‘So we need to get on the road,’ Masters suggested.
‘That’s definite,’ Richter replied, ‘so if you can throw the rest of that breakfast and coffee down your throat we can get going.’
It took less than fifteen minutes for Richter to check the three men out of the hotel, load their cases into the back of the Peugeot and drive out of the Campanile car park. Both Americans were now wearing their shoulder holsters and pistols, because although it was a long drive down to the Costa Brava there was always a chance that they might encounter the wanted man sooner rather than later. And, just like Richter, Masters and Moore both subscribed to the view that a man with a weapon in a case or somewhere else inaccessible rather than readily available on his person was exactly the same as a man who was unarmed.
They knew they were probably heading for trouble of some sort, and they all wanted to be prepared, ready for whatever happened.
Chapter 32
Porton Down, Wiltshire
Wednesday
George Slade had only been looking at the hundreds of folders on the hard drive on Vernon’s computer for about fifteen minutes when the door to the office swung open without a knock and two men wearing suits of such a dark blue that they appeared almost black walked in. Each was carrying a briefcase and the unmistakable air of authority, William Poulson trailing a few feet behind.
‘We’ll take it from here,’ the first man said, motioning Slade to stand back from the computer.
The phrase felt instantly familiar to Slade and for a heartbeat he thought of them as ‘Men in Black’, the supposed American government organisation that allegedly sent out people to suppress sightings of unidentified flying objects. The idea had made it as far as Hollywood and into quite a decent film. All they were lacking was the dark glasses. But then he guessed their identity and realised they were real and far more dangerous than that. A couple of seconds later, Poulson confirmed what he was thinking.
‘These two gentlemen—’ he somehow made the word sound faintly offensive ‘—are from the security service, MI5. They are here to examine Vernon’s computer and office. You are to assist them in any way that you can.’
Having said his piece, Poulson did a sharp about turn and left the office.
Slade knew he had no option but to let them get on with it, but he decided to stay in the room with them, just in case.
‘We don’t need you. You can take a hike,’ the man who’d spoken first told him, putting down his briefcase on Vernon’s desk beside the computer and snapping open the catches.
‘No,’ Slade said. ‘I’m the chief security officer here. I have a right to be anywhere on this establishment that I wish, and right now I wish to be here. I don’t know who you two are, just who you represent, and I’ll be staying here as an impartial observer, so get used to it.’
Both men stared at him for a few seconds, then they both turned away, shrugging their shoulders.
‘Whatever,’ the first man – Slade still had no idea of their names – replied. ‘Just keep out of our way and answer any questions we have.’
One of the new arrivals began methodically looking through the contents of the filing cabinets that stood on one side of the office. And, no doubt, once he’d finished that he would check every other piece of paper and storage facility in the room.
The other one took off his jacket, hung it over the back of Vernon’s office chair and sat down. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his hands a couple of times and stared at the directory structure still displayed on the computer screen. Then he took a large external hard drive from his briefcase, plugged it into a USB slot and a mains socket and ran a program that would clone the entire contents of the computer’s hard drive.
‘How big is that drive you’re using?’ Slade asked.
The man turned round, looking slightly surprised that Slade was still in the room.
‘Ten terabytes,’ he replied. ‘Why?’
‘Just curious. His hard drive is two terabytes, but he’s got more storage on the main server, another three terabytes, and you’ll need his password to get into that.’
‘Which you can give me,’ the man replied, framing it as a statement rather than a question. ‘That’s why we’re looking at the computer here rather than hauling it back to Millbank. We need access to the main server as well as his hard drive.’
Slade nodded. He hadn’t, he knew, got off to the best of starts with the two men from MI5, and wondered if a slightly different approach might yield more results. Antagonising them wasn’t going to work, because they had an absolute right to be there and were only doing their jobs. If they did find anything, something that he hadn’t found, they might be more amenable if he was on at least cautiously friendly terms with them. So he decided to try something slightly different.
‘Do you two guys want coffee or anything?’ he asked.
Again they both turned and looked at him.
‘Coffee would be good,’ the man looking through the filing cabinets replied. It was the first time he’d spoken since the two men had entered the room.
Slade used the office phone to call his secretary, and about ten minutes later she appeared carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits, and by that time the three men were chatting reasonably companionably. They’d introduced themselves as Mr Green and Mr Brown, names that Slade didn’t believe for an instant, but he presumed that, as they worked for a covert organization, the last thing they would do would be to use their real names on any operation unless it was considered essential.
Once the cloning operation was complete and Vernon’s hard drive and his personal storage space on the main server had been copied onto the MI5 man’s hard disk, he took out a small but high specification laptop from his briefcase, plugged the hard disk into it and began scanning it. He had several different tools at his disposal not only to check the files that were on the disk, but also a disk sector editor that would allow him to retrieve files that had been deleted. And it was this program that yielded the first results, albeit negative results.
‘This Charles Vernon,’ the man calling himself Green asked. ‘Is he computer literate? I mean, obviously he knows how to create documents in Word and Excel, things like that, because his computer is full of them, and he’s sent and received shed-loads of emails. But would you describe him as a computer expert?’
Both Green and Brown looked appraisingly at Slade.
He nodded, then shook his head, which wasn’t what you might call an unambiguous response.
‘We have a lot of scientists working here,’ Slade replied, ‘and I don’t know any of them that well. After Vernon vanished, I went through his personnel file, and I know that before he started working here he’d been employed at one laboratory where he did two computer courses, both apparently required by the job he was doing. One was an advanced database management course, and the other was a system security course. As far as I know, apart from those he probably just learned about the various systems here from the people he worked with, and he hasn’t done any kind of formal computer training since he arrived.’
‘Right,’ Green said. ‘That makes sense and it also explains what I’m seeing here.’
‘Which is?’ Slade asked.
‘When I started this survey, I made an assumption. I guessed that Vernon wouldn’t have uploaded classified information to his computer or storage on the server, or downloaded something he shouldn’t have access to, and then done a bunk, leaving the evidence behind him in plain sight. At the very least, I expected that he would have deleted any such files before he left. Or, more likely, I figured he might have stored anything incriminating on his own laptop or a memory stick or something like that.’
‘We have procedures here,’ Slade said, ‘and one of those is that none of our scientists are permitted to bring private computers onto the site, and all the USB sockets on the computers here have been disconnected, so a memory stick won’t work.’
Green didn’t reply immediately, just pointed
silently at the USB socket on the side of the system unit of Vernon’s desktop computer, the socket into which he had plugged the lead connected to his external hard drive.
‘Including that one?’ he asked, after a moment. ‘Or did you reconnect the socket when you knew we were on our way?’
Slade looked shocked, not least because he’d been watching Green working on Vernon’s system and hadn’t even noticed or registered that he was accessing the computer through a USB socket that simply shouldn’t have been functional. What surprised him even more was that Jonathan Lewis, the Dstl network manager, had also apparently not noticed that the USB port was functional despite using it himself. Maybe that was because he’d been fully occupied in getting into the desktop computer and bypassing Vernon’s new password, or perhaps he’d simply assumed that Slade had reconnected it after Vernon’s disappearance. Assumptions were always dangerous.
‘No,’ he said, almost through gritted teeth. ‘We didn’t reconnect that USB socket, so obviously that bastard Vernon did.’
‘A bit of an obvious security breach there then, Mr Slade,’ Green said. ‘In fairness, it’s not that difficult to either reconnect it, or run a new lead to the socket from the motherboard, but somebody – probably you – should have picked it up. I presume you do random checks of everything connected to your network?’
‘We do, yes, but the people who work here know more or less when to expect a check. They are done at random, but if Vernon only connected the socket when he wanted to copy or upload stuff, and then unplugged it again, the chances are we wouldn’t have discovered it unless he was very unlucky with the timing. I will be making some changes here because of this, obviously.’
‘Nothing quite like closing the stable door when the horse is already in a different county. Or in this case, country,’ Brown pointed out quietly.
‘Okay, I get it,’ Slade said. ‘So, what have you found?’
‘It’s not so much what I’ve found,’ Green replied, ‘more what I haven’t found. I’m sure you know as well as I do that when you delete a file all the computer does is change the first character of the filename to something that the operating system won’t recognise, so the file disappears from the directory structure, but it’s still physically there on the hard drive. I’ve got a bunch of software programs that can recover deleted files in a matter of seconds as long as the contents haven’t been overwritten by new files, and even if some of the original data has gone, I can use a disk sector editor to recover what’s left, byte by byte.
‘What I’ve found is evidence that a very large file or files were on Vernon’s hard drive, and they’ve then been deleted and can’t be recovered. The reason they can’t be recovered is that someone – pretty obviously Vernon – ran some kind of professional wipe utility over the files, overwriting them with random characters and probably doing it at least half a dozen times. All I can actually prove is the approximate size of the deleted material, which is just under 200 gigabytes, and I can only do that because I can analyse the amount of space occupied by a continuous sequence of random characters. But in my opinion, nobody goes to that kind of trouble, to bring in a wipe utility to permanently delete files, unless they’ve got something to hide. Unless you tell your scientists here that they are to do that as a matter of course? And you provide them with the utility program?’
‘We don’t tell them that, and we don’t give them access to a program of that sort. Obviously our IT section will have that kind of software to be used just in case we need to scrap a particular computer. If we do that, the hard drive is wiped, then physically destroyed by opening up the case and incinerating the platters.’
‘Then obviously Vernon is doing something illegal,’ Green said. ‘That much is self-evident. Unfortunately, right now I have no idea what that is, or what was in the files he deleted.’
Slade thought for a few seconds, then made a suggestion.
‘Vernon probably wouldn’t have uploaded anything, because there would be no point. If he had something on a memory stick or external hard drive, he could have loaded it onto his home computer, not his work machine. Wiping that amount of data has to mean it was a download that he hauled in from somewhere, somewhere that he could only access from here, which means either on the local intranet or more likely on a scientific website somewhere else that can only be accessed from another scientific establishment. He then probably used an external drive or a few high-capacity memory sticks to get the data out of Porton Down. We don’t do physical searches here unless we have a good reason to stop somebody.’
‘And?’ Green asked.
Slade looked puzzled.
‘And what?’ he said.
‘I don’t doubt what you’ve just told me, but I presumed you were going to make some kind of suggestion.’
‘Oh, just an idea, really. I’m not a computer expert, obviously, but if Vernon downloaded a whole bunch of data from somewhere, copied it onto a memory stick and then deleted it from his hard drive, maybe you could look at his download record to work out what it was and where it came from. That might give us an idea why he wanted to see it and why he didn’t want us to see that he’d seen it.’
Green had started nodding even before Slade finished.
‘That’s a good idea,’ he said, turned back to the computer and began looking at an entirely different part of the system.
‘Vernon obviously tried to sanitise his download record,’ Green murmured, almost to himself, ‘but there are ways of recovering it.’
About five minutes later the screen display altered to show a page of columns that included the date of a download, the URL of the source, the time the download started and finished and, crucially, the size of the downloaded file.
‘Here we go,’ Green said.
Brown left the filing cabinet he was rummaging through and walked around behind his colleague to stare over his shoulder at the screen.
Green pointed at the listing.
‘Vernon accessed a hell of a lot of data,’ he says. ‘Do you think this is normal? For his job, I mean?’
Slade was on firmer ground now and nodded.
‘Yes. This is a research establishment and most of the scientists employed here need access to the results of experiments and papers and data produced by other researchers around the world. The scientific community is huge but at the same time it’s very compact. Anyone who’s a leader in a particular field will certainly know most of the other scientists who are working on similar or related projects, either directly through personal contact or certainly through published papers. So I’d have been really surprised if Vernon hadn’t downloaded that sort of volume of material. Not that it helps us work out which of those downloads he decided to take a copy of and then deleted.’
‘No,’ Green agreed, ‘but I think there are some ways we can try to narrow down the search.’
‘How?’ Brown asked.
‘We can just apply a bit of logic here. We can probably discount all downloads that Vernon did more than a year ago. The way he left the country, and the bits of misdirection that he used suggested to me that he had a plan, but not a plan that he’d had in place for a long time. If he’d made the decision to run months ago he could, for example, have stolen a passport or bought one – if you know where to look it’s not that difficult to get hold of a genuine passport in a different name – or he could have left Britain by a different route, one where passports often aren’t checked. If you use a ferry or the Channel Tunnel to get to France, most of the time the British immigration officers at Dover will simply wave you through if you hold up a UK passport and never even look at it. And usually the Frogs aren’t even there. Our people normally only look at the passports of people coming into the country. They don’t care who leaves.’
‘He could have done that this time,’ Brown pointed out, ‘instead of buying an airline ticket and showing his real passport. I wonder why he didn’t.’
‘That still leaves a hell of a lot of downloads,�
�� Slade said, looking at the listing on the screen.
‘That’s just the first thing,’ Green said. ‘The other thing I’ve worked out is the approximate size of the files that Vernon did his best to delete, so we can just compare that number with the size of the downloads and see if we get anything like a match. I assume,’ he added, talking to Slade, ‘that most of these downloads aren’t compressed files, because that would add an extra layer of complication in doing a comparison.’
‘Most probably they’re not. Storage is really cheap these days and data transfer is quite fast, certainly through the systems we have access to here, so I doubt if many of the scientists involved would bother compressing their work. And the other problem with running a compression utility is that you can’t see what’s in the file until you’ve downloaded it and then decompressed it. Scientists are sharing information, and it would make far better sense to leave their files in their original form, so that somebody interested in the subject could look at the first few pages or the statement of intent or summary or even the results and conclusion to decide whether or not the information is relevant. That would avoid multiple downloads of irrelevant data and save a lot of time.’
Green nodded and turned his attention back to the computer.
Brown looked at Slade and nodded.
‘We understand all that,’ he said, ‘but what we haven’t talked about is the security classifications of some of this information. If one of the files is classified Secret, can a scientist, who hasn’t been cleared to that level, download the file and read it?’
‘Most of the data that gets exchanged with other scientific establishments is either unclassified public domain stuff or just possibly classed as Restricted. Anything classified above that is not available for download without further security procedures being implemented. Usually that means a classified file may have to be copied and then physically sent by courier to the establishment wishing to see it, but that is a very cumbersome process.’
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