The Cloud Collector (5 page)

‘Maybe I should.' He unloaded his plate of meat loaf and put both their empty trays on a nearby waiter stand. Coming back to the table but still standing, he said, ‘Well?'

‘I've been through every legal hearing in which the agency's been involved in remit transgressions, particularly under Nixon and Bush. As well as through all the textbook references I could locate. I couldn't find anything that even came close to this. And hacking isn't a crime, by our definition; that
is
what our remit is, entering other people's communications without their knowledge or permission, although I've never considered myself working as part of a botnet.'

Singleton began to eat. ‘I couldn't find a definite legal bar, either. But it's pretty well set out that NSA doesn't perform field operations.'

‘Jack covered that very specifically. Any fieldwork or humint retrieval is carried out by the CIA. And since 9/11 the courts have returned ambiguous rulings against us when we've been accused of wiretapping and bugging here at home, despite Signals Intelligence Directive 18 specifically prohibiting it without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillances Court.'

‘Washington commandment handed down from Mount Sinai: “Nothing's wrong or illegal until you're caught doing it,”' recited Singleton, quoting the in-house cynicism. ‘Don't forget the 2013 uproar over our Prism Project precisely to monitor Facebook through Britain's GCHQ, for which we gratefully handed over something like one hundred and fifty million dollars. What happens if there's another whistle-blower like Edward Snowden?'

‘There'll be another uproar,' accepted Marian drily, working her way through her salad.

‘Can we belatedly object?'

‘No,' she said without hesitation.

Singleton pushed his plate away, the meat loaf half-eaten. ‘According to our contract terms, we could simply withdraw. We didn't know what we were doing during the initial period.'

‘You mind taking that meat loaf away?' said Marian, a vegetarian. ‘It smells disgusting.'

‘Tasted disgusting, too.' Singleton transferred the plate to the waiter stand. ‘I asked what you're going to do.'

Marian didn't reply at once, chasing the last crouton around her dish. ‘I'm not sure where I'm safer, inside from where I'll be able to assess the dangers and accusations before they're made. Or outside, to plead ignorance when it all goes wrong.'

‘I'm not sure a court would accept an ignorance plea. Or that ignorance is even a defence.'

‘We're staying in, aren't we?' accepted the woman, resigned.

‘I guess.'

‘But I'll keep looking for something that gives it some legal justification.'

‘So will I,' said Singleton. ‘Let's hope it doesn't have to come from our trial lawyers.'

*   *   *

James Bradley prided himself on covering all the bases, which he wasn't able to do with Jack Irvine, and it unsettled him. His difficulty was in having to rely on records and written accounts of Irvine's cryptographic brilliance, unsupported by any biographical material apart from the abbreviated account of the debacle surrounding Irvine's ambassador father, which, realistically, he might have misinterpreted and didn't have any relevance anyway.

There were, of course, the obvious practical precautions such as the CIA surveillance he'd imposed upon Irvine and his Fort Meade team. Bradley looked up from the list of CIA internal-security officers he was forming to watch over Irvine and the operation, halted by a sudden doubt about Harry Packer's reliability. Shouldn't Packer be added to his personally compiled list? Bradley asked himself. Unquestionably, he concluded. He'd read somewhere that knowledge was power, and he was going to emerge from all this with more power than anyone suspected.

 

5

Jack Irvine got his cell alert halfway between Washington and the National Security Agency's installation at Fort Meade and was momentarily undecided between turning back or continuing. Calculating the next available turnaround intersection to be three miles farther on, he decided Meade was closer and kept driving.

Burt Singleton was waiting in the foyer of the main building. ‘We followed it back through the cutout chain—all the way to Hydarnes.'

Irvine said, ‘We're in business!'

‘What's the significance of the domain name?'

‘Hydarnes was a legendary Persian warrior; for
Persia
now read
Iran
.'

‘What ever happened to Hamid?' asked Singleton, remembering the domain name of Irvine's first darknet interception.

‘One day he just wasn't there anymore.'

Under Marian Lowell's supervision, the thirty-six-hour occupation of their assigned office following Irvine's formation briefing was only obvious from the newness of its furnishings. A wall-mounted selection of clocks showed world-time variations, from which daylight working times could be calculated. The display was above a cabinet-enclosed television, adjacent to another wall of filing cabinets, fax machines, photocopiers, transmission machines, and a separate scanner. A third wall was shelved almost to the ceiling: three racks were already filled with index-arranged mathematic, cipher, and encryption manuals in a range of Asian, Arabic, and Western languages, and another shelf was full of matching indexed dictionaries, idiomatic lexicons, and thesauruses. The only practical furniture was the individual desks for each member of the team—Marian's marked by a vase of red bud roses—topped by the highest-powered NSA desktop computers, each with even larger mainframe connection capability. One of the fully operational desks, in the centre of the rest, was for Irvine, who ignored it.

Instead he said to Marian, ‘Where are the others?'

‘Shab's taking a trial algorithm run. Akram is on the Dual EC DRBG generator, trying a random-numbers search.'

‘So it's a different encryption?' anticipated Irvine, turning back to Singleton.

‘Everything's different. Islamabad's no longer in the loop. Initial Halal routing this time was an encrypted text to Sana'a. From Yemen the link went through darknet cutouts to a Facebook account in Baghdad.' Singleton paused. ‘And from Baghdad we've lost it.'

‘No forwarding link?'

Singleton shook his head. ‘We're obviously embedded now in the Baghdad account, but there's been no onward activity. We only know it's for al Aswamy because it originated from Vevak.'

‘What about al Aswamy's Facebook account at this end?'

Marian gestured towards the computer on her desk. ‘I've had your botnet open from the start. Nothing.'

Irvine finally went to his desk, but sat on its corner, not the chair. ‘The different routing is an obvious precaution, after the Anacostia ambush. I always expected it would start from Tehran: that we'd follow from there to any new account al Aswamy set up.'

‘You want coffee?' invited Marian from a Cona setup Irvine hadn't seen in the filing-cabinet corner of the room. She'd already poured two mugs and held the pot over the third.

Irvine nodded acceptance as Singleton said, ‘Maybe we blindsided ourselves. They could have switched to something else, human couriers or flash drives, for instance, like bin Laden used from Abbottabad.'

By
we
the man meant
you,
Irvine knew, taking the coffee from Marian. ‘I told you the CIA's got al Aswamy in a box. He can't make a move we don't know about it.'

‘Don't you think you should give Langley the heads-up about this?' suggested the woman, behind her desk now.

‘This isn't three hours old yet,' protested Irvine.

‘We know from the phone call after the Anacostia ambush that there's an operation going down somewhere. And we've intercepted an encrypted message, as yet unbroken, from an electronic address of the Iranian intelligence service from which al Aswamy takes his orders,' argued Singleton. ‘That's enough for Langley to move.'

‘We've got time!' insisted Irvine.

‘This isn't what we've been formed to do; we can't sit on this,' came in Marian.

‘We're not going to sit on it!' insisted Irvine, refusing to recognize the weakness of his not reacting immediately. ‘We're going to give Shab and Akram time on the computers. If it defeats them—and us, because we're all going to work on it, too—then we'll alert Langley.'

‘By the end of this day if we don't crack it,' persisted Singleton.

The man was right, Irvine knew. ‘By the end of the day,' he capitulated.

*   *   *

‘You've upset a lot of people,' complained Jeremy Dodson the moment the secure telephone connection was established.

‘Who?' sharply demanded Sally, irritated at having to wait over an hour for a temporary desk and telephone.

‘I had the GCHQ security director on, querying your authority for what you wanted.'

‘They had my official accreditation and authority ahead of my arrival here!'

‘It's not the sort of request they're accustomed to, and they're nervous after all the whistle-blowing exposure in 2013,' said the MI5 operations director. ‘And a Detective Superintendent Pritchard's claiming you left with official police evidence.'

The complaints were being set out as accusations, Sally recognized, wondering if Dodson was trying to generate a personally protective smoke screen against the mistakes she'd already isolated. ‘The computer?'

‘Yes.'

She'd obviously unsettled the arrogant bastard more than she'd imagined. ‘They hadn't discovered its existence to make it part of any police evidence! And Pritchard told me I could have whatever I wanted of Bennett's property. He'll have to do a damned sight better than this to save himself from a disciplinary enquiry. Did you confirm that I had it and where I was with it?'

‘Of course I didn't. I said we hadn't been in contact, didn't know where you were, and that I'd get back to him when you made contact. He said he was taking it up with his chief constable.'

That risked creating the publicity of MI5 involvement the Director-General had forbidden, Sally immediately recognized. ‘I'm following a disastrous catalog of professional mistakes and cock-ups that could end as precisely that, a very real disaster that should and could have been prevented. I want you to have several things done for me as quickly as possible while I'm stuck here. And I'd appreciate you, personally, getting back to Pritchard to tell him what I've just told you, using those precise words. He's to do nothing whatsoever, something he's very good at, until he hears from me.'

Dodson didn't respond at once, and when he did, the uncertainty was obvious. ‘Are you seriously suggesting there's a terrorism danger here!'

There wasn't sufficient justification for that, Sally acknowledged. ‘I believe there's every indication.'

Once more there was initial silence. Then Dodson said, ‘What else do you want done?'

Sally had compiled her list to fill time while she waited for the desk assignment. She reminded the operations director that the leads to be immediately followed to the Cologne conduit were in the NSA's initial communiqué and dictated every relevant detail to trace a passport in Roger Bennett's name from the incompetently maintained Bradford crime file.

‘This is going to take time,' said Dodson.

‘Time's what we haven't got,' warned Sally, wondering if she was going to have anything to substantiate the exaggeration of connecting Bennett's death with a terrorist threat at the end of the GCHQ examination.

*   *   *

Independent of each other Irvine and Singleton followed the same algorithm search that had partially defeated Barker, both double-checking their effort after their partial failure. Irvine decreed an assessment session. Marian provided fresh coffee.

‘Let's start from absolute basics,' said Irvine. ‘It's obviously algebraic.'

‘Encrypted by someone or some group who'd know a search for its algorithm would be the first move if it were intercepted,' agreed Barker.

Singleton sighed. ‘Do we really have to be
that
basic! It's an intelligence-generated encryption, from our equivalent in Iran. So they'll be good, the best Tehran can find. They've been hit, here, but they don't know how or by whom, except that Anacostia looks gang-related, not an attack by law enforcement: that's our advantage. They wouldn't expect our level of expertise. But they'll still have put a lot of professional effort into protecting their traffic with cutouts and double or treble encryptions. We know from the partial Anacostia interception that they're going ahead with whatever attack they're planning. How many English letters can we reasonably get so far from the original Arabic?'

‘Three,' at once replied Marian, who'd maintained the tentative, insufficient deciphering.

‘But they're not positives,' protested Barker. ‘They appear to work in some sections but not in others.'

‘Multi-algorithms,' declared Irvine. ‘The letter-to-number or symbol transference is limited, changing at intervals, either fixed or irregular.'

‘I agree,' said Singleton.

‘It's Facebook, not Twitter,' Marian pointed out. ‘Even without being able to read it, I'd say from the length that it's attack instructions.'

‘I haven't forgotten the urgency,' said Irvine, recognizing the direction of the discussion.

‘Akram's not going to be able to contribute at this stage,' predicted Singleton.

‘You're right,' confirmed the tightly bearded man, entering the room after an hour at the random-number generator. ‘I've got some numbers for alphabetical substitution, but they fit in some parts but not in others.'

James Bradley answered his phone on its first ring.

‘We've got a problem,' announced Irvine.