The Cloud Collector (23 page)

‘Our botnet firewalls are still up: we're not falling into a trap!' pressed Irvine, the satisfaction stirring.

Instead of answering, Singleton gestured to his computer screen, clearly displaying Irvine's intact cutout protection.

‘That's brilliant,' enthused Irvine. ‘Either way's a winner.'

‘Providing we get it right from the moment Vevak's transmission starts,' qualified Singleton even more cautiously.

Irvine thought, annoyed, that he'd overdone the praise, like someone anxious to ingratiate himself. ‘I'm missing your point.'

‘I'm using your bots, into which we're both still logged, waiting for their next move,' reminded the older man, holding Irvine's total concentration. ‘And you're something like twenty-eight miles away in DC, sometimes not able immediately to react, which is how we've got to react when Vevak—or al Aswamy from wherever he is—moves. Down here, I'm set the moment that happens.'

Singleton was right, Irvine at once accepted. There was no benefit, no useful professional reason, for the duplication. But he didn't want to surrender the control. Everything was his. The idea was his and the project was his and its operation was his and the success had to be his; and when others got involved with their own agendas and ambitions and careers, it was his job to protect it. Matching the other man's caution, he said, ‘You think we could get in each other's way?'

‘Not working together, side by side, moving parallel with them. Reacting separately from each other, with no guarantee of being able instantly to communicate, we're endangering what we're trying to do.'

From the intentness with which they were all looking at him, Irvine suspected that some if not all of this had already been talked through, such as Singleton's earlier remark of Irvine's not being left out and the minimal effort made to contact him when Malik finally got a reaction from Anis and then Redeemer. ‘That's the first priority, not endangering what we're trying to do.'

It
was
his operation, his responsibility, Irvine told himself again. He could refuse to surrender control, as his father had refused to delegate: to share anything of what he'd tried to achieve diplomatically, determined to be the peacemaker where so many others had failed. Was that his motivation here, public recognition? Hardly. Cyber Shepherd could never publicly be acknowledged, as he could never openly be identified as its architect. All of which was immaterial, Irvine recognized, dismissing another illogicality to bring himself back to those still looking at him, waiting. He wouldn't be making any concessions. He'd be showing the mature responsibility of a team leader confident in his position, adjusting to the predictable expansion of a successful project. ‘I guess there's more to tell me, but this is how I see this part of it going forward. Still outstanding is al Aswamy, who may or may not reappear through Vevak's Hydarnes site in which we're still embedded and, it seems, unsuspected. What we don't know is whether the new stuff we've intercepted—but not so far broken—is linked to al Aswamy or an entirely new target through Redeemer and Anis.' The concentration was relaxing, no longer challenging, gauged Irvine. ‘So here's how we'll cut the cake. You, Burt, will take over the Vevak-Hydarnes monitor. You, Akram, will handle the Moscow Alternative darknet with the Anis and Redeemer postings and its subcatalogs—which I'm still waiting to hear about—with Shab and Marian acting as backup to the rest of you.' Irvine coughed, clearing his throat. ‘I'm spending more time in DC than I intended because of al Aswamy. The moment that's resolved, it'll reverse with my being back here most of the time. Until then, whenever I'm in DC, I want to be contacted, day or night, on my cell—which will never be switched off—the moment anything comes from anywhere that needs the sort of reaction Burt's talking about.' Irvine paused gratefully. ‘Anyone got an argument with that?'

No-one spoke. Irvine was relieved.

So, Irvine quickly decided, were most if not all of the others. Shab Barker began speaking, rehearsed but unprompted, as Irvine turned to him, appearing at first more anxious to move beyond the confrontation than talk of his pursuit of Redeemer. He'd taken the precautions Redeemer had ignored, assured Barker, establishing self-destruct firewalls in unsuspecting computer systems in Vistula, St Petersburg, and finally Helsinki. From Finland he'd chased Redeemer into the hacked mainframe of Malmö's third-largest fish-exporting company, established almost a hundred years earlier and still controlled by a family directorship. The chain hadn't progressed from there, nor had Redeemer returned to any Moscow Alternative subcatalogs since the first approach. Anis had not returned there, either.

‘But Malmö is where it begins and ends,' declared Barker. ‘Malmö is where the group is located.'

‘Where's the evidence to support that?' at once challenged Singleton, the edge back in his voice.

‘I finally got lucky with Anis: randomly different digital selection, randomly different result. I got the numeric code and the IP. While Akram was double-checking it today, I compared it against Redeemer, just filling in time until you got here. They're the same.'

‘You didn't tell us while we were waiting with you!' accused Marian.

Irvine was aware of Singleton sitting tight-faced except for an angry tic pulling the corner of his mouth down almost into a grimace.

‘Shab and I wanted to make absolutely sure before we started ringing bells,' said Malik. ‘It'll be a group privately sharing the same protocol on the Action darknet. Anis was the stalking horse, testing if there'd be any attempt to follow after he made the chat-room approach. Passed us on up the chain when he was satisfied we were genuine, not law enforcement. Redeemer didn't bother with cutouts because he didn't think he had to; he thought he was safe. It's classic darknet macho bullshit.'

There was such a thing as darknet macho bullshit, a lot of it even, accepted Irvine, acknowledging, too, that the delay in attempting to follow Anis had more to do with the distraction of al Aswamy than allaying fear of pursuit, but he shared some of Singleton's reservation.

Marian said, ‘It's not classic, and sharing a protocol is not enough on a darknet site to justify your assumption of a Malmö base. The far more likely explanation is that everything was transferred onto a memory stick to be continued from a separate computer.
That's
classic.'

‘I would have expected at least one protective cutout,' contributed Irvine.

‘That worries me, too,' picked up Singleton, still tight-faced.

‘Why should it be worrying any of us?' questioned Marian pragmatically. ‘We've picked up something that's worth taking forward. But it's not in our backyard. So we pass it on to the Swedish authorities, as we passed on the UK and Italian intercepts that turned out to be the al Aswamy operation.'

‘If I'm wrong, if it's a memory-stick transfer, we don't know if it's going to end up in our backyard or not,' disputed Malik, disconcerted at the opposition.

‘We can get into his bot,' reminded Irvine.

‘We didn't do that with the intercepts in Italy or the UK,' immediately confronted Singleton.

‘We didn't have the protocol at the time to get into either. And we didn't know we were looking at a jihad conspiracy,' came back Irvine, just as quickly. He went to Malik. ‘You did most of the hard work and there's no reason to stop now. Hack in.'

All the machines were connected to Malik's by remove access, the screens filling simultaneously with Malik's page.

Marian said, ‘A friendly backyard, but still no good to us.'

‘Oh yes, it is!' said Irvine. ‘That couldn't be better!'

*   *   *

Which couldn't be said for the early part of the evening, he decided, easing the neglected, tappets-clattering Volkswagen onto the I-95 for the unplanned return to Washington. Irvine believed he'd come out as best he could from the Singleton confrontation, but it was obvious to everyone that he'd conceded. It had all been evened out, though, by the Pakistanis' initial coup, which he'd confirmed by approving the hacking of Redeemer's botnet. Irvine didn't believe Shab Barker had only discovered that Redeemer and Anis were sharing the same darknet address shortly before his arrival, any more than Marian Lowell or Burt Singleton. And Singleton's barely controlled annoyance at an announcement he wasn't expecting more than balanced out whatever he'd achieved by gaining total control of the Vevak monitoring.

To what was he returning? wondered Irvine, welcoming the glow of Washington ahead. Conrad Graham's reaction to Irvine's Fort Meade telephone alert of Malik's success had been far more subdued than Irvine expected. The deputy CIA director's initial concentration must have been entirely on the following day's specially convened meeting Irvine had been summoned to attend. At least he now had something positive to offer for a change.

At just past ten thirty, when Irvine got to Owen Place, he abruptly thought of calling Sally. Just as quickly he put the idea out of his mind, irritated that the thought had occurred at all.

 

23

It took a further year of fighting and dying after the Vietnam peace declaration before Hanoi and Washington diplomatically agreed to the shape of the table at which an accord was formally ratified, recalled Jack Irvine. That absurdity, according to his mother, began her husband's professional disillusionment, later explained away—for diplomatically acceptable reasons, what else?—as an irrecoverable mental breakdown. Which of those currently assembled around the deputy CIA director's conference table was beyond recovery? wondered Irvine, surveying the men opposite. It surely had to be James Bradley, as always tightly mummified as if in readiness for burial. Johnston was also looking nervously around, inviting reassurance. What Irvine hadn't expected was being awakened at 5:00 a.m. by Harry Packer, whose NSA position couldn't be endangered, on his way from Baltimore insisting he wasn't partnered in internal manoeuvring with either Bradley or Johnston. Irvine felt comfortable in the knowledge that he was safe, eager to detail to Conrad Graham the previous night's discovery.

Irvine suspected that Graham staged his late arrival for effect, which he immediately compounded by announcing that as of that moment he was personally taking control of Operation Cyber Shepherd. There were to be no unilateral actions that hadn't first been approved by him, including the choice and delegation of all subsidiary CIA personnel. CIA surveillance upon anyone currently engaged in the operation had been lifted. None was to be imposed in the future. The open dissent and criticism of the control and command of Operation Cyber Shepherd from virtually every other Homeland Security agency had reached the White House, from where the instructions he was relaying had been issued. There were more than a dozen open threats of exchange withdrawal from foreign intelligence agencies with which they'd enjoyed close and useful co-operation, and
The New York Times
was now leading the worldwide media campaign for more information.

‘Don't anyone misunderstand what I'm telling you,' continued Graham. ‘We're into damage limitation. What began well is now an unmitigated disaster that could get even worse if a Homeland group tries to save its public ass by burning ours.'

Irvine wasn't feeling comfortable anymore, either. He was burning with frustrated anger at having everything he'd made successful—something the president himself had openly praised—endangered by incompetent assholes such as James Bradley and Charles Johnston. And it would be destroyed, Irvine knew. Damage limitation meant abandoning Operation Cyber Shepherd as a deluded aberration, which was how his father's enterprise had been labeled and discarded. Irvine understood at last the deputy director's almost disinterested response to his previous night's phone call. Conrad Graham had formally approved Cyber Shepherd and briefly basked in the initial presidential praise; now he had a lot of distancing to achieve to prevent himself from becoming a victim of its debacle.

Graham's curt demand—‘You have something to say?'—brought Irvine abruptly out of his reflection. He had to justify the operation, he determined; save it by convincing Graham that the situation wasn't as desperate as the man clearly imagined it to be.

Irvine stepped cautiously out onto the verbal tightrope between restoring faith in Cyber Shepherd and keeping safe from Johnston and Bradley anything about Vevak and Hydarnes. ‘We can recover,' he declared. ‘We're following a new trail on a known terrorist Internet route. One of the targets is careless, hasn't bothered to hide himself inside a host computer because he's working through a darknet, an underground, no-questions-asked, hidden-identity site, and believes he's safe. Which he isn't. We're not in a position to move yet, but we will be very soon. We've already discovered a connection from Malmö, in Sweden, where we believe his group is based, with another cell in England. The indications are that there's something being planned.' Irvine paused, not anticipating any understanding from either Johnston or Bradley, but hopeful at least of some recognition from Harry Packer or Conrad Graham.

It didn't come. Instead Johnston said, ‘What the hell interest is any of this to us!'

‘A potentially British-headquartered terrorist group is planning an action of some sort,' patiently finished Irvine, depressed and disappointed in equal measure. ‘A British MI5 officer is holding us to ransom over access to detainees who conceivably know not just where al Aswamy's hiding but where other American targets might be. Sally Hanning's lost her ransom threat. It's ours now. So are as many detainees as we want.'

‘Oh, yes!' finally acknowledged a beaming Conrad Graham. ‘Now we've got her by the balls, and I want them squeezed hard to get us out of this mess.'