Caleb leaned back in the chair, running his fingers through his hair in frustration.
It had taken him less than an hour to scour the first file of vetting forms, which covered the bulk of the analysts within GCHQ. He knew he would recognize what he was looking for the moment he saw it. It could be a fact or biographical detail or a pattern that could be seen in perspective, like unfocusing one’s eyes and seeing the rivers that run down the spaces on the page of a book.
But there was no one even close.
He drew back and looked at the other files, which were represented in a three-dimensional bar chart, a series of blocks of different heights clustered together, making Caleb feel like he was on an aerial route over a Manhattan grid of buildings.
By the time he finished with the third file, he was beginning to get concerned. Statistically, he knew that the odds were against him. Less than a million people had security clearance in the UK, so the chances of finding the one in a million were tight.
He drummed his fingers on the side of the chair. He had little option but to proceed at this point, having already taken the risk. But maybe he needed to look more closely at the files before opening them, to see whether the sections under which they were categorized were more likely to contain what he was looking for.
Caleb began to type, his fingers flying over the soft keys, the three-dimensional grid expanding and shifting to display the file names.
And that’s when he saw it.
A set of files with a strange logo on them.
He didn’t recognize it at first. It looked like an error, as if the space key had been skipped, leaving two identical letters squashed together.
Then he realized what he was looking at – an infinity sign.
Most forms of data encryption work through an algorithm that scrambles the text until it becomes a randomized stream of characters. Without a passkey, the data will not yield its secrets.
The initial Data Encryption Standard (DES), smashed with relative ease by hackers, led to a series of innovations designed to advance the standards of encryption. DES became Triple DES; the popular Twofish became Blowfish.
For Caleb, they were as easy to get into as a wet paper bag.
The US government’s Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was the current apex of protection and had not yet been cracked. Or at least was not known to have been cracked, although Caleb knew of several hacker networks that had done so but were waiting for a plum enough prize to steal before alerting the authorities they had the keys to their data kingdoms.
It was AES that wrapped and encrypted each of the GCHQ files.
The hacker methodology was ecumenical to any encryption method. Software targeted the encrypted data by randomly guessing millions of potential keys, and since an incorrect key results in an excretion of nonsensical data, the hacker knows by default that the key just used was wrong. Hacking was literal, every slash and swipe clearing a path forwards through the brush.
It took Caleb less than five minutes to find the key to the infinity sign file.
The data that was produced was less than the other files. A short burst of names and addresses without any other vetting information.
Caleb was about to discard the file and look at the next one when something struck him as peculiar. The list of names seemed strange. None of the first names seemed to be a match for the surnames. Daisy Haddad, Montague Kryzinski. And several of the first names contained curious anomalies in their spelling. Peterr, Simmon.
Considering a fresh approach would be best, Caleb resumed the hacking routine, and a few minutes later, a new set of results was received, also a list of names with no other information.
It was as he reviewed the second set of results that something dawned on him.
This ‘infinity sign’ file might be wrapped in honey.
Caleb had heard of honey encryption before – it was cooked up in a corporate lab somewhere in the US by a group of bearded conservative academics with entire pen sets sticking out of the breast pockets of their short-sleeved shirts. An older nerds’ revenge.
The encryption tool was built with an additional layer of security. When an incorrect key was guessed, the system would respond by sending fake data to the hacker, but data that appeared to be real. Since the data wasn’t a meaningless stream of randomized characters, the hacker wouldn’t be able to conclusively dismiss the recent result.
Without knowing what type of data was enclosed in the protected file, it was impossible to know what was real and what wasn’t.
The only option Caleb had was to review each result and search for anomalies, but with hundreds of thousands of keys tried every second, it would be like sifting through a haystack looking for straw-shaped needles.
Caleb stared at the results, lost in thought. There was only one way to crack a file wrapped in honey. He would need to guess the content of the file. If he knew what the file contained, he could separate the false results from the successful hacks.
He rubbed the end of his chin, considering his next step. Waterman would be back soon, and Caleb needed to be disciplined about his search, working through as many files as he could. But the fact that this file was wrapped in honey suggested it contained something more precious than the others. It was the only file protected with the experimental encryption tool.
And he had a clue to what was inside.
The infinity sign.
It could be a reference to many things – indeed it even had a peripheral meaning in coding language. But Caleb kept coming back to the image of the little girl on screen and the mark on her upper arm. The file had something to do with the girl. He knew it. Assuming he was correct, what he needed was some other piece of data which may likely be inside the file, which could be used as a way to test the validity of the data returned.
He picked up the remote and rewound the film, stopping periodically until he arrived at the moment he was seeking.
This is the first test of Orpheus. 30 May 1990.
He stopped the tape and rewound it again.
This is the first test of Orpheus. 30 May 1990.
He pressed the volume button and watched the bars climb on screen, a static din filling the room.
The man’s whisper to the young girl was audible now, but barely.
Happy birthday, by the way.
Caleb paused the tape.
The girl was born on 30 May.
Caleb changed the structure of the hacking code to seek any keys returned that featured 30 May.
He began the hack again and, to his satisfaction, seconds later, the final bar unlocked and a river of code ran down the screen.
He was in.
Hundreds of names.
All women.
He looked at each one, seeking the imprimatur GCHQ used that showed they had been vetted.
But there was none.
Strangely, none of the names were vetted.
Out of curiosity, he typed the first name into Google on his phone. She was a hairdresser living in Richmond. He continued to do this; the second was a lawyer in the City, the third was a flight attendant. They seemed to not have any connection to each other. A random list.
The final Google search caught his eye. The flight attendant’s birthday was listed as 30 May 1983 on her Facebook page.
This must have been the data that had allowed the honey wrap to be removed.
On a hunch, Caleb googled the other two women and checked their social media pages.
They were also both born on the same day: 30 May 1983.
Caleb looked down the list. There were about two hundred and fifty names there. All women. All born on the same day.
He’d stumbled on to a unique file, hidden within the vetting files. A file with no GCHQ employees, no one with security vetting. They were just random women with one thing in common – the day they were born.
He was about to exit the program when a name leaped out at him. It hit him with such force that he felt physically winded and stared at the screen for a full minute before breaking his trance. It was only then that he made the connection with the date.
He recognized the name.
It was Tara’s.