A cloud of bitterly cold vapour hit Jane and Doctor Owen in the face as he opened the door to his cold storage chamber at Mantek pharmaceuticals. They both squinted and took a step back as the temperature of the room started to drop. Doctor Owen disappeared into the cold darkness and emerged with an ice-covered plastic bottle filled with frozen blue liquid.
‘Can you bring that box over here?’ he asked. Jane slid a metal box along the workbench and opened the lid. Doctor Owen placed the bottle in the box and sealed it.
‘How long are we going to keep it in there?’ Jane asked, ‘Isn’t it going to thaw out?’
‘Yes it will, but that’s not important. This is the primary treatment so we’re going to be disposing of it, not developing it. Once we gather together all the samples and destroy them, we’ll be safe to finish the development of the secondary treatment without any distractions.’
‘Are we done here?’
‘No, not yet. There’s still something I need to do.’
Doctor Owen closed the door to the storage chamber and they left the store room. They walked across the corridor and into an office, where the doctor sat down at a computer and logged in.
‘What are you doing?’ Jane asked.
‘I’m going to remove all data about the primary treatment from the central servers,’ he said as he reached into his pocket, took out a pen drive and connected it to the computer.
‘But don’t they keep backups of the data on their systems?’
‘Yes they do,’ the doctor replied, ‘The data from the shared drive is backed up every night to a storage server. Once a week, this data is then archived to tape and sent to another facility a few miles away. That means we can restore the data and continue work from a recent backup should anything happen to this building.’
‘So what’s the point in deleting data off the server if they’re only going to restore it?’
‘I always keep my pen drive with me. It contains a batch file that will copy the data and remove all data from the storage server. Then all we have to do is recover the backup tapes and destroy them, and all of Mantek’s data about the primary treatment will disappear.’
He made it sound so easy. Jane thought it must be more complicated than that. If all they had to do was waltz into Mantek, pick up a bottle, destroy a few tapes and pick up a few more things, why hadn’t anyone else tried to sabotage this operation before? Why hadn’t the vampires done exactly what he was doing right now?
Doctor Owen opened up the contents of his pen drive, found the location of the batch file he was looking for and launched it.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘this will take a few minutes.’
‘Won’t anyone be able to tell that it was you that deleted all the data?’
‘It’s possible, but it’s a chance we have to take.’
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