The Cloud Collector
Page 21
‘What did he tell you!’ urged one of the interrogators.
‘What I told the others … that there were more people … other “armies,” he called them. That we could only fight once.’
The short-sleeved man thrust himself exaggeratedly back into his chair. ‘Abu al Hurr, let us help you, for God’s sake! It wasn’t easy for us to get you out of where you were earlier. We made ourselves responsible for you, promised we’d come to an arrangement. You keep on lying that you don’t know anything more, you’re strapped back on that bed and they’re drowning you again, and maybe this time they’ll manage to do it.’
‘No! Please no!’ It was an agonized wail. He began to cry.
‘Tell us what we want to know!’ demanded the first man.
‘I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you!’ screamed the man. His face was puce and he was choking on tears that mixed with the uncontrolled flow from his nose, both shaking hands stretched out imploringly.
The interrogators thrust up together. Struggling into his jacket, one said, ‘You had your chance, Abu. You blew it.’
A guttural noise broke from the man, a much deeper choking than before, and his face became a deeper purple seconds before he pitched forward, hitting the table edge before crashing sideways. Blood was mixed with the spittle that bubbled from his mouth.
The first man said, ‘Oh, fuck!’
His partner was at the door, banging at an alarm button.
From where he crouched beside the Pakistani, the first man said, ‘He’s not breathing. I can’t find his heart … I mean a beat.’
The second man stood back from the door as two medics burst in. One fumbled a defibrillator onto al Hurr’s chest and administered the first shock without warning his partner. Calming, warning this time, he gave ten further bursts before sitting back on his haunches to look at the two interrogators. He said, ‘My name’s Matt, not Jesus.’
The second man said: ‘This’ll cause a shitstorm.’
* * *
Irvine unthinkingly made room for Sally to position a chair so she could look over his shoulder, his concentration entirely on his terminal. She realized at once that Irvine’s screen was remote-access-linked to Fort Meade, the curser moved by someone there. But it was a fleeting awareness, like the recognition of an unintelligibly encrypted message. What truly shocked her was hearing the slow-drawl voice from NSA almost casually identify the Iranian intelligence service at the same moment that the remotely moved cursor rested on an account including the name Hydarnes and immediately afterwards mention the Halal Web site, described to her during her telephone cramming session with GCHQ’s John as the unattainable Holy Grail of Western intelligence eavesdropping.
‘… didn’t have the Nigerian router,’ the anonymous voice drawled on. ‘But I’d isolated the Paris account during the earlier run I followed. Then came the familiar transfer. And silence.’
‘So who—and where—is smartman@deathtrade.org.mil?’ said Irvine.
‘We do know it’s military, which frightens the hell out of me,’ came the Fort Meade voice.
‘You and me both,’ said Irvine. ‘Mil is a restricted military designation on which we also know there’s an Iranian intelligence transmission. Somewhere, somehow, Tehran is inside a U.S. military installation or facility.’
‘Including them all, the global count will be in the thousands … tens of thousands. But it could be a bot hacked into an ordinary account anywhere.’
‘My instinct is that it’ll be hidden in something genuinely military.’
‘I wouldn’t expect us to agree, would you?’
Irvine shifted, discomfited by Singleton’s aggression. Refusing to respond, he said instead, ‘What’s organized?’
‘You can see for yourself it’s straight encryption: short enough for a direct order or target identification,’ said the voice in time with the darting cursor. ‘Marian’s already arrived. Shab and Akram should be here soon. We’ll try for algorithms on SHA 2 as well as 3, see if 3 can justify its setup costs. We’ll generate a random-number search in tandem. But this is pure mathematics-based decryption, and we know it’ll be good because we know the source. It isn’t going to be easy.’
‘We’ve got the destination account,’ said Irvine. ‘You’re putting a code search through a numbers run?’
‘That’s what I called you about: everything else I’ve started is routine.’
Irvine hesitated. ‘You run a code run from there. I’ll do the registration search from here, where the Pentagon is.’
‘You going into the Pentagon?’
The predictable objections, Irvine recognized. ‘It’s justified.’
‘It’s illegal.’
‘Iranian intelligence is using a U.S. military designation. That comes well within our remit.’
‘Not if it’s inside a civilian shell.’
‘It is, by my judgment.’
‘You’re authorizing it?’
‘I’m authorizing it. And doing it.’
‘Are you coming up?’
‘Nothing I can’t do from here, and you’ve got everything else covered up there, haven’t you?’
‘I guess.’
‘Thanks for getting it organized from your end.’
‘I thought that’s how we’re working now.’
Irvine hesitated again, suppressing the sigh. ‘Yeah, that’s how we’re working now. Keep me up to speed.’
‘You going to ring bells?’
Another predictable demand, thought Irvine. He was surprised it hadn’t come up sooner. ‘Let’s give ourselves a little time to narrow the search field.’
‘Time is what we don’t have.’
‘Which is why I’m going into the Pentagon right now.’
‘It’ll be a botnet, even if it’s military.’
‘There might be a subcatalog indicator.’
‘You’re clutching at straws,’ accused the voice.
‘There’ll be a lot of codes, too many for me to handle alone.’
‘You giving the formal authorization for the access-code search to be conducted from here?’
Irvine sighed openly this time. ‘I already have.’ Would Singleton be recording this exchange just as formally?
‘We’ll keep in touch.’
‘We’ll need to.’ Irvine started slightly at Sally’s presence beside him, the smile uncertain. ‘Well, you wanted to know it all. Now you do.’
And she wasn’t going to miss one iota of the opportunity, determined Sally. ‘It’s a hell of a lot at one go. It makes al Aswamy almost irrelevant.’
‘That guy’s anything but irrelevant.’
‘How long have you been this deep in a Vevak Web site!’
‘Almost from the beginning: more than a year, operationally. Took me a long time before that, virtually from the conclusion of another CIA project I was involved in.’
‘Stuxnet.’
‘How did you know I worked on Stuxnet?’
‘I didn’t,’ Sally admitted. ‘It’s the only computer-intrusion operation I know about.’
‘I want to believe you.’
She couldn’t lose him, not after getting this far! ‘Then believe me! Johnston called you a whiz kid, which had to mean with computers and implied you’d worked with the CIA before. Stuxnet’s public knowledge: the Israelis openly admit co-operating with the CIA, building a mock-up of the Natanz installation.’ She could see he wasn’t convinced. Where the hell was her way back in? ‘We’ve already identified where the risks to Cyber Shepherd come from, and it isn’t me. And you can take that personally as well as professionally.’
‘Johnston and Bradley don’t know.’
That was inconceivable because … oh no, it wasn’t, she corrected herself; it was totally conceivable from someone with Irvine’s history. Quietly, all indignation gone, she said, ‘Jack, how many people do know?’
‘The guys at Meade, obviously: they have to know.’
‘Who else?’
‘Langley doesn’t know?’ she persisted, determined to get a definitive answer. ‘Conrad Graham?’
‘He signed off on an operation to combat radicalized terrorists before they organized themselves to attack us. Or any other Western target. He knew me, knew what I could do.’
It was so feasible, so understandable: a relationship formed during an earlier, hugely successful operation, two men with differing agendas, one elevated to high authority welcoming another potential coup, the other providing—and initially proving—how that could be attained by word-of-mouth undertakings, no need for specific details. The credo in practise: anything and everything that achieves an objective is acceptable. None of which affected her attitude or her thinking. She’d gained her personal objective far, far above and beyond any expectation, including her own. Sally said, ‘But you’ve told me. Shown me.’
‘I already told you I don’t know why I did.’
I believe I do, she thought. ‘You’ve no cause for worry.’
‘I’ve got things to do,’ Irvine announced, stirring himself.
‘I want to stay.’
He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Sally was bewildered at the ease with which Irvine hacked into the Pentagon Web site and just as easily worked his way through their subsites until he remarked it was NSA technicians and operators who’d recommended its design and installation. He explained, ‘And fifteen-year-old kids still get in and put the country on war footings.’ In the first hour Irvine forwarded what Sally estimated to be in excess of three hundred Pentagon entry codes to Fort Meade for supercomputer comparison against Smartman@deathtrade.org.mil. By 5:00 a.m., when Irvine called a halt, Sally guessed he’d downloaded more than a thousand, in addition to whatever registrations had independently been logged at Fort Meade. None had disclosed the Vevak recipient address.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Sally.
‘Start again tomorrow.’
‘You going to tell someone at CIA?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You should—know, I mean. And tell someone.’
‘It’s late.’
‘We should go to bed,’ she agreed.
They came together like longtime, familiar lovers, each knowing the other’s wants and pleasures, he unhurriedly undressing her and savouring her nakedness, Sally taking her time to undress him, tasting his body. They kept the pace, touching and feeling and luxuriating in each other, waiting for each other, and arriving together. They stayed locked together in sleep and awoke anxious for each other, and again it was perfect.
When it finally ended, Irvine said, ‘I’m safe with you. I know that.’
Sally didn’t speak, quieted by the knowledge that for the first time she hadn’t stayed apart, uninvolved. She’d made love.
27
In the Washington tradition—and speed—of political buck passing, the responsibility for al Aswamy’s claimed seizure was shuffled all the way up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. From there the White House chief of staff passed it straight back to the internationally besieged State Department with a demand for a politically and publicly acceptable explanation for the continued official silence. Encouraged by the implied presidential authority, the State Department convened a Homeland Security breakfast session restricted to directors and their deputies of all of its component agencies, who with one voice embarked upon another Washington tradition, the scapegoat hunt.
Each lined up behind the FBI—enraged at what it insisted to be illegal encroachment upon its internal U.S. jurisdiction and daily pillorying by an even more enraged New York Times—to denounce the CIA’s handling of the al Aswamy search as negligent, incompetent, and leaderless. None risked openly identifying the hapless Conrad Graham as the obvious sacrifice for authorizing Cyber Shepherd. But the tuned-in Graham already knew that CIA director Admiral Jack Lamb was privy to the intended career assassination of Graham, himself: despite Graham’s persistently memoed requests, he’d had no prior consultation with Lamb during the two-day, White-House-and-back runaround.
Based on how the criticisms had so far been voiced, Graham believed that he could face down the other agencies. His uncertainty was in publicly confronting someone who was not only a political appointee but also someone with the inherent support of fellow admiral and Homeland Security director Joshua Smith. But one word—political—lingered in Graham’s mind as he looked beyond the assembled directors to the White House and State Department staffers, none of whose expressions or body language matched the increasingly obvious satisfaction at the blame-fest that Joshua Smith was encouraging.
The specific insistence was for a public and politically acceptable explanation, Graham reminded himself. And the fixed-faced, unimpressed professional diplomats were the arbiters. For the second time that morning Graham pushed aside the temptation to totally scrap his intended counter-attack and improvise instead upon Jack Irvine’s unexpected phone call minutes before he’d entered the meeting. But there wasn’t enough information from what Irvine had hinted at. And whatever Graham speculated wouldn’t fit the White House remit, which hadn’t been addressed by anyone. That had to be his escape route.
And still wasn’t being addressed, Graham recognized, as FBI director Frederick Bowyer, with unembarrassed hypocrisy, demanded the CIA resolve a CIA debacle and that they publicly identify and discipline the inept officers responsible to restore public confidence. That having been done, the pursuit of Ismail al Aswamy had to be transferred to the FBI, whose investigation it should have been from the outset.
What little doubt Graham had of his total abandonment came with Joshua Smith’s invitation to Lamb—Jack, not Mr Director, the courtesy title by which he’d addressed every other agency head—to respond.
The debacle, unquestionably the fault of the CIA, had tarnished his recent appointment as its director, declared the grey-haired, smooth-faced Lamb, each word carefully selected. He intended a complete overhaul of operational procedures to prevent future failures and welcomed suggestions from all the Homeland Security agencies. He’d had no personal involvement in, nor did he endorse, Operation Cyber Shepherd, which had been initiated before his appointment. Specific details and answers to all the criticism would be provided by his deputy, Conrad Graham, who had approved the project.
Graham didn’t hurry assembling what little counter-argument he had with the lawyer’s acumen with which he’d graduated from Harvard. He intentionally waited for shifts of impatience from those around him before abruptly declaring, ‘I’m disappointed that so much time has been wasted without a single, constructive suggestion for what we’ve been brought together to provide.’
The shift in mood now was to startled surprise, the most visible from Admiral Smith. Hurrying to build upon it, Graham went word for word, line by line, through every accusation, logically insisting on the disarray that self-serving individual exculpation would cause, doubling the political and public clamour they were meant to allay.
Continuing to draw upon his lawyer’s training, Graham mentally composed an alternative as he demolished the arguments of others, encouraged by the now-visible reactions of the State Department and White House contingents. The Homeland Security announcement should be neither apologetic nor an admission of fault or failure, Graham asserted. Rather it should illustrate a considered, objective anti-terrorist investigation that had prevented a totally innocent man from being wrongly accused on circumstantial evidence provided by a closely allied Western intelligence service. That totally innocent man had been released. The inevitable demands for an identity would be enormous, conceded Graham. But they could be rejected on the grounds of fairness: innocent or not, the man’s life would be ruined by public exposure. The statement should make clear that no Homeland Security component had any knowledge of how the original story of Ismail al Aswamy’s seizure appeared in The New York Times.
There should be reassurance, insisted Graham. It should be made clear that obviously not every resource had been assigned to the misled investigation. Independent, parallel enquiries had guaranteed the unremitting hunt for Ismail al Aswamy continued and was lawfully led by the Central Intelligence Agency, responsible for external intelligence.
It was a decision for Homeland Security whether publicly to admit CIA failings, continued Graham, reaching for his briefcase for the prepared photocopied performance warnings to both Charles Johnston and James Bradley. Sliding the copies along the table for individual distribution, Graham read aloud his five-day-old replacement recommendation for both men that had been ignored by Admiral Lamb. He also offered his written requests to Lamb for a pre-conference briefing at which he had intended to outline every point he was making that morning. Apart from the two men whose replacement he’d recommended, the CIA’s failings were not those of incompetence but of too little adjustment time for a newly appointed director.
Neither had Operation Cyber Shepherd failed. It had proved the outstanding anti-terrorist success he’d anticipated when he’d originally authorized it.
‘And which it will continue to be, with other anti-terrorist activities as well as hunting down al Aswamy,’ Graham concluded, intent on the response from around the table.
Jack Lamb was looking for guidance from Joshua Smith, whose concentration in turn was on the murmurs among the White House and State Department group, some of whom were exchanging scribbled legal-pad notes. More messages were passing between other directors, too.
The FBI’s Frederick Bowyer broke the confused impasse. ‘So there’s been no mistakes! No-one’s done anything wrong!’
‘Just the normal internal glitches of an ongoing investigation,’ agreed Graham, defeating the intended sarcasm.
‘You really think The New York Times is going to buy it?’
‘You were as misled as a lot of other people in the beginning,’ guided Graham, conscious of two of the White House staffers openly smiling. ‘You’re genuinely sorry and you’ll make it up to them with a lot of exclusives in the future, starting with the confirmed arrest—or whatever the outcome—of al Aswamy.’