Folios/v7/Time-landscape-2019/MS-149
“Kate,” Matt said, rubbing her shoulder.
“What time is it?” she mumbled. “The meeting doesn’t start until nine.”
“What meeting?”
“The suffragettes, Matthew.”
There was a long pause, and then Matt said, apparently addressing someone else, “She’s dreaming.”
Kate opened her eyes to see who else was in their room, and blinked. Right. They were in Tom’s room, unlocking her aunt Katherine’s laptop.
“Are you awake now?” Matt grinned at her, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “Tom did it! He broke Katherine’s password. We’ve got access to all her files.”
Kate sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Really?”
“Yeah!”
Kate let out a relieved whoop. “Let me see. I can’t believe I fell asleep. Thanks for doing this, Tom.”
“No problem. That’s the good news. The bad news is, well … see for yourself.” Tom gestured for Kate to look at the laptop and Matt pulled up a chair at the desk for her. After she’d sat down, he leant on the back of it, to look over her shoulder.
The C-drive of the laptop was full of neatly labelled folders, of which Kate approved. She was a little obsessed with keeping her own files in order. She was clearly more like her aunt than she had ever realized. She scrolled down the list, scanning for any important ones, her eyes flicking through REPORTS, DATA, PCR RESULTS. She tried to open one, but it came up with an error message. Then she realized what Tom had meant by the “bad news”. A lot of the files were corrupted.
“I don’t understand,” Kate said, trying another file. It opened fine. It was only the files related to Katherine’s lab work which appeared to be affected.
“I think they were destroyed remotely,” Tom explained. “Someone on the same network made sure no one could open them.”
“Can you fix them?”
“No. I’ve tried, but there isn’t enough information left.”
Kate rubbed the back of her neck, and then turned to face him. “So this entire laptop is useless, basically.”
“There’s other stuff on there,” Matt pointed out. “See what’s in her email account.”
She opened the email inbox and then clicked through the most recent emails looking for anything relevant to her aunt’s work. It was mostly filled with newsletters, except for a few with subject lines like “WHERE ARE YOU?” and “RE: Faculty meeting”. She clicked the latter. Apparently Katherine had tried to set up a staff meeting days before her death, but it had been cancelled a few hours before it was held. None of the emails mentioned anything about their plans to steal from the laboratory or about releasing the bacteria, although that probably wasn’t surprising.
“There’s another account. Try that,” Matt suggested, pointing to a subfolder of the inbox. Kate clicked on it, and it opened up the emails for a private address. There were a dozen unopened emails, all identical.
The following message to <home.news@thetimes.co.uk> was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem: 1 error(s): SMTP Server <gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com> blocked sending of email to <home.news@thetimes.co.uk> due to breach of security (Error following higher command). Please do not attempt to resend this message or further action will be taken.
Final-Recipient: rfc822;home.news@thetimes.co.uk
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0 (permanent failure)
Subject: “Research at Central Science Laboratories”
Date: “21 June 2019 18:28:53 GMT”
Dear Editor of The Times,
This message concerns the implications of the work being undertaken at Central Science Laboratories. We are scientists, and over the past few months we have become increasingly worried about the subject of our work.
We are drawing these concerns to your attention because when we have attempted to discuss them with our superiors, they have repeatedly stopped us. We are becoming anxious about the steps they may take to keep us silent in future. If our fears are founded, then CSL is undertaking work which may affect every one of us.
Attached is a copy of our investigations, in which you will see evidence to indicate that CSL is guiding the work of scientists in our laboratory without their knowledge. CSL is creating what we believe to be a highly dangerous and uncontrollable weapon: a bacteria which will destroy the ecosystem and kill every organism it comes into contact with. Once started, it will spread death across the globe with no way to contain it. The creation of such a weapon violates several international laws as well as obvious moral rules. The fact that it is currently being developed in secret implicates CSL in a scandal which should be stopped at all costs.
We are sending this message now because our concerns are being ignored and because CSL is about to mass-produce the bacteria. To reiterate, once released, the bacteria will not stop at international boundaries and it will be impossible to prevent its spread. We will issue more information as soon as we can. This email has been sent to all British newspapers and international news organizations.
We hope that after you read this message you will work to bring this crime to light as soon as possible, and before it is too late.
Regards,
Drs Matthew Galloway, PhD., and Katherine Galloway, PhD.
Folios/v7/Time-landscape-2019/MS-169
There was a moment of horrified silence.
“Well,” Kate said, finally. “They definitely weren’t committing treason, then.”
“Whoever stopped them sending this email must also have destroyed all the files on the laptop,” Tom said. “They had a lot of power.”
“Do you think their bosses at CSL could do that?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The real question,” she said, “is why they did it. Obviously they wanted to stop the Galloways telling anyone about the bacteria. Yet information about it was released after they’d been killed. It was reported in the press. I’ve read the articles. But why? Why kill Katherine and Matthew to keep them quiet and then tell everyone about it anyway?”
“Because after Katherine and Matthew were discovered stealing the bacteria, the CSL had someone to blame,” Matt said, slowly. “Before that, the focus would have been on why the CSL were making this bacteria, but as soon as Katherine and Matthew were branded terrorists, the lab could blame them for everything. CSL could make out that Katherine and Matthew had adapted the bacteria to become a biological weapon and then tried to steal it. CSL were completely innocent.”
Kate stared at him in shock. “But what were CSL planning to do with the bacteria? Why make it in the first place?”
“They never used it,” Tom pointed out. “If CSL were planning something, they never went through with it.”
“That doesn’t matter. We still have to find out what happened,” Matt said. “Katherine and Matthew were just scapegoats. If we know the truth behind what CSL were planning, then we might discover what happened to your aunt and my uncle. We need to find out what exactly happened.”
They worked their way through the rest of the emails in a determined silence.
Folios/v7/Time-landscape-2019/MS-168
“So,” Tom said, opening a new document on his computer. Matt and Kate turned to watch the projection on the wall as he began to assemble a timeline of events. “They start to have suspicions. They do some investigating and find out that there is something dodgy going on with some of the experiments. Then they decide to tell everyone they work with about it. They get stopped by their boss, but must not have liked his explanations because they decide to go public.”
Tom went on, “They write a report. Try to email it to a load of newspapers, but it gets blocked. Somewhere around this time they go looking for more information somewhere – probably their lab. Anyway, then their family finds they have disappeared and their house has been ransacked. Then the newspapers report that they are dead and that they were terrorists.”
“But before they disappear they drop some stuff off at my grandparents’, including this laptop,” Kate interrupted to add.
“Yeah, good point. They must have suspected they would get arrested or something and wanted to protect the evidence. I bet they had no idea that their bosses would be able to corrupt the files remotely.” Tom said as he added this to the timeline.
“Then your grandmothers pestered the lab and CSL sent some soldiers to scare them into silence,” Matt said, and Tom wrote up his words.
“So, what we need to know is,” Kate said, mulling it over out loud, “a) what Katherine and Matthew found after they tried to send that email and b) where they found it.”
“We can probably assume that it was at CSL. That’s where Katherine and Matthew were when they were shot,” Matt said.
“Yes, but were they really killed there like the newspapers said or at a later date?” Kate asked.
“Good point,” Matt said, then added, “We also need to know c) what was done with this bacteria afterwards. If CSL, or whoever, were willing to kill to keep it a secret, then I doubt they just gave in and destroyed it when this happened. We also need to work out how the bacteria got released in the lab at CSL, and whether the Galloways did have anything to do with that.”
“Do we really want to get involved in this?” Tom said, a little apologetically. “I mean, Katherine and Matthew are dead. We can’t help them. And it’s not as if CSL are going to release the bacteria now: it’s been years. Why risk getting killed over it ourselves?”
“The fact that CSL haven’t released it yet doesn’t mean that they won’t. The people who did this could still be out there,” Matt pointed out. “If they were planning to use the bacteria before the war, then there is just as much reason to do that now as there was then. Nothing has changed since then. England is constantly on the brink of war with Europe. There’s nothing to stop CSL releasing the bacteria now if they wanted to.”
“And they’ve had years to finish making it. It could destroy the whole world,” Kate added. “And Katherine and Matthew are family. We have to prove that they are innocent!”
Tom sighed. “You’re right. It’s just a lot more serious than my Spartacus stuff. We really could get killed, if whoever is behind this wants to keep it a secret so badly.”
“We have to investigate it,” Matt said, softly.
Tom nodded resolutely.
They both turned to Kate.
“Let’s do it,” she confirmed.
They were all silent for a moment, and then Matt let out a groan. “Where do we even start?”
“I dunno,” Tom said. “Did you find anything else in the loft? Any memory sticks or anything?”
Kate shook her head. “Nothing like that. Here. This is all there was.” She picked up her rucksack and took out all the documents – the diaries and some old school books – that they’d found in the attic.
Tom flicked through the least glittery of Katherine’s diaries, which chronicled her life, starting with her university years. Kate hadn’t had a chance to look through it properly yet.
“So what does the code say?” he asked.
Kate stared at him. “What code?”
“Code?” Matt repeated, and jumped up to look over his brother’s shoulder. “Oh my God. Kate, it’s in code.”
The last fifty pages weren’t written in Katherine’s distinctive scrawl, but in a neatly written jumble of symbols.
“How did we miss that?” she said, gaping at the page.
“It has to mean something,” Matt said. “Maybe it’ll tell us more about what CSL were up to.”
“We need to decode it. As soon as possible,” Kate said.
“Well, luckily, I have a program which can do just that,” Tom said, grinning. “I think we’ve got our next lead.”