The Cloud Collector (33 page)

‘Got six guys already working on the review.'

‘Review?'

‘Going right back to your very first memo, before Operation Cyber Shepherd even had a name, before I left Covert Ops.'

Irvine remained unmoving, stretched easily back in the enveloping chair opposite the deputy director, cold cups of coffee on the low table between them. ‘You think something got missed? That there was a mistake before al Aswamy was lost?'

Graham shrugged. ‘Could have happened. It'll do, until you break that goddamned Smartman encryption.'

‘My entire team is on it with me. It's a bastard: the worst we've come up against in a long time. I'm going up to Meade when we're through here.'

‘Nothing my guys can work on with you?'

‘Not from the encryption.' Which was a qualification, not a lie. The only people who could work on what Marian Lowell had told him about the GCHQ message minutes before the Graham meeting were at Fort Meade, not Langley.

‘What then?' Graham frowned, recognizing the reservation.

‘Surveillance is back.'

There was another shrug. ‘The list of those stacked up against us is too long for a realistic sweep. We've got to live with it.'

‘It's a pain in the ass.'

‘Don't let it be. What about your team? You got enough working with you up there?'

‘We're not working bulk. Computers do the donkey work, and I've got all the facilities I need available at Meade.'

‘What about the doubters you talked about in your team?'

‘Not any longer. A hundred percent behind it.' Burt Singleton was working as hard as everyone else now, maybe even harder.

‘The review I've started?' pressed Graham. ‘The file is complete, isn't it? Nothing's at Fort Meade that needs factoring in?'

‘Nothing,' guaranteed Irvine, who'd ensured every connecting link with Stuxnet had been eradicated. After he'd irrecoverably wiped it clean, he'd dropped the computer hard drive holding the Vevak discovery into the Mediterranean during a farewell Israeli R&R in Herzliya.

‘We need to keep the Hanning woman locked in with us,' continued the other man. ‘She could be our get-out insurance if there's a problem with Abu al Hurr's death.'

‘Yes,' agreed Irvine tightly.

‘I'll call her.'

*   *   *

Sally snatched up the apartment telephone on its first ring. ‘I've been waiting.'

‘Things took longer.'

‘Where are you?'

‘On my way to work,' said Irvine, awkward with the necessary ambiguity on an insecure line.

Sally hesitated. ‘We arranged to speak first.'

‘There could be something.'

‘New or old?' demanded Sally, concern flaring.

‘New, from the Brits. I don't know anything more than that.'

Two-faced, cheating bastards, Sally thought. ‘I got an indication when I called this morning. That's why I wanted to talk.'

‘I'll come back tonight.'

‘Don't if there's something to work on.'

‘If there is, I'll call.'

‘Do that, either way.' Her phone rang again the moment she put it down.

 

32

Sally passed unchallenged through Langley's outer security on her MI5 accreditation. At the CIA complex an escort waited to take her through the identity-recording barriers to the executive level. There, another escort, female this time, was at the arrival elevator to take her to the deputy director's suite. Conrad Graham was at the open door, beyond the double-banked protective ring of personal assistants and secretaries. The deputy director, immaculate in a jacket, knife-creased trousers, and stiff-collared shirt, solicitously guided her to an already set visitor's chair before going to his pristinely uncluttered, authority-demarcating desk. No coffee was offered. No secretarial notetaker, either. There'd be an automatic recording system, Sally knew, remembering Monkton's noise blank-out.

He didn't intend to review past mistakes, Graham began, the presentation obviously prepared. Getting al Aswamy topped the recovery agenda. To achieve that he'd assembled a handpicked CIA task force, with SEAL and SWAT backup. She was officially to be part of that task force, at the epicentre of Operation Cyber Shepherd. He'd cleared that seconded appointment an hour earlier in a telephone conversation with David Monkton. An office was being made available to her at Langley. She'd have direct access to him at all times, through the Watch Room if it was out of hours; until al Aswamy was in a body bag, nothing was out of hours.

Graham extended a closely cupped hand. ‘This is how we'll have the son of a bitch Aswamy, like we got bin Laden, okay?'

‘Okay.' Sally nodded, hoping it hadn't sounded like mockery. It was a composite performance of every spy movie she'd ever watched—with borrowings from a few crime series.

Graham shook his head. ‘Let me hear some real feedback!'

He wouldn't like hearing that she still believed herself the convenient sacrifice to disaster. ‘This is where I want to be, at the centre. I think I can make a contribution,' she said, accepting that she sounded like a programmed talking doll.

‘The media problem's getting bigger—closer—by the day.'

Could the publicity be her nemesis? wondered Sally: she'd proposed the original press manipulation. ‘They're being fed leaks. Being briefed.'

‘We couldn't survive the shitstorm if they learned about Abu Hurr. Neither of us could.'

Was he talking personally or of their separate organizations? ‘Did you discuss it with my director-general?'

‘It's your input I'm looking for!'

‘I'll give it to you when I've properly thought it through.'

‘And after you've spoken to Monkton.'

‘Of course after I've spoken to Monkton!' shot back Sally, determined to end the exchange on her terms, not his. Feeling no hypocrisy she went on, ‘The shit we're trying to recover from was dumped by too many people trying to follow too many personal agendas.'

She hadn't expected an open admission that there was no NSA-linked CIA investigation, but at no time during this meeting had there been any reference to Fort Meade or Jack Irvine. The logical question risked an awkward as well as predictable answer, but she needed to ask it. ‘Jack Irvine's obviously part of this inner group that I'm now a part of.' There was no reaction from Graham at the mention of Irvine's name. ‘Who else? No one. This is a no-mistakes troika, Jack providing everything from NSA, your input—that's Monkton's guarantee, total British input—and me coordinating it all from here, at Langley.'

‘You know Jack from way back, of course,' chanced Sally.

‘What's he told you about that!' demanded the CIA deputy sharply.

‘Nothing operational,' said Sally, immediately detecting the suspicion. ‘Just that you and he worked together. Stuxnet is public knowledge: there was an obvious connection.'

‘He did good there. He's got to do even better now.'

It would be a mistake to push it any further. ‘Do I get to see my office?'

‘Tomorrow. On the same floor as Jack's.' Graham extended his cupped hand again, crushing it closed this time. ‘That's what's going to happen when we get the bastard.'

Graham might already be fantasizing about the Hollywood biopic of al Aswamy's seizure, but she didn't think he was a good enough actor to have carried on this long without an indication she'd have recognized. So Graham
didn't
know about her affair with Irvine. Which he would have if he'd been responsible for the surveillance. ‘Thanks for bringing me in.'

‘You've got a part to play.'

To my script, not yours, instinctively thought Sally.

*   *   *

And she thought it again, although from a different perspective, at Monkton's reaction to her account of the Conrad Graham meeting. ‘There's nothing we hadn't already anticipated.'

Sally said, ‘I'm briefing you on the meeting, not making a plea!' She'd decided against telling Monkton of his apparent failure to convince GCHQ to hold back its approach to the NSA and was further disconcerted by the attitude she was confronting now.

‘Good,' said the Director, clip-voiced. ‘You're embedded now as deeply as it's possible to be. And I did promise the total co-operation to provide you with as much protection as possible. You do, of course, have the added protection of your personal involvement.'

Sally's discomfort was at the communications cubicle's constrictions, not Monkton's reference to the affair, until it struck her that the man's surprising acceptance of a relationship with Irvine was prompted by Monkton's expectation of precisely such professional benefits.
‘Hopefully,'
she qualified pointedly.

‘That's for you to ensure.'

‘Our response—yours and mine—to Abu Hurr's death needs to conform if it's leaked, which is very likely in a bear pit like this.'

‘He died in U.S. custody, not ours.'

‘Custody we facilitated on a rendition flight.'

‘We made Abu Hurr
available
to U.S. authorities here in London after the Sellafield investigation discovered he had illegally entered the United Kingdom from America, which he'd
legally
entered on a still-valid student visa from Pakistan. He was still legally our prisoner: we were preparing indictments on terrorist charges. He had committed no offence in America. We had no awareness before handing him over that he would be repatriated to America, which was not discussed and certainly not agreed upon with Charles Johnston during any of our recorded contacts. Abu Hurr's death made pointless any Foreign Office protest about the episode to Washington.'

‘That won't be an easy message to pass on.'

‘Paraphrase it. Be subtle.'

She'd deserved that, Sally conceded. ‘I'll try.'

‘Don't use Langley communications for our conversations—'

‘I know I'll be monitored!' broke in Sally, although keeping the impatience from her voice.

‘—unless there's something you want to be intercepted.'

‘I've thought of that, too,' assured Sally contritely.

She'd come through the revelation of the affair with Jack better than she'd expected, Sally decided, making her way out of the embassy. Her cell phone rang the moment she turned it on in the parking lot.

Irvine said, ‘I've been trying to reach you! I'm on my way back.'

‘What is it?'

‘Owen Place. An hour.'

*   *   *

Sally left the car at Guest Quarters and used the metro route, confident she cleared her trail. She got to Owen Place with time to spare and checked for a stakeout, which she didn't detect. She waited fifteen minutes after Irvine arrived and was sure he hadn't been followed, either.

‘So what is it?' she demanded as she entered, anxious to guard against misspeaking from the beginning.

‘GCHQ are holding out on us!'

Not enough! ‘Holding out how? On what?'

‘An interception we didn't make, although we did provide the original IP: we left it alone, believing it didn't have any U.S. relevance. Your guys are obviously assuming we got it, and they're limiting what they're telling us! What do you know about it?'

As little as possible, Sally warned herself. ‘Just that it's new; that they were having trouble. Let me see it so you can explain what more you need to know.'

Irvine frowned, for a moment hesitating, but finally went to his computer bank. Sally was at his shoulder when the post came on his screen, glad she wasn't in his eyeline to see her startled reaction.

It wasn't a Smartman message; the connection went beyond the Hydarnes source. And at last she thought she knew what she was seeing in all the other domain names, despite this one's being different!

 

33

The domain IP was [email protected]. The concluding YE designated Yemen as the registration country. John Poulter's covering e-mail said they hadn't intercepted it until it was forwarded on Facebook from Riga, Latvia's capital, to their blanket-monitored Malmö site. Nothing indicated its continuing on to the UK; they suspected a memory-stick transfer. GCHQ was currently defeated by the encryption. Was Operation Cyber Shepherd encountering similar difficulty? Or had it made progress? If it had, however small or inconclusive, GCHQ would welcome the immediate guidance beyond the terms of the Echelon agreement, on the basis of their earlier co-operation on Facebook channeling. Had Fort Meade considered onetime message pads unexpected—even bizarre—as such antiquated cryptology might appear at first?

Sally's primary concentration was upon the intangible Facebook post—counting and comparing letters, every time with the same result except for the identity—but at the same time she was also trying to resolve her other uncertainties. The most important of which—personal and professional in equal measure—was that Jack Irvine hadn't been lying to her about their lack of progress. Nor had John Poulter lied to Monkton. GCHQ had intercepted a total of four, not one Facebook transmission beyond NSA's original Smartman trawl. And Poulter, suspecting Fort Meade was hanging back, was spreading his bets, hoping she might provide more information on one and Meade on the other.

Monkton was right, although not exactly from the same perspective. She was definitely at the operation's centre. For an uncertain period, maybe—exactly just how long still depended on a lot of variables over the next twenty-four hours—but momentarily she was in a position of not just knowing all that was going on but possibly, even, of manipulating it to her advantage. And Irvine would never, ever, know how she'd juggled her professional and personal integrity.

What about the variables, one above all others? Not a variable, Sally at once corrected herself: a hypothesis that had taken some time to get clear in her mind and still risked her being ridiculed by John Poulter. Would her awareness of his NSA approach be sufficient to persuade the man to restore her open access to Britain's eavesdropping facility even if he ridiculed what she was going to suggest? From variable to hypothesis to yet another conundrum, to go with too many others.