Caleb sat in the stillness, having paused the projector the moment Waterman left.
In front of him, the frozen image of the young girl stared at him.
Caleb wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and took a third shaky breath.
That face.
There was something about it he couldn’t fathom.
It was enough to pull him from his pain.
Throughout the film, the girl had remained a mystery to him, despite his best efforts. Everyone else he turned his formidable attentions to was an open book, and yet this child was an enigma. Her face remained a two-dimensional representation, pixels on a screen, announcing … nothing.
What did the adult she was to become want? This was Waterman’s question. Caleb stared at the picture, his eyes sliding off the screen each time, failing to find a purchase. He literally had no idea.
He toggled the remote control and tightened the image on to the locket. There was a design on the front he didn’t recognize, multi-coloured concentric circles. And some form of writing on its underside. He froze the image and saved a copy, tightening the resolution.
It was a number string.
515195140126923.
The numbers meant nothing to him.
He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose and then checked his watch.
He was running out of time. He needed to start.
He bent forwards, looking at the raised platform that housed the remote control and projector. It was covered in the same fabric that carpeted the floor. He reached out and felt along the seam until he found a patch that was loose enough to slide his fingers under. He gripped the end and tore it from its base, skinning the platform of its covering and exposing what lay beneath.
The projector was housed in a plastic casing bolted down by four screws. Caleb took a pen from his pocket and pulled the clip from the cover. The bevelled edge had served him well before in similar situations and he slid it into the cross-groove of the nearest screw and began to twist.
Once the four screws were removed, he placed them carefully in his pocket and lifted the shell up and away from the projecting unit. As he hoped, there was a USB port next to the projector that had been hidden by the cover.
Caleb pulled a wired USB silicon roll keyboard from his inside jacket pocket and plugged it in.
The keyboard and USB connection would give him the ability to interact with the processing unit of the projector, but not much more. In order to be able to access the main neural network in the facility, which was his intention, the reason he was here today, something just short of magical was needed. A series of siege-busting weapons would be required to plough through the fierce firewalls that ringed the virtual city walls of the military facility.
Caleb pulled out the flash drive from his pocket and plugged it into the port in his keyboard. The top of the drive glowed white as it whirred and disgorged its contents into the wafer-thin processor attached to the keyboard, along the USB wire and into the projector unit, like a syringe of nanites injected straight into the bloodstream of a sleeping patient.
Caleb knew the facility had the most vigorous virus checks on the planet.
But no alarms would be triggered if no virus existed.
Like the Stuxnet virus, which infiltrated and attacked the Iranian nuclear facility in 2010, Caleb had carefully built the virus in three separate parts – a worm that drove the attack, a rootkit that hid its nature from those watching and a link file that automatically replicated copies of the worm.
The three parts tunnelled in separately, below the watchful gaze of the defence systems, and only assembled once they were inside the firewall. Even now, they were spreading through GCHQ’s neural system, replicating like germs working their way through a host body, seeking control centres and modifying codes to build a bridge through which Caleb could enter.
The risks were high, Caleb knew. The consequences of breaching the Official Secrets Act were serious. They would throw him into a secure military cell whose walls he could touch with both arms spread wide and leave him there for decades.
But it was worth it.
Waterman had given him the idea, when he told Caleb he had been vetted.
The test administered by GCHQ and the other arms of British military intelligence to vet citizens was the most comprehensive in the world. The data points harvested on each person covered almost every aspect of their psychological make-up and personal history. This data would reduce the margin of error for review to almost zero. With access to their vetting files, Caleb would be able to search for those with the same skills as himself. If he couldn’t find anyone here, then he might as well shut up shop.