Milkshake

by Matt Hammond

  He copied the picture and enlarged the driver’s head. A white male, mid thirties, was all he could be confident of at this stage. Loading the facial recognition software being used at Heathrow, Brent dragged the blurry facial image into the centre of the screen, before navigating to the LTNZ internal database and setting it to scroll through the licence photographs of the 227,000 males between the ages of 29 and 39.

  Brent left the program running, hoping by the time he returned fifteen minutes later, it would have successfully identified the face, and it didn’t belong to a foreign national who had never applied for a New Zealand driving licence.

  * * *

  The screen was blank. Sleep mode. Cautiously, he pushed the mouse, flashing it into life. There were now two photographs, the grainy blurred image of the car driver and the licence photo of Tony Robinson.

  Now he had a name, the rest would be relatively easy. A passport records check revealed Robinson had spent time in the United States. He was a veterinarian. Tax details confirmed his employer as the Dairytree Vets' Practice. Brent was familiar with this cynically cosier name Cowood used for its loss-making consumer products division.

  Cowood was sending its own vet over to the island on a regular basis to look after the cattle it owned. Now he wanted to check whether Robinson had a contact on the island. Someone who might be aware of his frequent visits, or even unwittingly assisting him.

  He typed 'Veterinary Council of New Zealand' into the computer and compared the names against the electoral role on Waiheke Island. One entry caught his eye immediately: Edwyn Collington BVMS Bristol 1987. This guy was a British-trained vet.

  Brent had a hunch.

  He tracked back through David Turner’s residency application to locate the name of his Secondary School. Collington was the same age as Turner, had attended the same school and possibly even been in the same class. The coincidences did not stop there.

  The Waiheke phone book showed Collington’s address was the Mushroom Café which he co-owned with his wife, the former Anika O’Sullivan, who had been the wife of Patrick O’Sullivan before separating from him in a very public fashion several years before.

  Brent had collected more information in this last hour than he could have hoped for. The next phase of his investigation required even higher security clearance.

  The interception of emails had been routinely available to the intelligence service for many years, but since there was virtually no subversive, radical or terrorist activity, its use was largely confined to scanning sensitive messages sent from foreign embassies to their Governments, and back, or the occasional hijacking of embarrassing information sent by members of Parliament.

  Brent would have to obtain the written authorisation of the Minister for Civil Defence before he could start snooping through Edwyn Collington’s inbox. He explained to the Commander he needed the assistance of the tech guys located deep under the Beehive.

  Permission was quickly granted. All he could do was wait while others hacked into Collington’s phone account and copies of every email were extracted from the phone company’s records. Once all the information had been uploaded to the secure server in the Ops Room, an algorithm set to work locating key words.

  Brent was looking for any evidence Edwyn Collington was somehow involved in either the promotion or the prevention of Cowood’s activities. Not enough was known about him to judge where his sympathies lay. Trawling through ten years worth of emails would hopefully bring his true intent to light. In the meantime, a wire tap was put on the phone line of the Mushroom Café.

  The Civil Defence Emergency Management Group moved swiftly to activate the Domestic and External Security Co-Ordination Plan. Working on the presumption that the biosecurity threat was genuine, responsibility for coordinating the MAF response was delegated to the Exotic Disease Response Centre.

  A small team of vets from Massey University’s Institute of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences was assembled. The Field Operations Response Team – FORT - included five vets who had travelled to the UK two years before, to offer assistance and expertise during their outbreak of the foot and mouth virus.

  The Ministry had not yet carried out its annual exotic disease simulation exercise to test their response to the incursion of diseases like foot and mouth. The FORT team were keen to get onto the island.

  The information was withheld from the team that the threat was entirely fictitious. As far as they were concerned, this was no exercise.

  The Civil Defence Minister persuaded the FORT team that, due to the physical isolation of Waiheke from the rest of New Zealand’s livestock, and the likelihood that this was merely a hoax letter, there would be no point in arriving en masse just before nightfall. They would be better to fly over in the morning, by which time the Emergency Management Group would have had time to compose a suitable press release.

  Chapter 19

  Brent spent a restless night trying to decide if the Government was taking the right action. The KMP surveillance exercise was snowballing into an international crisis with no end in sight and no obvious solution.

  He had assisted in identifying the problem, but control of the solution had been passed to more than one committee. He had no issue with the Civil Defence Emergency Management group, but throughout the preceding day he felt his influence being gradually eroded away.

  By 3.00am he convinced himself he was being sidelined. He needed to walk back into the office with a radical plan of action.

  But before he had a chance, at 6.00am his phone rang.

  Managing the response to a national emergency was a twenty-four hour operation. The NZCIS had a Black Room through which all telecommunications generated in, or entering, New Zealand were passed. A small team had worked throughout the night and had finished compiling a file of emails.

  The concept of a ‘Cabinet Noir’ or Black Room dated back to the reign of Louis XIII. It was the office where letters sent by suspicious individuals were opened and read by public officials before being forwarded to their destination.

  The practice was adopted during the First World War when the New Zealand Government employed the tactic as a means of censoring mail in order to protect and maintain the morale at home, shielding it from graphic and depressing correspondence sent from the front line thousands of miles away in Europe.

  Black Rooms, although officially denied, existed around the world, small secure facilities, often housed in the unassuming offices of an existing telecommunications company, allowing access to all internet and phone traffic that passed through the room.

  New Zealand had ironically acquired its own Black Room in the mid-nineties when the main telecommunication company was owned, by an American corporation. The American Government had openly offered the facility as a means of establishing a discrete listening post in the Southern Pacific in the early days of the internet. The use of email and mobile phones was expected to grow. The intention had been to install a Black Room early, so it would be deeply embedded within the original system architecture and forgotten about.

  The New Zealand Government rarely used the facility but had, on request from friendly Governments, monitored the activity of terrorists and radicals who believed routing emails, texts or phone conversations via a small insignificant country kept them safe from interception.

  Today the information that passed through the Black Room would be used against the very country that had encouraged its installation.

  But the Americans were not so naïve as to have handed over complete control of the Black Room to the NZCIS. They had been thorough enough during the construction and commissioning phase to ensure a high frequency transmitter was hidden within the mass of switchgear in the Room.

  The Duty Officer called Brent, letting him know there were a number of significant emails awaiting his arrival. Brent leapt out of bed, showered, and walked across the parade ground to the Ops Room.

  He arrived just as the Duty Officer finished briefing his daytime counterpart.
Both looked up as Brent stepped from the cool morning air into the warm office. Although neither of them were military personnel, they instinctively straightened as he entered the room. “Morning, guys. Sounds like you had a busy night. What have you got then?”

  “I’ll start with the most recent, sir. Collington received an email at twelve thirty-eight yesterday afternoon via a contact website from a travel agency in Tokoroa. The message seems to have come from this Turner guy you are interested in. It says he wants to meet up with Collington on Waiheke.”

  “That’ll explain his eagerness to dump Hone. Do we have any info on how they reached the Island?”

  “We have CCTV of them getting off a bus at the harbour and we also have Collington emailing three people late last night to say the Turners are staying overnight with him. You might want to pour yourself a coffee and grab a Danish, sir. There’s a lot of stuff to read.”

  Over fifteen thousand emails had been retrieved from Collington’s email address on the phone company’s server. Once the algorithm had filtered out the spam, three hundred messages were left containing words or key phrases of interest.

  Brent sipped strong coffee and began scrolling, message by message. After a minute he realised he was going about this completely the wrong way and clicked to re-sort the messages. Now he could read, starting with the oldest first. This would build up a better picture in his mind of the sequence of events.

  The first message which caught his eye was one sent not by Collington, but by his wife, and copied to members of the Ecological Political Assembly of New Zealand. It noted the first visit of Tony, the Cowood vet, to the Island. The existence of such an email surprised Brent, given that once Anika had separated from Patrick O’Sullivan, she had, at least publicly, severed all ties with the party.

  At the time she had gone on record describing it as an inward-looking, corrupt, self-seeking and egotistical organisation, more interested in fulfilling its own agenda than promoting the interests of the ordinary Kiwi family. This email, and others, confirmed to Brent that she was not only in regular contact with senior members of the party but actively contributing to policy making. It was political dynamite.

  Brent ignored this revelation and instead concentrated on piecing together the roles of both Edward Collington, and now it seemed Anika Collington, over the last eighteen months.

  The emails revealed that soon after he began to visit the Island, Ed and Anika had managed to extract from Tony Robinson the true purpose of his regular visits to Waiheke. As Anika let her former political allies know, it appeared her former husband, the Chairman of Dairy Tree and head of EPANZ, was now intent on developing milk into bio-fuel as a commercial proposition.

  Then Brent read an email that made the hairs on his arms stand on end - not for the content, since it only requested Anika to make a phone call to a specified number - it was the name of the sender, Commander Dalton.

  Brent checked over his shoulder, noted the time and date of the email, and closed it again. He plugged a headset into the port on the front of the PC. Then, locating the file containing the outward phone calls made from the Mushroom Café, he found one matching the date of the email.

  He pressed Play.

  “Good afternoon. Roger Dalton’s office. How may I help you?”

  “This is Anika Collington. I’ve been given this number to call to speak to someone about Patrick O’Sullivan, my ex-husband?”

  “Thank you for calling, Anika. This is a private number at the Environment Ministry. I understand you‘ve been in contact with some of your former colleagues in the Ecological Party and that you may have some misgivings about the work your ex-husband may be involved in? I‘d like to discuss this with you in more detail, I believe you own the Mushroom Café on Waiheke. Will you be around on Thursday?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because I need to speak with you in person about this. Shall we say eleven?”

  “That’s ok with me.”

  Why had the Commander not made Brent aware of his contact with this woman earlier? Brent jumped; the headset had masked the approach from behind. A hand was on his shoulder. It was Dalton. There was no point in trying to conceal the evidence. If he had wanted to, Dalton could have easily destroyed the recording himself.

  “So, found anything interesting yet?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. You tell me. I’ve just been listening to conversation between you and Collington’s wife requesting a meeting with her.”

  Brent looked for a glimmer, a twitch, a forced smile, a shrug, anything.

  Commander Dalton didn’t miss a beat. ‘She’s working for us, Brent, both of them are. We were able to manipulate the absolute contempt she now has for her ex to our own ends. Anika and Ed have been keeping us informed about the Cowood situation on Waiheke for some time now.”

  “But I thought the line was the Government barely knows what’s going on?”

  “That’s absolutely correct. No one in the Cabinet office, and that includes the PM, has a clue about the seriousness of the position here. We intend keeping it that way, to protect the integrity of the mission, until we are in a position to inform the PM of a satisfactory conclusion.”

  “But he’s head of the Security Service. Surely he has a right to be kept informed.”

  “Correct, to a point, Captain, but you of all people must realise by now that this is a matter of huge significance, not only for this country, but internationally. The role of the NZCIS and, within that, the KMP, is to manage and deal with this crisis. The PM has complete faith in our ability to do whatever is required to deal with this. Any communication, even within the Cabinet, risks exposing our intentions to the Americans.”

  Brent didn’t understand. Despite his own position in the KMP; a secret organisation within the security service, he’d always believed his Government to be amongst the most open in the world. How could private communications within the Cabinet expose the counter measures that were now under way to the enemy? Shit! For the first time he’d consciously thought of the USA as the enemy.

  “We’ve good reason to suspect there may be a spy within the Cabinet, Brent. There’s mounting evidence that information is being passed to the Americans. Information which is only circulated at the highest level seems to have had a habit of turning up on the other side of the Pacific.”

  “For instance?”

  “Well, the latest example was yesterday with the logging truck ‘accident’. As we had some significant input into the incident, we made sure there was a complete news blackout until we had a press release ready for the Police Commissioner to deliver. Then I get the American Ambassador on the phone within the hour with an intimate knowledge of events. Far more stuff than he could have got even from the spy satellite. Someone had been passing him information.”

  Brent was astonished firstly by the revelation that the Collingtons were apparent informers and now Dalton’s candid admission that the Government leaked like a sieve at the highest level.

  He turned back to the screen, unsure whether it was worth continuing to sift through another year’s worth of emails and phone calls after what he’d just been told. “Commander, after the logging truck incident, what exactly was the chain of events from the time I spoke to you on the radio from the helicopter to you passing on the approved press release to Police Headquarters?”

  The Commander thought for a moment before replying. “Well, I called the PM’s Private Secretary as soon as I finished speaking with you. He then passed the information onto the PM who would’ve probably emailed the rest of the Cabinet, or at least contacted their respective secretaries. The draft of the press release was faxed to me for checking and proofing about forty-five minutes later. Early on, the PM’s Office will have also contacted the Police Commissioner’s office to request the media blackout. I called the PM straight back to confirm the draft was OK and then it would have been … ”

  Brent interrupted him, “Faxed to the office of the Commissioner of Police in Wellingt
on at 17.08pm.”

  “How the hell …. ?”

  Brent had a copy of the communications log from the fax machine in the Prime Minister’s Office on the screen in front of him.

  “Where the heck did you get that?”

  “During the night, the Ops guys managed to get this computer remotely logged into the feed from our Black Room. I can read any email, or listen to any phone call, made into, out of, or around the country, and call up records going back to 1995 if I need to. But there’s more. If you look at each record, line by line, it shows technical stuff, time and date, IP address or phone number, call duration, that kind of thing. But what is interesting is this column here….” Brent ran his finger down the screen. “This set of numbers indicates if and when the communication was last accessed externally. Let me show you.”

  Brent’s fingers moved quickly across the keyboard as he explained what he was doing. “I’m bringing up the records of all calls made from the Prime Minister’s personal extension number in the past month and, if you look at the column which shows these records being accessed it should show - yes, I thought so - you can see here that every ninety minutes the calls are being accessed. Now, if we enter your personal email address, you can see that the records have been accessed at the same time, at ninety minute intervals. Just for comparison, if I type in my mother’s phone number, I can see it looks like she called my auntie in Rotorua yesterday afternoon, but no indication that call has ever been externally accessed.”

  “That’s good work, Brent, but all it does it confirm my suspicion. It doesn’t point the finger in any particular direction, does it?”

  “Actually, sir, it does. Let me show you.”

  Brent loaded the Massey University Satellite Tracking and Electronic Recognition program - MUSTER. “If you look at the orbit of this particular US spy satellite, you can see it passes overhead every ninety minutes. Each time it does, it collects data. They’ve infiltrated the Black Room. That’s the source of the leak. As the satellite tracks eastward, and the Western seaboard of the USA appears over the horizon, the information is downloaded to the NSA’s own Black Room in San Francisco.