‘My very first need-to-know secret,’ Nat said, the semblance of contrition beginning to fray. ‘Just to be clear, is it secret that we sold it, or that we want it back?’
Silk glared at her, his pale lips pinched with irritation.
‘Discretion is required, Natalya,’ said Sir Peter quickly. ‘Clive, how much time do we have?’
‘Our first deadline is a JIC briefing in three days’ time – we’ll need to provide a full update. There’s talk of a COBRA meeting, if things go critical.’ Silk glanced at Sir Peter, then at Nat, for evidence that they understood the import of these references to the highest echelon of the state security apparatus.
‘Let’s hope that’s not necessary,’ said Beddoes obligingly.
‘Shall I write the JIC report?’ said Nat brightly. She was thinking that if an acronym could take human form, it would look just like Clive Silk.
‘No,’ said Silk. ‘I will.’
‘Then I’d better go and get Little Sister back,’ she said, her expression as polite and chastened as someone who felt neither could possibly manage. ‘Unless there’s anything else?’
‘Keep in close touch, Natalya. Until we have the genie back in its bottle, the scrutiny is going to be rather uncomfortable – for all of us.’
Nat stood up and started for the door. A little swing of the hips will do no harm, she judged. There was not much point in being so appealingly petite if you didn’t use it to put men off their stride when they were being obnoxious. She arched her back slightly as she walked and then, a yard short of the door, turned suddenly. Beddoes’ eyes were levelled at her bottom, as expected, but Silk was shuffling papers in his lap. What a prick!
‘I wouldn’t mind having something to say to your colleague Nigel de la Mere,’ said Sir Peter when Nat had gone. ‘You know he was here this afternoon? Told me he could be ironic about Little Sister for a maximum of seven days before turning vicious. Seemed to me to be in a thoroughly bad mood already.’
The arrangement by which Clive Silk had been foisted on him by MI6 was a source of annoyance to the Grosvenor chairman, and he frequently grumbled to Clive that it was as well they’d called him Head of Innovation because no one, himself included, knew what Clive actually did.
‘I’ll be handling the Grosvenor end of things from here on,’ said Clive. References to his primary role as an officer of MI6 usually gave him an agreeable sense of superiority. But Nigel de la Mere hadn’t bothered to tell him that he’d called on Beddoes; and Clive couldn’t now ask what had been said without drawing attention to this slight.
‘Oh. Good.’
‘Best to let me deal with Natalya.’
‘What, on the grounds that you’re immune to her charms while I am the proverbial putty?’
‘I didn’t say that. But Sir Iain is all over this one, and Natalya Kocharian is key to our strategy.’ Clive paused, then said: ‘He wants you to call James Palatine – thinks he may be able to help.’
‘I’d rather Palatine never found out about this,’ said Beddoes. ‘Every time I meet him I have the feeling he’s working out the quickest way to kill me. Do you get that?’
‘Better call him now.’
‘You always were a cold fish, Clive,’ said Beddoes, eyeing with dislike Silk’s square, doughy face with its self-absorbed expression. ‘I wonder what Sir Iain will do with you next?’
It was seven when James left the pub. His flat was two minutes’ away, but he had nothing much to go home to; and his legs were restless, his head bustling with half-formed theories about the enigmatic Sarah. Arriving on Camden Road, he decided to walk to the private lab he’d set up for himself in Southwark.
James only ever crossed London on foot, and spent many hours loping through its jumble of backstreets, parks, precincts and housing estates. He could do the five-mile route from Camden to Southwark on automatic, leaving his mind unoccupied: this was the state he sought when he needed inspiration. He’d spend hours worrying at a problem in the lab, then finally give up and go home, furious that he’d wasted the evening on an abject defeat. After ten minutes of hard walking, it seemed the solution would drift out of the night air and settle on the outskirts of his consciousness, waiting to be let in.
His encounter with Sarah had all the hallmarks of a clandestine approach – and one which obeyed the first rule of such operations: make sure the people at the business end know as little as possible. So who was Hamed? The answer did not seem to be blowing in the wind that evening. The plane trees in the squares south of the Euston Road had shed leaves the size of a man’s hand which spun and rattled on the pavement, scrabbling at his feet as he passed. High above, the empty boughs flailed against a darkening sky. He stopped for a bowl of noodles in Exmouth Market, then headed on towards the river, reaching the footbridge from St Paul’s to Tate Modern just as a fine, drenching kind of rain began to fall. A punk girl leading a tubby little dog with a red bandana tied around its neck approached and started to spin him a line. James stopped her mid-flow and handed over his change. The fingers that picked the coins from his hand were long and graceful. The brown Thames churned behind her. The tide was coming in hard and a dirty white dinghy with an underpowered outboard was struggling downstream, slapped about by a succession of stubby waves. James stopped and watched it for a while, willing the boat to defeat the dull might of the water. Its bow kept disappearing as it plunged into the gullies between waves, then leaping up again as if startled by something it had seen.
Nat swept down the stone steps at the entrance to Grosvenor’s Mayfair HQ and hailed a cab. Clive Silk can kiss his precious IPD400 goodbye, she thought. I’m not fucking getting it back for him.
‘Hard day at work, love?’ asked the cabbie.
‘Garrick Street,’ said Nat, and slammed the dividing window shut. The galling truth was that the accusation of irresponsibility levelled at her by her male colleagues was not entirely baseless. When news had got out that James Palatine was building a surveillance device for Grosvenor Systems, the reaction from her government and military clients had been dramatic. Barely a week later, Tony Schliemann, Chief Procurement Officer for the Signals Intelligence Directorate of the National Security Agency – Grey Tony, as he was known – had turned up in London and summoned her to the Intercontinental for cocktails. Speaking with the queasy mix of ingratiation, self-importance and menace that was the NSA man’s trademark, Grey Tony informed her that any attempt to sell the fruits of Dr Palatine’s labour to anyone other than himself would be treated as a threat to US national security.
‘I’m going to set aside the procurement hat, if you will, and don the avuncular Stetson,’ he concluded. ‘There’s plenty of good business out there for a smart young woman like you, but this isn’t it. Some real heavy hitters have taken the field, and even I’m staying out on the boundary. Forgive the sporting metaphor. But you understand what I’m telling you?’
Yes, Nat thought, resisting the temptation to slap the avuncular Stetson from his well-groomed head, you’ve promised Little Sister to some people even more important than you and you’re terrified you won’t be able to deliver the goods.
In the ensuing months, the queue for Palatine’s creation, whatever it might turn out to be, became so long and so fervent that Nat imagined herself retiring to Monaco on the commission from its sale. But when the IPD400 was finally delivered, nearly eighteen months later, Grosvenor immediately placed it under embargo. Nat assumed this was because it didn’t work.
All things considered, she reckoned she’d been pretty astute to unload the IPD400 promptly when the embargo was unexpectedly lifted. Claude Zender marked it on the Grosvenor sales inventory print-out she’d sent him and made her an offer so generous that it should probably have made her suspicious. But anyway, she’d accepted it. Unlike her government and military clients, Zender wasn’t forever mired in a swamp of sign-off procedures, and she was mindful that the embargo could be reimposed just as quickly as it had been lifted. When he asked her to fast-
track the deal, she did so without asking unnecessary questions. Because she was good at her job.
If she hadn’t been their best chance of getting it back, Nat was sure they’d have fired her outright. Brash, beautiful, foreign-sounding, female: she ticked every wrong box on the list. Even now, if they thought they could dodge prosecution by blaming the over-promoted bimbo in sales, it wasn’t difficult to see which way the chaps would swing.
The cab stopped on the corner of Garrick Street, just by Nat’s private drinking club. It was called Softly Softly, and it fulfilled all her requirements in a bar: busy, glamorous, faintly seedy. If you wanted a drink, a line of coke and some male company for the night, it was the perfect place to be.
James took the stairs to the sixth floor, unlocked the front door. . . And the loneliness he always felt when he came here rushed out to greet him.
Citygate was a big, purpose-built block that was only five years old, though the modish, stripped-down look had already revealed itself to be merely cheap. He’d bought the place with cash, using an assumed name – because what he’d needed at the time was not a private lab but a bolthole, and underground bunkers stuffed with survival rations and girdled with high-explosives were in short supply. Once the need to hide had passed, he’d set up his computing equipment in the kitchen and, sporting a high-vis jacket to keep the caretaker at bay, spent several mornings delving around in the ceiling of the underground car park until he’d adapted the cabling infrastructure to give himself enough bandwidth to satisfy the needs of a small office block.
He checked the routines he’d left running, inspected logfiles, re-started processes that had stalled. The kitchen was dark, animated only by the scrolling screens and the hectic whiff of fans running at full pelt as the chipsets parsed away a torrent of bits. Soon after setting up the lab, he’d been struck by the unwelcome insight that spending time in Citygate was like finding yourself inside the pale beige shell of a giant desktop computer, complete with ducting, air vents and white noise. His wet coat draped over the ungenerous radiator and his shoes standing in a spreading puddle of water were the only visible signs that this space ever had a human occupant.
He was a bachelor at thirty-two, uncomfortably aware that this probably couldn’t be ascribed to misfortune any more. He seemed to attract the sort of women who thought men were emotional simpletons. In his most recent relationship, he realised now, he had played the role of emotional simpleton to the point where the girl in question had decided he was a bore and left him. Sometimes it felt as if emptiness were his default state. There were his postgraduate students to turn to, plenty of whom seemed willing to slip into bed with him. But after repeated experience of this form of solace, James was coming to the dispiriting conclusion that he was regarded not so much as an eligible prospect, but as a trophy that was not all that difficult to win.
No curtains, either. It wasn’t cosy.
The walk across London had done nothing to settle his mind.
It seemed like you enjoyed it, Sarah had said. If you need to fight, you fight with precision and force, he should have replied. Instead, he’d felt ashamed.
Who was Hamed? Go to the next meeting of this Islamic Society and find out.
He pulled out his cellphone and dialled Sarah’s number. The call was connected but no one answered. He heard light breathing, then a pointed cough.
‘Who am I talking to?’
‘You should not have called this number.’ A man’s voice, Middle Eastern accent, soft but full of authority.
‘This is Sarah’s number. I want to speak to her.’
‘No, it is not. Please do not call again.’
‘She gave it to me earlier. I tried it in front of her.’
There was a pause.
‘You should not have approached her. You have put her in a difficult position. A dangerous position.’
‘Are you threatening her?’
‘I cannot be expected to protect this girl.’
‘Why did you get her—’
The man had already hung up.
Hamed.
Sarah must have gone straight from the pub to meet him, and he’d reclaimed the phone he’d lent her. James went online and checked which network was handling the number, then telnetted into the exchange and waited while the access control software checked his credentials. He’d been on the list of super-users for several years – it was wonderful what doors were flung open once you’d been identified as a friend by the first line of defence. He spoofed the system into thinking that someone was ringing her so that it would respond with the ID of any cellphone masts capable of connecting the call. Three masts picked up the roaming signal – one strong, two much weaker. He brought up the geo-locator query engine, keyed in the IDs and cross-referenced. The phone was in Wembley. The area capable of delivering the signal spectrum he was looking at was roughly half a mile square, but most of it was occupied by a park and an industrial estate. That narrowed it down to two or three streets.
Sarah’s phone was a Nokia 6282. He checked its specification at the Nokia developers’ site. It was GPS-enabled, but the UK version didn’t come with the locating software installed, so he’d have to upload it to the SIM – that would require an OK from the user, and he wasn’t sure he could circumvent it. Anyway, GPS didn’t work well indoors. He’d use the three masts instead, calculate the angles between them and the cellphone, and the fractions of milliseconds it took for the signal to transmit. He started to log the data.
The principle was sound, but the ether was always full of noise: any drifting pocket of damp air or swirl of diesel smoke could disrupt the passage of a data packet as it whisked from phone to mast. He waited impatiently while the measurements accumulated, then started to collate, discarding obvious anomalies and applying a Kalman filter to smooth out what remained.
In half an hour, he had drawn two curves – one for the angles, one for the latency – which mapped the most likely location of Sarah’s phone. He cross-referenced, then used the results to re-run the raw numbers, adding in new measurements as they appeared in his log. Twenty minutes later the results of his calculations stabilised.
Got you. Number 28 Ashington Road.
What next? Tracing a cellphone signal was an interesting challenge, but now it was done, James found himself asking sternly why he should be responsible for rescuing Sarah from whatever danger she might be in. Those in charge of his professional development as a military intelligence officer had repeatedly accused him of being impulsive, of behaving as if he could set the world to rights by diving in head first with his eyes shut – a particularly foolish form of egotism, apparently, and quite inappropriate for an officer of the British Army. They had a point: the consequences of his less well-considered actions had usually been both unintended and bloody. Anyway, if Sarah was in trouble, it surely wasn’t because he had made a call to her cellphone and conducted a wholly uninformative conversation with a stranger called Hamed.
James felt a little cheated by this bout of conscience. He made himself a cup of instant coffee and watched TV for half an hour before checking the trace again.
Wembley. Hamed hadn’t moved, or called anyone. Nor had he turned off Sarah’s phone. Careless.
The ten o’clock news came on. There’d been a terror alert at Stansted Airport and the Home Secretary was pontificating about the need to take pre-emptive action to safeguard national security in the context of the global terror threat. He talked about getting the right balance between freedom and safety – as if he knew just what the right balance was, but had only now decided to establish it. It was over a year since the July bombings, but the mantra hadn’t changed. Be alert but not alarmed, the minister advised. What was that supposed to mean? What if, in your alert state, you noticed something alarming?
James checked again. Wembley.
He watched an American sitcom that didn’t make him laugh.
Wembley.
He swept up all traces of his visit, then logged out of
the exchange. He washed up his mug and went to put on his damp shoes and coat. It was nearly midnight and he was hungry. He would spend the night here now, not sleeping much, but fretting over this odd girl who had elbowed her way into his life. I cannot be expected to protect this girl, the man had said, as if he were fed up with being asked.
And since you’re in the mood for a bit of aimless worrying, James thought, as he strode towards the kebab shop on Southwark High Street, why has Peter Beddoes’ PA at Grosvenor Systems rung three times over the last two hours? Sir Peter didn’t usually seek out his company – James had the impression he made the old man nervous. It could only be about Little Sister, and that could only be bad.
Chapter Two
The man Nat had brought home from Softly Softly the previous night left for the City at six, which saved her the trouble of throwing him out at eight. He was handsome in an identikit kind of way, but his eyes were always on the lookout for a mirror, and his buttocks seemed to be held in a permanent sculptural clench. After breakfast she went into Grosvenor and searched through her folder on the IPD400 prototype.
In among the thickets of technical documentation, she found the press release they’d issued in April 2006, just over five months ago:
Grosvenor Systems today announced that it has taken delivery of a prototype of the IPD400 (Internet Protocol Detector, version 4.00). The IPD400 is a monitoring and intercept system capable of untraceable real-time infiltration of secure data networks. This breakthrough technology has the potential to revolutionise the surveillance of terrorist organisations, organised crime syndicates, drug traffickers, money launderers and other criminal enterprises, as well as of hostile governments and their intelligence networks.
In the same folder were copies of the reactions it had elicited. ‘Grosvenor’s IPD400 is a spymaster’s wet dream,’ the Economist had declared, ‘like having the entire intercept capability of GCHQ packed into a square metre of clever circuitry with a carry handle on top.’ And a blogger had written: ‘From multinational corporations to government departments and the military and intelligence communities, anyone who thinks their secrets are safe had better think again.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 3