The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Not directly about that,’ qualified Fellowes, gesturing towards the newspaper.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m not breaking London’s rules of engagement, trying to encroach on forbidden territory. But I think you’ve been dealt a pretty shitty hand.’

  ‘Not a difficult judgment to reach,’ encouraged Sally, conscious of the attention from some of the other embassy staff in the corridor.

  ‘I’ve got friends, assets of sorts, in the Agency. And in the Bureau.’

  ‘I’d expect them to think of you as an asset, too.’ And be disappointed, she thought.

  ‘You’re being targeted,’ declared Fellowes flatly.

  ‘You sure about that, that it’s against me personally?’

  ‘As sure as I need to be.’

  Was she going to be challenged about herself and Irvine? Sally abruptly wondered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Inter-agency rivalry that’s all over the paper you’ve got under your arm, is what I think. Only a lot worse. Homeland Security’s too diversified to work effectively, properly: everyone’s staking their leadership claim, and there’s the proof of it, right there in your hand.’

  He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know—he was practically quoting verbatim from the paper as well—but she hadn’t anticipated danger beyond the tight circle into which she’d inveigled herself, the circle that very much included Jack Irvine. ‘Targeted how, exactly?’

  Fellowes shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Can’t find out in any precise detail. Discrediting exercise, possibly: CIA having to bring in British help.’ Hurriedly he added, ‘That’s a pure guess. Another guess is that the Madrid leak in this morning’s Times, resurrecting Abu Hurr from his unmarked grave, is part of it; maybe even a preliminary to more unspecified leaks.’

  Sally’s concentration was absolute now. ‘Did you get any steer on Abu Hurr and Madrid?’

  ‘Within an hour of it arriving at Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s why I wanted us to talk like this.’

  ‘Did you speak to London about it?’

  ‘No way!’ snorted Fellowes. ‘Forbidden territory, remember? Hands off, stay-away order signed by Director-General David Monkton himself. Which I’m ignoring talking to you now, putting myself at your mercy, in fact.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Sally, returning to the recurring question.

  ‘Not from altruism, believe me! From complete and utter self-interest and preservation. I don’t know what’s being mounted against you personally. But whatever it is, it won’t stop at you. It’ll ripple out to encompass the rezidentura, which I head. I don’t want to be caught up in any part of what you’re involved in: of what happens to you or Cyber Shepherd. I give you as much unofficial warning and help as I can—like I’m doing right now—I survive. I follow hands-off orders, I’m applying for jobs as a parking warden anytime soon. I don’t like the choice.’

  All the dots joined up to make a picture of sorts, conceded Sally. ‘I’m not sure I’ve even got a choice.’

  ‘I’m putting myself at your mercy.’

  ‘It’ll stay between us. I want to survive, too.’ Which—or whose—safety was she worried about, hers or Jack Irvine’s? Or both of them? She wasn’t sure of the answer.

  * * *

  For an organization in potential turmoil, outwardly Langley appeared as tranquil as its surrounding landscaped woodland. The customary taciturn escort—reduced by now to just one—delivered Sally to her room. The intercom sounded as she entered. An anonymous aide said Conrad Graham would see her and Irvine in two hours. They were to wait for his call.

  Irvine answered his Meade number on its first ring. ‘I hear you’re coming down?’ she said.

  ‘In about two hours.’

  ‘I heard that, too. I’m at Langley.’

  Irvine hesitated. ‘How is it there?’

  ‘Quiet. What about you?’

  Instead of answering, Irvine said, ‘You spoken to Poulter yet?’

  She should have called from the embassy, Sally thought, annoyed with herself: Why was she suddenly so concerned about their affair becoming known? ‘Not yet. What’s he told you?’

  ‘Can’t reach him,’ said Irvine shortly. ‘He’s at meetings.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Early breakfast this morning, London time.’

  Long after the New York Times disclosures, calculated Sally. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Redeemer’s gone quiet on us. Withdrawn.’

  ‘I’ll see you here in two hours.’ I hope, she thought. She had a lot to do before then.

  * * *

  ‘This isn’t a blame game,’ assured Frederick Bowyer. ‘Far from it. You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think I do, sir,’ said Ben Hardy.

  ‘You weren’t part of any over-reaction.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ For as long as he had a better use, thought Hardy objectively.

  ‘I need some inside leverage to make the Bureau’s case before any official enquiry or committee,’ reluctantly conceded Bowyer. ‘What’s happening with Packer and our guy?’

  ‘Jimmy’s set up an additional game for tonight. Says Packer’s flaky but doesn’t want to press too hard and spook him. Today’s Times has got to be the only other thing on tonight’s table apart from cards.’

  ‘I don’t want to spook him either, but I need to know what’s going on inside Meade and that special joint unit that’s running with the Agency: know the problems, the weaknesses that need plugging. They’re definitely there. It lost al Aswamy, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘I’ll talk to Jimmy right away.’

  ‘You got all the numbers to call me on, Ben.’

  ‘I have, sir.’

  * * *

  ‘That’s ridiculous! Doesn’t make any sense!’ argued Sally, exasperated, abandoning any thought of being able to get back to Langley from the embassy to meet Graham’s deadline. At that precise moment she didn’t give a damn. Nor did she care that from all the security checks and monitors her movements would be traceable in and out of Langley and the British embassy like a puppet on elastic strings.

  ‘I agree,’ said Monkton, as always frustratingly calm.

  ‘We know there’s going to be an attack! GCHQ withdrawing the specially agreed instant exchange like this could let it happen!’

  ‘A point I made personally, more than once, to the Director himself. To be told that all special arrangements had ended: that exchanges would revert to Echelon procedure unless outstanding circumstances arose.’

  ‘Outstanding circumstances like a fucking massacre we were too late to prevent!’

  ‘I gave that warning, too, without the profanity.’

  ‘You want me to apologize?’

  ‘No.’

  She would have found it difficult, thought Sally. ‘Why!’ she demanded, anguished.

  ‘The Director is new and GCHQ has been caught up too often in exposure and embarrassments of the sort that required the previous incumbent to resign, which his replacement doesn’t want to do. And today’s New York Times looks just like one of those embarrassments.’

  ‘Is everyone there thinking more about appointments and promotions than what they’re supposed to be doing!’

  ‘Questions like that don’t solve our problem.’

  ‘How much higher can you take it to get it reversed?’

  ‘I’ve already trodden on too many sensitive egos on this to have kept open receptive doors and ears. I’ve copied to GCHQ’s director and the foreign secretary the warning I’ve sent directly to the PM, so far without even acknowledgement from anyone.’

  ‘It’s got to be overturned, reversed!’

  ‘Give me something to do that with.’

  38

  Sally was an hour late getting back to Langley and didn’t care, twice ignoring her ringing cell phone until the third call as she was finally parking in the overflowing CIA lot.

  Irvine got as far as ‘Where the—?’ before she stopped him with ‘
I’m here, on my way up.’

  He was waiting at her office door. ‘Graham’s in meltdown.’

  ‘It’ll get worse,’ predicted Sally. ‘GCHQ have closed us out, frightened by the Times coverage. It’s strictly Echelon from now on except in extraordinary circumstances.’

  ‘We’re in extraordinary circumstances right now!’ insisted Irvine.

  ‘I’ve been in one ever since I went back to the embassy.’

  ‘I’ve told Graham you’re here; he already knew,’ said Irvine as they went up to the next floor.

  ‘The all-seeing electronic eyes and movement logs,’ said Sally sourly.

  ‘This better be a damned good story!’ greeted the deputy CIA director. His face was mottled red. The bourbon bottle of the previous night was gone, but Sally guessed it had been within arm’s reach minutes before they’d arrived.

  Turning the threat back on the man, she said, ‘It’s anything but good.’

  Graham’s face got redder as he listened, shifting awkwardly in his empowering executive chair. When Sally finished, the man said, ‘I’ll get on to Monkton.’

  ‘That’s who I’ve been talking to for the past three hours,’ said Sally impatiently. ‘And he’s talked until there’s nothing left to say to the GCHQ director, who’s adamant they’re going back to the official information-exchange system. Monkton’s gone direct to the prime minister, but as of an hour ago heard nothing back.’

  ‘What are the assholes worried about?’

  ‘Today’s New York Times.’ Sally looked directly at Graham, whose colour, which had started to recede, flared again.

  ‘The Senate intelligence committee are convening an enquiry session.’ Graham steadily held Sally’s gaze. ‘It’s being announced sometime today.’

  ‘That’ll frighten GCHQ even more.’

  ‘I’ll still call Monkton,’ stubbornly persisted Graham, turning to Irvine. ‘What’s this shit from Meade?’

  ‘Our best Vevak source—someone whose darknet transmission we could read because they weren’t encrypted—has closed down. The Brits were actually getting more than us. That’s why today was important: we could simply have switched to their interceptions—’

  ‘Whoa!’ stopped Graham. ‘How come they’re getting more than us?’

  ‘They’re blanketing a domain routing through Malmö, in Sweden, for what appears to be something directed at the UK. Some of the material that cross-referenced with us didn’t come on our Hydarnes route. Vevak’s obviously got another darknet we’re not into.’

  ‘Why’s our source closed down?’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Irvine. ‘Could be he was careless or arrogant or both by not encrypting: got punished for it. We don’t believe our close-down came from the guy we were used to: it was a totally different style, although he or she used the same domain name.’

  ‘What the hell are we left with?’ demanded Graham.

  ‘Only what we’ve already got and still can’t get a positive lead from.’

  ‘And the Brits have got more that they won’t share?’ Graham formed his fingers into a steeple that reminded Sally of the man’s earlier histrionics.

  Irvine hesitated, caught by the tone in Graham’s voice. ‘We think they might have,’ Irvine replied cautiously.

  ‘You know one of my favourite remarks?’ asked Graham with strained rhetoric. ‘Made by Richard Helms, one of the best CIA directors the Agency ever had. Called the CIA the president’s bag of tricks. We’ve already pulled a rabbit out of that bag proving with Cyber Shepherd that despite Iran’s nuclear non-proliferation bullshit, they’re still sponsoring Al Qaeda with communication facilities on darknet channels.’

  ‘I’m having difficulty keeping up with you,’ lied Sally.

  ‘We got an attack coming that we can’t do anything to stop, we’ve got to turn it over to people who can,’ declared Graham. ‘We’ve got to give Operation Cyber Shepherd over to the Brits.’

  * * *

  ‘Motherfucker!’ raged Irvine, fury trembling through him. ‘He can’t! No! Shepherd’s mine! I can do it. He’s got to let me do it.’

  Sally waved Irvine down into his chair, at once accepting that the outburst confirmed a lot of her earliest impressions, which saddened her. ‘He can do it and there’s unarguable justification that he should. It isn’t—can’t be—personal. If GCHQ have a better chance, a more definite lead, they’ve got to be given it. The only objectives are to stop attacks happening. If they crack the code that does it, it becomes the extraordinary circumstances they built into their back-channel refusal. So we’ll get it, too.’

  ‘But it won’t…,’ started Irvine, but stopped. Awkwardly he finished, ‘We don’t know they have a more definite lead!’

  But it won’t be me, thought Sally, mentally completing what Irvine had started to say. ‘You gave Graham enough reason to believe they have.’

  ‘Graham’s covering his ass. He passes it over, it’s not his responsibility anymore, is it? He’s squeaky-clean, every which way.’

  ‘Yes, he is. So are we.’ But she would have had no personal part—no personal recognition—in the successful conclusion as she’d had at Sellafield. But for her this wasn’t a private crusade, as it was for Irvine.

  ‘Bastard!’ said Irvine, appearing physically to deflate as the anger subsided. ‘You going to speak to Monkton?’

  ‘After he’s spoken with Graham and gotten back to GCHQ.’

  ‘I’ll wait to hear the reaction before going back to Meade.’

  ‘How do you think your guys are going to take it?’

  ‘As I’m going to take it, by not giving up.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine you would.’ She hesitated, wanting to satisfy an uncertainty. ‘You know Graham well, don’t you?’

  ‘I thought I did.’

  Sally ignored the self-pity. ‘My first impression wasn’t that he was a drinker?’

  ‘How’d you know he was?’

  ‘Was?’ she queried, ignoring the question.

  ‘He developed a problem during Stuxnet. Went into a programme just afterwards, straightened himself out. And you didn’t answer my question.’

  Irvine sat forward in his chair, suddenly demanding. She shouldn’t have started this conversation, Sally acknowledged. ‘Just a guess. We watched Bowyer’s press conference together: I thought he was a little high, that’s all. I didn’t know it had been serious.’

  ‘You telling me he’s relapsed, got too drunk to function properly! To make proper decisions?’

  ‘Don’t try to run with that, Jack! You’ll be the only casualty.’

  ‘Was Graham drunk?’

  ‘No! And I won’t testify to anyone or any enquiry that he was. He’s right in doing what he’s doing!’

  Irvine remained strained forward for several moments, staring fixedly at her. Then he said, ‘Isn’t it time you called Monkton?’

  * * *

  Sally did so from her Langley office, cautioning Monkton where she was, for the first time unconcerned at an unrestricted exchange’s being monitored.

  ‘Who’s idea was this?’ at once demanded Monkton.

  ‘The deputy director’s. He says, quite rightly, it’s the responsible thing to do. What’s GCHQ say?’

  ‘They want to know what the problem is.’

  ‘They’re the problem, cutting off the direct exchange.’

  ‘They think they’re being manoeuvred into something.’

  ‘Jesus! You’ve got to go over their heads: get a directive from Downing Street!’ Sally insisted once more.

  ‘I don’t need to be told what to do!’

  ‘That wasn’t impertinence. It was despair!’ Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to be uncaring of the CIA telephone monitoring.

  ‘Have GCHQ got all the U.S. intercepts?’ asked Monkton, clearly echoing a GCHQ demand.

  ‘All of them,’ said Irvine, listening at Sally’s shoulder, before she could repeat the question.

  ‘Who’s that?’ de
manded Monkton.

  ‘Jack Irvine, in charge of the Fort Meade unit.’

  There was a hesitation. ‘They must immediately be sent anything new that Meade get, even though their source appears to have dried: nothing held back,’ said Monkton, repeating what Sally guessed to be another GCHQ insistence.

  ‘They will be,’ undertook Sally, at Irvine’s begrudging nod. As exasperated as her lover, Sally said, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go back to how it was!’

  ‘That’s the manoeuvre they’re frightened of,’ disclosed Monkton.

  * * *

  Ben Hardy personally reached Frederick Bowyer on the FBI director’s cell phone after trying two of the other direct lines the man had provided in addition to the Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters numbers. Nervously, Hardy at once blurted, ‘You said I was to call anytime, sir.’ It was just after 8:00 p.m. The noise of people, laughter, was in the background.

  ‘And now you have, Ben, so it must be something you think I want to hear.’

  ‘Is it all right to talk?’

  ‘I’m walking to the den now.’ The noise faded. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Jimmy played hardball tonight. Cleaned Packer out and ended up with two hundred dollars of his markers before Packer packed in, which Jimmy did as well. Bought Packer bad-luck drinks and put the arm on as much as he felt was safe. Packer got as nervous as hell with the conversation Jimmy was pushing. Then the news came on the bar TV, with the enquiry announcement, and Packer says that Jimmy should talk to a guy named Bradley, who was the original CIA field supervisor whose crew lost al Aswamy. Bradley got sent into the boondocks because of it. Word now is he’s going to be the enquiry sacrifice and is crying foul—’

  ‘Which I think is a cry we should listen to.’

  ‘I thought you might think that. That’s why I had Jimmy get a number.’

  * * *

  Sally accepted lateral thinking as a convenient phrase for others to label her unusual reasoning, but it wasn’t something of which she was mentally or even physically conscious, like having a process or a formula she could summon at will to confront situations. To Sally it was simply the way she thought. Not until she entered the intelligence service did she actually acknowledge that she viewed and assessed things differently from most people. In her first year at Oxford she’d briefly thought she might have a cognitive problem because her logic was so often at variance with that of others, while even earlier, at prep school, she’d been worried about being judged mentally deficient like characters in Charles Dickens’s Victorian novels for being left-handed, which she was.