by Alan Judd
‘I still don’t understand how it gets from the MI6 system into the social security system,’ said Mary. ‘They’re not linked, are they?’
Everyone looked at Charles, who had no idea how the MI6 or any other system worked. He could understand the infection analogy but that was about all. He was saved by Tim.
‘They’re not linked but there are links. A kind of reverse engineering by some of our twelve-year-olds at Cheltenham has established that someone with internal access to the MI6 system who knew what they were doing – a contractor, for example, a British Snowden – could exploit the few links there are not only to communicate with other government systems but actually get inside them. On most MI6 terminals you couldn’t because it’s a sealed system, as Charles knows, but on some terminals you could. At one time it was literally no more than a handful but under Charles’s predecessor the number increased, including some laptops. So we’re looking at every MI6 user with access to those terminals. But it takes time because it has of course to be done in absolute secrecy and access lists are woefully incomplete or even unavailable. It’s essentially a cyber access problem, that’s the key to it.’
Everyone nodded, including Charles, although he was unconvinced. Of course it was a cyber access problem but if the two murders were admitted as part of it, it became something else as well. The existence of Viktor, let alone his address and cover identity, was probably unknown to anyone within the contemporary MI6. Viktor’s details might possibly be recovered from computerised files but only by someone who knew what to look for. Frank Heathfield’s address would be easier to find but the link between him and Viktor would be known to – whom? He could think of no-one apart from himself and Peter Tew.
He would need more than that to convince those around him, but he had to say something. ‘The first question,’ he said, ‘is whether we adopt the unified field theory by seeking a single explanation uniting everything that’s going wrong. Or whether we take each aspect on its own and seek separate solutions. My own hunch—’
Michael Dunton intervened. ‘They fall naturally into two groups – the murders and the escape of Peter Tew on the one hand, the cyber, Crown Jewels and communications issues on the other. With the latter it’s easy to see how one might flow from the other through clever cyber exploitation but there’s no indication of any link between them and the murders and Tew. In the absence of any evidence we’d be chasing a red herring to search for a unified field explanation or whatever we want to call it. That said, Charles’s theory that the murders are linked to each other through Tew is plausible enough to offer it to the police as a possible line of inquiry. But any suggestion that Tew could also be somehow hacking into the MI6 system from outside and getting from there into the CNI and beyond is stretching belief. I mean, I know that while in prison he acquired a reputation as a bit of a computer geek but bringing down the CNI is a step or two up from geekery. Is it not, Tim?’
Tim and Graham nodded. Charles held up his hand as if in capitulation. ‘Michael is right, of course. There’s a clear distinction between the two elements and we mustn’t confuse them.’ Matthew Abrahams had long ago taught him one of the secrets of success in Whitehall meetings. You had to start with an agenda, a clear idea of what you wanted to come away with, then occupy the middle ground by presenting yourself as objective and reasonable, conceding arguments on both sides. In a culture that placed a high value on collective responsibility this ensured you a hearing, since it was not done to attack the demonstrably reasonable man or woman. But by occupying that middle ground you had in fact advanced your own front line to your enemy’s, unopposed, while conceding nothing.
Charles had entered this meeting without an agenda but now he had one: to leave with his freedom of action unimpaired. He would use that freedom to establish the link between Michael’s two groups which he was now convinced must exist because, while Michael was speaking, he had remembered something else from the investigation of Peter Tew.
After Peter’s Carlton Gardens confession Charles was sent to interview members of the New York station to find out what opportunities Peter might have had to stray beyond his official access. The head secretary asked to see him privately after the formal interviews were over.
She came to his hotel room. ‘There’s something else you should know, something I suppose I should confess. I didn’t want to say it in the station with everyone else around. I don’t know whether it amounts to much anyway.’
‘Have a drink.’
Over a gin and tonic she described how while Peter was still on station a telegram had come in addressed to the head of the Washington station, who was visiting New York. It was an early Configure report but the name meant nothing to her and the security classification was no higher than usual. That was a mistake by the sender, someone on the Requirements desk in London who should normally have sent Configure traffic as DEYOU – decipher yourself – which meant that H/Washington would have had to take it from the cipher machine without even the cipher clerk being allowed to see it.
‘It came in with a whole load of other stuff and I put it in the tray for H/Washington to see. Meanwhile Peter, who’d been in the UN all morning, came back and hung around gossiping. I picked up the telegram again to see where it should be filed after H/Washington had seen it and he said, “You look puzzled, what is it?” I was puzzled because the file reference wasn’t one I recognised and there seemed to be a lot of technical stuff about signal transmissions. I had a feeling it shouldn’t go on one of the ordinary liaison files that anyone can see.
‘Anyway, at that moment the phone rang and I put the telegram down to answer it. Peter picked it up and looked at the distribution list and file number, then he put it down. But the phone call went on a bit and he stood looking at the first page. He could see only the first page, I’m sure of that, but I do remember noticing he was reading it. As soon as I put the phone down he turned away as if he’d lost interest.
‘“Don’t bother to file it,” he said. “Just shred it when he’s seen it. It’ll be filed in Head Office and Washington and it’s nothing to do with us. So much crud gets copied to us just for the sake of it. I’d chuck it if I were you.”’
She thought nothing of this at the time and didn’t realise she’d remembered it until Charles arrived with his questions.
‘I feel awful; I should have thought. I knew Peter wasn’t on the distribution, of course, but he didn’t try to read it all, didn’t seem that interested. And I just thought it was something technical that was nothing to do with us, the name Configure didn’t mean anything and there were other things going on, you know how it is. I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry.’
‘Not your fault but thank you for telling me. He almost certainly didn’t pass it on because he was back in London shortly after and he had no more meetings with his friend. It was the head office’s fault, not yours.’
The telegram, it later transpired, was the first Configure report indicating the possibility of Crown Jewels. Charles had written it, unaware of its full technical implications. But Peter Tew was scientifically more literate and probably did. He may not have been able to pass it at the time but now that he was out of prison he could have put it to use, if he had a mind to. And he probably had.
Tim was talking by the time Charles gave the meeting his full attention again. ‘Michael’s right that we must keep the police fully informed of anything relevant in the backgrounds of Frank Heathfield and Configure, which means explaining the possible link with Peter Tew. Meanwhile it would help if Charles could get us a more complete list of who in MI6 has access to computers which link to the outside world and whether it is possible for anyone other than the staff member concerned to access them. It would also help if we could have a staged shut-down, allegedly for maintenance, of MI6 servers. If we could identify a server which, whenever it’s down, means that no other systems are accessed, that would narrow the search.’ He looked at Charles. ‘It might, of course, mean that you would have
to indoctrinate someone else in MI6 into what’s happening.’
‘Unless I simply say it’s a process all government systems have to go through during the present crisis.’
They discussed technicalities. All was going well from Charles’s point of view until Michael, trying to be helpful, said, ‘If we’re assuming Tew as the link between the murders, then we’re also assuming he’s revenging himself on those responsible for putting him away. Of whom there’s only one left alive – and he’s sitting here.’
Everyone laughed. Angela mentioned Agatha Christie. Michael said that had struck him too. Everyone laughed again. ‘But there is a serious point here,’ said Michael. ‘Protection. Should Charles have police protection?’
It was the last thing he wanted. Smiling with the others, he rushed to reoccupy the middle ground. ‘Reluctant as I am to be a further charge on the public purse, I agree it’s something we should seek police advice on. I’ll raise it with them myself. Fortunately, we’ve just moved house and I think I’ve neglected to let anyone know the new address—’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ interjected Angela, to further laughter.
‘– but I’ll discuss it with the police, I promise.’
13
Sarah prepared a prawn stir-fry for supper and opened a bottle of claret, which Charles would drink with anything, including fish and chips, if he could. Most of the unpacking remained but their bedroom and her study were more or less done. She dared not start on his study because that would mean arranging his precious books and whatever she did would doubtless be wrong. There’d be no more unpacking this evening, anyway, just a cosy dinner during which he could tell her about his meetings and she could confess her approach from Mr Mayakovsky. She still felt as if, merely by being approached, she’d done something wrong.
Again, the telephone rang as she heard his key in the door. This time it was Jeremy Wheeler, exclaiming how wonderful it had been to see them both, how they must get together more often and how delighted he and Wendy were to have them in the area. She mouthed his name to Charles who gritted his teeth and turned his eyes to the ceiling. She mouthed, ‘Are you here?’ while saying how much she was looking forward to writing to Wendy that very evening. Charles shook his head too late because by then she’d had to say he’d just got in. He made a strangulated grimace as she passed him the receiver. She closed the door and left them to it.
Dinner and the claret were restorative and Charles’s irritation with Jeremy found relief in expression. ‘Bloody fool wanted a line to take with the press over Viktor’s murder. When I said he didn’t need one, it was nothing to do with him, no-one was going to ask him about it, he said he thought they would because they had known each other socially and what was he to say if they asked whether Viktor had been bumped off because he’d worked for us? Then when I said there was no reason for anyone to suspect that Viktor had worked for us and so the question wouldn’t arise, he confessed he’d already put out a press statement saying he much regretted Viktor’s death but had no knowledge of his past. Can you believe it? After we’d all gone last night Wendy told him that Viktor told her he had been a British spy. Wendy saw more of him than Jeremy did, apparently.’
‘How much more?’
‘No idea but between them, for good reasons or bad, they’ve hit upon the right answer and Jeremy, true to form, has done the one thing guaranteed to bring about the very thing we want to avoid. Needs to protect his own public reputation, he says. Pompous twat. He didn’t have one before but he might be on the way to one now. Publicity is the last thing we want at the moment, publicity about anything.’
Again she put off telling him, asking instead how the meeting had gone. By the time he’d finished that, the claret was also finished. She emptied the remains of her glass into his. ‘Your unified field theory, or whatever you call it, your desire for a single explanation for everything—’
‘Maybe impossible, I admit, but I’m sure it’s more likely than Michael Dunton’s two groups theory. For one thing—’
‘You haven’t heard what I’m going to say yet—’
‘– there is already a link between the two groups: misuse of the Service’s system. Someone is using it to wreak cyber havoc and someone must have used it to it to get Viktor’s name and address. Assuming, as I do, that there’s a professional explanation for his murder—’
She put her hand over his glass as he was about to drink. ‘– because you won’t let me finish—’
‘– and that explanation is Peter Tew—’ He struggled not to smile as he tried to take his glass with the other hand and she leaned across the table and grabbed his wrist.
‘The point about your unified field theory is that it doesn’t have to account for everything at once,’ she said, as they contested the glass. ‘It just has to account for enough for you to run with it and see whether the rest falls in later. The missing submarine, for instance—’
He stopped struggling. ‘Your nephew who’s about to get married – what did you say was the name of his ship? Boat, I mean. The Navy calls submarines boats.’
Her grip slackened. ‘I didn’t, I don’t know—’
‘ Beowulf ?’
She let go. ‘Oh God, it might be. I must ring Susan, I meant to earlier. Does she know?’
‘Don’t ring yet.’ He emptied his glass.
‘I think we might need another bottle,’ she said. ‘There’s something else I have to tell you.’
He heard her in silence, all the while holding the new bottle. When she finished he poured for them both and questioned her on detail, gently and precisely going over exactly what was said and in which order. At the end she smiled in relief and sipped the wine she didn’t want. ‘Doesn’t do much for your unified field,’ she said.
‘It does, it reinforces it. The fact that they want to know whether I’m in touch with Peter Tew and that odd reference to his computer suggests they don’t know where he is but would like to. They may be in some sort of contact but not as close as they want. Well done.’
‘I didn’t do anything. I was done to rather than doing. It was horrible. Will they really try and ruin us, d’you think?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not yet. They’ll want to see if it works first. It’s a very crude approach. I’d have thought better of them.’
‘But I said no, absolutely clearly. And I said I’d tell you. They can’t be under any illusion that it’s going to work.’
‘If they’re crude enough to have done it in the first place, they’re crude enough to hope for second thoughts and have another go. Puts us in a good position.’
‘What do you mean?’ He was talking about it as if it were happening to someone else. Professional detachment was all very well but this was personal, personal for them both. And she had felt so wretchedly guilty, as if she had brought trouble upon him herself.
‘There’s some advantage in playing them along for a while, if you could bear it. Getting them to expose more of themselves – whom they’re using, what they need to know, how they would run you if you agreed. Give them enough rope to hang themselves, then prosecute or expel them. Michael Dunton would enjoy a good expulsion case.’
She put down her glass. ‘You mean I should pretend to agree?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘He’s a horrible man, I hate him.’
‘Just once and only if they approach you again. Just so that you can find out what they would ask you. Useful to know what they want to know. We might even wire you up, stick something on you. So you can bug the conversation. Miss Moneypenny stuff.’ He smiled. ‘Could be fun.’
‘I don’t think that’s fun at all. What if they do what they threaten? Go to the press and make a great fuss about you and me and Nigel? It would be so easy to spin all that to make it sound sleazy and disgusting. And mud sticks, you know. For the rest of our lives.’
‘They wouldn’t if they knew that we would roll up their cosy little network here and
expose it, complete with News at Ten recordings of clumsy attempts to debrief you.’
She was horrified. ‘You’d put me on the news?’
He laid his hand on hers. ‘It won’t come to that. This is a little game for them, a tiny part of the Big Game. Nice if it works easily but drop it if it doesn’t, that’s what they’d do. Mayakovsky and his Snow Queen are just walk-on players, trying to face both ways. Keen to stay here, anxious to keep in with Moscow and show they’re nice, patriotic, rich, capitalist, modern Russians. Moscow wouldn’t expose them like this if they weren’t expendable.’
‘But don’t you think Katya Chester might be spying on Jeremy Wheeler? I mean, he must come across things – political gossip or more serious things to do with this committee he’s on – that they can use in some way.’
‘Almost certainly. That’s another reason for not letting it run on too long. Michael Dunton will want her out, provided the Home Secretary agrees and our ECHR judges don’t say we’re depriving her of a happy family life.’
‘With Jeremy perhaps?’
‘That would make expulsion a kindness.’
Monday for Sarah was wall-to-wall meetings. The two London Bridge project meetings were lengthy but fine – that at least was what the job was supposed to be. But the two career appraisals, her own and the one she was obliged to give her temporary trainee, were the waste of time all three participants privately knew they would be. No-one should need formal sessions with people they worked alongside everyday. On top of that there was a teleconference with the New York office at which she had to stand in for her managing partner. It took an hour and they never got to her agenda item because there was so much grandstanding by two of the litigation partners. Then there was the quarterly meeting of the business flow committee, a body supposed to determine who did what but which merely recorded everything and determined nothing.