The London Project (Portal Book 1)

by Mark J Maxwell

  ‘White Hat? Doesn’t ring any bells.’ Simon hesitated. ‘Louisa, what exactly did you see when your Portal profile was hacked?’

  She suppressed a smile. So he really was in the dark. ‘I saw a first-person feed from Claire Harris. I believe it was recorded shortly before she died. But for some reason we couldn’t locate her profile.’

  ‘She would have received one as part of the research project.’ Dietrich had been drinking steadily whilst Simon and Louisa were talking, and while he wasn’t quite slurring his words, his voice was thick, like his tongue was too big for his mouth. ‘The research facility operates under its own private subnet, quite distinct from the rest of the Portal network. She would have been assigned a profile as soon as she became a test subject.’

  ‘That would explain how she captured the footage,’ Louisa said. ‘But it doesn’t bring me any closer to finding out who White Hat is, or why he wanted me to come here.’

  ‘You know,’ Simon said, ‘we always considered the possibility the Portal breach was an inside job. But it was argued by Portal’s other security heads in the Applications and Nanoware departments that the tactics used to breach the firewalls indicated the attack originated from outside the network. The perpetrator utilised a massive botnet of compromised devices from across the globe. They argued that if it was an inside job, why would the perpetrator go to such lengths to extract the data through the company firewalls? It would have been much simpler to clone the data internally onto a physical storage medium and then connect it to the global web before transferring the data to China. Now though, I’m leaning towards the inside job theory again. This White Hat has been running rings around Portal techs and cutting through our security like it doesn’t exist. I don’t believe someone from outside the company would have the wherewithal to pull it off. Did White Hat give any indication as to what Dietrich might be able to help you with?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  Simon paused for a second. ‘Claire Harris is the key. There must be some reason why White Hat would want Claire’s treatment exposed. Maybe he’s a disgruntled Portal employee. When Benoit took over from Adam, a lot of the Old Guard were culled and replaced with Benoit’s lackeys. I’m one of the few who remains. If you uncovered the research project as part of an official MET investigation it would be extremely hard to make it quietly go away. We both know how tenacious you are when you’re working a case. You don’t quit until the job’s done. If I was looking for someone to expose a cover-up I couldn’t have picked a better serving detective.’

  Louisa nodded thoughtfully and then looked away, trying hard not to blush. Criticism she could deal with, but she always found compliments hard to handle. ‘Dietrich’s already told me everything he knows about the research project, Simon. I know how Claire died, but I still have no proof of Portal’s involvement in her maltreatment outside the bounds of the experiment.’

  ‘What if you weren’t led here because of what Dietrich knew about the research project, but because of what he could do for you? The only Portal department I have no access rights to is R&D. It’s physically separated from the rest of the company within its own facility. R&D employees don’t mix with the rest of us. If you’re going to find a smoking gun it will be there.’ He turned to Dietrich, who stared back with a slightly glazed expression. ‘Can you get her in, Dietrich?’

  Dietrich thought about it for a moment. ‘Ehh…maybe. Yes, yes! I think I can.’ He stood, swayed a little until he regained his balance, then walked to a set of drawers in the corner of the living room. He came back with a terminal. It was an early model—mostly solid-state with minimal nanoware-based components. He tapped the screen and the device came to life. ‘Let me see. I believe I remember the sequence.’ His face was a mask of concentration as he proceeded to move a finger around the screen in what seemed to Louisa like a random pattern. ‘That should do it.’ He handed it to Louisa.

  The terminal was executing the user registration extension, which ran when the devices were first activated. Completing the sequence would imprint her permanently as the owner. ‘Why would a new terminal help me get inside the research facility?’

  ‘It’s not a new terminal,’ Dietrich said. ‘It’s mine. And when you’ve finished imprinting, it will still identify itself as my terminal and will be managed by my profile. The only difference is you will be able to use it. We built the ownership transfer sequence into the terminals for testing purposes. I should still have an access token for the facility assigned to my profile. The last time I was there was for a tour of one of the new labs. It should be enough to get you inside without tripping the intrusion alarms.’

  Louisa stared down at the terminal in her hand like it was a live snake. Dietrich was suggesting she connect to the Portal network using his profile. It wasn’t exactly profile forging but it was close enough for her to be arrested if she was caught using the terminal back in London.

  ‘Even with the terminal, I can’t see you getting past security,’ Simon said. ‘The facility’s underground, for one thing. There’s only one entrance on the surface and it’s well guarded. The whole facility is layered in the latest generation of sense technology. It’s locked up tighter than Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘No, there might be another way in,’ Louisa said. ‘Claire couldn’t have walked far in her condition. There must be another way in along the tracks from St Pancras.’

  ‘If there is, I know nothing of it,’ Dietrich said.

  ‘There’s one more thing we need to discuss.’ Simon motioned in the direction of the back yard. ‘Kane Shepherd.’

  ‘We’re calling it in, Simon,’ Louisa said. ‘You can’t convince me otherwise.’

  ‘I never thought to,’ Simon said with a smile. ‘But have you considered what you will tell the locals when they arrive? I was here to visit an old friend. Kane pulled a gun on me and I shot him in self-defence. It will stand up in any court of law. But what are you here for, Detective?’

  That gave Louisa pause for thought. What could she say? She was investigating a case she was no longer assigned to? Some mystery man called White Hat told her to come here for a reason she didn’t understand? Witnesses to a homicide without any good reason for being at the crime scene became instant suspects. Simon was a Portal employee with all the legal resources of the company at his disposal. He could be released in a matter of hours. She’d be held for twenty-four hours at least. Especially once they found out she was a MET officer and the DPS were called in. ‘Fine. You’ve made your point. You have a suggestion, I take it?’

  ‘You were never here.’ Simon raised his hands as Louisa opened her mouth to protest. ‘Listen. What do you think’s going to happen when it gets out that Kane is dead? If he was here to cover up the research project, no matter if he was ordered to kill you or if he decided to come after you on his own volition, do you think there’ll be anything left for you to find in the facility when you’re released from custody? Never mind you’ll probably be under tight surveillance from MI6. If you want to get inside the facility, you need to go now.’

  As much as Louisa hated to admit it, Simon made sense. But it would involve her fleeing the scene of a crime, and on top of that, actively using someone else's profile. ‘Why are you doing this, Simon?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why are you helping me? Why do you care about whether I blow the lid on some secret Portal project or not?’

  Simon thought about it for a moment. ‘I’ll be honest. I don’t like the direction the company has taken since Adam died. He would never have let an intelligence service gain a foothold. Portal is too important for Britain for it to be misused by any government agency.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe it’s because I like you.’

  Dietrich chuckled. He was definitely past the point of tipsy now, and heading towards plastered. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me.’ He poured himself another drink. ‘I was inside all day. Never saw a thing. I’ve taken up drinking during the day, you see.’ He waved the near-e
mpty bottle at Louisa. ‘Who would believe anything I say anyway, as drunk as I am!’

  ‘Okay,’ Louisa said reluctantly. ‘We’ll do it your way.’

  Simon nodded. ‘You’ll need to leave straight away. It won’t be long before Kane is missed. Once that happens, MI6 will have a decision to make on whether they’re going to continue backing Portal or not. If they decide the company still warrants their investment, then…’

  Simon trailed off, unwilling to voice his train of thought. He didn’t need to. Louisa knew what he was thinking. They’d be coming after her, and this time she wouldn’t have a tactical support team or Simon there to bail her out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The drive back to the motorway was uneventful, the country roads quiet, but the lack of distraction was both a boon and a burden. Louisa’s thoughts were a dark eddy swirling between Jess, White Hat, Kane Shepherd and MI6.

  She tried to laugh off her fears, telling herself she’d watched too many bad spy films. Besides, MI6 didn’t need to make her disappear. As soon as she switched on Dietrich’s terminal all they had to do was have her arrested. A discredited police detective would no longer be any threat to Portal.

  She debated going to the press with what she knew. Perhaps to a non-Portal-affiliated news network. There were still a few remaining in the UK Portal hadn’t bought over yet. She could leave it up to them to expose Portal’s experiments and go back to looking after Jess. Then she tried to imagine what she would say to them and even to herself it sounded delusional. The ravings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist. God knows there are enough of them in London. She needed hard evidence of what Portal had done to Claire. Louisa couldn’t shake the feeling Simon had held something back. She may have worked with him before, but she didn’t really know him that well. In the MET he’d always kept to himself. He seemed to be friends with Dietrich, though. And he hinted he and Adam had been close. So how come he wasn’t fired with the rest of Adam’s cronies when Benoit asserted control over the company? Had he cut a deal to keep his job?

  A thought occurred to her then that made her heart thump. What if Simon was White Hat? She only had his word Kane was conspiring with MI6 to remove all traces of the research project. What if Simon was behind the cover-up? Kane could have been the one investigating Simon and Portal. Kane was at the professor’s accident, but what if he’d been trying to catch the professor before he bailed, just like her? If the professor’s VANS integration had been tampered with, who was more likely to have done it? MI6 or Portal’s head of corporate security? If so, what was she walking into at the research lab? Maybe that was Simon’s plan—to have her arrested when she was inside the facility with Dietrich’s terminal. Report her for profile forgery and breaking and entering and let the DPS take care of her.

  Her nerves were shredded by the time she reached the outskirts of London. The green fields bordering the motorway had morphed into industrial estates and suburban housing. She needed to concentrate on staying off the grid. No matter who was looking for her, she had to disappear. She’d driven past the garage earlier where her own car was waiting. Louisa couldn’t risk picking it up in case her profile history was being monitored. She tried to recall any cases where suspects had stayed under Portal’s radar, but they were few and far between, and never successful. Her previous attempt to do exactly that had been an abject failure if Simon was right about her mobile being compromised. She’d flung the phone out the window somewhere along the M40.

  She would be scanned by the first sense strip soon. The car would provide no protection. The strips would penetrate the windows with ease. Her coat had a hood and she raised it then and fished out a pair of sunglasses. She looked ridiculous, driving with her hood up and wearing sunglasses when it was dark outside, but if Ouza had managed to avoid getting logged by his history graph then perhaps she could as well. Like the MET, MI6 had full access to the sense logs. If they had a history graph active on her they could easily track her using the strips. She eyed other cars on the road, half expecting to be surrounded by a fleet of sleek vehicles at any moment, a squad of armed men pulling her out of her car and bundling her into the back of a van. That’s if MI6 are really looking for you. Simon, on the other hand, doesn’t need to track you. He knows exactly where you’re headed.

  She agonised over whether to call at the hospital to check on Jess, but decided it was simply too risky. Anyone looking for her would have the hospital staked out. Then she’d never shake them loose. What if they don’t just want to follow you? She’d covered enough homicides over the years to know there were a hundred discrete ways of killing someone and disposing of the body, and every one was bouncing around inside her skull like balls in a lottery machine.

  Stop it!

  Louisa shook her head to dispel the endless conjecture that was tying her thoughts in knots and leaving her a nervous wreck.

  You’ve decided on a course of action. Get a grip and see it through.

  *

  She parked in the same space she used three days previously near the railway service gate.

  Was it really just a few days ago?

  The gate was closed and locked this time. No young constable standing in front of it surrounded by a crowd of news hungry feed freaks.

  She sat for a while to see if another car appeared, but none did. No-one seemed to be physically tailing her, at least. She checked her watch. It was half past ten. The final train of the day trundled past, heading for St Pancras.

  The gate turned out to be surprisingly easy to climb, even with her current lack of mobility. Louisa pulled herself up using a metal crossbar and then balanced on it before throwing a leg over the top. Her confidence flagged when she considered the height of the drop on the other side. She tried to lower herself down to minimise the length of the fall but when she hit the ground her leg gave way. The now-familiar jolt of agony stabbed into her hip as she ungracefully collapsed onto her side, jaw clenched and eyes watering. She sprawled on the gravel path, taking slow and even breaths, waiting for the pain to subside, then she rolled over onto all-fours and pushed herself up onto her feet.

  Louisa paused briefly at the spot where Claire’s body had lain. There was no sign forensics had ever been there. It wasn’t lost on her that she was likely retracing the path Claire took before she died. In the state Claire had been in, barefoot, exhausted and injured, she wouldn’t have been able to walk far.

  She kept an eye out for fresh graffiti, hoping she’d spot some new handiwork from Sam and James, but it was too dark to know for sure. She couldn’t help but smile remembering their stubborn belligerence in the face of that asshole of a sergeant. She wished she had half their gumption.

  Louisa kept her head down as she passed beneath an overpass, recognising it as the one where a sense strip had scanned Claire.

  The tunnel’s mouth was larger than she remembered. Inside, it was lit by long fluorescent tubes. A raised concrete walkway ran along the left-hand side of the tunnel. Rusted iron rungs were embedded into the brickwork at the end of the walkway and she gingerly hauled herself up onto it.

  After a few minutes Louisa rounded a gradual curve in the track and spotted a metal barrier up ahead along the edge of the path. She picked up the pace, excitement growing. Sure enough, she spied a door set into the tunnel’s bricks, flush with the wall.

  Her enthusiasm waned when she saw no obvious means of opening it. No handle, no lock, no sign indicating what was on the other side. She felt along the edge for a gap but there was barely a seam showing between the door and a metal frame. There was no way she could prise it open.

  Louisa peered further up the tunnel. There was a straight section ahead for at least half a mile. As far as she could tell the tunnel’s walls were unbroken with no sign of another barrier or doorway.

  Stupid! She thumped the door in frustration. It responded mockingly with a dull clang.

  What did you think would happen—there would be a glowing Portal sign and ‘abracadabra’ the d
oor would swoosh open when you walked up? It’s a high security facility for god’s sake.

  Her head felt fuzzy. She leaned back against the door and slid to sit on the ground. How much sleep had she had in the last three days anyway?

  Coming here was a fool’s errand.

  She felt a sudden need to call John, to check up on Jess, but she’d thrown away the mobile phone. She took out her terminal. All she wanted to do was go back to the hospital, lie down beside Jess and sleep until everything was all right again. Louisa stared at the screen. She couldn’t quite bring herself to activate it. They’ll know where you are the instant you do.

  There was always Dietrich’s terminal. But then you’d be breaking the law. She looked back down the tunnel. There wouldn’t be a train leaving St Pancras for hours yet. The line was deserted.

  To hell with it.

  She took out Dietrich’s terminal and double-tapped the screen.

  She paused, looked around again. No sirens. No squad of heavily armed MI6 agents.

  The device initialised with Dietrich’s personal configuration. She navigated her way through the unfamiliar UI skin and layout. It felt strange using someone else’s profile—like wearing their clothes, nothing fit quite the way it should.

  She recognised a few of his extensions. Standard ones, like ID broadcast and general communications. She activated the latter and a list of Dietrich’s contacts appeared.

  Shit, what’s John’s Portal ID code? She never had to remember it before. It was always in her contacts. He might not even answer anyway. He won’t recognise Dietrich’s ID.

  Wait a minute—Dietrich’s ID! Could it be that simple? She tapped the ID broadcast icon.

  Nothing.

  There was a soft click from behind her. The door shifted suddenly and Louisa felt herself falling backwards. She flung out an arm and managed to grab hold of the doorframe. She twisted around. The door was open! It had moved back and slid into a recess in the wall.