The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

‘We know it’s Iranian because of Hydarnes. But the encryption is as clever as hell. It doesn’t conform to any mathematical rule, which ultimately it has to.’

  ‘Help me,’ urged Sally, lost.

  ‘At the moment we’re working on the principle of it going back to wartime cryptology,’ predicted the code-breaker. ‘Onetime message pads. The recipient already possesses the crib to transcribe the once-only encoded message he or she gets: neither the code nor its key is ever used again. New code, new crib, every time: nowhere for us to start, no comparisons we can make between a repetition of symbols, numbers, algebra … between any damned thing.’

  ‘Shit,’ broke in Sally.

  ‘Mountains of it. Just to make it more difficult, that one message needn’t be complete. It could be split, first half in the initial encryption, next part in another code. And that division needn’t be limited to two separations: it can be divided three or four times, impossible to read without its specific individual key. And it still doesn’t stop there. You want to make it really difficult, the deciphering—although it might translate into what appear to be comprehensible words or phrases—can turn out to be meaningless because those words or phrases represent algebraic numerals or symbols that need a totally different codex. And you’ve guessed it—that second mutation is onetime, too.’

  ‘You telling me it’s unbreakable?’

  ‘I’m telling you it can’t be broken in hours. For this stuff you can forget speed-of-light supercomputers and number crunching.’

  After a momentary silence from both ends, Sally broke it. ‘Could these two messages be to different recipients?’

  After another pause John said, ‘A lateral thinker!’

  ‘One or two?’ persisted Sally, caught by an attitude quite different from her previous exchanges with the man, particularly over Sellafield.

  ‘We’re expecting there to be two, using a shared IP,’ reluctantly conceded the code-breaker.

  ‘Remind me again what a shared IP means.’

  There was a discernible sigh. ‘Sharing the same domain address.’

  ‘Could it be more than two senders?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Sally’s eyes fogged, cleared, then fogged again from the intensity with which she was staring down at the side-by-side printouts. But it was not the absolute concentration nor the further silence that unsettled her. It was a freakish sensation, which she later thought akin to hallucination, of not recognizing something from the shapes of symbols and number outlines burning into her mind. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut to refocus, clearing her vision and the impression with it, only partially registering the words from GCHQ.

  ‘… from Fort Meade?’ Sally heard.

  ‘I’m sorry, I missed that?’

  ‘I asked what progress Meade’s made on Smartman and Anis,’ repeated the man impatiently. ‘That’s why you’ve called, isn’t it? That’s the arrangement…?’

  It was, Sally accepted uneasily, surprised the demand had taken so long. ‘Like you, nothing.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing at all?’ queried the man disbelievingly.

  Sally’s unease deepened at the assertiveness: she wasn’t leading anymore, not keeping control of the exchanges. ‘Not as of last night. It’s still only six in the morning here. I’ll come back to you around your three this afternoon.’

  ‘I need to speak direct, technically,’ said the man briskly. ‘They might have some progress that would make sense to me but not to you. They’ve had more time, after all.’

  ‘It’ll be better if you wait,’ insisted Sally, confronting a situation—and an attitude—she hadn’t anticipated. ‘My being here’s sensitive. It took a lot to get this degree of co-operation. It’ll jeopardize it—give the impression you and I aren’t working fully together—if they get a direct approach.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! There are things impossible to communicate through you … things you wouldn’t understand. Call me this afternoon, after I’ve spoken to them.’

  Sally’s reaction was immediate. She overrode every communications-room protest from other users demanding priority connection to Thames House, repeating the insistence to reach David Monkton. He cut her off with ‘Stay there’ after less than a minute, leaving her in what she accepted as an appropriate punishment sweatbox, uncertain if she’d explained sufficiently.

  It scarcely mattered, Sally concluded, edging the cubicle door ajar. Cheltenham wouldn’t agree to what she’d pleaded with Monkton to achieve. She—and technically GCHQ because their officer had trusted and worked with her—would be circumventing an internationally negotiated and agreed-upon operational procedure. Could she recover to stay involved? She thought she could. She’d lose all direct co-operation from GCHQ, but hopefully Monkton could retain that at some level. And Irvine was still at Langley, maybe not even going down to Fort Meade; if there was a reason, they’d arranged to speak before he left, so she’d be able to tell him about Anis before any GCHQ approach. Definitely recoverable then. What about David Monkton? She hadn’t … Sally’s mind was suddenly seized, the reflection broken—as it had been less than an hour earlier—by the side-by-side Vevak transmissions still set out on the cubicle ledge.

  There was something, a connection between the two that she should be seeing, questioning—which was preposterous. How could she, someone knowing nothing of the techniques or craft of code-breaking, imagine—because that’s what she was doing, imagining a significance without being able to see or say or work out what it was—when the interceptions were defeating the best mathematically trained minds in American and British cryptology. And yet …

  The linkup signal jarred into the cubicle, startling her, and Sally almost dropped the headset fumbling it back into place.

  ‘It didn’t go well,’ announced the Director-General. ‘They’re not prepared to breach international protocols, which I didn’t expect them to be, no matter how important we consider this individual operation. Co-operation and participation, particularly with NSA, is how they work. It’s their ethos. And there’s more to it than that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The man you’ve been liaising with, John Poulter, is short-listed for the deputy directorship, largely on the strength of his involvement with Sellafield. It got GCHQ a prime ministerial commendation, which more than balanced all the problems in 2013 when they had to admit receiving one hundred million pounds from NSA for circumventing American law; they didn’t like being labeled poodles or being exposed by renegade spy-agency contractors. They want distance from us.’

  ‘As bad as that!’

  ‘The best I could do was to get them not to send their Smartman questions to Meade for twenty-four hours, to give you time to fix things at your end.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sally, chastened and not liking the feeling.

  ‘From now on I must be the first person you speak to professionally in the morning.’

  ‘You will be.’

  ‘Your remaining where you are depends upon it.’

  * * *

  ‘Thirty guys in the unit,’ spelled out Conrad Graham. ‘Know them all personally from my time at Covert Operations: vouch for every one of them. No private agendas, no fuckups. All of them thought Johnston was an asshole: dodged any assignment with him in charge knowing it would fuck up.’

  ‘I wish it had been organized like this from the start,’ said Jack Irvine, meaning it. It was his first contribution in the thirty minutes it had taken Graham to set out the CIA organization he’d put into place to re-establish Operation Cyber Shepherd.

  ‘I wish a lot of things had been organized like this from the start,’ came back the deputy director heavily. ‘This is how it’s got to be between us personally from now on, Jack, everything out on the table.’

  Irvine said, ‘That’s how I want it to be, too. Definitely how it has to be.’

  ‘Got six guys already working on the review.’

  ‘Review?’

  ‘Going right back to your
very first memo, before Operation Cyber Shepherd even had a name, before I left Covert Ops.’

  Irvine remained unmoving, stretched easily back in the enveloping chair opposite the deputy director, cold cups of coffee on the low table between them. ‘You think something got missed? That there was a mistake before al Aswamy was lost?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘Could have happened. It’ll do, until you break that goddamned Smartman encryption.’

  ‘My entire team is on it with me. It’s a bastard: the worst we’ve come up against in a long time. I’m going up to Meade when we’re through here.’

  ‘Nothing my guys can work on with you?’

  ‘Not from the encryption.’ Which was a qualification, not a lie. The only people who could work on what Marian Lowell had told him about the GCHQ message minutes before the Graham meeting were at Fort Meade, not Langley.

  ‘What then?’ Graham frowned, recognizing the reservation.

  ‘Surveillance is back.’

  There was another shrug. ‘The list of those stacked up against us is too long for a realistic sweep. We’ve got to live with it.’

  ‘It’s a pain in the ass.’

  ‘Don’t let it be. What about your team? You got enough working with you up there?’

  ‘We’re not working bulk. Computers do the donkey work, and I’ve got all the facilities I need available at Meade.’

  ‘What about the doubters you talked about in your team?’

  ‘Not any longer. A hundred percent behind it.’ Burt Singleton was working as hard as everyone else now, maybe even harder.

  ‘The review I’ve started?’ pressed Graham. ‘The file is complete, isn’t it? Nothing’s at Fort Meade that needs factoring in?’

  ‘Nothing,’ guaranteed Irvine, who’d ensured every connecting link with Stuxnet had been eradicated. After he’d irrecoverably wiped it clean, he’d dropped the computer hard drive holding the Vevak discovery into the Mediterranean during a farewell Israeli R&R in Herzliya.

  ‘We need to keep the Hanning woman locked in with us,’ continued the other man. ‘She could be our get-out insurance if there’s a problem with Abu al Hurr’s death.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Irvine tightly.

  ‘I’ll call her.’

  * * *

  Sally snatched up the apartment telephone on its first ring. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

  ‘Things took longer.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On my way to work,’ said Irvine, awkward with the necessary ambiguity on an insecure line.

  Sally hesitated. ‘We arranged to speak first.’

  ‘There could be something.’

  ‘New or old?’ demanded Sally, concern flaring.

  ‘New, from the Brits. I don’t know anything more than that.’

  Two-faced, cheating bastards, Sally thought. ‘I got an indication when I called this morning. That’s why I wanted to talk.’

  ‘I’ll come back tonight.’

  ‘Don’t if there’s something to work on.’

  ‘If there is, I’ll call.’

  ‘Do that, either way.’ Her phone rang again the moment she put it down.

  32

  Sally passed unchallenged through Langley’s outer security on her MI5 accreditation. At the CIA complex an escort waited to take her through the identity-recording barriers to the executive level. There, another escort, female this time, was at the arrival elevator to take her to the deputy director’s suite. Conrad Graham was at the open door, beyond the double-banked protective ring of personal assistants and secretaries. The deputy director, immaculate in a jacket, knife-creased trousers, and stiff-collared shirt, solicitously guided her to an already set visitor’s chair before going to his pristinely uncluttered, authority-demarcating desk. No coffee was offered. No secretarial notetaker, either. There’d be an automatic recording system, Sally knew, remembering Monkton’s noise blank-out.

  He didn’t intend to review past mistakes, Graham began, the presentation obviously prepared. Getting al Aswamy topped the recovery agenda. To achieve that he’d assembled a handpicked CIA task force, with SEAL and SWAT backup. She was officially to be part of that task force, at the epicentre of Operation Cyber Shepherd. He’d cleared that seconded appointment an hour earlier in a telephone conversation with David Monkton. An office was being made available to her at Langley. She’d have direct access to him at all times, through the Watch Room if it was out of hours; until al Aswamy was in a body bag, nothing was out of hours.

  Graham extended a closely cupped hand. ‘This is how we’ll have the son of a bitch Aswamy, like we got bin Laden, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ Sally nodded, hoping it hadn’t sounded like mockery. It was a composite performance of every spy movie she’d ever watched—with borrowings from a few crime series.

  Graham shook his head. ‘Let me hear some real feedback!’

  He wouldn’t like hearing that she still believed herself the convenient sacrifice to disaster. ‘This is where I want to be, at the centre. I think I can make a contribution,’ she said, accepting that she sounded like a programmed talking doll.

  ‘The media problem’s getting bigger—closer—by the day.’

  Could the publicity be her nemesis? wondered Sally: she’d proposed the original press manipulation. ‘They’re being fed leaks. Being briefed.’

  ‘We couldn’t survive the shitstorm if they learned about Abu Hurr. Neither of us could.’

  Was he talking personally or of their separate organizations? ‘Did you discuss it with my director-general?’

  ‘It’s your input I’m looking for!’

  ‘I’ll give it to you when I’ve properly thought it through.’

  ‘And after you’ve spoken to Monkton.’

  ‘Of course after I’ve spoken to Monkton!’ shot back Sally, determined to end the exchange on her terms, not his. Feeling no hypocrisy she went on, ‘The shit we’re trying to recover from was dumped by too many people trying to follow too many personal agendas.’

  She hadn’t expected an open admission that there was no NSA-linked CIA investigation, but at no time during this meeting had there been any reference to Fort Meade or Jack Irvine. The logical question risked an awkward as well as predictable answer, but she needed to ask it. ‘Jack Irvine’s obviously part of this inner group that I’m now a part of.’ There was no reaction from Graham at the mention of Irvine’s name. ‘Who else? No one. This is a no-mistakes troika, Jack providing everything from NSA, your input—that’s Monkton’s guarantee, total British input—and me coordinating it all from here, at Langley.’

  ‘You know Jack from way back, of course,’ chanced Sally.

  ‘What’s he told you about that!’ demanded the CIA deputy sharply.

  ‘Nothing operational,’ said Sally, immediately detecting the suspicion. ‘Just that you and he worked together. Stuxnet is public knowledge: there was an obvious connection.’

  ‘He did good there. He’s got to do even better now.’

  It would be a mistake to push it any further. ‘Do I get to see my office?’

  ‘Tomorrow. On the same floor as Jack’s.’ Graham extended his cupped hand again, crushing it closed this time. ‘That’s what’s going to happen when we get the bastard.’

  Graham might already be fantasizing about the Hollywood biopic of al Aswamy’s seizure, but she didn’t think he was a good enough actor to have carried on this long without an indication she’d have recognized. So Graham didn’t know about her affair with Irvine. Which he would have if he’d been responsible for the surveillance. ‘Thanks for bringing me in.’

  ‘You’ve got a part to play.’

  To my script, not yours, instinctively thought Sally.

  * * *

  And she thought it again, although from a different perspective, at Monkton’s reaction to her account of the Conrad Graham meeting. ‘There’s nothing we hadn’t already anticipated.’

  Sally said, ‘I’m briefing you on the meeting, not making a
plea!’ She’d decided against telling Monkton of his apparent failure to convince GCHQ to hold back its approach to the NSA and was further disconcerted by the attitude she was confronting now.

  ‘Good,’ said the Director, clip-voiced. ‘You’re embedded now as deeply as it’s possible to be. And I did promise the total co-operation to provide you with as much protection as possible. You do, of course, have the added protection of your personal involvement.’

  Sally’s discomfort was at the communications cubicle’s constrictions, not Monkton’s reference to the affair, until it struck her that the man’s surprising acceptance of a relationship with Irvine was prompted by Monkton’s expectation of precisely such professional benefits. ‘Hopefully,’ she qualified pointedly.

  ‘That’s for you to ensure.’

  ‘Our response—yours and mine—to Abu Hurr’s death needs to conform if it’s leaked, which is very likely in a bear pit like this.’

  ‘He died in U.S. custody, not ours.’

  ‘Custody we facilitated on a rendition flight.’

  ‘We made Abu Hurr available to U.S. authorities here in London after the Sellafield investigation discovered he had illegally entered the United Kingdom from America, which he’d legally entered on a still-valid student visa from Pakistan. He was still legally our prisoner: we were preparing indictments on terrorist charges. He had committed no offence in America. We had no awareness before handing him over that he would be repatriated to America, which was not discussed and certainly not agreed upon with Charles Johnston during any of our recorded contacts. Abu Hurr’s death made pointless any Foreign Office protest about the episode to Washington.’

  ‘That won’t be an easy message to pass on.’

  ‘Paraphrase it. Be subtle.’

  She’d deserved that, Sally conceded. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Don’t use Langley communications for our conversations—’

  ‘I know I’ll be monitored!’ broke in Sally, although keeping the impatience from her voice.

  ‘—unless there’s something you want to be intercepted.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, too,’ assured Sally contritely.