DARKMARK

He could not yet grasp what was happening, or from where all these documents were coming, but as far as he could establish, this did not resemble anything like company work. The name of the file into which he was pasting the text was confusing. It was called ‘Sierra Leone’. The engineer was indeed working on an oil-refinery project in Sierra Leone. Darryl breathed a sigh of relief – perhaps it was legitimate business after all. It was later on that it dawned on Darryl why the engineer had chosen this name. If anyone walked past his computer, he would just minimise the file and all they would see on the task bar was a tab named ‘Sierra Leone’: the very project he was working on.

It would have fooled Darryl, too, had the VNC not then spotted an unregistered drive – F: – which indicated that the engineer was using a portable disk of some type. Darryl sent the VNC into the mystery drive and ordered it to copy the tens of thousands of documents that he found there.

Still unsure how to proceed, and not yet in a position to establish what on earth was going on, Darryl ordered his faithful VNC to explore the innards of the suspect computer one more time. He programmed it to start taking screenshots of the engineer’s PC every thirty seconds. Looking at the computer in real time was baffling. It was impossible to identify what the data actually represented. But when he saw the screenshots – frozen images of the engineer’s activity – he gleaned a pretty good idea of what was going on: these were hundreds upon hundreds of credit-card numbers, bank accounts, personal details, PIN numbers and email addresses. This had absolutely nothing to do with the development of Sierra Leone’s nascent oil-refining capacity.

Darryl then printed one particularly dense page from Bank of America Online, and took it to his MD, Mike Smith. Within minutes Smith had picked up the phone and called the police in Scunthorpe.

When DS Dawson arrived at Grimley Smith, the MD presented him with the printouts. There was a mind-boggling array of data: information on banks, estate agents, insurance companies, theme parks, cinemas, charities and more, including what looked like some information extracted from the US military. He immediately suspected that he was dealing with some form of fraud, but he could not know what the material signified or how he could begin to confirm these suspicions. These were difficult questions.

‘Right,’ said Dawson ‘Let’s get him in the office for a chat, shall we?’