The Cloud Collector (41 page)

‘Will Fisher,' identified the man. He was clean shaven, about thirty-five, compensating for his premature baldness with a tightly clipped, full, black beard.

‘You did good, finding it,' at once praised Irvine.

‘You coming out?'

Irvine paused, frowning. ‘Will, I'm almost three thousand miles away; don't know how short a deadline we're looking at! And you're already there.'

‘It's your operation,' pressed the man.

‘And it's your expertise: you're the guys who sweep the Oval Office and all those other secret basement places where the president holds his crisis meetings. You know all the traps and tricks, which I don't, not completely. This time you've got the official IP codes and passwords to both hacked machines: no official firewalls in the way. And you've got Smartman's complete IP, too. I'm risking breaching the no-contact insistence for Fort Meade to come to you with anything else you might need.'

‘Give me every detail of what you want,' said the man, resigned.

‘Our own botnet beside Smartman's, in both the desktop and laptop. I want to hack into Smartman's bots, get everything he's got there. I want his hard disk memory, for what's already on it and whatever's to come; to be there for whatever's to come is the most important. And I want his contacts lists to gauge the possible size of the assault.'

‘That all?'

‘Don't forget flash drives,' added Irvine, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘We'll need everything recorded, as you go—'

‘In case I mess up.'

‘Nothing and nobody's going to mess up. Is there CCTV in this officer's room?'

‘Yes.'

‘Re-align it so we get it in pictures, too. I want a digital feed to here.'

‘Which do you want first, desktop or laptop?'

It was a professionally valid question, Irvine acknowledged, briefly considering it. ‘Smartman will have put firewalls into his botnets, if he really is a smart man. And cutouts on his hacked way in. But the desktop was his ultimate target, so let's make it ours, too.'

‘Should we risk direct commentary from Creech to you, for the record to be maintained?'

The communication clampdowns were against written interception, thought Irvine, but he'd already ordered two minimal breaches.

‘I've arranged a direct line from Fort Meade, and I want the CCTV relay to watch what goes on from here, which is already too much. You make your own record, as you work.'

‘You didn't wish him good luck,' said Sally, as the screen blanked.

‘Maybe I should have. But professionals shouldn't need luck, should they?'

She might once have made that sort of remark, conceded Sally. She wasn't sure she'd have done so as casually now.

*   *   *

‘It's a total lockdown,' complained Frederick Bowyer. ‘But it's within the United States: I've the right, the authority, to know!'

‘Yes sir, you have,' agreed Ben Hardy uncomfortably. Being summoned personally to Pennsylvania Avenue and involved in one-to-one conversations like this was unquestionably a professional elevation. But he was unsettled at what appeared to have become an obsession with the director, which had earlier precedents.

‘I want you to go back to Packer. Give the impression it's semi-official: Bureau concern at suggestions from other agents about Packer's personal difficulties. Unfortunate if NSA internal security got involved, that sort of approach. You just want to talk it all through with him, colleague to colleague. Get the idea?'

Hardy shifted awkwardly. ‘I think so, sir. But that's how Jimmy Lowe tried it, and I got knocked back at the last minute.'

‘So don't get knocked back this time. If the son of a bitch still tries it, tell him it's more serious than you thought, and that it's your responsibility to talk to NSA security after all.'

*   *   *

The executive operations officer's desk had been cleared of everything except the desktop. That was manoeuvred for its screen to be the central focus of the CCTV's relayed feed to Irvine's Owen Place installation. Additional lighting whitened everything almost too brightly. Will Fisher was completely visible, but everyone else moved in and out of the shot: sometimes there appeared to be disembodied arms and heads. Without sound the CCTV's view was ghostly surrealism, heightened when an unattached hand and arm came in and out of the frame. More of another body but without a head offered Fisher a combined microphone and ear-padded headset attached to a telephone.

‘The direct line to Meade,' said Irvine. His hands twitched across an imagined keyboard, the real one deeper in on the table in front of him. Abruptly aware, he pulled them back, rubbing one over the other as if he were washing the impulse away.

The familiar unattached arm and hand deposited a yellow legal pad and pencils beside Fisher. Already written on it were the officially registered entry codes and passwords to the desktop and laptop. Mouth moving in silent acknowledgement, the man began scribbling number selections, stopping with a block of ten.

Irvine said, ‘Meade's first-try algorithms, if Smartman doesn't let us in.'

Sally hoped he wouldn't keep up the commentary.

Theatrically Fisher spread the fingers of both hands, interlaced them, and then cracked them like a concert pianist about to perform. The icon-packed screen illuminated at the registered entries. Fisher splayed his fingers again. He reached forward confidently.

The attempted entry got as far as
SMA
before the screen seized solid. After a pause the icons vanished, replaced by the smiling face of Ismail al Aswamy as a screen saver. It remained there a timed second before diminishing into a receding dot that vanished into oblivion.

The screen was a flurry of different body movements until Fisher reappeared with the desktop. He stared, face crumpled in fury, at the screen, then turned it towards the CCTV camera. It was blank.

‘Fuck!' said Irvine vehemently.

‘They'll know we found it,' said Sally quietly. ‘Al Aswamy himself will know we found it and that he beat us again.'

 

42

It became, like so many before it, another mostly sleepless night, which, Sally reflected, probably gave Irvine preparation time for his impressively measured responses to the varying reactions he encountered. His first response was to relegate Conrad Graham to last on his priorities list. While he waited for Will Fisher's helicopter to arrive back at Nellis, Irvine briefly outlined the disaster—which scarcely required a long explanation anyway—to Burt Singleton at Fort Meade. The concentration had to be upon attack-abandoning Facebook posts between their known jihadists: he asked for their suggested algorithms list to be copied to Owen Place. In the longer conversation that followed with John Poulter, Irvine repeated his abandonment expectation, in spite of which he was continuing the Creech sweep, initially focusing on the connected machines of the base commander and the other two executive officers to discover from their hard drives what sensitive material had been accessed by the Smartman intrusion. The two Smartman-infected machines, the flash drives, CCTV film, and Fisher's seconds-long commentary would be shipped to Fort Meade for forensic investigation. The hard drives of both computers would confirm what al Aswamy's group had obtained. GCHQ would get complete details immediately when they were available.

‘No doubt now that it's al Aswamy,' said Poulter.

‘Or that we've lost a way to trap him a second time.'

‘At least it won't get into the public domain.'

‘I'm not taking bets.'

‘What do you know about the firewall?'

‘Nothing. I'm waiting for Fisher to arrive.'

‘You think Smartman could really be a serviceman on the base?'

‘A visually activated firewall, you mean?'

‘It's technically possible,' Poulter pointed out. ‘But I was thinking more about the degree and depth of personnel background checks that have been carried out at Creech?'

It hadn't been mentioned during the military overview, Irvine remembered. ‘I don't know. I'll find out.'

‘We're almost through the staff personnel checks here. We had to be careful of accusations of racism; so far it's a total blank. And we'll keep the equipment sweep going, of course.'

‘Let's talk again tomorrow—' Irvine paused. ‘Or rather, later today. Sorry to have woken you up for nothing.'

Sally was listening intently enough to pick up the resurging self-pity, which irritated her after Irvine's unexpectedly imposing performance so far, but since al Aswamy's firewall appearance her greater concentration had been upon re-adjusting her misconceptions, which was probably the greater cause of her annoyance than Irvine's poor-me lapse.

She'd allowed the unimaginable and let herself be guided—or rather misguided—by the interpretations of others instead of rationalizing and thinking as she should have done, Sally acknowledged, the anger burning through her. None of the conveniently appropriate proverbs and aphorisms had been backward-looking at past drone attacks upon Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq. That wasn't—wouldn't have been—the Arab mind-set, which she knew, had always known, but hadn't brought into any analysis. She'd become complacent—arrogant—hypnotizing herself with incomprehensible hieroglyphs instead of thinking at least like a surrogate Arab upon the intended meaning of their translations.

So how, belatedly, would a surrogate Arab think? Or better still, how would a committed jihadist think? mused Sally, halting her reflections as Will Fisher appeared on the screen.

Irvine said, ‘I want everything, second by second, but before you start, this isn't an inquest looking for guilt. You were up against the best, and that's what they are, the best. Anyone would have lost him.'

Fisher's lips moved, without words. Then he said, ‘Thank you. I'm still sorry.'

‘We watched but obviously couldn't hear. So tell us…' At Sally's nudge, Irvine added, ‘This is a British colleague beside me, Sally Hanning.'

Fisher nodded at the introduction but didn't speak, looking briefly down from the Nellis screen at what Sally guessed to be self-defence reminders. They'd tried to anticipate everything, insisted the man strongly. To prevent a Smartman firewall from being triggered by a laptop power surge to the larger machine, they'd disabled the Wi-Fi from which both operated and charged them instead from heavy barrier USBs. Flash drives were installed in both to duplicate any transmission and to download the Smartman botnet's hard drive and contact list if their hack succeeded. Both machines registered negative to electronic testing for built-in Wi-Fi. Fort Meade had provided ten potential algorithms' entries for the Smartman bot. Fisher had attempted the first. The screen had frozen after three letters. The keyboard had seized solid, too. So had the screen and the keyboard on the laptop. Fisher's impression had been of a fraction of time—he hoped it would be measurable from the flash drives—before the face appeared on both screens.

‘The keyboard!' demanded Irvine. ‘Was there any change in the keyboard tension between the legitimate IP and password entry and your attempted hack?'

Fisher frowned, hesitating. ‘We were watching the laptop, not operating it.'

‘That wasn't my question. What about the desktop?'

There was another pause. ‘I wasn't conscious of any difference; again, milliseconds, which might be on the flash drive. The hack was over in milliseconds, too … then it was solid, like a rock.'

Sally waited but when Irvine didn't continue she said, ‘I looked hard at the image of Ismail al Aswamy in those few milliseconds. I thought there was some lip movement. Were there any sounds … any words?'

‘There was something,' confirmed Fisher more confidently. ‘I couldn't make it out as a word or words … the volume receded with the image.'

‘Maybe forensic will get it off the flash drive, be able to enhance it,' suggested Irvine.

‘I … we,' Sally corrected quickly, ‘we need to hear it, know what it was.'

‘He appeared to be laughing,' offered Fisher hopefully.

‘He had every reason to,' said Irvine bitterly.

*   *   *

Irvine twice postponed their promised return to Langley, finally arriving there with Sally after midnight. They parted in the elevator, Irvine to go up one more floor to Conrad Graham, Sally to speak to David Monkton from her office.

‘Just like that!' said the man, incredulity in his voice. ‘Why did they attempt the hack in situ? Surely it would have been safer in forensic surroundings with the specialized equipment they're subjecting the computers to now, when it's too damned late!'

It arguably had been a mistake, conceded Sally: Jack Irvine's mistake. ‘They had equipment. The Meade sweepers are the best.'

‘No, they're not! They were beaten, in seconds from how you've explained it. It was the golden—possibly the
only
—chance to get ahead of them. Now it's gone!'

‘Irvine's sure they'll abandon the attack.'

‘What do
you
think!'

Sally isolated the change in tone from incredulity to dismissal of Irvine's opinion. ‘It would be the obvious thing to do: which may be why they won't do it.' She needed to fit the receding image of Ismail al Aswamy into its proper place among all her other re-considerations and re-examinations.

‘Or delay so that we believe they
have
abandoned it and then strike, and to guard against that would require us to keep God knows how many military service groups on indeterminate standby! Or they could shift to another target we might not find out about in advance where they won't fail, as they did with the Washington Monument, the Colosseum, and Sellafield! It's got to be stopped, not moved on!'