“A girl…” Musgrave thought for a while. “She dropped him off, when he first got here. She was,” he turned to Black, with a smirk on his face, “you know, she was hot, in a kind of punky-goth way.”
“She have a name?”
Musgrave thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Amber something. That’s all I know.”
Chapter Thirty
They spoke to Wheatley’s tutor, a PhD student named Lawrence Hall. He suggested meeting in the cafeteria on the top floor of the Marine Biology building, saying his office was a mess.
“What was Wheatley like as a student?” West began, sizing the man up. He was good looking, but seemed to know it, and he dressed for attention. Hall didn’t answer at first, instead forming a steeple with his fingers while he considered the question.
“Unusual.” He finally responded.
“How so?” Black asked, and the man turned to him instead.
“He wasn’t like any other freshman I’ve tutored,” Hall went on. “He was unusually precocious. He knew a lot, and he wanted to show people how he knew a lot. He dominated the few tutorials he actually attended.”
“He didn’t attend that often?” West cut in.
“At first he did. In fact he came to see me before we were even due to meet. Right here, as it happens. And for the first few weeks he would be waiting outside the door before the session started. But more recently, he missed a couple of weeks. And the ones he did get to, he seemed distracted. Less engaged.”
“Would you say he was the kind of guy you could imagine had some kind of secret agenda? Some kind of secret life? Like running a bombing campaign, against chemical companies?” Black asked, and again there was a long delay while the tutor considered this.
“I can. He’s exactly the kind of guy I could imagine doing that,” he answered in the end.
“What kind of a question was that?” West asked when they got back to their car, parked in the lot below. It was the first thing she’d said since they shook hands with Hall and left him, still sipping on his cappuccino.
“Huh?” Black frowned.
“You wanna ask it in a more leading way, or can’t you think of one?”
“What? What’s up with you?”
“What’s up with me? How many students has he taught who have gone on to run secret bombing campaigns? How many students has he even taught? The guy’s barely twenty five years old himself.”
“Hey! I was only asking if he was the sort of kid who might do something like this. And once again, the people who knew him recently all find it easy to believe it. It’s only you who doesn’t.”
“Well he’s not going to know, is he. He’s not going to know that.” West pressed a hand to her brow. She’d hoped that a report of a young man, climbing frozen and exhausted out of the water, would have emerged over the preceding days, but they hadn’t. Nor had watches being kept on his home on Lornea Island, his student address, and his father’s boat, which was big enough to live aboard, turned up anything. His bank account hadn’t been touched in three days, and his cell phone had last pinged from midway across the island, apparently showing Wheatley on his way to catch the ferry. Her own phone rang, interrupting the discussion before it could turn into a row.
West listened, and then turned to Black. “They’ve got into his computer.”
They hurried back to the office, and went to see the technical analyst who had been tasked with gaining access to Wheatley’s laptop. He sat with the computer at his desk, plugged in to what was presumably his own system, cables linking the two.
“I’d say he was extremely paranoid,” the technician said, answering another leading question from Agent Black. The man wore a short-sleeved shirt, even in winter, and had narrow, thin arms that were painfully pale. “He had two passwords to get through, the first is the regular one you put on a set up on this type of system, you know when you set up a Linux system?” he paused, and it was West who answered.
“No.”
“Oh, well you have to put in a password, and with this type of system you can’t just access the source file and read what they are, like you could with most people’s set ups. And anyway, like I said he had two passwords,” the man explained. He seemed to be happier talking to West than Black. “But then I realized this wasn’t a standard Linux installation at all. It was something else, a kind of custom crossbreed.”
“So what does that mean?” West gave an encouraging smile.
“Well, Linux is a recreation of UNIX, but this was more of a continuation…”
“No, I mean did you get in or not?”
“Oh, right. Well yeah. You see for the first password he used a randomly generated combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Technically that’s impossible to break, but if you can throw enough computer power at it, you can just try every possible combination and get through that way.”
“So that’s what you did?”
“No way. It would take like, longer than all the time left in the universe. No you see the weakness of passwords like this is you have to either remember them, which is hard, or store them somewhere, which means there’s a weakness. He had a password vault set up, and luckily it’s one we already cracked. So I was able to try all the passwords from there as his main password. And bingo.”
“So he’s paranoid, but not too bright?” Black asked.
The analyst frowned at once. “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, maybe, like if he was an expert on FBI methods and was assuming we’d try and get in, then yeah, pretty dumb. But if he was just an ordinary citizen going about his business, then I’d say his level of protection was extraordinarily high. It just depends.” He shrugged.
“So what have you actually found?” West was keen
