The Messiah Secret - James Becker [11]
The whole process was automated, and McLeod would only get personally involved if the hacking software he’d designed failed to breach the defences of a particular network. Then he’d flex his hacking muscles and spend a pleasant few hours working out how to get inside that system. But normally, he just scanned the results when they were displayed on his monitor, weeded out the obvious rubbish, and sent the rest up to Donovan’s workstation on the top floor of the building.
Because it was a Monday and the offices had been closed since Saturday morning, there were dozens of results to analyse. As usual, most of them were of neither interest nor relevance, but when McLeod looked at the nineteenth search result he sat back in his seat and whistled.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he muttered to himself.
He checked the source of the data, but that turned out to be no surprise at all. He’d seen immediately that the information had been posted on the front page of a small local newspaper, and the version his proxy had located had been in the on-line version of the journal, hosted on an entirely unprotected server.
McLeod read the article in its entirety, and one short paragraph caught and then held his attention. He sat in thought for a minute or so, then clicked his mouse button a couple of times to bring up an internet search engine. He entered a simple search term and looked at the results, which gave him the name of the website he was interested in. He opened up one of the hacking programs he’d written himself and started probing the distant server, looking for a way inside. There was something there he definitely needed to get a look at.
In less than fifteen minutes he was looking at a list of police case files, listed by number. Then he changed the parameters and generated an alphabetical list of the names of the claimants or victims. Most of the files were small, the incidents fairly pedestrian – muggings, car thefts, burglaries, and so on. And then he saw something big. There were numerous statements, reports by the attending officers, forensic analyses and the like, and a whole sheaf of crime-scene photographs, all neatly labelled and catalogued.
He flicked through the forensic stuff until he found the one that related to the paragraph in the newspaper story, and made a copy of it on his hard drive. Then he glanced through everything else he’d found, and despatched the original newspaper report up to Donovan’s computer with the rest of the stuff. When his boss got in, he guessed he’d get a call.
But he had a completely different recipient in mind for the forensic report he’d copied from the police database.
4
Two hours later, Angela had turned off the M25, where the traffic was actually moving, for a change, and was heading up the A10, the old London Road. Her satnav had protested when she made the turn, but she’d decided to take the scenic route because she had two ulterior motives. First, she wanted to treat herself to lunch in a country pub somewhere, and there were no such facilities on the M11. And, second, she wanted to be able to stop somewhere and ring her ex-husband, Chris Bronson, to explain why she’d be out of town for the rest of the week. She’d called his mobile from her flat in Ealing before she left, but it had gone straight to voicemail. Knowing Chris as well as she did, she knew she’d be able to reach him at lunchtime.
Nearing the village of Wendens Ambo, she spotted an old pub and parked her Mini in one of the few remaining spaces in the front car park.
She ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of Perrier, and carried the drink over to a seat right beside a window that overlooked the main road outside. While she waited for her food to be served, she pulled out her mobile. This time, Bronson answered almost immediately.
‘Hi, Angela. Where are you?’
‘How do you know I’m not in my office, slaving away over a broken pot?’ she said, a little annoyed with herself for feeling pleased to hear his voice.
‘I’m a detective, remember. Actually, I