Carte Blanche - Jeffery Deaver [134]
In addition, I have a plan for a similar device that would extract data from hard drives before they are destroyed. I believe it’s possible to create a machine that would break apart laptop or desktop computers, optically identify the hard drive and route it to a special station where the drive would be temporarily connected to a processor in the destruction machine. Classified information could be copied before the drives were wiped and crushed.
He recalled his tour of Green Way and Hydt’s excitement about the automated computer destruction devices.
In a few years that will be my most lucrative operation.
Bond read on. The document-shredder scanners were already in use in every city where Green Way had a base, including at top-secret Serbian military facilities and weapons contractors outside Belgrade.
Other memos detailed plans to capture less classified but still valuable documents, using special teams of Green Way refuse collectors to gather the rubbish of targeted individuals, bring it to special locations and sort through it for personal and sensitive information.
Bond noted the value of this: he found copies of credit-card receipts, some intact, others reconstructed from simple document shredders. One bill, for instance, was from a hotel outside Pretoria. The card holder had the title ‘Right Honourable’. Notes attached to it warned that the man’s extramarital affair would be made public if he didn’t agree to a list of demands an opposing politician was making. So, such items would be the ‘special materials’ Bond had seen being shipped here in Green Way lorries.
There were also pages upon pages of what seemed to be phone numbers, along with many other digits, screen names, pass codes and excerpts of emails and text messages. E-waste. Of course, workers in Silicon Row were looking through phones and computers, extracting electronic serial numbers for mobiles, passwords, banking information, texts, records of instant messages and who knew what else?
But the immediate question, of course: where exactly was the Cutter going to be detonated?
He flipped through the notes again. None of the information he’d found gave him a clue as to the location of the York bomb, which would explode in a little over an hour. Leaning forward over a work table, staring at the diagram of the device, his temples throbbed.
Think, he told himself furiously.
Think . . .
For some minutes, nothing occurred to him. Then he had an idea. What was Severan Hydt doing? Assembling valuable information from scraps and fragments.
Do the same, Bond told himself. Put the pieces of the puzzle together.
And what scraps do I have?
• The target is in York.
• One message contained the words ‘term’ and ‘£5 million’.
• Hydt is willing to cause mass destruction to divert attention from the real crime he intends to commit, as with the derailment in Serbia.
• The Cutter was hidden somewhere near March and has just been driven to York.
• He’s being paid for the attack, not acting out of ideology.
• He could have used any explosive device but he’s gone to great trouble to build a Cutter with actual Serbian military designations, a weapon not available on the general arms market.
• Thousands of people will die.
• The blast must have a radius of 100 feet minimum.
• The Cutter is to be detonated at a specific time, ten thirty a.m.
• The attack has something to do with a ‘course’, a road or other route.
But rearrange these ragged bits as he might, Bond saw only unrelated scraps.
Well, keep at it, he raged. He focused again on each shred. He picked it up mentally and placed it somewhere else.
One possibility became clear: if Hydt and Dunne had re-created a Cutter, the forensic teams doing post-blast analysis would find the military designations and believe the Serbian government or army was behind it since the devices weren’t yet available on the black market. Hydt had done this to shift attention away from the real perpetrators: himself and whoever had paid him millions of pounds. It would be