Chapter 39

Whitehall, London. January 5th, the following year.

The lights went out suddenly, unexpectedly. All of them. He looked up, irritation on his face, though there was no one there to see it, and it was too dark for the irritation to be seen anyway. There was a loud mechanical thump, then a softer one, and moments later the lights came back on. The backup generators had switched in. He stalked to the window and twitched the curtain open. There was no sign of any lights outside. He could see out across the park, but where there would normally have been street lights and lights in office buildings, even at, he glanced quickly at his watch, six thirty-eight in the morning, now he could see just the lights of a single bus in the distance.

Curfew had been over for nearly three quarters of an hour, he thought, why wasn’t there more traffic?

He walked back to his desk to continue with his work. Always an early starter, he had been at his desk since six fifteen. As he sat down, there was a tap on the office door.

“Come,” he called sharply.

“I’m sorry Prime Minister,” the young man who entered said. “There’s been a power cut that’s affected all of Whitehall and a fair way beyond.”

“Yes I can see that,” Thorn answered curtly.

The young man gulped nervously. “Y Yes sir. It’s just that we are a bit short on juice for the generator, so I’m turning off as many lights as possible.”

“Very well then. Get on with it.”

“Yes sir.” The young man, a janitor in all but name, entered the small office and turned off three of the six lights. The one nearest the prime minister’s desk, and the desk lamp itself he left on, plus a smaller one by the door.

“That’s all sir, if you could turn those three off when you leave, sir.”

Thorn nodded his dismissal, but then had another thought. “Why are we short?”

“Er, the price sir. And the general shortage.”

“Shortage? What shortage? There’s no petrol shortage.”

“Er, it’s diesel sir, and since that fire there’s been a massive shortage. We haven’t been able to get more than a few litres now and again for a couple of weeks.”

“Not even for number ten?” Thorn asked, his temper rising.

“No sir. When they do find out, they almost always manage to find us a couple of extra litres, but that’s all. No one is hiding it from us.”

“What time did the trip go?” asked Thorn sharply as the janitor was about to leave the room again.

“Er, six thirty-six and forty-seven,” he was told. The janitor had guessed he was likely to be asked, so had deliberately checked before coming up.

“Hmm.” Thorn waved the janitor away. That was a very odd number. Unlikely it was deliberate. After that ridiculous woman had made those treasonous statements on Christmas day, he was half expecting trouble. So far, to the best of his knowledge, nothing had happened. He relaxed a little and turned back to his work: this wasn’t it.

Catterick Garrison in north Yorkshire, once the largest British Army base in the world, and now the home of the Security Patrol, lost its power nearly three hours after Downing Street. It too had local backup power generators, but also like Downing Street and Whitehall in general, it had very limited fuel available. A couple of hours later, Hendon in North London also lost its power: the old Hendon Police College had been taken over by the Safety Patrol both as a training site, and also as the operational headquarters of the Safety Patrol. It had no working backup generators, so when the power went down there, the lights stayed out. Across the country, at various times of the day, another eight areas also lost power. Some had backup generators but only a small amount of fuel, others had none, but within all those areas were the regional headquarters of the Patrol. Most local Patrol stations were not affected, only the few that were supplied by the same local electricity distribution sub-stations as their regional HQ’s.

When Graham Thorn’s office at number 10 had gone down, the government’s main communications hub, underneath the old Cabinet Office building on Downing Street, had gone down at the same time. When the generators had kicked in, they had not had enough power for all the servers, so only the most important servers were restarted. When, twenty-five minutes later, mains power came back, off-duty staff were called in to help sort out the mess.

An hour later, the power to Whitehall again failed, this time only for five minutes, but in the rush of all the off shift staff arriving, no one noticed an extra person there, anyone who saw her assumed she was from one of the other shifts who had come in to help out.

Fifty-three-year-old Sarah Leeves was terrified, more terrified than she’d ever been in her life. She was a computer programmer. A good one. Had been for thirty-two years, and this was totally outside her experience. Until now, her excitement had been her weekly walks on Saddleworth moor in East Lancashire with her three labrador dogs.

Getting in had been hard enough, though the lack of electricity had actually helped as the security guards were unable to spot that her ID card was fake. The scanner would have flagged it immediately, but it was not working so they just nodded her through, writing her name and ID number on a pad, along with everyone elses. Even getting into the main systems support office had been fraught with worry. She had been told there was no particular security into here, but that might have changed. It hadn’t. She worried and wondered, in the back of her mind, who had got the information she needed. Surely, if they could do that, then they could do what needed to be done. Couldn’t they?

It hadn’t, and now she was sat at what she knew was normally a hot-desk, and as soon as the power had come back on, and the computer systems available, she began trying to log in. She knew which application to start, and what to enter, but then the system login screen came up, looking nothing like she expected. But it did look vaguely familiar. She racked her brains for a few moments before amazement dawned.

“Bum,” she muttered. “That’s not what...” She quickly looked through the various note pads and other bits and bobs on the desk, then opened a desk drawer and scrabbled through the stuff there. She had a user name, SECURE2, and password. Now, unexpectedly, she needed a session name and service name. Session names, if she was remembering correctly, were normally free format, but there could be a standard format expected to them, and if she did it wrong and someone noticed, it would be easy enough to trace it back to this terminal, and that would be the end of her. She could guess a service name, but again if that wasn’t used here, or they had renamed it, she could have problems.

Across the room, Miguel Escarra, an office cleaner working a bit earlier than normal, had just noticed Sarah’s arrival. He had an excellent memory for faces and knew almost everyone who came into this office by sight. Her face however, he didn’t recognise and this caught his attention. He was expecting someone, but this middle-aged, grey haired, mousy, nervous looking woman wasn’t it. Was this the person he was supposed to wait for, he wondered nervously. She was sitting where the person was supposed to sit, so maybe it was. His only job was to identify and keep an eye on whoever did come in, and try and intercept anyone who was going to interrupt them in any way. He had no idea how he was supposed to do this though.

He had been working in this building for nearly a month, coming into this particular office twice a day every day on his rounds. He had managed to steal a number of passwords and other security information, mostly by watching the office staff carefully but discreetly, and watching either what they typed, or more usually by noting down where they read passwords from. It had been surprising just how many of them wrote obvious passwords down. People were required to change passwords weekly, and so many people just scribbled the new passwords onto pieces of paper it was scary. And a real bonus for him. A few staff used electronic documents or personal electronic devices to store their passwords, but Miguel had collected a lot of user names and passwords, including some system passwords, from off pieces of paper.

He knew enough about computers from his own time at school to know that many of the office computers, although old and using no longer supported operating systems, were in use daily for some very sensitive systems. What he didn’t know was that the actual systems, the databases themselves, were on other machines elsewhere, but by careful listening to people talking as he cleaned he had gleaned a lot of incredibly useful information. He normally had on what appeared to be an MP3 player playing through ear buds, but in fact it was a sensitive, directional, speakerphone recording a lot of what it heard. He passed the recorder on to his Maquis contact at the end of each day, getting a clean one back in return for use the following day. Exactly where or how they then cleaned it up, and how much of what they got was actually useful, he didn’t know. But it must have been of at least some use otherwise he wouldn’t have been here today, now, watching and waiting for someone. He took a deep, nervous breath, and wandered slowly in her direction, emptying waste bins as he went.

“Okay,” Sarah muttered, “risk it for a biscuit.” She got in. All four elements worked. User name, job name, service and password. “All right my love, what’s running?” She murmured. She thought for a moment, then slowly typed DOCF(J, M) and pressed return. “Yes!” She murmured, relief flooding through her. The screen filled and then paused. She pressed return and the list continued. These were all the running MAC jobs, jobs where a person was sat in front of a developer or support terminal, rather than an end user session. Looking down the list, she eventually saw her own session. It didn’t stand out from the others, and all the job names she saw seemed to have no particular form. She breathed a sigh of relief. A DOCF(WM) to check the work mix told her she’d guessed the right service name: EMAC was the default supplied service name, though many sites chose to amend the parameters for all sorts of reasons, and often renamed it when they did.

Miguel moved slowly past where Sarah was sitting. Glancing at her screen he saw nothing that made any sense to him, but then he didn’t really expect it to. He moved just around a corner, where he could see her if he looked, and began to take apart a coffee machine for cleaning and refilling. This was something he did twice a day anyway, even though the machine only actually needed cleaning every other day, and refilling only once a day. He had been doing this ever since he had started so that no one who saw him do it would become suspicious. What actually happened was that the drinks produced were actually nicer than before, and more than one person had thanked and complimented him on his work.

Sarah paused for a moment. Where to start, she wondered. “Okay. What services are running?” DOCF(J, TPCONTROL) she typed. Twenty-four lines came up this time, rather more than she had expected, but one of them caused her to smile in relief. She was in the right place. Good.

DUD(SV) was her next command. Four lines scrolled up, showing all the services associated with the current user. She looked at the name of one, SEC2, then typed DSVD(SEC2) to give her details of that specific service. The second line read ‘LONG ANNOTATION’ followed by a short gap and ‘IDMS DATABASE SERVICE’.

Good, now, was it running? Hmm. Old and long disused memories began to flood back. She wasn’t sure whether this was correct, but typed DSVD(SEC2,, F) the screen scrolled rapidly up, then paused. She quickly spotted what she was looking for. An entry STARTED with todays date and a time of 07:49:02, this was followed by a line containing just the word STOPPED with no date and then another line with STATUS STARTED. She smiled. The service had only just restarted after the latest power failure. It was unlikely people would start logging in again quite yet. She hoped.

The command hadn’t given her all she wanted though and she frowned in concentration. What the hell was the command? Tentatively she typed IDMSXDSVD(SEC2) and after a momentary pause, was rewarded with screens full of information about the database service. Including where all the data files were.

This was what she needed. She grinned. Yes! She kept pressing return every time the screen filled, and eventually found the next thing she was looking for. She jotted down the names she’d found, then carried on.

Next she needed to create three libraries. These she did with four rapidly typed commands:

INTRLB(SOURCELIBRARY)

INTRLB(OMFLIBRARY, *STDOMF)

INTRLB(SERVICELIBRARY, *STDOMF)

CLBD(SERVICELIBRARY, SER=Y)

This last came back with a permissions error:

****ERROR 20029 A PRIVILEGED OPERATION HAS BEEN ATTEMPTED

“Bum,” she muttered again, though she wasn’t totally surprised by the error.

She did a DUD(F, STD) and went down the list it displayed, using ENTER XF to delete a lot of files that looked as if they might be important. Files called simply XXX or similar, of which there were a lot, she left alone. That was just staff being sloppy. She smiled slightly when she saw just how long it was since some of these files had even been looked at. One of them, almost nine gigabytes in size, hadn’t been accessed, not even to look at, in over sixteen years. “What a waste,” she muttered.

XF(*ICL9NJOURNAL);LGT was her next command.

She quickly logged back in again, using a slightly different session name, and carried on her destructive work.

She now needed to be quick. She quickly typed FNTPMS(SECURE2) the screen froze for a moment, then came back AWAITING RESOURCES followed by AWAITING WRITE ACCESS TO VOLUME IN CSRB10CT and then froze again. “Oh hell,” Sarah muttered. She just prayed that whatever CSRB10CT was, it would become available automatically. “That’s securing something. What and where?” She jotted down the name.

A moment later the screen displayed RESOURCES AQUIRED, then SLOTFILE DELETED. Sarah sighed softly with relief. A few more messages appeared, then SEC2 CLOSED appeared, followed by SEC2RO CLOSED and then SEC2QM CLOSED. “Youch,” she muttered. She hadn’t noticed SEC2QM in the list of services. “Bugger.” That could be a problem. She quickly typed DUD(SV) again. “Bum,” she muttered. It wasn’t there. “Bum, bum, double bum.”

DCTD(CSRB10CT) told her that this was a tape category. A pool of tapes to be used by any process that required a tape. “Tapes?” She muttered. “Still?” DCTD(CSRB10CT, EVERYTHING) gave her a long list of files, many owned by other users. As she read down, she grinned. More by accident than design, she’d found a motherload of archived data.

DTMPL(DCTD) told her there was an action parameter to the template of the DCTD command.

One command this operating system didn’t have, was an equivalent of ‘del .‘ or ‘rm -r *’ but there were ways to create one.

It took her just two minutes, and only two false starts, to create a temporary module, to do a LOT of damage:

COMPILESCL(,, NO, NE)

PROC KILLTAPE IS (INT LNAME, RESPONSE FLAG)