He found himself a quiet spot in a pub and sat down to think through his proposition, nursing a small scotch and nibbling at some crisps left by the last people at the table.
We think we have a mole. Why do we think that? We think that because a KGB chappie let it slip. Was he qualified to speak on the issue? After all he was only a low level staffer… Low level yes, but he was a homosexual being rogered by someone who was closer to the action. So far so good. Even considering the post Philby-Blunt paranoia, only mild cause for concern, more a call for verification of the story. But when we start looking something is triggered, something larger, because our chap ends up dead along with four other people. Alarm bells ringing at the station house, bloody big bells because not even the KGB will sanction a kill like that. We don’t kill innocents if we can possibly help it, and we don’t kill operatives unless absolutely necessary, and the Kilos are the same. Yet we have four dead. Then I start to look for the mole, the reason for it all – and I find the computer data tampered with, and the only reference point gone. Synopsis is a low level Kilo blurts something that gets himself and four others chopped. The two are not synonymous.
He sat back and sipped the scotch. He rationed himself these days since his wife was dead. There were two reasons he rationalised. One was he became very maudlin when he was drunk – and the other was that his daughter gave him hell for it. She still lived at home, a solidly competent theatre sister at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, an avid theatregoer and currently seeing a bearded lecturer at the Polytechnic. They would be married soon and he was steeling himself for her departure from the house. He would miss her terribly, that he knew, so in deference to that he never drank more than one scotch, not these days. There had been a time when he could nudge a whole bottle, but he was younger then.
Suddenly he smiled to himself. Synonymous? No wonder they’re not synonymous. He congratulated himself with the last mouthful and still smiling made his way to the station.
He sat and looked at her as she spoke, almost mesmerised by her azure blue eyes.
“This system is capable of much more than the operators ever demand of it. Now then, we can’t re-capture what has been purged, but we can recall some segments that were cross referenced.”
“What will that give us?” Arnold asked.
“Depends on what you’re looking for. Probably some dates, maybe a name or two... But there is one facility we can use. When we designed the software, we had a check package. That was so we could actually follow up early entries and ensure they were loaded and accessible from each of the working programmes.”
He smiled and she stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking how nice it is to find someone who speaks English about computers.”
Wendy gave him a look. “We aim to please..” Then she went on, “So, using the check package, we can access the operator security programme.”
“Which will what?”
“Well, it will give you the access code of everyone who has been in for any file. In this case, it will tell you who the last persons were into your dumped area.”
“Won’t that have been dumped as well?”
“Absolutely not. I designed this. This was one of the extras I built in, a three stage security package. Every designer does it, little enhancements that you don’t offer to the user because they would just confuse the working issues. Now, with this, the person who got at the file would have known about stages one and two. Stage three was an extra that none of the operators ever knew about. It’s a pig to get at, however. I’ll need about an hour...”
“And you can give me the name of the persons last into that file?”
“Yes…”
His eyes narrowed. The smell of the quarry was closer now.
“Do it,” he said, “I’ll be next door.”
Feeling good, he got up walked purposely though to the main registry, his thoughts of the night before clear in his mind.
Later that afternoon, armed with possible names, Henry Arnold advised John Burmeister that he was ready to involve the Security Service (MI5) Counter Intelligence – and, at 9am the following morning, a team of three MI5 investigators squeezed themselves into Arnold’s cubby-hole office at Milburn. The phone lines ran hot between the services, the Foreign Office and Special Branch – who wanted to add a member to the team to ensure procedures were followed and the evidence for the courts was both conclusive and irrefutable. Technically it was now MI5’s case, but Callows applied pressure to allow Arnold to stay in to the kill, both for the inter-service kudos and to be sure that the job was done properly.
The prime suspect was a thirty-two year old woman who had been employed in Century main registry for six years. Her name was Meredith Jane Mortimer and she was still resident, Special Branch had established, in Datchet near Windsor. Suspect number two was the Head of Registry, but virtually discounted because his access code was used in programme checks. A team of MI5 watchers was put on Meredith Mortimer while Arnold and the investigators went to work to establish a case.
“Look, all I’m saying is this. We should have been in on this from the bloody start.” The speaker was a big florid man, his red nose bulbous and moving imperceptibly as he spoke.
Arnold looked at him like he looked at dog mess on his shoes. “Just count yourself lucky you’re in at all,” he replied, a six man to the end.
“Look, we have systems. We need a case that will stand up in court with some lefty lawyer trying to rip it
