The Cloud Collector (32 page)

‘More than wonderful.'

‘But now we must talk.'

‘I made a mistake and I'm embarrassed about it: wasn't thinking properly. I'm sorry.'

‘What we're doing, this assignment, won't go on forever: I won't be here forever. While I am here, I want this to go on, and I hope you want it to as well. But we're not making commitments.'

‘No.'

‘Are you offended, shocked?'

Irvine shook his head. ‘No commitments is what I want, too.'

She was doing the right thing, keeping the GCHQ discovery to herself, Sally decided. She wasn't abandoning him. She'd share it when the proper moment came: when everything was in place and couldn't be ruined by internecine ambition and ego wars. Waiting until then meant she had to be included in everything.

 

31

Sally's decision to withhold the GCHQ interception wavered during her night-time stirrings, ending in a moment of awakening guilt at treating Irvine with the arrogance with which she believed he'd kept the Vevak penetration from Conrad Graham. Just as quickly came the justifying contradiction. There was no comparison between her holding back GCHQ's Smartman interception and what Irvine still hadn't told Conrad Graham. So why was she seeking one? It was ridiculous to feel—even to imagine—guilt, because guilt about anything she did or had to do was unprofessional, an unacceptable relapse in the profession she supposedly practised. It was not one that allowed morality at any level or for any normal reason.

The self-correction made—and proper professionalism restored—Sally acknowledged that to stay ahead, where she believed she now was, she had just slightly to adjust that day's schedule. Which sadly didn't allow for any early-morning repeat of the previous night's lovemaking. She eased herself carefully from the bed and managed to shower and dress without waking Irvine.

‘Why so early?' he protested as he emerged from the bedroom.

‘England's been awake for hours. GCHQ might have something.' She was keeping the exchange honest, speaking to Cheltenham ahead of Monkton, reflected Sally, so she was being truthful and at once wondered why she'd needed that self-reassurance.

‘You know there's been nothing overnight from Meade,' said Irvine, gesturing to his silent computer bank.

‘I want to be up to speed before today starts officially here,' said Sally uncomfortably.

‘If there's nothing moving at Meade, I'll stay here, after seeing Graham.'

‘Let's talk either way. There might be something from my end.' And she'd be manipulating all the moves.

Sally was an hour ahead of her usual time, but the traffic was just as heavy. She drove, keeping an eye on her rearview mirror, introducing one detour, but didn't pick up any followers. The embassy car park was as unexpectedly crowded, forcing Sally to an outer bay. On impulse she took a circuitous path towards the building, searching for the two surveillance vehicles of the previous night, but found neither. She didn't see the waiting Nigel Fellowes, either, until she was well past the staff entrance.

‘Earlier than ever!' he greeted, smiling. He wore a new, unstained Eton tie that predictably clashed with the brown suit.

Was it pure ineptitude, or did he want her to know he was monitoring her embassy visits? Either way, it was an opportunity to utilize. ‘Didn't you say something about early birds when I arrived?'

‘I didn't think you were taking any advice from me.'

‘You're right, I'm not,' she goaded.

‘Which is unfortunate.' Fellowes flared at the mockery. ‘I could have given you a lot of help: the embassy could have provided a lot of support.'

‘About what, specifically?'

‘Specifically about the danger of arrogance and blind over-ambition,' the man tried to mock back.

Fellowes really shouldn't have been allowed out by himself, Sally thought. ‘The downfall of so many.'

His stick-on smile slipped. ‘Have you any idea what trouble you've caused in London! It's all hell let loose back there: absolute hell.'

She shouldn't waste too much more time. ‘What car do you drive, Nigel?'

The MI5 station chief was briefly speechless.
‘What!'

‘Your car? What make is it?'

Fellowes still hesitated, finally stumbling, ‘Jaguar. British of course. The flag and all that.'

‘Not a Honda? Or a Toyota?' There was no point in correcting the man about Jaguar's corporate ownership.

‘I don't understand—' Fellowes started, but stopped abruptly. ‘We're not riding shotgun for you, Sally. You told London you didn't need help or intrusion from us, remember?'

Why, then, had he been skulking in the entrance-hall shadows this early, watching her? She'd warned Fellowes that his surveillance had been detected if he or the MI6
rezidentura
were involved, which was sufficient. ‘It's good to know it's not you: I didn't want the embassy caught up in what's likely to happen because of it.'

‘What's that!' demanded the man, the concern immediate.

‘Nothing you need to be concerned about: you're safely separated from it all, don't forget. Best to keep it that way.'

*   *   *

Sally settled expectantly into her soundproof cubicle with plenty of time to spare, judging the encounter with Fellowes an additional bonus in a still-to-come carefully manoeuvred—and hopefully fruitful—day. It was a short-lived aspiration.

‘Nothing,' flatly declared the GCHQ conduit she still knew only as John.

‘There's surely something!' blurted Sally.

‘We've had Smartman exactly forty-three hours, forty-two minutes, and [email protected] twelve hours, six minutes!' retorted the man, irritably pedantic. ‘It's not Scrabble we play here, you know!'

‘It wasn't a criticism,' soothed Sally, smoothing out the Hydarnes transmissions on the narrow ledge in front of her.

‘We know it's Iranian because of Hydarnes. But the encryption is as clever as hell. It doesn't conform to any mathematical rule, which ultimately it has to.'

‘Help me,' urged Sally, lost.

‘At the moment we're working on the principle of it going back to wartime cryptology,' predicted the code-breaker. ‘Onetime message pads. The recipient already possesses the crib to transcribe the once-only encoded message he or she gets: neither the code nor its key is ever used again. New code, new crib, every time: nowhere for us to start, no comparisons we can make between a repetition of symbols, numbers, algebra … between any damned thing.'

‘Shit,' broke in Sally.

‘Mountains of it. Just to make it more difficult, that one message needn't be complete. It could be split, first half in the initial encryption, next part in another code. And that division needn't be limited to two separations: it can be divided three or four times, impossible to read without its specific individual key. And it still doesn't stop there. You want to make it
really
difficult, the deciphering—although it might translate into what appear to be comprehensible words or phrases—can turn out to be meaningless because those words or phrases represent algebraic numerals or symbols that need a totally different codex. And you've guessed it—that second mutation is onetime, too.'

‘You telling me it's unbreakable?'

‘I'm telling you it can't be broken in hours. For this stuff you can forget speed-of-light supercomputers and number crunching.'

After a momentary silence from both ends, Sally broke it. ‘Could these two messages be to different recipients?'

After another pause John said, ‘A lateral thinker!'

‘One or two?' persisted Sally, caught by an attitude quite different from her previous exchanges with the man, particularly over Sellafield.

‘We're expecting there to be two, using a shared IP,' reluctantly conceded the code-breaker.

‘Remind me again what a
shared
IP means.'

There was a discernible sigh. ‘Sharing the same domain address.'

‘Could it be more than two senders?'

‘Of course.'

Sally's eyes fogged, cleared, then fogged again from the intensity with which she was staring down at the side-by-side printouts. But it was not the absolute concentration nor the further silence that unsettled her. It was a freakish sensation, which she later thought akin to hallucination, of not recognizing something from the shapes of symbols and number outlines burning into her mind. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut to refocus, clearing her vision and the impression with it, only partially registering the words from GCHQ.

‘… from Fort Meade?' Sally heard.

‘I'm sorry, I missed that?'

‘I asked what progress Meade's made on Smartman and Anis,' repeated the man impatiently. ‘That's why you've called, isn't it? That's the arrangement…?'

It was, Sally accepted uneasily, surprised the demand had taken so long. ‘Like you, nothing.'

‘
Absolutely
nothing at all?' queried the man disbelievingly.

Sally's unease deepened at the assertiveness: she wasn't leading anymore, not keeping control of the exchanges. ‘Not as of last night. It's still only six in the morning here. I'll come back to you around your three this afternoon.'

‘I need to speak direct, technically,' said the man briskly. ‘They might have some progress that would make sense to me but not to you. They've had more time, after all.'

‘It'll be better if you wait,' insisted Sally, confronting a situation—and an attitude—she hadn't anticipated. ‘My being here's sensitive. It took a lot to get this degree of co-operation. It'll jeopardize it—give the impression you and I aren't working fully together—if they get a direct approach.'

‘Don't be ridiculous! There are things impossible to communicate through you … things you wouldn't understand. Call me this afternoon, after I've spoken to them.'

Sally's reaction was immediate. She overrode every communications-room protest from other users demanding priority connection to Thames House, repeating the insistence to reach David Monkton. He cut her off with ‘Stay there' after less than a minute, leaving her in what she accepted as an appropriate punishment sweatbox, uncertain if she'd explained sufficiently.

It scarcely mattered, Sally concluded, edging the cubicle door ajar. Cheltenham wouldn't agree to what she'd pleaded with Monkton to achieve. She—and technically GCHQ because their officer had trusted and worked with her—would be circumventing an internationally negotiated and agreed-upon operational procedure. Could she recover to stay involved? She thought she could. She'd lose all direct co-operation from GCHQ, but hopefully Monkton could retain that at some level. And Irvine was still at Langley, maybe not even going down to Fort Meade; if there was a reason, they'd arranged to speak before he left, so she'd be able to tell him about Anis before any GCHQ approach. Definitely recoverable then. What about David Monkton? She hadn't … Sally's mind was suddenly seized, the reflection broken—as it had been less than an hour earlier—by the side-by-side Vevak transmissions still set out on the cubicle ledge.

There
was
something, a connection between the two that she should be seeing, questioning—which was preposterous. How could she, someone knowing nothing of the techniques or craft of code-breaking, imagine—because that's what she was doing, imagining a significance without being able to see or say or work out what it was—when the interceptions were defeating the best mathematically trained minds in American and British cryptology. And yet …

The linkup signal jarred into the cubicle, startling her, and Sally almost dropped the headset fumbling it back into place.

‘It didn't go well,' announced the Director-General. ‘They're not prepared to breach international protocols, which I didn't expect them to be, no matter how important we consider this individual operation. Co-operation and participation, particularly with NSA, is how they work. It's their ethos. And there's more to it than that.'

‘Like what?'

‘The man you've been liaising with, John Poulter, is short-listed for the deputy directorship, largely on the strength of his involvement with Sellafield. It got GCHQ a prime ministerial commendation, which more than balanced all the problems in 2013 when they had to admit receiving one hundred million pounds from NSA for circumventing American law; they didn't like being labeled poodles or being exposed by renegade spy-agency contractors. They want distance from us.'

‘As bad as that!'

‘The best I could do was to get them not to send their Smartman questions to Meade for twenty-four hours, to give you time to fix things at your end.'

‘Thank you,' said Sally, chastened and not liking the feeling.

‘From now on I must be the first person you speak to professionally in the morning.'

‘You will be.'

‘Your remaining where you are depends upon it.'

*   *   *

‘Thirty guys in the unit,' spelled out Conrad Graham. ‘Know them all personally from my time at Covert Operations: vouch for every one of them. No private agendas, no fuckups. All of them thought Johnston was an asshole: dodged any assignment with him in charge knowing it would fuck up.'

‘I wish it had been organized like this from the start,' said Jack Irvine, meaning it. It was his first contribution in the thirty minutes it had taken Graham to set out the CIA organization he'd put into place to re-establish Operation Cyber Shepherd.

‘I wish a lot of things had been organized like this from the start,' came back the deputy director heavily. ‘This is how it's got to be between us personally from now on, Jack, everything out on the table.'

Irvine said, ‘That's how I want it to be, too. Definitely how it has to be.'