The Cloud Collector (2 page)

‘I strictly followed established procedure by passing it on to Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit,' recited Dodson. It wasn't going to be enough, he knew.

‘And left it there, as someone else's responsibility?'

‘No!' denied Dodson, the forcefulness just short of impertinence. ‘The Yard traced Bennett to the London School of Economics; he'd dropped out and returned to his home in Bradford after two terms. He apparently knew Arabs there, but there was no evidence of radicalization or of his attending a mosque in Bradford or anywhere else. The Yard is overstretched, as you know. They judged him too low-key to justify an intercept warrant on his phone or any other electronic equipment.'

Monkton let an accusing silence build. ‘There was a Pakistani connection: positive suspect chatter. You have the authority to apply for an electronic intercept warrant.'

‘The Yard passed it on to the local police,' tried Dodson desperately.

‘Who are now trying to find out why and how Roger Bennett ended up in a Bradford alley, stabbed to death and with half his tongue cut out.'

‘Bradford police are investigating it as a gang killing. They have Bennett as a petty criminal, not a terrorist.'

‘Did he have a criminal record?'

‘In his late teens. Robbery with violence and aggravated assault.'

‘Which I don't see in this file,' persisted Monkton, tapping the papers before him.

‘It had nothing to do with terrorism.'

‘Who, then, was making contact with him from Pakistan, through a German intermediary? And why was he on NSA's suspect airways list six months before he's found murdered?'

‘I don't know,' miserably conceded Dodson.

‘But I want to know,' insisted Monkton. ‘Use proper channels to reach the chief constable, seeking his authority and assistance to clear up something we don't understand, that sort of approach. I don't want anyone believing their toes are being trodden upon or their territory invaded. And I don't want any media leaks.'

‘I'll avoid that,' promised Dodson.

‘I'll be extremely disappointed if you don't. And I'm already disappointed enough as it is.'

*   *   *

‘Thanks a fucking lot!' protested Jack Irvine as the door closed behind the head of the CIA's covert division.

‘You got a problem?' mildly queried Harry Packer, NSA's liaison director to the Agency. He was a bespectacled, balding man with the stoop of someone uncomfortable with his height, determined physically as well as figuratively to keep well below the parapet until he'd worked out the personal benefits of this operation. So far, he believed they might be considerable, and to climb out of the toilet into which his personal life was being flushed away, he needed all the benefits he could get.

‘I think not getting any support or input from your two guys with whom Shepherd is being worked is a problem, yes,' said Irvine, over-emphasizing the irritation. ‘I also think I was set up as the fall guy if Johnston scrapped the whole operation.' He'd done the right thing, holding back until now: he still had the back channel to the CIA deputy director if Johnston changed his mind. He'd marked both as promotion-positioning backwatchers manoeuvring maximum advantages from Cyber Shepherd.

‘But he didn't scrap it, did he?' James Bradley, Irvine's CIA counterpart, smiled. ‘There wasn't a chance in hell of Johnston cancelling something already approved by our recently elevated deputy director. Johnston's ass is Teflon-tempered.'

Conrad Graham's promotion created the vacancy Johnston now occupied following belated recognition of Graham's role establishing the joint National Security Agency/CIA task force that devised, with the Israeli Mossad, the Stuxnet cyberwar weapon. A worm that without detection overrode already-installed computer control programs, Stuxnet was introduced into Iran's uranium-processing facility at Natanz in late 2010 and unknown to its Iranian operators alternated between fast and slow the intended centrifuge rotations sufficiently to disrupt Tehran's atomic development.

They wouldn't mock if they knew how much he'd gained from Stuxnet, Irvine thought. ‘So why the big silence?'

‘Shepherd's your baby: you didn't need any help from us setting it all out for the new man,' said Bradley, a carelessly crumpled bachelor fattened by microwave TV dinners and whose invariably tightly buttoned jackets concertina-creased over yesterday's shirt. ‘I thought we'd established the rules of engagement: you handle all the clever cyberspace shit. I pick up when everything gets down to ground level: a perfect combination.' And one that was going to get him a $2,000 grade hike, reflected Bradley.

‘That made us little more than observers today,' endorsed Packer. ‘What
could
we have contributed that you couldn't explain better?'

‘So what did you observe?' Irvine mocked back, even-voiced.

‘New guy on the block, feeling his way in, is all,' said Bradley.

‘And now it's time to move on,' hurried Packer, determined to get away from the CIA's Langley headquarters in time for that night's poker, upon which the monthly alimony depended.

‘I'm coming up to Fort Meade fully to brief the team,' announced Irvine. ‘Meade is where the facilities are, from where we're going to get the leads.'

‘I'll make the arrangements,' undertook Packer, a career bureaucrat, not a cryptologist, who'd already decided to associate himself with all that was safe—and probably documented—and to steadfastly avoid anything and everything that was not. Staff movements were his responsibility, and he was apprehensive that Irvine's relocation to DC might prove too expensive.

‘That would be a contribution,' said Irvine heavily, but then wondered why he'd bothered: he was going to keep them at a greater distance than they imagined they were keeping him. Looking to Bradley, he said, ‘We haven't talked about al Aswamy.'

‘What's to talk about?'

‘You pick up when everything gets down to the ground,' irritably echoed Irvine. ‘We still don't properly know how important he is.'

‘He's locked in our box and we've got the key,' guaranteed Bradley. ‘You look after your side, I'll look after mine.'

That's precisely what he intended to do, thought Irvine.

*   *   *

‘Arrogant son of a bitch!' declared Bradley, generously pouring Jack Daniel's for both of them. They'd finally moved from the viewing room to the man's mission-assigned office, which had corner-window views out over the Virginia forest as far as Rock Creek Park, although the Potomac was hidden in the intervening valley.

‘He's the best Arabic scholar at Meade, never known an encryption he couldn't break, and he works a computer like Chopin played the piano,' enthused Packer sycophantically, gauging he had a maximum of thirty minutes before he needed to get on the road. ‘And Conrad Graham judged him invaluable on Stuxnet.'

‘Which very obviously Irvine believes, too,' said Bradley, settling behind his desk. ‘Important maybe, invaluable, no. This is a crusade against Islamic extremism, not a reputation-building exercise or redemption effort for the fuckups of his father.'

‘He talked about his father with you?' asked the surprised Harry Packer, who'd imagined he'd be the only one to check out Irvine's background.

Bradley shook his head. ‘Came up in all its sorry detail during his background check: hell of a mess. Sure as hell don't want to be caught up in a repetition.'

‘That's hardly likely: this is altogether different.'

‘It's got the potential.'

‘Everything we do, either here or at Fort Meade, has the potential for disaster,' Packer argued back, more for his own reassurance than the other man's. Shaking his head against a refill, he said, ‘What about Chuck Johnston?' Today had been their first personal encounter.

Bradley considered his answer. ‘Word is that there's never been a decision, right or wrong, with his name on it.'

A responsibility-avoiding principle he also studiously observed, Packer recognized. ‘This hasn't got his name on it. Conrad Graham signed off.'

‘That's why I knew Johnston wouldn't pull the rug from under us.'

‘Still right to handle it as we did.'

‘Don't want anything to come up and bite us in the ass, do we?' invited Bradley, adding to his own glass.

‘Absolutely not.' He'd be back in Baltimore soon enough, Packer decided. He had a good feeling—a winner's feeling—about tonight.

*   *   *

‘I've made all the necessary police approaches: gone back to Scotland Yard and GCHQ, as well. There's nothing beyond what you've already seen,' Jeremy Dodson told Monkton. ‘And I've drawn up a list of officers if you want us to get physically involved.'

‘I definitely intend our getting involved,' said the Director-General, for once behind his overwhelming desk. ‘And I've already decided upon an officer.'

Dodson hesitated, covering his awkwardness by retrieving the sheet of paper he'd already pushed partially across the desk. ‘You won't be needing this, then?'

‘No, I won't be needing that.'

‘I've still got time to brief him this afternoon,' offered Dodson hopefully.

‘I've already done that, too.'

 

3

‘So MI5 is recruiting women now!' The desk plate identified Edward Pritchard as a detective superintendent. The undisguised implication was that the employment barrel had been scraped from its absolute bottom, including splinters. The wall behind the man was a collage of overseas police-force pennants and framed photographs of foreign events all featuring Pritchard in the foreground.

‘They have been for a long time now.' Sally Hanning smiled, contemptuous of the chauvinism of the man who sat with both hands cupping a bulged gut, as if it needed support. It would have been charitable, which she rarely was, to think its burden was the reason for his not standing when she'd entered the room.

‘Actually licensed to kill!'

‘No,' she said, impatient with the condescension. ‘Just to get easily irritated by irrelevant nonsense. Your chief constable promised every assistance. And that he'd send you a memo setting that out.'

Pritchard's superciliousness slipped. ‘What, precisely, do you want?'

‘That promised assistance. I'd like to see the full case file on Roger Bennett, be updated on what progress there's been about a possible Pakistani terrorist connection, and hear whether it had any connection with his murder.' Sally smiled again, happy at the abrupt change in attitude. ‘In fact, I'd like you to talk everything through with me from the very beginning.'

‘I'm having the case file copied; it'll be ready before you leave,' said the detective chief stiffly. ‘There's no connection whatsoever between Bennett's killing and any Pakistani terrorism. Apart from what was passed on from America, which only amounted to half an A4 page, there's absolutely nothing to substantiate a Pakistan connection to the man. We didn't find any mosque he attended and therefore no evidence of any conversion or interest in Islam.'

‘What assistance did you get from Cologne?'

‘Cologne?' queried Pritchard blankly.

‘The contents of that half A4 page were routed through Cologne,' Sally pointedly reminded him. ‘Are the German details in the file being copied for me?'

‘I've just told you we don't believe Bennett was involved in terrorism.'

‘Are you telling me you haven't had any communication with Cologne?'

‘It wasn't necessary. Bennett was a petty crook, nothing more.'

‘Why do you think he was killed, had his tongue cut out?' broke in Sally, irritated at the returned dismissiveness.

‘He was a thug, small-timer imagining he was big-time,' recited Pritchard wearily. ‘Offended someone who'd watched too many Hollywood films and didn't like something Bennett said. We've got a lot of lowlifes of too many nationalities in Bradford, all fighting among themselves. Roger Bennett isn't any loss to the community.'

‘I don't understand your remarks about the tongue cutting and Hollywood movies?'

Pritchard gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘All those Hollywood films about the Mafia: what happens to gangsters who shoot their mouths off.'

Sally didn't immediately respond. ‘We're discussing possible Middle East terrorism. Tongue cutting is for a different sort of offence there.'

Now it was the police chief who remained briefly silent. ‘You weren't born in this country, were you?'

‘No,' confirmed Sally, with no intention of satisfying the man's curiosity. She'd inherited her Jordanian mother's olive complexion and Chanel-chic, small-busted figure, and her blue-eyed natural blondness from her English father.

Again Pritchard waited, but when she didn't continue, he said, ‘What is it a punishment for?'

‘Mostly dishonour.'

‘I'd say that's the same thing.'

‘There's a big difference,' insisted Sally. ‘You know the lowlifes with whom Bennett mixed?'

‘None that know anything about his killing. Or who'd tell us if they did.'

‘What about family?'

‘He didn't have any. Only son, mother died in the nineties, father nine months ago, when Bennett was at college in London.'

‘There were surely schools or colleges here he went to before graduating to the London School of Economics?'

‘Got there from a probation-rehabilitation scheme after convictions for violence; would have gone to jail, where he belonged, if the save-the-world evangelist couple he held—and stabbed—at knifepoint hadn't pleaded in court for leniency to save his soul for God. People in the parole office ran a book on how long he'd last in London. His probation officer won thirty pounds, bought drinks all around.' Pritchard looked pointedly at his watch.