Quite Ugly One Morning (12 page)

As oily creeps go, Clive Medway was deluxe multigrade. If he had been American, Parlabane decided, he would have had a ponytail, even though he was losing it both at the front and on top. He had the roundest head Parlabane had seen outside of Peanuts, above a shiny blue tie and a designer suit which conclusively proved that shelling out a fortune for your clothes doesn’t stop you looking like a complete tit.

He had a whiny, nasal voice which frequently degenerated into a whiny, nasal laugh at his own witticisms, or insincere chuckling at anyone else’s. He made Parlabane want to take a shower to wash his presence off, but he felt slightly guilty thinking all these uncomplimentary thoughts, as Clive was introducing him to numerous ‘important’ people and firmly instructing them to tell Parlabane absolutely anything he wanted to know.

He took Parlabane on a brief tour of the administration block first, explaining which office dealt with which aspect of running the Trust, and allowing him to familiarise himself with the layout of the place.

‘Impressive facilities, great decor,’ Parlabane said, passing another minor brushland of potted plants. ‘It’s important to have the right environment for people to work in, I think.’

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Clive replied. ‘You can’t expect trained professionals to work in a pig-sty, can you? Ha-ha-ha. You have to show personnel that they are valued and respected if you want them to be team players.’

‘I wouldn’t imagine all this was cheap, but it’s certainly money well spent,’ Parlabane offered, reeling him in.

‘Well, it couldn’t be cheap. This is the corporate face of the Trust, the business image we project to the marketplace. It wouldn’t impress anyone out there for us to look impoverished. What the carpers don’t understand is that sometimes being what they regard as ostentatious is a pro-active marketing tactic. You have to be seen to be spending money on yourself, on your image, so that the market knows you are in good financial shape.’

Parlabane found the word ‘pro-active’ enormously useful, as it immediately exposed the speaker as an irredeemable arsehole, whatever previous impression might have been given. Once upon a time, he remembered, people and companies just did things. But that ceased to be impressive enough, and for a while they ‘actively’ did things. Now they ‘pro-actively’ did things, but it was still the same bloody things that they were doing when they just plain old did things. Meaningless wank-language. Every time he heard it he imagined George Orwell doing another 360 down below.

Parlabane followed Clive around for a while, shmoozing practisedly, shaking hands, asking questions, having things pointed out to him. The suits needed little prompting from Clive to answer Parlabane’s questions, as his very presence was making them feel terribly important. The LA angle was what really opened them up, the thought of all those people out in Hollywoodland reading about their pro-active pro-activeness proving too intoxicating for them to notice that Parlabane wasn’t actually listening to anything they were saying.

A sharper eye might have spotted that what Parlabane was actually doing was casing the joint. They saw that his little dictaphone was rolling away on the desk in front of them and seemed to assume that it was linked directly to his brain via his ears. They didn’t wonder what a man with a dictaphone was doing scribbling in a notepad as they spoke, or notice that his camera was pointing slightly away from them when he took their pictures.

They all cooperated in standing against one wall for his great idea of taking a shot of a whole office area completely deserted, and then with its staff sitting back at their desks – ‘it’s for a kind of sequential thing: empty, like first thing in the morning, then busy, with a montage of all you guys at your various duties running alongside it.’ Nobody noticed that Parlabane didn’t set his camera to flash for the empty shot, or wonder whether it was just for the best angle that he took it from directly underneath the fixed close-circuit video camera. And nobody noticed that he didn’t shut the window properly after opening it to take a panoramic shot of the ‘wonderful view’ enjoyed by RVI staff and patients, or that much of the window concerned was obscured from the aforementioned video camera by a bank of filing cabinets.

Parlabane had anticipated that Clive would introduce him to the happy smile club, presenting the most positive image possible, and was therefore paying attention to who he was specifically not being allowed to meet, as that was who would be most likely to tell him something useful or at least true. The most obvious – and potentially most useful – was the conspicuously pissed-off computer trouble-shooter who was hopping from desk to desk looking stormy and fraught.

‘It’s a magnificently complex-looking computer system you’ve got here,’ he said to Clive. ‘But then I suppose it would really have to be state-of-the-art to run this whole operation.’

‘Quite,’ Clive agreed. ‘It’s extremely advanced, and processes everything from budgets and accounts to medical records.’

‘Must be some responsibility for the systems manager.’

‘Oh yes. He’s one of the busiest men in the building, and I’m afraid I daren’t interrupt him just now. Can’t have the whole Trust at a standstill because the network is down and the systems manager’s chatting to a journalist about how great the computers are. Ha-ha-ha. That
would
be embarrassing.’

And so on.

Parlabane bided his time until he was allowed to go walkabout on his own, which came about because Clive had ‘an eleven o’clock with the chief exec’, followed by ‘a twelve-thirty at the Sheraton’. Parlabane figured Clive’s day had started with a seven-fifteen on the bog then a seven-twenty-five in the shower, followed by an eight o’clock in the kitchen.

Twat.

He spotted the computer bloke hovering around what looked like an enormous central file server and made directly for him.

‘Problems?’ he asked.

The guy just shook his head gravely. He looked late thirties, going a bit grey, but maybe it was just the day he was having.

‘I don’t know a helluva lot about these things,’ Parlabane said, ‘but that looks like an awful lot of hardware for a place this size.’

‘No kidding,’ the man replied. ‘Everything runs off this file server here – everything. No local facilities whatsoever, so the
machines don’t get bunged up with personal junk and the terminals can only run what they’re here to run. But to be honest, you could run every computer for two square miles off of this rig. It’s enormous.’

‘Room for expansion?’

The man just laughed, bitterly.

‘I’ve seen a few like this,’ Parlabane said, very quietly, touching the seven-foot cabinet full of stacked drives and mini-screens. ‘Maybe it’s because companies would rather
over-
estimate how much computer they might need. Or maybe it’s because the systems manager submitted an accurate spec and the boys upstairs ignored it and bought twice as much because the nice computer company accidentally spilled some money into somebody’s bank account. But not here, obviously.’

‘Obviously. And that’s a very cynical viewpoint, Mr . . .?’

‘Parlabane. Jack Parlabane.’

‘Parlabane. Very cynical indeed.’ He smiled and offered his hand to shake. ‘Matt Dempsey. You’re a journalist, yeah? You ever seen the system down at the
Evening Capital
?’

‘Only very briefly.’

‘It’s another stoater. The hardware’s no bad, but the software? Fuck’s sake. Portuguese, it is.’

‘Of course,’ said Parlabane. ‘Think software, think Portugal.’

‘I worked at the
Capital
for a wee while a few years back, when they brought that one in,’ Dempsey said. ‘Nightmare. New DTP system, never been used live by anyone before. The first rule of buying software is
never
buy version 1.1 of
anything.
Let some other clown find out whit’s wrang with it and then buy version three when the thing actually fucking works. Not the
Capital.
They volunteer to be guinea pigs on this thing called Dash. The hacks all called it Colon instead, because it’s full of shite. When I was there it crashed for a different reason every three hours, half its error messages were in fucking Portuguese and it practically doubled the paper’s production times. But I’m sure it was all worth it to the fat bastard in the boardroom who mysteriously acquired a villa on the Algarve and free golf membership for life.’

‘But obviously, again, that sort of thing would never happen here,’ Parlabane stated flatly.

‘Certainly not. All the hardware and software we’re running was purchased strictly in accordance with my requests and
projections, down to the last floppy disk. That’s why we’ve got a fucking NASA-grade central server and I’m running about daft all day fixing programme crashes and trying to retrieve lost files.’

‘And absolutely everything runs off the central server?’

‘Aye. Management policy. Means nobody can be farting aboot playing games on their PC or loading up dodgy or even illegal software. It also means the boys upstairs can monitor everything that’s going on. The heid bummers can access all levels of the system, so they can spy on the underlings, see what wee messages they’re writing to each other. That kind of thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Parlabane, ‘what was the phrase your man Medway used . . . ? Something about showing people that they were valued and respected. So if someone with those privileges wanted to know how much a certain doctor earned, for instance, he could just access the wages files directly?’

‘Aye. But that’s just the way the hierarchy works. As senior management they’ve got the right – in fact, I suppose you could say it’s their job – to know or to be able to know what’s going on down below. The more distasteful aspect is the Loud Labelling.’

‘The what?’

‘Loud Labelling. It’s a wee piece of software. Every type of file gets assigned an automatic label as soon as it’s created: accounts, spreadsheets, budget, medical records and all that. But person-to-person messages get assigned a Loud Label. That means it gets noted by the computer that so-and-so sent a memo file to such-and-such, and so the heid bummers can call up a list of who’s talking to who. If they see something they fancy a swatch at, they can just call it up. They’re at it all the time. Whiling away the hours doing fuck-all work and reading other people’s mail.’

‘So is it a password system?’ Parlabane asked ‘Getting into the right access level, I mean.’

Dempsey glared. ‘Don’t fucking talk about it. The chief exec and a few more in senior management have got passwords that even I’m not allowed to know. How am I supposed to police the system when I don’t have access to the whole thing? It’s just a power trip. It’s not as though there’s any information I – or any other bugger – would be remotely interested in. It’s only a fucking hospital, for God’s sake.
No, it’s purely so they can feel more important than everybody else.’

Parlabane looked on with obvious incredulity. ‘You’re not telling me that you haven’t set up a few backdoors for yourself, surely.’

‘I’m not a hacker, I’m just a systems manager. And to be honest, I don’t have any great curiosity to know what they’re up to. I’d just like to have the run of my own network.’

‘Does the Loud Labelling have a hierarchy as well? Can the chief exec see what the other big cheeses are saying to each other?’

‘Of course. The whole fucking thing was his idea.’

‘So if you were able to access at his level, you’d have complete freedom of the system?’

‘Apart from the direct programming, which only I can access, aye.’

‘So,’ Parlabane said, looking Dempsey in the eye with that helplessly untrustworthy glint, ‘if someone could provide you with a piece of software that would reveal the chief exec’s password, would you be worried about the fact that that person might go poking around your system?’

‘Not at all,’ Dempsey said quietly, glancing quickly over Parlabane’s shoulders to see whether anyone was paying them too much attention. ‘Because I’m the only one who could access the direct programming to install that software, and I’d be the only one who could call the software up once it was running.’

Parlabane nodded solemnly.

‘Of course,’ Dempsey continued, ‘that person might not
give
me the software unless I agreed to set him up with a user name – say “Jack P” – and a password – say “hack” – that would allow him to access the system and call up the software at least fifteen minutes after I leave at four o’clock this afternoon.’

With a flick of the wrist Parlabane produced a grey 3.5” disk from his pocket and tapped it absently on the edge of the desk.

Dempsey glanced down and nodded once. ‘But before I did that I’d obviously need to know why that person wanted to go poking around my system when he’s told everyone he’s writing an article about hospital management.’

‘Yes,’ said Parlabane. ‘Chances are you’d feel more public-spirited about it knowing he was actually investigating a
murder, but you would feel all the more reassured knowing that if he double-crossed you and raided the files for purposes of profit or espionage, you have his name and about a hundred witnesses that he was here.’

‘Yes, that would certainly put me at ease,’ Dempsey said. ‘So how does it work?’

‘Well, the good news is that as you’re running everything off the central server, you won’t need to install it individually on the machines of the people whose passwords you want. You just need to bung it on the network. The bad news is that it’s not a codebreaker and it won’t just take a look at the security software then print out the magic words.

‘What it
will
do is record every keystroke made on whatever terminal or terminals you tell it to look at, whatever programme they are running, then allow you to get a listing of them at any time. Then you either wait till morning if you’re not in a hurry, or shut the system down and ask everyone to re-boot.’

‘And the first thing they key in is their name and password,’ Dempsey said, grinning. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Mr Parlabane, I think the network might be about to have a problem.’