The Cloud Collector (11 page)

‘It's just been proved, if proof were necessary, that we're confronted with a state-sponsored conspiracy, not an independent Islamic group,' said Johnston. ‘We'll benefit from someone with her sort of background to compare with Irvine's assessments.'

‘Working under whose jurisdiction and control?' at once demanded Packer, anxious for as much insider knowledge as possible: the protection that presidential approval bestowed also carried with it greater official scrutiny. He didn't want his fucked-up private life to emerge.

‘Ours here at Langley,' assured Johnston. ‘Her brilliance is in analysis, not cryptology. If we'd had that analytical assessment available earlier, we might now have al Aswamy in custody.'

‘What do you think?' asked Harry Packer thirty minutes later, in Bradley's office, a bottle of Jack Daniel's open between them.

‘Putting his own person in,' judged Bradley cautiously. He needed time, a lot more information, to make a proper assessment. One immediate decision was not to tell Packer of his suspicion of Johnston's surveillance. Which reminded him he had his own group to confront.

‘Maybe you can turn her into becoming our person,' said Packer hopefully.

‘Always good to have a joker in the pack.'

 

11

Jack Irvine went through the high-fives ritual at the Oval Office video feed for individual presidential praise—as well as the required Georgetown champagne pit stop on the way home—but throughout it all his mind, and his imagination, were in the past. It wouldn't have been a video feed if his father had succeeded as he'd deserved to succeed. It would have been a full-blown White House ceremony, his father centre stage at the president's side, the Arabs in whom he'd misplaced his trust completing the historic group, the door to the secretary of state's office wide-open for his occupation.

As he entered his Owen Place ‘safe house' apartment, taking a Miller Lite instead of champagne from the refrigerator as he passed, Irvine wondered if the few who knew or who vaguely remembered his father's betrayal would make the connection with what had happened today. Irvine doubted it. Too few people knew and even fewer cared; success, however manufactured or hyped, was to be associated with in Washington, DC, never perceived failure. Only he would ever know, or need to know, that he'd dedicated today to his father: the day but not its implications. In practical reality today was his, an event he'd earned for penetrating the innermost core of Iranian intelligence, and he was going to use it to every possible benefit. From today his was a voice—and a name—that would be listened to. From now on those with whom he'd unwillingly been assigned, without choice, knew that whatever their designations or titles, he was their equal, not a subordinate to be patronized, as he believed Johnston and Bradley and even Packer had imagined they could treat him.

It was essential he remain objective, Irvine acknowledged; stay with Miller Lite, not aspire to champagne. Burt Singleton
was
right: they had been fucking lucky. And Shab Barker and Akram Malik were right, too: the attempted but overly exaggerated political reassurances of outright anti-terrorist victory would fuel a fundamentalist challenge they'd confront, with attacks even more spectacular than those so narrowly—so fucking luckily—averted. And Ismail al Aswamy, a far more important figure than Irvine had initially imagined, was still free potentially to mastermind them.

Irvine picked up another beer on his way to the computer bank that had been his first installation after his transfer from Fort Meade. It comprised two protective firewall terminals programmed instantly to self-destruct at attempted intrusion. Additionally there were special USB barriers perfected at Meade. The mainframe was linked, on a dedicated secure line, to the Shepherd office in Maryland. Irvine's cell phone was additionally linked, on a separate dedicated and USB blocking line, to alert him to any enemy-targeted activity, no matter how slight, when he was away from either his Meade or Owen Place stations. The Owen Place machines could not operate independently and could only be activated after a signal from Fort Meade by a sequence of commands between all three. Disconnecting or severing any power lead or umbilical link between the three triggered automatic destruction as well as sounding an alarm at Fort Meade. Irvine changed the three hard drives each month after transferring their contents to a storage cloud.

Irvine settled comfortably in his wingback chair, dismissing the passing thought of a third beer, fingering his way instead through the keyboard labyrinth. The system operative, he embarked upon another slightly less complicated entry into the carefully hidden botnets that completely concealed his trawling Internet presence, particularly inside the anonymous, underground darknets. The primary priority for such concealment was to establish the bots in countries with lax or disinterested cybersecurity; best of all were those countries whose governments actively sponsored commercial intelligence hacking. China was Irvine's first choice in which to stable his Trojan horse, actually in a Ministry of Commerce site in Beijing. There was the familiar blip of satisfaction at the easy entry, with no flashback alarm or barrier. Irvine moved on just as smoothly—and unobstructed—into his second cutout, embedded unknowingly to the Yemeni government in its Finance Ministry Web site. From Yemen he moved to his operational bot deep within Moscow's Interior Ministry. Irvine's domain name was [email protected], the final initial letters identifying its internationally recognized Internet Protocol registration through an unwitting shipping company in St Petersburg. Irvine chose Russia for its haphazard Internet security, and the name Shamil as bait. Imam Shamil was a Muslim warlord who led a three-year uprising against czarist expansion in the northern Caucasus in 1825.

‘Move on, find more, destroy more,' Irvine said to himself; for the moment the White House had to be ignored. The way now was back, not forward: back to Moscow Alternative, a darknet site with a number of shared subcatalogs that he'd found in the computer contact lists of two of the Anacostia group he'd penetrated after discovering Ismail al Aswamy's recruitment approaches, before learning of the man's importance or, ultimately, of Vevak's Hydarnes domain. One of those subdivisions was called Object. Another was Action.

On his first entry into the Action forum he invoked the devout
Inshallah
—if God wills it—in Arabic before agreeing in English to an insistence posted by an anonymous Vladimir that America was ‘the Devil's crusader.' To be labeled or accused of being a crusader is the most vilifying accusation that can be leveled against a man in the Arab world. No responses had been posted on his wall, and Vladimir had not appeared in the chat room again during Irvine's following visits, which had been intermittent because of the concentration upon the other, obviously more productive targets. During those infrequent visits, though, he'd had two offers of sales of Russian military weaponry, both including grenade and handheld rocket launchers, and engaged—only once and then briefly, to avoid the unlikely attention of an official Russian monitor—in another one-to-one exchange with Enslaved, who was recruiting volunteers for bomb attacks in Moscow in protest against continued Russian oppression in Chechnya.

Irvine finally got another beer from the refrigerator before computer hopping to his eventual St Petersburg concealment. He scrolled quickly through the Moscow Alternative subcatalogs to reach Action, recognizing none of the previous tag names with whom he'd had contact. He decided against an immediate phishing trip, instead offering his sublisted Shamil25 identity as bait, setting himself a thirty-minute time frame. And waited. There was a bite after twenty-five minutes. The sender domain was Anis@mukhtarbrigade. Irvine instantly identified the significance. Anis is a Libyan name. Omar al-Mukhtar was one of Libya's most famous historical freedom fighters. Anis opened with
As
-
salamu alaykum,
‘peace be upon you.' The message, in English, read,
Where have you been?

Irvine replied with the peace invocation before replying,
Travelling.

Anis wrote,
Was there sunshine in the desert?

Not all the time,
responded Irvine, paraphrasing the Arab proverb without directly quoting it. His computer was on automatic save, for the exchange to be code analyzed later, although Irvine doubted it would provide anything useful this soon.

Travel is sometimes better in the cold of the night.

The three attacks were scheduled for 3:00 a.m.! But it would be an inconceivable coincidence for this to be a reference to the al Aswamy conspiracy. Irvine wrote,
Unless there are unseen hazards.

Always to be guarded against,
came the response.

But not always possible to avoid,
risked Irvine. He shouldn't press any harder, build too much—build
anything
—on this, but most important he shouldn't frighten off whoever Anis might be.

Journeys can always begin again if the will exists.

It sounded like another proverb, but Irvine didn't recognize it this time.
As it does exist,
lured Irvine.

Marg bar Amrika,
came the Iranian diatribe.

Death to America,
echoed Irvine in English.

Inshallah
registered on Irvine's screen, which then blanked.

‘Fuck!' Irvine said aloud.

*   *   *

Charles Johnston decided his newly formed relationship with David Monkton—hopefully to be continued through Sally Hanning—was emerging to be his ace in the hole. Two hours earlier the MI5 chief had provided more than Johnston would have imagined possible to assemble in such a short time.

According to the UK dossier, Horst Becker had instantly been named by frightened members of the Sellafield attackers as the psychopathic killer of Roger Bennett, selected by Becker to be the disposable to-and-fro gofer once the three groups had been assembled. But the killing—and leaving the body as a warning to others in the conspiracy—had been ordered by Ismail al Aswamy when Bennett attempted to blackmail them after realizing the extent of the conspiracy. According to the Sellafield confessions—corroborated within the following hour by three statements from the arrested Italian group—al Aswamy had boasted of organizing other units for an already planned and rehearsed global jihad.

Johnston prepared his memoranda with care, timing its circulation and ensuring all its recipients were listed on every copy to avoid any later accusation of the manipulation that he was, in fact, orchestrating. The White House chief of staff headed his distribution list, followed by Homeland Security and the State Department team that had attended that day's joint meeting. Those he dispatched by courier. The remainder, to Conrad Graham, Bradley, and Irvine, he held back until the last internal mail drop, which wasn't collected for delivery until 9:00
P.M.
, by which time he knew all three would have left the building.

*   *   *

Sally Hanning completed in a single day the formalities of closing down her Pimlico apartment, arranging the redirection of what little personal mail she received, and fixing drawing arrangement through Washington's Connecticut Avenue branch of HSBC, her London bank, through which she established direct-debit settlements for the few continuing bills. She collected from Thames House the up-to-the-minute running dossier on the Sellafield investigation on her way to Heathrow Airport for the last flight of the day, picking up a selection of British and American newspapers from the Special Branch unit permanently based there, who'd extended the helpful colleague courtesy by getting her upgraded to first class.

On the plane, the adjoining seat was unoccupied, removing the difficulty of her openly reading MI5 material with triple security classification in public surroundings. Al Aswamy's claim to be masterminding other impending attacks would cause official panic, Sally knew. But she was reading an interrogator's paraphrasing, not a verbatim transcript. If the word had been
boasted,
it could conceivably have been just that, empty braggadocio. But only
just
conceivable. It was vital that the near-hysterical publicity—more sensational in the English than American newspapers beside her—hadn't in any way indicated the NSA's original interception. Sally skimmed the sensationalism, knowing more than the self-proclaimed security correspondents, reading more closely the diplomatic reactions. There was total European Union condemnation of Iran, with unanimous support for the emergency UN Security Council debate America was instigating. Russia and China were indicating they would introduce their veto. Italy, Germany, and France were recalling their ambassadors from Tehran for consultation. During an emergency debate in the British Parliament, three MPs described the attack on Sellafield as an act of war.

Sally left until last her Washington introductory file, belatedly curious at being attached for the first time to an overseas British embassy. In the Alice in Wonderland fantasy world of espionage, in which every host country knows every embassy intelligence officer, each of whom knowing their counterpart in every other embassy, the cover of Nigel Fellowes, MI5's Washington station chief, was assistant trade attaché. His half-framed, coloured studio portrait showed a flaxen-haired, tightly mustached man in a country tweed jacket over an unmatched Eton tie. Attached beneath it was a printed-off personally addressed computer assurance to her that he was looking forward to her arrival, with a promise to do whatever he could to help.

Sally hoped the promise was genuine, although she didn't really care if it was or not.

*   *   *

‘Totally confidential?' queried Harry Packer, feeling the first stirrings of unease.