‘If you’re meeting with the Chancellor for some time, shall I take quick lunch now?’ asked Mina. ‘That way I’m ready help you when you finished meeting with him?’ She gave Cape another of her coy looks.
‘Good thinking,’ replied Cape and, glancing at his watch again. He suggested that she be back by two thirty - rather over an hour from now. Then, with his thoughts focused on how he would brief the Chancellor, he hurried from his office, head bent low, small quick steps, concentration on ‘high’.
* * * * *
As soon as he was gone, Mina half-ran from his office back to her desk. She collected up her large floppy leather bag, put on her coat and a Cossack style mock-fur hat, rushed downstairs and out of Number Eleven. Leaving Downing Street, she gave a broad, little-girl grin to the policemen on the gates, turned left and headed up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square. As soon as she was out of sight of the Downing Street Gates, she got out her mobile phone and rang another mobile number. Her phone told her the number was in use.
She smiled. The information of the memory stick was hopefully going to be worth a good deal of money to her – enough perhaps for some celebrations in Italy. She would also be able to give her other branch of ‘the family’ what they were looking for. She would try the mobile again in a minute. She tried twice. In her eagerness, she nearly dropped the phone − trying to use it a third time whilst threading her way through the lunchtime crowds. It was still some distance to the small Internet Café she often used, so she stopped in Trafalgar Square and sat on a step there. She rang the number a fourth time. Eventually it was answered.
‘Wheeler’ said a firm voice.
‘It’s me, Mina.’
‘Mina, nice to hear from you - something for me?’
‘Yes, very big, I’d say it’s “hot stuff” - you’ll be most surprised I think’ she said, now speaking without a trace of accent, in quick, fluent English.
‘Hot, you say?’ Wheeler sounded cautious.
‘Yes, hot’, she repeated. ‘I have a memory stick with some secret information on it. I’m on my way to the Internet Café I usually send you this kind of secret information from − I’ll be there in five or six minutes. I’ll email some of it to you – all of it will be too much, might make the internet café owner suspicious. We’ll have to meet some time for me to give you the memory stick itself, Okay?’
‘Well, yes if that’s what you need to do with it. In the meantime, can you tell me a bit more about what you’ve got?’
‘Could tell you a bit more I suppose,’ she said, ‘but I also need to talk to you about a special bonus for this lot.’
‘We’ll talk about bonuses when I see what you’ve sent,’ replied Wheeler, ‘but give me a hint anyway.’
Mina explained as briefly as she could the events of the morning – the way she had copied the contents of the memory stick and what she had been able to overhear from Cape’s various telephone conversations. She had only been able to look a few of the files on the stick, but could tell Wheeler what had been on the pages she had printed off for Cape. When she finished her tale, there was a coughing sound from the other mobile.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ said Wheeler, his voice now hoarse. ‘There’s going to be a demonstration this afternoon to show off the power of Athena’s internet hacking capabilities? Who the hell is Athena?’
‘It’s apparently the next generation of computer software,’ she said, ‘Mr Cape was saying to someone on the phone that it will take over from all the present computer systems which he said were like kid’s stuff by comparison.’
‘It’s going to be easier for me to understand once I’ve actually seen what you’re sending me and what’s on the memory stick,’ said Wheeler. He was intrigued. Why would the Chancellor be interested in a new generation of computer software? Why the secrecy? Why hold a Cobra Meeting – such meetings were usually only convened when there was a perceived threat to the nation.
‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘as I already said, this information should mean a really big bonus?’
‘Okay, Okay,’ replied Wheeler, now irritated with her usual harping on about money − even though he acknowledged to himself that her payments, her bonuses as she called them, were probably her entire motivation for risking so much by passing on information to him. And with two of the world’s giant accountancy firms as clients, her information was one of the main reasons he had manoeuvred her into the job there in the first place.
After a pause in the haggling he conceded ‘If what you’ve got there is as good as it sounds, you’ll be very well rewarded, believe me’.
‘That’s better,’ said Mina, ‘we can talk about that when I hand over the stick with the rest of the materials on it. I’ll go to the internet café now and send you what I printed out for Mr Cape – it still has everything about the demonstration, the hedge fund being used for it, the agenda for Athena’s launch tomorrow. I’m going to pretend I’m sending something very personal so I don’t make the café manager suspicious – I’ll think of something’, she said as she got to her feet to continue her journey, still holding the mobile to her ear.
‘Just send me what you can and meet me tonight at the Antelope Pub in Eaton Terrace,’ he said ‘be there at seven o’clock if you can make it by then. I’ll bring my laptop and I promise I’ll bring plenty of money in case your information’s worth it.’
She ended the call and hurried on towards the Globespan Internet Café.
At the café, knowing that most booths had just a keyboard and screen, she went straight to the manager’s counter and smiled her usual blend of lost little girl and coquette. The young customer services manager behind the desk recognised her from earlier visits, gave her a broad grin and came out with the usual ‘can I help you?’
‘I have to email with my employment details for a new job – my CV,’ she said looking directly into his eyes. ‘But unfortunately they’re here on this memory stick; is there somewhere I can plug it in to send it as an attachment to an email?’ She had put the foreign accent back on, to help with the plea.
‘Sure, do it from here,’ he said as he lifted the section of the counter and beckoned her through.
She quickly sat down at one of the Café’s admin screens, pulled out the little memory stick, and inserted it into the desktop’s tower drive down by her left knee. Next, carefully checking Wheeler’s email address, she opened an email form on the screen. She wrote a covering email to ensure that he did not forget to bring plenty of cash to the Antelope. In it she boasted again about the importance of the information she was sending – the demonstration, Athena’s new software and the preparations to counter a cyber-attack on a bank tomorrow. She then attached three files off the stick and pressed send.
This done, she took a second little memory stick out of her bag, plugged it into the tower of the desktop and copied the entire contents of the first stick onto the second. Taking both sticks out of the tower, she put one back into her bag and the other into a padded jiffy-bag envelope she had already addressed to Anton Silayev, care of the Russian Embassy. It would go in the next diplomatic bag to Moscow and then on to Silayev. She smiled. For all of Wheeler’s assumption that she was spying only for him, this second envelope would be worth ten -thousand pounds to her – probably five times what Wheeler would be paying her in the Antelope pub tonight. Ah well, she thought to herself, it’s not bad money for very little work, so who cares whose paying it?
Her clandestine work successfully completed, she got up and hurried out. In a flurry of confidence in the value of this information, she left far more cash on the counter than was needed for the time she had spent on their machine.
As she left the internet café she had no qualms of conscience or feelings that she betrayed the trust Number Eleven had placed in her when they gave her a job – to her this was just business, a lucrative side-line and she even hummed a favourite Italian song to herself as she headed for a very quick pub lunch before going back to
Number Eleven.
Strange that she had ignored some of her training from Wheeler whilst in the café. In her excitement at what she was sending, she had allowed that thrill to overcome her trained caution. In writing her long email, she had forgotten that the ever-watchful eyes of the world’s surveillance teams would be on the lookout for a number of words that she had used in it – not least “cyber-weapons” and “Athena”.
Chapter 7
Thursday, mid - afternoon,
The SVR, Yesenevo, Moscow
Igor Komarov had taken great care when setting up his personal links to the Federation’s various intelligence services. The arrangement meant that his assistant, Pavel Rostov, looked after all matters connected with internal affairs. This meant mainly keeping a close watch on the President’s list of dissidents. Until Angus Macrae had moved Komarov’s money this morning, both Boreyev and Mikhail Vassilov, had been on this long list of dissidents. Naturally, Komarov said nothing to anyone in the office about his financial dealings with Macrae, but hinted that it was the President’s wish that the two of them be removed from the list because of some personal rapprochement. Apart from this one instance of personal intervention, Komarov left the boring dissident matters to Rostov.
The exciting activity, and potentially that from which the glory would come, was the hunt for the new cyber weapon and this Komarov took for himself. This hunt was almost exclusively handled by his own personally fostered connection with Danil Morozov in the SVR.
Much of the strength of the link between Morozov and “mentor Komarov”, rested on Morozov’s near hero-worship of Komarov’s close connections to the President and, in his own mind, lifted Morozov above the rest of his co-workers. Indeed, by inference, Komarov allowed Morozov to feel that he himself was but a step and a half from the President. Thus, whereas many on electronic stake-out duties might easily have allowed the hours’ of boredom to take the edge off vigilance, Morozov’s dedication on his mentor’s behalf was devoted and meticulous.
Danil Morozov’s main areas of his expertise were the monitoring of all foreign communications - emails, telephony – both landline and mobile. His computer surveillance programmes were also set up to keep a watch on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. All of his work had recently been greatly enhanced with yet another reorganisation of the SVR’s capabilities and was now supposedly able to match those of any of his counterparts in the UK’s GCHQ or the US at Langley and the NSA.
Morozov’s search programmes – sophisticated algorithms - were capable of spotting words or phrases which “popped up” in emails, documents, or telephone conversations almost anywhere on the internet or over the airwaves – that is to say, anywhere in the world. It was therefore of considerable excitement when, just after three in the afternoon, a small red-light alarm went off when one of his key search words “Athena” had been picked up more than once in an email that had just been sent in the UK. Morozov quickly focussed more machine power on this UK search which had found this first occurrence. Soon more of his key words and phrases began to appear. By looking through not just emails, but databases on the laptops and computers involved in the first email – Mina’s to Wheeler – ever more data came flowing into Morozov’s files where his internal systems began to sort and organise them.
To make even greater use of information, Morozov was able to ask other machines to expand on new names as they appeared. It was the fruits of these expanded searches that got Morozov’s pulse to quicken, for he soon found that Mina was listed as working for the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom and the recipient as being the partner of a London PR company. Further searches through the contents of attachments of Mina’s email seemed to indicate that this “Athena” was almost sure to be the new generation software Komarov had been trying to hunt down for the past year.
His usual method of working with Komarov was to put his findings into documentary form and email them twice a day. Now, with this exciting breakthrough, he picked up the telephone in the hope that Komarov too would be excited by the news and would not want to wait for one of the usual emails late that evening. To his disappointment, Komarov was out of the office and not expected back till much later. Morozov’s excitement prevented him from just leaving matters at that and asked the junior in Komarov’s office if he could leave a message.
‘It’s Morozov here from the SVR,’ he said, ‘could you alert him the moment he gets in to look at an email and attachments I’ve just sent him. It is of great importance and also urgent.’
Chapter 8
Thursday Lunchtime
Struthers, Wheeler & Co, The Strand, London
As Max Wheeler was due to receive Mina’s email, he told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed and did not want any calls put through to him till further notice. He wanted to study what Mina was sending him before telling his partner, John Struthers - for a start, his partner was not even aware of Mina’s existence.
He and Mina had met a couple of times and he had also got her an introduction to Cape at a party given specifically for that purpose. Spiked drinks combined with Mina’s charms were all that were needed and Mina eventually got the job at Number 11. Mina was delighted. Though she had learned well how to manipulate Cape so as to get information needed by Wheeler, she had also learned how to manipulate Wheeler who was still under the impression that the bonuses she got from him were important to her impoverished family in southern Italy and were also her entire motivation. This background story she enhanced each time she and Wheeler communicated and she always bargained for more than he offered. She even went as far as giving Wheeler her boyfriend’s address as being hers, whereas she lived nearby in a very comfortable furnished apartment within a security-guarded block of flats. Her boyfriend’s apartment was in an insalubrious old block and when Wheeler was initially vetting her apparent poverty was one aspect of her life that convinced him he could maintain a strong hold on her. Mina had soon come to understand the cynical ways in which Wheeler used her and it amused her that he still believed that he had recruited her – though, of course, it was her family who had sought out Wheeler to use his expertise to get her into Number 11. And as Wheeler had two of the large Accountancy firms as clients and even the Mafia needed to keep up to date with changing financial rules, it was working well for them as well.
The information that Wheeler got from his team of informers varied considerably – as might be expected. In Mina’s case, it was for her to get advance information on the government’s intentions in world of finance and finance law. Whereas his army of spies were not always good judges of the importance or indeed the relevance if the information they were passing on and sometimes, without telling them, their offerings went straight into the bin. On many other occasions – as with this one of Mina’s – the information from Cape’s memory stick and conversations was sure to be of direct relevance to several of Wheeler’s clients.
Advance and secret information on a new kind of software and its launch at a Bank of England conference was interesting enough, but her specific mention of hedge funds had caught his attention and he now settled himself comfortably at his desk and opened Mina’s newly arrived email. As he read, he jotted an occasional note. Struthers & Wheeler had two hedge funds as clients, three companies involved in internet security and the contents of the email could well impinge on any or all these. It was as he was reading through that he suddenly dropped his pen. He read the sentence a second time.
“The demonstration on the Matthews Finch Hedge Fund this afternoon will show beyond any doubt Athena’s mastery of the internet and its unique ability to hack right into the core programmes of organisations, however well protected they may think they are from cyber-attack.”
As he got his handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his forehead, he noticed to his horror that his hand was trembling. Fine beads of sweat had formed round his pale, freckled forehead, just beneath his close-cropped red hair. The Matthews Finch acco
unt was one of their most important clients and any adverse publicity on them – such as this – could reflect badly on him as well. He quickly read on the end of the email and its attachments. To make sure that he had not misunderstood what was happening, he read through the passage yet again and then picked up the telephone and asked for John Struthers.
As one of their clients put it, “if you want good press coverage, a reliable job well done or a well-managed launch event, go to John Struthers, but if it’s flair you need or someone on your side in a scandal, Max Wheeler’s your man”. Although Struthers did not mind this widely accepted view of the two of them, he was wary of Wheeler’s sometimes unconventional methods - already this year he had need to step in to sort out a mess that Max had got the company and a client into. So when he got an excited Max asking for an urgent meeting, he was already on the defensive.
Wheeler’s account of the email, “from a reliable source” was hurried and emotional and Struthers sat back nodding his head, not entirely sure why Wheeler was so hyped-up over some new software, cyber-attacks, or a Bank of England’s conference the next day. But he sat up and leaned forward across the desk at Wheeler’s next part of the tale.
‘This demonstration this afternoon is using Matthews Finch as a guinea pig to show off this new software,’ Wheeler said, ‘quite how the Bank of England has come to be endorsing illegal computer-hacking is beyond me and I hope to learn more when I meet my source this evening,’
‘Maybe Nat Matthews or Paul Finch personally authorised this tampering with their trading software?’ suggested Struthers, ‘Perhaps they offered their company for demonstration purposes, in exchange for something we don’t know about?’
Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series) Page 6