Pandora Red

Chapter 3

Chapter 1

March 1999. GCHQ Cheltenham, England.

Sarah Edwards glanced at the wall clock, noting it was 23:17 hours. Nearly time. The plan was to get started as the shifts changed to the night staff. During late shifts, the hexagon shaped green building, flanked by prison-like towers, had the feeling of a ship silently moving through the night. There was a faded sound, like a distant roar from outside the double glazed windows of her office, a downpour of rain Sarah could see coming down in sheets from an external building light.

The main GCHQ building was planted in the sprawl of the Oakley site in Cheltenham, England, where she had been an employee for six years. As Intelligence liaison officer, Sarah had access to top secret information that would never become public, even under the official secrets act. The glass walls of her office reflected artificial light across the floor and she glanced outside into the main section once again. A few people were still milling around, their flickering screens displaying worldwide operation updates, while the central heating hummed in the background. She moved her slight figure back into the large swivel chair and tapped once again on the keyboard, logging herself out of the main network. To access and copy the information meant using another terminal on the floor above.

Sarah cast her eyes around the office for the last time. The feeling weighed heavily that after tonight, she would possibly never see her family, her friends, or anyone she cared about again. She wouldn’t be able to say goodbye either, that was the most painful part of it. For the last three months, she had churned the decision over and over in her mind and kept arriving at the same conclusion.

She put on her jacket, grabbed her bag, and slipped out across the thick carpet along the corridor, caged by metal and glass partitions that seemed to go on forever. Her feet quickly ascended the metal steps at the end, the echoes adding to her anxiety as she left G block and an entire lifetime behind her. No more after work drinks with the boys. No chinwags with her friend in the service, Janet Chambers. How surreal it would all soon seem.

She could only imagine the shock of her colleagues when the news spread about what she had done. They would understand, in time. Surely they would?

In a few years, this site would be empty of its machines, the people and the families in the housing complex would all be moved to the new GCHQ location at Benhall. The new ‘doughnut’ shaped complex would be state of the art at the cost of hundreds of millions and Sarah knew the security would be much tighter there, another reason to act now.

A quick flash of her identity card on the wall scanner and she was allowed through to the floor above. It would only be a matter of time before her access and subsequence actions were traced back to her but by then, all s**t would have hit the fan and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

Even now, it wasn’t too late and she could still turn back. She could leave the building as normal and continue her life, keep her friends, and stay in touch with her family. She shook that idea out of her head quickly. This was no time for second thoughts or doubt. It seemed like a dream but she steeled herself and pressed on across the carpeted floor that hosted rows of cubicles, a haphazard mix of screens that flickered in the darkness as if watching her progress. The truth must be leaked, no matter what the consequences.

She stopped at a monitor, sat down, and quickly typed in her login and encrypted password to access the main system. There seemed to be a temporary freeze on the screen and Sarah frowned while she waited.

‘Access Denied’ flashed at her in large letters on the monitor.

She cursed under her breath. There was no logical reason she would be denied access at this level. Sarah retyped, her fingers stumbling across the keyboard, and she hit return to see the same ‘Access Denied’ once more.

Come on, Sarah, keep it together!

Slowly, she re-typed, voicing the letters and numbers in her head and breathed a sigh of relief as the familiar green coded access came up. She carefully plugged in the thumb drive that had been meticulously moulded to look like a keyless entry remote for a Honda Accord Acura TL, the exact same car she owned. It had been made through a contact that she had outside of the agency. Working with those outside the law had its benefits and discretion was essential.

She immediately hit the shortcut keys to launch the Shell access command line and typed in a sequence to bypass the computer’s automatic security scan of her device.

Once again, she needed to fill in her login credentials to the remote server and then the black console screen filled with a fast moving list of file names as they copied from the ‘Project Oculus’ folder.

These were the very same files that she had found and read with increasing alarm and exasperation over the previous months. She had not liked what she saw one bit.

“Good evening,” the voice came from behind her, making her gasp out loud. Game over, before she had even started. The sounds of the footsteps grew nearer and she spun around, squinting at the night guard. He smiled at her, nodded, and walked on by. Sarah felt her heart pumping so loud, she was sure he could hear it. “Good evening,” she replied.

Time slowed down, the file transfer was still reeling through its list and there was nothing Sarah could do to speed things up. There were a lot of files to copy.

She thought about her mother and father, seeing life drift by from their Brighton semi with a fine view of the sea and the pier. Had she really forsaken them? Would she really never see them again? Sarah refused to believe that. She would find a way.

She remembered first seeing the GCHQ advert in the newspaper. It was a test to find an apprentice and Sarah’s mother had encouraged her to apply. Sarah had always been top of her classes, wiping the floor with everyone else and her future glittered like gold. But dark shadows loomed in the corners of her memory: the bullying. There were a few in her class who had targeted her. She could only guess it was because of her intelligence or maybe the social inadequacy.

The only thing she lived for was her studying, the knowledge that she so eagerly soaked up like a sponge and the books she buried herself in.

She passed the test, a puzzle to decode a series of seemingly random letters and then after a yearlong selection process, began her intelligence career, working in the foreign sources section and then later transferring to anti-terrorism monitoring.

It was at the ‘firm’ she met her first real friends. For the most part, anyway. There were a few comments from some of the male colleagues, but all in all, it was like a family. Besides, Sarah had always seen herself as a trailblazer, working hard to fight her way into a male-dominated environment.

A beep sounded and the copy was complete. She took the drive and slipped it inside her bag then typed in: sfc /purgecache in the command line to delete the cache and dump any record of her folder access before shutting down the workstation. She didn’t want to leave unnecessary breadcrumb trails.

Sarah braced herself for getting out of the building. For obvious security reasons, no files of any kind were allowed to leave the walls of GCHQ. She knew the routine and just hoped she had thought of everything. There was a risk. There always was.

She moved quickly now, passing the endless monitors, workstations, and desks that seemed to blur past her. She rode the lift down to the ground floor, taking even, deep breaths to calm her nerves. The lift opened and she walked up to a set of double doors, passing her entry card over the scanner, which opened them with a gentle hiss.

Without hesitation, she stepped through and placed her leather handbag with the car key lob inside onto the x-ray scanner conveyor that was manned by Gilly, the elderly night security man. He smiled at Sarah and briefly glanced at the monitor that exposed the contents of her bag. It was a well-worn routine.

“It’s a bit late for you, innit, love?” he asked in his thick welsh accent.

Sarah smiled weakly at him, the thumping in her chest once again seemingly growing louder with each beat as she brushed a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. “The devil’s work is never done,” she heard herself say.

She stepped through the frame of a large metal detector, not unlike those in airports and held her breath as she did so. Despite there being nothing incriminating on her person, the prospect of the alarm sounding haunted her. To her relief, no alarms were triggered and she stood at the end of the conveyor, waiting.

Gilly adjusted glasses on his wide face and scrutinised the monitor and shapes of items inside her bag; her purse, cosmetics, notepad, the Honda key-less entry remote…

He glanced at her for a moment, a hint of regret on his wrinkled face and sighed.

“I’m really sorry, luv, but I have to do a random check. You know how it goes.”

Sarah stared at him for a second, half thinking he was joking and then realised he wasn’t. She had only been subject to a couple of random checks in her whole time there and it had barely registered as a concern in her planning. Did he know something? It wasn’t possible.

His face then turned into a grin, trying to make light of it. “It’s your lucky night, obviously.”

Sarah then managed a smile in return but it was not good news. A random check meant a more thorough search and possibly a body check. The risk factor was rising.

“It’s no problem. You’ve got a job to do,” she said evenly.

The handbag came through and the guard began to take out the items one by one, placing them on a long table. Sarah fixed her eyes on the contents of her bag as he checked; looking inside the cosmetics pouch, flipping through the notepad at her meaningless scribbles. Most of the items had been placed in there for show; the plan always being to mix everything up in the bag. There were also random items such as food receipts or a tube of mints thrown in for good measure. She wondered if the cosmetics were overkill, especially as she barely ever wore much makeup.

His hands reached for the key lob and he picked it up, spinning it around in his fingers for a moment.

“Any weekend plans?” she asked, a forced cheery ring to her voice.

The guard turned and grinned again.

“At the allotment if it’s not raining but we’ll be lucky, won’t we? It’s bound to rain, innit?”

“Almost definitely,” she said, clenching her fists inside her jacket pockets.

He sighed as if regretting something and began placing the items back in the bag and handed it to her.

“Have a lovely evening now,” he said. She took the bag and smiled in genuine relief. “You, too. Fingers crossed for the weather.”

The rain-washed streets cast reflections from the street lamps, the echo of Sarah’s footfall bouncing off the walls of red-brick houses lining the complex where the GCHQ employees had built their lives. No one was out at that hour and a quietness hung in the air like a blanket.

No more friends.

She unlocked the front door to her cosy 2-bedroom semi where she had lived for almost seven years.

No more family.

Grabbing the large holdall bag that waited in the hall, she then walked to her Honda Accord parked in the driveway and slung it into the boot. There was no point in going back to the house. Everything she could think of had been done, cleaned down, or shredded. Anything she had not wanted them to find had been taken to the landfill, five miles away. Her entire life was now in one bag.

The car weaved its way past the red brick houses and grey block buildings, away from the complex and toward Cheltenham train station.