although she could have got into them easily enough if she had wanted. But she didn’t need to. The evidence she was after was buried far below such superficial applications, hidden away in the genes of the system itself, and she had already found one line of code that didn’t fit.
In a sense, it was no concern of hers. There was no perceptible effect on the efficiency of the network. Carla could simply complete her installation and sign off on the assignment, but she felt personally intrigued and challenged. Whoever had tampered with the system had done an almost completely seamless job, but he had left a few crumbs here and there, and she was determined to identify the intruder.
Unlike most of her colleagues at the Turin-based Uptime Systems, Carla Arduini was not obsessed with computers, but she had an instinctive feel for them, the way some people do for animals. She had discovered this while at university in Milan, when a last-minute change of schedule by her mathematics professor — who tried to keep the time he had to spend away from his villa on Lake Como down to the absolute minimum — led her to take a course in systems analysis to fill in a blank couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons.
The experience was a revelation to her. Mathematics, she had already begun to realize, was like one of those languages which are simple, straightforward and logical in the early stages, but which rapidly spiral out of control in a frenzy of idioms, oddities, idiosyncrasies and exceptions to the rule which even native speakers cannot always get right, never mind explain. From advanced calculus to proving Fermat’s theorem or calculating the value of pi was a large step, to be sure, but it would never go away, would always be a step not taken.
The prospect of such indeterminacy on the horizon, however distant, was one which Carla found intensely threatening. Her childhood had been a shuffled series of abrupt moves, often taken furtively and under cover of darkness; of ‘relatives’ and ‘friends’ who came and went and never reappeared; of her mother’s sudden reticence and evasions; and above all her father’s absence. Later, as an adolescent, when she finally understood the reasons for all this, it turned out to be too late. Neat labels such as poverty, neglect, fecklessness and sheer bad luck would not adhere to those childhood memories, which remained unmanageable and apart, a perpetual source of anxiety which could awaken her even now, sweaty and trembling, in the middle of the night.
She had been drawn towards mathematics in part because of a natural gift for the subject, but largely because it seemed to offer a secure refuge, a way of containing and exorcising such imponderables. Two and two can never make five or three, still less nothing at all. They can’t change their minds, or sink into depression, or disappear for days on end, or get drunk and abusive and then suddenly burst into tears across the dinner table. All they can ever do is make four.
Most of her classmates found this and similar tricks a bit dull, but not Carla, because she knew that they could be relied upon to work over and over and over again, and never let her down. It was not until she got to university that this simple faith began to desert her. It was a question of scale. Two and two make four, four and four make eight, eight and eight make sixteen… Even this childishly simple series was, like all series, infinite. Stronger, more stable spirits than hers, she knew, delighted in the possibilities for intellectual acrobatics this provided. All Carla felt was the return of a familiar sense of panic.
It was while struggling with this loss of mathematical faith that she was fortuitously introduced to the world of applied computing. It was love at first sight. Although seemingly complex, computers were actually reassuringly simple-minded. Whether searching a vast database for a single instance of a string, rotating three-dimensional sketches of hypothetical buildings or calculating the value of our old friend pi to fifty billion places, they were in essence no more mysterious or threatening than the spy in some old thriller sending a coded message by switching a torchlight on and off. Their memories were prodigious but finite; the Library of Congress, not the Library of Babel.
Carla reorganized her syllabus, took some private extramural courses, and when she graduated got a job first with Olivetti and then with a firm specializing in installing and maintaining computer networks linking individuals and departments within an organization. She was entirely familiar with this particular system, which she had installed many times before, and she was determined not to let some anonymous hacker outwit her.
Her cellphone started beeping. Was it her employer, complaining about the length of time it was taking her to fine-tune this system to everyone’s satisfaction? Or was it one of her employer’s employers, the judges and magistrates of the AntiMafia pool, wanting to know when they would finally be able to use this high technology to collate their files, communicate internally, and coordinate information and objectives with their colleagues elsewhere in Sicily?
In the event, it was simply her father.
‘Carla? How’s it going?’
‘All right. And you?’
‘Not too bad. Listen, are you free this evening?’
Free?’
‘For dinner. I’ve just realized that apart from meeting for coffee in the morning, we don’t seem to actually spend very much time together and I feel bad about it, for some reason. I suppose I’m missing you.’
Carla laughed charmingly.
‘I’d love to come to dinner, Dad.’
‘We could go out, I suppose, or you could come round here.’
‘Shall I bring something?’
‘A dessert, perhaps. I’ll put something together. It won’t be much, but at least we can be together and talk.
‘Of course. Eight, nine? They eat late here, I’ve noticed.’
‘Let’s say eight. At my age, you don’t change your habits so easily.’
‘I’ll be there at eight, Dad.’
‘Wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing you and being able to talk freely. It’s odd…’
‘What is?’
‘Well, this whole situation. No?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
‘Till tonight, then.’
She clicked the phone back together and turned to the sullen, recalcitrant screen. Dinner at eight. Yes, that was all right, she supposed, although she found it difficult to look forward to the evening with any great enthusiasm. Her father was right: despite the fact that Carla had requested this assignment in Sicily — not that she’d faced much competition! — in order to be near him, this physical proximity hadn’t yet resulted in the warm, natural, easy relationship she had hoped for. At moments, indeed, it was hard to believe that Aurelio Zen really was her father.
Not literally, of course. The DNA tests they had had done in Piedmont had proven their genetic linkage beyond a shadow of doubt, but was that all there was to being a father or a daughter, a demonstrable genetic link? In law, yes, but Carla was beginning to think that the real meaning of such terms lay elsewhere, in the years of nurture and intimacy she had been denied, the long chronology of daily life stretching back into the mists of a personal pre-history, when all was myths and magic.
Not that she had any sentimental illusions about such kinship. She knew that there were good fathers and bad fathers, some supportive and some brutally abusive. Nevertheless, they were all, for better or worse, the real thing. This wasn’t, and with the best will in the world there was nothing that either of them could do about it. As soon as she had finished this assignment, she would catch the first flight north. After that, she would phone her father from time to time. Perhaps they might even get together once in a while, at Christmas, but that would be all.
Meanwhile there was this unsolved problem of the virtual draught. Carla resumed her search of the system log files. After about five minutes she heard a hesitant knock at the door.
‘Come in!’ she called impatiently.
The door opened but Carla did not turn around immediately. When she did, she found the judge called Corinna Nunziatella standing in front of her. They had met a few times during the preceding weeks, in the corridors and the canteen of the building, to which the older woman, by virtue of her status as a DIA judge, was effectively restricted.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Corinna Nunziatella remarked with a smile.
Carla got up from her desk.
‘Good morning, dottoressa.’
