Whiteout - Ken Follett [61]
The engine was still running. Craig sat in the driver’s seat. He engaged first gear and drove slowly forward. Sophie ran into the garage and stood in the car’s headlights. As it entered the garage, she used her hands to show Craig how close he was to the wall.
On his first attempt he was no closer than eighteen inches from the wall. That was not good enough. He had to try again. He looked nervously in the rearview mirror, but no one else was around. He was grateful for the cold weather that kept everyone indoors in the warm.
On his third attempt he managed to position the car four or five inches off the wall. He got out and looked. It was impossible to see the dent from any angle.
He closed the door, then he and Sophie headed for the kitchen. Craig felt jangled and guilty, but Sophie was in high spirits. “That was awesome,” she said.
Craig realized he had impressed her at last.
7 P.M.
KIT set up his computer in the box room, a small space that could be reached only by going through his bedroom. He plugged in his laptop, a fingerprint scanner, and a smart-card reader-writer he had bought secondhand for £270 on eBay.
This room had always been his lair. When he was small, they had had only the three bedrooms: Mamma and Daddy in the main room, Olga and Miranda in the second room, and Kit in a cot in this box room off the girls’ room. After the extension was built, and Olga went off to university, Kit had the bedroom as well as the box room, but this had remained his den.
It was still furnished as a schoolboy’s study, with a cheap desk, a bookshelf, a small TV set, and a seat known as the sleepchair, which unfolded into a small single bed and had often been used by school friends coming to stay. Sitting at the desk, he thought wistfully of the tedious hours of homework he had done here, geography and biology, medieval kings and irregular verbs, Hail, Caesar! He had learned so much, and forgotten it all.
He took the pass he had stolen from his father and slid it into the reader-writer. Its top stuck out of the slot, clearly showing the printed words “Oxenford Medical.” He hoped no one would come into the room. They were all in the kitchen. Lori was making osso bucco according to Mamma Marta’s famous recipe—Kit could smell the oregano. Daddy had opened a bottle of champagne. By now they would be telling stories that began “Do you remember when . . . ?”
The chip in the card contained details of his father’s fingerprint. It was not a simple image, for that was too easy to fake—a photograph of the finger could fool a normal scanner. Rather, Kit had built a device that measured twenty-five points of the fingerprint, using minute electrical differences between ridges and valleys. He had also written a program that stored these details in code. At his apartment he had several prototypes of the fingerprint scanner and he had, naturally, kept a copy of the software he had created.
Now he set his laptop to read the smart card. The only danger was that someone at Oxenford Medical—Toni Gallo, perhaps—might have modified the software so that Kit’s program would no longer work; for example, by requiring an access code before the card could be read. It was unlikely that anyone would have gone to such trouble and expense to guard against a possibility that must have seemed fanciful—but it was conceivable. And he had not told Nigel about this potential snag.
He waited a few anxious seconds, watching the screen.
At last it shimmered and