Social Engineer

Social Engineer - Chapter 2

Today 8:50am

Avoiding eye contact with the three senior executives sitting confrontationally on the other side of the huge oak meeting table, Brody plugged the projector and audio cables into his top-of-the-line tablet computer. The absence of small talk heightened the sense of tension in the room. Brody thought about saying something, anything really, to break the ice, but then remembered he wasn’t here to make friends or seek their approval. He was here to make a point.

Not that Brody had many friends, well not in the real world anyway.

It was early on a rainy Monday morning in HTL’s head office campus near Shoreham in Kent. The pharmaceutical company’s Research and Development Director, Dr Moorcroft, had yet to arrive. Moorcroft had scheduled this meeting immediately following his reading of Brody’s report on Saturday morning, which Brody had submitted only the evening before. This had rankled Brody because he’d had to cancel his weekend’s plans at short notice, instead using the time to prepare the presentation he was now about to give. And he’d had to set his alarm for some ungodly hour this morning to make it here on time from his apartment in London. He made a mental note to never again submit a findings report on a Friday evening.

A mirror image of Brody’s tablet computer materialised on the large screen at the foot of the table. Satisfied the projector worked, he turned the mirroring off. On the desk next to his tablet, his smartphone flashed the receipt of a text message. He picked it up and saw it was from his girlfriend, Mel, confirming she could meet him for lunch later on. He patted his pocket nervously, feeling the shape of the small item it contained.

With nothing left to do but wait for Dr Moorcroft, Brody studied the HTL executives sat silently across the table: two men flanking one woman. Moorcroft had explained during their phone call on Saturday morning that he would summon the heads of IT, Human Resources and Security to Brody’s presentation. Moorcroft had not provided names but this hadn’t deterred Brody from checking out who they were ahead of the meeting.

He already knew which of them was the Head of Security, having previously researched him as part of the original brief. For the other two, he had browsed through the HTL corporate website and then searched LinkedIn, the ‘business’ version of the social networking site Facebook, to determine who they were and check out their backgrounds. Based on the photos in their publicly viewable LinkedIn profiles, he was pleased to see his quick investigation had narrowed down to the correct people.

The IT Director was called Rob Hall. His LinkedIn picture presented a lean, tanned face with a full head of hair but the photo must have been taken some years before. In real life, Hall was flabby and overweight with an aggressively receding hairline. He wore an ill-fitting light grey suit with open-necked pink shirt and was intently thumbing through messages on his BlackBerry.

The woman was much younger than her two colleagues, who both looked to be in their mid-forties. She was perhaps in her early thirties, similar in age to Brody. Brody had discovered that she was called Kate Wilson and ran Human Resources. She shuffled some papers and peered at Brody over the top of her rimless glasses, stage-managed to give her the air of seniority denied by her relative youth.

The last was Paul Jacobsen, HTL’s Head of Security. According to LinkedIn, he had originally been in the Navy, having served in the Falklands and then, up until a few years ago, had been a senior ranked detective in Greater Manchester Police. He was thin and well groomed, wearing a dark, pinstriped suit, plain white shirt with an inoffensive tie and cufflinks. The job title alone had made Brody believe that the Head of Security would be his biggest obstacle this morning and, watching Jacobsen nonchalantly twirl an expensive Montblanc pen around in his fingers, the impression was reinforced. In fact, having spotted Jacobsen’s shiny tan brogues as he entered the meeting room a few minutes earlier, Brody was now one hundred per cent positive there would soon be a head-on confrontation.