Martin Wilmot had left the Dstl at Porton Down some fifteen years earlier and had taken up his present position at Imperial College only three years ago. In truth, what he knew about the TRAIT trial hadn’t even crossed his mind until near the beginning of his relationship with the man calling himself Michael, when Wilmot had decided that the old paperwork covering the subject would be a harmless bit of originally-Secret but now-declassified information that he could hand over. He’d really offered it just to keep the man quiet for another few weeks and had then virtually forgotten about it.
But what Michael had told him had shaken him to his core. Porton Down had abandoned TRAIT both as a concept and as a vehicle not for practical but purely for ethical reasons. Michael had been right about that: TRAIT had worked, and towards the end of the twentieth century the concept had probably seemed to offer a way of helping to tackle one of the most obvious long-term problems facing the human race. But attitudes and ethics change, sometimes very quickly and, at best, TRAIT left a bad taste in the mouth and had been abandoned, the files classified at a high enough level to ensure that they could never be accessed accidentally. The results of the field trial, without which the project’s documentation was clearly incomplete, had been filed away with even greater and higher-level protection. With hindsight, it might have been better for the entire documentation to have been shredded and any electronic records permanently deleted. But research is expensive and always at least potentially valuable, and somebody had presumably decided to retain the data just in case the concept ever needed to be revived. And, perhaps not as obviously, once any material is uploaded to any part of the Internet or even onto a private intranet, it’s almost impossible to delete all traces of it. There are almost always copies or part-copies held somewhere.
Because of his position at Imperial College, Wilmot had access to a huge variety of databases and other resources that were inaccessible to non-academics, and with Michael’s instructions still ringing in his ears, he knew he could access the archive where he knew the files concerning the project had been stored. He hadn’t personally been involved with TRAIT, but he had known something about it from talking to colleagues at Porton Down when he’d been stationed there.
Alone in his office the following afternoon, Wilmot input his credentials into the appropriate database, then navigated through the listings of reams of projects until he identified the one he was looking for. He didn’t download the files, which is what he would normally have done if he’d been intending to read the information or do any work on it, but he did study the summary sheet that formed the first page of the record, something he’d never usually bother to do. It contained exactly the kind of information that he had expected: the date the trial was authorised and the date it was finally abandoned; a one-paragraph summary outlining the aims of the trial; the full filename and number, the unit or organisation responsible for it and a number of other pieces of static information. Below that was a dynamic field that listed the dates the file was accessed and by whom, which was what he had hoped to find.
He glanced back and saw his own access record dated a little under five years previously, after which nobody had looked at it until just over six weeks ago, when it had been inspected by a man named Jefferies working at Cambridge University, and about a month ago by ‘Vernon, Professor Charles H, Dstl’.
And that was not good news.
Twenty minutes later, Wilmot walked out of the building, telling one of his colleagues that he’d be about a quarter of an hour or so, and just wanted to buy a newspaper and grab a coffee. He made his way to a side street about a hundred yards away where he knew there was one of London’s few remaining public phones. He knew that because he had used that same phone before when Michael had demanded contact with him, contact that was too complex to be handled by the very basic code they had worked out between them.
When he turned the corner, Whitmore saw that there was nobody using or near the phone, and he walked straight over to it. He had memorised Michael’s contact number and dialled it as soon as he picked up the handset.
‘It’s me,’ he said when his call was answered, ‘and I’m using a public phone, as you instructed.’
‘What do you have for me?’ Michael demanded. ‘Have you got the information?’
‘Yes,’ Whitmore said, almost hesitantly. ‘Vernon did look at the files about four weeks ago. And,’ he added, uncertain whether he was conveying bad news or worse news, as he took a slip of paper from his pocket, ‘although the file has been archived for years, another academic opened it about six weeks ago. His name is Jefferies, Hubert Jefferies, and he works at Cambridge University.’
For a few seconds there was no response, then Michael uttered a single expletive – ‘Fuck’ – which was the first time Whitmore had even heard him swear or even raise his voice.
‘What do you want me to do?’
It took a few moments before Whitmore realised he was talking into a dead phone.