Bridge had first met Lisa on her only trip to Telehouse, and a couple of times since at joint briefings. Her primary impression was of a woman who didn’t talk much, and didn’t like being told what to do. At first Bridge had taken against that, but after some reflection realised her own colleagues could just as easily say the same about herself. Besides, Monica knew and trusted Lisa. So Bridge sent her the files, and briefed her via video link. Lisa was sceptical of the whole operation, but would keep an eye on things while Bridge was otherwise occupied.
And as she was given le grand tour around the Guichetech/Exphoria offices, Bridge could see she really would have her hands full for a while. The site manager, the MoD civil servant spoken of in London, had welcomed her to the facility before immediately excusing himself from showing her around. His name was James Montgomery and he oversaw day-to-day operations, assigned tasks to department managers, supervised staff hiring and firing (although with a project like this, unproductive members were more likely to be shunted somewhere unimportant than outright fired, for security reasons) and reported back to Chisholme’s department in Whitehall. Bridge knew from his file that Montgomery was an officious man, a former SPAD to the Secretary of Defence, with an especially good reputation for his paperwork. And no doubt, there was plenty of that paperwork to go round here. But she also got the impression most of his colleagues were more than happy for him to work somewhere else, where they wouldn’t have to deal with him.
It fell to Montgomery’s deputy, François Voclaine, to show Bridge around. He complained under his breath in French that he had much more important things to do than be tour guide to a jumped-up secretary, but nevertheless gave an insincere smile and ushered her through the offices in merely adequate English. She would have understood him better in French, but neglected to tell him that just yet, preferring instead to let him stumble his way through the tour while muttering and grumbling uninhibited to himself.
Security inside the offices was more impressive, and modern, than outside. Every room and department was sealed off by windowless soundproof security doors, and entered with keycards that were renewed weekly. Most offices contained no more than half a dozen people, while the largest space housed just twenty coders, and Bridge noticed there were even some single-person rooms.
“Why are these men working alone?” Bridge asked her guide. All the single-office occupants were indeed men.
Voclaine shrugged in reply. “They make work better alone,” he said. “Many are the elite code writers, who do not have need to be part of a group. Some of the men are not pleasant. Some are both.” Antisocial hackers were nothing new to Bridge, but she nodded firmly, as if digesting this information for the first time.
In the multi-occupant offices, everyone’s workspace was arranged to prevent staff from being able to peek at each other’s screens. From what she saw, it would be extremely difficult to see what your next-door neighbour was working on without them, and everyone else around you, knowing it.
“How flexible are your working practices?” Bridge asked. “Can staff work where they prefer?” She knew the answer, but it was the sort of thing an HR inspector would ask.
“No,” said Voclaine, full of contempt, “everyone is to stay at their desk, and using only their computer. For the security, so these files do not have need to be moved.”
So there was no ‘hot desking’, where staff might carry their own files with them on a thumb drive and plug in to whichever computer was available. That was good for security, and as they went from office to office, Bridge guessed the working files didn’t live on individual computers. The coders appeared to be operating dumb terminals, linked to a server where the actual data was held. That, too, was good. It would always be easier to secure half a dozen servers and backups, in a controlled and fixed location, than a hundred laptops moving around a building.
But if data security was this tight, it meant the mole must be clever indeed. To extract and copy files from a secure server, without leaving a trace, took more than plugging in a USB drive and hitting control-C. At some point Bridge would have to take a look at the server logs herself, just to check. But Exphoria operating procedure, which she’d read, dictated the logs be on a constant analyse-and-verify pattern, where unusual behaviour would be automatically flagged up by the server itself, and also double-checked by a rota of human analysts from the coding team once a week. To evade that kind of scrutiny took skill, deep knowledge of a system, and above all a devious mind. The sort of mind that might also come up with the idea of using ASCII art to send encrypted messages.
For the sake of completeness, Voclaine walked Bridge around the entire facility, including the bathrooms and maintenance crew areas. There were ten maintenance and janitorial staff, all French, and by necessity they had access to every room in the building. But what they didn’t have was any kind of system-login access, and like everyone else on Exphoria, they’d been thoroughly vetted. Bridge couldn’t count them out entirely, but it was unlikely any of them would be the mole.
No, the most likely candidates were the coders and their project leads, and that was where Bridge intended to focus. She’d already done some preparatory filtering, and if she had to interview every remaining name on the list in order to find the mole, she was prepared to do just that.
First, though, the tour was finished. Voclaine showed Bridge to her desk
