Provo. Gordon Stevens

season and the first hint of cold ...

      ... she was fourteen, tall and thin yet becoming attractive, even in school uniform. She had forgotten a hockey boot – had thought she had packed both – and run home to pick it up. The day before she had brought home her school report, the evening before she had sat in the warmth of the sitting-room, the fire blazing in the grate, while her father read carefully through it in the manner she called his solicitor’s style, her mother opposite her dwelling on every nod of his head. Grade 1 in every subject, it was no more than she had expected, had worked hard for. An outstanding student, the head teacher had written; we confidently expect superb examination results and university entrance.

      The house was quiet, the grandfather clock ticking in the hall. Her mother and her aunt were having tea together as they did every Wednesday. Quintessentially English, Walker would think in the years to come, when the hate was fired and burning in her. Quintessentially bloody bourgeoisie. She wouldn’t disturb them, she thought, if she did she would have to explain, then she might be late for the practice. She ran quietly up the stairs, found the boot, and began to come down again.

      The sitting-room door was slightly open. Her mother was showing her aunt her school report – she could tell by the conversation.

      ‘She’s done very well.’

      ‘Very well indeed.’ There was something in her mother’s voice which took her by surprise. ‘Considering.’

      She stopped unseen on the stairs and wondered what her mother meant.

      Even though she thought the house was empty her mother crossed the room and closed the door.

      Considering what, the girl thought that night. She had everything, her parents were well-off though perhaps slightly old-fashioned, neither she nor her brother had ever wanted for anything. They lived in a large house in the Home Counties, had been educated privately from the age of four, and always been encouraged to study. Considering what? she was still thinking when she woke the following morning . . .

      . . . the coffee was cold and the study was quiet around her.

      Each of the jobs she had done for Conlan, or for others through Conlan, had begun differently. Some – the longterm jobs – had started this way: the months of detailed and often fruitless research. Others had been more immediate: a dead letter drop where the weapon was waiting for her, the target details, a back-up supplying the way in and out. Always, however, Conlan had insisted on two fundamentals: that no one ever knew her identity, and that everyone assumed she was a man. As if he always had the spectacular in mind, she could not help thinking again, as if he always had her in mind for it. That was why he had not used her for two years, had allowed her to disappear into the shadows.

      The afternoon drifted into evening. She left the flat and took the underground to the West End. It was eleven in the evening, the night still warm. The lights of Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus were flashing behind her, the taxis filled with theatre-leavers and the streets busy. She left Trafalgar Square and walked through Admiralty Arch and into the Mall. The night was suddenly darker and colder and the pavements empty, only an occasional cab passing her. Six hundred yards in front of her she saw the lights of Buckingham Palace.

      She would need access to the royal schedule, and one way to that was through the Wednesday List – the diary of engagements for each member of the royal family circulated by Buckingham Palace to the Newspaper Publishers Association and through the NPA to interested publications. The list, containing the skeleton of engagements for up to a year ahead and updated on a monthly and weekly basis, was sent out every Wednesday, hence its name. The PinMan operation, however, would require not just the official timetable of formal appointments where the target would be high profile and carrying massive protection, but – and more importantly – the details of the more informal and therefore probably more personal events, even though PinMan would still be accompanied by a bodyguard.

      Buckingham Palace or the NPA? She was walking quickly, thinking quickly, weighing the options. If she accessed the computer system in the press office at the Palace she might also get inside the personal offices, get information not on the Wednesday List; if she made do with the NPA she might get less material but the risks were fewer. The computer security at the Palace would be more difficult to penetrate, yet in a way that did not concern her. What did, however, was the probability that at the Palace the system would, or should, pick it up immediately. And that might warn the security services.

      A police car slid past her – the dark maroon of the Diplomatic Protection Group. She reached the Victoria Monument and stood looking up at the Palace, the standard fluttering from the flag pole. Queen’s in – she remembered the day she had stood here with her mother, the way her mother had pointed out the flag to her, she in her best school uniform and her brother in his school blazer.

      The NPA, she decided, keep the Palace as a last resort.

      She turned down Buckingham Gate and into Petty France, the Passport Office on the right and the Home Office on the left; then she cut through to the Houses of Parliament and took the underground back to Chalk Farm.

      The following day she began the process of building up a computerized file on PinMan. In doing so she was governed by one simple fact of life: that despite the system of passwords and other security measures which an individual or a company might build into a system, there was no such thing as computer security.

      If the police or security services ever suspected her, the first thing they would do would be to search the flat. And the first thing they would do when they saw the computer would be to call in a specialist. By using a tape streamer, DOS operating system boot disk and a programmer’s toolkit, an expert would first of all bypass the security and password system normally assigned to the C drive, access the hard disk and X-copy all information stored on it, even remnants of items which she had ordered to be deleted but which might not have been completely overwritten by the computer.

      If she replaced the standard BIOS chips with chips carrying security passwords, they could replace those she had installed or circumvent them totally by taking the top off the computer, removing the hard disk, copying it, then replacing it. And if she had encrypted the material on the hard disk they would know she was hiding something and send it to the codebreakers at GCHQ.

      For these reasons she would place no PinMan information on the hard disk. She would destroy all irrelevant material immediately, encrypt the material she wanted, using a standard software package, and place it on a floppy disk which she would in turn place in a bank deposit box hired under a false name.

      The office was cool. She switched on the PC and checked the list of dial-up numbers she had acquired during her years in the City. Most were of banking, financial or related institutions, though four were of newspapers and the twenty-seventh was that of the Newspaper Publishers Association. She plugged the modem connection to the telephone socket, called up the communication software and keyed in the NPA number. The computer system at the NPA answered and she logged in. Eight minutes later she accessed the computer file based on the Wednesday List. On the pale amber of the screen were the outline schedules of every member of the royal family for the next twelve months, with the first six months of that period already highly detailed. She transferred the material from the NPA machine to her own and copied it on to a disk. Then she exited the NPA system, made herself a coffee, printed out the material and studied it.

      The material was as she had suspected – useful but only as a starting point. Nowhere in it were the seemingly minor details, the unofficial functions or personal timetables, which she would need for the PinMan operation.

      She burned the print-out and placed the floppy in the wall safe. The next morning she deposited it in a security box at a bank in the City, then returned to the flat, wrote out a list of publishers, and made the first telephone call. Two days later she entered the details of all books written about the royal family over the previous five years on the PinMan file, again placing the floppy in the bank deposit box.

      Three of the books were out of print, two could be purchased over the counter, and five could be ordered, though the waiting time was up to five weeks. The following morning she went to the British Library, on the ground floor