Going through the completed vaccine forms, which are finally all back, except V’s, of course (L really, really wishes the parents could do things without needing to be reminded), L notes that two of the other families have refused permission. One child has an allergy and one is a Muslim. She’ll refer the Muslim refusal under PREVENT – makes sense, if she’s referring V. Just so it’s clear she’s not singling her out. There are two other Muslims in the class whose parents have agreed to the vaccine. In one case L knows it’s because the mum can’t read English, but then that’s her lookout. Get a translator! No way would L sign a form she hadn’t read.

Come to think of it, this flu vaccine is a really useful tool for PREVENT. L wonders if the other class teachers are being as vigilant. Perhaps she should drop an email to SLT.

Z is to handwrite two sets of minutes – one with red herrings and one with different red herrings – and distribute Herrings A to those three people whom Z, W and P have identified as potential moles. Herrings B are to go to everyone else.

It is a risky strategy, P says.

W agrees, but what other option do they have, short of actual menace? The likelihood of people comparing documents is very small, she says, because they think they all have the same. Everyone has been told not to bring the minutes into work – they are handed them personally as they leave the site, and told not to bring them in again. This has been reiterated many times. Anyway, if they do rumble us, all they’ll know is that we’re on to them.

Which will make them more careful, says P.

In Cheltenham, the analysts have made a connection between Z and O. At 1.35 p.m. Z added the editor of the New Humanist on Facebook. Though innocuous enough, this brings him within a pattern of contacts that mirrors that of the Leeds group, and of O.

There is nothing else in the metadata to link them. There is nothing yet to warrant a content search. But if a link goes live, there will be.

Z has been sure all along that the government has him in its sights. And now, for the first time, he is right.

Z and O do not know each other, and have never been in contact, but they do have some common interests, which tend towards the political. Neither of them is in contact with the Leeds group, but again, there is metadata tracking a potential link, which, if activated (a friend request, a Twitter follow), trips the trap.

*

Management have got the first herrings and not the second ones (unless, of course, it’s a double bluff). This means that the potential moles are, as suspected, one or more of S, Q and E. Now to narrow it down.