The Cloud Collector (30 page)

 

29

Conrad Graham sat unmoving, both hands flat against his desk as if needing its support, his expression halfway between bemusement and outright disbelief. When they came, the words were spaced, reflecting both. ‘You're—reading—Iran's—intelligence—transmission!'

‘
One
site,' carefully qualified Jack Irvine, encouraged by the reaction.

Graham's secretary answered the intercom instantly. Graham said, ‘No calls from anyone.
Anyone
. No interruptions whatsoever,' and snapped the machine off as he moved to lock his door, with the other hand clicking on the outside red warning light of a restricted meeting in progress. He didn't bother going back behind his desk, perching instead on its edge. ‘From the start! I want everything from the very beginning, right up to now, this moment!'

‘Are we being recorded?' asked Irvine, syncing his presentation to the other man's attitude: straight down the line as far as possible, layman-level techno-talk to gloss over how long he'd been a cuckoo in a Vevak nest.

‘Absolutely not!' guaranteed the deputy director earnestly. ‘Just us: no notes, no automatically triggered disks, nothing.'

‘I guess it goes back as far as Stuxnet, when I asked myself if we did the unthinkable then, why couldn't we do the unthinkable again. Just differently this time. And better.'

Graham was swinging his hitched-up leg like a metronome, keeping time, an inviting smile permanently fixed.

‘Easier thought about than done,' continued Irvine, introducing his timeline-covering caveat. ‘With Stuxnet we tried using Iran's Halal Web site, although eventually we had to infect technicians' personal PCs to introduce the worm into the Natanz centrifuges.'

Graham nodded sagely, as if he remembered; Irvine was sure he didn't. Graham's participation had been practical espionage, organizing and supervising infiltrated field agents.

‘We're being straight with each other, right?' demanded Irvine. ‘Everything in the open: There won't be any changes of mind, no misunderstandings? Not like it's been since we lost al Aswamy?'

‘What!' Graham frowned, the smile slipping.

‘There was some hesitation from a couple of my team, in the beginning. About legality.'

The derision spluttered from the other man. ‘For fuck's sake, Jack! I'm the guy that's backed you from the start, remember!'

‘Just clearing the point.'

‘We're talking about terrorism, finding a known Iranian terrorist leader, saving Operation Cyber Shepherd and us with it! Stop jerking off about legality.'

Irvine almost wished a recording were being made. ‘I spent a lot of time, months, years in fact, surfing Halal and the criminal and suspect darknets—cyber back alleys where anything and everything goes—and hacking into those that featured regularly—'

‘What about normal NSA stuff … you fix some sort of dispensation … a moratorium?'

Irvine shook his head, ready for the question. ‘The majority was in my own time: borrowed just a little from NSA, as well as the facilities. Expanding what we've now got from a NSA breakthrough, too: their discovery that some terrorist groups—not Al Qaeda in the beginning—were hiding in, and behind, Western social Web sites. That widened the search but ironically concentrated it: Was Vevak adding things like Facebook to their Halal and darknet communications to their cells in the West?' Irvine paused. ‘It took me almost a year to come up with the answer, which was yes!'

‘They're using Facebook!'

‘Along with millions and millions of other people!'

‘How!' demanded Graham.

‘A shared user, single-named domain umbrella account, no linked contact between sender and recipient, each recipient with separate subcatalog address known only to their Control, Vevak.'

Graham laughed aloud. ‘It's basic intelligence tradecraft, with a twist … a cyber dead-letter drop! We used it for years, still do, when it fits the circumstances. The Russians, too. Goddamn! Nothing's new!'

‘Cyber dead-letter drop is good,' flattered Irvine. It was going well, better than he'd hoped. Wrong to relax, though, as wrong as it would be to offer much more without prompting. Question and answer from now on: Graham's encouraging questions, Irvine's limited answers. ‘You with me so far?'

‘In step all the way. You get al Aswamy through Facebook?'

Shit! thought Irvine. Maybe he could manoeuvre around the answer, although it meant abandoning the intended brevity. ‘I didn't fully understand al Aswamy's importance at that time, had no way of realizing then the size of his operations. At that stage I only knew it was initiated by Vevak, not even that Hydarnes was a shared account. The first intercepted post indicated a recruitment drive, nothing more. We sabotaged that, believing we were destroying potential terrorist cadres and their trust in each other. What I didn't realize was how central, literally, al Aswamy was to the combined international assaults: that he was the coordinator. The trigger messages directed to Britain and Italy were under different subcatalog accounts: that's what fooled me.' Again he'd gotten himself into position more easily than he'd imagined. ‘I've got a point to make here, out of context with others I want to flag up later. We passed on, in accordance with the Echelon agreement, British- and Italy-designated transmission. It was the Brit, Sally Hanning, who jointed all the dots together; if she hadn't, the Washington Monument and Rome's Colosseum would probably be piles of rubble, and Britain would be dealing with its own Chernobyl. And we've got Sally Hanning here with us in DC.'

Conrad Graham stared across the desk, blank-faced and unspeaking for several moments. Then he said, ‘What
is
the point you're making?'

‘We're talking survival: your word. We need her with us if we're going to survive.'

Graham's face opened in feigned understanding. ‘I already built that insurance into the announcement if we have another Abu Hurr fuckup. Any sort of fuckup.'

Whatever it took to get her included, Irvine consoled himself. ‘She's also a hell of an operator. She'll contribute.'

‘Let's get back to what's important,' urged Graham impatiently.

*   *   *

‘Abu Hurr's dead.'

Sally decided against telling Monkton that she already knew. ‘Under torture?'

‘Heart attack during interrogation were Conrad Graham's words.'

‘Same things,' insisted Sally. ‘What else did he say?'

‘It was an accident which they regretted. He hoped the co-operation would continue. What do you think of Graham?'

‘A damned sight more than I thought of Johnston or Bradley, professionally. I need more personal contact to go much beyond that.'

‘I hope you'll get it. He guaranteed you're part of what he called the team.'

‘To be sacrificed if there are any more big mistakes?'

‘That's how I read it.'

‘What pressure does Abu Hurr's death in U.S. custody give us?'

‘Unquantifiable, at the moment. I don't know—and don't expect to be told—in whose custody he physically was. Could be a dozen different rendition countries. Graham's line was that Abu al Hurr didn't exist, had never existed.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘Nothing. And you're right about Graham being professional.'

‘How?'

‘There was a white-noise eradicator at his end of the telephone; there was nothing on the recording here when we tried to play it back.'

‘Which means you weren't compromised, either.'

‘All's not totally lost.'

Sally smiled in anticipation. ‘Did Johnston believe Abu Hurr existed?'

‘Vociferously so. And we got the registration of the CIA's rendition plane, even if we didn't get its flight plan.'

Who was the more professional, Conrad Graham or David Monkton? wondered Sally. ‘When are you going to let Graham know?'

‘When it serves a useful purpose:
our
useful purpose.'

‘Anything from GCHQ?'

‘They haven't cracked a message code yet. But there was a subcatalog link that they're working on. Now that I know you're physically in the communications room, I'll have the link sent immediately so you can take it up with GCHQ.'

The GCHQ discovery was already waiting, under her designated Eyes Only restriction, when Sally emerged from her cubicle. Conscious, as Monkton clearly was, of Nigel Fellowes's pervasive presence, Sally held back from any outward reaction in front of the communications room technicians, merely asking to be reconnected to London. From the security-guaranteeing Thames House she was patched through to Cheltenham and was relieved to be connected to the surprisingly co-operative John.

‘This was random?' Sally pressed at once.

‘Totally. We're still only treating it as a possibility that there's a link to the message code.'

‘That's not sufficient. We've got to be absolutely sure,' insisted Sally. Where's the supposed close co-operation? she thought, irritated.

‘I don't need to be told that!' said John, abruptly indignant.

‘What's the possible connection?'

‘Mil,' replied John with obvious reluctance.

‘[email protected]?' queried Sally, quoting what she'd memorized from Irvine's computer.

There was a momentary silence. ‘Yes.'

‘Which ends the doubt?'

‘Yes.'

Sally didn't bother to conceal the sigh. ‘Could NSA have missed the transmission?'

‘It's possible. We haven't been in contact yet.'

‘Don't. I'll liaise from here.'

‘Could this be as important as Sellafield?' the man asked at the end of the briefing.

‘It could be even more so.'

She was ahead of everyone still involved in Operation Cyber Shepherd, Sally calculated, in a position, even, to take a lead that Jack Irvine and Conrad Graham would have to follow. Was the gamble worth it?

*   *   *

‘That's it, right up to where we are now,' declared Jack Irvine, echoing Conrad Graham's initial response, as the uncertainty finally left him. He'd done it! He was well past any time-frame challenge on his Vevak penetration: from now on it was forward not backward examination, and he had that as clearly arranged in his mind as he'd planned everything else. ‘And it gives us a hell of a problem.'

Conrad Graham had gone back behind his desk as Irvine had come to his obvious conclusion. At once the man came up from head-sunk contemplation. ‘What problem?'

‘Being able to make proper use of it,' said Irvine flatly.

‘You're not making sense!'

‘I thought we were talking about survival: keeping Cyber Shepherd intact. How long do you imagine we'll be able to do that after you tell all those different Homeland Security agencies who want to stake you out naked in the mid-day sun what I've just told you? If I've got half-right what you've told me of yesterday's meeting, I'm betting it'll be seconds before it leaks to every major television and media channel in the country—and no longer than a minute before I lose my Vevak window.'

Graham looked across the desk in undisguised astonishment. ‘For Christ's sake, Jack, stop being such an asshole!'

‘I'm being practical. No matter how well you pitched it and how well you talked up national security, all any of them are concerned about is stopping the al Aswamy shit from falling on their individual fiefdoms.'

‘You really think I'm going to tell a single one of those motherfuckers!'

Once again Irvine came close to regretting there wasn't a recording. ‘How
are
you going to handle it?'

‘I tell you what you do. You keep intercepting and cracking Vevak codes and leave the implementation of what we do to me.'

Too vague, Irvine recognized at once. ‘You're going to keep me in the loop, aren't you?'

‘We're equally dependent upon each other, aren't we, Jack, joined at the hip? You survive, I survive; I survive, you survive: the perfect partnership.'

‘It'll be daily contact?' questioned Irvine uncomfortably.

‘Much tighter than that. I want a running commentary as things happen, the very moment they happen. Joined at the hip, don't forget.'

‘Okay.' Irvine shifted in his seat.

‘Just before you go.' The other man stopped him. ‘You say nothing of this came up
during
Stuxnet? It was all long after?'

‘Long after.' Fuck it, Irvine thought.

 

30

Sally ignored the instinctive temptation to call Irvine from the security of the communications room, reluctant to establish the personal link on a call she knew would automatically be recorded and logged. She didn't detect any surveillance on her roundabout drive back to her apartment. Irvine picked up her call immediately, but she didn't let him get beyond a greeting, breaking in to insist they meet at the Georgetown restaurant at eight thirty, if he wasn't returning to Fort Meade. She was encouraged when he told her he wasn't.

‘What's the problem?' Irvine demanded.

‘There isn't one. This is an insecure line.'

‘I've got stuff to tell you.'

‘Tonight,' she stopped him, reminding herself that it was she who was breaching tradecraft.

It took her less than thirty minutes to change and find a Hertz location in the phone book, and a further fifteen to study from her apartment window the three potential surveillance vehicles outside.

She set off on foot, identifying the awkwardly slow-moving dark blue Honda that had been stationed outside Guest Quarters. She timed her move as the car was halted by a stoplight at Foggy Bottom, suddenly turning into the metro as if making a last-minute decision. She took a train conveniently already at the platform, needing to switch services twice to orientate her direction before finally returning to street level and the Hertz rental office at Commonwealth Avenue. She rejected the first offered Toyota because it was red, settling for the dark green, which the clerk told her was more frequently rejected because of the bad luck associated with the colour.