A. N. T. I. D. O. T. E. (16 page)

I did as he suggested just to humour him. Moments later, what was obviously a family photograph appeared on the screen. A girl with dark hair stood between two boys. From the look of it, the photo was about three or four years old, but there was no doubt about it. It was the same Julian. Halle’s boyfriend was Marcus Pardela’s son.

Halle looked as if she’d just been slapped. ‘I don’t believe it …’ she whispered.

‘It’s right there – in full colour,’ Nosh said furiously. ‘Your boyfriend is Pardela’s son. He’s probably been reporting everything we’ve said and done straight back to his dad.’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’ Halle’s eyes took on a steely glint. ‘Julian wouldn’t do that. I met him on an ANTIDOTE march, for goodness’ sake.’

As for me – it was as if every hope, every optimistic thought I’d allowed myself, had just been totally wiped out.

‘Halle, if you didn’t want to help me, you should’ve just said so,’ I hissed at her. ‘You shouldn’t have set me up like that.’

‘I didn’t set you up. I swear I didn’t,’ Halle denied.

‘You must have known Julian’s surname – or couldn’t you put two and two together?’ I fumed.

‘Listen here, Elliot. Julian told me his surname was Dulles. He never said one word about being Marcus Pardela’s son.’

‘He and his dad must’ve had a real good laugh at us when he left last night.’ To my embarrassment, my eyes began to sting. I actually wanted to cry, which of course made me even madder at Halle. ‘How could you, Halle?’

‘You’re not listening to me!’ Halle shouted. ‘I didn’t know. Look, there must be some mistake.’

She pushed me to one side and moved in for a closer look at the screen.

‘There’s no mistake,’ Nosh said. ‘Anyone with half an eye could see it’s your boyfriend.’

The insistent peal of the doorbell was like cold water thrown over all of us.

Giving Halle a lasering look, Nosh headed downstairs. I was dishing out some nasty looks of my own. Not that Halle caught many of them. She was too busy staring in disbelief at the screen.

If seeing Julian on the screen was a shock, seeing him in person was an even bigger one. He stepped through
the
door and his querying expression turned into a frown.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

Halle stood up and regarded him without saying a word.

‘Oh! You know,’ Julian said, quietly.

‘So it’s true.’ Halle’s voice gave an odd hic.

‘It’s true that I’m Marcus Pardela’s son. But that’s the only thing that’s true. Until last night, I hadn’t seen him in over three months.’

‘You saw him last night?’ Nosh asked.

Julian nodded.

‘Why?’ said Nosh belligerently.

‘I wanted to help Elliot and his family – so I went to my father’s flat, hoping I could copy his mail messages onto the gadget Elliot gave me,’ Julian explained. He dug into his jacket pocket and brought out the memory key. ‘Here you are, Elliot. I don’t know what’s on it but I hope it’s something you can use.’

‘Are we supposed to believe that?’ Nosh scoffed.

‘Yes, because it’s true.’ Julian’s voice raised just a fraction.

‘You said your name was Julian Dulles,’ said Halle.

‘It is. I started using my mother’s maiden name over four years ago when Mum and Dad got divorced.’

‘So when we first told you about Elliot’s mum and Shelby’s Pharmaceuticals, why didn’t you tell us who you really were then?’ Halle accused.

‘Because I really am Julian Dulles. Look, what is this? You’ve all decided that I’m guilty without even hearing my side of it.’

‘What did you tell your dad about Mum and Uncle Robert and me?’ I had to ask, although I couldn’t trust myself to speak without blubbing.

‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t even know that I know you,’ Julian said earnestly. ‘Dad was in a rage because he’d just read Sarah Irving’s mail message and he knew the cat was out of the bag.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Nosh.

Halle and I didn’t say a word. We didn’t have to. Julian knew how we felt from our expressions. He lowered his head briefly and when he straightened up again, his eyes were bitter like a long, hard winter.

‘All my life I’ve been judged by what my father is and does and says. Is it any wonder I changed my name? And you, Halle, after all the time we’ve been together, I would’ve thought you’d know me better than that.’

Still no one spoke.

‘Thanks a lot – all of you.’ Julian placed the memory stick on the PC table and after one last bitter glance, he left the room.

‘EXCUSE ME,’ HALLE
said quietly.

As she headed out of the room, Nosh said, ‘He’s not worth it, Halle. He …’

‘Shut up, Nosh. Just shut up.’ Halle rounded on him.

It wasn’t so much her words as the tears running down her face that finally made Nosh keep quiet. Halle all but sprinted from the room. Moments later, the front door was slammed shut.

‘Nosh, I … if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to spend some time on my own,’ I told him.

‘It’s not my fault …’

‘I never said it was,’ I replied impatiently. ‘The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.’

Nosh looked at me, then turned and left the room. Again, the front door was slammed shut. The moment I knew I was alone, I buried my head in my hands as I tried to collect my thoughts. Exactly how much had Julian been told, how much did he know about this whole business? I tried to gauge just how much he’d hurt us.

It was my fault. I should never have involved so many people in this. Taking a deep breath, then another, I sat back in my chair. It was no good beating myself up about it. I had to decide what to do next to help Mum. If I could do that then the last few days wouldn’t have been a total waste. I sensed the key to all this was the coded file on Mum’s phone. I loaded the SHELBY file back up onto the PC and started sussing out the free decoding programs that were scattered across the Internet. When I found a likely-looking program, I download it onto Mum’s hard disk and tried running it on the SHELBY file.

The first few programs I tried were no good at all. They just asked for a decryption password. They assumed that you were the one who had coded the file and that you were now trying to decode it again. What I wanted was a deciphering program – a password cracker!

The next few I tried must’ve been put on the Internet for a joke. They were useless. I could’ve written better decoders than that in one minute flat. I was getting nowhere! I took a break and went downstairs for some orange juice. When I got back, I just sat for a bit staring at the gibberish on the screen, like I could make sense of it by sheer willpower. And then I spotted it! Near the top of the file, a sequence of characters that I recognized. My heart started beating a little faster and my hands were getting sweaty with excitement. I
grabbed
the first file I could find, a letter Mum wrote to British Telecom, and checked out the header. Yes! I was right. It was a standard header. So it wasn’t some secret code, it was just a normal document. I opened the SHELBY file from the PC’s word processor … and it asked for a password! I nearly screamed with frustration. If I never saw another password again … and then I remembered. Mum already had a program that hacked word processor and spreadsheet passwords. She had bought it last year when she forgot the password to some document she was writing. I searched around until I found it, and ran it on the SHELBY file. It took two seconds to tell me that the password was ‘eJ3kAW4vzTttz’. That didn’t seem very likely – but I tried it anyway. It worked! It actually worked! I must’ve been grinning from ear-to-ear as I started to read the decrypted document. It was the last page of a report of some kind that was something to do with accounting but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. The title of the report – PROJECTED EXPENDITURE – was about the only bit that didn’t immediately whizz over my head. There had to be something to this file – something that made Shelby’s desperate to get my mum and uncle out of the picture. I leaned forward for a closer look. One bit of the report showed what the rent per year would be at a particular address. The address rang all kinds of bells in my head. Slowly, I realized why.

It was the address of the ANTIDOTE office.

This was obviously a report written by someone when ANTIDOTE was first started up. At the bottom of the report, just above Paul Darmare’s name was the line:

PROJECT APPROVED: BUDGET APPROVED
.

The rest of the file had things in it like future staff salaries and the cost of office equipment, etc. Was this really the file that so many people were trying to get their hands on? Why? I looked at the name at the bottom of the report. Paul S. C. Darmare. I went downstairs and phoned the ANTIDOTE office.

‘Hi. Can I speak to Paul Darmare, please?’ I asked in my best grown-up voice.

‘Who?’ The woman’s voice at the other end of the phone asked. It sounded like Sarah Irving. I had to really resist the temptation to accuse her over the phone.

‘Paul Darmare,’ I repeated, stonily.

‘We don’t have anyone here by that name,’ Sarah said.

‘How long ago did he leave your company, then?’ I said.

‘We’ve never had a Paul Darmare working here. Who is this?’

‘But Paul Darmare is the one who set up your organization,’ I said, confused.

‘No, we received our major funding from an anonymous source,’ said Sarah. ‘
Who is this
?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Sorry to bother you. Bye.’ I put the phone down before the woman could ask me any more questions.

So who was Paul Darmare?

I trudged back upstairs, deep in thought. Paul S. C. Darmare … Every time I sorted out one problem, two more popped up in its place.

‘Come on, Elliot!’ I muttered. ‘Think!’

Once I was in front of the PC again, I saw the memory key Julian had left behind. Should I risk it? It could be a booby trap and wipe out every piece of information on Mum’s hard disk … I picked it up, turning it over and over in my hands. Maybe we had been unfair …? But it was such a shock. And just suppose it contained his dad’s mail messages, just as Julian had said.

I stuck the memory stick into a USB port before I could change my mind. Searching through the contents, I found only mail message directories. Holding my breath, I went for it. I copied all the data from the memory key to the hard disk. I had no problem getting into his mail messages either.

And he had loads. I displayed the list of all his mail messages sent out over the last month and it literally ran into the hundreds. I called up some likely-looking ones and it was all finance or snotty instructions to people I didn’t know. But then I hit upon something strange.

One of the messages I retrieved didn’t have Marcus Pardela’s name at the bottom of it as all the others did. Instead it said, PAUL S. C. DARMARE.

So Marcus Pardela knew this mystery man. But I was
still
in the dark. Why on earth was Paul Darmare using Marcus Pardela’s account to send messages when he could just as easily set up his own account? I entered the command to display only those mail messages that had Paul Darmare’s name in them somewhere. There were quite a few. Most of them were to do with financial stuff, but a number of them were sarcastic memos sent out to slag off the recipient. Paul Darmare was obviously just as charming as Marcus Pardela …

And then it hit me – like a bolt of lightning.

It couldn’t be … It just couldn’t be …

Writing Paul S. C. Darmare’s name down on a piece of paper, I then rearranged the letters. I was right. The evidence was in front of me and yet I still found it hard to believe I was right. If you rearranged the letters of Paul S. C. Darmare you got … Marcus Pardela.

There was no doubt about it. I went back to the SHELBY file I’d copied up from Mum’s phone. No doubt about it.

ANTIDOTE had been set up and funded by
Marcus Pardela
.

But why? I couldn’t believe Marcus Pardela set up ANTIDOTE out of the goodness of his heart, so why? Unless … unless it was to make sure that he always had total control of ANTIDOTE. Having a mole at their offices obviously wasn’t enough. If he owned the entire organization, he could set them on his rivals whenever he wanted to. And it would also provide him with a
good
way of finding out exactly who his opponents were.

I sat back, as the full implications of what he’d done hit me. Is that what he’d meant in his original memo when he told Joshua Shelby to remember ‘just whose idea all this was in the first place’? At last it all made sense. The march against Shelby’s over the weekend had just been – what do they call it? – window dressing. And he’d managed to make ANTIDOTE look bad because of the fire at Shelby’s. But now I thought about it, ANTIDOTE were a lot more active in pursuing other chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

Did that mean that more people than Sarah Irving were reporting back to Marcus Pardela? I couldn’t believe that all those people at ANTIDOTE would work there, knowing that their wages, their funding, everything they were was a direct result of Marcus Pardela’s scheming.

The phone had rung a few times before I realized it. I bounded down the stairs and picked it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Elliot? Thank God you’re OK.’

‘Mum! Mum, I’ve figured it out from your phone,’ I burst out. ‘ANTIDOTE was set up by Marcus Pardela. That’s what he and that other guy, Joshua Shelby, are so desperate to keep hidden. That’s the real deal, I’m sure of it.’

‘Elliot …’

‘I managed to decode the file on your phone. It was
signed
by someone called Paul S. C. Darmare, but that’s just an anagram for Marcus Pardela,’ I rushed on. ‘Is that why they set up you and Uncle Robert? Because they didn’t want you decoding the SHELBY file and making the information public?’

Click …

Only then did I remember what Mum had said about our phone being bugged. I stared at the receiver, horrified. I could’ve bitten my tongue off. How could I be so
stupid
!

‘Mum, I’m sorry …’

‘Elliot, listen to me very carefully,’ Mum said. There was no trace of a smile in her voice. She sounded … she was frightened and for the first time she made no attempt to hide it. ‘I want you to reformat my hard disk to wipe out everything on it. Then I want you to reset my phone to wipe out everything on that. Then you’re to leave the house and not enter it again until I get back. Is that understood?’