonight it is,” he said brusquely and hung up.

I had warned George, that Julie and I would be working all night, so when I brought Professor Oldfield to the office we were duly let in without any trouble. George promised to keep me informed if anybody else wanted to get in and I showed Professor Oldfield into the main computer room and left him to it.

There was nothing to do whilst he was playing with the machines so I thought I might as well look over the personnel files once more. I don't know how many times I went through the files, but nothing seemed out of place. Finally I gave up and Julie and I went down to the computer room to see how the Professor was getting along. He had been at it for hours and it was past midnight. He didn't look up as we entered, indeed we might as well not have been there at all for all the notice he took. My questions were answered in monosyllables, so I made us some coffee. It looked as if it was going to be a long night. Oldfield was totally engrossed in his work and I thought back to the first time we met.

He was shorter and heavier than I thought he might be considering Julie's tall and slim body. Prematurely bald with sharp inquisitive eyes he appraised me carefully showing neither like nor dislike. It was disconcerting and reminded me of a particular JSIW (Joint Services Interrogation Wing) interrogator who quizzed me for days during Special Forces training. He seemed so anomalous to what I expected.

“I did some work for your father many years ago. Did you know that?”

“Know I didn't,” I replied, glancing quickly at Julie to see if she knew.

“You never told me that Dad.” She sounded a little irritated.

“It isn't important. Way before he became rich and famous. We met at Cambridge and I was a post grad Rhodes scholar. I used to lecture Business Management students on the business applications of modern computer technology. Of course that was in the analogue days. Well the end of the analogue days really. Digital systems were just starting to come online.” He stared into the bottom of his empty whisky glass and I reached across the cockpit table and filled his glass with a passable Glenlivet. “He seemed to like puzzles and that's what computer programming is all about. When he started his first company I designed an encryption for his computer system. Basic stuff and a long time ago.”

“I had no idea my father knew anything about computer systems.”

“He didn't but he was a fast learner. I remember your father particularly fondly because he was the only one who asked sensible questions.”

“How strange life is.” Julie stared at her father as if she was seeing him for the first time and appreciating him, differently.

“Did Julie tell you I'm not her real father? Hence the different surname?”

“Yes she did,” I lied.

Oldfield smiled, knowing the lie and yet enjoying that I sprang to her defence at the risk of my own integrity. “I like you. Chivalry is alive after all.”

Julie stood angrily and went into the saloon. We could hear her crashing about in the galley loading the dishwasher.

“Take care of my little girl. She's all I have.” If he thought his whisper couldn't be heard he was wrong.

“I'm not deaf. Dad.” She emphasised his family title, still angry. Later, much later, I questioned her about her anger.

“Because he is my father, the only one I've ever known and it angers me that sometimes he doesn't seem to embrace that.”

“Personally I appreciate the truth. Family secrets can only haunt and hurt. Besides, he loves you more than you want to accept.”

I went down to see George in the security room, leaving Oldfield and Julie working on the mainframe. He had been in the Army at the same time as me and retired a couple of years ago. As with a lot of retired soldiers, he picked security as the closest thing to his previous way of life. We discussed the old days, the people and places we both knew, into the early hours of the morning. It was good to relax and come down to earth after the events and people of the past months. George proved both witty and perceptive and I thought that if ever the need arose I could rely on him for support, no questions asked.

Oldfield finally finished at a quarter to five in the morning. He looked completely washed out, bloodshot eyes staring out of his pale face.

"That's it," he said. Tired he might be, but he was going to milk our relationship to the last. I resisted the temptation to pump him for information and just let him take his time. When he saw I was not going to bite, he continued. "I’ve got all the information I need, but it will take a few days to evaluate. I’ll have to do it in my spare time."

"Will you need another night here?"

"No, not yet. I'll have to wait until I've had a chance to go through all this." He saw the looked of confusion on my face. “I inserted an access into the base code, a remote 'back-door' into the system. If anything strange is going on I'll know.”

“My father had a similar set-up on a computer in my flat at the Hall.”

Oldfield looked me sharply. “What do you mean?”

I told him what I had discovered. He smiled gently. “That’s the code I showed him how to write back when we were at Cambridge. My own invention. He remembered. Well I'll be damned. It's quite antiquated now, but obviously it still works.”

He declined a flight in the helicopter, preferring to keep his feet on the ground and opted to take the train.
'Good meditation time'
was how he put it.

Julie and I flew back to the Hall as dawn broke across a threatening looking sky. A cold front was expected in the early afternoon and I didn't want to be caught out. As it was, the first spattering of rain began just as we wheeled the aircraft back into the hangar.

I
t was still raining two days later
as we pulled into the parking slot at the University. Big drops splashing down, gathering force until soon it seemed as if we were driving through a waterfall. Oldfield had called and asked us to meet him at the University. Cambridge was only one hour’s drive away and with the weather conditions, flying made no sense.

Julie and I dashed to the door and were met by the Professor. He led us through the corridors, greeting students and faculty alike until we finally arrived at his office, a small but immaculately kept room full of reference books on computer theory and computer language. He wasted no time once we were settled into our seats.

"What do you know about the way computers operate?" he said to me.

“Not much. Zeros and ones?” I offered. Julie dug me in the ribs sharply and Oldfield just looked at me as if I was an idiot.

"I know you know more than that. Okay. These days with the Internet and cloud storage, we can keep billions and billions of pieces of information in multiple places, that unless you were specifically looking for, and knew the pathway to, you would never find." He paused and crossed to a filing cabinet, opened it and pulled out a bottle of Talisker Single Malt Scotch Whisky. “Unless you're a very good hacker.” He poured two glasses handed one each to Julie and myself, then poured a generous amount into his own glass.

“Now you will appreciate that if a company such as yours takes all its financial, employee records, accounts and other business activities, and stores that information in the 'Cloud', it is particularly susceptible to fraud or sabotage. Indeed a certain gentleman has claimed that he could
'steal a company blind in three days and leave its books looking balanced'
. It has been done on numerous occasions and the ones we know about are only the people who have been caught. Now we try to prevent 'hacking' from occurring by employing very sophisticated security encryption programs, but sometimes the base system is so outdated that it is easy to crawl in through a 'backdoor'. One reason why Governments are always being hacked is that they employ security companies with the lowest bid.” He took a long draft of scotch and licked his lips appreciatively before turning his gaze on me. “How do you like the whisky?”

“A little peaty for my taste, but interesting.”

He nodded and poured more into his glass. “How did you know that there was something wrong with the system?"

"Well, it's more of a gut feeling. I feel there's something wrong and yet there is no information, which serves to further fuel my feeling that there is something wrong. That and the fact that my father was murdered."

He nodded. “I managed to find out the amount of computer storage that had been used, cross-checked this with the programmes running and the data files. There are seven and a half gigabytes unaccounted for. The computer is simply a machine that relies upon being given information. Very sophisticated and complex information to be sure, but information coded by a human being. In this case you can run through the specific area of Rathborne Micro-Electronics and come up with all the answers to questions relevant to business, but if you then compare the data usage to the function, you come up with a missing seven and a half gigabytes." He looked at me with a smile of satisfaction. “That's the simple explanation.”

I sat and thought for a moment. "OK. Now you answer me a question, how did you manage to get that information out of the computer, if there are these encryption security devices for obscuring the data?"

He continued to smile, and I began to feel a fool before he answered. This was his territory and I was an outsider with little understanding.

"It's what I do. Most of the programmers in companies such as yours do not have the time or the expertise to dream up complicated protection devices, so tend to stick to a simple code, or use off-the-shelf systems. Once I unravelled that code, the rest was easy. After all, that is one reason why your father kept the files of the board of directors on paper and in his safe." I was about to ask him how he knew when he held up his hand to silence me. "I know because they are not stored anywhere else."

"So what have we got then? A missing seven gigabytes of data and nothing else?"

"Not quite. I think if you check up on the cash transfers of Rathborne you may find that large sums have been given to contractors. The invoicing seems to be correct but the amounts and method are not in keeping with the rest of the system. That was the only thing I could find that didn't seem quite as it should be."

"Would the IT guys in the Company have noticed this?"

"I would think so, if they had not done it themselves in the first place. Don't forget, the IT guys are rather like computers themselves. They will only react and work to a set of instructions that are given to them."