Case:Black - 40. Chapter 40

White Sands Missile Range, NM

Department of Homeland Security

Section 39- Secure Biohazard Lab

July 17, 2016 0405 CST

Sal Martino and Ray James sat in the observation area of lab-5 and watched as the labs best computer geek attempted to retrieve the information from the media recovered from lab-3.

Aaron Brooks had started well before the Ray James had come back from lab-3. It took some time to set up things to handle the media. Anything that came from lab-3 had to be treated like it was contaminated so Brooks had set up a laptop and the necessary drives to read the media in a vacant secure glove-box lab under biohazard-level 4 (or BL-4) containment protocols. Brooks was inside the containment lab in a blue Tyvek “space suit” drawing air from tubes connected to labs air supply.

They watched as Brooks took the sealed bag containing the tapes and portable hard drives, pulled it through the airlock and broke the seal on the package.

He took a careful look at the tapes and the hard drives and said, “They all look to be in pristine condition. There’s no apparent damage to any of the four.”

Brooks opened the second bag holding the DVR that James had taken from the security system. He held it up to the light and said, “The DVR looks good too. I’m going to start with it.”

He put the DVD into the laptops CD/DVD player and closed the drive. It took a few seconds to spin up and he said, “I’m getting good data from the DVR. Now I’m going to dump it to server so we can look at it in detail.”

After entering a few commands, the laptop began dumping the contents of the DVD to the local fileserver.

While the laptop was busy with its assigned task, he put took one of the portable hard drives and connected it to a USB port. The laptop connected to the drive instantly and Brooks grinned. “Bingo. I’m reading the first drive. Looks like about sixty gigs of PC data from the lab-3 group. I’m uploading it now.”

Since the laptop was busy shoving all of that data across the network, Brooks looked around the lab. There was a stool stashed under the work table so he pulled it out and had a seat in front of laptop and whistled. “Looks like a whole lot of biochemistry and molecular biology data. I see stuff here from HyperChem, DNAStar, EMBOSS, Mathematica and more that I don’t recognize.”

Sal pushed the conference button and said, “That’s just what we’re looking for Aaron. Keep it up.”

Brooks nodded and watched as the laptop as the data moved to the network. When it finally stopped, he loaded the second drive and it pinged when the USB connection was established.

The technicians took a few moments and said, “Boss, this drive has been wiped.”

Sal said, “What? There’s no data on it?”

Brooks said, “No- it has been wiped. Give me a minute. I’ll see what I can do about recovering it.”

It took him about ten minutes but Brooks pumped his fist and said, “Gotcha.”

Sal asked, “What’s happening?”

Brooks said, “Whoever wiped this drive wasn’t real clever or thorough about it. He did a simple block delete. The data is still there, I just had to recover it. It’ll take some time depending on how much data is here but we’ll get it all.”

While the laptop was occupied with recovering the data from the hard drive, Brooks mounted the tape drives in the reader and then executed a Linux program on the server to read the drives and dump the data to the server. That might take upwards of a half hour but he knew he was in the home stretch.

The program un-deleting files on the second hard drive pinged to announce its completion and Brooks began to block copy the data to the server. Once he was done, he stood and began the elaborate process of extricating himself from the secure lab.

In the lab-5 data center, Raymond James was already looking at the data from the security DVR. As Director Martino looked over his shoulder, the photos of their suspect resolved: first in Doctor Porter’s lab and again in the server room on the next level up. James captured image after image.

James narrated, “It’s 1900 on August 17, 2005.”

Martino said, “That was the Wednesday before everything went crazy.”

“Our boy goes into Porter’s lab carrying a laptop case. He’s in there for twelve minutes. Next, he goes upstairs and uses an over-ride code to open the server closet. He’s in there for a half hour. He takes the elevator up and exits the building and is never heard from again.”

Martino said, “So that’s why we thought Porter had gotten out. He must have lifted Porter’s pass card when he was in his lab.”

James said, “And that’s why we thought Jason Cunningham was dead in the lab. He never swiped his card when he left. What do you know about him Sal?”

“We hired Cunningham out of graduate school. Heck- I think Porter even gave him a recommendation letter. He had a Masters from Stanford in virology and a strong molecular biology background. He was assigned to work with Doctor Porter’s team when they arrived in… late 03 or early ‘04.”

James asked, “What were they working on?”

Martino sighed, “That’s so classified that even I didn’t know exactly. I knew they was a huge grant from the DHS Bio-terrorism task force. I was pretty sure they were working on vaccines against possible viral pathogens. Beyond that, I didn’t need to know. My job was to keep them secure and in plenty of test tubes.”

A somewhat bedraggled Aaron Brooks entered the computer lab and went to his workstation.

Martino said, “Put all of Doctor Porters data in a zip file and send it to ftp site USARIID sent us. After that, send the data down to our people. The more heads working this problem the better.”

James asked, “Now that we know about Cunningham, what are we going to do?”

Martino said, “Frankly I don’t really know where to start. There’s only one guy that I trust with this.”