The Hurst Chronicles | Book 4 | Harbinger

by Crumby, Robin

  “Only in the movies. With the right checks and balances, it’s simply the natural evolution of man and machine. The sooner we form a symbiotic relationship with technology that benefits all, the better.”

  Zed cast a sideways glance at Gill. “So how does a local girl from Salisbury know so much about all this?”

  “Osmosis. I’ve spent years surrounded by geeks who live and breathe this stuff. We worshipped the evil geniuses. People like Zuckerburg, Page, Brin, Musk. If you want to blame someone for this mess, blame the dumb people who fail to take precautions with their online security. Don’t blame the system, look for the human vulnerabilities.”

  Zed nodded. “The Colonel shares your view. He’s still convinced there’s a mole, someone on the inside. A Snowden or a Manning. This data breach seems to confirm that.”

  “Motivated by what?”

  “The same as ever. Greed, revenge, ideology.”

  “You couldn’t get away with it at Porton. There’s nowhere to hide.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I told you. Fox deployed this experimental AI software a few years back that uses facial recognition to understand the intricacies of human psychology. It assigns every employee with a risk score.”

  “That’s why you were so worried about the CCTV cameras in the canteen?”

  “The system never sleeps. It’s forever analysing our language and speech patterns to figure out if someone might be suffering from depression, anxiety, or exhibiting symptoms of stress. The AI matches everything up with your employee profile, your family, medical history, travel itineraries, home life, hobbies, friends, social media, everything. They monitored everyone, all the time.”

  “Didn’t it worry you that they had access to everything? What about privacy?”

  “We all signed those release forms, traded privacy for security. Gave them permission to search our emails, telephone conversations, meeting notes, expense reports, attendance records and log-in times looking for any telltale signs. Any disengagement, acting out of character, downloading more data than usual, performance issues? Those were the red flags they watched out for.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Human resources took care of the rest. Reassigned or dismissed. Like I said, it only takes one weak link to bring down an entire system. You’d be amazed what you can find on the dark web. Stolen passwords that get you into secure government networks. Happens more often that you realise.”

  “What about Sentinel? You told me it pulled data from hundreds of other facilities and sent it all to the WHO for analysis.”

  Gill cast her mind back. “True, but it never had direct API access. We used middleware to protect the network. I don’t know the full details. It was something Fox helped set up.”

  “How much data are we talking, going back and forth?”

  “I don’t know. Terabytes exchanged weekly? Sentinel tracked over five thousand different strains of influenza worldwide at any one time.”

  “Surely that amount of data whizzing around the internet must have created risk?” suggested Zed.

  “It’s encrypted at both ends. Military grade. Ultra secure. This was the WHO’s showpiece project. Unprecedented access to healthcare systems and hospitals around the world. The entire thing caused quite a stir.”

  “You said before there were teething problems with Sentinel?”

  “Sure. Like any big IT project. Fox had a full-time team of government cybersecurity geeks during the beta phase putting the programme through its paces. It passed with flying colours.”

  Gill pulled out her laptop and fired up the log-in screen. “There are a couple of things I meant to check out.”

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “Sounds silly saying this out loud but, for years now, two members of my team have claimed there was a ghost in the machine. I blamed Fox and MacDonald for being overbearing, but now I’m not so sure. Strange inconsistencies. Sometimes you think you’re going mad, wondering whether people are accessing your secure files. I told them they were being paranoid.”

  “Sorry. Hanging around with me does that.”

  She smiled, navigating through various start-up screens. “Now shut up and let me work, will you? I’ve only got an hour left before we get to Southampton.”

  Chapter 29

  The Mercedes screeched to a halt at the Allied checkpoint just outside Southampton jolting Zed awake. His head rested on Gill’s shoulder. The dry mouth and withering look suggested he’d been snoring. Gill’s attention returned to her work, the laptop screen filled with scrolling lines of code. Their intended route through Totton and the west bank of the River Test was cordoned off with a temporary barrier, forcing them into Redbridge and the container port.

  Sergeant Jones sat up straighter at the approach of a uniformed soldier, his team members reaching for weapons, held out of sight. Zed inspected the ‘bullet proof’ kite mark on the glass in his eye-line. Under the bonnet throbbed a V8 capable of ‘high-tailing’ it out of trouble, as Jones had explained on the outbound journey.

  In the distance, Zed could make out the distinctive multi-coloured stacks of Southampton container port, towering cranes stationary like giant spiders poised over their prize. The British soldier circled their vehicle, cupping his hands, peering at the reinforced plastic trunks in the boot. He tapped on the glass, twirling his finger in the air.

  Jones wound down the driver’s window, handing over his identity card and papers, eyeballing the young soldier as he went through the motions of checking them against his clipboard.

  “Step out of the vehicle, please, Sergeant?” insisted the guard.

  “We have a boat to catch, Private.” His tone firm but friendly. Jones kept both his hands on the wheel, keeping cool, playing for time. Torchlight illuminated the American’s paperwork, the beam searching out the other passengers’ faces. He lingered over Zed and Gill, a fraction longer than the others. Perhaps MacDonald had radioed ahead, after all.

  The guard turned his back, relaying a code response into a hand held radio. A few seconds later, two more soldiers emerged from the Portakabin shelter. One cupped a brew, curious to see what all the commotion was about. There was a brief exchange before the officer rushed inside to make a call.

  Jones reached over, keeping his hands in view, unlocking the driver’s door, ready to exit the vehicle in a hurry. The officer reemerged from the shelter, pointing into the distance. “They’re sending a chopper to take the VIPs back to St Mary’s. You’re to carry on down this road. You’ll see the entrance to the compound up ahead on your right.”

  “We have our own orders. There’s a boat waiting for us in Eling.”

  “This came straight from Major Donnelly. We’ve had reports of rebel activity tonight,” continued the British soldier.

  “VIPs,” whispered Gill, enjoying the attention. The guard raised the barrier and waved them through.

  “You want me to check in with the Chester?” asked Jones, turning to face Zed.

  “No, let’s see how this plays out.”

  “What if it’s a trap?” cautioned Jones. “Or Ephesus talked?”

  “Trust me, Ephesus would never talk. He’d take his secrets to the grave,” reassured Gill.

  “I hope you’re right,” said Jones, pulling up next to the low rise building, in full view of a uniformed woman, watching their arrival, speaking on the phone. “You two stay here. I’ll go find out what’s happening.”

  “I don’t like this,” worried Daniels.

  “We’ll be fine,” reassured Zed. “You worry too much.”

  “That’s my job,” reminded Daniels.

  Jones ordered the two soldiers and Daniels to have a look around, see what they could find, leaving Zed and Gill alone for a few minutes.

  Gill’s face was illuminated by the ghostly glow from scrolling lines of code, trance-like, her eyes flicking down the page, speed-reading blocks of characters and commands.

  “What are you lookin
g for?” asked Zed, fascinated by her powers of concentration.

  “Inconsistencies.” She patted the external hard drive, blinking away beside her. “I’m scanning all the departmental backup files to see if there were any anomalies.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Two terabytes of data to crunch through. May take a while.”

  “They let you take that thing home at night?”

  “It’s all encrypted. Requires a secure key to access. Never outside Porton before.”

  Gill blinked rapidly, refocusing on something outside to give her eyes a break. “You remember you asked me about Sentinel’s APIs and its data management protocols?”

  “Did I?” replied Zed, not remembering that particular line of enquiry.

  “You know, how Sentinel talks to other systems? Anyway, I started looking at the log files showing how much information was going back and forth.” She toggled screens and pulled up a graphical representation. “The chart’s fairly consistent. No obvious spikes, no evidence of any rogue applications piggy-backing.”

  “Spikes for what?”

  “I’m just saying the graph proves that the cybersecurity AI didn’t miss anything major. Having said that, there were a couple of minor blips here and here,” she said, pointing to the peaks of activity level, “but within acceptable ranges.” She noticed Zed’s disappointment. “Wait, I’m getting to the good bit. Then I started looking at Sentinel’s code base. Ran a debugging programme we use to look for any redundant code, basically anything that shouldn’t be there.”

  “You mean like a hidden virus?”

  “No, scans would have picked up a virus. I was thinking more of disused code like you sometimes see in commercial software. Programmers get lazy and leave in code blocks they no longer intend to use because they’re not doing any harm.”

  “Sort of sleeper code?” asked Zed, trying to understand where Gill was going with this.

  “Yeah, kind of. There was a case a few years back when a Russian hacker managed to insert his own code, replacing disused blocks, waiting for an external trigger or pre-defined time to activate. Then the code deletes itself when it’s done whatever it was designed to do. Makes it very hard to detect. The Americans used the same trick when they targeted those Iranian SCADA systems I told you about.”

  “I see.” Zed nodded, not sure he’d really understood what Gill was suggesting. “How long until you’ve analysed the entire code base?”

  “A couple of days, maybe sooner, if I get lucky. I forgot how large Sentinel is. Eighty million plus lines of code, give or take.”

  Zed rested his head back against the seat support, trying to calculate what that volume of code might look like. “Something you said earlier. I want to make sure I understand. You’re saying that Sentinel had access to, not only hospitals and public health data, but also to government facilities like Porton Down, the CDC, the WHO, Fort Detrick, VECTOR, some of the most secure biotech sites in the world?”

  “Correct.”

  “What if a third-party mined all that data? Manipulated it somehow to degrade the world’s response to a pandemic?”

  “Why?”

  “To ensure maximum loss of life. You might reprogramme Sentinel to sow disinformation about vaccination programmes or containment strategies, even treatment plans. Misdirect government resources. Chase white elephants,” said Zed, ruffling his hair, animated by the hypothesis.

  “A global conspiracy? Come on.”

  “Just humour me for a second. Say several environmental groups claimed overpopulation was the cause of climate change and seriously believed stricter population controls are a solution.”

  “Sustainability through depopulation.” Gill laughed. “I can’t think why Greenpeace didn’t choose that as their slogan.”

  “Look, I’m not joking. Is it really such a giant leap? Sometimes scientists forget the numbers in their spreadsheets relate to real lives. A few percentage points translate into thousands more dead and dying.”

  “I suppose we all get desensitised. It’s the same in the emergency services. It’s a coping strategy.”

  “The Russians built a whole industry around producing disinformation, alternative facts and fake news designed to drown out real science. Maybe they hacked Sentinel? Disabled our shiny new early warning system?”

  One of Jones’s men completed his reconnaissance of the car park with a nod to the Mercedes occupants, offering a cigarette. Daniels leaned against the bonnet as the American lit him a cigarette, waiting for Jones to return.

  “Why go to all that trouble?” asked Gill. “Sentinel was doing a great job of failing all by itself.”

  “I thought you were a cheerleader for Sentinel?”

  “Publicly, yes. Privately, I would be the first to admit, Sentinel was hugely ambitious, depending on a whole web of interconnected third party systems, each one vulnerable to human error. Every time a doctor misdiagnosed symptoms of infection, they weakened our collective response. The WHO trained Sentinel to look for harbingers of an outbreak, outlier cases, unusual hospital admissions, localised web searches. Even if the system had worked properly, our response was too slow. We needed to act in real time, to get ahead of any outbreak but our limited defences were swept away by the sheer scale of the thing. There were too many points of failure, even before you got to Sentinel.” Her voice trailed off with a heavy sigh.

  “You’re not to blame, Gill.”

  “We knew it was coming but we still failed.”

  “Trust me, it’s taken years to realise, guilt solves nothing. All those sleepless nights worrying whether you did the right thing. We all start with the best intentions, but it doesn’t stop people we care about getting hurt.”

  She shook her head. “I feel like a total failure. Devoting my entire life to understanding and preventing a pandemic and then it happens anyway.”

  “Listen, we all made mistakes.” She looked up, realising Zed was talking about himself. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the thousands of innocent men, women and children who died in Iraq, because of me. I had a chance to make a difference and I blew it.”

  “You have nothing to feel guilty about.”

  “Doesn’t stop the regret though, does it? I failed to convince the politicians.”

  “How?”

  “A collective failure of intelligence.” Zed laughed at the double meaning. “We could have prevented the whole invasion, if I’d just found proof those weapons were already destroyed. Thousands of Iraqis died because of that.”

  Gill put her hand on his arm, nodding gently. “You said yourself, they were never found because the Iraqis evacuated the entire programme by road and air, to Syria and Russia, right before the invasion.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about that mobile lab and the samples the UN says were airlifted to Boscombe Down. What if Donnelly knew all along, but said nothing? All those years of denial, of disinformation.”

  Jones jogged back into view and wrenched open the driver’s door in frustration. “Heads up. We’ve got company.”

  “Did you get hold of anyone?”

  “No, they’re stonewalling us. Trying to keep us here until the chopper gets here.”

  They could already hear the faint sound of the approaching Merlin sweeping low across the docks, making straight towards them. Gill instinctively logged out of her screen, closed down her laptop, disconnected the portable hard-drive and hid them at the bottom of her rucksack. Zed followed suit tidying away the reports laying unread on his lap.

  They all got out of the car to admire the helicopter’s landing in the deserted car park, shielding their faces from the downdraught. The ramp at the back whirred open as Captain Armstrong and Major Donnelly marched towards them in lockstep.

  “Take those two into custody,” he ordered, pointing at Zed and Gill.

  “On what grounds?” asked Zed, defiantly holding his ground.

  “Espionage, handling stolen documents, falsifying order
s. As for you,” Donnelly redirected his fire towards Gill, “leaving Porton without my permission? You’ll face charges too.”

  Zed caught Daniels’s eye, waiting for his cue. “As for the rest of you, you’re to report immediately to the Chester. Your commanding officer will deal with you. Daniels, you’re coming with us.”

  Jones’s curled lip was as close to insubordination as his discipline allowed. One of the guards secured Zed’s wrists with handcuffs, directing him towards the waiting helicopter. As the hydraulic ramp began to close, Sergeant Jones inclined his head, powerless to stop them. Zed could only hope the Americans would get a message to Colonel Abrahams as soon as possible.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a short crossing over the textured waters of the Solent the Merlin touched down within the security compound of St. Mary’s and Zed was frogmarched to his private office on the second floor of the science block.

  “Open it,” demanded Donnelly, pointing to the antique safe behind Zed’s desk.

  “On whose authority…?” he started.

  “I have a search warrant signed by the Council,” he replied, waving a folded executive order. “We have reason to believe you’re in possession of stolen documents, obtained without permission.”

  “The Colonel gave my investigation full authorisation,” said Zed, reaching for the letter signed by the intelligence officer.

  “That authorisation has been rescinded.”

  Zed thought about appealing to Donnelly’s sense of justice, but realised he was wasting his time. He reluctantly agreed and fished inside his shirt for the key held on a string around his neck. The heavy metal door swung open to reveal dozens of folders and documents to the obvious delight of the major and his female aide. He reached inside for one of the many notebooks Zed maintained to document his research, placing the first stack on the table.

  “Those are private journals.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get them back when I’m done with them. Where did you get these?” said Donnelly, leafing through the United Nations stamped documents written in French.