by Adam Brookes
Patterson watched Hopko stand and walk purposefully to a man who had remained silent throughout, brow furrowed, concentrating on the screen before him. Middle-aged, this man, thinning fair hair on a pale pate; the moist patina of one who spends many hours in windowless secure rooms. And the dress sense, too. Ill-fitting, pleated trousers, a light-blue shirt, square spectacles.
Patterson looked at the man’s identity badge. It read, “McGovern, Mike.” The green strip with the word CONTRACTOR in white. Beneath it CALTRON APPLICATIONS INC. So McGovern, Mike was private sector, brought in by GCHQ from a corporation. A very big, very quiet corporation. To do what, exactly?
Hopko reached out a hand.
“Mike. Hello. Val Hopko.”
He looked up and regarded her, a weary look, one that braced for criticism. He shook her hand, said nothing.
“And to what do we owe the pleasure?” said Hopko.
McGovern held up his hands in surrender.
“They tell me to be here, I’m here,” he said. A faint Irish accent.
Hopko waited.
“I’m on the exploitation team because you will be using applications that were designed by Caltron,” he said slowly. “Security applications. Applications that will ensure your networks are not all blown to bits by whatever is about to be brought into this room. Figuratively speaking.”
A pause.
“Consider me tech support. I’m here to help.”
Hopko seemed about to say more, but the door opened with a hiss and two uniformed security men escorted in a courier in a rumpled suit. The courier looked around, questioning, and Patterson, as holder of the relevant codes, stood to meet him. She uncuffed him and then entered the combination that opened the case. The room was quiet now. Hopko, on tiptoe almost, watched Patterson pull out the watertight box, open it, unwrap the gadget. The technicians crowded around making approving noises. There was business with signatures, and the courier, clearly relieved, left the room. The lead technician, wearing rubber gloves, took the car key, opened it up and inserted the drive into a terminal.
Patterson watched Hopko, saw in her dark eyes sheer, joyful venality.
Once McGovern and the techs had pronounced it clean, the team worked their way through the drive trying to discern what they had, explorers in a pixellated tomb.
They had a lot. They broke the product out into serials. WOODWORK to cover hundreds of documents related to China’s missile program; the DF-41 was there, so was the carrier killer, so were anti-satellite weapons still on the General Armaments Department’s drawing board, and policy papers that projected the capacity of China’s strategic missile forces twenty-five years into the future. Analysts pretended to fall off their chairs and rub their eyes in shock. They ate sandwiches at their desks until the techs objected because of the crumbs, and nobody minded the overtime. QUILTER to cover naval procurement files, which would need the creation of a special analytic cell with draftees from DI Strategic Assessments, Naval Intelligence and more specialists from the corporations who joked about being “pressganged.” DRAWBRIDGE to cover product related to budgets and accounting practices, STEAMER to cover a tranche of personnel files; God only knew when they’d get to them. Patterson was alternately madly busy channeling samples of product to Waverley of Requirements and stunned with boredom as the translators haggled over some minute distinction in the vocabulary of phased array radar. She ate miserably, slept fitfully in visiting officers’ quarters and washed out her underwear in the sink, her overnight bag having proven woefully inadequate.
But the serial that created most excitement in the room, especially among the technicians, was GAMMA, which was to cover product describing the Chinese military’s information operations. A slender file, GAMMA, but tantalizing. Here were maps of the network infrastructure. Here was China’s military telecommunications backbone. Here was the chain of command leading from China’s new cyber warfare units to the General Staff. And that, there, said the lead technician, a balding man in his fifties wearing a blue cardigan and rubber-soled shoes, gesturing to the screen, that is a list of exploits we’ve already found in the operating system.
“A tiny bit more explanation, please,” said Hopko.
“They don’t have their own operating systems, you see, Val,” said the technician. “All their software was written, originally, in the west. But because they’re a secure network, they’re not connected to the Internet. So they don’t receive the updates that the writers of the software send out. So their operating systems are full of holes, which they should have patched. But they never did, did they?”
There was much joking among the technicians about the state of the operating system. “It’s like a Swiss cheese,” one said. “Some of it looks like pirated software. Honestly, ripe for the picking.”
And wherever material appeared that seemed destined for the GAMMA serial, there was McGovern of Caltron Applications Inc., purveyors of cyber expertise and intelligence support systems and services to a number of very quiet agencies. McGovern listened to the translators, offered occasional advice to the techs, pointed out a new approach, a new route. He spoke modestly, and was self-effacing in his manner, and allowed others to take credit for his successes. Then he withdrew to his own screen, or sometimes left the room for half an hour.
And, Patterson noticed, McGovern of Caltron Applications Inc. became as close to animated as was possible for him to be when it was discovered that the gadget had unearthed, from deep in the Chinese network, a series of files detailing contracts awarded to a Chinese corporation, China National Century Inc. CNaC, as it was known, China’s brave new telecoms warrior. CNaC fiber stretched from Tibet to Manchuria, its wireless from Korea to Angola, its processors everywhere, from alarm clocks to spy satellites to weapons systems in one hundred and thirty countries.
Patterson watched as McGovern leaned in, the glimmering screen reflected in his smudged spectacles.
Later, on her way to the canteen, Patterson saw Hopko standing in an office and speaking on a secure phone, gesticulating.
The conference room, deep in the Ministry of Defence, was paneled with rich dark wood. At one end, an assortment of comfy leather armchairs, of the sort one might find in a gentlemen’s club, arranged around a fireplace. Along the length of the room ran a mahogany table, a file with a tan cover at each seat, each classified to a level of secrecy appropriate to its contents. The contents of the files would not leave the room, nor would they be discussed beyond the room with any degree of specificity. Mobile phones, laptops and any other consumer electronics—the bane of security—were to be relinquished upon entry. Coffee and croissants on a side table lent a wonderful morning smell. And at vantage points throughout the room were positioned, delicately and invisibly, a number of cameras and microphones, so that the proceedings might be closely monitored in adjoining rooms.
Hopko sat in an adjoining room of meaner appointment. Before her were six screens and a keyboard equipped with a little joystick.
Patterson clattered into the room, accidentally slamming the door behind her. Hopko looked her up and down sympathetically.
“Trish. You look hot and bothered,” she said. “Sit you down.”
Patterson exhaled and sat.
“What exactly are we doing here?” said Patterson.
“Security. Simon Drinkwater is supposed to do it, but I volunteered to do it for him and he accepted with an indecent degree of alacrity.”
Patterson looked mystified.
“We listen and ensure the briefers don’t say anything they’re not supposed to,” said Hopko.
As she spoke a smart MoD functionary holding a clipboard opened the door to the conference room and a procession of men entered. Patterson and Hopko watched them on the screens. The men were tailored in the manner of senior executives, some affecting a classic masculine authority in navy blue and gray pinstripe, others alluding to current fashion in black, cut snug and narrow.
The men wore visitor passes on dangling c
ords with a contractor stripe and national flag. Most were British, but here and there Patterson saw an American or a Canadian. Beneath the flag was printed their corporate affiliation: Such-and-such Systems Inc. Such-and-such Mission Solutions. Such-and-such Kinetic Applications. Shiny, hard-edged names, evocative of movement and power, yet elusive in their lack of specificity. What, thought Patterson, do they actually do at TRSI Risk Dynamics?
“See this one?” said Hopko. She touched the joystick and the camera moved in on a silver-haired American, suited in black with a simple red tie. He had poured himself a cup of coffee and sat unspeaking at the end of the table.
“Who’s he?” said Patterson.
“He’s ex-CIA, Trish. He used to be Deputy Director of their Clandestine Service. But he retired. Now he has a very comfy billet at Shady Creek Group.”
Patterson wondered if the name was supposed to mean something to her. Shady Creek. A name suggestive of small beginnings, roads less traveled, dappled sunlight, authenticity.
On the screen Hopko and Patterson watched the executives open the files, all of which, Patterson could now see, were stamped with GAMMA/TOP SECRET.
“So these are all corporations and we’re briefing them on the product?” said Patterson.
“Or those bits of the product that we think they need to know about,” said Hopko.
“Why do they need to know any of it?”
“So they can design things, services, capabilities, that we will buy from them,” said Hopko. “Here’s China’s network, we say. Now go away and build something that will penetrate it.”
The briefer was talking now, taking the executives through the early read on the GAMMA material and what it revealed of China’s telecommunications infrastructure, its cyber future.
“Though I can’t imagine our friend from Shady Creek is going to learn much he doesn’t already know,” Hopko said.
“Why?”
“Why? Because Shady Creek is private equity. It owns Caltron, among other things. And you can’t move for Caltron people at GCHQ. Remember that pasty fellow during the exploitation? McGovern? He was Caltron.”
Hopko paused for a moment and leaned forward to look more closely at the screen.
“So I imagine that our Shady Creek friend here has already been briefed on everything that was on our drive,” she said.
The door opened again and another figure entered the conference room, hurriedly. Not so well-suited this one, Patterson noted. The figure pulled up an extra chair next to the silver-haired American and murmured in the American’s ear.
“Well,” said Hopko.
“What’s he doing here?” said Patterson.
“Making sure,” said Hopko, “that Shady Creek Group has everything it needs.”
And, as she spoke, Roly Yeats, Head of Western Hemisphere and Far East Controllerate, looked straight into a camera, as if locking eyes with Patterson and daring her to question him.
Later, Patterson took the Tube home to Archway and walked home in darkness suffused with a rain so fine it was almost mist. She unlocked the front door and stood in the still hallway, listening for a sign that Damian was at home. She heard nothing but the city’s low frequency whisper-roar, climbed the stairs to her flat and let herself in. She changed into jeans, heated lasagne in a foil tray and poured herself a glass of red wine.
She sat at her laptop, eating. She searched Shady Creek Group. The firm’s headquarters, she read, sat not on a creek of any sort, but a river, the Potomac, a short distance from the White House and the Pentagon and Langley.
And there Shady Creek had designed the private equity strategy that had brought them to their illustrious position at the most secret conference tables. First the big ramping-up a decade earlier: the acquisition of translation and security and logistics companies. The recruiting of the hard men, ex-Delta and SAS, and the field operatives. At one point the director of the CIA had to ask Shady Creek to stop recruiting in the cafeteria at Langley.
But then, just as the wars were at their height, and with them the tide of United States federal dollars and the endless contracts, Shady Creek pivoted. It started buying clever little cyber start-ups, muscular network systems and intelligence support outfits. And recruiting Chinese speakers, not Arabists.
Patterson looked at the websites. The Shady Creek Group, through its wide portfolio, offers deep industry expertise and critical mission support across multidisciplinary intelligence operations. A photograph depicted a uniformed American soldier in helmet and black ballistic glasses, next to a smiling elderly woman wearing a robe and headdress, which, while generic, signaled ethnic otherness. A third man holding a clipboard gestured into the distance, into the sunlight, towards a city on a plain, and the soldier and the woman followed his gaze.
Patterson couldn’t sleep. She lay holding herself, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, listening to the city’s vibrational hush, its surging and its falling. She thought of the suited men in the conference room, their lack of affect, the sense of deracination that surrounded them. What was their mission, these quiet men? What was her role in it?
She thought back to certainty she had known. Her last day in theater. She remembered the dawn, and the thudding and chattering of the helos. She had stood on the flightline, drinking tea from a styrofoam cup. The helos came swinging in to land in great washes of dust, the pale sun behind them. She watched the shadowed figures on the tarmac, hunching beneath the rotors, the whump whump whump and the gentle, balletic lift, tilt and turn into the sky towards the mountains. Jenkins had been with her, and Rashid, the snarly little staff sergeant from Bolton, pride of the battalion for his Pashtun, his blizzard of Waziri dialects.
“So we’re losing you, ma’am,” Jenkins had said.
“Losing you to the funnies,” said Rashid. “You won’t like it, ma’am, all those fast cars, Martinis, whatnot. You’ll miss us.”
“I’ll miss you like a sucking chest wound,” she’d said, and they’d laughed. Her flight had been called, and she’d hefted her bergen and her weapon, and waved, and turned and jogged towards the helo.
She threw the duvet off and padded through the flat, checking the front door and windows.
She thought about Granny Poon, the woman’s unease, the unexplained probing of her phone. Someone was trying to beacon her.
Who?
30
SIS, Vauxhall Cross, London
The Director, Requirements and Production, had a mouthful of brioche when his phone rang. He swallowed quickly and reached for his handkerchief to wipe the crumbs from his mouth. He took a quick swallow of coffee. He’d arrived late this morning and the overnight telegram traffic lay on his desk untouched.
“The Permanent Under-Secretary would like you to come straight over, please. Your car’s waiting.”
They were there when he walked in, the Permanent Under-Secretary, the Special Adviser and minions.
And C, the chief of SIS.
Nobody had told him that C would be at the meeting, but there he was, with his rimless spectacles and thinning hair, folded into his chair like some spindly, dark-eyed predator in its lair, poised for ambush.
The Director of Requirements and Production tried to collect himself.
“Extraordinary,” the Permanent Under-Secretary was saying. “Quite extraordinary.” On his desk a folder marked TOP SECRET/UKEYES ALPHA/GAMMA.
The Special Adviser was beaming.
“Cheltenham’s in paroxysms,” he said. “Listen to this. A formidable penetration, sure to yield unique and priceless insight into China’s information architecture, cyber warfare capability, and the geography of its military-industrial complex. Honestly, they’re like teenagers discovering pornography.”
Laughter. The Director of Requirements and Production waited.
“But seriously,” said the Permanent Under-Secretary, “everyone’s impressed. I mean the missile stuff is fascinating and important, but the cyber stuff, well. The sheer scale of it.”
H
e paused.
“And. And we now know what those duplicitous shits at China National Century Corporation are doing. Did you see that bit?”
He looked up and peered round the room, a picture of injured innocence.
“They are, apparently, manufacturing corrupted processors and pushing them towards certain American importers. With the intention—the active intention, mark you—of getting them into important bits of American military kit. And they’ve succeeded. Dodgy CNaC chips, gentlemen, with who knows what on them, appear to have made their way into America’s shiny new littoral combat ship. Deliberately.”
Another pause.
“Wait till we tell the Yanks. I’ll enjoy that. Oh, and even the addled cynics at MoD seem to feel the product is not forged. It’s ‘internally consistent,’ they say. And there’s too bloody much of it. You must pass on our congratulations to Roly Yeats.”
“I shall, of course,” the Director of Requirements and Production said.
C was quiet. Now the Special Adviser spoke.
“Might I just bring us straight to the central question here? Given the extraordinary scope and importance of this penetration, there’s obviously a hope it may yield more. Lots of questions, obviously. And so we wonder what expectation we might realistically have of STONE CIRCLE going forward.”
We do, do we?
C spoke for the first time.
“I have given assurances that we can and will review the basis on which this operation was conceived, and we will review whatever arrangements were put in place. I’m sure we’re all agreed that this is an appropriate course of action.”
“I’m sure it is,” said the Director of Requirements and Production. Except, he thought, I will have to tell Hopko that whatever deal she made with her agent is off.
C was there before him, though, working like a scalpel.
“Now we appreciate that assurances were given to those involved, and Roly Yeats has made clear that changing an agent’s expectations at this stage of the game might present problems for the case officers and for the access agent. So I accept the logic that a change in the operational modalities is desirable.”