The Cloud Collector

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Looks like you were right again about avoiding a too obvious military buildup,’ lightly mocked Irvine.

  ‘It’s not about who thought what first. These are obvious precautions,’ dismissed Sally.

  ‘What if we don’t find Smartman?’

  ‘You’re more qualified to answer than me. I’d want to look all over again, until we do find him.’

  ‘So would I.’

  Sally nodded towards the screen upon which they were receiving a simultaneous, Pentagon-provided television feed from both bases. ‘It looks good—secure—set out like that. I’m guessing three days, tops, before there’s some sort of leak.’

  ‘I’m not concerned about a few locals seeing a convoy moving around the Mojave Desert: the military do that all the time. What we’ve got to worry about is Smartman or someone else in the jihad having a lookout position from which they can make the connection. So I’d give it a little longer than three days.’

  ‘Just a little, not a lot longer.’

  * * *

  Sally kept her reservations to herself at Cyber Shepherd’s enthusiastic acceptance of GCHQ’s suggested decryption pattern because the evidence appeared unarguable. Her reluctance anyway came down to the same unease that she’d had before but still couldn’t translate into words that others might accept.

  The British assumption was that the intercepted Iranian messages were predicated, like the darknet chat-room exchanges, on Arabic proverbs and aphorisms. Their recommendation was that decoding should be approached using selections—or combinations—of each as crib grids. Following that principle, two codes had been transliterated in the preceding twelve hours. One, from Kermani, was from the encryption in which Sally had located the Waddington post code that led to Creech.

  It read, A mosquito can make a lion’s eye bleed.

  The second was another original GCHQ intercept from Smartman. The transliteration was One tiny insect may be enough to destroy a country.

  ‘The Brits have made the breakthrough,’ declared Irvine, one of the few among the assembling groups to remain subdued.

  ‘Have they?’ questioned Sally, matching Irvine’s mood, which she guessed to be chagrin at the proverb idea not coming from him after his having supplied the chat-room lead.

  Irvine looked at her curiously. ‘The attacks are against drone bases. What do Al Qaeda and the jihadists call drones? Mosquitoes. How else can you read it?’

  ‘Not even encoded. How do you read insects bringing down countries?’

  Irvine’s curiosity deepened into a frown. ‘Reinforcing the mosquito analogy, maybe; we know GCHQ have a second Vevak source, although they haven’t gone all the way back as we have with Hydarnes. There could be different recipients.’

  ‘I’m not arguing with the transliterations. It’s the interpretations—our interpretations—that I’m not sure about.’

  ‘Give me another one,’ demanded Irvine.

  ‘I don’t have another,’ openly admitted Sally, not liking the inadequacy or his head shake of disappointment.

  ‘Then until you do find one, we’ve got to go with what we’ve got.’

  That evening, thirty-six hours after the alert, the first security review was held on a conference-link video between the Creech and Waddington commanders, each with their staff officers—the Americans from Nellis, the British similarly hidden at RAF Cranwell—as well as David Monkton, John Poulter, and an unidentified Foreign Office official at GCHQ, and Conrad Graham, Jack Irvine, and Sally Hanning at Langley.

  The military overviews were presented by an unidentified U.S. colonel staff officer and an equally anonymous British wing commander, both in undesignated fatigues, against aerial backgrounds of both Creech and Waddington. At Creech, one thousand men, predominantly Special Forces from all three services, made up the immediate defence and were already in place. A further five hundred were on standby at Fallon, Nevada’s third air base. At Waddington, five hundred Special Forces were stationed at the four conveniently close bases. High-altitude American E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft were already permanently airborne over Creech and Waddington; their look-down radar provided horizon cover over 320 kilometres. A minimum of four helicopters—the normal daily average in and out of Nellis—were currently airborne, as were two at Waddington. That cover would be maintained from regular base fleets on twenty-four-hour rotation pending the attack. Throughout the available darkness of the preceding thirty-six hours, a helicopter wing of thirty gunships had been assembled at Creech—fifteen at Waddington—and concealed in hangars. The moment of the attack would trigger the launch of an additional ten troop-carrying helicopters from Fallon. A further two hundred troops would be helicoptered into Waddington from RAF Digby. Psychologically disorienting sound systems had also been brought into both bases under cover of darkness, as well as additional mobile radar equipment, ground lighting, and television relay equipment. Electronically, from its beginning and throughout any engagement, Creech and Waddington would be beneath an electronic shell, inside of which, from both ground and E-3 radar, the attempted incursion would be visible and recorded.

  Sally thought what followed was an anti-climax given the military preparations, with their illustrated backgrounds, including photographs of the latest covert-operations Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and even some older, Vietnam-style, open-side gunships. John Poulter, whose obvious self-confidence was in contrast to the uncertain man she remembered from their Sellafield encounter, said the successful GCHQ reading of seemingly innocuous Facebook transmissions unquestionably confirmed the imminent attacks. Sally positively rejected the half-formed thought that Jack Irvine’s contribution lacked the presentational confidence of his British counterpart’s.

  Conrad Graham waited until the television screens blanked and the technician controller confirmed the sound system was off before saying, ‘I thought that went pretty well. I could have made the presentation myself.’

  ‘I expected you to be the spokesman,’ said Irvine.

  And I wish you hadn’t been so dogmatic, thought Sally protectively.

  Graham said, ‘I want us to crack the attack signal.’

  ‘That can be your moment,’ said Sally.

  ‘You’re right!’ said Graham, too absorbed in his biopic fantasy to detect the sarcasm.

  Memory-stick-terminated decryptions from both Fort Meade and GCHQ were waiting for Irvine when he and Sally got back to Owen Place. GCHQ had another Kermani post—Who does not think that his fleas are gazelles—that Fort Meade had not intercepted. They had, though, transliterated another insect encryption—When the ant grows wings, it is about to die—from Swordbearer. Sally spent more time poring over an Anis message—Death rides a fast camel—because it wasn’t insect referenced.

  Irvine didn’t break her concentration until Sally finally thrust herself back into her chair, sighing. ‘Well?’

  ‘The attack’s getting close,’ suggested Sally. ‘But that’s too easy: it’s all too easy to make that conclusion.’

  ‘It’s—’ started Irvine, closer to the computers, but then he erupted, ‘Found it.’

  Sally came forward to read the screen and said quietly, ‘It could be Graham’s moment.’

  41

  Smartman@deathtrade.org.mil was embedded in the desktop of the executive operations officer of Creech Air Force Base and was loop-connected to the base commander and two other executive officers and was separately backed up in the man’s personal laptop.

  As he read the initial Nellis-relayed alert, more to himself than to Sally, Irvine said, ‘It would have gotten into the mainframe through the less secure laptop. That’s how we got the Stuxnet worm into Iran’s nuclear installations at Natanz and Bushehr.’

  After a transmission pause of several minutes, a second e-mail came, requesting a Skype conference. Irvine said, ‘The sweepers are frightened to go in.’

  Sally said, ‘They should be.’

  Before Irvine could reply, another e-mail, this time addressed directly to hi
m, said a helicopter was on standby from Creech to Nellis: they could be talking in ten minutes. Irvine said, ‘Ten minutes wasted!’

  ‘Frightened people make mistakes,’ warned Sally.

  Irvine e-mailed that he would be waiting, continuing on with a longer secure post to GCHQ suggesting that despite the time difference in England, John Poulter be awakened to listen to the impending Skype discussion via remote access. Still not pausing, Irvine separately forwarded to England the brief details of the Smartman discovery before copying the complete file to his Fort Meade unit, who were to make direct contact with the sweeper group. In the interim they were to prepare alternative Smartman algorithms. Finally he called Conrad Graham. It took Irvine several minutes to convince the acting CIA director that the Owen Place computer system was more secure than any at Langley, and that everything he’d set up to remain in DC on Graham’s orders was concentrated in his security-guaranteed apartment.

  ‘You expect me to come there!’ demanded Graham.

  ‘I don’t expect that at all. I’m keeping you in the loop is all. And which I’ll continue doing, with whatever develops.’

  After a silence Graham said, ‘You think there’s going to be something moving tonight?’

  ‘At this stage I haven’t any idea what’s going to happen tonight.’

  ‘I’ll be here. Call me every half hour.’

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ refused Irvine. ‘I’ll call you immediately if there’s a definite reason and in between times otherwise.’

  Irvine’s telephone sounded as he replaced it. He was expecting it still to be Graham, but John Poulter said, ‘Thanks for the invitation.’

  ‘Sorry you won’t be able to see as well as hear.’

  ‘You going in right away?’

  ‘Of course. You briefed your guys at Waddington on what I just sent?’

  ‘They’ve worked from the bottom down: done all the officers and middle ranks already, official equipment as well as personally owned stuff. Looks like you’ve got Smartman all to yourself.’

  ‘No second chance if something goes wrong, then?’

  ‘That’s another way of putting it,’ agreed Poulter.

  ‘You’d better connect up.’

  Nellis linked exactly on time. Irvine initiated the Skype from Owen Place to ensure total privacy apart from the British connection. Momentary interference rippled across the screen, but suddenly it cleared. Irvine didn’t recognize the face.

  ‘Will Fisher,’ identified the man. He was clean shaven, about thirty-five, compensating for his premature baldness with a tightly clipped, full, black beard.

  ‘You did good, finding it,’ at once praised Irvine.

  ‘You coming out?’

  Irvine paused, frowning. ‘Will, I’m almost three thousand miles away; don’t know how short a deadline we’re looking at! And you’re already there.’

  ‘It’s your operation,’ pressed the man.

  ‘And it’s your expertise: you’re the guys who sweep the Oval Office and all those other secret basement places where the president holds his crisis meetings. You know all the traps and tricks, which I don’t, not completely. This time you’ve got the official IP codes and passwords to both hacked machines: no official firewalls in the way. And you’ve got Smartman’s complete IP, too. I’m risking breaching the no-contact insistence for Fort Meade to come to you with anything else you might need.’

  ‘Give me every detail of what you want,’ said the man, resigned.

  ‘Our own botnet beside Smartman’s, in both the desktop and laptop. I want to hack into Smartman’s bots, get everything he’s got there. I want his hard disk memory, for what’s already on it and whatever’s to come; to be there for whatever’s to come is the most important. And I want his contacts lists to gauge the possible size of the assault.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Don’t forget flash drives,’ added Irvine, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘We’ll need everything recorded, as you go—’

  ‘In case I mess up.’

  ‘Nothing and nobody’s going to mess up. Is there CCTV in this officer’s room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Re-align it so we get it in pictures, too. I want a digital feed to here.’

  ‘Which do you want first, desktop or laptop?’

  It was a professionally valid question, Irvine acknowledged, briefly considering it. ‘Smartman will have put firewalls into his botnets, if he really is a smart man. And cutouts on his hacked way in. But the desktop was his ultimate target, so let’s make it ours, too.’

  ‘Should we risk direct commentary from Creech to you, for the record to be maintained?’

  The communication clampdowns were against written interception, thought Irvine, but he’d already ordered two minimal breaches.

  ‘I’ve arranged a direct line from Fort Meade, and I want the CCTV relay to watch what goes on from here, which is already too much. You make your own record, as you work.’

  ‘You didn’t wish him good luck,’ said Sally, as the screen blanked.

  ‘Maybe I should have. But professionals shouldn’t need luck, should they?’

  She might once have made that sort of remark, conceded Sally. She wasn’t sure she’d have done so as casually now.

  * * *

  ‘It’s a total lockdown,’ complained Frederick Bowyer. ‘But it’s within the United States: I’ve the right, the authority, to know!’

  ‘Yes sir, you have,’ agreed Ben Hardy uncomfortably. Being summoned personally to Pennsylvania Avenue and involved in one-to-one conversations like this was unquestionably a professional elevation. But he was unsettled at what appeared to have become an obsession with the director, which had earlier precedents.

  ‘I want you to go back to Packer. Give the impression it’s semi-official: Bureau concern at suggestions from other agents about Packer’s personal difficulties. Unfortunate if NSA internal security got involved, that sort of approach. You just want to talk it all through with him, colleague to colleague. Get the idea?’

  Hardy shifted awkwardly. ‘I think so, sir. But that’s how Jimmy Lowe tried it, and I got knocked back at the last minute.’

  ‘So don’t get knocked back this time. If the son of a bitch still tries it, tell him it’s more serious than you thought, and that it’s your responsibility to talk to NSA security after all.’

  * * *

  The executive operations officer’s desk had been cleared of everything except the desktop. That was manoeuvred for its screen to be the central focus of the CCTV’s relayed feed to Irvine’s Owen Place installation. Additional lighting whitened everything almost too brightly. Will Fisher was completely visible, but everyone else moved in and out of the shot: sometimes there appeared to be disembodied arms and heads. Without sound the CCTV’s view was ghostly surrealism, heightened when an unattached hand and arm came in and out of the frame. More of another body but without a head offered Fisher a combined microphone and ear-padded headset attached to a telephone.

  ‘The direct line to Meade,’ said Irvine. His hands twitched across an imagined keyboard, the real one deeper in on the table in front of him. Abruptly aware, he pulled them back, rubbing one over the other as if he were washing the impulse away.

  The familiar unattached arm and hand deposited a yellow legal pad and pencils beside Fisher. Already written on it were the officially registered entry codes and passwords to the desktop and laptop. Mouth moving in silent acknowledgement, the man began scribbling number selections, stopping with a block of ten.

  Irvine said, ‘Meade’s first-try algorithms, if Smartman doesn’t let us in.’

  Sally hoped he wouldn’t keep up the commentary.

  Theatrically Fisher spread the fingers of both hands, interlaced them, and then cracked them like a concert pianist about to perform. The icon-packed screen illuminated at the registered entries. Fisher splayed his fingers again. He reached forward confidently.

  The attempted entry got as far as SMA before the scr
een seized solid. After a pause the icons vanished, replaced by the smiling face of Ismail al Aswamy as a screen saver. It remained there a timed second before diminishing into a receding dot that vanished into oblivion.

  The screen was a flurry of different body movements until Fisher reappeared with the desktop. He stared, face crumpled in fury, at the screen, then turned it towards the CCTV camera. It was blank.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Irvine vehemently.

  ‘They’ll know we found it,’ said Sally quietly. ‘Al Aswamy himself will know we found it and that he beat us again.’

  42

  It became, like so many before it, another mostly sleepless night, which, Sally reflected, probably gave Irvine preparation time for his impressively measured responses to the varying reactions he encountered. His first response was to relegate Conrad Graham to last on his priorities list. While he waited for Will Fisher’s helicopter to arrive back at Nellis, Irvine briefly outlined the disaster—which scarcely required a long explanation anyway—to Burt Singleton at Fort Meade. The concentration had to be upon attack-abandoning Facebook posts between their known jihadists: he asked for their suggested algorithms list to be copied to Owen Place. In the longer conversation that followed with John Poulter, Irvine repeated his abandonment expectation, in spite of which he was continuing the Creech sweep, initially focusing on the connected machines of the base commander and the other two executive officers to discover from their hard drives what sensitive material had been accessed by the Smartman intrusion. The two Smartman-infected machines, the flash drives, CCTV film, and Fisher’s seconds-long commentary would be shipped to Fort Meade for forensic investigation. The hard drives of both computers would confirm what al Aswamy’s group had obtained. GCHQ would get complete details immediately when they were available.

  ‘No doubt now that it’s al Aswamy,’ said Poulter.

  ‘Or that we’ve lost a way to trap him a second time.’