‘At least it won’t get into the public domain.’
‘I’m not taking bets.’
‘What do you know about the firewall?’
‘Nothing. I’m waiting for Fisher to arrive.’
‘You think Smartman could really be a serviceman on the base?’
‘A visually activated firewall, you mean?’
‘It’s technically possible,’ Poulter pointed out. ‘But I was thinking more about the degree and depth of personnel background checks that have been carried out at Creech?’
It hadn’t been mentioned during the military overview, Irvine remembered. ‘I don’t know. I’ll find out.’
‘We’re almost through the staff personnel checks here. We had to be careful of accusations of racism; so far it’s a total blank. And we’ll keep the equipment sweep going, of course.’
‘Let’s talk again tomorrow—’ Irvine paused. ‘Or rather, later today. Sorry to have woken you up for nothing.’
Sally was listening intently enough to pick up the resurging self-pity, which irritated her after Irvine’s unexpectedly imposing performance so far, but since al Aswamy’s firewall appearance her greater concentration had been upon re-adjusting her misconceptions, which was probably the greater cause of her annoyance than Irvine’s poor-me lapse.
She’d allowed the unimaginable and let herself be guided—or rather misguided—by the interpretations of others instead of rationalizing and thinking as she should have done, Sally acknowledged, the anger burning through her. None of the conveniently appropriate proverbs and aphorisms had been backward-looking at past drone attacks upon Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq. That wasn’t—wouldn’t have been—the Arab mind-set, which she knew, had always known, but hadn’t brought into any analysis. She’d become complacent—arrogant—hypnotizing herself with incomprehensible hieroglyphs instead of thinking at least like a surrogate Arab upon the intended meaning of their translations.
So how, belatedly, would a surrogate Arab think? Or better still, how would a committed jihadist think? mused Sally, halting her reflections as Will Fisher appeared on the screen.
Irvine said, ‘I want everything, second by second, but before you start, this isn’t an inquest looking for guilt. You were up against the best, and that’s what they are, the best. Anyone would have lost him.’
Fisher’s lips moved, without words. Then he said, ‘Thank you. I’m still sorry.’
‘We watched but obviously couldn’t hear. So tell us…’ At Sally’s nudge, Irvine added, ‘This is a British colleague beside me, Sally Hanning.’
Fisher nodded at the introduction but didn’t speak, looking briefly down from the Nellis screen at what Sally guessed to be self-defence reminders. They’d tried to anticipate everything, insisted the man strongly. To prevent a Smartman firewall from being triggered by a laptop power surge to the larger machine, they’d disabled the Wi-Fi from which both operated and charged them instead from heavy barrier USBs. Flash drives were installed in both to duplicate any transmission and to download the Smartman botnet’s hard drive and contact list if their hack succeeded. Both machines registered negative to electronic testing for built-in Wi-Fi. Fort Meade had provided ten potential algorithms’ entries for the Smartman bot. Fisher had attempted the first. The screen had frozen after three letters. The keyboard had seized solid, too. So had the screen and the keyboard on the laptop. Fisher’s impression had been of a fraction of time—he hoped it would be measurable from the flash drives—before the face appeared on both screens.
‘The keyboard!’ demanded Irvine. ‘Was there any change in the keyboard tension between the legitimate IP and password entry and your attempted hack?’
Fisher frowned, hesitating. ‘We were watching the laptop, not operating it.’
‘That wasn’t my question. What about the desktop?’
There was another pause. ‘I wasn’t conscious of any difference; again, milliseconds, which might be on the flash drive. The hack was over in milliseconds, too … then it was solid, like a rock.’
Sally waited but when Irvine didn’t continue she said, ‘I looked hard at the image of Ismail al Aswamy in those few milliseconds. I thought there was some lip movement. Were there any sounds … any words?’
‘There was something,’ confirmed Fisher more confidently. ‘I couldn’t make it out as a word or words … the volume receded with the image.’
‘Maybe forensic will get it off the flash drive, be able to enhance it,’ suggested Irvine.
‘I … we,’ Sally corrected quickly, ‘we need to hear it, know what it was.’
‘He appeared to be laughing,’ offered Fisher hopefully.
‘He had every reason to,’ said Irvine bitterly.
* * *
Irvine twice postponed their promised return to Langley, finally arriving there with Sally after midnight. They parted in the elevator, Irvine to go up one more floor to Conrad Graham, Sally to speak to David Monkton from her office.
‘Just like that!’ said the man, incredulity in his voice. ‘Why did they attempt the hack in situ? Surely it would have been safer in forensic surroundings with the specialized equipment they’re subjecting the computers to now, when it’s too damned late!’
It arguably had been a mistake, conceded Sally: Jack Irvine’s mistake. ‘They had equipment. The Meade sweepers are the best.’
‘No, they’re not! They were beaten, in seconds from how you’ve explained it. It was the golden—possibly the only—chance to get ahead of them. Now it’s gone!’
‘Irvine’s sure they’ll abandon the attack.’
‘What do you think!’
Sally isolated the change in tone from incredulity to dismissal of Irvine’s opinion. ‘It would be the obvious thing to do: which may be why they won’t do it.’ She needed to fit the receding image of Ismail al Aswamy into its proper place among all her other re-considerations and re-examinations.
‘Or delay so that we believe they have abandoned it and then strike, and to guard against that would require us to keep God knows how many military service groups on indeterminate standby! Or they could shift to another target we might not find out about in advance where they won’t fail, as they did with the Washington Monument, the Colosseum, and Sellafield! It’s got to be stopped, not moved on!’
‘They could do all of that. And probably more,’ agreed Sally wearily.
‘We’ve got to stop them winning!’
They hadn’t won, not yet, but it wasn’t worth the argument. ‘I know that, too.’
* * *
They didn’t speak much on their way back to Owen Place. Irvine said the bourbon smell still beat all the peppermint breath cleansers Graham had chewed, and that the acting director had already been mad at the intelligence committee’s acceptance of a formal enquiry into the death of Abu al Hurr, which was a waste of time because the body had already been cremated. He’d made a lot of noise about the loss of the Smartman bot and was going to call another televised conference later in the day. The failure had to be contained at all cost. Sally limited herself to saying Monkton was furious, without going into pointless detail.
Both were too exhausted to think of lovemaking, but Sally remained awake long after Irvine fell into a snuffling sleep, running like a film clip through her head the decoded Vevak transmissions she’d memorized practically word for word, just as she’d memorized the smirking, vanishing face of Ismail al Aswamy. That unquestionably was how he’d been, Sally determined: smirking arrogantly, mocking.… Sally stopped the mental slide show at the word she’d been searching for, fixing its place. That’s what Aswamy had been, what all the underlying intentions of the encryptions had been—mockery. Why? What was it that made the man so contemptuously sure that this time he’d properly succeed—even if they’d broken the codes or found the targets? The firewall wasn’t enough, even though it had self-destructed. Al Aswamy had posted his own image, said something: she had to know what that word or words were to analyze the derision. Wha
t was there she could deduce? They wouldn’t abort. That was part—the entire point and purpose—of the contempt. No matter what precautions were taken or protection emplaced, al Aswamy and Vevak were sure they couldn’t be stopped. But how could they be so confident! It couldn’t be the timing, whenever that might be. Everything was in place, every contingency anticipated, both bases ready to be cordoned off in minutes: impenetrable according to the military briefing. Obviously they’d still be better protected if they had the date and were able to get enough men inside, confronting the onslaught, not catching up from behind. Was the timing in the codes, like the mockery? Or was there something she was still missing, the way she’d missed so much else until now? She didn’t know; couldn’t think. The date and the derision: she had to know—work out—the date and the reason for the derision. What—or where—was the significance? Date and derision, echoed in her head, like a mantra. Date and derision, date and derision, was Sally’s last conscious thought before she finally drifted to sleep.
43
And were the first words that came into Sally’s mind when she awoke. And stayed there like a taunt as she showered, anxious to get to the embassy to speak to Monkton, knowing she’d need his support. Irvine came into the kitchen as she finished making coffee.
Sally said at once, ‘Al Aswamy won’t abort the attacks.’
Irvine stood staring at her for several moments, not speaking. ‘How’d you know?’
Sally sipped her coffee, glad of the rehearsal, but conscious of Irvine’s visible bemusement as she talked.
He remained silent again for several moments when she finished, as if expecting her to say more. When she didn’t, he said, ‘That’s it! Nothing more?’
‘It’s how an Arab thinks.’
‘Not these Arabs. They’re jihadists first, Arabs second; militarily trained zealots don’t attack a target they know is expecting them, not even if they’re assured of paradise if they die doing it. You try to argue this at today’s assessment, they’ll laugh in your face, and it’ll be difficult for me not to laugh with them. Think about it from every which way, Sally! None of it makes sense. There’s nothing to support it.’
‘I’m leaving ahead of you. I want to speak to Monkton from the embassy.’
‘Do that. I really want you to: for you to be ordered not to do it.’
‘When will we get Meade’s preliminary reports on the computers, know what al Aswamy said?’
‘That’s not going to convince anyone, darling! We don’t know if he said anything!’
The darling word jarred but didn’t block out date and derision. ‘When?’
‘I’ll know when I get to Langley. There should be something today.’
‘I’ll come directly there from the embassy.’
Sally detoured to Watergate for a change of clothes, using the delay to rethink her approach to the MI5 Director-General. She hadn’t expected Irvine’s outright rejection, though he’d tried to couch it, an oversight she shouldn’t have allowed. She hadn’t properly gauged how it would sound, lacking any supporting facts or evidence, because she was back thinking the way she always thought—automatically thought—which made logical sense to her but hardly ever to anyone else.
Sally changed a phrase or two of her original argument but basically it remained the same, and Sally was aware from the pitch of Monkton’s voice, though it had reverted to its customary monotone, that he wasn’t accepting her insistences any more readily than Irvine.
‘I don’t know why Ismail al Aswamy believes he can carry it out!’ admitted Sally, answering Monkton’s repeated question. ‘But I’m convinced he’s going to: that the attack’s still on.’
‘Are you suggesting something nuclear, the final proof, despite all the denials and permitted weapons inspections, that they’ve got the capability?’
‘I’m not ruling it out nor ruling it in,’ said Sally, inwardly cringing at the vacuity of what she was saying. ‘At most I’m arguing against a premature withdrawal of everything that’s in place at Waddington and Creech. If I’m out-argued about Creech, please keep Waddington on standby.’
‘For how long?’
‘Until it happens and we can put up some sort of resistance—save lives!’
‘You’re asking a lot.’
‘To achieve a lot.’
She’d half expected Nigel Fellowes to be lurking outside the communications room, which seemed to have become his habit, and was glad that he wasn’t there as she left. It had started to sleet heavily as she hurried across the parking lot, and with Fellowes in mind she remembered his initial warning of winter’s arrival when October turned into November.
Her cell phone sounded as she reached her rental car. Irvine said, ‘Graham in an hour: something we didn’t expect. And the conference linkup is at three. What did Monkton say?’
‘That he’d think about it. But he didn’t forbid it. What about the computers and flash drives?’
‘Nothing.’
* * *
‘The son of a bitch is denying any knowledge or involvement, of course,’ said Conrad Graham. ‘I’ll push it as far as I can, make sure every goddamned person on the Senate intelligence committee hears what he tried to do. Bowyer will survive until the next president’—Graham snapped his fingers—‘then good-bye, Frederick fucking Bowyer. And until then the leash will be short enough to strangle him.’
‘I never doubted Harry Packer for a moment,’ admitted Irvine.
‘You didn’t have cause to,’ Sally pointed out. ‘It was he who wouldn’t co-operate with the FBI and instead blew the whistle to NSA security.’
‘He put himself in the position to be compromised … blackmailed,’ said Irvine. ‘He’ll be out.’
‘Bradley won’t.’ Graham smiled in anticipation. ‘He should be, sure. But I’m going to keep that little cocksucker in his little coop, and I’m going to refuse a resignation or any application for premature retirement, and I’m going to have monitored every single move he makes, up to and including every time he takes a leak.’
‘Do you think it could have been Bradley—or someone in the FBI—who put that surveillance on us?’
Graham shrugged. ‘Could be. Who knows? You think you’re still being tailed?’
‘No, as a matter of fact I don’t.’ Sally hadn’t bothered to check that morning or for two or three days, or nights, prior to that. She hadn’t thought about Nigel Fellowes’s warning of being targeted, either.
‘Now let’s hear about this cockamamy attack theory of yours,’ demanded Graham.
* * *
The preliminary damage assessment arrived from the National Security Agency an hour before the televised conference linkup. It was separated into two sections. In the first, the potential harm of Smartman’s sideways intrusion into the Creech commanding officer’s computer was described as an incalculable disaster. Intelligence information held on the desktop included the identity of all civilian suppliers and contractors to the base, making them potential terrorist targets; forward-planning proposals against Al Qaeda and jihadist training camps in Mali, Yemen, and Somalia; allied-country over-flight co-operation; and intended drone and pilot capability at both Creech and Waddington over the following six months. The contact list had the restricted e-mail addresses—some containing the unlisted or security-restricted telephone numbers—of top-echelon officers at the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence. The second, much smaller section was devoted specifically to the failed Fort Meade attempt to isolate the Smartman botnet. The cutout laptop would have been the self-destruct trigger for the desktop, but the forensic examiners believed its destruction programme had a reverse function if the desktop were swept first, which had been the case. Destruction had been absolute, in both machines, leaving no electronic fingerprints. It had taken maximum volume enhancement to obtain audibility from the indistinct sounds from Ismail al Aswamy’s receding image. Even then the sound was difficult to distinguish. It sounded like the repetition of a single English w
ord: the most likely was conquest, but that was not definitive.
The NSA also included two successful interceptions over the previous twenty-four hours. The transliteration of one from Kermani read, A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain. Anis’s post was decoded as Better a thousand enemies outside the tent than one within.
* * *
Once again Sally divided her attention, listening to—and analyzing—the exchanges between England and the Nevada air base, but at the same time assessing what she’d speed-read from NSA, seeking anything to support her insistence that Creech and Waddington remain on high alert. But she couldn’t find it. She thought Anis’s thousand-enemies post could refer to the Smartman hacking—further derision of the hacker still serving on the base—but Sally accepted that suggestion would be overwhelmed by the Creech commander’s assurance to Irvine’s previous day’s prompt from John Poulter that every serviceman’s background had thoroughly been cleared. And there was nothing she could utilize from the minimal NSA report on the two infected machines.
‘I have already notified the Pentagon of the gravity of the loss,’ the Creech commander was telling London. ‘And having now learned the seriousness, I imagine you’d like to terminate this discussion to do the same with your Defence Ministry.’
David Monkton took the question. ‘We haven’t discussed the armed forces disposition at both bases.’
No immediate response came from either base. One finally came from an undesignated wing commander at Waddington. ‘What’s to discuss? It wasn’t ever going to be a physical attack. They’ve achieved a victory that’s going to take us months, years, to recover from, and we’ve wasted hundreds of thousands on a pointless military exercise that we’ve got today to start standing down.’
‘Don’t!’ declared Sally, hoping the strength of her voice would disguise the plea. ‘They have achieved a victory. But they haven’t stopped. There will be an attack. And if the military is stood down, their second, public victory will be the destruction of both bases from which their most feared and hated weapon, drones, are deployed.’
The Cloud Collector Page 32