‘It’s a sad day, Natasha. I couldn’t get over your email — suspected murder in a hospital of all places. What are these crack-heads coming to?’
‘I don’t know John’ she replied sadly. ‘The police are beginning to think that the hit-and-run accident on his motorbike may have been the first attempt on his life.’
‘God — I can’t believe it.’ John shook his head in surprise. ‘I mean it Natasha, let me know what you need me to do to help.’
Natasha looked around John’s office. ‘What’s happening here? I saw someone packing up their desk downstairs.’
‘I’m afraid so. There’s a big enquiry on and we’re being shut down in stages. Non-essential staff have already been told to take a holiday until it’s all over.’
‘I suppose there isn’t anything else for us to do anyway’ said Natasha glumly.
I’ll give you a hand if you need any of your stuff moving.’
‘Thanks John’. Natasha didn’t get up. ‘Actually I wanted your advice on something else.’ Natasha fished the envelope out of her pocket.
‘I was given this letter at the hospital. They found it on Ben and they let me have it as it was addressed to me.’ Natasha handed the envelope to John. ‘I wondered if you might be able to tell me what it’s about? She indicated the second column. For instance here is a list of codes, but I don’t recognise them. If they were anything to do with the navigation software I think I would know.’
John scanned the sheet. ‘They look like the codes we give our backup tapes. The column on the left is probably the date when the backup was made and the end column must be Ben’s notes on whether he was able to retrieve data from the tape.’
‘I see. Why do you think he would be interested in backup tapes?’
‘Well, you know how it is. Occasionally the staff forget and delete files they shouldn’t. If we didn’t keep backup tapes then they wouldn’t be able to get the file back. It may be that Ben was searching for a particular file and couldn’t find it on one tape so he tried several others.’
Natasha shook her head. Something didn’t seem right. ‘There are more than twenty tapes listed here — why would he need so many if he was just looking for one file?’
It was the manager’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Perhaps he wanted more than one file. It looks like he tried tapes going back over a month or more. Perhaps when he discovered the files weren’t on the first few tapes he needed to go back in time. But you’re right — it sure does look funny. I can’t think why he would need to try so many tapes.’
He opened a booklet on his desk. ‘I’ve got a list of our servers here and each one has a series of tapes coded to it. Let me see’ he said running his finger down the list.
He looked up. ‘I’m beginning to get an idea. This doesn’t look like he was searching for one particular file — it’s too systematic for that. It looks like he was trying a selection of backup tapes from all the servers to see what the results might be. It’s like he was doing an audit of the backup tapes.’
‘Why would he do that?’
John made a face. ‘I’ve no idea. It does look as though some of the tapes weren’t good backups. Maybe he was trying to get to the bottom of that? But if so he would have talked to Jack Langham. He’s in charge of backups and archives and anything to do with security. You should try him.’
‘Thanks John. I might just do that.’
Back at home Natasha opened up her laptop and wondered if she could still access the network at work. Although some staff had been told to leave she thought the company’s server farm might remain accessible for the time being.
She found the USB token located on her key ring and pushed it into a slot on the side of her laptop. The computer would not log onto the network without it. She typed in the eight digit number that was currently showing on the token and the laptop went through a long rigmarole of assigning her a computer profile and granted her the permissions she needed in order to access her workspace. Eventually she was in and Natasha breathed a sigh of relief.
She created a new folder to contain all the log files from Cetus. Then she began the process of finding them and copying them into it to make it easier to search through them. After two hours Natasha’s eyes were beginning to droop and she started thinking of going to bed. She forced herself to concentrate and complete one more test before shutting down her laptop. She had run several scans on the files already but this time she configured the program to list the names of the modules together with the time they took to upload to Cetus. Privately she hoped that one of the modules had somehow miss-loaded.
But the long list that scrolled down her screen told her nothing. Everything looked normal and each module had loaded correctly. She decided to look at one more aspect before going to bed. Copying the list into a spreadsheet, she sorted them in alphabetical order. Sometimes modules did not load properly and needed to be reloaded. If that was the case she would find a duplicate.
But there were no duplicate lines to see. Then her eye leapt to a summary line at the end of the report which showed that the total loading time for all the modules was 37min and 45 secs. Rubbing her eyes Natasha checked the total loading time from the master list. This showed 32 mins 40 secs. For some reason the upload took over five minutes longer, but there were no reloads which might explain the extra time it took.
Bed beckoned but Natasha knew that the puzzle would keep her awake. She made another coffee and came back to her computer. If no extra modules were loaded and each one took its allotted time, then there should be no difference. There was nothing for it but to look at how long each module took to load and compare this with the master list.
Natasha groaned. There were over 700 modules and it would take her forever to check the loading times for each one — that was if she had to finish the task manually. She knew from experience the quickest way would be to load all the information into a database which she could create just for this particular task.
Half an hour later she had the answer. The database had compared the loading times of all the modules with the actual time they took. Every single module loaded within one second of its specification, except for one called SM_itinerary_pack. This took 5 min 22 secs and accounted for the difference in total time barring a second or two.
Natasha now had the bit between her teeth. What made the itinerary module take much longer to load? She used her own filter software to find the detail in the upload log. The size of the file was 4,532,784 bytes in length but normally the modules were around 20,000 bytes long. Puzzled, Natasha looked up the correct file size from the master list. This showed that it should be 25,476 bytes.
But that was as far as she could go. The logs gave no clue as to why it was nearly 200 times its normal size. Waves of exhaustion crashed over her and she just made it to bed before her eyes closed.
She woke four hours later and sat straight up. Her subconscious must have been at work while she was asleep because now she knew the answer to the problem that had been troubling her.
She reached for the bedside phone and rang Stan’s home. It picked up after the fifth ring.
‘Hi, Stan — it’s Natasha. I think I’ve found something.’
‘Nat, what time is it?’ Stan sounded tired.
‘Seven thirty. Listen, I think there was a problem. I’ve been going through the logs and I’ve found an anomaly.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just before Cetus launched there was a hitch.’
‘What sort of hitch?’ Stan sounded intrigued.
‘Well, one of the packages took a long time to upload. I’ve been going through all of them and one of them was much bigger than it should have been.’