Dr Jennifer Bowers opened the door of the conference room and switched on the light. The air smelt stale, although, thank God, since the smoking ban it no longer reeked of ashtrays. These internal rooms could be anywhere in the world rather than in a building overlooking the Thames. But it felt good to be here at Security Service headquarters in Millbank rather than some of the godforsaken spots she’d been posted to at times. Or even a satellite office in the UK – Manchester or Ludgate Hill.
She placed a brown leather portfolio on the table. Reaching over for the remote control, she switched on the two large television sets and watched as the video conference camera swivelled to face into the room. Her own image appeared on the left hand monitor and she adjusted the neck of her blouse then smoothed down her hair with the palm of her hand. Blonde with a touch of grey. Many people would have resorted to the colorants but she already had a lot of deception in her life.
She selected the camera setting for a one person conference and the image zoomed in on the empty chair facing the screens, just left of centre table. There was a coffee machine in the corner. She walked over and dispensed a cappuccino in a paper cup before taking her seat and carefully arranging her belongings: laptop, notebook, pens, pack of tissues. Preparation was the key to control in any situation. She looked at her watch and took a sip of the coffee.
The incoming call came exactly at one o’clock. The sound of a ringing tone over the loudspeakers and the right hand screen flashed into life. The caller was younger than her – perhaps in his late thirties – his hair cut in the American style, as short as clippers could make it. He was wearing a checked sports coat.
“Good morning, Allan,” she opened the call. “I’m sorry to get you up so early but my diary’s full for the rest of the afternoon.” Allan Jacobs was her main CIA contact, often just for routine arrangement of the formal meetings between the heads of their respective departments; occasionally, as now, when something unexpected came up. He was a high flyer. But reliable, that was the main thing. And he didn’t share the tendency to panic that marked some of his colleagues.
“No problem. I knew last night was short notice and I’m always in by seven thirty.”
“And what’s so urgent in Washington that it couldn’t wait for tomorrow’s joint committee meeting?”
“I wanted to touch base with you ahead of the meeting. We have an anomaly and I wanted to check whether you’d picked anything up on your side of the pond.” The American smiled, his expression momentarily distorted by a ripple in the picture before it settled down. “We think there’s a very sophisticated piece of malware out there. It may be disguising itself as a System Idle Process.”
“Can’t say that I’ve come across that one.” Jennifer frowned. “But what do you mean, ‘may be’? Have you detected it or not?”
“Good question. Quite by chance, we came across some hidden files on one of our restricted systems after a scan of the registry showed that one of them would auto-load at Start-up with the name ‘System Idle Process’.”
“And it wasn’t a system file?”
“Not at all. And this system was running Windows Seven. System Idle Process was something from the old Windows XP system. Win 7 doesn’t have an idle process anymore.”
“I suppose your forensic people had a field day with that. What did they find?”
“Absolutely nothing,” the American said flatly. “Nada. Zilch. Nobody had touched the computer but the suspect files were gone. The registry was clean.”
“Might someone have been imagining things?” Jennifer raised an eyebrow.
“We thought that too. So we checked a few other machines in the facility. Same pattern. The first few we checked had the registry entries and the files but as soon as we started to look for the details they disappeared. Then, after a couple dozen systems where every one was positive all the rest were clean.
“By this time we were getting nervous. I won’t tell you where these systems were but they got max attention. Our techies pulled them apart and went over the disks with a fine tooth comb. Then we checked the BIOS that allows the computer to attach to disks and load programs. It had been altered!
“And not only on the machines that had tested positive. On the other machines as well. Whoever wrote this thing knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Good Lord!” Jennifer exclaimed. “Have you found out who did it?”
“Not yet. There isn’t much to go on. All we know is that it seems to be more sophisticated than an amateur could produce. We can’t rule out terrorism or even a hostile government but it isn’t even clear yet that we've got a fixed signature. We think there’s a link to the BIOS modification but that’s not certain. That’s why we wanted a check with your people.”
“What’s the payload? If we think about the damage it’s going to do, perhaps we could work backwards to who’d have a motive.” Despite her computing background, Jennifer knew that the human element was usually the best place to start.
“We’re working on that but you have to believe me when I tell you this thing is well engineered. The boys in the lab are concentrating on trying to capture a live example on disc but so far they haven’t managed it. Their idea is to fry a processor before it can delete the intrusion and then mount the disc on a clean machine but so far they haven’t been quick enough. I know it sounds stupid but it almost seems as if, as soon as they choose a machine to inspect it gets cleared up.”
“How can you be sure that the problem is still there if you can’t see it? Are you seeing threats where none actually exist, perhaps?”
“We can’t be sure, is the bottom line. But the symptoms are there. Unknown, encrypted traffic streams on the network. Peripherals – webcams and microphones – switched on when they shouldn’t be, system closedown disabled. A systematic pattern of odd things that you’d dismiss in isolation.
“And in any case, we can’t just leave it. Even if it eventually turns out to be a false alarm, we have to investigate. Our whole military and security apparatus is jeopardised until we clean this. We have to view anything as carefully engineered as this as being potentially hostile. This is the front line of the cyber war and we can’t be too careful.”
“Chinese? Iranian? Russian? Does anything push you one way or another?”
“Not even a smell.” Allan laughed. “And the trackers have been out sniffing for a week. You can understand that our people were reluctant to ask for help on this one but, in the end, we had to alert you and ask you to check a few of your systems.”
“So do you want this on the agenda for tomorrow?” Jennifer asked.
“Not unless we find something more. No need to raise the alarm as yet. The last thing we need is to feed questions we can’t answer to the innocent Senior Citizens.”
“Quite,” Jennifer said carefully. She had to trust Allan’s judgement that this wasn’t imminently about to blow up. “But some urgent investigation sounds like a wise precaution. And judging when to tell them’s going to be a delicate choice.”
Friday, 29 November 2013
150 Lyon and J take a statement from Fielding
“Welcome to Liverpool.” As Greg walked past the taxis, John Jackman was waiting for him with his car.
“I don’t think I’ve ever actually been here before.” Greg looked up at the Victorian glass roof of Lime Street station. “Quite elegant, really. I’d need to fill in a mountain of forms to be allowed to drive in to Euston to pick you up in London.”
“You wouldn’t need to. I could get the Underground. I suppose it has a certain...” Jackman paused. “Call it a country charm. As long as you’re not easily bored. Can’t wait to get back to London myself.”
“Well we may have some progress on that.” answered. It felt good to be out of London. And this might actually turn into a real case. “Your client list has at least five terror suspects on it so Eileen – my boss – has authorised us to talk to your friend Fielding. If he’s credible we might be on the way to taking a closer look at Mr Corby.”
“Doctor Corby. As Mister Fielding will instantly point out. With a load of technical double speak to explain why Corby doesn’t deserve it. But I’ll let you sort that out face to face.”
“And you’ve set up the interview room?”
“Yes. I’ve booked a suite in the Hope Street Hotel. We can talk comfortably and the foods good. We can take a break for lunch. Fielding’ll meet us there at eleven.”
“And he’s a reliable witness?” The last thing Greg needed was another flake.
“A bit of an axe to grind. But he knows his stuff. And he’s known Corby since they were students. Corby’s always been dodgy, apparently, so there’s no surprise he’s got himself in trouble at last. And there’s more this end as well. Doctor Corby’s been shopping.”
“What did he buy?”
“He’s after weapons. Guns. On of our sources down in New Ferry where he lives was tapped by a friend of his. Not fussy what type. Te told our man they’d also discussed explosives.”
“So we just pick him up?”
“We don’t think he’s actually got hold of a shooter yet. And quite honestly, if he had one that’s not really the threat he poses.”
Jackman pulled up on a double yellow line and placed a blue ‘Disabled’ sticker in the windscreen. “Saves having to buy tickets at the machine. This is close to the university so Fielding’s walking down. I’ve checked in and occupied the room, so we can go straight up.”
In fact, Adrian Fielding was waiting for them in hotel reception. Impressive, really, better dressed than you would expect for a country boffin. They made their way with him directly to the room.
“Mr Fielding, thanks for joining us today.” Not a northerner, from the accent and maybe someone to do business with. Certainly more interesting and civilised than lurking outside Islamist bookshops for hours at a time. “I appreciate that you’ve already briefed Sergeant Jackman so I am very grateful you could spare the time to go over your evidence again with me. It’s important to make sure that all the details are properly recorded. This could be going to the very top levels of government and it has to be absolutely bomb proof.”
“It’s a pleasure.” Fielding replied. “I only hope that I can help to make the country a safer place. Computing really is the weak spot of our modern society. With every facet of life run by computers it would be disastrous if terrorists were able to take advantage of that to attack us in some way.” Yes! Right on message for Eileen!
“I think that DS Jackman has explained to you that w need to record this interview. He’ll operate the equipment and we start by recording the time, 11:42. Present, Sergeant John Jackman of Merseyside police, Mr Adrian Fielding of the Liverpool City University and myself, Gregory Lyons of the United Kingdom Security Services.
“Sergeant Jackman tells me that you’ve known the suspect – Steven Corby – since you were students?”
“Yes. He and I shared lectures as undergrads from second year onward. Generally we took similar courses. Even then he tended to be a loner. Missed lectures and tutorials, late handing in assignments, few friends and didn’t mix readily with the other students.”
“You were friendly with him, though? Knew him well?”
“Nobody was friendly with Steven Corby. He had no social life. I don’t think anyone really knew him.”
“And the quality of his work? Was he a good student?”
“That’s more difficult to say than you might expect. As I say, he tended to hand assignments in late and he was always in trouble for sloppy preparation. I would say he did the minimum required to meet the course requirements.
“So was it a surprise when he went on to do postgraduate work?”
“Absolutely.” Fielding frowned. “Most people thought he was a borderline pass. On one course, I met him the day before the exam and asked him how he thought he would do. Seeing that he’d attended almost no lectures, I wasn’t surprised when he said he was worried. He told me he didn’t have a copy of the course text. He’d tried to borrow one from the library but theirs were all out on loan.
“I’d finished my revision so I lent him mine. When the results came out he’d scored a first. Highest in the year for that topic. Even better than my mark.”
“So he’s clever?”
“I can’t say he isn’t. But it could be more sinister. If he had access to the paper in advance, he might have used that book in a very different way. Looking back, maybe he was always outside the rules.”
“And as a postgraduate?”
“He kept himself to himself, as always. Did some work on neural networks for his PhD. The application of parallel processing to pattern recognition. I didn’t bother to read his thesis but it was a collaboration with a research project in North Africa. Funded in part by the then government of Libya. I guess that was when he started to become involved with radical Arab factions.”
“He travelled to Libya? Did he say what he did there?”
“He was very cagey about that. I know he went during term time and stayed there into the vacation.”
“Oh yes.” This was starting to look quite promising. “You could check the stamps in his passport.”
“Better than that. Since 9/11, we’ve been recording entries and exits through UK airports, so we can get chapter and verse on that.”
“Then, once he had his PhD, he began accumulating obsolete computing equipment. Everyone wondered what he was up to. There were all sorts of theories and he set up a security system that logged everyone entering or leaving the Intelligent Systems office building. That certainly raised eyebrows. Now, of course, we all know he was developing some sort of virus attack.”
“And he was working on this alone?” Greg made a note. This was a crucial point.
“No-one in Liverpool was involved. But we know some of the work he published was co-authored with his Arab collaborators. He was applying for permission to release his programs into the university but, thank God, he was stopped and his computers were confiscated. My guess is he then made a desperate attempt to do it anyway and it went off half cocked.”
“How do you know he couldn’t have done this on his own?” Greg needed to be able to reassure Eileen Griffin that the conspiracy angle would stand up.
“Even a simple hacker attack takes months of effort. Steven Corby told people a Artificial Intelligence system was writing his programs for him. And his grant applications. Computers just aren’t that sophisticated yet. You write a program and it generates a result. The sorts of things he was claiming are just science fiction at the moment – especially when you think of the obsolete computers he claims he was using. He clearly had help he wasn’t going to admit to and where else could it have come from?”
That sounded plausible. There was obviously no love lost between Fielding and Corby but Fielding was an expert and if he said Corby would have needed help... “But he wasn’t successful?”
“We were lucky. He reckoned without the human factor. He never allowed for the fact that his computers would be scrapped and then someone would reply to his e-mail. That reply was the clue that showed up the attack. The virus itself was deleted from the university network. But we managed to get hold of a copy of the macro he’d used to do the initial installation, using a false identity. A smoking gun that linked him to it.”
Not conclusive. But a qualified, expert opinion. Enough, surely, to justify at least a direct check. “So, in your professional opinion, was he engaged either directly or indirectly in terrorist activities? Think carefully, Mr Fielding. Your answer here is of critical importance.”
“Directly. Yes. Definitely directly.”
When Fielding had gone, they went down to lunch in the hotel restaurant. Greg turned to Jackman. “I see what you mean. And you say the Crown Prosecutor won’t act?”
The reply was unprintable, ending in “lawyers!”
“And aside from that?” Greg laughed. “Seriously, though, what’s stopping you from getting more evidence?”
“Everything. We haven’t got access to the files on his Islamists. Or the lawyer’s clients. The surveillance comes up with trying to buy a firearm – enough for a slap on the wrist. The university case hangs on a legalistic thread and in the meantime, this guy is walking the streets, free as the wind. You’ve got to help me. There’s no telling what he’ll do next. Not everything in England happens in London you know.”
“I know. But your Doctor Corby could be quite harmless.”
“But he’s not. Or at least, we don’t know he’s harmless. Not every threat to security involves explosives. You should know that in your job. This is a global village, you know. What if he got his virus directly onto the Internet and it was to disrupt the Bank of England? Or the New York Stock Exchange? What would you say to your bosses then? ‘Oh yes. It was in Liverpool, so we thought it didn’t matter’? How would that sound?”
That was a real risk. And the food in Liverpool – The London Carriage Works restaurant, at any rate – deserved another visit. Specially if the alternative was another shift eating stale ham sandwiches in the back of a BT van outside the mosque in Finsbury Park.
“Ok. I’ll talk to Eileen. See if we can clip his wings a bit. It’s worth a try. I can’t promise anything, mind. But I’ll give it a go. Best shot and all that.”
“Thanks, Greg. You’re a mate.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever actually been here before.” Greg looked up at the Victorian glass roof of Lime Street station. “Quite elegant, really. I’d need to fill in a mountain of forms to be allowed to drive in to Euston to pick you up in London.”
“You wouldn’t need to. I could get the Underground. I suppose it has a certain...” Jackman paused. “Call it a country charm. As long as you’re not easily bored. Can’t wait to get back to London myself.”
“Well we may have some progress on that.” answered. It felt good to be out of London. And this might actually turn into a real case. “Your client list has at least five terror suspects on it so Eileen – my boss – has authorised us to talk to your friend Fielding. If he’s credible we might be on the way to taking a closer look at Mr Corby.”
“Doctor Corby. As Mister Fielding will instantly point out. With a load of technical double speak to explain why Corby doesn’t deserve it. But I’ll let you sort that out face to face.”
“And you’ve set up the interview room?”
“Yes. I’ve booked a suite in the Hope Street Hotel. We can talk comfortably and the foods good. We can take a break for lunch. Fielding’ll meet us there at eleven.”
“And he’s a reliable witness?” The last thing Greg needed was another flake.
“A bit of an axe to grind. But he knows his stuff. And he’s known Corby since they were students. Corby’s always been dodgy, apparently, so there’s no surprise he’s got himself in trouble at last. And there’s more this end as well. Doctor Corby’s been shopping.”
“What did he buy?”
“He’s after weapons. Guns. On of our sources down in New Ferry where he lives was tapped by a friend of his. Not fussy what type. Te told our man they’d also discussed explosives.”
“So we just pick him up?”
“We don’t think he’s actually got hold of a shooter yet. And quite honestly, if he had one that’s not really the threat he poses.”
Jackman pulled up on a double yellow line and placed a blue ‘Disabled’ sticker in the windscreen. “Saves having to buy tickets at the machine. This is close to the university so Fielding’s walking down. I’ve checked in and occupied the room, so we can go straight up.”
In fact, Adrian Fielding was waiting for them in hotel reception. Impressive, really, better dressed than you would expect for a country boffin. They made their way with him directly to the room.
“Mr Fielding, thanks for joining us today.” Not a northerner, from the accent and maybe someone to do business with. Certainly more interesting and civilised than lurking outside Islamist bookshops for hours at a time. “I appreciate that you’ve already briefed Sergeant Jackman so I am very grateful you could spare the time to go over your evidence again with me. It’s important to make sure that all the details are properly recorded. This could be going to the very top levels of government and it has to be absolutely bomb proof.”
“It’s a pleasure.” Fielding replied. “I only hope that I can help to make the country a safer place. Computing really is the weak spot of our modern society. With every facet of life run by computers it would be disastrous if terrorists were able to take advantage of that to attack us in some way.” Yes! Right on message for Eileen!
“I think that DS Jackman has explained to you that w need to record this interview. He’ll operate the equipment and we start by recording the time, 11:42. Present, Sergeant John Jackman of Merseyside police, Mr Adrian Fielding of the Liverpool City University and myself, Gregory Lyons of the United Kingdom Security Services.
“Sergeant Jackman tells me that you’ve known the suspect – Steven Corby – since you were students?”
“Yes. He and I shared lectures as undergrads from second year onward. Generally we took similar courses. Even then he tended to be a loner. Missed lectures and tutorials, late handing in assignments, few friends and didn’t mix readily with the other students.”
“You were friendly with him, though? Knew him well?”
“Nobody was friendly with Steven Corby. He had no social life. I don’t think anyone really knew him.”
“And the quality of his work? Was he a good student?”
“That’s more difficult to say than you might expect. As I say, he tended to hand assignments in late and he was always in trouble for sloppy preparation. I would say he did the minimum required to meet the course requirements.
“So was it a surprise when he went on to do postgraduate work?”
“Absolutely.” Fielding frowned. “Most people thought he was a borderline pass. On one course, I met him the day before the exam and asked him how he thought he would do. Seeing that he’d attended almost no lectures, I wasn’t surprised when he said he was worried. He told me he didn’t have a copy of the course text. He’d tried to borrow one from the library but theirs were all out on loan.
“I’d finished my revision so I lent him mine. When the results came out he’d scored a first. Highest in the year for that topic. Even better than my mark.”
“So he’s clever?”
“I can’t say he isn’t. But it could be more sinister. If he had access to the paper in advance, he might have used that book in a very different way. Looking back, maybe he was always outside the rules.”
“And as a postgraduate?”
“He kept himself to himself, as always. Did some work on neural networks for his PhD. The application of parallel processing to pattern recognition. I didn’t bother to read his thesis but it was a collaboration with a research project in North Africa. Funded in part by the then government of Libya. I guess that was when he started to become involved with radical Arab factions.”
“He travelled to Libya? Did he say what he did there?”
“He was very cagey about that. I know he went during term time and stayed there into the vacation.”
“Oh yes.” This was starting to look quite promising. “You could check the stamps in his passport.”
“Better than that. Since 9/11, we’ve been recording entries and exits through UK airports, so we can get chapter and verse on that.”
“Then, once he had his PhD, he began accumulating obsolete computing equipment. Everyone wondered what he was up to. There were all sorts of theories and he set up a security system that logged everyone entering or leaving the Intelligent Systems office building. That certainly raised eyebrows. Now, of course, we all know he was developing some sort of virus attack.”
“And he was working on this alone?” Greg made a note. This was a crucial point.
“No-one in Liverpool was involved. But we know some of the work he published was co-authored with his Arab collaborators. He was applying for permission to release his programs into the university but, thank God, he was stopped and his computers were confiscated. My guess is he then made a desperate attempt to do it anyway and it went off half cocked.”
“How do you know he couldn’t have done this on his own?” Greg needed to be able to reassure Eileen Griffin that the conspiracy angle would stand up.
“Even a simple hacker attack takes months of effort. Steven Corby told people a Artificial Intelligence system was writing his programs for him. And his grant applications. Computers just aren’t that sophisticated yet. You write a program and it generates a result. The sorts of things he was claiming are just science fiction at the moment – especially when you think of the obsolete computers he claims he was using. He clearly had help he wasn’t going to admit to and where else could it have come from?”
That sounded plausible. There was obviously no love lost between Fielding and Corby but Fielding was an expert and if he said Corby would have needed help... “But he wasn’t successful?”
“We were lucky. He reckoned without the human factor. He never allowed for the fact that his computers would be scrapped and then someone would reply to his e-mail. That reply was the clue that showed up the attack. The virus itself was deleted from the university network. But we managed to get hold of a copy of the macro he’d used to do the initial installation, using a false identity. A smoking gun that linked him to it.”
Not conclusive. But a qualified, expert opinion. Enough, surely, to justify at least a direct check. “So, in your professional opinion, was he engaged either directly or indirectly in terrorist activities? Think carefully, Mr Fielding. Your answer here is of critical importance.”
“Directly. Yes. Definitely directly.”
When Fielding had gone, they went down to lunch in the hotel restaurant. Greg turned to Jackman. “I see what you mean. And you say the Crown Prosecutor won’t act?”
The reply was unprintable, ending in “lawyers!”
“And aside from that?” Greg laughed. “Seriously, though, what’s stopping you from getting more evidence?”
“Everything. We haven’t got access to the files on his Islamists. Or the lawyer’s clients. The surveillance comes up with trying to buy a firearm – enough for a slap on the wrist. The university case hangs on a legalistic thread and in the meantime, this guy is walking the streets, free as the wind. You’ve got to help me. There’s no telling what he’ll do next. Not everything in England happens in London you know.”
“I know. But your Doctor Corby could be quite harmless.”
“But he’s not. Or at least, we don’t know he’s harmless. Not every threat to security involves explosives. You should know that in your job. This is a global village, you know. What if he got his virus directly onto the Internet and it was to disrupt the Bank of England? Or the New York Stock Exchange? What would you say to your bosses then? ‘Oh yes. It was in Liverpool, so we thought it didn’t matter’? How would that sound?”
That was a real risk. And the food in Liverpool – The London Carriage Works restaurant, at any rate – deserved another visit. Specially if the alternative was another shift eating stale ham sandwiches in the back of a BT van outside the mosque in Finsbury Park.
“Ok. I’ll talk to Eileen. See if we can clip his wings a bit. It’s worth a try. I can’t promise anything, mind. But I’ll give it a go. Best shot and all that.”
“Thanks, Greg. You’re a mate.”
140 Corby tries to buy a gun
Corby closed the door behind him and locked it carefully. He paused for a moment, listening, then walked down the narrow corridor separating his kitchen and bathroom and into the bed/sitting room of his apartment. There was a space along one wall where the police had taken the stack of old computers but his bed, wardrobe, desk and chair left very little room for swinging cats. Normally he would feel safe here, behind the steel reinforced doors fitted in this area as standard by the council. This afternoon, though... Why would the Russian mafia be interested in his research?
An intelligence like DENIS might be capable of hacking passwords, for example, or breaking into online banking. Or money laundering. If this really was a Russian mafia, or someone from the Middle East... He’d thought things through on the bus home and he couldn’t rely on the lawyers. And as for the police...
Moving along the wall so as not to be seen, he drew the curtains to, leaving just an opening of a few inches. Outside, he could see the gardens behind the flats. The children’s swings were mostly broken but one was being used, squeaking loudly as a small child was pushed higher and higher, shrieking with excitement. The rusty seesaws and roundabouts were being ignored by a group of kids kicking a ball. He watched for a few minutes but no one else appeared.
From the kitchen window he could look out onto the road. Nothing out of the ordinary. Was he overreacting? Then, as he allowed the net curtain to drop back into place, a car pulled up along the road, a new, navy Ford Fiesta. He stretched up for a better view but couldn’t make out who was in it. His heart beating faster, he waited. OK, they could be a couple of lovers saying good night after a day at work. But that would be unusual here, a real coincidence. The car was clean too. Who’d bring a brand new car down into this street? A drug dealer? If they were driving a new car it wouldn’t be a Fiesta.
When nothing more moved, he put the chain on the front door and bolted it. Then he went back into the living room, hung his anorak on the back of a chair and sat down on the edge of his bed.
Leaning forward, he reached under it and pushed his shoes aside. From behind them, he pulled out a black deed box, put it on the bed beside him and unlocked it. He unfolded the first of the papers it contained and glanced at it. A death certificate. His father’s, from twenty years ago. Next was a pile of letters, tied with a pink ribbon, which he laid, unopened on top of the certificate.
He looked at a bundle of his old school reports – all those ‘A’s carefully preserved by his mother – and some photographs of his parents’ life together. A photo taken by his cousin at his father’s funeral with his twelve year old self gazing strangely – perhaps resentfully, it was difficult to tell – out at a rain soaked cemetery.
His mother’s Will. The inheritance hadn’t been enough to make a dent in his study loans so he’d bought a desk and the curtains for his flat with it. The curtains were nearly closed now, of course and it was starting to get dark inside so he switched on the light. Back on the bed, he found what he’d been looking for in the deed box. A bundle of ten and twenty pound notes held together by an elastic band. Quickly, he counted the money. Three hundred and forty pounds.
He picked up his old Post Office Savings book and looked at the balance. Seven hundred and fifty seven pounds and ninety four pence. The interest since it was last updated must be worth something too. He peeled off a hundred pounds from the bundle and put it, with the post office book, into his trouser pocket. Then he replaced the rest of the contents, locked the deed box and put it back under the bed.
He glanced round the room then went out and locked the outer door behind him. He made his way along the balcony. The street below was now deserted except for the car parked twenty five yards from the entrance. As he watched, the engine started and whoever was in it drove off. Of course that probably just meant someone was now watching from nearby. He walked down the stairs.
Even though it wasn’t tall enough to qualify as a tower block, it was a sixties building, part of the reconstruction around the ship yards on the south bank of the river Mersey. The staircase was littered with cigarette packets, chocolate wrappers, empty beer cans and other stray remnants of packaging in various stages of disintegration. A faint smell of stale urine. Two floors down, he paused outside one of the apartments. The green paint of the door had been all but obscured by graffiti. The fanlight was cracked with a sheet of dirty cardboard wedged against it on the inside, perhaps as an attempt at draught proofing. He knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice from inside.
“Steven Corby from number thirty six. I need a word with Tim.”
“He’s busy. What’s it about?”
“It’s, er, private. It won’t take long.”
“What is it, Jeanie?” He heard Tim’s voice inside the flat.
“It’s Steven from upstairs. Says he needs to see you in private.”
“Well let him in then.”
The sound of the key in the lock, then drawing back of several bolts and the door opened a crack on the chain. After making sure that Corby was alone, the woman admitted him to the hallway. The layout of the flat was an exact copy of his own. A broken umbrella rack, draped with coats stood behind the door so it couldn’t open fully and the floor was littered with junk mail. The smell was tomato soup and boiled cabbage, mixed with the aroma of stale cigarette smoke, spilt beer and cannabis.
Corby made his way into the living room. A baby was asleep on the unmade bed that occupied the left wall and Tim, a small red headed man, was seated at a round table by the window. A hand-rolled cigarette rested in an overflowing ash tray in front of him. He looked up as Corby entered.
“You’ve come down to see us, Professor. How’re things upstairs in the posh part of New Ferry?” He didn’t stand but gestured to the seat across the table.
Corby hesitated then lowered himself carefully into the chair which creaked unsteadily under him.
“I think I’m being followed,” he said. “Twice on the bus today and then walking in the street.”
“That’s the trouble with being rich.” The small man laughed. “They wouldn’t follow me. Nothing they could rob. Perhaps they’d do me a favour and steal the brat.”
“No, seriously,” Corby continued. “I don’t know what they want. But I’m convinced they’re dangerous.”
“Well don’t bring ’em in here. Look at you, six foot three and big with it. A fit lad like you should be able to deal with them. Go in low. No matter how tough they think they are, they won’t keep coming after a good kick in the bollocks.”
“There’s more than one. A whole gang, I think.” Corby frowned. “I can’t fight them bare handed. I’ve decided I need a firearm. Some sort of gun.”
The small man laughed. “A firearm! Some sort of gun!” He laughed. “Yeah, ’cause I just got loadsa guns lying around.” He gestured round the cluttered room at the piles of plastic bags and the clothing pouring half out of the cupboard. “You sure you don’t want a grenade or some Semtex while I’m at it? What makes you think I gotta flamin’ gun?”
“No. I didn’t necessarily think you would have one. Here, I mean. It’s just that I thought... You got me those old computers and, well, maybe you know someone. That is... You sometimes buy. Well you might know someone who sells things that aren’t, you know, legal.” Corby paused in confusion.
“Are you sure you want to have something like that, Professor? You’re an educated man, of course, but would you know how to use it? You know they always say the person shot’s mostly the owner of the gun. And if I got one for you it wouldn’t come with a licence. The feds don’t like that. They’d likely throw the book at you.”
“I know all that. But I don’t see how things could get worse than they are.”
“Oh they could. Things can always get worse.” Tim thought for a moment. “How much would something like that be worth to you? If you were to give me some money, say six hundred quid, then perhaps I could try and get hold of something?”
“I was more thinking that you might be able to get hold of it first and then I’d pay you.” Corby hesitated. “Or you could put me in touch with someone.”
“And what’s in it for me if I do that, then? There’s a risk involved, you know. Not just for you. I don’t do that sort of thing for the love of it. Give me a hundred and I could find you a name.”
“A hundred? That’s a bit much. How about fifty?” Corby thought. “But you’d have to set up a meeting, and I couldn’t give it to you just for a name. Not that I don’t trust you but it would have to be paid after I actually had the weapon.”
“Not that I don’t trust you either, Professor, but it’d ’ave to be fifty up front. Then another fifty when you get the goods.”
An intelligence like DENIS might be capable of hacking passwords, for example, or breaking into online banking. Or money laundering. If this really was a Russian mafia, or someone from the Middle East... He’d thought things through on the bus home and he couldn’t rely on the lawyers. And as for the police...
Moving along the wall so as not to be seen, he drew the curtains to, leaving just an opening of a few inches. Outside, he could see the gardens behind the flats. The children’s swings were mostly broken but one was being used, squeaking loudly as a small child was pushed higher and higher, shrieking with excitement. The rusty seesaws and roundabouts were being ignored by a group of kids kicking a ball. He watched for a few minutes but no one else appeared.
From the kitchen window he could look out onto the road. Nothing out of the ordinary. Was he overreacting? Then, as he allowed the net curtain to drop back into place, a car pulled up along the road, a new, navy Ford Fiesta. He stretched up for a better view but couldn’t make out who was in it. His heart beating faster, he waited. OK, they could be a couple of lovers saying good night after a day at work. But that would be unusual here, a real coincidence. The car was clean too. Who’d bring a brand new car down into this street? A drug dealer? If they were driving a new car it wouldn’t be a Fiesta.
When nothing more moved, he put the chain on the front door and bolted it. Then he went back into the living room, hung his anorak on the back of a chair and sat down on the edge of his bed.
Leaning forward, he reached under it and pushed his shoes aside. From behind them, he pulled out a black deed box, put it on the bed beside him and unlocked it. He unfolded the first of the papers it contained and glanced at it. A death certificate. His father’s, from twenty years ago. Next was a pile of letters, tied with a pink ribbon, which he laid, unopened on top of the certificate.
He looked at a bundle of his old school reports – all those ‘A’s carefully preserved by his mother – and some photographs of his parents’ life together. A photo taken by his cousin at his father’s funeral with his twelve year old self gazing strangely – perhaps resentfully, it was difficult to tell – out at a rain soaked cemetery.
His mother’s Will. The inheritance hadn’t been enough to make a dent in his study loans so he’d bought a desk and the curtains for his flat with it. The curtains were nearly closed now, of course and it was starting to get dark inside so he switched on the light. Back on the bed, he found what he’d been looking for in the deed box. A bundle of ten and twenty pound notes held together by an elastic band. Quickly, he counted the money. Three hundred and forty pounds.
He picked up his old Post Office Savings book and looked at the balance. Seven hundred and fifty seven pounds and ninety four pence. The interest since it was last updated must be worth something too. He peeled off a hundred pounds from the bundle and put it, with the post office book, into his trouser pocket. Then he replaced the rest of the contents, locked the deed box and put it back under the bed.
He glanced round the room then went out and locked the outer door behind him. He made his way along the balcony. The street below was now deserted except for the car parked twenty five yards from the entrance. As he watched, the engine started and whoever was in it drove off. Of course that probably just meant someone was now watching from nearby. He walked down the stairs.
Even though it wasn’t tall enough to qualify as a tower block, it was a sixties building, part of the reconstruction around the ship yards on the south bank of the river Mersey. The staircase was littered with cigarette packets, chocolate wrappers, empty beer cans and other stray remnants of packaging in various stages of disintegration. A faint smell of stale urine. Two floors down, he paused outside one of the apartments. The green paint of the door had been all but obscured by graffiti. The fanlight was cracked with a sheet of dirty cardboard wedged against it on the inside, perhaps as an attempt at draught proofing. He knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice from inside.
“Steven Corby from number thirty six. I need a word with Tim.”
“He’s busy. What’s it about?”
“It’s, er, private. It won’t take long.”
“What is it, Jeanie?” He heard Tim’s voice inside the flat.
“It’s Steven from upstairs. Says he needs to see you in private.”
“Well let him in then.”
The sound of the key in the lock, then drawing back of several bolts and the door opened a crack on the chain. After making sure that Corby was alone, the woman admitted him to the hallway. The layout of the flat was an exact copy of his own. A broken umbrella rack, draped with coats stood behind the door so it couldn’t open fully and the floor was littered with junk mail. The smell was tomato soup and boiled cabbage, mixed with the aroma of stale cigarette smoke, spilt beer and cannabis.
Corby made his way into the living room. A baby was asleep on the unmade bed that occupied the left wall and Tim, a small red headed man, was seated at a round table by the window. A hand-rolled cigarette rested in an overflowing ash tray in front of him. He looked up as Corby entered.
“You’ve come down to see us, Professor. How’re things upstairs in the posh part of New Ferry?” He didn’t stand but gestured to the seat across the table.
Corby hesitated then lowered himself carefully into the chair which creaked unsteadily under him.
“I think I’m being followed,” he said. “Twice on the bus today and then walking in the street.”
“That’s the trouble with being rich.” The small man laughed. “They wouldn’t follow me. Nothing they could rob. Perhaps they’d do me a favour and steal the brat.”
“No, seriously,” Corby continued. “I don’t know what they want. But I’m convinced they’re dangerous.”
“Well don’t bring ’em in here. Look at you, six foot three and big with it. A fit lad like you should be able to deal with them. Go in low. No matter how tough they think they are, they won’t keep coming after a good kick in the bollocks.”
“There’s more than one. A whole gang, I think.” Corby frowned. “I can’t fight them bare handed. I’ve decided I need a firearm. Some sort of gun.”
The small man laughed. “A firearm! Some sort of gun!” He laughed. “Yeah, ’cause I just got loadsa guns lying around.” He gestured round the cluttered room at the piles of plastic bags and the clothing pouring half out of the cupboard. “You sure you don’t want a grenade or some Semtex while I’m at it? What makes you think I gotta flamin’ gun?”
“No. I didn’t necessarily think you would have one. Here, I mean. It’s just that I thought... You got me those old computers and, well, maybe you know someone. That is... You sometimes buy. Well you might know someone who sells things that aren’t, you know, legal.” Corby paused in confusion.
“Are you sure you want to have something like that, Professor? You’re an educated man, of course, but would you know how to use it? You know they always say the person shot’s mostly the owner of the gun. And if I got one for you it wouldn’t come with a licence. The feds don’t like that. They’d likely throw the book at you.”
“I know all that. But I don’t see how things could get worse than they are.”
“Oh they could. Things can always get worse.” Tim thought for a moment. “How much would something like that be worth to you? If you were to give me some money, say six hundred quid, then perhaps I could try and get hold of something?”
“I was more thinking that you might be able to get hold of it first and then I’d pay you.” Corby hesitated. “Or you could put me in touch with someone.”
“And what’s in it for me if I do that, then? There’s a risk involved, you know. Not just for you. I don’t do that sort of thing for the love of it. Give me a hundred and I could find you a name.”
“A hundred? That’s a bit much. How about fifty?” Corby thought. “But you’d have to set up a meeting, and I couldn’t give it to you just for a name. Not that I don’t trust you but it would have to be paid after I actually had the weapon.”
“Not that I don’t trust you either, Professor, but it’d ’ave to be fifty up front. Then another fifty when you get the goods.”
130 Corby thinks he’s followed by gangsters
Completely futile. Like everything else the lawyers had done. The meeting with the barrister, Hassam, Hassan, Has-been, whatever his name was, had been a complete waste of time.
The conversation went round in ever decreasing circles of complex legal jargon and in the end, the two lawyers seemed as lost as Corby was. To be honest, he’d switched off about half way through, more worried about the people following him. He’d first noticed the car behind the bus in Cleveland Street. It could have overtaken but it hung back. It was there again as they left the Birkenhead bus station and headed for the tunnel.
Then there was the woman who’d got off with him at Argyle Street and followed for a few blocks. When he stopped to look in a charity shop, she was still behind him after he came out. Was he just being paranoid? He turned left, then right, walked two blocks parallel and then right again, back onto Mount Pleasant. And there she was, still behind him. She turned off, and he breathed a sigh of relief. But then he noticed the man standing at a bus stop. Why would he suddenly have started walking behind him when he passed?
Now they were back at Shaikh’s and the frustration was killing. No idea whether he would be charged with whatever they could charge him with. No progress on getting compensation. Completely futile!
“We’ve to do something. Where have you got to on suing the university?”
“Don’t forget, I haven’t agreed to take on the civil case. All I agreed to do was take a look at your contract. And we were going to wait until we knew what was happening about your job.
“This is ridiculous. You can’t tell me whether I’ll be OK if they lay charges. I might be locked up for a crime I haven’t committed. And now you aren’t even going to help me to get compensation.” Corby stood up and walked over to the window. Yes. A car was parked across the road with two men sitting in it. “And what are you going to do about these people following me?”
“Following you? What do you mean?”
“Someone was following me on my way here. And they’re outside now waiting for me.”
“Following you?” Shaikh repeated. “Who was it? Are you certain?”
“Almost. A woman and a man followed me to your office and they’re outside now, waiting for me. Come and look.”
“Most likely pure coincidence.” Shaikh walked over to the window. “The police have released you. The university would have no interest in following you. In any case, no-one actually does that sort of following. Only spies on television. There are two men out there in a parked car. So what? I’ve represented dozens of people with problems with the authorities and if they were following you, you’d never notice.”
“Maybe not, but I did a presentation on my research at a conference last year and a number of people were interested enough to talk to me afterwards. If you don’t think it’s an official organisation then who could it be?”
“I’m telling you. You’re imagining this. The only people with the resources to follow people in that way would be a government. Or gangsters. And I can’t see you being of interest to them.”
“Gangsters?” The thought hadn’t occurred to him before. “Yes. I suppose if they got to hear about DENIS. If they got hold of DENIS they might see a potential to make a lot of money.”
“Nonsense.” Shaikh seemed intent on ignoring the problem. But then it wasn’t his neck on the line. “In any case, if the mob were interested, there’s nothing we could do about it.”
“So, to sum up. We don’t know if I’m going to be charged. If I’m charged, we don’t know if I have a defence. Gangsters may or may not be following me. If they are, you can’t help. And you’re not prepared to help me get compensation for the loss of my research.”
“You know that’s not fair, Doctor Corby. If the police decide to charge you, we’ll defend you and you heard the conversation with Ibrahim Hassan. There’s a good chance – a very good chance – that the prosecution won’t succeed. And I haven’t said that we won’t act for you against the university. Not definitely.”
“It amounts to the same thing. We sit here doing nothing and wait for things to happen. Perhaps I need to find someone else to act for me.”
“If you want to. And if you don’t trust my advice, you definitely should. The important thing is to behave rationally.”
“Behave rationally? Behave rationally? I’ve had my life ruined. I’m probably going to gaol. The only person – entity – I can talk to has been sent to the municipal tip. I am being targeted by some mafia or other that I’ve never heard of. And my lawyer? My lawyer wants to pick and choose what he takes on and then he tells me what? That I’m behaving irrationally!”
“Doctor Corby! Doctor Corby! Please be calmer. I understand you see the situation as grave. As I said, we will help you to the best of our ability. But we should not be emotional. Logic is everything. I apologise for the comment on rationality. The last thing I wished to suggest was that you were behaving irrationally. That was not what I meant. Not at all.”
Corby looked at the lawyer. If anyone was behaving emotionally, it was him. The man looked distraught. His tie was set off to one side. His cheap suit was shiny. Behind him, the desk was a pile of clutter that made Corby’s own look tidy. The bookshelves sagged. Was this really the lawyer on whom he would stake his freedom, his financial compensation and, yes, his revenge? “I’m sorry Mr Shaikh. This session is at an end.” He picked up his anorak folded over the chair and put it on. Two pens had slid out of the pocket onto the floor. Pausing only to pick them up, he walked out of the room and closed the door.
Corby paused in the hallway to calm himself before walking out onto the street, where he remembered with a shock that the car with his two watchers was still parked across the road. As he turned to walk down the hill, both occupants were talking on mobile phones.
The street was quiet. A few pedestrians were walking uphill and a few more down in the same direction as him. He wondered which of them was following him. The woman twenty five yards behind? Or perhaps the man he overtook coming in round the corner from a side street. Whoever it might be, he could be sure someone was.
The conversation went round in ever decreasing circles of complex legal jargon and in the end, the two lawyers seemed as lost as Corby was. To be honest, he’d switched off about half way through, more worried about the people following him. He’d first noticed the car behind the bus in Cleveland Street. It could have overtaken but it hung back. It was there again as they left the Birkenhead bus station and headed for the tunnel.
Then there was the woman who’d got off with him at Argyle Street and followed for a few blocks. When he stopped to look in a charity shop, she was still behind him after he came out. Was he just being paranoid? He turned left, then right, walked two blocks parallel and then right again, back onto Mount Pleasant. And there she was, still behind him. She turned off, and he breathed a sigh of relief. But then he noticed the man standing at a bus stop. Why would he suddenly have started walking behind him when he passed?
Now they were back at Shaikh’s and the frustration was killing. No idea whether he would be charged with whatever they could charge him with. No progress on getting compensation. Completely futile!
“We’ve to do something. Where have you got to on suing the university?”
“Don’t forget, I haven’t agreed to take on the civil case. All I agreed to do was take a look at your contract. And we were going to wait until we knew what was happening about your job.
“This is ridiculous. You can’t tell me whether I’ll be OK if they lay charges. I might be locked up for a crime I haven’t committed. And now you aren’t even going to help me to get compensation.” Corby stood up and walked over to the window. Yes. A car was parked across the road with two men sitting in it. “And what are you going to do about these people following me?”
“Following you? What do you mean?”
“Someone was following me on my way here. And they’re outside now waiting for me.”
“Following you?” Shaikh repeated. “Who was it? Are you certain?”
“Almost. A woman and a man followed me to your office and they’re outside now, waiting for me. Come and look.”
“Most likely pure coincidence.” Shaikh walked over to the window. “The police have released you. The university would have no interest in following you. In any case, no-one actually does that sort of following. Only spies on television. There are two men out there in a parked car. So what? I’ve represented dozens of people with problems with the authorities and if they were following you, you’d never notice.”
“Maybe not, but I did a presentation on my research at a conference last year and a number of people were interested enough to talk to me afterwards. If you don’t think it’s an official organisation then who could it be?”
“I’m telling you. You’re imagining this. The only people with the resources to follow people in that way would be a government. Or gangsters. And I can’t see you being of interest to them.”
“Gangsters?” The thought hadn’t occurred to him before. “Yes. I suppose if they got to hear about DENIS. If they got hold of DENIS they might see a potential to make a lot of money.”
“Nonsense.” Shaikh seemed intent on ignoring the problem. But then it wasn’t his neck on the line. “In any case, if the mob were interested, there’s nothing we could do about it.”
“So, to sum up. We don’t know if I’m going to be charged. If I’m charged, we don’t know if I have a defence. Gangsters may or may not be following me. If they are, you can’t help. And you’re not prepared to help me get compensation for the loss of my research.”
“You know that’s not fair, Doctor Corby. If the police decide to charge you, we’ll defend you and you heard the conversation with Ibrahim Hassan. There’s a good chance – a very good chance – that the prosecution won’t succeed. And I haven’t said that we won’t act for you against the university. Not definitely.”
“It amounts to the same thing. We sit here doing nothing and wait for things to happen. Perhaps I need to find someone else to act for me.”
“If you want to. And if you don’t trust my advice, you definitely should. The important thing is to behave rationally.”
“Behave rationally? Behave rationally? I’ve had my life ruined. I’m probably going to gaol. The only person – entity – I can talk to has been sent to the municipal tip. I am being targeted by some mafia or other that I’ve never heard of. And my lawyer? My lawyer wants to pick and choose what he takes on and then he tells me what? That I’m behaving irrationally!”
“Doctor Corby! Doctor Corby! Please be calmer. I understand you see the situation as grave. As I said, we will help you to the best of our ability. But we should not be emotional. Logic is everything. I apologise for the comment on rationality. The last thing I wished to suggest was that you were behaving irrationally. That was not what I meant. Not at all.”
Corby looked at the lawyer. If anyone was behaving emotionally, it was him. The man looked distraught. His tie was set off to one side. His cheap suit was shiny. Behind him, the desk was a pile of clutter that made Corby’s own look tidy. The bookshelves sagged. Was this really the lawyer on whom he would stake his freedom, his financial compensation and, yes, his revenge? “I’m sorry Mr Shaikh. This session is at an end.” He picked up his anorak folded over the chair and put it on. Two pens had slid out of the pocket onto the floor. Pausing only to pick them up, he walked out of the room and closed the door.
Corby paused in the hallway to calm himself before walking out onto the street, where he remembered with a shock that the car with his two watchers was still parked across the road. As he turned to walk down the hill, both occupants were talking on mobile phones.
The street was quiet. A few pedestrians were walking uphill and a few more down in the same direction as him. He wondered which of them was following him. The woman twenty five yards behind? Or perhaps the man he overtook coming in round the corner from a side street. Whoever it might be, he could be sure someone was.
110 Greg Lyons asked to help J investigate C as a cyber-terrorist
“I think that’s everything you need for this morning’s session.” Greg Lyons had spent twenty minutes updating his boss for the weekly progress meeting. There wasn’t much. His contacts in the groups he was monitoring had been unforthcoming. As usual.
“I think you’ve given me enough.” She was paying for coffees in the Starbucks on Ludgate Hill downstairs from the office. “But tell your man from Liverpool to give you a bit more notice next time. I don’t want you to make a habit of missing these meetings.”
“I know. But the text from Jackman does say he’s onto something big.” The meetings were the only opportunity to meet anyone important but nothing ever happened in them so he wasn’t going to lose sleep. Eileen could present his boring portfolio and leave him to some real fieldwork. In her late thirties, with short, dark hair, low key make-up and conservative suit, she could have been on her way to a meeting in any of a hundred local office buildings.
“Shouldn’t he be here by now?” she asked.
“I can’t imagine that he’ll be early. The train gets into Euston on the hour and it’ll take a good twenty minutes to get through the Underground.”
“All the same, get into the office as soon as you can. I’ll get them to put you to the back of the agenda just in case. And remember this is just an initial assessment. You’ve a lot on your plate already so be careful not to commit us to anything.”
“True, we’re busy.” He conceded. “But it’s all so much dross. Observation here, a hint there. We’ve nothing we can get our teeth into. This sounds as if it could at least be something definite.”
“Possibly, even probably, criminal. But not definitely anything. Least of all anything that should concern us. It’s not our job to catch criminals. If it’s not keeping the banking sector in the City of London secure from terrorists it isn’t our patch. And how reliable is this Jackman, anyway?”
“He’s solid. I came across him a couple of years ago on the 7/11 investigation. He has a nose for things. A lot of the leads came through him. He’s high energy. It was a real loss when they posted him to Liverpool. But who knows, having someone out there in the sticks may work out well after all.”
“OK. Well I’ll be off. The boss won’t wait.” She picked up her briefcase. “And remember what I said. No adventures. Let’s stick to our knitting.”
As he watched her retreating figure, Greg wrinkled his nose and picked up his newspaper. Ten minutes passed and the crowd was beginning to thin slightly when the door opened to admit John Jackman. He made his way over to the table.
“Hello Greg,” he said, “Sorry I’m a bit late. The traffic gets worse and worse and the cabs always seem to pick the busiest roads.”
“No problem, John. Long time no see!” Greg smiled and held out his hand. “Shall we take a walk? This place is a bit crowded for conversation.”
The two men left the café and, crossing the road set off up Old Bailey towards Smithfield. They walked in silence past the courts and then turned left into Newgate Street.
“So? You say you have something promising?”
“Indeed, Greg. Indeed.” Jackman paused, then continued. “Looks like a case of cyber-terrorism. University lecturer with contacts in Libya, unleashes a virus attack at the University.”
“Interesting, John. But I can’t see my boss being prepared to put any resource into something as flimsy as that. Do you have any evidence of terrorism?”
“Well, there is the Arab connection. It’s in the file.” He handed over a Manilla folder. “And he also attacked a colleague. And he’s threatened the University.”
“Still not enough. What was the virus?”
“That’s the worrying thing. So far we haven’t been able to isolate it. It’s not one that the anti-virus shops have come across. It appears to have been an original, and clever enough to destroy the evidence of infection. Bloody clever, in fact.”
“Hmmm. And where’s the culprit now?”
“On the loose. We took him in but we couldn’t get a peep out of him and the CPS got cold feet. Then it turns out that he had some sort of agreement to let him make backups to the network so they’ve refused to charge. Which is why I need your help. I think this is a classic case where prevention is better than cure. We can’t deliver the proof to charge him so we need to find some other way to stop him from doing it again – or worse.”
“Look John, I’d love to take a piece of this, but I don’t think I can do anything. My hands are tied. My boss has us stretched to the limit watching every Arab language book shop in London and monitoring mosques and madrasas and loons of every description. Anything definite that we could move on would have been progress but she won’t let us do anything unless there is a more definite connection. You need to link him to the Islamist terror networks or with something else that’s a definite a security threat.”
“Come on, Greg.” Jackman turned to face him. “You know that I put my arse on the line for you and ended up being booted out into the cold. This is important to me. I need to get a result that can get me back to London. The least you can do is give me a hand.”
“Don’t you have anything more concrete to tie him in as a security problem?”
“Well there’s his lawyer. He’s done a lot of work getting dodgy immigrants into the country. At least one of the people he defended has absconded when his refugee status was refused. He could be a link.”
“Any of his clients with an Islamist background?”
“Very probably. Almost certainly, in fact, given the types he takes on.” Jackman thought a moment. “But that wouldn’t be easy for us to find out. We don’t have access to that sort of stuff.”
“That might be an angle. I know my boss wouldn’t want me to spend any time on this but I don’t see why I shouldn’t run a quick check on your man’s client list. You’d better let me have his details.”
“Lawyer’s in the file. Meanwhile, I’ve managed to get my chief to let me put surveillance on him. Let him know they’re about and see if he makes a move.” Jackman smiled slyly. “Almost like old times, hey?”
“Yes, John. Almost like old times.”
“I think you’ve given me enough.” She was paying for coffees in the Starbucks on Ludgate Hill downstairs from the office. “But tell your man from Liverpool to give you a bit more notice next time. I don’t want you to make a habit of missing these meetings.”
“I know. But the text from Jackman does say he’s onto something big.” The meetings were the only opportunity to meet anyone important but nothing ever happened in them so he wasn’t going to lose sleep. Eileen could present his boring portfolio and leave him to some real fieldwork. In her late thirties, with short, dark hair, low key make-up and conservative suit, she could have been on her way to a meeting in any of a hundred local office buildings.
“Shouldn’t he be here by now?” she asked.
“I can’t imagine that he’ll be early. The train gets into Euston on the hour and it’ll take a good twenty minutes to get through the Underground.”
“All the same, get into the office as soon as you can. I’ll get them to put you to the back of the agenda just in case. And remember this is just an initial assessment. You’ve a lot on your plate already so be careful not to commit us to anything.”
“True, we’re busy.” He conceded. “But it’s all so much dross. Observation here, a hint there. We’ve nothing we can get our teeth into. This sounds as if it could at least be something definite.”
“Possibly, even probably, criminal. But not definitely anything. Least of all anything that should concern us. It’s not our job to catch criminals. If it’s not keeping the banking sector in the City of London secure from terrorists it isn’t our patch. And how reliable is this Jackman, anyway?”
“He’s solid. I came across him a couple of years ago on the 7/11 investigation. He has a nose for things. A lot of the leads came through him. He’s high energy. It was a real loss when they posted him to Liverpool. But who knows, having someone out there in the sticks may work out well after all.”
“OK. Well I’ll be off. The boss won’t wait.” She picked up her briefcase. “And remember what I said. No adventures. Let’s stick to our knitting.”
As he watched her retreating figure, Greg wrinkled his nose and picked up his newspaper. Ten minutes passed and the crowd was beginning to thin slightly when the door opened to admit John Jackman. He made his way over to the table.
“Hello Greg,” he said, “Sorry I’m a bit late. The traffic gets worse and worse and the cabs always seem to pick the busiest roads.”
“No problem, John. Long time no see!” Greg smiled and held out his hand. “Shall we take a walk? This place is a bit crowded for conversation.”
The two men left the café and, crossing the road set off up Old Bailey towards Smithfield. They walked in silence past the courts and then turned left into Newgate Street.
“So? You say you have something promising?”
“Indeed, Greg. Indeed.” Jackman paused, then continued. “Looks like a case of cyber-terrorism. University lecturer with contacts in Libya, unleashes a virus attack at the University.”
“Interesting, John. But I can’t see my boss being prepared to put any resource into something as flimsy as that. Do you have any evidence of terrorism?”
“Well, there is the Arab connection. It’s in the file.” He handed over a Manilla folder. “And he also attacked a colleague. And he’s threatened the University.”
“Still not enough. What was the virus?”
“That’s the worrying thing. So far we haven’t been able to isolate it. It’s not one that the anti-virus shops have come across. It appears to have been an original, and clever enough to destroy the evidence of infection. Bloody clever, in fact.”
“Hmmm. And where’s the culprit now?”
“On the loose. We took him in but we couldn’t get a peep out of him and the CPS got cold feet. Then it turns out that he had some sort of agreement to let him make backups to the network so they’ve refused to charge. Which is why I need your help. I think this is a classic case where prevention is better than cure. We can’t deliver the proof to charge him so we need to find some other way to stop him from doing it again – or worse.”
“Look John, I’d love to take a piece of this, but I don’t think I can do anything. My hands are tied. My boss has us stretched to the limit watching every Arab language book shop in London and monitoring mosques and madrasas and loons of every description. Anything definite that we could move on would have been progress but she won’t let us do anything unless there is a more definite connection. You need to link him to the Islamist terror networks or with something else that’s a definite a security threat.”
“Come on, Greg.” Jackman turned to face him. “You know that I put my arse on the line for you and ended up being booted out into the cold. This is important to me. I need to get a result that can get me back to London. The least you can do is give me a hand.”
“Don’t you have anything more concrete to tie him in as a security problem?”
“Well there’s his lawyer. He’s done a lot of work getting dodgy immigrants into the country. At least one of the people he defended has absconded when his refugee status was refused. He could be a link.”
“Any of his clients with an Islamist background?”
“Very probably. Almost certainly, in fact, given the types he takes on.” Jackman thought a moment. “But that wouldn’t be easy for us to find out. We don’t have access to that sort of stuff.”
“That might be an angle. I know my boss wouldn’t want me to spend any time on this but I don’t see why I shouldn’t run a quick check on your man’s client list. You’d better let me have his details.”
“Lawyer’s in the file. Meanwhile, I’ve managed to get my chief to let me put surveillance on him. Let him know they’re about and see if he makes a move.” Jackman smiled slyly. “Almost like old times, hey?”
“Yes, John. Almost like old times.”
104 Corby released. Explains things to Shaikh
Spending three days in gaol is no picnic. The only friendly face Corby had seen was his lawyer. And Shaikh hadn’t helped much. The odd encouraging word, but mostly just defeatism and nothing concrete until he turned up to say Corby was being released. It was quite abrupt and then they were in Shaikh’s car with Anne in the back seat.
“You have to look on the bright side,” Shaikh said, as he drove out of the car park. “They’ve been indiscreet and you’ve had a lot of publicity but they haven’t charged you. Yet. I think the detective was hoping that if he held you for long enough the evidence he was looking for would just turn up.”
“That’s all very well; but this article in The Globe makes me out to be some sort of criminal idiot. How can I hold my head up on campus again? Have you seen the photograph on the front page?” It was the first time Corby had seen the paper and it came as a shock.
“Yes. They shouldn’t really have mentioned your name.”
“Is it libellous? Can I sue them?”
“We’d need to show what they said is untrue and then show damages. But perhaps the best thing would be just to let it go. What’s the point of revenge anyway? ”
“I’m not interested in revenge. But some money to restart my research... And what they’ve written’s definitely untrue. Here they say I unleashed an Internet Virus. Firstly, what I did wasn’t a virus. Secondly, it wasn’t on the Internet. Thirdly, they seem to be implying a link to some contract that the university have made to improve their computer room security. Listen to this. ‘Adrian Fielding! Adrian Fielding, responsible for detecting the virus. New security and disaster recovery facilities for the university computer centre.’ And ‘A contract for the Liverpool Royal Bank’. People will think straight away I’m about to break into every computer centre on Merseyside and wreak havoc. It’s totally ridiculous.”
“As I told you, Doctor Corby, the reporter – Warwick – must have had been smoking something seriously hallucinogenic.”
“Warwick telephoned me at home last night,” Anne chimed in from the back of the car. “I told him to get lost. Again.”
“Did he say how he got your number?” Shaikh asked.
“I didn’t ask. But it can only have been someone at the University. No-one else knew I was helping Steven.”
“Be very careful what you say to him.” Shaikh swerved out into the road to avoid a parked car.
“I won’t say anything at all to him,” Anne said.
“Anyway,” Corby persisted, “What do you think will happen next?”
“I don’t know.” Shaikh frowned. “You know that computer crime is a hot topic these days. The detective in charge of the case said the investigation was – how did he put it? – ongoing. He’s convinced your computer was involved. We’ll have to wait and see whether they charge you or not.”
“I couldn’t dispute that my computer was involved.”
“You mean you’ll be suggesting somebody else might have used it to send the e mail?”
“No.” If only he hadn’t used the spoof e-mail. “They’d probably be able to prove from the e-mail server it was one of my IP addresses. When I tried to make a backup on the data centre machine my assumption was they’d never actually notice.”
“Just say that again,” Shaikh interjected. “You said you were making a backup copy?”
“Well of course. I was going to lose some of my machines. I thought it was temporary, so I backed them up to an unused machine in the arts department.”
“Interesting. You know I’ve been looking at your contract with the university? They were obliged to keep a backup of your research in the university data centre. You’ve muddied the water, of course, using a false e-mail address, but I believe you may have been entitled to save your work.” Shaikh slammed on the brakes as the lights changed to red. The car behind hooted furiously. “I wonder if that one will fly. There isn’t a huge amount of precedent but it may cast sufficient doubt to deter a prosecution. We’ll have to take advice on this one, I think. The best thing would be to go and sit down with a barrister and see what he has to say.”
He took out his mobile phone and dialled a number as the lights changed and the car behind hooted again. As Corby listened to his half of the conversation, he decided that he wouldn’t be driving with Shaikh in the future. He’d been warned about his drinking but not his driving. Although, thinking about it, perhaps the two went together. With the smell of peppermints, too.
“Let me check.” He turned, almost facing Corby and nearly hitting another parked car. “Would you be available Monday afternoon?”
“That’s nearly a week. But I suppose so if that’s as soon as we can make it. It’s not as if I have all that much to do.”
“OK Ibrahim. Half three? Fine.” He put the telephone down. “Ibrahim Hassan. His father was a partner when I was articled. He’s a real high flier and he’ll be able to give us a view on what the chances are.”
“This sounds expensive?” With no salary coming in...
“It will cost a couple of hundred, but this is potentially a serious criminal charge. And we can discuss the civil case with him at the same time. You don’t want to take chances. You could end up sitting in a small place for a long time if this goes against us. It could be that the best thing, if they charge you, is to find a deal where you plead guilty.”
“Plead guilty? Never. They’ve wrecked my research. Do you realise what they’ve done? This is three years down the drain. And DENIS is gone. There’s an issue of principle here I have to defend. If they’d gone into my office and burnt a filing cabinet full of papers everyone would see how serious it was. The whole thing is confused because what they destroyed was recorded on disks but the issue’s just the same.”
“But how did writing a virus have anything to do with all that? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“It wasn’t a virus! I’ve explained that.” Was the man stupid? “What I’ve developed is a way of distributing a neural network across a group of computers. What it does is the nearest we can get to the way natural – animal and human – intelligence works. When a human or an animal perceives a stimulus, say hears a sound or views an object, a pattern of nerve cells in the brain are stimulated.
“You’ve seen those maps in railway stations where you select your destination and the stations on your route light up? This is a bit like that. You see a cat and one pattern lights up. A different pattern comes up for a bird. A dog is more like a cat so the pattern is similar. Anyway, when a pattern comes up the neurones change so they’re more likely to form that pattern in the future and associations build up in the brain that mould the interpretation it puts onto what it perceives.”
“And you discovered all that?”
“What I’ve just said is pretty well known. But I had no money to buy a powerful computer so I had to find a way to divide it all up across a lot of ordinary personal computers I could lay hands on.”
“And that’s difficult?”
“You can ask Anne. It’s harder than it sounds and nobody had really done it before. If the patterns were random then it would be impossible. Luckily, though, the patterns were structured in the same way as the real world that I was trying to model. Like a dog is closer to a cat than to a musical note or a television commercial, so I could keep similar things together. And once I had got past a certain point, I had DENIS to help me.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned DENIS before. A colleague? Or a friend of yours?”
“No. Yes. Well, in a way. DENIS is the artificial intelligence that came out of the process. From quite early on, I could use the system to experiment with different ways to organise the information and he – it – DENIS – learned to distinguish good organisations from bad ones, so really he helped to build himself.”
“But surely you have a back-up of the program? I’m not an expert, but everyone says that’s what you have to do.”
“It’s more complex than that.” How to explain this to a layman? “The program itself is relatively small, and, yes, there’s a back-up of that. But the real intelligence was in the network of associations distributed across the machines that were stolen. The copy program backed up some of the database to another machine at the university but, from what the police said when they charged me, the university computer department have managed to lose even that. DENIS, as I knew him, is gone. Even if I could get the computers back and start again, the new intelligence would have to build itself again, from its own experiences. It would start from a different point, learn from its own sensations. The result would be completely different. As different as humans are from each other.”
“OK. I think I understand. From what Hassan said on the phone it sounds as if we do stand a chance of getting the criminal charges dropped. Let’s hold on until we’ve spoken to him next week before doing anything else. Can you make it to my office for, say, two thirty?”
“You have to look on the bright side,” Shaikh said, as he drove out of the car park. “They’ve been indiscreet and you’ve had a lot of publicity but they haven’t charged you. Yet. I think the detective was hoping that if he held you for long enough the evidence he was looking for would just turn up.”
“That’s all very well; but this article in The Globe makes me out to be some sort of criminal idiot. How can I hold my head up on campus again? Have you seen the photograph on the front page?” It was the first time Corby had seen the paper and it came as a shock.
“Yes. They shouldn’t really have mentioned your name.”
“Is it libellous? Can I sue them?”
“We’d need to show what they said is untrue and then show damages. But perhaps the best thing would be just to let it go. What’s the point of revenge anyway? ”
“I’m not interested in revenge. But some money to restart my research... And what they’ve written’s definitely untrue. Here they say I unleashed an Internet Virus. Firstly, what I did wasn’t a virus. Secondly, it wasn’t on the Internet. Thirdly, they seem to be implying a link to some contract that the university have made to improve their computer room security. Listen to this. ‘Adrian Fielding! Adrian Fielding, responsible for detecting the virus. New security and disaster recovery facilities for the university computer centre.’ And ‘A contract for the Liverpool Royal Bank’. People will think straight away I’m about to break into every computer centre on Merseyside and wreak havoc. It’s totally ridiculous.”
“As I told you, Doctor Corby, the reporter – Warwick – must have had been smoking something seriously hallucinogenic.”
“Warwick telephoned me at home last night,” Anne chimed in from the back of the car. “I told him to get lost. Again.”
“Did he say how he got your number?” Shaikh asked.
“I didn’t ask. But it can only have been someone at the University. No-one else knew I was helping Steven.”
“Be very careful what you say to him.” Shaikh swerved out into the road to avoid a parked car.
“I won’t say anything at all to him,” Anne said.
“Anyway,” Corby persisted, “What do you think will happen next?”
“I don’t know.” Shaikh frowned. “You know that computer crime is a hot topic these days. The detective in charge of the case said the investigation was – how did he put it? – ongoing. He’s convinced your computer was involved. We’ll have to wait and see whether they charge you or not.”
“I couldn’t dispute that my computer was involved.”
“You mean you’ll be suggesting somebody else might have used it to send the e mail?”
“No.” If only he hadn’t used the spoof e-mail. “They’d probably be able to prove from the e-mail server it was one of my IP addresses. When I tried to make a backup on the data centre machine my assumption was they’d never actually notice.”
“Just say that again,” Shaikh interjected. “You said you were making a backup copy?”
“Well of course. I was going to lose some of my machines. I thought it was temporary, so I backed them up to an unused machine in the arts department.”
“Interesting. You know I’ve been looking at your contract with the university? They were obliged to keep a backup of your research in the university data centre. You’ve muddied the water, of course, using a false e-mail address, but I believe you may have been entitled to save your work.” Shaikh slammed on the brakes as the lights changed to red. The car behind hooted furiously. “I wonder if that one will fly. There isn’t a huge amount of precedent but it may cast sufficient doubt to deter a prosecution. We’ll have to take advice on this one, I think. The best thing would be to go and sit down with a barrister and see what he has to say.”
He took out his mobile phone and dialled a number as the lights changed and the car behind hooted again. As Corby listened to his half of the conversation, he decided that he wouldn’t be driving with Shaikh in the future. He’d been warned about his drinking but not his driving. Although, thinking about it, perhaps the two went together. With the smell of peppermints, too.
“Let me check.” He turned, almost facing Corby and nearly hitting another parked car. “Would you be available Monday afternoon?”
“That’s nearly a week. But I suppose so if that’s as soon as we can make it. It’s not as if I have all that much to do.”
“OK Ibrahim. Half three? Fine.” He put the telephone down. “Ibrahim Hassan. His father was a partner when I was articled. He’s a real high flier and he’ll be able to give us a view on what the chances are.”
“This sounds expensive?” With no salary coming in...
“It will cost a couple of hundred, but this is potentially a serious criminal charge. And we can discuss the civil case with him at the same time. You don’t want to take chances. You could end up sitting in a small place for a long time if this goes against us. It could be that the best thing, if they charge you, is to find a deal where you plead guilty.”
“Plead guilty? Never. They’ve wrecked my research. Do you realise what they’ve done? This is three years down the drain. And DENIS is gone. There’s an issue of principle here I have to defend. If they’d gone into my office and burnt a filing cabinet full of papers everyone would see how serious it was. The whole thing is confused because what they destroyed was recorded on disks but the issue’s just the same.”
“But how did writing a virus have anything to do with all that? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“It wasn’t a virus! I’ve explained that.” Was the man stupid? “What I’ve developed is a way of distributing a neural network across a group of computers. What it does is the nearest we can get to the way natural – animal and human – intelligence works. When a human or an animal perceives a stimulus, say hears a sound or views an object, a pattern of nerve cells in the brain are stimulated.
“You’ve seen those maps in railway stations where you select your destination and the stations on your route light up? This is a bit like that. You see a cat and one pattern lights up. A different pattern comes up for a bird. A dog is more like a cat so the pattern is similar. Anyway, when a pattern comes up the neurones change so they’re more likely to form that pattern in the future and associations build up in the brain that mould the interpretation it puts onto what it perceives.”
“And you discovered all that?”
“What I’ve just said is pretty well known. But I had no money to buy a powerful computer so I had to find a way to divide it all up across a lot of ordinary personal computers I could lay hands on.”
“And that’s difficult?”
“You can ask Anne. It’s harder than it sounds and nobody had really done it before. If the patterns were random then it would be impossible. Luckily, though, the patterns were structured in the same way as the real world that I was trying to model. Like a dog is closer to a cat than to a musical note or a television commercial, so I could keep similar things together. And once I had got past a certain point, I had DENIS to help me.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned DENIS before. A colleague? Or a friend of yours?”
“No. Yes. Well, in a way. DENIS is the artificial intelligence that came out of the process. From quite early on, I could use the system to experiment with different ways to organise the information and he – it – DENIS – learned to distinguish good organisations from bad ones, so really he helped to build himself.”
“But surely you have a back-up of the program? I’m not an expert, but everyone says that’s what you have to do.”
“It’s more complex than that.” How to explain this to a layman? “The program itself is relatively small, and, yes, there’s a back-up of that. But the real intelligence was in the network of associations distributed across the machines that were stolen. The copy program backed up some of the database to another machine at the university but, from what the police said when they charged me, the university computer department have managed to lose even that. DENIS, as I knew him, is gone. Even if I could get the computers back and start again, the new intelligence would have to build itself again, from its own experiences. It would start from a different point, learn from its own sensations. The result would be completely different. As different as humans are from each other.”
“OK. I think I understand. From what Hassan said on the phone it sounds as if we do stand a chance of getting the criminal charges dropped. Let’s hold on until we’ve spoken to him next week before doing anything else. Can you make it to my office for, say, two thirty?”
102 Fielding questioned by CPS. Prosecution declined
Sergeant Jackman had said he probably wouldn’t be needed but Adrian Fielding had to be in the building just in case. He sat next to Jackman’s desk marking assignments and waiting for news on the prosecution. When he got bored, he leafed through his copy of the file, refreshing his memory on the details of the network configuration and the exact sequence of the e-mails. He looked up to see Jackman come in through the glass doors.
“You’re on, Prof.” He’d taken to calling Adrian ‘Prof’. Adrian had corrected him the first few times but it seemed to amuse the sergeant to continue. Perhaps he just knew the future of the department? Adrian smiled at the thought, picked up his bag and followed him out into the corridor. The police HQ was a bit of a labyrinth – corridors with offices and interview rooms so you had to pass through security doors every few feet. They headed down a flight of stairs and Adrian glanced to his left through the glass and wire mesh of a security door. Two men were walking away from him down a long corridor.
There couldn’t be two gangling beanpoles with that wig-like hairstyle. The dreaded hacker was clearly on his way back to the cells. Where he belonged.
“Have they been interviewing Corby?” Adrian thought he’d better not use the word ‘questioning’ even if Jackman was on the side of right and justice.
“Yes. Prosecution Service bending over backwards for him.”
“But they’re still going to prosecute?”
“I’m relying on you, Prof. The lawyer’s a bloody-minded bozo.”
They went into the room where a couple of uniformed policemen and a woman in a business suit were sitting at a table. Some intros – the woman was Mrs Weston from the Crown Prosecution Service – and she started to grill him.
“You’re the University representative? What is your precise role in this investigation?”
Adrian explained that he’d volunteered as an IT expert because the technicalities were quite complex.
“One of the key points we would have to prove is that the fake e-mail originated from a computer that only Dr Corby had access to. How can we be sure of that?”
“We have a trace from the e-mail server that gives us the Internet address of the computer the mail was sent by.”
“And only Dr Corby had access to that machine?”
He started to explain how the Internet addresses are allocated and that Corby was the administrator for the segment where his private machines were and so on, but she cut him off.
“Are you saying you don’t have a record of which of those machines the e-mail came from?”
“I’m saying it was one of Corby’s machines. He had over three hundred of them, mostly obsolete and a health risk, which is why we had to dispose of them. It doesn’t make any difference which particular machine it was. He controlled it.”
“Yes,” Jackman cut in. “We can show conclusively that all those addresses were allocated to him.”
“Sergeant Jackman, I’ve already asked you, in our session with Doctor Corby, not to interrupt my interviews.” She turned back to Adrian. “Can you demonstrate that he was the only person with access to those machines?”
“We know that he worked alone. Everyone knew that he was the only one involved in that particular research. It was an unauthorised private project. He wouldn’t even discuss it with the rest of the staff, let alone the students he was supervising.”
“And you could state under oath that he had not involved anyone else? Those students, for instance?”
“Clearly he was the only one with the motivation, but it might be hard to be that definite. He was a loner. I don’t think anyone would want to help him and I’m sure it’s true, but since the computers are no longer available, it’s hard to prove conclusively.”
“Very well. Let’s leave that for the moment. What was the function of the virus?”
“That’s hard to say. What we know for certain is that he loaded a program – the virus – onto a server and, as a result, the contents of the machine were erased. It looks as if that was simply revenge because he was turned down for a research grant.”
“But how do you know that’s what he intended? You seem very sure of his motivations.” She glanced up from her notes and took off her glasses to look him in the eye.
“Er, we can infer intent because he used a false name to send out the original e-mail. He was aware that he didn’t have authorisation load things onto that computer.”
“That’s as may be, but might he not have thought the program he loaded was innocuous?”
“He’s a clever man – a computing expert – who’s has been behaving psychopathically, assaulting people. I’m sure he would have known what he was doing.”
“Assaulting?”
“He even attacked me.”
“He assaulted you? Was that in connection with your involvement in this investigation?”
“Mrs Weston,” Sergeant Jackman interjected. “Mr Fielding isn’t accused of anything. This hostile questioning’s totally unnecessary. In London we’d have gone ahead without this level of antagonism.”
“I don’t care how things are or aren’t done in London, Sergeant. This is nothing compared with what a defence barrister would do. Even if we think that Dr Corby probably did intend to cause criminal damage, I don’t see how we can prove it. And without that, I don’t see how we can prosecute. Thank you very much for your time, Mr Fielding. Sergeant Jackman will see you out.”
Jackman looked as if he wanted to argue but thought better of it.
“Stupid, negative cow! Didn’t even look at most of the file. Nothing on his prior associations.” The door banged to behind them.
“So you can’t charge him?” What a fiasco!
“Without her say-so? No.”
“And he gets away with it? Surely that can’t be possible after all the work we’ve put in?” And the obstacles overcome to get the University to involve the police at all!
“Sometimes you have to accept you’re on a loser.” They walked a few paces. “But this isn’t one. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Where the lawyers haven’t got the balls to do what needs to be done.”
They went on down the corridor without speaking and Adrian decided not to press him further. At last they came to the glass security doors at reception.
“Thanks for coming down and all your help.” Jackman held out his hand. “I need to talk to someone down South and I’ll let you know how it goes. If things work out, you’ll need to tell them the story too.”
“You’re on, Prof.” He’d taken to calling Adrian ‘Prof’. Adrian had corrected him the first few times but it seemed to amuse the sergeant to continue. Perhaps he just knew the future of the department? Adrian smiled at the thought, picked up his bag and followed him out into the corridor. The police HQ was a bit of a labyrinth – corridors with offices and interview rooms so you had to pass through security doors every few feet. They headed down a flight of stairs and Adrian glanced to his left through the glass and wire mesh of a security door. Two men were walking away from him down a long corridor.
There couldn’t be two gangling beanpoles with that wig-like hairstyle. The dreaded hacker was clearly on his way back to the cells. Where he belonged.
“Have they been interviewing Corby?” Adrian thought he’d better not use the word ‘questioning’ even if Jackman was on the side of right and justice.
“Yes. Prosecution Service bending over backwards for him.”
“But they’re still going to prosecute?”
“I’m relying on you, Prof. The lawyer’s a bloody-minded bozo.”
They went into the room where a couple of uniformed policemen and a woman in a business suit were sitting at a table. Some intros – the woman was Mrs Weston from the Crown Prosecution Service – and she started to grill him.
“You’re the University representative? What is your precise role in this investigation?”
Adrian explained that he’d volunteered as an IT expert because the technicalities were quite complex.
“One of the key points we would have to prove is that the fake e-mail originated from a computer that only Dr Corby had access to. How can we be sure of that?”
“We have a trace from the e-mail server that gives us the Internet address of the computer the mail was sent by.”
“And only Dr Corby had access to that machine?”
He started to explain how the Internet addresses are allocated and that Corby was the administrator for the segment where his private machines were and so on, but she cut him off.
“Are you saying you don’t have a record of which of those machines the e-mail came from?”
“I’m saying it was one of Corby’s machines. He had over three hundred of them, mostly obsolete and a health risk, which is why we had to dispose of them. It doesn’t make any difference which particular machine it was. He controlled it.”
“Yes,” Jackman cut in. “We can show conclusively that all those addresses were allocated to him.”
“Sergeant Jackman, I’ve already asked you, in our session with Doctor Corby, not to interrupt my interviews.” She turned back to Adrian. “Can you demonstrate that he was the only person with access to those machines?”
“We know that he worked alone. Everyone knew that he was the only one involved in that particular research. It was an unauthorised private project. He wouldn’t even discuss it with the rest of the staff, let alone the students he was supervising.”
“And you could state under oath that he had not involved anyone else? Those students, for instance?”
“Clearly he was the only one with the motivation, but it might be hard to be that definite. He was a loner. I don’t think anyone would want to help him and I’m sure it’s true, but since the computers are no longer available, it’s hard to prove conclusively.”
“Very well. Let’s leave that for the moment. What was the function of the virus?”
“That’s hard to say. What we know for certain is that he loaded a program – the virus – onto a server and, as a result, the contents of the machine were erased. It looks as if that was simply revenge because he was turned down for a research grant.”
“But how do you know that’s what he intended? You seem very sure of his motivations.” She glanced up from her notes and took off her glasses to look him in the eye.
“Er, we can infer intent because he used a false name to send out the original e-mail. He was aware that he didn’t have authorisation load things onto that computer.”
“That’s as may be, but might he not have thought the program he loaded was innocuous?”
“He’s a clever man – a computing expert – who’s has been behaving psychopathically, assaulting people. I’m sure he would have known what he was doing.”
“Assaulting?”
“He even attacked me.”
“He assaulted you? Was that in connection with your involvement in this investigation?”
“Mrs Weston,” Sergeant Jackman interjected. “Mr Fielding isn’t accused of anything. This hostile questioning’s totally unnecessary. In London we’d have gone ahead without this level of antagonism.”
“I don’t care how things are or aren’t done in London, Sergeant. This is nothing compared with what a defence barrister would do. Even if we think that Dr Corby probably did intend to cause criminal damage, I don’t see how we can prove it. And without that, I don’t see how we can prosecute. Thank you very much for your time, Mr Fielding. Sergeant Jackman will see you out.”
Jackman looked as if he wanted to argue but thought better of it.
“Stupid, negative cow! Didn’t even look at most of the file. Nothing on his prior associations.” The door banged to behind them.
“So you can’t charge him?” What a fiasco!
“Without her say-so? No.”
“And he gets away with it? Surely that can’t be possible after all the work we’ve put in?” And the obstacles overcome to get the University to involve the police at all!
“Sometimes you have to accept you’re on a loser.” They walked a few paces. “But this isn’t one. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Where the lawyers haven’t got the balls to do what needs to be done.”
They went on down the corridor without speaking and Adrian decided not to press him further. At last they came to the glass security doors at reception.
“Thanks for coming down and all your help.” Jackman held out his hand. “I need to talk to someone down South and I’ll let you know how it goes. If things work out, you’ll need to tell them the story too.”
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