The phone went dead and Hammond stared at the handset for a moment before cradling it gently.  They now had no way of manipulating the votes, so he had to focus on the two main priorities.  He called Harvey into his office and wasted no time when the group leader arrived.

“Double the efforts on finding that device, and find us something to pin on Gray's associates.”

Chapter 9

Monday 18th April 2011

Tom Gray woke just before five in the morning.  No-one had made a move on the building and he had managed to grab some sleep just after three o’clock, although the night was far from quiet.  Two of his guests had made plenty of noise at around midnight but after ignoring their muffled calls for a while he had eventually shut them up for the night with a few well-aimed blows.  Stuart Boyle had also played up for a while but Gray hadn't even entered his cell: he didn’t trust himself to show any restraint and now wasn’t the time to deal with him.  Mr Boyle’s day would come, but today wasn’t that day.

After checking that the boys were still with him and secure, he scanned his monitors: no sign of any movement except for up at their control vehicle, where a couple of people were standing around drinking hot drinks and looking bored.  Not long to go, guys, he thought.  This was well beyond their pay grade and it wouldn’t be long before the Regiment were called in to take over.  It was unlikely that his former colleagues would ever launch an attack, given the consequences and the defences he had put in place, but they need to be ready, just in case the security services discovered his device.  While Gray knew they would never find it, they would nevertheless be pursuing that line of investigation rigorously.

He made himself some breakfast and watched the figures on his laptop tick over as he ate.  Surprisingly, the Live votes were slightly in the lead, so he checked that his countermeasures were still in place and operational.  Everything seemed fine, so he ran a code comparison tool which compared the files on the South African web server with the ones on his laptop:  they were exactly the same, which meant the code hadn’t been interfered with.  Next he ran the duplicate email tool and that appeared to be working, too.  If anyone tried to send more than one email from the same email address it would only accept the first as a valid vote: the rest would be recorded on a separate system but not included in the final vote.  The same applied to IP addresses, which prevented people from using more than one email account on the same computer.  Basically, it was one vote per household.  His software had identified over six hundred thousand duplicate emails, which was not unexpected, given the passion some people seemed to have for what was happening.