A. N. T. I. D. O. T. E. (12 page)

But I couldn’t sit still. The house was too quiet. I went into my bedroom to get my MP3 player and took it into the back bedroom with me. I pressed the play button and Tinie Tempah’s song
Written In The Stars
started. I turned up the volume, feeling slightly silly at being so nervous, but doing it nonetheless. More than half the tracks on the album had finished playing before the disk had finished downloading. It was ridiculously slow! With impatient fingers I began to hunt through Uncle Robert’s system, unsure of what I was looking for but hoping that something would jump out at me. There were a number of ANTIDOTE directories, full of memos, letters and documents written by various people in the ANTIDOTE office, but nothing that looked out of the ordinary. Searching through the hard disk was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Harder in fact, because I had no idea what the needle looked like or even if it was there at all.

Two hours later, I was burning with frustration at my lack of success. I’d learnt more about ANTIDOTE than I’d ever wanted. I knew who was due for a pay rise, all about the office furniture re-shuffle and had read proposal documents on the previous day’s march to Shelby’s. But there was nothing about the mole in the company, nor anything else that could help me. There were two memos – from Uncle Robert to Sarah Irving
and
vice versa – listing dates, times and ports where ANTIDOTE were sure Shelby’s had illegally smuggled in animals for their experiments – but even that didn’t help much because the dates were all in the past. Then an idea hit me. There was still one place I hadn’t searched.

Uncle’s Internet account … I had his user ID and password, so why not? Uncle wouldn’t mind – not once he knew why I’d done it. I fished out the piece of paper I’d found with the CD and then logged on to Uncle’s email account. After selecting the option, the screen cleared and then:

‘Yes!’ I grinned.

At last – progress!

But when I checked through the e-mail messages, they were all as dry as stale biscuits. I sat back and frowned at the screen. There had to be something else I could do. I was on the right track. I could
feel
it, but now what? I decided to check through the log of all Uncle’s incoming e-mail messages – all the ones he’d received from other people. I expected to see a list of about a dozen or so messages but it looked like Uncle had kept every message he’d ever been sent from the time the Internet had started! I searched down through his list, starting with the most recent message first. I checked
each
subject heading carefully but nothing jumped out at me. I only went back over the last month. I reckoned Uncle must have found out about the mole at ANTIDOTE quite recently so there was no point in going back beyond that date. He and the others at ANTIDOTE wouldn’t want to hang around doing nothing once they knew that one of them was a traitor. I went back to the beginning and checked both the subject heading and the sender details in case I’d missed something.

Nothing.

I was about to give up and load Mum’s back-up when it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked down the list of messages that Uncle Robert had sent out. I frowned as I considered. Was it even worth doing this? I really was clutching at straws now. Deciding that I might as well, just to be thorough, I called up the list and glanced down it.

I noticed it at once because
it wasn’t there
.

There was a list of all the e-mail messages Uncle Robert had sent out in the last month and he’d carefully kept copies of each of them – except one. The e-mail message number was still listed but there was no heading and no recipient details. Why would Uncle have deleted the details of just that one message?

I made a note of the e-mail message number on the back of my hand, then downloaded Mum’s back-up. I went straight into her Internet account to check her incoming e-mail messages. Like Uncle, she had a list of all her incoming messages going back over the last three months. But there was one message which had no sender or subject heading details. I checked the message number – 183404292. It was the same message that Uncle Robert had sent out. I tried to call up the message by double-clicking on the right line but the warning,

E
RROR
. E-
MAIL MESSAGE NUMBER
183404292,
NOT AVAILABLE

appeared. I had a quick scan through all Mum’s other directories and likely-looking files on the hard disk but again, nothing else leapt out at me.

So where was this missing e-mail message? After a moment’s thought, I checked the history log for 11th April. The history log was a log of all the commands
Mum
had typed in on that day and the log filled at least five screens. I searched through it carefully, until I came to the line that explained what had happened to the file.

C
OPY
/D
EL
M
AIL
M
ESSAGE
=183404292 H:\183404292.TXT

Mum had copied the mail message off her computer, and probably onto her phone, making sure that the message was deleted once it’d been copied. And that would certainly explain why both Mum and Uncle Robert’s hard disks had been trashed and why Smiler and his friend were so keen to get hold of Mum’s mobile.

But what did this mail message say? Was it to do with ANTIDOTE-CONFIDENTIAL, the file that Marcus Pardela had sent to his colleague in Geneva? I dismissed the idea at once. I couldn’t believe Marcus Pardela and his cronies would go to all this trouble over that memo.

So it had to be something else. If it was important before, it was even more urgent now that I break Mum’s VAULT password and find the message. I was going to spend the rest of Sunday trying to crack the password and I
was
going to do it – I had to believe that.

But first things first. I had to write the program to search each of the PCs at the ANTIDOTE office. I’d probably only get one shot at this so I had to get it right.

I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon writing and testing my program. I tested it using
Uncle
Robert’s back-up disk as well as Mum’s. My program searched through all the text files on the hard disk looking for certain words. Any file with those words in it was copied to the memory stick. When I was happy it was working, I loaded the program onto a memory key that I could give to Halle.

I switched off the PC and headed back to Nosh’s house, taking a good look around me once I was outside. The chills tingling up and down my spine like icy fingers made me hurry. Once I was at Nosh’s door, I had another look around. There was no one in sight – but I knew, just as surely as I knew my own name – that I was being watched.

SUNDAY TURNED INTO
Monday and I think I had Mum’s phone out of my hands for all of about ten minutes. I even slept with it in my hand, with my hand under my pillow. I wouldn’t let the thing out of my sight. I reckoned that with me at all times was the safest place for it. I tried everything I could think of but I still had no luck cracking Mum’s code. The only other way of getting into the mobile was to reset it. That would wipe out Mum’s password all right. The only trouble was, it would wipe out all the other data on the phone as well, which was the last thing I wanted.

And I had an even bigger concern. Today was the day when I was meant to meet Mum in the park. And – if Mum was right about our phone being bugged – she wouldn’t be the only one waiting for me.

Throughout breakfast, I hardly said a word. I forced myself to eat and try to appear normal, but my bacon could’ve been gravel for all the pleasure I got from eating it.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Nosh’s mum asked me more than once.

I just nodded.

Halle’s boyfriend, Julian, came round at about half-nine. I was the one who was unlucky enough to open the door for him. He was gangly and skinny and spotty and had a really fake grin plastered over his face. He was what Uncle Robert would call a tall glass of warm water! His hair must have had a whole can of mousse sprayed into it, as each thin section of hair was carefully combed back and defined and it was a colour I’d never seen before, a strange kind of charcoal grey. His eyes were the same colour too, which made me suspect his hair colour was out of a bottle.

‘Hi!’ he smiled. ‘You must be one of Nosh’s little friends.’

I didn’t say a word. One of Nosh’s little friends, indeed! What a bloomin’ cheek!

‘Is Halle in?’ he asked, still grinning at me.

‘Halle, your boyfriend, Hadrian, is here,’ I shouted.

‘The name is Julian,’ he corrected.

‘Whatever!’ I dismissed and walked off leaving him at the door.

What a numpty! Nosh was absolutely right about him. Halle dashed down the stairs, almost knocking me over in her hurry to get to ‘Julian’.

‘Elliot, his name is Julian, not Hadrian – as I’m sure you know. You won’t be so cute if you start picking up Nosh’s bad habits,’ frowned Halle.

‘I don’t have to pick up anyone’s bad habits. I’ve got enough of my own,’ I told her.

She flounced past me, unimpressed, and started kissing Julian on the doorstep. I thought they were trying to swallow each other. It was disgusting! Leaving them to it, I started up the stairs. With a sudden start, I turned back.

‘Halle, you are still going to help me, aren’t you?’ I asked quickly.

‘I said so, didn’t I?’ Halle replied. ‘Don’t nag me. I hate to be nagged.’

Me? Nag? I felt like telling her that only grown-ups nagged, but I didn’t push it. Today was definitely a day when things were going to happen. But I’d given up trying to predict if they were good things or bad things. My gut feelings had let me down before – and in a big way. I dug the memory stick out of my pocket and went back downstairs, followed by Nosh who suddenly appeared. Halle and Julian were holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. If they knew how drippy they looked, they wouldn’t have done it!

‘Halle, here’s the thing I was telling you about,’ I said pointedly.

Puzzled, Halle frowned at me, then her expression cleared. ‘Oh, yes! So what do I do with it?’ she asked.

‘You plug it into each PC you can, and when it tells you what drive-letter it has assigned, you just go to the
right
drive and then double-click on the file named ‘DETECT,’ I told her.

‘DETECT. Got it,’ Halle repeated. ‘What does it do?’

‘It will snaffle any interesting-looking files and also copy all the emails out of each person’s inbox directory onto the memory stick. That way I can read each person’s messages without worrying about their email account passwords.’

Halle chewed on her bottom lip, her unease evident. ‘I must admit, Elliot, I’m not so sure about this any more …’

‘Not so sure about what, muffin?’ Julian asked.

Muffin!
Ple-eease
!

‘Pass the sick bucket.’ Nosh said what I was thinking.

‘Haven’t you got something better to do, Nosh?’ asked Halle. ‘Like playing with the traffic?’

‘Only if you join me,’ said Nosh, sweetly.

‘Not so sure about what, muffin?’ Julian repeated.

‘I’m coming with you to the ANTIDOTE office,’ I told Halle.