The Cloud Collector (3 page)

Sally relaxed back in her chair. ‘Where did he live?'

‘In whatever gutter he woke up in. There was a room at a hostel, but it's been emptied now, of course.'

‘I'd like to go through everything from the crime scene that you're still holding: clothes, what he had in his pockets, stuff like that.'

‘You can help yourself to whatever you want.'

‘And an officer to take me to the hostel to see if there's anything Bennett left behind.'

‘You can have anything you want,' repeated the man, shuffling ineffectually to stand, to end the encounter. ‘Is that all?'

‘Unless something else comes up.' Sally smiled. When it did, she'd decide to take Pritchard's offer literally.

*   *   *

Jack Irvine's chosen team was already assembled in the smallest of the first-floor conference rooms at the National Security Agency's sprawling Fort Meade complex.

During their work together on Stuxnet, Irvine had recognized Burt Singleton—around whom it was said the NSA had been built—not just as one of its foremost cryptologists but as one of its most innovative thinkers. Marian Lowell, who positioned herself two rows farther back from Singleton, was an equally revered legend, a married-to-the-agency professional whose encyclopedic memory virtually made unnecessary the meticulously maintained research that Irvine believed to have shortened by months the final development of the Stuxnet worm. On either side of Marian, mother hen protecting her chicks, sat Shab Barker and Akram Malik, American-born grandsons of two Pakistani immigrant families whose respective hotel and leisure empires made possible Yale and Harvard educations with magna cum laude mathematics degrees. Proud of their American citizenship—the family name of Bibi had become Barker, Shabaz shortened to Shab—they'd also inherited a pride in their ancestry, which they considered shamed by the terrorist complicity and corruption of Pakistan.

‘Marian's given me three-to-one against our finally hearing what the hell's going on,' declared Singleton, a flop-haired man who hid his prowess beneath a convincingly adopted Louisiana-ole-boy accent to match an appearance of constant perplexity. The elbows and cuffs of his jacket were leather patched, and the cord trousers puddled over scuffed combat boots.

‘You should have held out for ten.' Irvine smiled back, grateful for the man's unwitting icebreaker. ‘But first you're going to hear an apology. We're going to run a highly classified project, Operation Cyber Shepherd, partnered with the CIA, who until now has insisted on my working with them on a need-to-know basis. What you're being told today you should have been told earlier, and I'm sorry you weren't.'

There were frowns between Singleton and Marian but no immediate challenge, which Irvine had half expected.

‘Some things came up during Stuxnet that didn't specifically contribute to that project,' continued Irvine. ‘They did, though, give me an idea that I ran past Conrad Graham, then the CIA's director of covert operations. He approved my exploring them as a possible operation, which for a time I did as a research project.' Irvine stopped, again risking an interruption he didn't want and fortunately didn't come. ‘It's important for all of you to understand that everything you've so far done at my request was properly approved and authorized.'

Irvine was conscious of renewed looks between Marian and Singleton. The two Pakistani Americans still gave no reaction.

‘It's a CIA-financed operation, headed by a covert-division supervisor named Jim Bradley. Harry Packer's the liaison officer from here,' went on Irvine. ‘Everyone in this room has the highest security clearance, higher probably than a lot of the CIA people working on the periphery of what's involved. We're not on the periphery. We're at the very core, the people making it work, and I don't want it continuing as it has until now.'

‘I don't think I do, either,' intruded Singleton at last. ‘I'd like what at the moment sounds like nonsense properly explained, right now!'

‘We'd all like that,' insisted Marian. ‘Our employment contracts are with the National Security Agency, not the Central Intelligence Agency, by whose operating procedures none of us is bound.'

Irvine had forgotten Marian held a corporate law degree. ‘That's why we're having this meeting.'

*   *   *

‘To make the Stuxnet sabotage work we had to get to the Programmable Logic Controller of Iran's Natanz and Bushehr facility computers,' reminded Irvine. ‘Which we couldn't, not by direct hacking. The Iranians had anticipated the danger of an Internet connection. Their nuclear PLCs weren't connected but ran independently. Our only way in was to hack the personal computers of the Natanz and Bushehr scientists to create our botnets—or Trojan horses or spiders, whatever you want to call them—the moment they put their memory sticks into their otherwise protectively isolated mainframes…'

Marian and Singleton were nodding in recollection. Barker and Malik were both pressed forward, easily following the explanation.

‘Israel's Mossad had a lot of personnel file details on the Iranian and Russian technicians at Natanz and Bushehr,' picked up Irvine, his earlier tension easing. ‘Israel also have equipment similar to our own algorithm capacity and our dual random-number generators.' Irvine cleared his throat, wishing he'd brought water into the room with him. Looking to Singleton, he said, ‘Am I making myself clear?'

‘I'll let you know if you don't,' said the man with obvious reservation.

Was it just an irritation at not being included from the beginning? wondered Irvine. Or was it deeper than that, the resentment of someone twenty years his senior believing he should have been the project leader? ‘Once we got into the personal PCs, we automatically gained access to every name—and computer—on each PC's contacts list, multiplying our botnet trawl. They were careless, these guys; had every excuse to be, I guess. They were inside what was supposed to be the most secure facility in the entire country. No-one could get to them, read their mail, which was why they wrote in clear, never encryption. I read a hell of a lot, we used a hell of a lot. There was one guy I picked out early on, signed himself Hamid. Came to believe that at another time in another Cold War he'd have been described as a commissar. Hamid didn't close down after Stuxnet so I went on monitoring him in my own time back at Meade; tried to follow his communication routes, which started to go through cutouts, although too often still unencrypted. His using the anonymous darknet chat rooms didn't surprise me. Facebook did. It took me a year to hack into all Hamid's cutouts—as well as Hamid's shared darknet account—to be able to follow the traffic both ways, although not quite as long to realize that Hydarnes, his shared Tehran account, is that of a covert-operations division of Vezarat-e Ettela'at va Amniat Keshvar.' Irvine paused, preparing his denouement. ‘We have our own Trojan horse deep inside, totally without Tehran's knowledge or suspicion.'

Singleton interrupted disbelievingly, ‘You got us
inside
Iran's espionage service!'

‘An active subversive operational unit of Vevak,' qualified Irvine, using the acronym. ‘From that one discovery and the botnets we installed from the address-book links, we've established that they're heavily using Facebook when they leave their darknet concealment to get into the West.' The hesitation was again intentional, for effect. ‘And it hasn't stopped with social networks. Through darknets I've got into chat rooms. I think we've got a handle on at least two, maybe three, darknets regularly visited by Al Qaeda groups in Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, the Maghreb, Europe, and here.'

‘All that has emerged from social networks!' questioned Marian Lowell, an angular-bodied woman whose blue-dyed hair was lacquered into a protective helmet and who always wore business suits. Today's was brown check, with a belted jacket.

‘A lot of it,' confirmed Irvine. ‘Don't forget we didn't then fully appreciate how social networks would be used to avoid censorship and security controls in the Maghreb revolutions of 2011. Then it was to publicize regime change. Think of the opposite. What better concealment can any sort of terrorist group have than to be among millions upon millions of social-network users, until now hidden from us, too, despite our worldwide signals intelligence-sharing with Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK and our bilateral exchange agreement with the UK. It's the equivalent of double, even triple encryption with double, even triple anonymity.'

There was a contemplative silence. Singleton stirred as if to speak, but before he could, Barker said, ‘Okay, so we're ahead of the game. We can alert counter-intelligence to prevent the attacks before they're mounted. That's our job; what's different with what you're doing?'

From anyone else Irvine would have considered the question sarcastic, but not from Barker, a soft-voiced, gentle-mannered man confronting a regretted teenage addiction to hot dogs, hamburgers, and molasses-soaked waffles with a self-devised white-fish, nut, and herbal-drink diet that contributed nothing to any weight loss but substantially to discomforting flatulence.

Irvine breathed deeply, preparing himself. ‘We're not stopping when we identify a planned attack. We hack into the planners' computers, add or remove or alter their messages—sometimes leaking to rival groups, intruding Shia or Sunni hatred—to turn one against the other.' He paused. ‘So far two groups have destroyed each other instead of innocent Americans … innocent civilians anywhere.'

There was utter silence for several moments. Then Singleton said, ‘I want to know a lot more than that.'

‘You picked up a private Facebook message to Boston six months ago that originated from Syria,' reminded Irvine. ‘I got a botnet into the Boston recipient's laptop. He was a Syrian immigrant. The CIA found an Al Qaeda suicide video in his apartment when they made a quick in-and-out intrusion. He'd formed up with two others, both Palestinian-born Americans with Hamas-based relatives in Gaza, all part of the Hamas–Al Fatah reconciliation.'

‘I don't remember arrest publicity,' complained Singleton. ‘When's the trial? On what charges?'

‘There wasn't a trial. I followed the Syrian-led group through their Facebook cutouts into their operational e-mails. They were buying weapons for Hamas through Mexican suppliers, shipping through Colombia on a drug-supply route. I introduced an e-mail through Colombia to the gunrunners' Gaza control, showing they were operating a weapons-supply business on the side. All three got taken out by a Hamas hit squad.'

‘So we're setting up our own Murder Incorporated and you're inviting us to become part of a botnet hacking group to operate it?' Singleton calmly asked.

‘Absolutely not,' rejected Irvine, anxious to introduce the carefully prepared justification. ‘We got bogged down in an illegal war in Iraq, we got bogged down in Afghanistan—where no invader has ever won a war—and we've crossed too many borders of too many countries clandestinely fighting terrorists. And what's the universal condemnation against America every time? Collateral damage, killing or maiming civilians. We identify a target in Pakistan, a Predator drone drops its bombs or fires its missiles, kills two or three terrorists—if we're lucky—and wipes out twenty innocent old men, women, and children. You know our kill score of innocents so far in Pakistan? Three thousand and rising. And with every one of those innocent deaths also dies every hope of our ever winning hearts and minds and stopping America from being the most vilified and hated nation on the planet. This way there's no collateral hurt. Those we trace who don't kill each other we pursue and punish, legally if at all possible. No dead innocents, no America Go Home banners, no American-flag burning.'

‘Didn't we leave loose ends in Boston?' relentlessly persisted Singleton.

‘Again, very definitely no!' insisted Irvine, believing he was winning the inevitable moral argument. ‘Through the Syrian we got to two more whose supposedly hidden Facebook exchanges claimed Al Qaeda affiliation. The FBI has the entire group under blanket surveillance—with court-approved wiretaps on cell phones, landlines, and Internet connections—until this new Al Qaeda–affiliated group and other associates are identified. From the Colombian Facebook traffic there was a steer to the three-man Boston assassination team. The Boston assassination trio are based in Miami; their day job is acting as the conduit for a cocaine cartel working out of Medellín. Everything's now with the Drug Enforcement Administration, who didn't have the Miami three flagged until we told them.'

Marian said, ‘I logged other partial penetrations, following the guidelines you set for us. How many more fatalities have there been with your intervention with those?' Once again it wasn't an accusation.

‘Two in Washington, a month and a half ago,' responded Irvine. ‘Both were Americans, former infantry who'd done four tours between them in Afghanistan. Came home not just disillusioned but anti-U.S.; converted to Islam and met their recruiter, an Iranian named al Aswamy, in an Arlington mosque. I got that from al Aswamy's Facebook. He was using a binary code, half-encrypted on his private Facebook wall, the other half on a different time and day by cell-phone texts, read properly only when the two halves were put together. There was also a reference to another radicalized Muslim group in Annapolis; they'd apparently rejected al Aswamy after he made a recruitment approach: they'd identified him as a Sunni. They were Shiites.'

‘I got their cell number for you,' remembered Barker.

‘Which was all I needed. Al Aswamy was routing through Pakistan's Islamabad on a darknet to conceal his Tehran control. I hacked back into his Facebook traffic and his cell and reversed al Aswamy's original message en route about recruiting the Americans. I added that they'd been dishonourably discharged from the U.S. infantry after an incident in Sangin in which two Shia girls were raped before the entire family were shot dead. It was an actual atrocity that occurred in Afghanistan, without any arrests. I also added, as if in reply to al Aswamy, that in view of the Annapolis rejection he anonymously leaked to U.S. authorities that they were planning a terrorist attack and sent it as an apparently misdirected e-mail.'