The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

She’d come through the revelation of the affair with Jack better than she’d expected, Sally decided, making her way out of the embassy. Her cell phone rang the moment she turned it on in the parking lot.

  Irvine said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach you! I’m on my way back.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Owen Place. An hour.’

  * * *

  Sally left the car at Guest Quarters and used the metro route, confident she cleared her trail. She got to Owen Place with time to spare and checked for a stakeout, which she didn’t detect. She waited fifteen minutes after Irvine arrived and was sure he hadn’t been followed, either.

  ‘So what is it?’ she demanded as she entered, anxious to guard against misspeaking from the beginning.

  ‘GCHQ are holding out on us!’

  Not enough! ‘Holding out how? On what?’

  ‘An interception we didn’t make, although we did provide the original IP: we left it alone, believing it didn’t have any U.S. relevance. Your guys are obviously assuming we got it, and they’re limiting what they’re telling us! What do you know about it?’

  As little as possible, Sally warned herself. ‘Just that it’s new; that they were having trouble. Let me see it so you can explain what more you need to know.’

  Irvine frowned, for a moment hesitating, but finally went to his computer bank. Sally was at his shoulder when the post came on his screen, glad she wasn’t in his eyeline to see her startled reaction.

  It wasn’t a Smartman message; the connection went beyond the Hydarnes source. And at last she thought she knew what she was seeing in all the other domain names, despite this one’s being different!

  33

  The domain IP was Kermani@imagemaking.org.ye. The concluding YE designated Yemen as the registration country. John Poulter’s covering e-mail said they hadn’t intercepted it until it was forwarded on Facebook from Riga, Latvia’s capital, to their blanket-monitored Malmö site. Nothing indicated its continuing on to the UK; they suspected a memory-stick transfer. GCHQ was currently defeated by the encryption. Was Operation Cyber Shepherd encountering similar difficulty? Or had it made progress? If it had, however small or inconclusive, GCHQ would welcome the immediate guidance beyond the terms of the Echelon agreement, on the basis of their earlier co-operation on Facebook channeling. Had Fort Meade considered onetime message pads unexpected—even bizarre—as such antiquated cryptology might appear at first?

  Sally’s primary concentration was upon the intangible Facebook post—counting and comparing letters, every time with the same result except for the identity—but at the same time she was also trying to resolve her other uncertainties. The most important of which—personal and professional in equal measure—was that Jack Irvine hadn’t been lying to her about their lack of progress. Nor had John Poulter lied to Monkton. GCHQ had intercepted a total of four, not one Facebook transmission beyond NSA’s original Smartman trawl. And Poulter, suspecting Fort Meade was hanging back, was spreading his bets, hoping she might provide more information on one and Meade on the other.

  Monkton was right, although not exactly from the same perspective. She was definitely at the operation’s centre. For an uncertain period, maybe—exactly just how long still depended on a lot of variables over the next twenty-four hours—but momentarily she was in a position of not just knowing all that was going on but possibly, even, of manipulating it to her advantage. And Irvine would never, ever, know how she’d juggled her professional and personal integrity.

  What about the variables, one above all others? Not a variable, Sally at once corrected herself: a hypothesis that had taken some time to get clear in her mind and still risked her being ridiculed by John Poulter. Would her awareness of his NSA approach be sufficient to persuade the man to restore her open access to Britain’s eavesdropping facility even if he ridiculed what she was going to suggest? From variable to hypothesis to yet another conundrum, to go with too many others.

  She could, of course, do the whole thing differently: put her suggestion to Monkton for him to propose. But that risked exposing the Director-General to humiliation if the idea was laughable, as well as—an equal if not more essential consideration—losing her Sellafield-gained reputation for innovative thinking if it provided the way forward.

  ‘Did you know about it!’ repeated Irvine, impatient at the time she was taking hunched over his screen.

  Why didn’t she put her theory to Irvine? There wouldn’t be any humiliation if he laughed it away: it could become their personal joke, something for both of them to laugh about. For the same reasons that she wasn’t going to involve Monkton, she acknowledged, with customary self-honesty. Avoiding the question, she said, ‘Mirza Kermani was an Iranian revolutionary: assassinated a shah. You didn’t have his name as a trigger word?’

  ‘I just told you we didn’t have anything,’ said Irvine, the impatience growing. ‘You’d have known if we had.’

  Sally pushed aside the faintest twinge of guilt. ‘And you haven’t responded directly to the Kermani discovery?’

  ‘With what! We’ve got nothing to respond with!’

  Except pride, Sally thought, recognizing like for like. Which was a passing thought: she could move the pieces around the board to position herself even more firmly at the epicentre. ‘I can sort the differences there seem to be between you and GCHQ through Monkton, but not now. It’s three o’clock in the morning in England!’

  ‘This will be the end of your being here—of everything—if it’s not sorted. Graham would have already nailed you to the barn door if he knew GCHQ were holding back.’

  ‘Let’s not tell him then.’ Sally smiled.

  * * *

  For the first time since that awkward first night, the lovemaking wasn’t good, although both of them feigned otherwise, and yet again Sally was awake long before Irvine. She waited until she reached the living room to put on their shared bathrobe. It was instinctive to stop at the sentinel line of black-faced, standby-lighted computers. The touch of a key would wake the master screen, instantly showing what might have come from Fort Meade over the past few hours. If there had been progress, everything could be affected—changed entirely—and need complete re-evaluation to keep her ahead. Sally snatched back the reaching-out hand, as if the firewalls had physical, burning heat. Irvine had described his protection as impregnable: talked of self-destruct programs against intrusion supplemented by specialized connection USBs that instantly garbled unauthorized entry. But she wasn’t hacking in: she was already there, officially accepted. She simply wanted to wake a hibernating machine. Her hand twitched but stayed tight to her side. It was wrong to become impatiently over-confident, to take risks that didn’t need to be taken.

  Sally pulled the robe more tightly around her and pushed farther into the room. With its photographic display, it was, she realized, far more complete than her initial impressions. There was even a picture—the location unidentifiable from its background—of a boy of about nine she presumed to be Irvine gazing up admiringly at his white-haired, immaculately uniformed father. Not simply a family collage, Sally decided: there was only one, an indistinct picture of the woman who had to have been Irvine’s mother. It was a shrine, an homage, to an adored man.

  ‘Did you know him? Did your father know him, I mean?’ Irvine was unashamedly—bizarrely, it immediately seemed to Sally—naked, as he had been the morning after their first unfulfilled encounter.

  ‘My father would have, obviously. I knew the name, that’s all. I don’t remember ever being in his company. I was away in England, at school and college for a lot of the time.’ She hadn’t wanted this, didn’t want it.

  ‘He was betrayed—cheated—by people he trusted.’

  ‘Is this what Shepherd’s all about, surrogate revenge?’

  ‘No!’ denied Irvine, red-faced.

  It was lightening outside, dawn maybe in another hour. Around nine now in London. ‘I’m glad, because that would have been confused thinking, and there’s alr
eady some confused thinking that I’ve got to sort out, remember?’

  ‘I’m not on a surrogate revenge trip!’

  ‘I believe you,’ lied Sally. ‘I need to get dressed now and do my job.’

  Which she was on her way to do when the news break came on the Volkswagen radio.

  Irvine said, ‘That’s not going to affect anything, is it?’

  ‘Sounds like stage posturing,’ dismissed Sally.

  Which, by itself, it was. But at that moment—and for a further hour to follow—she didn’t know how a cruel chance would be over-interpreted and re-fuel the terrorist hysteria on two continents.

  * * *

  Sally’s dismissal of the car-radio news flash was based solely on sound-bite extracts from Giovanni Moro’s first public court arraignment in Rome, which in addition to radio coverage was televised live. And for which, knowing Italian law permitted personal opening statements, the murdered politician’s grandson had meticulously prepared.

  The beard and moustache had gone. The hair was almost militarily short. The tie was muted grey. The shirt was pale pink, to appear white on-screen by avoiding the strobe-light glare. The well-tailored suit was businessman black. The voice in which he announced he would defend himself (“against lies and hypocrisy with truth and honesty”) was clearly audible but not strident. The rehearsed opening statement was measured, free of histrionic tirade. The fundamentalist clichés were restricted to martyrs (jihadist warriors), Satan or satanic (the USA and its Western acolytes), and crusaders (Western opponents or oppressors).

  The United States of America was powerless to confront or defeat the forces of Allah. The wrath of God was continuing what had begun (“but thwarted by deception”) with the attack upon Rome’s Colosseum and England’s nuclear facility. It would engulf the West in blood, war, and devastation. For every fallen martyr ascending into paradise, a hundred crusaders would die to descend into hell.

  From the live television and radio recordings it was possible to fix at precisely 11:32 a.m. the moment Moro declared, ‘Today is the Armageddon against infidels.’

  It was also the precise moment two suicide bombers simultaneously detonated their backpacks in the second and third carriages of a train as it entered Madrid’s Atocha terminus. Sixty-three people, including the bombers, died instantly. A further thirty-six died on a train stationary at the opposite platform. The explosion almost completely ripped off the roof of the still-moving third carriage, although it remained intact and attached at one end as it flattened sideways into a massive scythe that sliced waist-high along the entire length of the platform upon which people who’d escaped the direct blast still stood or huddled, too shocked or dazed to move. Thirty died on the platform. Twenty more were among the total of fifty-five from the two trains who died later in hospital. More than a hundred were permanently maimed.

  At 11:55 a.m. an unwitting Sally was connected from the British embassy communications facility to GCHQ’s John Poulter, who was also totally unaware at that time of the atrocity.

  * * *

  ‘I’ve discussed everything with your director-general,’ declared John Poulter stiffly.

  On the point of rejection before she’d spoken a word, Sally thought, attuned to the tone. She had to restore her relationship with the man, which meant convincing him as quickly as she could that he had more to lose than to achieve by blocking her out. ‘I know. And thank you for the twenty-four-hour concession with the Smartman transmissions, which Meade hadn’t intercepted. Neither had they seen Kermani until your post to them.’

  After an initial silence from England, which Sally took as a good omen, Poulter said finally, ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Positive. And as of this moment they’re making no progress with Kermani.’

  ‘What about Smartman?’

  ‘Nothing that makes any sense. Meade believes you’re holding back. If I told them this morning another interception was coming and you sent it within, say, half an hour, it would reassure them you weren’t—iron out all the uncertainties.’

  ‘Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?’

  The rejecting tone wasn’t there, but had it gone sufficiently for the question she had to ask next? Risking it, Sally said, ‘You aren’t, are you—holding anything back?’

  ‘Why would we?’

  Not the answer she wanted. Avoid Poulter’s promotional concern, she decided. ‘Because of the problems in 2013 when the CIA contractor defected: the Prism Project and GCHQ’s Tempura programme?’

  Another silence. Then Poulter said, ‘No, we’re not holding back. Something’s being set up: that much is clear from the amount of electronic chatter, quite apart from the coded transmissions we’re intercepting but can’t read. And wherever the hell it’s planned for, we’ve got to stop it.’

  ‘Send all the Smartman material to Meade an hour after we finish talking. They’ll know it’s on the way.’

  ‘An hour from now,’ accepted Poulter, moving to close the conversation.

  ‘There’s more I want to say!’ stopped Sally. ‘I’m glad that we are talking, as we were before.’

  ‘We’ve got an atrocity to stop.’

  Let him have the justification, thought Sally, satisfied. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ demanded Poulter, the impatience returning.

  ‘Start from Anis@mukhtarbrigade.ru. Compare it to Mohammed@homagebridge.ye. Then to Nek@dangerrange.ng. Follow that with Swordbearer@forevermystery.org.uk.’ She paused. ‘You seeing anything?’

  ‘No,’ said the man flatly.

  ‘Go on to Smartman@deathtrade.org.mil to Kermani@imagemaking.org.ye.’

  ‘For God’s sake, make your point, Sally!’

  ‘All IP addresses in every domain name are created—with the exception of Kermani—from the same letters in the first NSA interception, Anis@mukhtarbrigade. Ignore the country registration letters. What about the numeric ASCII code. Why can’t the real terrorist messages be encoded in the IP domain address with the recipient maybe having a crib—the modern equivalent of a onetime numeric message pad—that you’ve actually been working on?’

  After a snort of derision, Poulter said, ‘Absolutely ridiculous! Absurd!’

  ‘Why? Because it’s technically impossible? Or because it’s something you’ve never considered or encountered before?’

  ‘Mathematics has rules: conformity.’

  ‘All the domain addresses we’re talking about have a mathematical rule.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You at a station?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Split your screen and load Kermani and Smartman and Swordbearer side by side.’

  John Poulter became silent. So did Sally. She could hear his breathing; twice there was a heavy inhalation, as if he were about to speak, but he didn’t. Then, suddenly, there was a faint sound of what she hoped was realization. The man said, ‘It’s an understandable impression.’

  ‘It’s a lot more than an impression,’ insisted Sally, emboldened. ‘All domain addresses are composed from identical Roman-alphabet lettering, although each make up different words. All vary in length and in the number of intervening decimal dots. In the longer addresses, the same letters are repeated.’

  ‘So they’re the code we’ve got to break?’ It was a genuine question, not sarcasm.

  ‘I think they make up coded messages. But acknowledging that these guys aren’t amateurs, I’d expect they’ll be as intentionally misleading as whatever the supposed, currently indecipherable message will turn out to be.’

  ‘What do the NSA team say?’

  The flattery of honesty, Sally decided. ‘I risked your ridicule in preference to theirs.’

  ‘I like our working together again,’ Poulter said.

  So did she, decided Sally; one hurdle crossed, two more to go.

  * * *

  Harry Packer stared down at the loan rejection letter, his stomach—and his mind—hollowed in despair. It had been his last resort—all th
e other already-tapped sources run dry—and the fucking bank, which already had 30 percent of the house, wasn’t just refusing to extend by another $5,000, but was demanding a reduction on the existing debt in a month. And that was the limit Rebecca’s lawyer had imposed in his letter the previous day before initiating court proceedings for back alimony.

  He needed a miracle, Packer knew, and there were no such things as miracles.

  34

  The coincidence that was to cause so much confusion and as many misconceptions was the arraignment in Rome of Giovanni Moro—with his earlier Basque terrorist associations—coming on the same day and time as the Spanish atrocity, which was instigated by an Algerian-based Al Qaeda affiliate and totally unconnected with al Aswamy or the Colosseum attack. The misinterpretation, never fully corrected, was compounded in less than an hour by Al Jazeera’s transmitting an Oran-sourced suicide video identifying the bombers as two more American, ex-army converts disaffected by their combat tours in Afghanistan.

  Italy’s publicity-eager justice minister provided what was initially accepted by American and European governments—and the international media—as official confirmation of the continuation of the al Aswamy jihad. Utilizing the adjust-as-required adaptability of Italy’s legal system, the minister suspended Giovanni Moro’s court appearance and announced on television a re-opening of the investigation into Moro’s terrorist activities. Madrid immediately accepted the Italian invitation to participate.

  Presented with a better-scripted opportunity than he’d prepared for his fifteen minutes of dubious fame, Moro improvised that his court declaration had been planned in the event of his capture. Rome’s announcement of his trial a week ahead of its opening had given the Madrid bombers their simultaneous time frame.

  Sally emerged for a brief, in-between calls respite from cubicle claustrophobia to the Italian foreign minister’s voice-over reaction to mobile-phone footage of the Madrid carnage, preparing her for the conversation she would be having with David Monkton. He, predictably, was unemotionally monotone, rejecting pre-conception and the invited hysteria from nervous Downing Street support staff anticipating parliamentary demands for Italian explanations. He told Sally he was awaiting reports from the Rome embassy rezidentura, as well as inevitable approaches from Italian and Spanish counter-intelligence. She was to keep in closer touch—from her CIA office, to establish her presence there—in case any positive associations were established.