Thirty seconds later Bridge was leaning out of the guest room window, inhaling a cigarette.
The Exphoria logs showed no indication of unauthorised data extraction from the server, and nobody’s terminal had been used to copy any code. There was one incident where a junior clerk had tried to copy a USB stick full of MP3s onto his terminal. But the junior, terminal, and USB stick were all immediately quarantined and investigated, and nothing else was found. He really had just been stupid enough to bring pirated music into work.
There was nothing else. The logs were clean, the security was intact and verified. If the mole was copying data somehow, they had to be an elite hacker in possession of world-class black hat software that could not only break into highly-secure servers, locate the data, de-encrypt it, and copy it to a second location, but do all that without anyone, or any part of the system at any time, noticing it was happening.
Or they could be taking photos of code on a terminal.
Bridge swore under her breath, coughed as she inhaled the very end of her cigarette, and lit another. It sounded crazy, so low-tech and old-school it couldn’t possibly be true. But then, this whole affair was at odds with itself. Passing coded messages online by pairing them with clues inside newspaper crosswords, transferring data by physically meeting a contact, and now stealing bleeding-edge computer code by snapping pictures of a screen.
And yet, was it really that low-tech? This wasn’t a cat burglar sneaking in at midnight with a microscopic camera hidden inside a matchbox and only enough space for ten pictures. If she was right, the mole was using a modern phone camera to take dozens, hundreds, potentially thousands of very high-resolution images, sharp enough that someone else could read them back and type them into another computer. Hell, you could probably automate it, hand it off to an OCR program and let it transcribe the lot. Although, if Bridge were in charge she wouldn’t do that. Recent OCR was much improved from the days of getting schoolboy laughs from trying to read words like ‘flick’ and ‘burn’ from bad photocopies, but it still wasn’t perfect. And for something as error-sensitive as code, she’d want someone familiar with the language doing the typing. That meant a coder, stashed away somewhere, touch-typing what they read on pictures from a phone.
That was how she found the maximum distance: standing one and a half metres from the Dell, with a terminal window open, she could take a photo of the screen that — when zoomed in sufficiently — made every line of her bash session legible. And that was with the cheap HTC phone they’d given her to use while she was undercover. With a better model she could probably stand two, maybe three metres away and get the same results.
It still sounded absurd. She was loath to float the idea to Giles, let alone Dunston, who would probably laugh her out of the room. But the more she thought about it, the more she realised it made a perverse kind of sense. The lack of data breach, the meetings in London…if they were passing USB sticks, they could be filled with photos as easily as code. And by doing physical handovers they were bypassing the cloud completely, which was entirely sensible. Despite whatever public assurances the tech companies rattled off, it was an open secret in the intelligence community that every agency in the world was monitoring cloud activity.
The mole probably also had auto-upload switched off, or could be using a phone with no SIM, completely disconnected from the cellular network. And the lack of CCTV at Guichetech meant that, so long as they took photos while no-one else was physically present, they would be unseen.
Bridge thought of her daily trips through facility security. All handheld electronics were scanned separately, like at an airport, and every day random employees were chosen to be searched more thoroughly. The mole would have to get through that somehow. Security didn’t open and scan everyone’s phone or tablet as they went through the scanners; they were just looking for explosives, contraband, drugs. Still, it would be pretty risky to carry photos like that through on any device. And a USB stick by itself would surely stand out. But if Bridge was right, the mole had already managed to avoid security, and other watchful eyes, many times. So how on earth could she find and track this, to prove her theory?
She took a drag, felt nauseous, and realised this cigarette was now down to the filter too. She tossed it into the night, disgusted with herself, and leaned out to look around at the rest of the guest house. Hers was the only light on this side of the house. If she wasn’t careful, she’d gain the reputation of Crazy Englishwoman Who Stays Up All Night sooner than she liked.
She resolved to call Giles in the morning. With any luck, he’d had a breakthrough in London.
42
“Ah! Excusez-moi, monsieur.” Henri Mourad apologised for bumping into the thickset man, but even as he spoke he knew it wasn’t the man in the photograph.
Henri ignored the man’s obvious disgust at being touched by an Algerian, and resumed his frustrated scanning of the crowd disembarking the Eurostar. He’d rushed to Gare du Nord after a call from Emily Dunston and Giles Finlay in London. He’d worked for her long enough, and taken enough calls from her, to know immediately that Emily was annoyed at Giles about something. Henri wasn’t sure what, until she made a sarcastic remark about ‘new information’, and the way she said it made him realise it was new to her, as well. Giles had a
