Friday, October 21

Dan got into the office early that morning wishing within two minutes that he’d called in sick. It was total chaos and Dan suspected it was man-made. It had to be. Prophet hadn’t just crashed, it had been almost irreparably reprogrammed. After two hours of painstaking investigation, he’d concluded that someone had walked into the IT department and using his log on and workstation, deleted large sections of code, more or less at random. Back-office operations, the nerve center of the company’s internal and external communications network, were demolished. The website was down. E-mail too. Complaints were poring in. No one could access any programs; even their calculators and screen savers weren’t working. He had back-up files, but no back-up to the system code. At huge expense he would have to call in the third party programmers, have them analyze the code, diagnose what was missing, and repair the damage. They’d be lucky if they had it done by Monday.

The more Dan thought about it the more certain he was that this was the work of either a brilliant saboteur or a complete idiot.

Dan called Harry.

Harry was ‘in a meeting’.

Dan hung up, suspicious.