“This image was sent to us by the MoD.  They confirm that Tom Gray was one of theirs but he appears to have understated his role.”  After glancing at her notes, she continued.  “He joined Two Para aged eighteen and after achieving the rank of Sergeant he joined Two-Two Regiment, where he spent his last eight years, including three tours in Iraq which earned him the Distinguished Conduct Medal.  We'll have more details when his file arrives.”

“He's SAS?”  Hammond asked.

“It appears so.”

“Which means he probably will have the knowhow to create the device he mentioned, so we proceed on that assumption.”  Hammond massaged his cheeks for a moment.  “He mentioned colleagues on the outside.  Work that up, see who he has been in contact with over the last six months.  Phone records, email account, we need names and addresses for everyone.”  The Assistant Director General of MI5 turned to Harvey.  “Andrew, our main priority is that bomb:  Get every available resource looking for it.  Once that’s rolling, ask the techies to get working on that website.  Examine every avenue, give us some options.  I don't want them to make a move, just options.”

The intelligence officer nodded and left the room.

“Diane, I want reports on each of these boys, and get on to GCHQ and surveillance, see if we can find Gray's location.  The techies might get us something but I want to double up on everything.”

Lane nodded and walked towards the door. “Will do.”

Hammond returned to his office and made a quick phone call before grabbing his briefcase and walking towards the exit.  “I'm going to see the Home Secretary,” he told Harvey in passing.  “Keep me posted on developments.”

Chapter 4

Tom Gray watched the counter on his laptop as it crept towards two hundred.  The freelance programmer who had created the bespoke software had explained that when a new visitor arrived at the website, The Global.asax file captured their IP address and other items in the ServerVariables collection, wrapped them in an XML message and emailed it to his inbox.  His email software then dumped it in a folder which is monitored by a FileSystemWatcher component, which extracted the information and fed it into a web service which returned known information based on the server variables, and then fed it into a database and displayed the results on the screen, which was refreshed every few seconds by a Timer component.

In layman’s terms, if someone visited the website, he would know about it, and have a good idea who and where they were.

Gray had contacted the news outlets forty minutes earlier, and as no-one else in the world knew about the website he thought it safe to assume that the first visitors would be the news outlets, the government and the intelligence service.