Gordon Stevens - Provo

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 of the British Museum in Great Russell Street, and obtained a reader’s pass in the name of Sampson, her application authenticated by a letter on University College headed notepaper which she herself had printed and on which she had written details of a fictitious PhD thesis. For the next ten days, in the vast domed reading room of the British Library, she worked her way through the books she had listed from the publishers’ catalogues.

The following week she spent five days at the Press Association in Fleet Street, tucked into a corner in the newspaper cuttings library, again using the name Sampson and paying cash. On the first morning she asked for files on environmental pollution, with special reference to interest in the subject shown by the Prince of Wales; at the end of the morning she moved on to royal cuttings in general, taking the relevant folders from the filing cabinets herself and returning them once she had finished, so that there was no record of herself or which files she had consulted. The following week she spent four days in the British Newspaper Library at Colindale in north London.

The photograph was in the diary column of the Daily Mail.

Perhaps it was because she was concentrating on the content of the various reports, perhaps because the report in question was about a lunch party and therefore of little consequence, perhaps because the cutting at the Press Association library was slightly torn or the microfiche machine at Colindale was slightly out of focus, that she did not register it. It was only three evenings later that the feeling began to seep into her that sometime, somewhere, over the past days and weeks, she had missed something. Not something important, not something she could have used. And that was what annoyed her. Because not only could she not remember what she had seen or where she had seen it, but she did not even know why she should have noticed it or why it was surfacing from somewhere in her subconscious.

For the two weeks after that she concentrated on European and American magazines and newspapers specializing in scandal stories about the royal family. In each case the stories were more sensational, and less likely to be corroborated, than in the British newspapers, and the photographs were more intimate, or at least more intrusive.

September had slipped into October, and soon October would give way to November. Somewhere in the mass of information she had gathered together was the key to PinMan, she was aware; somewhere among what seemed like an industry in itself was the one person who could give her that key. Except that already she was running out of time.

Something she had seen in one of the photographs at the Press Association or at Colindale – perhaps she had been aware of the unease before, perhaps she had pushed it aside. Now it crept up on her again, only caught her because something deep in her psychology allowed it to. Not something about PinMan. Something about herself.

It was nine o’clock. She went into the lounge and switched on the television.

The Sun received the tip-off shortly before seven. Something important had happened in the life of the Princess of Wales, the source said; the previous evening she had toasted the news with close friends at one of her favourite restaurants.

‘What news?’ the deputy editor asked.

‘The source wasn’t sure.’

‘How reliable’s the source?’

On the fringe but reliable in the past, the reporter who had taken the call informed him. Offering the story on an exclusive basis but needing an answer fast. Or she would take it to another newspaper, the implication was clear.

‘You’ve talked to the Palace?’

‘They’re making no comment.’

They wouldn’t, unless you asked something specific, the deputy editor understood, and even then they normally didn’t comment anyway. The story was weak – in a way it wasn’t a story. Except that it might be, and someone else might have it. The editor was in Australia and the paper’s royal-watcher was on holiday somewhere in the Far East. Buy the woman up and close the source, he thought, except that if she knew, then someone else probably did as well. And if another paper knew, they’d be running it that night.