David Gilman - The Devil's breath

She sat on a barstool; there was no one else in the room. “Tobias, you nearly killed me,” she said with a straight face. Tobias’s mouth opened in an unspoken moment of uncertainty and confusion. “You remember that Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special you made me?” she said.

“Yes. There was no booze in it. Honest.”

“I know.” She waited, wanting to draw out his suffering a little longer.

“I blended the fruit and mix myself. You got sick? Food poisoning? Maybe it was something else you ate.”

“It was the old flask, Tobias. Your Desert Buster must have had fermented fruit in it. It blew up.”

“Blew up?” He was trying to picture the moment when his concoction escaped the confines of the flask. “Did the flask hurt you?”

Kallie grabbed ice cubes from the bucket, dropped them into a glass, reached for the lemonade dispenser and filled the glass. “It’s all right if I have a drink, is it?” she asked.

He nodded, still trying to put together how his actions might have caused her harm.

“It exploded, drenched me and the cockpit, soaked the integrated electronic circuit relay and short-circuited the solenoid on the hydraulic steering mechanism.” She said the first thing that came into her head. Tobias knew how to make every drink under the sun but nothing about airplanes. “I barely made it. I had to report it but I didn’t mention you or the Desert Buster.”

“Thank you. Kallie, I’m sorry, I had no idea a soft drink could cause so much trouble.”

“An exploding soft drink, Tobias.”

“Right.”

“In a container unsuitable for the use for which it was intended.” She remembered the words from a consumer rights report in a magazine.

“It was an old flask, but it was a flask, so it must have been suitable because that’s what flasks are for,” he said.

Kallie realized she might have gone a bit too far in trying to con Tobias on the Trade Description Act. She needed to give him a reality check.

“I could have died, Tobias.”

He nodded gravely.

“But I didn’t. So I just thought I’d come back and let you know. So you didn’t worry.”

Tobias considered this for a moment. “But I would not have worried, because I would not have known if you had not come back and told me.”

“Listen. Do you want my dad to hear about this?”

He shook his head. That was a confrontation no one in their right mind would want.

“No. Course not. And believe me, I have no intention of telling him.”

“Thank you, Kallie.”

“It’s all right. You’re a friend.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes it is. And friends are here to help each other.”

Tobias nodded soberly. “So, how much is this going to cost me?”

“I’m hurt and shocked that you think I would ask you for anything,” she said, refilling her glass. She sipped the lemonade. He waited. She shrugged. “Only the cost of a phone call.”

Sayid was on ablution block cleaning duty. The boys worked by rota, swabbing out the showers, making sure the toilets were clean, wiping tiles, cleaning mirrors, checking if loo rolls needed replacing. No one liked doing it, and deals could be made with other boys to take over a weekly duty which interfered-not with school lessons, because that would mean it would have an abundance of volunteers-but with a much more important matter known as TT, or Town Time, on Wednesday afternoons. The school bus would take them to the city, where afternoon movies, coffee shops, record stores and bookshops beckoned, and where some of the older boys inexplicably spent time chatting up girls. But Sayid had volunteered to swap with one of his friends, making the excuse that he needed to build up some free Wednesdays later in the year. What Sayid really wanted was some undisturbed time to work on the mystery phone number that Mr. Peterson had rung and which was proving to be totally untraceable.

Sayid had never had so much trouble hacking as he had now with the codes for the telephone exchange routing system. This was supposed to be a straightforward procurement of an encrypted telephone number. He had tried a reverse number look-up, but that didn’t work because it was an unlisted number. A GUI on his computer screen had shown a London location, but then it had blanked out. Where the relay stations for the telephone connections should have flashed up in a nice big box with an orange background and kebonged a tone for his attention, the screen had remained still and silent. Sayid, like most hackers, was self-taught, but he had enough skills to go a long way. He had started programming with Python, then Java, and over time progressed to C, but that always needed debugging, so he updated his hardware and went back to Python. He knew he had to eventually get to grips with one of the oldest programming languages, LISP, the name derived from “List Processing,” but it needed time and experience to write properly although it was the preferred choice for artificial intelligence research. Among the cyberspace community Sayid’s reputation was slowly becoming established. It was a love of programming that kept the hacker community in touch with each other. There were people in America who spent their lives underground in basements, surrounded by computers, absorbed in the endless possibilities at their fingertips. Sayid knew a few who worked in research and development of major computer companies and, although their names were buried deeply in code, he had sent an urgent help request to one of them. That was yesterday.

He ran the squeegee across the floor one more time: the place sparkled. He had done a good job quickly. Now he needed to get back to his room. He left the floor marker warning that the floor was wet, propped the mop, bucket, squeegee and cleaning materials as a small assault course in case any of the teachers got nosy-they were bound to knock something over, then he could be out of his room and down the corridor in time to cover his absence.

The small figure of a whirling dervish danced across his computer screen. This was a message from America. To connect to the message, he had to double-click on the dervish icon. Once he had done that, a page of code clogged the screen and he tapped in a previously agreed-upon access number. Like harpoons, these numbers shot out from the base of the screen, grabbed letters and words from the code page, rejumbled the letters and decrypted the message.

hey bro, this is your Code King Buddy. how you doin? this is big, kid that number forget the exchange that’s no good to you anyway. doesn’t mean nuthin. he could be anywhere and reroute. this number. cool. no time for guessing games. your man is high clearance. this is defense-code-scrambled. don’t have a name. he’s MI6. tread careful, pal. peace and goodwill. except to the bad guys.

The British Secret Intelligence Service; the words sounded like a huge pyramid of power in Sayid’s head. He stared at the screen for a moment, then erased everything. If MI6 was hunting Max’s dad, then he must have done something pretty serious and Peterson had connections in much higher places than your bog-standard geography teacher. Sayid tried to make some sense of it all. Max’s dad was missing, someone tried to kill Max, then Peterson had Max followed to the airport. The police in Namibia were in touch with Peterson, and Peterson was asking for help from MI6. Whatever Max’s dad had discovered, it had everybody scared and they were trying to stop Max from discovering his father and his secret. Sayid stopped his mind going down the wrong route. This was not an MI6 operation. The state was not involved. This was Peterson asking for help from a well-placed contact who would be untouchable. Peterson was owed a favor, so maybe Peterson had done dirty work for MI6 in the past. That made more sense. And it was also more frightening. How did Peterson come to be teaching at Dartmoor High? Just what kind of clout did he have to get help from a foreign police force?