Chapter 24
‘This is a very nice building,’ said Ezra as he and Henley stepped into the lift that would take them to Soteria’s offices on the twelfth floor.
‘Are you thinking of leaving us?’ Henley asked.
She looked stressed and could easily have blamed her appearance on the cause and effect of working an intense case, but it was more than that.
The internal debate that Eastwood, Pellacia and Stanford had a right to know the truth about Rhimes’s death was exhausting her.
‘Why, do you want me to leave?’ Ezra replied.
‘Fishing for a compliment much,’ Henley said in jest as they exited and began to walk down a carpeted hallway. ‘Didn’t think you cared.’
‘I do have a heart,’ Ezra replied.
‘Of course you do and, for my own selfish reasons, I would hate for you to leave,’ Henley admitted, heading for the empty reception desk. ‘Let’s be honest, you’re brilliant. You could be working somewhere like this and earning double the money the SCU pays you.’
‘Triple and benefits.’
‘Triple! Are you serious?’
‘Serious as a heart attack. Every couple of months I get an email from a head-hunter or the NCA cyberunit wanting to talk to me about exciting opportunities. You’d think they’d give up asking.’
‘They want you because you’re good, Ez. Best of the best.’
‘Thanks, boss,’ Ezra said with both embarrassment and pride. ‘I thought I’d really messed up my life when I got sent to prison. Do you know that I fainted in the dock when the judge said I was going down for five years?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Banged my head on the stupid chair and knocked myself out. I was proper convinced that my life was over, but the worse thing was knowing that I’d disappointed not just my mum and dad but my entire family.
You know what it’s like, boss, there’s a bunch of people out there who think we’re all from broken homes, don’t know our dads and that we’re in gangs stabbing each other up and then what do I go and do?
Get myself a stretch in Coldingley. Became a big ol’ stereotype. ’
‘Don’t ever think of yourself as a stereotype. You made a mistake, but you did your time and, most importantly, you didn’t give up on yourself,’ Henley said as a door behind Ezra opened and a man stepped out, his hands still wet.
‘I am so sorry,’ the man said, stepping behind the desk, wiping his hands along the side of his legs before picking up a headset and placing it around his neck. ‘I was in the … do you know what? Never mind. How can I help you?’
‘Detective Inspector Henley,’ she said as she presented her warrant card. ‘This is my colleague, Ezra Williams and you are?’
‘Ada Payne.’ He peered at the warrant card and then at Ezra with suspicion. ‘And what about your colleague. I need to see his credentials.’
‘He’s with me,’ Henley said in a tone that made it clear the question was moot.
‘Fine. So, how can I help you? There’s nothing in the diary to show an appointment.’
‘I’m investigating a murder, and the victim was being monitored by Soteria. I need to see your director of cybersecurity.’
‘Kaiden Longley,’ Ezra whispered behind her.
‘He’s in a meeting but that should be wrapping up now,’ Ada replied as left his position, with his ID card in hand. ‘I’ll take you through.’
Ada led them through an open plan office that had views of the city of London on both sides.
Henley could feel it as she walked, tension hung heavy in the air, phones were ringing and people raised their heads to watch the unscheduled visitors on parade.
‘Here he is,’ Ada said as a tall man in his mid-forties stormed out of a conference.
‘Kaiden,’ Ada stopped him, leaned in and whispered. Kaiden looked up at Henley, tiredness evident all over his face, and nodded to Ada.
‘Kaiden Longley,’ he had an American accent. He shook Henley’s hand firmly. ‘I don’t have much time. I’m in between … there’s a lot going on. I’ll take you through to my office.’
Henley sat down on a chair that had not been created for comfort while Ezra sat equally uncomfortable next to her.
‘I’m sorry, I should have asked if you wanted one,’ Kaiden said as he pushed a coffee pod into the machine behind him.
Henley shook her head no, instead asking, ‘How long have you been working for Soteria?’
‘It will be four years next month,’ Kaiden replied. ‘I moved here from Boston because my wife wanted to come home.’
‘So, you know Soteria’s IT system well?’
‘Like the back of my hand.’
‘This is my colleague, Ezra Williams. He’s our …’ Henley paused, suddenly realising that she wasn’t sure what Ezra’s official title was with the SCU as he seemed to change it each week.
‘Senior forensic computer analyst for the SCU,’ Ezra said proudly. ‘Specialist in cybersecurity and network security.’
‘We’re investigating the murder of Sian Fox-Carnell who was being electronically monitored by Soteria,’ Henley explained.
Kaiden’s face paled. ‘Murder,’ he said. ‘I thought she was just missing?’
‘How can you not know?’ Henley asked incredulously. ‘Her tag came back online last Friday morning.’
‘It came online but then it went off again once the battery died, but the point is I wasn’t informed the offender had been found and that she was—’
Kaiden paused and watched through the glass as a small group exited the conference room he’d been in earlier. ‘Ever get the feeling that you’re being hung out to dry? Sorry, you’re not here to talk about office politics.’
‘No, we’re not,’ said Henley. ‘When Fox-Carnell first went missing we were told that you were unable to track her because your systems had exceeded their data storage capacity, but it turns out that was wrong.’
‘But that’s what happened. We had a server migration issue which in turn led to the data storage issue.’
‘How come you weren’t able to produce the electronic monitoring reports for Fox-Carnell?
’ Ezra demanded. ‘The only reason you couldn’t do that was because someone who works for you, shut down your systems and made it look like you were hacked.
You didn’t have a server migration or data storage issue. ’
Kaiden opened his mouth and closed it again as Henley shot Ezra a warning look.
‘Why are there two different versions of events?’ Henley asked, watching Kaiden sip his coffee, buying time.
‘I was on annual leave when the systems went down,’ Kaiden said eventually. ‘No one told me what happened with the systems until I came back.’
‘That’s not an explanation.’
‘Soteria secured a six-year contract to deliver electronic monitoring services to England and Wales for the Ministry of Justice,’ said Kaiden.
‘That contract is worth ￡200 million with a two-year extension available worth another ￡75 million. The contract is up for renewal in nine months. I can only assume that it would be better for the company to say that the systems went down because of a data capacity issue.’
‘Are you saying that this company released a statement blaming the issue on data storage because they didn’t want to lose a government contract?’ asked Henley.
Kaiden nodded. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘So, what do you know?’
‘The systems went down on Tuesday afternoon when I was on the Eurostar to Paris. I was aware of the issues but the Wi-Fi on the train was terrible, and it was difficult to send and receive emails. I did see the messages telling me we had a data issue but when I came back to work on Friday morning, I knew that couldn’t have been right because all of our offenders’ movements would still be recorded. ’
‘Did you think you’d been hacked or that it was an internal error?’
‘I thought it was an internal error initially,’ said Kaiden.
‘The network was compromised from 3 a.m. Tuesday morning which is, for lack of a better word, the dead zone. 95 per cent of curfews start between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. and we usually start receiving breach alerts from 6 p.m. to about midnight. After midnight, it’s dead, there might be the odd one or two breaches, but no one is usually breaching at 1 a.m. and no one is in the office monitoring server activity after hours.
The network then went back online at 3.18 a.m..
At 6.02 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon the entire network was compromised.
I thought it was a hack because compromising the network for a short period of time, a few minutes or an hour, is the reconnaissance stage of a cyber-attack. ’
‘You said you thought it was hacked? What made you unsure?’
‘There was no command and control of the network, which is stage six of a cyber-attack. Usually, when someone hacks a network like this, they download everything they can, release malware into the system, lock us out of the network and start demanding eyewatering sums as ransom but that didn’t happen here.
No obvious control of the network. No mass download. No ransom.’
‘Told you,’ Ezra muttered.
‘So, what were they doing in the system, other than shutting it down?’ asked Henley.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Kaiden admitted.
‘I’ll be able to tell you, if you let me take a look at your systems,’ Ezra said excitedly.
‘I don’t think that would be wise,’ Kaiden answered warily. ‘Our systems have already been compromised, and you don’t have the authorisation’
‘We’re the police, well the boss is, and the fact is someone out there,’ Ezra spun around in his chair and pointed at the office, ‘has been poking around in your system and getting up to no good.’
‘How long would it take you?’ Henley asked Ezra, before Kaiden could voice any further objections.
‘Not long, once I get access from the big man here. Also, if you think they’re setting you up to take the fall, you’d have ammunition.’
Kaiden tapped his fingers against his empty cup as he watched Ezra, a wry smile spreading across his lips. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Ezra released a low whistle as Kaiden pushed open the doors to the room that housed his cyber-security team.
Half of the team were wearing noise cancelling headphones and didn’t look up when they entered the room and were led to an empty desk.
Kaiden leaned over the keyboard, inserted his ID card and typed in his password. ‘All yours.’
‘I’m not being funny, but your cyber-security is lax,’ said Ezra five minutes later as he stared intently at the screen, his fingers dancing across the keyboard.
‘I have no idea what I’m looking at,’ Henley admitted as she watched the expressions on Kaiden’s face morph from intrigue to impressed as Ezra worked.
‘Neither do I,’ Kaiden confessed.
‘Ok, it looks as though I was wrong, and your systems were accessed externally which doesn’t quite make …
do you mind if I copy data?’ Ezra asked.
He reached for his rucksack and pulled out a memory stick.
‘Most hackers leave some kind of digital footprint, think of it like a graffiti artist leaving a tag. They just can’t help themselves. ’
‘Go ahead,’ Kaiden replied.
‘Bingo!’ Ezra said a few minutes later. ‘There it is. Your hacker placed a digital tracker on the Sian Fox-Carnell equipment, which means that the GPS data was being sent to a third party. They also shut down the system, placed the shutdown on a timer and installed malware that made it look like you had exceeded the data storage system.’
‘Are you saying the systems were still monitoring the offenders?’
‘That’s exactly what they were doing. Look, all the reporting information from Tuesday morning at 3 a.m. until 9 a.m. on Friday was being diverted to this encrypted folder which was then sent to a virtual drive.’
Kaiden crouched down and scrolled through the data on the screen. ‘Can you tell where the hack originated from?’
‘It’s the usual rerouting the IP address and bouncing it around,’ Ezra said. ‘I could tell you, but you know how it is.’
‘It would take a while.’
‘Exactly and me and the boss have another appointment we have to get to.’
Henley raised her eyebrows at the sudden revelation of their second appointment, but instead of questioning it she asked, ‘Ezra, were you able to download all of the reporting information for Fox-Carnell?’
Ezra removed the memory stick from the computer. ‘It’s all here,’ he said. ‘And I’ve decrypted the file that contained the monitoring information for everyone on tag and moved it to your main server.’
‘Thanks for that. Is there anything else you need?’ Kaiden asked, taking Ezra’s place at the screen.
‘Nope,’ Ezra replied. He turned to Henley and pointed at his watch. ‘We’re going to be late.’
‘Why did you want to get out of there so quickly?’ Henley asked once they were out on Cannon Street and a safe distance away from the Soteria offices.
Ezra blew out his cheeks and headed to an empty table outside a café. ‘Ok, those lot up there were hacked but the weird thing is that the hack originated from within that building.’
‘I thought you said their servers were accessed externally. You also said that it would take you too long to find out that information.’
‘Boss, seriously, it’s me and I’m not an amateur. The hacker rerouted the IP address and made it look as though it originated from San Francisco. They bounced it all over the place, China, Japan and Brazil, but I tracked it back and guess where I tracked it back to?’
Henley turned around and looked up at the building that they’d just left. ‘Someone in Kaiden’s team hacked the system?’
Ezra shrugged. ‘Could have been Kaiden or it could have been Ada from reception for all I know.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Henley. ‘Why would anyone go through all of the trouble of hacking the system and diverting all of Fox-Carnell’s reporting information. Why not just shut the entire thing down?’
‘They wouldn’t be able to find her if they shut the entire thing down.’ Ezra picked up a menu. ‘It makes sense to me. Track her movements. Follow her and grab her. And by the time the police are called no one knows where to start looking because to you she’s disappeared into the wind.’
‘Pellacia was right. You really should think about joining the force.’
Ezra smiled. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Hmm,’ Henley leaned back, processing it all, ‘I’m just thinking, what if Fox-Carnell wasn’t the only offender they put a digital tracker on?’
‘I’ll start looking as soon as we get back to the SCU, after you buy me lunch.’
‘It’s not even midday.’
‘Call it brunch then.’
‘You’re worse than Eastwood,’ Henley laughed, picking up a menu. ‘Anything else I need to know?’
‘Remember when I said that some hackers like to leave a tag?’
Henley nodded as she beckoned a waitress over.
‘This hacker – or Soteria employee – did exactly that. It’s like they couldn’t help themselves, boss.’
‘What’s their tag?’
‘SpecterCipher393, but give me a few days and I’ll be able to tell you their real name.’