by Alan Judd
‘Before they read it in the headlines,’ said Graham Wood.
They went over the ground, with Graham giving more examples of CNI attacks. Tim leant forward again, elbows on table, hands clasped as before. ‘Of course, your immediate problem is how to investigate your own people without any of them knowing there’s an investigation. It could be any of them, including your own security people. The only person in MI6 we know it couldn’t be is you, since you haven’t had access to any MI6 computer systems and therefore can’t be the one who’s letting the attackers in.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’
‘Be our eyes and ears, let us know of anything remotely suspicious. I now have people in Cheltenham accessing your systems to try to find the source but it would help no end if you could let us know of any weaknesses you spot, human or system. And keep us informed, day or night.’
Charles nodded. He had taken over a few odd jobs, he reflected, but nothing quite like this. Certainly nothing in which ignorance was an advantage.
‘There is one thing you could do, though, something that maybe only you can do. But, again, you’ll have to make sure no-one else in your service knows. You could recontact an old friend of yours, Configure, and see if he can help. He gave us a lot of help in this area in the past. Don’t worry, everyone around this table knows about him.’
‘Everyone except me. Who’s Configure?’
‘You knew him as Lover Boy,’ said Michael. ‘Russian intelligence officer. That was his code name when you recruited him in London about a hundred years ago. It’s changed a couple of times since. He defected not long before you left MI6, if you remember. You were brought back into the case to help with the exfiltration.’
Viktor Koslov. The then youthful KGB officer had been Charles’s first case, though it was an exaggeration to say that Charles had recruited him. He had recruited himself, more or less, which was often the way; you had to be there to catch the falling apple. ‘He can’t still be working for us, surely? And cyber security was never his field, was it?’
‘No but it was his brother’s field. May still be. He had an amateur interest and was beginning to get good stuff from his brother – without the brother realising – at about the time you left the case. You might even have reported some of it. It expanded exponentially afterwards and became his main contribution. It continued after his defection.’
‘How? Surely, the Russians—’
‘The Russians don’t know he’s here. Or didn’t. They may now. Nor did or does his brother. You remember how the exfiltration went at the time?’
Charles remembered. It was a rush job after the Berlin Wall came down and while the Soviet empire was disintegrating. Fortunately, it was well rehearsed and a new identity including bank accounts, driving licence, passport and employment, built up over years in the UK, was waiting for Viktor to flesh it out.
The first indication of trouble was when Viktor was reassigned within the SVR, as the KGB was by then called. He had been working in a counter-espionage department that looked for spies within the Russian bureaucracy, a priceless position for MI6 and even more so for the CIA, until abruptly moved to processing intelligence reports from the Middle East. This was a post normally occupied by no-hopers, by people without patronage or by those under punishment. Then his father-in-law, an influential apparatchik, fell out with the new ruling clique over the ownership of a bank. He escaped prison only by keeping quiet and retiring to the rented family dacha in Latvia, leaving his wife in Moscow. Finally, Viktor’s wife decided she would no longer tolerate his philandering and demanded a divorce.
Viktor used a dead letterbox in a Moscow suburb to trigger the exfiltration, announcing that his current mistress was coming with him. That entailed emergency clearance from a reluctant foreign secretary for the import of an unknown and possibly unreliable woman. At the last minute the mistress – fortunately still under the illusion that Viktor was proposing that they should run away to Latvia – declared that she couldn’t leave Moscow, so Viktor travelled to Latvia alone.
His cover was that he was pleading with his father-in-law to help save his marriage. In fact, his father-in-law was interested only in Moscow gossip and having someone to shoot with in the forest and get drunk with in the evenings. The exfiltration was to have happened when Viktor notionally returned to Moscow. He and Charles would have rendezvoused and then crossed the Finnish border, Viktor posing as Charles’s Polish business partner. He spoke Polish as a result of a Warsaw posting and the alias passport Charles carried for him was up to date with forged entry and exit stamps.
But the sudden death of his father-in-law – drunk and supine in an armchair, he hiccoughed twice and fell half out of it, dead – delayed everything. For the better, it turned out. Viktor returned to Moscow where, after risky communications with London, he retired from the SVR, putting it about that he and his wife were separating and that he was taking on the dacha. His wife was compensated for the loss of their SVR flat by moving with their two children to her mother’s much larger one, content that the major part of Viktor’s pension was sent to her monthly from his bank in Latvia. Viktor, so far as his wife and former employers were concerned, simply faded into wooded obscurity. The exfiltration proceeded as planned.
‘Any more wives since he got here?’ asked Charles.
‘Probably but not his own. He’s still married, anyway, and neither she nor his former employers know he’s here. We think. They’re still paying his pension.’
‘That’s incredible.’
‘Incredibly useful, too, as Tim will tell you. His cryptologist brother works for the military bit of their signals outfit. Thinks Viktor’s still in Latvia, goes and stays. We reinsert Viktor back for a couple of weeks and they gossip about the brother’s work. He doesn’t come over with the algorithms, of course, but Viktor’s pretty mathematical and a bit of a computer geek with an amateur interest in cryptology, so he picks up a lot about directions of travel and recent access that makes Tim and the NSA happy bunnies. Luckily it’s all very tightly held and wasn’t betrayed by Snowden, the NSA defector. They play chess with each other on the Internet, Viktor and his brother. That’s mainly how they keep in touch.’
‘But surely his brother must be able to see from that—’
‘We’ve fixed it so that Viktor’s computer is routed through servers in the Baltics,’ said Tim. ‘Worked very well until the SIA interregnum, shall we call it, when defectors ceased to be looked after. Your old MI6 resettlement section was disbanded. So far as the new management was concerned, defectors had told all they knew, had their pay-offs, got their pensions and were on their own, left to themselves in this rather foreign country. Liberated and self-sustaining, they called it. Abandoned, in other words, with an emergency number to call but no regular point of contact or support. A lot of them need that, as you know.
‘Point is, we lost contact with Viktor. His last case officer resigned after a spat with the SIA, lives with a dancer in Bangkok and is no longer vetted. We need someone to reestablish the relationship, get Viktor to see his brother and ferret out any gossip on these cyber attacks. It’s not precisely his brother’s area but he mixes in those circles and may know whether or not the Russians are doing it. He may even have an idea how. If he knows nothing we’ll concentrate resources on the Chinese. At present we’re having to look at them and the Russians.’
Operational involvement was not normally expected of a head of service, but to Charles it was the sound of a trumpet, a call to arms, an echo of youth. ‘Where is Viktor?’
‘He’s your neighbour,’ said Tim. ‘Your about-to-be neighbour, anyway. He lives not far from the cottage you’re renting in Sussex. We know all about that, you see.’ They all laughed. ‘We met your landlord-to-be recently, former colleague of yours, now an MP and serving on the Intelligence Services Committee.’
‘No—’
‘Jeremy Wheeler. Afraid so, Charles.’ They laughed again, except for Angela who smiled.
‘We had to brief them last week to ask them not to go too public about what’s going on and we met him then. Seemed to think he’d got you in his power at last.’
‘He doesn’t know about Configure?’
‘Not as far as we know.’
‘Let me have Configure’s contact details and I’ll see him on Saturday when we go down to take over the cottage. Someone had better brief me on what I can say and what to ask him.’
The meeting broke up, with Angela rushing back to the Foreign Office after a hurried discussion with Tim about Beowulf , which Charles only half heard and didn’t at all understand. Anglo-Saxon verse seemed a surprising mutual interest, but Whitehall had always been full of people with surprising interests.
Michael Dunton touched his elbow. ‘One other surprise for you. News of another old friend of yours. Nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about. Peter Tew, aka Stoat.’
‘Not out already, surely?’
‘Freed himself. Walked out of the open prison he was in, a sort of halfway house for those coming up for release. Strange thing was, he hadn’t long to go, thanks to the last government’s wizard wheeze of releasing everyone early. Must be mad.’
‘He was never mad, unless there was method in it. But he was bitter.’ He could still picture Peter’s face in the dock as he stared across the court at Charles and Frank Heathfield, two of the four who had unmasked him. His grey eyes, so often playful, had rested on Charles’s for a long unforgiving moment. They had been friends, not just colleagues, had toured the eastern states of the US together when Peter was in New York and Charles was visiting CIA headquarters at Langley. It later turned out that that was when Peter had begun spying for the Russians. Charles had talked freely about what he’d learned at Langley.
‘Trouble is, he must still know stuff,’ said Michael. ‘And he never told us all he’d passed, anyway, not once he’d decided to clam up. Presumably he’ll try and make a bolt for Russia but would he really want to spend the rest of his life there, like George Blake? Never believed in the cause, anyway, did he? Rather more personal motivation, wasn’t it? If they’d have him now.’
‘They’d have him, they’d make a great thing of it, show the world they always look after their own. I’m not sure it was purely personal for Peter, anyway. There was a dollop of ideology in the mixture.’
‘Maybe escaping was a spur of the moment thing and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
Charles shook his head. ‘He was a calculator, Peter, it wouldn’t have been spontaneous. I don’t think most of us realised how much his life had to be calculation in those days, given what he was and the way things were. He should have stayed in banking, with his beloved statistics. He loved numbers.’
‘That’s what he did before he joined your lot?’
‘He thought spying would be more interesting than making a fortune. Which he’d already done, anyway. He was right, it was. Just a bit too interesting. Couldn’t stop doing it.’
‘Well, life is going to be pretty different for him now, wherever he is. Whatever he calculates.’ They were in the corridor leading to the Whitehall entrance. ‘Bloody nuisance from our point of view. It’s police and probation business really, of course, but we’re going to have to go back through all the files for clues as to where he might go or what he might do, who his friends were and all that. Last thing we need, historic espionage investigations taking people away from international terrorism. Not to mention all this cyber business. At least he’s not involved in that. Next thing we know there’ll be a terrorist bomb somewhere and we’ll get blamed. Your identity must have been blown to the Russians by Stoat, of course? Stoat Red, as we used to say.’
Stoat, strictly speaking the code name for the investigation into Peter which had inevitably come to stand for him, had confessed to identifying Charles and many others in MI6 to the Russians. He had also, when on remand, passed names and addresses to imprisoned IRA terrorists. ‘As Red as it gets.’
4
The next morning Charles paused before addressing the faces around the boardroom table. His five directors, three men and two women, had all been appointed before him. They were in their forties or fifties and each of the men was bald. He had to stop himself touching his own hair for reassurance.
Simon Aldington was director of operations. Charles remembered him from the old MI6 as a youthful head of station in Cairo who had since risen through the ranks of the SIA, gaining weight and losing hair. Clive Thatcham was director of requirements, moved from the Foreign Office for his last job before retirement with a compensating promotion. Melissa Carron was another SIA survivor, formerly a career MI5 officer and now director of security. He had known her slightly in her MI5 days as pedantic and particular, not overly imaginative or clever, but particularity was a virtue in security. Stephen Avery, director of cyber and technical support and also on his last posting, had been brought in from GCHQ. Michelle Blakeney, director of human resources, was the only one to have contacted Charles before the meeting, emailing him her CV and explaining that she had been brought in from industry in order to professionalise what she called ‘the antique and amateur human resources structures and practices that had previously characterised the agency’.
At the end of the table, facing Charles, was Elaine, his private secretary, recently assistant private secretary to Angela Wilson and posted, he suspected, to keep an eye on him and the new MI6. But anyone who survived working for Angela would also be good. She was athletic-looking with quick, intelligent features and an obliging manner.
‘Welcome to Croydon,’ he said. They smiled. At that moment a power-drill started in a nearby office. They laughed. ‘We won’t complain if there are gaps in the minutes,’ he told Elaine, ‘or perhaps no minutes at all.’
Elaine stood. ‘I’ll just see if I can—’ She hurried out.
The boardroom was in the corner of the fourth floor of the 1960s block, which was to have been refurbished before they moved in. The continuing works were described as ‘making good’ the trunking routes for the IT system. It was running late because of delays in security clearance for the workers and frequent power cuts. The emergency generators were installed but not yet working.
The drilling stopped and Elaine returned. ‘They’re going to find somewhere else to drill.’
‘Well done.’ Charles turned to Stephen Avery. ‘We may as well start with a progress report on the move here, which I gather you had wished upon you.’
‘A cup I prayed would pass from my lips but to no avail.’ Stephen smiled. ‘Naturally, it’s all taking longer and costing more than anticipated. No surprises there. The main thing now is not just when it’s going to work but whether. We’ve had to change the IT specifications more than once in view of all these recent hacking attacks but our internal system works okay, more or less. The problem is we’ve still got no secure way of communicating with OGDs – other government departments. We’re having to rely on the GSN, the government secure network. Which, as everyone knows, is not really secure.’
‘So we can’t email CX reports to our customers?’ asked Charles. ‘What about comms with our overseas stations?’
‘They’re all right because they’re on our own system. It’s where we link with outsiders that we have problems. We can do it but not securely.’
‘How are we getting our reports out?’
‘We’re not,’ said Clive Thatcham, director of requirements. ‘Not since the last of the old SIA reports went out the week before last. We’re getting them in from the stations but we’re sitting on them until we’ve got secure comms. Not ideal, I agree. Qui
te appalling, in fact. But par for the course where things technical are concerned.’ He sounded almost gratified.
‘It’s worse than appalling. It’s unacceptable.’ Charles stared at Clive, aware of the stiffening around the table. Most of what he had achieved in life he had achieved by being pleasant, being reasonable, but he was conscious now that he had to be, if not unpleasant – invariably counterproductive in Whitehall – then at least unreasonable. Unreasonably but justifiably demanding. He had hoped for a board that was keen, collegiate and cooperative. So far, it had the smell of complacency.
‘How many reports are we sitting on?’
Clive shrugged, as if it weren’t really anything to do with him. ‘Well, I couldn’t say exactly, of course. We wouldn’t have issued them all anyway. Maybe not most of them. So many don’t really come up to the mark, if we’re honest with ourselves. Fall into the “interesting if true” category. Of the good ones – well, a dozen or so, maybe.’
‘Could you find out?’
‘Of course.’
‘Now, if you please.’
For a moment Clive didn’t move. Then he got up and left the room.
Charles turned to Simon Aldington, director of operations. Like the rest now, he looked sombre. ‘That doesn’t sound very many. How many stations do we have?’
Simon pursed his lips. He had become bloated since his days as an energetic head of station and his complexion had coarsened. ‘Well, about – I would say – probably a couple of dozen worldwide.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I could find out, if you like.’