He turned his attention to his laptop and waited for the votes to start coming in.

* * *

Andrew Harvey walked into the Technical Operations office and made his way straight to Gerald Small’s workstation.

“What have we got?” he asked.

Small continued tapping at his keyboard as he explained their progress.  “We have the website host.  It’s a UK company based in Guildford, and he’s either too dumb to know how to hide its location, or he doesn’t care.”

“Or maybe he wants us to find it.” Harvey suggested.  “What else?”

“We have gained access to the website’s source code.  It’s written in a programming language I am familiar with, and so far I have discovered a couple of interesting bits of code.”  Small brought up the first page of interest.  “This area here checks to see if it is operating within a date and time range.  That range was a couple of minutes before the first call to the BBC and ended forty five minutes later.  It has collected details of every visitor during that time and sent the details to Gray’s email address.  What he has done with that information, we don’t know, but he wanted it for a reason.”

“Which means he knows our IP address and can block or monitor our visits?”

Small nodded

“What about using a different terminal?” Harvey asked.

“We access the outside world via a proxy server, so no matter which terminal you use, it will always show the IP address of the proxy.  What we can do is use a different connection.”  He shuffled his chair to another terminal and opened up a command prompt.  After typing for a few moments he declared the job done.

“This terminal uses our failover connection and doesn't use a proxy.  It will show up as a residential account if he ever digs that deep.”

“Excellent,” Harvey said.  “So we have anonymous access.  What options do we have now?”

Small shuffled back to his own terminal and brought up another page of code.

“This function calls a web service that brings back the results of the votes.”  Noticing the blank look from Harvey, he dumbed it down.  “A web service is a way for two websites to talk to each other.  The results are going to another server in South Africa, one we don’t have access to.  This code here calls that other website and asks it to send the results.  This means that if we want to manipulate the results, we could do it here, as the results come back.  We could easily add thirty percent to the number of ‘Die’ votes and show this as the number of ‘Live’ votes.  That way, none of them are killed.”

Harvey looked sceptical.  “I’m worried that he is making this too easy for us.  What other options are there?”

“Well,” Small said, rubbing the back of his neck, “we could intercept all emails going to his inbox and delete every third one that says ‘Die’ before he receives it, I suppose.”