The Cloud Collector (6 page)

‘Serious?'

‘It could be.'

*   *   *

Sally Hanning's concern deepened far more quickly than either she or Jeremy Dodson anticipated. Forty-five minutes after her short-tempered exchange with MI5 headquarters in London, the GCHQ official she only knew as John returned to her temporarily assigned office to announce that nothing remotely resembling a coded message had been deleted from the hard drive of Roger Bennett's computer.

‘Which is why it's been so quick,' said the man. ‘What has been deleted is inconsequential. Seems to have gambled a bit: dog- and horse-racing tips, stuff like that.'

‘You've kept it all?'

‘Of course. We're running printouts right now, assuming you'd want to go through them.'

‘I do,' said Sally at once. She was sure she hadn't over-reacted to her finding of the computer, but where else was there for her to look for what she was sure was a terrorist outrage in the making! ‘Was text all there was? No pictures? Film?'

The man shifted awkwardly. ‘There were some photographs. A film.'

Sally frowned, aware of the man's discomfort. ‘What's wrong?'

‘They're pornographic.'

Sally gave no open reaction, conscious of the man's embarrassment. ‘Have you copied them all?'

‘Yes.'

She nodded to the television in the corner of her temporary office. ‘I'd like to go through the printed text and still photographs first, before looking at the movie. Can it be watched on that screen?'

‘There's a DVD facility. Can you work it okay?'

Sally recognized the apprehension that she might ask him to operate the player. ‘I'll manage.'

‘And now you want us to work backwards through the hard drive from the date of the NSA interception?'

‘I thought we'd agreed that.' From the relieved smile she knew she was right about playing the disk.

‘There isn't a great deal on the earlier part of the hard drive, but you might want to book into a hotel in the town.'

Sally shook her head. ‘I've grown to like the room, don't want to leave it until I find what I want. I'll wait here until you get the rest of the stuff.'

Sally spread out everything John had so far retrieved, working methodically. She separated the electronic messaging from the pornographic stills, leaving the DVD to last, isolating potential inconsistencies in the printouts on her second reading. Sally added to her curiosity list on her third reading. When he returned after two hours, John confirmed her guess. He reported they were halfway through the remainder of the hard-drive examination and, less embarrassed than before, that it included another pornographic movie. It took two more hours of intense study of the pornography for Sally to make the connection between the still and movie pictures. Her immediate excitement had nothing to do with the sexual content and was balanced anyway by her completely objective acceptance that although her discoveries could easily be assembled into a circumstantial presentation of a crime, it provided absolutely no indication of what, where, or how that crime might be attempted.

It was past nine that night when her GCHQ escort finally returned to Sally's room, with the second DVD download and the sheaf of printed-out electronic messages.

‘I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed,' he apologized.

‘Maybe I won't be.'

She watched for ten minutes, oblivious to John's discomfort behind her, before she suddenly said, ‘Oh my God!' and snatched out for the telephone.

She calmly dictated her identification number and password when she was connected to the MI5 Watch Room at Thames House, even-voiced although authoritative when demanding to be patched through to Jeremy Dodson with the assurance that she was calling from a secure telephone.

When the man answered she said, still totally controlled, ‘I've got it! It's nuclear!'

At that precise moment, just over three thousand miles away at the National Security Agency complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, Jack Irvine took the telephone call for which he'd anxiously been waiting.

James Bradley got on the line: ‘It's more than a problem. It could be a goddamned emergency.'

 

6

‘How the fuck could it happen!' demanded Irvine, careless of Marian Lowell, in whose presence cursing was forbidden.

‘I'm waiting for the agent-in-charge to get back here. All I know so far is that we've lost al Aswamy as of thirty minutes ago.'

‘Bullshit! Tell me what happened!' Irvine was aware of the looks passing between Marian and Singleton: the other two were concentrating entirely upon him, all their automatic random-search programs initiated. Belatedly Irvine switched to speakerphone.

‘The son of a bitch kept to routine. Left the Ely Place apartment around noon, walked the usual route to the Dubois take-away for the lamb kebab, which he ate on the premises, then went directly back to Ely Place.'

‘Didn't it occur to anyone that the routine was established for a reason!' broke in Irvine, exasperated.

‘I'm rehearsing the obvious questions, too,' rejected Bradley. ‘Al Aswamy left Ely Place at four this afternoon and took the crosstown bus, with our guys on it with him. He rode all the way to the old post office building. Got straight off the bus and onto the pillion of a Honda 250 cc that had followed from somewhere along the route.'

‘Your guys didn't have vehicle backup?' groaned Irvine, exasperation turning into incredulity.

‘No.'

‘What about the registration?'

‘It all happened too quickly.'

‘Jesus!'

There was a brief pause from the Langley end, where Bradley was bunkered in his locked office, the occupancy slot reading
IN CONFERENCE.
He was sweating profusely, his normally tightly buttoned jacket discarded, shirt collar open. ‘We fucked up big-time. Satisfied?'

‘Fighting among ourselves isn't going to help,' cautioned Burt Singleton.

‘Who's listening to this!' The irritation at his having made a public admission echoed in Bradley's voice.

‘Speakerphone. Me and the team,' said Irvine.

Whose was the greater mistake, his and his surveillance team's, or Irvine and his cryptologists'? If there was some way to recover, which at the moment he couldn't foresee, he'd have to work hard to shift the majority of the responsibility on the NSA, Bradley calculated. ‘What chance is there of picking things up from your end?'

‘We're routing high-velocity random programs,' said Irvine. ‘But the Facebook account in Baghdad is dormant.'

‘Talk words I understand!' protested Bradley.

‘Think of Baghdad as a PO box number, a place for receiving mail,' lectured Irvine with forced patience. ‘It received today's coded message from Yemen. The Baghdad operator, Taliban or Al Qaeda, copies it—typing it onto another, separate computer that has no electronic connection with the Facebook receiving machine. The link is broken: we can't follow it. It's downloaded from the new computer onto a flash drive, a memory stick, to be sent from an Internet café without leaving any trace to a sender or a recipient.'

After another silence Bradley said, ‘So we're entirely dependent on your breaking the code?'

‘We can't rely on that being sufficient until we read the message. It might be incomplete, not giving us enough information. We need to find al Aswamy.'

‘What about al Aswamy's cell phone; you're tapping that, right?' demanded Bradley, searching for wiggle room.

From his desk Singleton said, ‘It's not currently switched on. There haven't been any e-mails or voice mails.'

‘There must be another way!' insisted Bradley, hoping it didn't sound like a plea, which it was.

‘Al Aswamy!' exclaimed Irvine in abrupt awareness. ‘Was he carrying anything when he left Ely Place, a bag or an obvious computer case maybe?'

After the third confused silence of the day from Langley, Bradley said, ‘I don't know.'

‘For fuck's sake, find out!' yelled Irvine.

*   *   *

An official GCHQ car, with a security-cleared driver, enabled Sally Hanning to keep in cell phone contact with London throughout the journey. Sally had known Director-General David Monkton would be with Jeremy Dodson when she arrived at Thames House just after midnight. She hadn't been told of a third man.

‘You convinced us sufficiently to call in the Cabinet Secretary,' announced Dodson, as he introduced Sir Peregrine North, a grey-haired, patrician-featured man whose soft handshake matched a marshmallow voice.

‘Have you warned Sellafield?' Sally asked at once.

‘Maximum alert, army units on standby,' confirmed Dodson just as briskly. ‘Let's hope you're not mistaken.'

Dodson very much hoped she would be, Sally knew. ‘After all the bungling there's already been, let's all hope I'm not,' she retorted, ignoring the differing expressions between North and David Monkton. ‘What about identification from the photographs I had wired from Cheltenham?'

‘Have you any idea how big the terrorist suspect list is!' protested Dodson.

‘I didn't ask how long the list was.' She was being peremptory, verging on impertinence, Sally accepted.

‘Which leaves us with the rest of your evidence to assess,' urged Monkton.

‘And to act upon it quickly if you're right,' emphasized North, infusing urgency into his muted voice. ‘There's been considerable emergency mobilization with nothing to substantiate it apart from your conviction.'

‘Is there a screen with a DVD player?' asked Sally, aware of Dodson's satisfied smirk at the Cabinet Secretary's reservation.

‘Waiting,' said Dodson. He was still flushed from their irritable exchange and knew it.

To the other two men, Sally said, ‘You probably already know that the photographs I sent from GCHQ are pornographic. So are the DVDs I want you to see. I'm not uncomfortable; please don't be on my account.'

The viewing was set up in an anteroom to the Director-General's office, chairs already arranged. The three men sat. Sally remained standing and said, ‘What you're going to see could be dismissed as teenage obscenity or average stag-night entertainment, which is precisely what I believe it was intended to be mistaken for were it intercepted: the sort of stuff that's on a lot of computers belonging to men of Roger Bennett's age and background. He was twenty-one, remember.…' She turned to the television. ‘Here's the first. It had been wiped, but GCHQ recovered it from the hard drive.'

On the screen appeared a pastoral scene—hedgerows, a country lane, cows in a distant field—with a sound of birdsong. Into the frame came a group of Western-dressed men and women, all Caucasian. Some of the men were darker, more Mediterranean complexioned than the others; two of them were bearded. Three of the women had the same dark colouring. The group came to a crossroads and had an animated although mostly inaudible discussion in what nevertheless sounded like English. One of the darker-skinned men pointed, without comment. Unquestioningly the group took the indicated direction. The film cut to a hedged field, in which the women in the group were laying out picnic rugs and food hampers but being jostled by the men into feigned wrestling that quickly degenerated into supposed rape, two blond-haired women held by some of the men for the pleasure of the others.

Sally abruptly stopped the DVD, putting the disk on rewind before turning back to the room. ‘What did you see?'

‘Filth,' said an even-redder-faced Dodson, looking for agreement from the Director-General, who ignored him.

North said, ‘I presume the significance was in the background? They took the direction of the street sign to Seascale, the nearest village to Sellafield.'

‘And the signpost had the county identification of Cumbria,' endorsed Monkton.

‘Sellafield,' confirmed Sally, ‘scene of a disastrous fire that destroyed a reactor and released 750 terabecquerels of radioactive material into the atmosphere, including dangerous iodine-131 that can be absorbed by humans. That closed-down reactor still contains fifteen tons of uranium fuel that can't be finally decommissioned until 2037, according to the information I accessed from my iPhone on the way back here.' Neither Monkton nor North was betraying any embarrassment or outrage at the film, she saw as she started the DVD again.

Almost at once Sally freeze-framed the rape scene, using the remote-control zoom to enlarge as much as possible the features of a man who still remained indistinct, almost hidden at the rear of the watching group. ‘I believe this man is our murder victim, Roger Bennett. And hope that identification will be confirmed when the film is subjected to better forensic enhancement.' Sally moved the zoom, isolating the bearded, direction-choosing man and two blond women. ‘Remember these particular faces.'

She unfroze the film but stopped it again at the fake orgy. ‘Look particularly at the faces of the two blond women who are the supposed victims and the man at the signpost who is one of the rapists. They seem almost anxious to show their facial features.' She stopped and extracted the disk, replacing it with another. ‘This is the stills collage that I had individually transmitted from GCHQ for the comparison with known or suspected terrorists. There are twelve in total, and in all the two bearded men and the two blondes predominate. I'd guess the still photographs were taken on the same day as the first movie: the discarded clothes are the same, and I think we might be able to date it by enhanced photo-analysis. They might be naked, but both men and the smaller of the two blondes are wearing elaborate wristwatches, which might have a calendar facility. I don't know what significance it might have, but I think it's worth forensically testing. I also suggested there should be very careful analysis of every piece of dialogue, beyond the usual porn-movie grunt and groan, that can be recovered from the first film and the one you're about to see.'