Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap (18 page)

Up in the Clarity suite, true to form, he was sitting behind his desk, busying himself with some important-looking papers, while Charlie Fielding sat at the conference table with a laptop open in front of him. Liz had expected a geeky-looking boffin, but this was a rather attractive man, bespectacled and thoughtful-looking, with curly brown hair and a broad smile. Peggy introduced Charlie to Liz and they all sat down while Pennington continued his reading.

Finally, he got up from the desk and joined them, taking his place at the head of the table.

Pennington looked accusingly at Liz. ‘I gather this is all going from bad to worse.’

She replied as calmly as she could, ‘I believe we are making progress. I wanted to see Dr Fielding because I need to understand more about the project he and his colleagues are working on.’

Henry Pennington started to rub his hands together – the inevitable sign of agitation. Liz went on hastily: ‘As you know, Peggy and I are now cleared to Clarity Purple, so you don’t need to worry about security for this conversation.’

The hand-washing speeded up and Pennington said, ‘I made it clear that I didn’t approve of Miss Kinsolving being cleared to Purple. It seemed to me to be broadening the knowledge unnecessarily.’

Peggy flushed and Liz said determinedly, ‘Take my word for it, Henry, it was necessary or we wouldn’t have asked.’

She turned to Charlie Fielding. ‘We’ve had the Clarity briefing, but it would be helpful if you would describe what you’re actually doing at Brigham Hall.’

Fielding put his hands on the table as he gathered his thoughts. ‘How much do you know about drones?’

Peggy said, ‘Invisible planes in the sky?’

Fielding laughed. ‘That’s a start anyway, though they’re perfectly visible. I’m sure you’ve at least heard about the remotely piloted drones – the ones flown by an airman sitting in an air force base in Nevada, chewing on a Hershey bar and looking at a picture of a scene 7,000 miles away; he presses a button and thirty people are blown up outside a Pakistani village. Some of them may even have been terrorists,’ he added, raising an eyebrow. Henry Pennington tutted.

‘Then there are simpler kinds of drone, unarmed ones that fly very high and take pictures and send them back, or at the most basic level actually bring the pictures back. Practically all these drones – except the very simplest, which can be pre-programmed – depend on continuous communication, either from the ground nearby or from a huge distance away via satellite.

‘Cyber-espionage can be very sophisticated: it’s not just hacking into someone else’s computer and stealing the contents, it can also involve the continuous feeding of data to the attacker, or even the attacker controlling the computer and making it obey external commands.

‘The media assume any attack that’s detected these days is coming from China, but everyone is developing the capability – and trying to defend themselves against it. The French, the Americans, the Russians and us of course. Cyber-espionage – both conducting it and defending against it – is GCHQ’s top priority nowadays.

‘Back to drones. The cleverer the drone, the more sophisticated the communication system it needs to have. And the next generation is going to be very clever. They’ll be able to control their own family of mini-drones, making decisions for themselves according to what they find on the ground.’

‘They sound terrifying,’ said Peggy.

‘Well, yes, but it’s still a very new science,’ Fielding went on. ‘As you know, Clarity is a joint programme with the Americans. The idea is that in a limited way the drone should be able to think for itself. For example, the controller could say something like, “Go down three hundred feet, but go up again if you see a gun emplacement on the ground.” Or, “Fire your missile when the car looks as if it’s stopping, but if it speeds up hold fire.” Imagine how much more effective that would be than just being able to make it go left or go right.

‘If the programme is successful, and it’s early days yet, we’ll have an expert system on board the drone that will let it make decisions as subtle as that for itself. But for now, it has to let someone else tell it exactly what to do and when.

‘So Clarity is concerned with the communication systems and commands sent to drones. We’ve developed protocols that let us send instruction to these new drones in natural language.’

‘Natural?’ asked Liz.

‘As opposed to artificial – which is what computer languages are. Look.’ And he flipped open the top of his laptop and tapped a key. The screen was filled with row after row of numbers and symbols. ‘That’s raw ASCII, the bits and bytes that tell this machine what to do.’

‘Looks like Chinese to me,’ said Peggy. Then realising what she’d said, blushed and added, ‘Oh, sorry. Let’s hope it’s not.’

‘So where does Operation Clarity fit into all this?’ Liz was anxious to move things on now. She could see Henry Pennington shuffling in his chair, ready to make an unhelpful remark.

‘It encrypts the natural language commands in real time – which means they are protected by codes as soon as they’re spoken. If any of the communications were intercepted, the interceptor wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of them – so they’re hidden, if you like.’

Liz sat back, trying to take in his mini-lecture. ‘Then if we look at Bravado’s information, why would anyone want to infiltrate the programme?’

‘To encrypt their own counter-commands, which would be accepted because they’d be similarly encoded.’

‘How would you go about stealing the encryption code?’

‘Well, first you’d need to get into our working system at Brigham Hall.’

‘So this is where Bravado’s mole in MOD comes in? If he exists.’

‘There is no mole in the Clarity project,’ said Henry Pennington, suddenly coming to life at the end of the table. ‘I’ve told you that our vetting system in Clarity is totally reliable.’

Ignoring him, Liz went on addressing Fielding. ‘I know Peggy’s briefed you about her interviews with Cowdray and Duggan, and that you’ve agreed to keep them in play.’

‘That’s right. We’ve kept Hugo Cowdray’s machine operating as normal. I have it on my desk at Brigham Hall and I take it back to my digs at night. It’s set up as a dummy machine, so that anyone trying to get into the Brigham Hall system via the email footprint which Duggan and Hugo left, would find Hugo’s PC alive and well. But if they tried to look further at the network – and to get into the encryption work – they’d hit a dead end. I’ve put an alert on the machine, so I’ll know the minute anyone tries.’

Liz said, ‘But wouldn’t they know that, and realise they’d been sussed?’

‘Not necessarily. Hopefully, they’ll just think they’ve hit a brick wall. Even the most segregated systems have internal checks, so in theory at least, anyone coming in will feel they just haven’t cracked the internal codes.’

‘By which time,’ said Peggy cheerfully, ‘we should have nabbed the culprit.’

Fielding gave a fleeting smile. ‘Only if we’re quick enough. Or they’re not quick enough to get out before we identify them.’

‘Is there any evidence that anyone has used the Duggan footprint to try to get in?’

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. As I said, we’ve set a trap for them, but it’s a question of whether we closed the stable door in time.’

‘I was talking to my colleague in the US Embassy the other day and he said there had been some technical hitches in the trials. Do you know what they were?’

‘Yes, I do. The most interesting was when the drone seemed to ignore the ground controller’s natural language command and do something different. Fortunately, it got back on course in the end.’

‘Could that mean external interference?’

‘Too early to say. The assumption at the moment is that it was some sort of technical failure. It’s not impossible it was something external, but if it was interference it would indicate a very advanced infiltration of the system.’

Henry Pennington looked as if he were about to faint. ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ he asked. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

‘Oh, you will be, Henry,’ said Liz. ‘If it turns out to be anything serious.’

Chapter 30

On Tuesday, Martin Seurat left Toulon feeling disappointed but unsurprised to have found no trace of his former colleague Antoine Milraud. When he’d first known him he had rather admired Milraud, thinking him clever and resourceful. But those qualities had eventually turned to shiftiness and cunning, driven by the relentless greed that had finally made him into a crook. Martin felt glad to leave Toulon and its neighbourhood and was looking forward to visiting Marseilles again.

He hadn’t been there for ten years, but he remembered its notorious traffic jams. They were even worse now that the town had become the second largest city in France. He left his rental car in a car park in an area of the city where multinational corporations occupied grimly modern office blocks, surrounded by the even grimmer towers of public housing built for the large immigrant population.

A short taxi ride took him to the old quarter of the town, with its narrow slanting streets, small neighbourhood bars full of tough-looking North Africans, and alleyways festooned with clothes lines and smelly overflowing gutters. He walked through Le Panier, then joined the crowds shopping on La Canebière, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, where every shop seemed to be holding a sale, and nothing was undiscounted.

Tough times, but these were tough people, as he knew to his cost. During his six-month secondment here, tracking an Algerian extremist cell, he had been shot at twice, and once had his car run off the road. Unlike the Parisians, the Marseillais didn’t make the slightest effort to look sophisticated or chic; their clothes said you took them or left them as they were. But they were friendly, unreserved people, and when Martin stopped and asked directions from a kebab stall, the vendor, noting both his accent and the street he was enquiring for, asked cheerfully what a cop from the North was doing this far south.

The office of the Police Nationale, which contained the DCRI office, turned out to be a handsome old stone building with shuttered windows. The nail-studded wooden door was still in place at the top of the steps, but at the bottom access was gained via a metal barrier manned by an armed policeman in a flak jacket. Martin’s documents passed scrutiny and he made his way up the steps into the building where a desk sergeant in the reception area sent him upstairs with a jerk of his head.

At the top of the stairs he entered a large, open-plan room, crammed with desks and tables and unmatched chairs, most of them unoccupied. A young uniformed policeman who was busy on the phone raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and Martin mouthed the name of the person he had come to see. The man gestured with a finger at the room’s far end, where an office had been carved out in the corner. On the door a wooden sign read
DCRI
.

He knocked and a voice called out, ‘
Entrez
.’ As Martin stepped inside he was struck by the contrast with the shambles of the open-plan exterior. This office was tidy and well decorated, with a new thick carpet, a modern desk, two matching chairs and a small conference table.

Its occupant, Maurice Fézard, was equally well turned out: tall, well dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, and polite, standing up to shake hands with him. Fézard had been notified of his visit by a call from Isobel in Paris, and judging by his helpful manner Martin guessed that a small bomb had been put under him. He lost no time in pleasantries, saying only, ‘Monsieur, it is a pleasure to meet you,’ before continuing, ‘I may have some news to report. I assure you that we have been most thorough.’

‘Of course,’ said Martin. ‘I hear you are known for your diligence.’

Fézard waved the
politesse
away. ‘As I told Isobel Florian, we felt badly about losing this Russian, though mobile surveillance in this city is very difficult and to find him again after losing him was never going to be easy. Unfortunately the Swiss gave us very little notice and it was a particularly busy day. So I hope you will understand. Since Madame Florian phoned me, however, we have had some success.’

‘I’m most grateful. Tell me what you’ve found – or what you haven’t found.’ Martin was pleased to find the local man had not taken offence at the pressure that had been applied from Paris.

Fézard lit a Gitane, after offering one to Martin who turned it down. He was pretty sure smoking was not allowed in the office, which suggested someone confident of his senior status. Blowing out a long plume of smoke, Fézard said, ‘Marseilles is a big town, as I’m sure you know.’

‘I was stationed here for six months in the nineties.’

Fézard nodded. ‘Ah, then, you understand. Let us take a little stroll, Monsieur; I have something to show you.’

Martin was beginning to grow impatient with how long it was taking Fézard to reveal what he had learned, but felt he had no choice but to go along. They left Police Headquarters and walked into the nearby area of the Old Port, crossing La Canebière, which was warming up under the noon sun. Fézard led the way through a maze of small interconnected streets, alleys and entries little wider than a Vespa scooter – which seemed to be the favoured mode of transport in this part of the city.

Suddenly, ahead of them Martin could see the aquamarine of the Mediterranean, behind the walls that encircled the harbour. When they were still a street away, Fézard stopped. He pointed. ‘Do you see the
tabac
up there?’