Read Online Three Great Novels by Henry Porter - Free Book Online Page B

discreetly.’

    ‘Loosen up, Isis. That’s the point of pillow talk.’ He drank a glass of wine and smiled at the restaurant. ‘Your friend, the man in the bookshop, was doing interesting things with his PC.’

    Herrick set down her glass and looked at Dolph’s black eyes dancing. ‘Can you talk about this now ?’

    ‘Of course. He has a novel line in screensavers. Actually it’s one screensaver - an aquarium with fish swimming across it. You know the kind of thing.’

    She nodded.

    ‘Only, his aquarium is different, you see. It’s got a little timer in it that ticks away and then releases information.’

    ‘There was a message hidden in the image?’

    ‘Not quite. What happens is this. He logs on in the morning and automatically downloads the same screensaver - same bloody guppies, same bloody eels, same bloody octopus with the smiley face. Then half an hour later, maybe an hour, maybe two hours later - the interval changes according to the day of the week - he clicks on one of the guppies and a message is sent from the screensaver to a pre-prepared file on his hard drive. You only have a few minutes to read it before it disintegrates.’

    ‘Where’d you get this?’

    ‘Friend of mine - a bloke I play poker with in the office. Good guy. Crap at cards though.’

    ‘Why’d he give it to you?’ She lowered her voice. ‘This is sensitive stuff.’

    ‘He owed me a couple of bob from a game. I told him he had to tell me something interesting to stop me breaking his legs.’ He saw Herrick’s brow furrow. ‘Look, I’m joking. Don’t be so fucking serious.’

    ‘What else did you find out?’

    ‘This and that.’

    She gave him a look of exasperation.

    ‘Try me,’ he said.

    ‘Okay, so why was Norquist here?’

    ‘Cabling - they’re going to lay high capacity cables under the Atlantic so the Americans can get more of the stuff they already don’t have time to read. It’s as simple as that. ’

    ‘But why was the Prime Minister involved? That’s all a bit nuts and bolts for him, isn’t it?’

    ‘Strategic matters also, I hear. That is to say, what are we going to do about the Europeans?’ Dolph lit a cigarette and offered her a drag which she declined. ‘We’d be good together, Isis. Really, we’d be fucking wonderful because we get each other.’

    She shook her head. ‘So this screensaver works like a virus?’

    ‘Not quite. It’s more targeted than a virus. For one thing it doesn’t reproduce itself, and for another it’s got a very short life span. If the correct procedure isn’t followed at the right moment the message disappears. And here’s the beauty of it. If the screensaver is intercepted, all you get is fish. Nothing else. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got the software that goes with it - the male plug and the female socket, if you see what I mean.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Good pillow talk, no?’

    She nodded. ‘What do you think it means?’

    ‘That Rahe was a shit-load more important than we thought he was.’ Dolph looked out on the muddy evening sky. ‘The men at the airport, why do you think they were all dressed like Senegalese lottery winners? What was that about?’

    ‘Reverse camouflage,’ said Herrick quietly. ‘The more noticeable your clothes, the less people look at your face. It’s the opposite effect to the one you achieve, Dolph.’

    He ignored the remark. ‘Like having a parrot on your shoulder?’

    ‘Yes. Can I ask something else?’

    ‘You have my full attention.’ He began to fold his napkin.

    ‘Do you think the two things were connected at Heathrow?’

    ‘Of course they were. I quote you the product law of probabilities. “When two independent events occur simultaneously their combined probability is equal to the product of their individual probabilities of occurrence.” That means it was bloody unlikely that the two events were unconnected. They were syzygial - yoked, paired, conjoined, coupled - like we should