Manhunt (13 page)

Stanway had taken the pen with him to Vauxhall Cross, and had walked through the entry and exit scanners every day for two weeks, and the machines had detected nothing unusual. The second day of
the third week, he had made one slight alteration to the pen while still at home, but again had found himself able to enter and exit Vauxhall Cross without problems. That evening Stanway had sat at
home by himself, as usual, and in celebration had drunk half a bottle of Chateau Lafitte – arguably one of the best red wines that the vineyards of Bordeaux have ever produced, which was not
so usual – while the pen sat innocently on the coffee table in front of him.

The invisible modification to the pen was a thin copper sheath positioned underneath the outer plastic, and which enclosed both the internal chambers. This addition effectively screened the
inside of the pen from most scanning devices, and the reason Stanway had been celebrating was that he had, that same morning, removed the three spare ink cartridges and replaced them with a single
short rod-like object with an oblong socket at one end. It was a tight fit inside the pen, but the two had been designed to slot together. The rod-like object was a specially manufactured
solid-state USB drive with a capacity of thirty-two megabytes. To put that into perspective, one full-length novel would occupy only around one megabyte.

That had been three years earlier, but the USB drive that Stanway had been using for the last six months – and which, as a precaution against discovery during any random search of his
apartment, he was going to put in his safe-deposit box at his local bank on his way to Vauxhall Cross – was a device with a capacity of four gigabytes, or
four thousand
megabytes.

To copy files, Stanway merely plugged the drive into one of the vacant USB ports on the back of his system unit. The computer’s operating system automatically recognized the drive, and all
he then had to do was use Windows Explorer to drag the selected files to the USB drive. And doing everything by using the mouse ensured that there were no keystrokes to be recorded, even if a
keystroke logger had been loaded on his machine without his knowledge.

Once the drive was full, he removed it from the port, tucked it away inside his special pen, and left it in one of the dead-letter drops – what the Russians call
‘
duboks
’ – on his way home from Vauxhall Cross. Lomas would collect it later that evening, and leave an identical, but empty, drive in the same location, which Stanway
could collect at leisure.

The pen was now back in the pocket of Stanway’s suit jacket, but holding three ink cartridges in the second chamber instead of the USB drive.

He picked up his briefcase and his new mobile phone, still in its box, and took the lift down to the ground floor of the building. There was a small utility room there, adjacent to the lift.
Stanway put his briefcase on the floor, reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys. He selected one and unlocked the door.

He stepped inside, put the mobile phone box on a small workbench that ran along the left side of the room, opened the box and removed the phone and its charger. He plugged the charger into the
wall socket, connected the other end of the lead to the phone itself, switched on at the socket and checked that the phone was charging properly. Then he took the box, crushed it beneath his feet
to flatten it, and slid it into his briefcase. He would dispose of it somewhere convenient on his way to work.

He was, he realized, perhaps being a little overcautious. After all, there was nothing illegal in owning a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, but he knew that the Security Service would see that as
suspicious, not least because he already possessed a mobile. That was why he had decided to charge the phone here in the utility room, just in case somebody from ‘The Box’ was planning
on visiting this building while he was out at work. They might well decide to search his apartment, but he doubted that they would bother searching the rest of the building.

He would just wait them out, he decided, as he re-locked the utility room door and pocketed the keys. Once Lomas had either confirmed that a clerk had run from Moscow, and could compromise him,
or discovered that the whole story was a fiction – simply an operation designed to flush him out by making him panic and run – then Stanway would decide what he had to do next. And if
there was some frightened little clerk skulking around Europe clutching a bag of papers that could incriminate him, Stanway knew exactly what he would have to do to eliminate the threat.

Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

Holbeche had reached his office late, having been due to leave Vauxhall Cross for an off-site meeting at nine-thirty that morning, but after he’d taken a look at two
classified files, flagged ‘Flash’, he decided to delay his departure by half an hour and called Simpson just after nine-forty.

‘There’s been no approach to the Moscow embassy,’ he announced, after getting through on the secure line.

‘I wasn’t expecting one,’ Simpson replied. ‘Whoever our mole is, he’s probably a reasonably experienced intelligence officer, not to mention an experienced spy, and
there’s no way someone like that is going to ring up the embassy just to ask if the story about the clerk is true. He would be certain that we’d have taps on all the lines out of
Vauxhall Cross, and he would hardly try to use his home phone either. You have already placed taps, I presume?’

‘Yes,’ Holbeche replied. ‘Arkin has arranged for taps to be placed on the home phones of all SIS officers, apart from those belonging to the most junior grades, who simply
don’t have the access needed.’

There was a lot of misinformation in the public domain about telephone tapping in Britain. The official position, trotted out every time anybody asked the question, was that whenever the
Security Service MI5 wished to install a telephone tap, the request had to be submitted to the Home Secretary in person, who would read it and then, if he approved, sign the authorizing warrant.
The SIS was required to follow a similar procedure, but their requests were submitted instead to the Foreign Secretary. Each warrant was subject to a monthly review, and a further or extended
warrant would only be approved if the requesting organization could manage to convince their particular Secretary that continuing the surveillance could be justified.

The physical installation of telephone taps and other bugging devices was carried out by a security division within British Telecom, and taps would not be installed unless a proper warrant was
produced. This rule might be relaxed if it could be demonstrated that the case was extremely urgent or had grave security implications – for example, if the phone is believed to be currently
used by active terrorists – but, even then, the authorizing warrant had to be submitted to British Telecom within forty-eight hours of the tap being placed.

Comforting though the above procedures might be to the innocent citizens of Great Britain, the reality of the situation was somewhat different.

First, the Echelon monitoring system – a joint automated-surveillance system operated primarily by the intelligence services of Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand –
monitored every international telephone call that originated in, terminated in, or passed through any of the participating countries. It also monitored emails and faxes within the same broad
geographical area.

Second, and rather more worrying to anyone with the slightest interest in personal liberty and freedom of speech, Special Branch, which was the executive arm of the Security Service, had the
authority to request the installation of a tap or a bug on a telephone line of a suspected criminal without reference to the Home Secretary, just by applying to a senior British Telecom official.
Special Branch officers, even without specific direction from the Security Service, were perfectly capable of interpreting the term ‘suspected criminal’ in its loosest possible sense.
Practically speaking, therefore, MI5 could actually tap the telephone of pretty much anyone they wanted to, for as long as they wanted to, without the Home Secretary or anyone else even being aware
of it.

‘There has been some other activity here, though,’ Holbeche said.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Cheltenham has reported some slightly unusual signal traffic between London and Moscow this morning on the usual circuits.’

‘A known code?’ Simpson asked. ‘Or one they can read?’

‘No,’ Holbeche replied. ‘It was a single message in a high-level cipher that has never been broken, but which is frequently used for extended-length transmissions to
Moscow.’

‘So what was unusual about it, then?’

‘As I said, this cipher is normally used for high-volume traffic, long transmissions which GCHQ has always presumed was just the usual diplomatic waffle. But this message was really short,
just a few groups, according to Cheltenham.’

Simpson remained silent for a few moments. ‘Maybe,’ he then said slowly, ‘just maybe Cheltenham’s take on this is wrong. The short message could have been a simple
request for confirmation of the missing-clerk story from Moscow Centre. If it was, that means two things. First, it means that our mole . . . our file on this breach is “Egret Seven”,
and we’ve code-named the source of the leak “Gecko” by the way. It means our mole has attended one of the briefings already given, which means he’s a very senior officer
indeed, and much more dangerous than we thought. Second, it suggests that the previous high-volume traffic might not just have been a bunch of diplomats exchanging off-colour jokes and party
invitations. Instead, it might have been stuff that the London SVR
rezident
has already received from the mole, and which he was then transmitting to Moscow. In which case—’

‘In which case,’ Holbeche finished it for him, ‘we’re not looking at a new security breach. This bastard could have been sending stuff to Moscow for months, or perhaps
years.’

There was a silence on the line as both men absorbed the implications of this suggestion.

Simpson roused himself first. ‘It’s circumstantial, of course,’ he said, ‘but it does seem to hold together. And, until something breaks, there’s not a great deal
we can do. I would suggest tasking GCHQ with tackling that cipher, though if they’ve had no success so far, that’s probably a waste of time. But it might be instructive to find out when
this particular cipher was first used because, if our guess is correct, that could give us an indication of the scale of the breach.’

‘I’ll ask Cheltenham to check the logs and provide us with a breakdown,’ Holbeche concurred.

‘Good. Perhaps the reason the System-Three directory structure was being sent as hard copy to Yasenevo by courier was because it might have been too difficult to convert it into a format
that could be sent in signal form.’

‘You could be right and, in that case, we’ve been incredibly lucky. If that Russian hadn’t collapsed, we might never even have known about the mole.’

‘Exactly,’ Simpson added. ‘I would love to find out for sure if that single message this morning was a request to Moscow Centre for confirmation that some SVR clerk actually
has skipped.’

‘So would I, Simpson. So would I,’ Holbeche replied, before ending the call.

West London

Andrew Lomas wasn’t worried, but he was definitely concerned, for Stanway was getting decidedly jittery. That was proved by the emergency summons to the meet in the
Indian restaurant, one of five emergency rendezvous places and times indicated by different types of chalk mark scribbled on the church wall.

When he had first started working with Stanway, the Englishman had appeared surprised at Lomas suggesting they indicate their meeting places by means of chalk marks or similarly archaic devices.
What was wrong, he had asked, with using pagers, mobile phones or even call boxes?

Lomas had been firm, however, since his training in Moscow had been thorough and specific. The problem with using any telephone, whether fixed or mobile, was that with the right equipment the
call could be monitored and both the calling and contacted numbers identified. Besides, as a matter of routine, the Security Service monitored all the public telephones located close to Vauxhall
Cross and to most of the other buildings occupied by sections of the British intelligence establishment, as well as the phones adjacent to all the foreign embassies.

That was a ‘just in case’ precaution based on the somewhat tenuous assumption that any British intelligence officer wishing to pass classified information to a foreign power would
simply nip out of Vauxhall Cross during his lunch break and call the appropriate embassy from a phone box on the street nearby. And although this blanket surveillance had so far never led to the
detection of any serious breach of security, there was some logic to it; for anyone wishing to make a call without being overheard would tend to opt for a public phone, and a phone box that was
conveniently located.

But Lomas had firmly refused to let Stanway make any routine contact by telephone, and had insisted that he learn and use the simple codes that Lomas had devised. And, as a result, for years
their contact had remained almost entirely impersonal. Stanway would deposit the USB drive, containing the files he had copied, in a dead letter box; Lomas would collect it and replace it with a
blank drive. And about once every three or four months the two men would meet, but always briefly and always a long way from home.

Of course, Lomas could understand why his contact was now concerned. If some clerk genuinely
had
run from Yasenevo carrying documents that could identify Stanway, it was a potential
disaster. But Lomas was reasonably sure that if such an event had occurred, Moscow Centre would have already told him about it. That left the possibility – or perhaps even the probability
– that it was some sort of operation being run by MI5 to flush out a suspected traitor.

He had contacted the Russian Embassy in London as soon as possible after leaving the Indian restaurant, requesting a thorough check. And the response he’d received by encrypted email in
the early hours of the morning had puzzled him. The decoded message read: