Campbell moved on to the analysis of Admiral Rao’s mail archive. Most of the mails were to her secretary or chain of command. That’s not what he was interested in anyway. He wanted to see where those messages got forwarded.
As expected, Rao’s secretary, was a major connection from Rao’s office to people all over the CSF operation on Bliss. This was to be expected, and was a pattern he had seen on other planets without Bliss’s problems.
He searched Rao’s archive for ‘exercises’, then examined the hits to see which mail was the first to mention the recent exercises. He needed the date. He then went back to the mail analysis to show just the mails from the week after that date.
What Campbell was looking for in all this was low-hanging fruit, something that stuck out to him as unusual. He was relying on his experience of having done similar analyses on planetary headquarters operations before.
But nothing stuck out to him yet. Everything looked like the standard chaos of human interaction within a hierarchy. What he was looking for and did not see was the unusual pattern, the structured piece that didn’t fit the chaos. It should tie in with one or more of his suspects.
Maybe this group was more disciplined, and didn’t use electronic messaging, but the speed of response in swapping his lamps back made that unlikely.
Clearly more and deeper analysis was needed, but the low-hanging-fruit look-see was first. Sometimes you got lucky.
Campbell checked the time, and walked over to the Officers Mess for lunch.
After lunch he went back to his office in the Planetary Intelligence Headquarters. He was puttering away at some accounting statements when Lieutenant Commander Acheson tapped on the doorframe and walked in.
“Good afternoon, Sir.”
“Ah, Commander. There you are. I was looking into clubs on base over at the Planetary Operations Headquarters this morning, and you know what? They have an astronomy club here. Isn’t that great?”
“An astronomy club, Sir?”
“Yes. An astronomy club,” Campbell said. “I’ve always liked astronomy. It’s one of the reasons I joined the CSF. But planetary staff assignments don’t have anything to do with astronomy, and warships don’t have windows. Just displays. So it’s been an unfilled desire of mine.”
“I see, Sir.”
“Commander, I was going to ask you. Do any of the consulates here throw parties?”
“Parties, Sir?” Acheson asked.
“Yes, parties. The embassies on Jablonka have the most wonderful parties. Of course, Jezgra’s the capital of the Commonwealth, so those are embassies, not consulates. But there’s also a lot of brass on Jablonka, so I usually can’t manage an invitation. I was wondering if any of the consulates here throw parties like that. As a Senior Captain, maybe I could wangle a few invitations.”
“Well, I imagine the consulate parties here are less elaborate affairs than the embassy parties on Jablonka, Sir, but I can look into it.”
“Wonderful,” Campbell said. “Please do, Commander. Nothing like a few nice parties to lift one’s spirits on a boring assignment.”
Campbell left early. He told Acheson he was going to walk, stopping by the Officers Mess, which was on the way, for supper.
After supper, Campbell walked over to the Planetary Operations Headquarters and went down to his secure workspace. There was another wrinkle he wanted to look into.
The personnel records for Intelligence Division often had two parts. The unclassified front part included most of the normal personnel data. Rank, years in the service, decorations received, listed companions, if any, pay grade – all that sort of thing. The classified back part included confidential information – like current assignment, training, certifications. In such cases, the front part had the notation “Other Information Classified” where that information would normally appear. Other Intelligence Division personnel had normal personnel files, without the back part. All their current assignment, training and other information was there on the front page.
But a few people in Intelligence Division had a third wrinkle, the existence of which was itself classified at a high level. Their personnel file was a normal personnel file, without the notation. All the information was there on the front page. Or seemed to be. There was no clue to the existence of the classified back part.
Bill Campbell was one of those few. His personnel file looked completely normal, if rather plebeian. Rank: Senior Captain. Years in Service: 13. Current Assignment: Accounting review of Intelligence Division operations on various planets, per the travel schedule of the CSS Patryk Mazur. Listed Companion: Jan Childers. Training: CSF Academy, with a major in accountancy. Clearance: Sensitive.
Yawn.
The hidden, rear portion of his file included things that overrode the false information on the front. Training: CSF Academy, Intelligence Track; Unarmed Combat School; Tactical Firearms School I & II; Sniper School; Explosives School; Surveillance Electronics School; Computer Intelligence Methods School. Certifications: Unarmed Combat - High Expert; Tactical Firearms - High Expert; Sniper - Expert; Explosives - Expert; Surveillance Electronics - Expert; Computer Intelligence Methods - High Expert. Specialties: Infiltration, Counter-Intelligence, Neutralization. Clearance: NOT LIMITED.
Whereas for a normal two-part personnel record, access was limited to someone with a Top Secret clearance level, only someone with a NOT LIMITED clearance could see the rear portion of personnel files with a false front. Anyone else querying the personnel database would see the front portion only, with no hint a rear portion existed.
And all those accesses were recorded. That’s what Campbell was interested in. Who had accessed his personnel file in the weeks leading up to his arrival, and had anyone accessed the hidden rear portion?
He entered the local copy of the CSF Personnel Division database, pulled up his personnel record, then selected access history. This would not be available to everyone, but it was available to him. He ran it back fourteen months, since before they were assigned on the Grand Tour. This would only show him accesses on Bliss. There were sixteen names listed, including Kyle Acheson, Mary Rao, Sumit Langford, Rita Allyn, and Vasia Haber. Of course, all these people also had a legitimate reason to access his personnel record, but he felt pretty confident one of these sixteen people had to be in the espionage ring.
He pushed into his rear page and selected access history. None. OK, so no one on Bliss had a NOT LIMITED clearance, or, if they did, they were uninterested in one William Campbell. Good.
Campbell isolated each of those sixteen people in the mail diagram, and then highlighted them in combinations, overlapping them in different combinations with the suspects he had highlighted before. Looking for that magic pattern, the one that popped out to his trained intuition, that caught his discerning eye.
He continued working late into the night, walking back to the townhouse about three in the morning. He sent a message to Acheson from his comm that he was under the weather, and not to pick him up that morning. He misspelled ‘weather’ in that message as ‘wether.’
When he got back to the townhouse, he made a lot of noise and staggered as if drunk on his way across the living room. Once out of sight of the visual surveillance, he got ready for bed normally and was asleep within minutes.
A Little Matter Of Death
Bill Campbell got up late the next morning, after a full night’s sleep, and had breakfast at the Officers Mess when everyone else was having lunch. A CSF fleet base always had people coming and going that were on different time zones, both from different locations on the planet and from ships arriving. The messes on base always served breakfast around the clock.
He came into the office after lunch.
“Good afternoon, Sir,” Acheson said.
“Oh, God. Is it afternoon already? I don’t know how those Operations people do it. It must be all that time on ship, standing weird hours on watch.”
“Sir?”
“Never drink with an Operations guy,
Commander,” Campbell said. “They save up all their immunity to alcohol from when they’re on ship and can’t drink anyway.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Campbell went down to the Class 2 secure workspace in the Planetary Intelligence Headquarters, the one he knew was compromised. He needed to do some investigation, and his cover in this case would actually serve for that, and might start making people a little anxious without tipping them off as to what he really was and scattering the rats.
People on military bases died at a higher rate than their civilian counterparts in town. Military bases dealt with big machinery, and weapons, and training in all sorts of dangerous activities, and the people who went into the military were also more risk-taking than the general population. The result was a higher mortality rate for a given age.
The CSF maintained a lot of data about this sort of thing, and Personnel Division did a lot of study of the data to try to minimize the effect, but having a lot of risk-taking young people training in dangerous weapons and big equipment all the time was going to result in a certain number of accidents, and that’s all there was to it.
Those accidents were costly. In addition to the equipment damage, there was the death payment to the survivors and the loss of invested training in the deceased. Such losses were accounted for, and appeared on the accounting records Campbell, in his cover assignment, was reviewing.
But there was another aspect to accidental deaths. Establishing an espionage ring on a CSF planet often took extreme measures. Someone found out what was going on. Someone was in a position where his subordinate was in the espionage ring, but needed to advance to the next position up to have the access he needed to accomplish the group’s goals. In such cases, a fatal accident might be arranged.
Campbell looked up all deaths of CSF personnel on Bliss in the last three years, and compared the death rate per capita to the death rate per capita on other CSF planetary fleet bases. Bliss was toward the top of the range, with three deaths more than the average one might expect.
Going back to the individual deaths, Campbell first stripped out the deaths where the cause of death was listed as disease. He then stripped out the deaths in which the person who died did so as the result of their own actions. He was looking for situations where one person made a mistake, and some other person died. Also deaths due to violence, usually a mugging or rape that occurred off-base.
There were about a dozen such fatalities in the last three years. Again, that number was about three deaths higher than he would expect given the CSF population on-base on Bliss.
He made a mental note to include the people who got promoted as a result of those deaths in his suspect list.
It was time to generate a little concern among the conspirators.
It was late afternoon when Campbell went back up to his office. He buzzed for Acheson.
“Yes, Sir?”
“Commander, the accounting records show costs associated with the deaths of CSF personnel here on Bliss. Those costs, as you may know, are always high. Death benefits, loss of training investment, destroyed equipment – all that sort of thing. One aspect of controlling costs is to get a handle on those things, see if we can’t hold those numbers down a bit. So I need some help with this.”
“What do you need, Sir?” Acheson asked.
“I think one thing is to go see where each of these deaths occurred. You know, go to the site, talk to the supervisor there, see if I can gain any insight beyond what’s in the reports. Do you think we can do that, Commander?”
“I assume so, Sir.”
“All right. Good,” Campbell said. “A few of those deaths were in town, so I suppose I ought to talk to the Joy Chief of Police, and see if he has any insight for me. We should probably arrange that, too.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Campbell handed Acheson a note. “These are the dozen or so deaths I’m most interested in, in terms of their circumstances and associated costs. See what you can set up for me along the lines I mentioned.”
“Yes, Sir,” Acheson said. “Timeframe?”
“Oh, sometime in the next two weeks should be fine.”
“Yes, Sir. I’ll take care of it.”
Campbell left early again, and told Acheson he was heading for the Officers Mess. After dinner, he walked over to the Planetary Operations Headquarters and went down into his Class 2 secure workspace in the basement.
He quickly replicated his earlier work on the local deaths that met his criteria for further investigation. He found the six people who were promoted into positions of authority as a result, and added them to his suspects list.
He then pulled up the mail connectivity diagram and looked at it again, rotating it and highlighting various suspects in combinations. Hmm. Nothing obvious yet. They may have remained disciplined in their communications. Most espionage rings became comfortable as they continued to be undiscovered, and became sloppy.
Campbell tried another tack. Turning someone inside the CSF was sometimes easier if they were originally from the spying nation, and particularly so if they had relatives there who could be threatened or rewarded. He ran a sift over the personnel records for people who were not born on a Commonwealth planet. A large number of people jumped out on the mail diagram. Perhaps fifteen percent. Not unusual, as the CSF was often the easiest way for a new immigrant to get up to speed within the Commonwealth.
What about a further refinement? Bliss had not been a target before it had significantly enhanced its precious metals mining operations. Which Outer Colony planets had the most to lose from that move?
He pulled up an analysis of precious metals mining in the Outer Colonies. Arramond, Duval, Oerwoud, and Wolsey were the big players. They were older than some of the other Outer Colonies, had more investment in system infrastructure and had bigger navies. Duval and Oerwoud were closer to Bliss, while Arramond and Wolsey were on the other side of the Commonwealth. That would be a long reach for an incursion force, making an out-and-back trip without resupply. Then again, some of the Outer Colony worlds had resupply agreements with others.
Sticking with Duval and Oerwoud for the moment, Campbell highlighted personnel who were originally from Duval or Oerwoud on the mail connectivity diagram, then added his suspect list. He rotated the diagram, inspecting it critically. He paid particular attention to companions, as transferred over from the organization chart program. Was that a pattern starting to emerge? He marked some of the more interesting connections.
He checked the time. 02:00.
Well, he was making good progress in assembling things. It was only the end of his third full day on Bliss.
Rear Admiral Jan Childers, aboard the Patryk Mazur in hyperspace, got a delayed mail from Bill Campbell.
FROM: CAMPBELL
TO: CHILDERS
SUBJECT: BORED
Hi, Hon:
End of my third full day here. Nothing to do. Everyone is still very friendly and welcoming. My work is transparent and obvious. Boring! And no hope it will improve soon.
Love you.
Bill
That was worrisome. Inverting all his sentences as before, the message said 1) he was working wall-to-wall, 2) he had no idea who the threat was, so it could be anyone, 3) he still had no clue what was going on, but 4) he hoped he would be making some progress soon.
Well, no sense worrying about him. He’s a big boy and can take care of himself, Childers thought. I hope.
Follow the Money
Campbell slept in again on Friday, to get his full eight hours. He had again messaged Acheson not to pick him up this morning. He had breakfast at the Officers Mess and then headed into his office in the Planetary Intelligence Headquarters.
“Good morning, Sir,” Acheson said.
“Yes, it’s still morning. You see, Commander. I learned my lesson.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Have you made any progress in setting up those meetings?” Campbell asked.
“Yes, Sir. I’m setting s
everal up for next week. I’m aiming at the afternoons in order to, uh, accommodate your work schedule.”
“Excellent, Commander. Excellent.”
“I also thought we would hold the meeting with the chief of police for last, Sir, after you’ve had the practice of speaking to the others. We probably only get one good bite at that apple, while you can revisit any of the people here on base if you need to ask additional questions.”
“Good. Well done, Commander. Carry on.”
Campbell stuck with his established routine of leaving early, eating supper at the Officers Mess, and then going to his Class 2 secure workspace in the Planetary Operations Headquarters.
There are several ways to turn someone to working for a foreign power, and one was almost as old as government itself. Money. Tonight he was going to follow the money.
Campbell used his clearance and permissions to extract financial data about his growing suspect list from several sources. Spending at the base commissary. Deposits and withdrawals from the CSF Credit Union. Applications for loans, advances, or assistance submitted through the Personnel Division. What he was particularly looking for were people who were having financial problems, or living at one level, and whose financial situation then dramatically improved. As with the death data, he went back three years.
Getting into the financial data around the privacy protections was cumbersome, and each request had to be made individually. For that, he needed a sign-off at flag rank (senior captain or above) and probable cause. As a senior captain, he was senior enough to sign off on his own access. The issue was, did he have probable cause.
It wasn’t something he wanted to screw up, or the perpetrators could be exonerated by exclusion of all subsequent evidence for lack of probable cause. Fruit of the poisoned tree. Any decent defense attorney out of JAG would make that argument whether it was valid or not. That was up to the military court to decide. It was Campbell’s job not to make the argument valid.
Campbell- The Problem With Bliss Page 5