Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series)

by William Wield

  ‘Quite a catch, then,’ said Kim.

  ‘Yes and then there’s our young genius hacker, Perry; deserted by his father when he was twelve; he had to support his alcoholic mother with large quantities of booze, pay for the food, the house-hold bills, all the jobs of a head of the family. I wonder what would you or I would have done in his shoes?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Kim, ‘especially if you’re too young to claim benefits and your mother’s too drunk to do anything about them either. What a hole to find oneself in.’ She gave a faint shudder, ‘so what did he do?’

  ‘The short answer is that he found he had a natural talent with computers and at learning off the internet,’ replied Angus, ‘taught himself everything, improved all the time, upgraded his equipment regularly; by the time he was twenty he had a substantial income from syphoning money from the accounts of organised crime syndicates and the Mafia – chose them as he guessed that they’d never create a fuss over the money – all of it stolen, of course. To get away with this he developed unique computer software to cover his tracks – no one could see who he was or where he’d been – the Craithe Team uses the same technology to this day.’

  ‘He seems quite difficult to talk to sometimes,’ said Kim, ‘I don’t know if that’s just me or…’

  ‘No he has a touch of Asperger’s syndrome, makes him shy, even distant to some,’ said Angus, ‘but he’s fine with people he knows,’

  ‘That’s a relief I thought it might be me.’

  ‘My uncle who provided him with a QC his hacking trial, got him a mere community service sentence. Got it in exchange for valuable information on the mafia and organised crime syndicates. To avoid mafia reprisals, however, he needed new names and Peregrine was both a name used by many Towneleys in the past, and in gratitude that’s what he chose – though shortened to Perry.’

  ‘Well, it suits him,’ said Kim, ‘I’ll be meeting all of the team won’t I? What about some of the others?’

  ‘There’s the other hacker, Marty, and the brilliant mathematicians, Johnno but rather than going through the whole list just now, why not do that face to face when I introduce you.’

  ‘Okay, fine. Anything else I should know about Athena as we’re on the subject?’

  ‘Perhaps a quick word about our first priority this weekend’ replied Angus, ‘the demonstration this afternoon.’

  ‘The demonstration, I’ve heard it mentioned, but what is it exactly?’

  ‘It’s an important part of Athena’s launch,’ said Angus. ‘To protect the City of London institutions, we need to install our cyber-attack warning system onto the computer systems of any organisation likely to be attacked – Banks in particular. The moment an attack is detected, that warning system triggers a retaliatory counter-attack from Athena and the attackers have their equipment immobilised – effectively made useless. All right so far?’ Kim nodded her head.

  ‘Unfortunately, a few organisations are refusing to install Athena’s warning software; without it installed there’s nothing to trigger an Athena counter-attack, and they’ll just have to rely on their own defences – and we all know how poor some of those are.’

  ‘Don’t know where I heard it,’ said Kim, ‘but I thought the aim was to have Athena just about everywhere in the City of London and that it would then be installed progressively throughout the world after that. Wasn’t the idea that hackers would eventually give up attacking financial targets. So, does it give you a problem if some don’t join in?’

  ‘Afraid it does,’ replied Angus. ‘I just need to complete my uncle’s last project, especially as he sees it as a really worthwhile legacy to the financial world. It would be Sod’s Law if the one bank that hadn’t installed Athena, was the one to be attacked brought down, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But why on earth won’t they all install Athena?’

  ‘Most of them have agreed the installation with their Boards of Directors, but some waverers still talk of Bank of England “intrusion” – bullying them to putting our software onto their systems. They say that they know how to run their businesses, and have perfectly adequate and extremely expensive defences already.’

  ‘Well, they do have their own defences, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but not counter-attacking defences; I’m trying to fix this problem, however, by putting on the demonstration this afternoon. I’m hoping that it will shock the waverers into changing their minds,’ continued Angus. ‘It’ll show them what a cyber-attack could do to their businesses, how they could lose everything without Athena. It’s being televised on ITV as part of a documentary on the London Stock Exchange. When they see how Athena had achieved the almost impossible feat of hacking into a Hedge Fund who are known to be paranoid about their defences and then altered its secret trading algorithms…’

  ‘It’s what?’ interrupted Kim.

  ‘Its trading algorithms - they’re just software instructions which run their market trades automatically. It means they can do without expensive human traders with their huge bonuses. Anyway, the authorities told us which hedge fund to use for the demonstration, and Perry and the others hacked into it and rewrote a section of their trading programmes. The result of this is that, for just one minute, the company will trade with all its safety restrictions removed, upper and lower trading limits for example; we also switched off the hedging function as well.’

  ‘You lost me there, what does all that mean, in layman’s language?’ asked Kim,

  ‘In layman’s language? In effect it will be like a bookie at a race course taking bets on the horses without limiting the size of the bets. Imagine what would happen if he also didn’t bother hedging those bets, that’s to say spreading his risk by laying those bets off and with other bookies?’

  ‘He’d risk going bankrupt, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ said Angus, ‘so we’re hoping that the waverers will understand that if Athena can hack its way into such a well-protected hedge fund, and force it to trade wildly out of control, that they’ll have the sense to see what it could do them too. We hope that having thought again, they’ll allow us to install our software onto their systems.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kim nodding her head, ‘one other thing − so that I’ve got the whole picture − why restrict the wild trading to just one minute?’

  ‘To limit potential losses,’ replied Angus. ‘Although the Bank of England is picking up any of this Hedge Fund’s losses, they still want to keep these to a minimum. For example, when high frequency trading on Wall Street ran out of control not long ago, in just three or four minutes of chaotic trading, the Dow Jones Index dropped some fifteen percent – that was billions of dollars of losses, in just minutes.’

  ‘So let’s hope the demonstration message gets across to these waverers.’

  ‘Yes, we hope so.’

  ‘Just so as I understand the actual process,’ said Kim, ‘you install the Athena warning system and then what happens?’

  ‘As soon as an attack comes in, virtually instantaneously, it triggers Athena’s counter attack which disables the attacker,’ replied Angus, ‘and their equipment will be rendered useless.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kim. ‘Is there anything connected with Athena or the weekend that I can help with before we go up to Craithe?’

  ‘Maybe,’ replied Angus. ‘We’ve been asked to get the latest information we have on Athena over to my old friend Freddy Briston for the Cobra Meeting that’s about to take place,’

  ‘Freddy Briston, the Chancellor of the Exchequer?’

  ‘Yes, one of his senior aides asked for the Athena update for the meeting Cobra meeting so we need to do that right away,’ said Angus.

  ‘What could I do to help with that?’ asked Kim.

  ‘Ring Perry,’ replied Angus. ‘But just about anyone else in the team knows what to do. At short notice – which it is right now – the safest way to send secret documents is to put them onto a special computer memory stick. Just tell whoever you speak to, to
use our standard method; tell them to send by Towneley Bank courier what’s known as the Update File to Freddy at Number 11 Downing Street.’

  ‘If the Athena stuff is so secret, isn’t that a risk, sending on a little memory-stick?’

  ‘Not memory sticks that we use,’ said Angus, ‘they all have a self-defence programme on them. Anyone intercepting it and trying to get into it to see what’s there will simply have their equipment locked down and made unless they’ve first use a complex password.’

  ‘So completely safe?’ asked Kim.

  ‘Yes, always worked very well when we’ve used them to date, so if you ring Perry he’ll tell you what to do.’

  During the next half hour or so, Angus rang number eleven Downing Street. The Chancellor was busy and could not speak to him so he asked for Mr Cape. When he got through to Mina, she rattled off such a convincing need for an update of Athena that he told Kim it was all right to send it to Downing Street. Kim got Perry to deal with it. She then closed off all the banking issues for the weekend and returned to Angus’s office.

  ‘As you’re now going to be involved in Craithe’s business,’ said Angus, ‘is there anything that is particularly worrying you about the project?’

  ‘Nothing desperate,’ replied Kim as she sat opposite Angus again.‘Though a little while back I asked you if Athena could cope with both the launch and an attack at the same time, and you said something to the effect of I hope so – why the doubt?’

  A smile flickered across Angus’s face for a moment and was quickly gone again. ‘Up till now we’ve only been able to practice on mock adversaries. But tomorrow the attack will be from a real live hacker – one who has been practicing for their attack in Manila. We won’t know if they’ve learned any new tricks we don’t know about until they actually attack.’

  ‘Is that a worry?’

  ‘Don’t know really. Mainly for my uncle’s sake – but others’ too I suppose − Athena’s just got to succeed. And whereas the Craithe team’s probably among the best in the world − even the NSA’s in the States − we won’t know just how good we are when faced for the first time by the real thing.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kim quietly, ‘I’m sorry I hadn’t really appreciated the degree of responsibility before.’ She gave Angus a wisp of a smile and went back to her office to get ready for the trip north.

  Angus was beginning his tidying up to leave when the telephone rang.

  ‘Yes Perry,’ said Angus, ‘is this about something that can’t wait? The helicopter taking us up to meet the others at Glasgow Airport is due shortly and I’m just finishing up here.’

  ‘Though I haven’t quite finished my searches of Ramos’s two laptops in Manila,’ said Perry, ‘I’ve done some quick scans and I thought you’d like to know who his associates are, especially before you leave the office,’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Two names keep coming up,’ continued Perry, ‘they’re Silayev and Komarov. This Komarov is the same Igor Komarov whose money you asked me to move to your bank earlier today. I’ll need more time to look further into Anton Silayev.’

  For a moment there was silence.

  ‘You did the right thing catching me before I left for Scotland,’ said Angus, ‘see what more you can get on both of these two and we’ll have a chat as soon as I get to Craithe.’

  As soon as he had put the telephone down, he pressed a couple of numbers on the intercom. As soon as he was through to Peter Fleming, his General Manager he spoke urgently. ‘Pete, do us a favour, will you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The new account I opened for a Mr Komarov and transferred money into this morning?’

  ‘Mr Igor Komarov, yes.’

  ‘Make sure that account is blocked immediately will you. Until further notice, no one but me is to be allowed to access that account, got that?’

  ‘Got it,’ said Fleming.

  Chapter 6

  Thursday, lunchtime,

  Number 11 Downing Street, London

  Simon Cape, the Chancellor’s chief legal aide at Number 11 Downing Street, got down into the hall just as the Towneley Bank courier arrived with the package. It underwent the standard safety checks – for such as explosives or anthrax – and Cape then took it to his office.

  As many Government computers have their usb memory stick drives disabled, Craithe had also verified that Cape would use his own laptop into which he could plug the memory stick. Cape plugged the security-cleared stick into his laptop followed by the password given to him earlier by Perry. On opening the files on the stick, he first read through the schedule to be sure he was up to date with Athena’s launch programme:

  Today, 3.35pm to 4.15pm, ITV’s programme ‘A Day on the London Stock Exchange’

  3.50pm Demonstration of Hedge Fund’s erratic trades for exactly one minute. Presenter of this sponsored programme to focus on this erratic trading. (Programme available thereafter on iPlayer for one week).

  Good Friday, 9am to midday, Bank of England Cyber Defences Convention. By invitation only. Repeat of the attack sequence from the televised demonstration.

  Installation of Athena’s attack detection software on any mainframes still not protected by it. Questions and Answers on Athena.

  Conference to be warned that, at any time during the conference, there might be a cyber-attack on one of the companies attending.

  Athena software on client’s machines to detect the attack and from its base, Athena to counter-attack and eliminate the attacker.

  Cape looked through the contents of the memory stick a second time and chose a few documents which he thought would help the Chancellor at the Cobra Meeting. These he copied into a new folder on the machine’s desktop and named it “for printing”. He then called for his secretary, Mina, to come in quickly as there was an urgent print job to be done.

  ‘Mina, the Chancellor’s going to a Cobra Meeting shortly, and he needs some documents for that.’

  ‘What’s a Cobra Meeting?’

  ‘Look, I know you’re always asking questions because you want to get better at your job,’ said Cape, ‘but we’re in a hurry right now’. Mina put on her little pouting face for a second, and as usual Cape relented. ‘All right then; Cobra meetings are named after the initials of ‘Cabinet Office Briefing Room’; they’re emergency meetings for when a threatening incident would benefit from a get-together of the PM, senior ministers and advisors. There, that’s all I’m saying on that, so please do the printing now. I’ve put the documents the Chancellor needs into a file on the desktop and named it ‘for printing’. I’ve got more to look through on the memory stick when you finished and as I don’t want to have to re-enter the long password, just leave the memory stick in the machine while you do the print job. Okay?’

  Mina was aware that the memory stick might shut down on a time lock if not used for a while, so she got Cape to keep it ‘awake’ before she took it for printing. ‘Could you just check that you’ve put everything you want me to print into the folder?’

  ‘Right,’ said Cape. He quickly looked through the files once more. ‘No, that’s all I need. Get them printed now as quickly as possible, will you?’

  ‘Of course, quick as can. But I have to go the photocopying room with this as the printer in my office is not working,’ she said putting on her ‘cute’ accent – the one she had used when they had first met.

  ‘Very well, if you must. But careful with the memory stick, now that I’ve opened it with the long password, anyone could read what’s on it.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ replied Mina and she hurried out holding the Laptop as though it was made of porcelain. She hoped he would not check that there was nothing wrong with her printer. For what she planned to do, she needed to be out of Cape’s sight. She hurried along the corridor to the photocopying room. She saw no one on the way – many staff having already been allowed to go off early for the long holiday weekend. Although this was Cape’s own laptop, it was already set-up for use on o
ne of the wifi-enabled printing machines there.

  She clicked for it to print off copies of the documents in Cape’s ‘for printing’ folder, and whilst the machine gently whirred and clicked its way through them, she went over to the door and peered along the corridor in both directions. There was no one in sight.

  Hurrying back to the printer and laptop, she reached into the top of her bra and pulled out a small computer memory stick of her own. This she plugged it into one of the laptop’s spare usb ports. She then carefully selected Angus’s memory stick which was still ‘open’ on the desktop. She then copied much of its contents onto hers. She was careful not copy the entire contents, in case the Craithe Team had software on it that would detect a complete transfer and see it as theft. Clearly well used to this kind of operation, she then extracted her own memory stick and snuck it back into the top of her bra with many of Craithe’s and Athena’s secrets now on it.

  As soon as all the printing was finished, she collected it up, stacked it on top of the closed laptop with Angus’s memory stick still firmly in place and hurried back to Cape’s office. During the entire operation she had seen no one.

  ‘All done, want to cheek?’ she beamed as she carefully laid the laptop and pile of papers down on his desk.

  ‘Check,’ he corrected, ‘it’s check not cheek.’ She smiled, though, out of sight under the desk her left foot tapped with irritation. Looking through the copies and checking them off against his list, Cape finally said, ‘Great, you’re getting quite good at all this now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I hope,’ she smiled yet again.

  Checks completed, Cape looked at his watch. No time left for looking at other material on the stick right now, so he removed it from the laptop and put it into his small wall safe. Shutting the door firmly, he twiddled the locking wheels and then tested that it was properly secured for it was not just the instructions that had come with the memory stick that made him nervous about its security − what little he had read convinced him that its contents should be kept limited to as few people as possible.