The Messiah Secret

Firstly, it meant he could leave early in the afternoon and head for the beach with his surfboard, as long as the sun was shining. If it wasn’t, or if he had a lot to do, he’d climb back on his Harley, track over to his penthouse apartment just south of Carmel, right on the Californian coast, and spend the rest of the day working on one of his computers, using his administrator access to remotely monitor the company’s network. Of course, leaving early only worked if nobody had broken anything or otherwise screwed up the system, which didn’t happen quite as often these days because they’d ditched Vista, which only occasionally did what it was supposed to do, and reverted to XP, which was clunky but usually reliable. He was still evaluating Windows 7.

The second reason was that arriving at work two hours before anyone else allowed him to run his usual checks on the operating system, application software, back-up devices and the various linked databases – getting on with his basic network housekeeping, in other words – without any of the non-geeks interfering or asking the usual idiot questions.

McLeod had been the network manager, database designer and just about anything else to do with the NotJustGenetics Inc. – colloquially known as ‘NoJoGen’ – computer system for over ten years, pretty much since the day the company was formed. He’d done well out of it. Not as well as the guy who’d come up with the idea of genetic research and gene manipulation to attempt to cure or at least help combat specific diseases, but well enough. He had a six-figure salary, could dress just about however he liked, and turn up pretty much whenever he wanted, as long as the network and software were stable. And there were other bonuses as well.

McLeod pressed the code to open his office door, dumped his crash helmet on the table in the corner and peeled off his leather jacket. It was already getting hot outside, but he wore the leather for protection in case he crashed the hog, not for warmth. Under it he wore a faded CalTech T-shirt – unlike most people who affected such garments, he had actually been there – and tight-fitting black jeans that emphasized his height and lean build. They were cinched around his waist with a leather belt which was fastened with a solid silver buckle depicting a fist giving the finger. It was, in many ways, an accurate indication of his outlook on life.

Then he switched on his monitor. Like most commercial operations that relied on computers, which meant almost everybody these days, the NoJoGen system ran 24/7. Only the flat-panel monitors were shut down when the offices were closed.

McLeod sat down in his swivel chair, ran his fingers through his untidy mop of dark curly hair, opened up his master diagnostic program and started it running. He’d designed the software suite himself. It was a management program that executed a series of commercial diagnostic routines one after the other and displayed the results at the end, and it usually took no more than about ten minutes to run to completion. That gave him enough time to plug in his coffee machine and load up the first brew of the day – in McLeod’s opinion, a supply of decent coffee was almost as important to him as good diagnostic software.

Only when the system analysis results popped up on the screen – all showing green – and his first cup of java was sitting on the desk beside him, did he take a look at the search routines his machine had been running overnight. These weren’t normal internet searches. The wide-area search routines McLeod had put in place accessed private databases as well, many of them run by government agencies and commercial organizations, databases whose managers fondly believed were secure against hackers.

But Jesse McLeod wasn’t just any old hacker. He’d narrowly avoided a prison term at the age of fifteen when he’d wormed his way past three separate firewalls and numerous intruder detection systems to get inside a network at the Pentagon. He’d gained administrator access there, given himself a username and password, and used that network as a gateway that had allowed him to jump straight into another network based in Pennsylvania Avenue and operated by the White House. The reason he wasn’t prosecuted was probably largely due to embarrassment that a kid of his age had managed to outwit the best security consultants and computer experts in the American government and military.

He had been ordered to show these experts exactly how he’d managed to effect his intrusion, however, so that those loopholes could be closed, and he’d also been instructed to test all the Pentagon’s and the White House’s access points – under close supervision – to see if he could defeat those as well. He had, twice, which had resulted in four civilian administrators and three senior military officers losing their jobs within the next three weeks.