The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Still noisy enough for us not to be eavesdropped: I checked while I was waiting. You want to make your own voice-level check?’

  Irvine shook his head. ‘What’s there to talk about?’

  ‘Please! I’m up to here with this morning’s bullshit from Johnston and Bradley.’ Sally took his twisted smile as confirmation that he already knew.

  Their waiter interrupted the conversation. Sally had decided on what she’d order while she waited. Irvine ordered what he’d eaten last time, without bothering with the menu or the specials recitation. He waited for the waiter to get out of hearing before saying, ‘They’re not my favourite people, either.’

  A way in? wondered Sally. ‘Or unique, although those two are in a league of their own. You know what always surprises me? How many people like Johnston and Bradley get to be department heads or managers and wreck entire operations—hugely important, essential operations—through incompetence. That’s what’s happened here. If Bradley had properly organized his surveillance teams, we wouldn’t have lost al Aswamy and be in the shit state we are now.’ His face had tightened as she spoke, but at what?

  ‘My operation isn’t wrecked! And you know it because you also know, from today’s confrontation with Johnston and Bradley, that we’re onto something new.’

  ‘I know you’ve got a new lead you’re using to get a UK detainee you hope will lead you to al Aswamy,’ seized Sally. ‘A UK, not a U.S., lead.’

  The waiter returned with their appetizers, and this time Irvine didn’t wait for the man to get beyond hearing before he said, ‘It isn’t the only one.’

  ‘Threatening America?’ Sally persisted, drawing upon her earlier con-if-you-can briefing from GCHQ. ‘Or something you’ll have to pass on to the UK or some other participating country under the Echelon agreement as you did with the Sellafield attack: something else outside U.S. jurisdiction that doesn’t get you any closer to al Aswamy?’

  Pointedly, like someone believing her argument won, Sally began eating, pausing only to add the neglected wine to both their glasses. Irvine started eating, too, concentrating on his food without saying anything for several minutes.

  She’d unsettled him, Sally decided. And felt a twinge of regret at doing to Irvine what Johnston and Bradley had far more clumsily attempted—and so pitifully failed at—with her. Irritably pushing the out-of-place reflection aside, she said, ‘This shouldn’t be a fight.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make one.’

  Had the Meade team really uncovered something separate from a UK lead: another potential attack there’d be an advantage in her learning?

  ‘It was the asshole double act, Johnston or Bradley. Or more likely both, trying to impress each other.’ Irvine pushed his plate aside. He’d eaten little.

  ‘The same asshole double act you’ve still got around your neck,’ Sally determinedly continued. She had to go on abrading the sensitive nerve she’d obviously touched.

  ‘Maybe not for much longer.’

  Braggadocio, to impress her? Or insider pull from his time with Conrad Graham on Stuxnet? If Johnston was sidelined or removed altogether, David Monkton would lose whatever benefits remained from his direct contact with the covert operations director. ‘It’s good you know Graham as well as you do, I guess.’

  The waiter shared the last of the wine between them as he cleared their appetizer plates for the salad. Irvine ordered another bottle.

  ‘You really want to spend the rest of the evening talking like this?’ suddenly demanded Irvine.

  She had to back off. Oddly—illogically again—she wasn’t upset at the break. ‘What else is there to talk about?’

  ‘You. Me. Anything but what we’re talking about now because I’m not going to tell you anything more about the UK lead, am I?’

  Sally smiled what she hoped he would imagine to be a rueful smile. Maybe the time she’d spent in the embassy library hadn’t been wasted after all.

  * * *

  Akram Malik got the positive English connection at nine fifteen Washington time that night: three words, in English and clear—Order en route. It came to Malmö on the multiple-shared, Russian-registered Anis address, but the English sender was Swordbearer@forevermystery.org.uk. Malik, who was working the night shift, was actually ready, alerted by the incoming-message trigger with which he’d armed his eavesdropping Trojan horse.

  Burt Singleton, also alerted by the trigger, was at the younger man’s shoulder when the recipient-only e-mail arrived.

  ‘Everything’s coming on quicker—faster—than we could have imagined!’ exclaimed Malik. It was his coup: the total justification for his selection to such an elite operation!

  ‘Maybe too fast,’ cautioned Singleton, more subdued.

  ‘What?’ Malik frowned.

  ‘You ever caught a fish by hand? Dangled your arm into the stream until that great fat trout senses no danger from the smooth, tickling fingers that’ll kill it quicker than you can hit that SEND key there?’

  ‘Not even after reading Huckleberry Finn, and I’m fresh out of ambiguous analogies, Arabic or American,’ complained Malik impatiently. ‘You want to talk to me in words, in clear ones, that I’m not going to misunderstand?’

  ‘I’m not happy with people on anything-goes darknet sites not bothering with cutouts or firewalls or encrypting their traffic. That’s hand fishing: fishing with an f not ph.’

  ‘We’re not directly involved, for Christ’s sake!’ protested Malik irritably. ‘We’re simply going to pass on the address we’ve just got to the Brits. Whatever might be wrong—if anything’s wrong, that is—it’ll be for them to deal with, not us.’

  ‘I don’t like it: not anything about Cyber Shepherd. It’s not what our job is. What it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘I thought our job was protecting the country from its enemies,’ over-simplified Malik.

  ‘It is. This is us becoming vigilantes.’

  ‘Why’d you take the job? Jack gave you a choice, like the rest of us.’

  ‘Maybe I made the wrong one.’

  ‘You can still opt out.’

  Singleton didn’t respond, going back to his own station.

  ‘You think we should call Jack?’ asked Malik from the other side of the room.

  ‘Anis is your assignment, not mine.’

  ‘It’ll keep until the morning. There might be something more.’ Malik hoped the miserable son of a bitch did opt out to make room for someone with a better idea of what this specialized assignment entailed.

  * * *

  Sally Hanning’s awareness of her own sexuality held no conceit. She didn’t need a full-length mirror to know her designer tastes clothed a model’s figure without a mannequin’s haughtiness. But at rare moments Sally visited another part of her mind where she hid all the secrets she’d kept from the MI5 psychologists. She’d had relationships, of course. Affairs even: her first lover had been a married junior attaché at the French embassy in Ankara, when her parents had still been alive. And she’d lived with a German student during a post-graduate semester at Oxford. But she always felt herself a detached onlooker, never an eager, uninhibited participant in relationships, more satisfied by infrequent one-night stands with no more expectation than the passing pleasure of the moment. Why then was she allowing herself to think like this, letting it even enter her mind! Personal liaison of any sort at any level with intelligence agency colleagues was not just professionally forbidden; until now it had been beyond her comprehension. And logically still was. Or should be. She would be juggling with semantics trying to rationalize that the prohibition didn’t apply because Irvine was an American employed in a totally different branch of intelligence gathering. So it was time to stop pointless distractions and concentrate entirely upon her assignment.

  ‘You majored in political science?’ she picked out from what she’d recognized to be a rehearsed presentation.

  ‘No, it wasn’t my major,’ Irvine backtracked. ‘I started out with politics. But I got
caught up in mathematics, realized I was good at it, and switched. The government has spotters at all our leading universities, like I know they have at yours. I got approached, passed all the requirements, and here I am.’

  His response was edited for casual encounters with someone who didn’t listen sufficiently to ask the awkward questions, Sally recognized. Keep it light, she warned herself. ‘Fast-tracked from politics to code-breaking mathematics with a pit stop on the way to learn excellent, even colloquial Arabic! NSA must think they’ve got themselves an Einstein prodigy!’

  Irvine sipped his wine, gaining time. ‘I guess there are prodigies at Meade. I don’t consider myself one of them.’

  She had to let in more slack, wanted to give him more slack, not set verbal traps. ‘How’s it work? From all the whistle-blowing leaks from renegade CIA contractors, I got the impression that between the five Echelon countries—you, the UK, Canada, and the Antipodes—you hear or read every radio, telephone, or Internet message—every conceivable electronic communication—anywhere in the world every day. That just can’t be done!’

  Unexpectedly he smiled. ‘The estimate that no-one argues with is that the figure is one point seven billion items every day, which probably couldn’t be humanly read in a lifetime! But it can be sifted by Meade’s supercomputers operating at incredible speeds: the Carillon, IBM 7950 Harvest, Frostburg, and Loadstone.’

  Back on safe, comfortable territory, judged Sally. ‘Computers can’t read.’

  ‘They can if they’re programmed to recognize trigger words, phrases, or titles.’

  She was edging in the right direction, Sally decided. Why didn’t she feel more satisfied? ‘I thought Internet communications—even innocent ones—were encrypted in transmission?’

  ‘They are, to patterns, which make them identifiable from hidden code exchanges, which themselves are trigger targets because they don’t conform to pattern regimes.’

  That didn’t sound like anything she’d gathered from the basic GCHQ briefing and probably meant he was dismissing her with technical-sounding nonsense. She should, she supposed, be irritated, but she wasn’t. ‘Cyber Shepherd is specialized. How’s it operate differently from what you’ve described?’

  From the sudden attentiveness she guessed she was right about his dismissal. ‘I set it all out at the first Conrad Graham meeting you were at.’

  ‘I don’t think you did,’ she openly challenged. ‘I think you left something out, something that makes this operation different from what you normally do, which is why it’s a special covert project worked in conjunction with the CIA, who’ve let you down.’

  Irvine said, ‘Why don’t you tell me where you learned your excellent, even colloquial Arabic?’

  * * *

  Sally found no hypocrisy in her own rehearsal, scarcely preparation beyond concentrating upon her own trigger word, diplomacy. She introduced it in her opening sentence and kept employing it, generalizing that her upbringing was exclusively diplomatic, always in the Middle East. Her mother had been Jordanian—her father’s first posting had been Amman—and for a period headed the country’s refugee agency working out of the United Nations. Arabic had been the primary language in the home, and she’d grown up completely bilingual. Her father’s equal fluency, coupled with an Oxford double first in Oriental studies—which she’d matched in the same module twenty-five years later—kept him permanently in the Middle East. They lived successively at British embassies in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Cairo, and Lebanon.

  At that moment, something happened completely without warning that definitely wasn’t rehearsed, and which Sally even more definitely didn’t want. She swallowed against the sudden flood of emotion that welled up, choking her, hurriedly lowering her blurred eyes to her wine as Irvine had earlier used his wineglass to avoid holding her look. He wasn’t focused on her anyway, his head down as well, although ignoring his glass.

  ‘He was MI5 station chief in Beirut at the formation period of Hezbollah, which Israel considered sufficiently threatening to cross into the country to try to destroy,’ Sally forced herself on, only just managing to keep her voice even. ‘No-one knew then of a supposed American move to broker a cease-fire that included Al Fatah and involved a peace negotiation: there was a lot of confusion, accusations of double-dealing and unofficial diplomacy. The British foreign secretary was touring the Middle East: he flew from Cairo for talks with the Jordanian king and government, our strongest allies in the region. Everyone had to go from Beirut to Amman, of course: it was a high-level diplomatic initiative. There was no danger: all the fighting was in the south. It turned out later that Hezbollah had informants at Beirut’s air traffic control: they knew of the British diplomatic mission going from Lebanon to Jordan. It was virtually automatic that my mother travel with British diplomats, as close as she was to the Jordanian government. There was a Hezbollah ambush almost outside the St Georges Hotel on their way to the plane. My father was one of the five, including the ambassador, who died instantly. My mother was kept alive on a life-support machine, although she was technically brain-dead. I agreed to it being turned off after two weeks.’

  She’d used diplomat or diplomacy eight times, Sally guessed, maybe more. All the unpredictable emotion had fortunately gone. ‘Some other—’ she started, but Irvine at last came up to confront her.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’

  Lie, in the hope of some slip when he tried to defend his father? Or go on being honest? ‘I didn’t, not until I got here. You’re not an MI5 target, not any target.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. What is there to do?’

  ‘My father was blamed for the massacre; made the scapegoat for a lot of other things, too.’

  She didn’t want a right-or-wrong, guilty-or-innocent argument. ‘There’s always got to be a scapegoat. Ours have probably already been decided.’

  Irvine didn’t respond for what seemed a long time, eventually straightening as if surprised to see Sally at the table with him. ‘I think the evening’s over.’

  ‘Were you followed, coming here?’ Sally demanded, trying to restore some of the abandoned professionalism.

  Irvine looked uncomprehendingly across the table. ‘I don’t understand…?’

  ‘On the phone … I warned…,’ groped Sally, wishing now that she hadn’t bothered.

  ‘The Volkswagen’s blown a piston,’ said Irvine, still vague. ‘I came by cab … need to get another…’

  ‘I’ve got a car.’

  * * *

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his hunched back to her, his voice muffled.

  ‘It wasn’t the right time.… It’ll be all right.’ They’d left a corner light on and she could see his shoulders had a soft thatch of blond hair.

  ‘It shouldn’t have—’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, halting him. ‘It’s not a qualification test.’

  ‘You going home?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I won’t.’

  He eased himself partially onto his back but still didn’t turn to her. Sally moved her arm towards him, so their bodies could touch. He didn’t move. She could see he had his eyes closed.

  ‘We kill them, have them kill each other,’ Irvine blurted abruptly. ‘When we think we’ve got a group, we infiltrate their messages and set them against other groups: create suspicion and distrust. We only move against them ourselves when they don’t destroy each other. There’s no proper investigation even then, not if we can take them out ourselves: no trial proof. Just what we judge from their exchanges.’

  They lay unspeaking, still not touching, for a long time.

  Again Irvine broke the silence. ‘You’re not saying anything.’

  ‘Let’s put out the light.’

  25

  There was no awkwardness. Sally awoke first but didn’t get out of bed, ready to feign sleep for Irvine to slip out ahead of her if he showed any discomfort. But he didn�
��t. They still weren’t touching—she hadn’t been conscious of their accidentally doing so during the night, either—but she was aware when he stirred, half turning on his back again before stopping, as if remembering just then that he wasn’t alone.

  Quiet-voiced, Irvine said, ‘You awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sally in a normal tone. She sensed his movement towards her and turned to face him.

  ‘Hi.’ There was a half smile.

  ‘Hi.’ Was she as ready, as prepared, as she had been the previous night? She thought so. He didn’t feel out for her.

  ‘I’ve got coffee but not much else.’

  ‘Coffee’s good.’

  ‘There’s a deli on the corner; we could get breakfast there.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you want to take a shower while I do the coffee? I’ve got to shave as well; takes longer.’

  ‘I’ll do the coffee, you have the bathroom first. Have you got a robe?’

  His beard line was darker than his head hair, more ginger than blond; what hair there was on his chest and shoulders was darker, too. Without any embarrassment Irvine got out of bed and didn’t cover himself when he returned from the bathroom with the robe. ‘You’re lucky. Yesterday was laundry day.’

  Sally had no difficulty with nakedness, either, and didn’t contort herself getting into the robe, which did smell freshly laundered, although it still had the faintest trace of the cologne he’d worn the first night they had dinner.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he promised.

  ‘Take longer. It’s still early.’ And she didn’t have a crowded schedule, she reminded herself. She was surprised at the neatness of the apartment, with the exception of a spaghetti-cabled workstation of what, from the obvious linkages, appeared to be three interfaced desktop computers. All three screens were blank, but their standby lights were on. The living room also had more photographs than she expected to find in a bachelor apartment, a selection of campus scenes with Princeton banners in the background. A section of one wall was occupied by a collage of family photographs and framed honour citations and awards naming Irvine’s father, which Sally absorbed at once but didn’t linger over, not wanting to be caught doing so by Irvine’s emerging from the bedroom.