The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Does the president also know that we’ve lost al Aswamy, who from my reading of everything you’ve told us from today’s assessment is a top-level Iranian agent moving freely not just around America but around the world—which obviously means different identities supported by different passports—organizing international attacks?’ said Marian.

  ‘Of course State took that on board,’ said Irvine, exasperated at their lingering doubt at the justification for what they were doing. ‘Today’s meeting was a review of what we know of an ongoing situation, with still more to come out. But it was obvious Tehran is going to be hung out to dry diplomatically when we get more from Italy and the UK.’

  ‘I don’t think Rome’s statement was well phrased,’ suggested Shab Barker, tentatively offering a Muslim mind-set reaction. ‘These were major, coordinated state-sponsored acts of terrorism, more so even than 9/11. There’s a lot of jihadists and fundamentalists who’ll read it as a challenge.’

  ‘That’s my assessment, too,’ supported Akram Malik, savoring the acknowledgement at identifying the Washington Monument target.

  ‘And State’s view,’ confirmed Irvine. He looked at Singleton. ‘You can add Rome’s mistake to your list.’

  ‘I’m not making lists or issuing challenges, just trying to establish parameters,’ dismissed the older man. ‘On the subject of which, how was it between the CIA divas?’

  ‘Strained,’ judged Irvine, shrugging. ‘The White House congratulations were to Conrad Graham for approving Cyber Shepherd. Until his announcement of a UK involvement, Johnston was virtually a sidelined observer.’

  ‘What about that UK involvement?’ pressed Marian. ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘What I know, you know,’ said Irvine, shaking his head. ‘That’s why Harry Packer stayed behind in Washington, to find out more.’

  ‘But it’s MI5, not GCHQ?’

  ‘That’s what Johnston said.’

  ‘So it doesn’t directly impact on us like Tempura and hacking the telephones of world leaders did?’

  ‘I supposed I’ll have some contact at Langley,’ said Irvine. He went to Singleton again. ‘I went into the Tehran botnet before I came down today. It’s dormant.’

  Singleton indicated his illuminated screen. ‘It still is. I expect it to stay that way, don’t you?’

  ‘Locating al Aswamy here in America is down to Homeland Security and the FBI now. We stay with the Vevak botnet, permanently monitoring.’ Irvine hesitated, the lack of response burning through him. ‘Who knows,’ he continued, concentrating on Singleton, ‘maybe our luck will hold,’ and wished he hadn’t the moment he spoke.

  ‘What more practicably have you got in mind?’ asked Singleton, refusing to rise to the remark.

  ‘What we’ve today been overwhelmingly sanctioned to do: move on, find more. Destroy more.’ Irvine hoped this time the pause was better planned. ‘I’d like to think you’re all still with me in doing that.’

  Barker and Malik smiled in reassurance, Malik actually nodding. Singleton and Marian Lowell remained expressionless.

  * * *

  ‘What you achieved, in such a short period of time, was remarkable,’ opened David Monkton. That afternoon’s one-to-one encounter in the Director-General’s river-view office was more formal, but the diminutive man still avoided the embarrassment of sitting behind his expansive desk, instead pacing around his office as if physical movement were part of his thought process. Twice he’d stopped close behind her, once with his hand on her chairback.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sally inadequately. The Thames House rumor was that the bachelor Director-General was a misogynist, which made the very idea inconceivable, but it would have been easy to imagine that the man was working up to some physical approach. She was more curious than alarmed at the possibility.

  ‘There’ve been a lot of high-level exchanges between Downing Street and Washington; your contribution’s been made very clear,’ said the man from somewhere behind her.

  ‘That’s extremely generous.’ And a potential procedural breach, she thought: individual officers were never identified, under any circumstance.

  Monkton came into view but ignored his chair, perching instead awkwardly on the front edge of the desk. ‘What would your reaction be to my appointing you my director of operations?’

  Sally was unaware of instinctively pulling her skirt farther to her knees until she was actually conscious of doing it and stopped, irritated. ‘I’d appreciate the confidence, but it’s not a role in which I’ve ever imagined myself. I’ve always considered myself a field officer, like my father.’

  ‘Which is what you’ve overwhelmingly proven yourself to be and why I’ve changed my original intention.’ Monkton smiled, a quick on-and-off expression. ‘I’m attaching you, nominally, to our embassy in Washington. But you won’t be working from our rezidentura. You’ll be attached to the covert CIA unit that got onto the Sellafield attack in the first place. Will you have any personal difficulty with the posting?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Sally, covering her surprise.

  ‘I’d hoped there wouldn’t be.’

  She came forward in her seat, her concentration absolute. ‘They’ve already agreed to this?’

  Monkton’s smile was longer this time. ‘Without any hesitation.’

  ‘Why so quickly?’

  ‘I know, very slightly, the covert operations director in overall command of the unit.’

  That wasn’t sufficient reason, Sally decided. ‘So you approached him? They didn’t come to us?’

  ‘Approached him accidentally, initially. And before you put so much of Sellafield together as you did.’

  Which made the acceptance of an outsider even more difficult to understand. ‘Who’s my case officer?’

  ‘Me, quite separately from the rezidentura. This is a totally restricted operation.’

  More interoffice resentment, accepted Sally, who knew Jeremy Dodson had seen her pass his office on her way to this meeting with Monkton. ‘What’s my brief?’

  ‘To find out how they did it. We almost missed out on Sellafield. I don’t want to get that close to disaster again.’

  Monkton surely didn’t believe the CIA was casually going to share some secret route or source! Sally said, ‘I can leave right away.’

  ‘Be very careful.’

  She’d need to be, Sally guessed.

  * * *

  All three sat unmoving in the covert director’s suite, each mentally circling the other for the greatest territorial advantage.

  ‘We could scarcely have imagined presidential approval,’ opened James Bradley, establishing the high ground.

  ‘But that’s what we’ve got,’ insisted Harry Packer, striving to keep the satisfaction from sounding too obvious. He’d had a personal congratulations from the White House: the name Harry Packer was known to the president! He hadn’t missed a trick so far, now that Irvine’s relocation costs had passed unchallenged. A lot of rungs—all with the very necessary salary increments—in Meade’s promotional ladder were still to be climbed.

  ‘As long as you continue to justify it,’ qualified Johnston, distancing himself. ‘What’s the progress with al Aswamy?’

  ‘Highest Homeland Security priority,’ insisted Bradley. ‘Every appropriate agency involved, top of the FBI Most Wanted list. Picture selection on every TV newscast tonight, in every newspaper tomorrow.’

  ‘You think it’s possible to entrap someone like al Aswamy, whom we now know to be a major Iranian terrorist, in a country the size of America, with the length of its seacoasts and land borders with Canada and Mexico?’ said Johnston.

  The other two men shared a hesitation. Point up the defeatism, Bradley decided. ‘No, but we’ve sure as hell got to try, along with all the other agencies.’

  Packer said, ‘And we’ve still got our electronic trace.’

  Johnston shifted, preparing himself. ‘Unfortunate that you lost him when you did.’

  The cocksuck
er had them under surveillance! seized Bradley. Why hadn’t his own watch team picked up the tail!

  ‘We didn’t lose him electronically,’ exaggerated Packer. Johnston was covering his ass against any later accusations.

  ‘But you haven’t got him in the bag.’

  ‘We identified the Washington Monument—with its proximity to the White House—as the target,’ insisted Packer.

  ‘And risking the leak wasn’t a difficult decision for me to make,’ came in Bradley. ‘I’m sure you would have confirmed it had I been able to reach you earlier than I did.’

  ‘It’s got to be us who gets al Aswamy, not another Homeland Security agency,’ insisted Johnston.

  ‘How do you intend this UK participation to work?’ demanded Packer, more interested in the future than the past.

  ‘She pulled together all we so far know about the combined attack,’ said Johnston, also welcoming the subject change. ‘She’ll have useful input.’

  ‘She?’ questioned Packer.

  ‘Middle East background, like your guy,’ said Johnston, who’d withheld the gender at the earlier, larger meeting. ‘Name’s Sally Hanning. Jordanian diplomat mother, father an MI5 station chief in Lebanon, Turkey, and Syria; both died in a Hamas ambush. She’s bilingual in Arabic, Oxford educated … the whole works.’

  ‘It’s just been proved, if proof were necessary, that we’re confronted with a state-sponsored conspiracy, not an independent Islamic group,’ said Johnston. ‘We’ll benefit from someone with her sort of background to compare with Irvine’s assessments.’

  ‘Working under whose jurisdiction and control?’ at once demanded Packer, anxious for as much insider knowledge as possible: the protection that presidential approval bestowed also carried with it greater official scrutiny. He didn’t want his fucked-up private life to emerge.

  ‘Ours here at Langley,’ assured Johnston. ‘Her brilliance is in analysis, not cryptology. If we’d had that analytical assessment available earlier, we might now have al Aswamy in custody.’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Harry Packer thirty minutes later, in Bradley’s office, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s open between them.

  ‘Putting his own person in,’ judged Bradley cautiously. He needed time, a lot more information, to make a proper assessment. One immediate decision was not to tell Packer of his suspicion of Johnston’s surveillance. Which reminded him he had his own group to confront.

  ‘Maybe you can turn her into becoming our person,’ said Packer hopefully.

  ‘Always good to have a joker in the pack.’

  11

  Jack Irvine went through the high-fives ritual at the Oval Office video feed for individual presidential praise—as well as the required Georgetown champagne pit stop on the way home—but throughout it all his mind, and his imagination, were in the past. It wouldn’t have been a video feed if his father had succeeded as he’d deserved to succeed. It would have been a full-blown White House ceremony, his father centre stage at the president’s side, the Arabs in whom he’d misplaced his trust completing the historic group, the door to the secretary of state’s office wide-open for his occupation.

  As he entered his Owen Place ‘safe house’ apartment, taking a Miller Lite instead of champagne from the refrigerator as he passed, Irvine wondered if the few who knew or who vaguely remembered his father’s betrayal would make the connection with what had happened today. Irvine doubted it. Too few people knew and even fewer cared; success, however manufactured or hyped, was to be associated with in Washington, DC, never perceived failure. Only he would ever know, or need to know, that he’d dedicated today to his father: the day but not its implications. In practical reality today was his, an event he’d earned for penetrating the innermost core of Iranian intelligence, and he was going to use it to every possible benefit. From today his was a voice—and a name—that would be listened to. From now on those with whom he’d unwillingly been assigned, without choice, knew that whatever their designations or titles, he was their equal, not a subordinate to be patronized, as he believed Johnston and Bradley and even Packer had imagined they could treat him.

  It was essential he remain objective, Irvine acknowledged; stay with Miller Lite, not aspire to champagne. Burt Singleton was right: they had been fucking lucky. And Shab Barker and Akram Malik were right, too: the attempted but overly exaggerated political reassurances of outright anti-terrorist victory would fuel a fundamentalist challenge they’d confront, with attacks even more spectacular than those so narrowly—so fucking luckily—averted. And Ismail al Aswamy, a far more important figure than Irvine had initially imagined, was still free potentially to mastermind them.

  Irvine picked up another beer on his way to the computer bank that had been his first installation after his transfer from Fort Meade. It comprised two protective firewall terminals programmed instantly to self-destruct at attempted intrusion. Additionally there were special USB barriers perfected at Meade. The mainframe was linked, on a dedicated secure line, to the Shepherd office in Maryland. Irvine’s cell phone was additionally linked, on a separate dedicated and USB blocking line, to alert him to any enemy-targeted activity, no matter how slight, when he was away from either his Meade or Owen Place stations. The Owen Place machines could not operate independently and could only be activated after a signal from Fort Meade by a sequence of commands between all three. Disconnecting or severing any power lead or umbilical link between the three triggered automatic destruction as well as sounding an alarm at Fort Meade. Irvine changed the three hard drives each month after transferring their contents to a storage cloud.

  Irvine settled comfortably in his wingback chair, dismissing the passing thought of a third beer, fingering his way instead through the keyboard labyrinth. The system operative, he embarked upon another slightly less complicated entry into the carefully hidden botnets that completely concealed his trawling Internet presence, particularly inside the anonymous, underground darknets. The primary priority for such concealment was to establish the bots in countries with lax or disinterested cybersecurity; best of all were those countries whose governments actively sponsored commercial intelligence hacking. China was Irvine’s first choice in which to stable his Trojan horse, actually in a Ministry of Commerce site in Beijing. There was the familiar blip of satisfaction at the easy entry, with no flashback alarm or barrier. Irvine moved on just as smoothly—and unobstructed—into his second cutout, embedded unknowingly to the Yemeni government in its Finance Ministry Web site. From Yemen he moved to his operational bot deep within Moscow’s Interior Ministry. Irvine’s domain name was Shamil25@akhoulgo.org.ru, the final initial letters identifying its internationally recognized Internet Protocol registration through an unwitting shipping company in St Petersburg. Irvine chose Russia for its haphazard Internet security, and the name Shamil as bait. Imam Shamil was a Muslim warlord who led a three-year uprising against czarist expansion in the northern Caucasus in 1825.

  ‘Move on, find more, destroy more,’ Irvine said to himself; for the moment the White House had to be ignored. The way now was back, not forward: back to Moscow Alternative, a darknet site with a number of shared subcatalogs that he’d found in the computer contact lists of two of the Anacostia group he’d penetrated after discovering Ismail al Aswamy’s recruitment approaches, before learning of the man’s importance or, ultimately, of Vevak’s Hydarnes domain. One of those subdivisions was called Object. Another was Action.

  On his first entry into the Action forum he invoked the devout Inshallah—if God wills it—in Arabic before agreeing in English to an insistence posted by an anonymous Vladimir that America was ‘the Devil’s crusader.’ To be labeled or accused of being a crusader is the most vilifying accusation that can be leveled against a man in the Arab world. No responses had been posted on his wall, and Vladimir had not appeared in the chat room again during Irvine’s following visits, which had been intermittent because of the concentration upon the other, obviously more productive targets. During th
ose infrequent visits, though, he’d had two offers of sales of Russian military weaponry, both including grenade and handheld rocket launchers, and engaged—only once and then briefly, to avoid the unlikely attention of an official Russian monitor—in another one-to-one exchange with Enslaved, who was recruiting volunteers for bomb attacks in Moscow in protest against continued Russian oppression in Chechnya.

  Irvine finally got another beer from the refrigerator before computer hopping to his eventual St Petersburg concealment. He scrolled quickly through the Moscow Alternative subcatalogs to reach Action, recognizing none of the previous tag names with whom he’d had contact. He decided against an immediate phishing trip, instead offering his sublisted Shamil25 identity as bait, setting himself a thirty-minute time frame. And waited. There was a bite after twenty-five minutes. The sender domain was Anis@mukhtarbrigade. Irvine instantly identified the significance. Anis is a Libyan name. Omar al-Mukhtar was one of Libya’s most famous historical freedom fighters. Anis opened with As-salamu alaykum, ‘peace be upon you.’ The message, in English, read, Where have you been?

  Irvine replied with the peace invocation before replying, Travelling.

  Anis wrote, Was there sunshine in the desert?

  Not all the time, responded Irvine, paraphrasing the Arab proverb without directly quoting it. His computer was on automatic save, for the exchange to be code analyzed later, although Irvine doubted it would provide anything useful this soon.

  Travel is sometimes better in the cold of the night.

  The three attacks were scheduled for 3:00 a.m.! But it would be an inconceivable coincidence for this to be a reference to the al Aswamy conspiracy. Irvine wrote, Unless there are unseen hazards.

  Always to be guarded against, came the response.

  But not always possible to avoid, risked Irvine. He shouldn’t press any harder, build too much—build anything—on this, but most important he shouldn’t frighten off whoever Anis might be.

  Journeys can always begin again if the will exists.

  It sounded like another proverb, but Irvine didn’t recognize it this time. As it does exist, lured Irvine.