Milkshake (30 page)

He replaced the handset and read the report.

The previous afternoon had been spent trying to
cross-reference Cowood Industries' assets to actual locations. He’d
stopped looking when he’d found the link to the Kutete wine
operation. Someone in the Prime Minister’s own team had taken
another look and identified a further link. They discovered there
were a number of Cowood-owned farms all located on Waiheke Island.
For such a small place, Cowood had an unusually high ownership
ratio. These farms had all been acquired within the last two years.
This needed further investigation.

Brent looked up from reading the document. “We need to get
onto the island and take a closer look at these farms, take blood
samples from the cattle and test them. But we also need to do it in
a way that doesn’t raise Cowood’s suspicions.”

“I’ll pass your suggestion back to the PM’s office. They can
evaluate the options.”

Brent’s mobile phone rang. It was Hone. “It’s me, boss. The
Brits want to go to Waiheke Island. Dave says he has an old school
mate there. What do you reckon?”

Brent thought for a moment. Having the Turners on the island
at the same time Government officials could be there investigating
the cattle made him uneasy. As he was about to reply, he heard
shouting coming from the phone. Something wasn’t right. “Captain,
Hone, is everything OK?”

“They’ve gone. They’ve taken the bloody car and driven
off”

“How did you let that happen?”

“I’ve got out to get better reception on the phone and bloody
Dave has got into the driver’s seat and hooned off down the
hill.”

“D’you think they’ll head to Waiheke?”

“Not sure, boss. They’ve headed north. Just send someone to
pick me up before those bloody loggers catch up with
me.”

Brent was thinking of a way to get on to the island to test
the milking herds. Then he remembered, in London, reading about the
outbreak of foot and mouth disease that had occurred the year
before. It led to the widespread slaughter of animals, disruption
to sporting events, and even the postponement of the General
Election. He knew his own country was mercifully free of the
disease. Any potential outbreak was likely to be treated very
seriously by both the Government and public alike. It could
decimate the entire economy. He had his solution.

“There’s going to be the threat of an outbreak of foot and
mouth on Waiheke.”

The Commander frowned.

“We need vets on the island taking blood samples, right? So
we invent a story. The Government has been sent an anonymous threat
that the foot and mouth virus has been released on the island.
This’ll give us a credible reason to declare the state of
emergency.”

“And you reckon it could work?”

“No reason why not. Despite our investigations, we’ll find no
evidence of the virus. The source of the threat will never be made
public and the whole story will blow over and be forgotten in a few
weeks.”

Commander Dalton narrowed his eyes, thinking for a moment.
“I’ll contact Wellington with the idea. If they decide to go ahead,
they’ll need to brief the Ministry of Ag. The operation will have
to be completely ready to go before releasing any kind of media
statement.”

An hour later, Brent read the draft of the proposed media
release, to be released at 11am the following day:

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Director of
Biosecurity said today that MAF and Police were responding to a
claimed deliberate release of foot and mouth virus on Waiheke
Island.

He said the claim, advised by letter to the Prime Minister’s
Office this morning, was probably a hoax but was being taken very
seriously.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has activated its
disease management response systems this morning after the letter
was received.

As part of this precautionary response a controlled area
notice has been issued which restricts the movement of livestock
and risk material on and from the island whilst the investigation
proceeds.

A controlled area notice has been issued under the provisions
of the Biosecurity Act in order to restrict the movement of risk
material. Risk materials include live animals, hay, equipment used
with animals, untreated products from animals, milk, cheese, meat
and wool.

The Director said the notice took effect this morning. He
stressed the importance of securing the full co-operation of
everyone in the area in dealing with the situation.

He emphasized that there was no risk to public safety or
public health. Foot and mouth disease only affects ruminant animals
such as sheep, cattle and pigs.

The Police Assistant Commissioner said anyone with any
information that might assist enquiries was encouraged to contact
their nearest police station immediately.

Senior Ministers and officials have been briefed and a police
enquiry into the origin of the letter has been launched.

“While this matter is probably a hoax we must take all
necessary steps to safeguard New Zealand’s interests and public
welfare,’ the Director said.

Brent grinned. “Good stuff. I like the reference to the fact
it’s probably a hoax. Prepares everyone for the expectation we
won’t actually find anything.”

He selected a vacant desk, keyed in a website address he had
been handed by one of the tech officers, and was on the official
Government National Emergency intranet. The Civil Defence Emergency
Management Act meant he now had delegated authority and
wide-ranging powers to:

“Devise, promote and carry out, or cause to be carried out,
research and investigations into matters relating to civil defence
emergency management.”

This simple sentence granted him access to any information
held on any Government-controlled computer system.

He keyed 'Waiheke Island dairy farms' into the search box.
Over 5,000 links appeared. Filtering the search by adding 'Cowood
Industries', a much shorter list appeared. He checked farm names
against the
Land Information New
Zealand
online database and confirmed
Cowood had purchased fifteen farms on the island in the past two
years. The next step would be trying to prove the dairy herds on
the island were being experimented on before the Ministry vets even
had the opportunity to take blood samples.

He accessed the
National Law
Enforcement
computer system and noted all
the vehicles registered to Cowood, before finding a file of all the
images recorded by the permanent speed cameras situated near the
ferry terminal on the island.

The public believed the cameras were only used to photograph
speeding vehicles. In fact they were calibrated to photograph every
car that passed them, in both directions.

The evidence was clear. A 2002 Toyota Landcruiser registered
to Cowood had visited the island at least twice a month, with
visits gradually becoming more frequent in the past two months. He
had the vehicle. Now he needed to know who the driver
was.

Brent’s fingers worked quickly across the keyboard,
cross-checking the Landcruiser against pictures taken by other
cameras across the Greater Auckland area, until he found the image
he was looking for.

He copied the picture and enlarged the driver’s head. A white
male, mid thirties, was all he could be confident of at this stage.
Loading the facial recognition software being used at Heathrow,
Brent dragged the blurry facial image into the centre of the
screen, before navigating to the LTNZ internal database and setting
it to scroll through the licence photographs of the 227,000 males
between the ages of 29 and 39.

Brent left the program running, hoping by the time he returned
fifteen minutes later, it would have successfully identified the
face, and it didn’t belong to a foreign national who had never
applied for a New Zealand driving licence.

* * *

The screen was blank. Sleep mode. Cautiously, he pushed the
mouse, flashing it into life. There were now two photographs, the
grainy blurred image of the car driver and the licence photo of
Tony Robinson.

Now he had a name, the rest would be relatively easy. A
passport records check revealed Robinson had spent time in the
United States. He was a veterinarian. Tax details confirmed his
employer as the Dairytree Vets' Practice. Brent was familiar with
this cynically cosier name Cowood used for its loss-making consumer
products division.

Cowood was sending its own vet over to the island on a regular
basis to look after the cattle it owned. Now he wanted to check
whether Robinson had a contact on the island. Someone who might be
aware of his frequent visits, or even unwittingly assisting
him.

He typed 'Veterinary Council of New
Zealand' into the computer and compared the names against the
electoral role on Waiheke Island. One entry caught his eye
immediately: Edwyn Collington BVMS Bristol 1987. This guy was a
British-trained vet.

Brent had a hunch.

He tracked back through David Turner’s residency application
to locate the name of his Secondary School. Collington was the same
age as Turner, had attended the same school and possibly even been
in the same class. The coincidences did not stop there.

The Waiheke phone book showed Collington’s address was the
Mushroom Café which he co-owned with his wife, the former Anika
O’Sullivan, who had been the wife of Patrick O’Sullivan before
separating from him in a very public fashion several years
before.

Brent had collected more information in this last hour than he
could have hoped for. The next phase of his investigation required
even higher security clearance.

The interception of emails had been routinely available to the
intelligence service for many years, but since there was virtually
no subversive, radical or terrorist activity, its use was largely
confined to scanning sensitive messages sent from foreign embassies
to their Governments, and back, or the occasional hijacking of
embarrassing information sent by members of Parliament.

Brent would have to obtain the written authorisation of the
Minister for Civil Defence before he could start snooping through
Edwyn Collington’s inbox. He explained to the Commander he needed
the assistance of the tech guys located deep under the
Beehive.

Permission was quickly granted. All he could do was wait while
others hacked into Collington’s phone account and copies of every
email were extracted from the phone company’s records. Once all the
information had been uploaded to the secure server in the Ops Room,
an algorithm set to work locating key words.

Brent was looking for any evidence Edwyn Collington was
somehow involved in either the promotion or the prevention of
Cowood’s activities. Not enough was known about him to judge where
his sympathies lay. Trawling through ten years worth of emails
would hopefully bring his true intent to light. In the meantime, a
wire tap was put on the phone line of the Mushroom Café.

The Civil Defence Emergency Management Group moved swiftly to
activate the Domestic and External Security Co-Ordination Plan.
Working on the presumption that the biosecurity threat was genuine,
responsibility for coordinating the MAF response was delegated to
the Exotic Disease Response Centre.

A small team of vets from Massey University’s Institute of
Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences was assembled. The Field
Operations Response Team – FORT - included five vets who had
travelled to the UK two years before, to offer assistance and
expertise during their outbreak of the foot and mouth
virus.

The Ministry had not yet carried out its annual exotic disease
simulation exercise to test their response to the incursion of
diseases like foot and mouth. The FORT team were keen to get onto
the island.

The information was withheld from the team that the threat was
entirely fictitious. As far as they were concerned, this was no
exercise.

The Civil Defence Minister persuaded the FORT team that, due
to the physical isolation of Waiheke from the rest of New Zealand’s
livestock, and the likelihood that this was merely a hoax letter,
there would be no point in arriving en masse just before nightfall.
They would be better to fly over in the morning, by which time the
Emergency Management Group would have had time to compose a
suitable press release.

Chapter 19

Brent spent a restless night trying to decide if the
Government was taking the right action. The KMP surveillance
exercise was snowballing into an international crisis with no end
in sight and no obvious solution.

He had assisted in identifying the problem, but control of the
solution had been passed to more than one committee. He had no
issue with the Civil Defence Emergency Management group, but
throughout the preceding day he felt his influence being gradually
eroded away.