Milkshake (31 page)

By 3.00am he convinced himself he was being sidelined. He
needed to walk back into the office with a radical plan of
action.

But before he had a chance, at 6.00am his phone
rang.

Managing the response to a national emergency was a
twenty-four hour operation. The NZCIS had a Black Room through
which all telecommunications generated in, or entering, New Zealand
were passed. A small team had worked throughout the night and had
finished compiling a file of emails.

The concept of a ‘Cabinet Noir’ or Black Room dated back to
the reign of Louis XIII. It was the office where letters sent by
suspicious individuals were opened and read by public officials
before being forwarded to their destination.

The practice was adopted during the First World War when the
New Zealand Government employed the tactic as a means of censoring
mail in order to protect and maintain the morale at home, shielding
it from graphic and depressing correspondence sent from the front
line thousands of miles away in Europe.

Black Rooms, although officially denied, existed around the
world, small secure facilities, often housed in the unassuming
offices of an existing telecommunications company, allowing access
to all internet and phone traffic that passed through the
room.

New Zealand had ironically acquired its own Black Room in the
mid-nineties when the main telecommunication company was owned, by
an American corporation. The American Government had openly offered
the facility as a means of establishing a discrete listening post
in the Southern Pacific in the early days of the internet. The use
of email and mobile phones was expected to grow. The intention had
been to install a Black Room early, so it would be deeply embedded
within the original system architecture and forgotten
about.

The New Zealand Government rarely used the facility but had,
on request from friendly Governments, monitored the activity of
terrorists and radicals who believed routing emails, texts or phone
conversations via a small insignificant country kept them safe from
interception.

Today the information that passed through the Black Room would
be used against the very country that had encouraged its
installation.

But the Americans were not so naïve as to have handed over
complete control of the Black Room to the NZCIS. They had been
thorough enough during the construction and commissioning phase to
ensure a high frequency transmitter was hidden within the mass of
switchgear in the Room.

The Duty Officer called Brent, letting him know there were a
number of significant emails awaiting his arrival. Brent leapt out
of bed, showered, and walked across the parade ground to the Ops
Room.

He arrived just as the Duty Officer finished briefing his
daytime counterpart. Both looked up as Brent stepped from the cool
morning air into the warm office. Although neither of them were
military personnel, they instinctively straightened as he entered
the room. “Morning, guys. Sounds like you had a busy night. What
have you got then?”

“I’ll start with the most recent, sir. Collington received an
email at twelve thirty-eight yesterday afternoon via a contact
website from a travel agency in Tokoroa. The message seems to have
come from this Turner guy you are interested in. It says he wants
to meet up with Collington on Waiheke.”

“That’ll explain his eagerness to dump Hone. Do we have any
info on how they reached the Island?”

“We have CCTV of them getting off a bus at the harbour and we
also have Collington emailing three people late last night to say
the Turners are staying overnight with him. You might want to pour
yourself a coffee and grab a Danish, sir. There’s a lot of stuff to
read.”

Over fifteen thousand emails had been retrieved from
Collington’s email address on the phone company’s server. Once the
algorithm had filtered out the spam, three hundred messages were
left containing words or key phrases of interest.

Brent sipped strong coffee and began scrolling, message by
message. After a minute he realised he was going about this
completely the wrong way and clicked to re-sort the messages. Now
he could read, starting with the oldest first. This would build up
a better picture in his mind of the sequence of events.

The first message which caught his eye was one sent not by
Collington, but by his wife, and copied to members of the
Ecological Political Assembly of New Zealand. It noted the first
visit of Tony, the Cowood vet, to the Island. The existence of such
an email surprised Brent, given that once Anika had separated from
Patrick O’Sullivan, she had, at least publicly, severed all ties
with the party.

At the time she had gone on record describing it as an
inward-looking, corrupt, self-seeking and egotistical organisation,
more interested in fulfilling its own agenda than promoting the
interests of the ordinary Kiwi family. This email, and others,
confirmed to Brent that she was not only in regular contact with
senior members of the party but actively contributing to policy
making. It was political dynamite.

Brent ignored this revelation and instead concentrated on
piecing together the roles of both Edward Collington, and now it
seemed Anika Collington, over the last eighteen months.

The emails revealed that soon after he began to visit the
Island, Ed and Anika had managed to extract from Tony Robinson the
true purpose of his regular visits to Waiheke. As Anika let her
former political allies know, it appeared her former husband, the
Chairman of Dairy Tree and head of EPANZ, was now intent on
developing milk into bio-fuel as a commercial
proposition.

Then Brent read an email that made the hairs on his arms stand
on end - not for the content, since it only requested Anika to make
a phone call to a specified number - it was the name of the sender,
Commander Dalton.

Brent checked over his shoulder, noted the time and date of
the email, and closed it again. He plugged a headset into the port
on the front of the PC. Then, locating the file containing the
outward phone calls made from the Mushroom Café, he found one
matching the date of the email.

He pressed
Play
.

“Good afternoon. Roger Dalton’s office. How may I help
you?”

“This is Anika Collington. I’ve been given this number to
call to speak to someone about Patrick O’Sullivan, my
ex-husband?”

“Thank you for calling, Anika. This is a private number at
the Environment Ministry. I understand you‘ve been in contact with
some of your former colleagues in the Ecological Party and that you
may have some misgivings about the work your ex-husband may be
involved in? I‘d like to discuss this with you in more detail, I
believe you own the Mushroom Café on Waiheke. Will you be around on
Thursday?”

“Yes, why?”

“Because I need to speak with you in person about this. Shall
we say eleven?”

“That’s ok with me.”

Why had the Commander not made Brent aware of his contact with
this woman earlier? Brent jumped; the headset had masked the
approach from behind. A hand was on his shoulder. It was Dalton.
There was no point in trying to conceal the evidence. If he had
wanted to, Dalton could have easily destroyed the recording
himself.

“So, found anything interesting yet?”

“I’m not sure, sir. You tell me. I’ve just been listening to
conversation between you and Collington’s wife requesting a meeting
with her.”

Brent looked for a glimmer, a twitch, a forced smile, a shrug,
anything.

Commander Dalton didn’t miss a beat. ‘She’s working for us,
Brent, both of them are. We were able to manipulate the absolute
contempt she now has for her ex to our own ends. Anika and Ed have
been keeping us informed about the Cowood situation on Waiheke for
some time now.”

“But I thought the line was the Government barely knows
what’s going on?”

“That’s absolutely correct. No one in the Cabinet office, and
that includes the PM, has a clue about the seriousness of the
position here. We intend keeping it that way, to protect the
integrity of the mission, until we are in a position to inform the
PM of a satisfactory conclusion.”

“But he’s head of the Security Service. Surely he has a right
to be kept informed.”

“Correct, to a point, Captain, but you of all people must
realise by now that this is a matter of huge significance, not only
for this country, but internationally. The role of the NZCIS and,
within that, the KMP, is to manage and deal with this crisis. The
PM has complete faith in our ability to do whatever is required to
deal with this. Any communication, even within the Cabinet, risks
exposing our intentions to the Americans.”

Brent didn’t understand. Despite his own position in the KMP;
a secret organisation within the security service, he’d always
believed his Government to be amongst the most open in the world.
How could private communications within the Cabinet expose the
counter measures that were now under way to the enemy? Shit! For
the first time he’d consciously thought of the USA as the
enemy.

“We’ve good reason to suspect there may be a spy within the
Cabinet, Brent. There’s mounting evidence that information is being
passed to the Americans. Information which is only circulated at
the highest level seems to have had a habit of turning up on the
other side of the Pacific.”

“For instance?”

“Well, the latest example was yesterday with the logging
truck ‘accident’. As we had some significant input into the
incident, we made sure there was a complete news blackout until we
had a press release ready for the Police Commissioner to deliver.
Then I get the American Ambassador on the phone within the hour
with an intimate knowledge of events. Far more stuff than he could
have got even from the spy satellite. Someone had been passing him
information.”

Brent was astonished firstly by the revelation that the
Collingtons were apparent informers and now Dalton’s candid
admission that the Government leaked like a sieve at the highest
level.

He turned back to the screen, unsure whether it was worth
continuing to sift through another year’s worth of emails and phone
calls after what he’d just been told. “Commander, after the logging
truck incident, what exactly was the chain of events from the time
I spoke to you on the radio from the helicopter to you passing on
the approved press release to Police Headquarters?”

The Commander thought for a moment before replying. “Well, I
called the PM’s Private Secretary as soon as I finished speaking
with you. He then passed the information onto the PM who would’ve
probably emailed the rest of the Cabinet, or at least contacted
their respective secretaries. The draft of the press release was
faxed to me for checking and proofing about forty-five minutes
later. Early on, the PM’s Office will have also contacted the
Police Commissioner’s office to request the media blackout. I
called the PM straight back to confirm the draft was OK and then it
would have been … ”

Brent interrupted him, “Faxed to the office of the
Commissioner of Police in Wellington at 17.08pm.”

“How the hell …. ?”

Brent had a copy of the communications log from the fax
machine in the Prime Minister’s Office on the screen in front of
him.

“Where the heck did you get that?”

“During the night, the Ops guys managed to get this computer
remotely logged into the feed from our Black Room. I can read any
email, or listen to any phone call, made into, out of, or around
the country, and call up records going back to 1995 if I need to.
But there’s more. If you look at each record, line by line, it
shows technical stuff, time and date, IP address or phone number,
call duration, that kind of thing. But what is interesting is this
column here….” Brent ran his finger down the screen. “This set of
numbers indicates if and when the communication was last accessed
externally. Let me show you.”

Brent’s fingers moved quickly across the keyboard as he
explained what he was doing. “I’m bringing up the records of all
calls made from the Prime Minister’s personal extension number in
the past month and, if you look at the column which shows these
records being accessed it should show - yes, I thought so - you can
see here that every ninety minutes the calls are being accessed.
Now, if we enter your personal email address, you can see that the
records have been accessed at the same time, at ninety minute
intervals. Just for comparison, if I type in my mother’s phone
number, I can see it looks like she called my auntie in Rotorua
yesterday afternoon, but no indication that call has ever been
externally accessed.”

“That’s good work, Brent, but all it does it confirm my
suspicion. It doesn’t point the finger in any particular direction,
does it?”

“Actually, sir, it does. Let me show you.”

Brent loaded the Massey University Satellite Tracking and
Electronic Recognition program - MUSTER. “If you look at the orbit
of this particular US spy satellite, you can see it passes overhead
every ninety minutes. Each time it does, it collects data. They’ve
infiltrated the Black Room. That’s the source of the leak. As the
satellite tracks eastward, and the Western seaboard of the USA
appears over the horizon, the information is downloaded to the
NSA’s own Black Room in San Francisco.