The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  Giles thought for another moment, then leaned over and jabbed a button on his desk phone.

  “Hello, IT?”

  “Giles Finlay, floor seven. I need a clean laptop, in my office, soonest.”

  “Five minutes, sir.”

  Giles turned back to Bridge. “When that machine arrives you’re going to show me every file, every message, every code on this drive. Then you’re going to recount every detail of your movements last night, including however the hell you convinced the police to let you snoop around the victim’s home, until we’re done.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I’m going to decide whether or not to throw you on Five’s mercy.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Giles had softened a little. Bridge guessed his main problem with her actions was simply that she hadn’t told him; if she’d approached him first he might have told her to go ahead anyway, because then he would have felt in control. But he also could have completely shut her down, seeing as all she had to go on was a gut feeling and a frankly suspect email. She’d calculated it was better to ask forgiveness than permission — at least, so long as she came up with the goods. If it had turned out to be a wild goose chase after all, her current conversation would be very different.

  “Just one question,” said Giles, reading through the files. “Have you verified these decodes? Did your friend get them all correct?”

  “First thing I did once I figured out the encryption method,” she replied. “I had to try a few algorithms, but there are only so many that will do this kind of thing, and eventually I found it. All the messages checked out.”

  “What are the words and names, that stuff that isn’t time or date? Code words for locations, perhaps?”

  “Possibly, but why encode something twice? Either you trust your encryption or you don’t.”

  “Silly Tommy maps,” Giles murmured, lost in thought.

  Bridge had no idea what that meant. “Excuse me?”

  “Old SOE trick. Back in World War Two, saboteurs often needed maps, in order to know their targets. But if they were captured, the Germans would figure out our intel level, which could raise an alarm. So some SOE maps were only accurate as far as they needed to be; target locale, exfil path, that sort of thing. Everything else was slightly incorrect, enough that any captors would see it and assume our intel was poor.”

  She nodded, getting the slang. “And they’d say ‘Silly Tommy, you know nothing.’ When in fact we knew everything.”

  “Exactly,” Giles smiled. “Encrypting twice isn’t always redundant.”

  Bridge pulled up the master list of decoded messages. “Say we assume the other stuff is another code, then. But for what? They’re real words, not encrypted garbage, so it must be a straight cipher of some kind. And look at the variety of them: Holland, Euterpe, Cavendish, Gladstone, Temperance, Bunyan…do you think by any chance our mole is a classicist?”

  Giles hummed. “Holland could simply mean the Netherlands. It’s right next to France. And Cavendish — that could be connected to Terry Cavendish, in the Air Force. But the rest of it just sounds like a list of famous people. You’ve got Bunyan, and Gladstone. Is Disraeli in there, too?”

  She scanned down the list. “No. Poor old Benny, never gets any respect. Even his statue’s a poor job compared to Gladstone’s…” she trailed off, her eyes widening. “Oh, bloody hell. Statues.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “They’re statues, here in London. Holland, in Holland Park. Cavendish, in the Square. Gladstone, down the far end of the Strand. Hang on,” she said, walking round to Giles’ computer and tapping in search terms. After half a minute, she clenched her first in triumph. “There you go. Euterpe is a muse, she’s in St George’s Gardens. Temperance sits on top of a fountain at Blackfriars. Get it? They’re the rendezvous locations.” She turned the laptop round so Giles could see.

  “I should coco,” he nodded, staring at his screen. “Now, show me the newsgroups where these were posted.”

  Still leaning over Giles’ shoulder, Bridge navigated to Usenet. To her surprise, someone had posted another ASCII message sometime in the early hours of the morning. “Well, well, well.” She smiled. “Do you have a copy of yesterday’s Times?”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, Bridge returned to Giles’ office with her HP laptop, and brought up the new ASCII post on her own screen. Giles had found yesterday’s Times under a small pile of document folders on his desk. “Good thing I hadn’t chucked it in the recycling yet,” he said. “But I should warn you, I only made it halfway through yesterday’s puzzle before I was distracted.” He turned to the crossword section, showing her the half-completed grid.

  She checked the clue reference at the end of the post. “Ten across, four down.”

  “We’re in luck, I did those already. Answers are penultimate, and glockenspiel. Is that really enough for you to decode the message?”

  “One way to find out,” said Bridge as she pasted the ASCII art into a script window she’d set up the previous night, using Ten’s methods. First, the script stripped all the whitespace and linefeeds from the text, leaving a solid block of three thousand characters. Next it asked her for the key. She typed ‘PenultimateGlockenspiel’ in response, and the decoding algorithm began to do its thing. Fifteen seconds later it had finished, and she read it aloud. “Possible compromise - have returned - standby for next details.” She looked up at Giles, who was deep in thought. “They mean Ten. Shit, they think he was one of us. Please, we have to look into this. Has anyone come forward? Any witnesses, anything on CCTV to show who might have killed him?”

  Giles leaned back in his chair, removed his glasses, and cleaned them with his handkerchief. “Not to my knowledge, but I don’t believe the pathologist has conducted their examination, yet. Once they do, I’m sure they’ll have a better idea of what happened.”

  “Well, is there at least some way I can be kept in the loop?”

  “Seems to me you’ve done a pretty good job of getting inside so far, without my help.”

  Bridge sighed. “Surely you can understand why I was hesitant to come to you before I knew what I had.”

  “Deniability? You appear to have forgotten who we work for. I’d deny the sky is blue if necessary. Now, what are we going to tell Five about all of this?”

  She hesitated. “I hadn’t given that any thought.”

  “No, that much is clear.”

  Bridge resisted the urge to argue, even though she knew he was right, and after a moment’s pause Giles reached a decision. “Here’s how we play it. You called me as soon as you read the dead man’s email, and I ordered you to proceed, following his instructions to locate the drive. We didn’t inform Five, or the police at the house, for fear of leaks before we knew if there was anything solid. You then brought it to me this morning, and I’m going to hand it over to Andrea Thomson in about…” he checked his watch, “…forty-five minutes.”

  “What do we do in the meantime? Do you want me to clone our own copy before we hand it over the river?”

  Giles shook his head. “Monica can do that. No, you have a rather more important meeting to attend. I’m going to read you in on Exphoria.”

  24

  While Monica made a second clone of Declan O’Riordan’s hard drive, Giles left Bridge alone inside Broom Eleven, a tiny two-person cupboard, for ten minutes. Then he returned and led her downstairs to Broom Three, one of Vauxhall’s larger briefing rooms. Two people were waiting for them inside, and a third looked out from a wall-mounted screen.

  Giles indicated the older person of the two in the room, a white-haired and straight-backed man in the greyest of grey suits. “Brigitte, this is Devon Chisholme, SEO at the MoD.” She nodded at the civil servant as Giles turned to the second person, a large middle-aged woman she recognised. “And you know Emily Du
nston, our head of Paris bureau.” Dunston had been H/PAR since before Bridge had entered the Service, and grew up in the Cold War era, giving her what could charitably be called an ‘old school’ approach to espionage. She especially disdained computers and data analytics, as Bridge had found the first time she tried to discuss the topic, and relations between them had been cool ever since. Now Dunston gestured at the man on the video screen, who smiled. He was slim, handsome, with dark skin and alert brown eyes. Something of the Berber about him, thought Bridge.

  “This is Henri Mourad,” said Dunston, confirming her hunch. “One of my men in Paris.”

  “Enchanté,” he waved at Bridge.

  “Algerian,” she replied, recognising his accent. “Native?”

  Henri shook his head. “Only my dad,” he said with a surprisingly strong south coast twang, and smiled again. “Born in sunny Brighton.”

  “And this is Brigitte Sharp, one of my CTA officers,” Giles said, indicating her to the room. “She found the material that indicates a leak in Exphoria.”

  Chisholme raised an eyebrow. “Indicates? We’re not certain?”

  Giles sat down across the table from Chisholme and Dunston. Bridge took the hint and sat next to him, still a little confused as to what exactly was going on. “The probability is high,” said Giles, “and that’s why we’re here. I’m proposing a mole hunt.”

  “You mean a fishing expedition,” said Dunston, peering down at her notes with disdain. “‘Source embedded’? ‘Handoff’? This is paper-thin, Giles.”

  “I’d say someone merely knowing the project codename justifies a certain amount of digging, Ems,” said Giles, and Bridge resisted a smile at his needling. He knew as well as she did that Dunston hated that diminutive, especially in formal circumstances.

  Chisholme nodded in agreement. “The fact these messages appear to have come from France is very unsettling.”

  Bridge cleared her throat. Giles hadn’t said if he expected her to speak at this meeting, or if she was supposed to be quiet and listen. But then, she’d never been very good at that. “That’s not confirmed,” she said to Chisholme. “The posts were made to a French-language newsgroup, but they decode to English, and anyone can post to that group from anywhere. I could do it right now.”

  The civil servant frowned. “What about that tracing thing, where you work out someone’s location on the internet?”

  Bridge didn’t need to see Giles’ expression to know he was praying she wouldn’t patronise Chisholme for his obvious ignorance of the internet. In fact, she was relieved the civil servant wasn’t actively dismissive, or accusing her of being a “jumped-up computer game expert,” both of which had happened before in dealings with the MoD. “The sender obscured their internet address, and posted with a false email,” she explained, “which means no, we can’t back-trace them. Unfortunately, these methods are widespread among hackers, and even security personnel. All of our own traffic does the same thing, for example.”

  Dunston sighed. “So not only could these posts have been made from anywhere, they could have been made by anyone.”

  “That’s correct.” Bridge decided to go out on a limb, guessing this was part of Giles’ game plan. “And that’s why we need a mole hunt. We can monitor these posts till we’re blue in the face, but right now we have no way to connect them to a source.”

  “Exactly so,” Giles nodded, and Bridge relaxed. Now she knew why she was here.

  Chisholme pushed again. “But you’ve worked out how to decode the messages, yes? So why not sit back and read their conversations?”

  “Because there may not be any more,” said Dunston. “Since Ms Sharp’s friend interrupted what we presume was a handoff, we must also assume they, whoever ‘they’ are, know their code is compromised.”

  “I thought this man wasn’t connected to the security services.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Bridge. “But I think Ms Dunston’s point is that his killer didn’t know that.”

  “We can continue monitoring that group,” said Giles. “But even if more messages are sent, they may not lead us anywhere. We need to gather physical evidence.”

  Henri Mourad, the Paris officer on the video link, spoke up. “Which needs a physical investigation. So you want me to start questioning people?”

  Giles held up a hand before Dunston could respond. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first thing we need to do is read both of you in on Exphoria.” He pulled the room’s keyboard towards him, and looked to Chisholme. “I’ll bring up the slides. Devon, would you be so kind as to walk us through it?”

  The civil servant took a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and propped them on his nose, while Giles logged in and called up a document. A crude project logo filled the screen: the Union Jack and Tricolour flags side by side in the background, with the word EXPHORIA superimposed in bold black letters.

  Chisholme opened the files in front of him and read from them. “Exphoria is a joint UK-France defence project to design the next generation of control software for unmanned combat aerial vehicles.” On the screen, Giles brought up a photograph, and Bridge noticed Henri Mourad look down from the video link, presumably seeing the same images on a second secure screen at his office. “Or, as everyone calls them nowadays, ‘drones’.”

  Bridge had thought the photo was of a stealth bomber, all strange angles and swept wings, but then realised there was no cockpit or viewport. This was itself a drone, an attack craft designed to be controlled by a remote pilot in a command headquarters halfway around the world, with limited software for autonomous flight and targeting.

  “This is just one potential model, using the same anti-radar design principles as a stealth bomber. There are several prototypes in development for the hardware, but whatever the final design, it will use Exphoria software technology.”

  “Is the hardware a joint operation, too? Like a drone version of the Eurofighter?”

  Chisholme bristled at Bridge’s interruption, but nodded. “Something like that, although we do rather hope to keep more of a lid on the finances this time around. Giles?”

  The screen changed from a still image to a video. It showed a more traditional-looking drone flying over a mostly empty airfield. The letters X-4 were stencilled on the drone’s fuselage. As they watched, the drone made some high-speed manoeuvres, then resumed a direct flight path. A barrage of small missiles flew toward it from below. The drone deftly avoided them all, and fired its own payload while taking evasive action. The camera quickly panned down to the grey airstrip below, where a dozen blue cars were all tightly parked, surrounding a single red car in the middle. The missile bullseyed the red car, while above it the unharmed drone cruised on.

  “Impressive,” said Bridge. “Targeting error correction isn’t easy. Full marks to the pilot, too.”

  Chisholme half-smiled. “On the contrary, all the pilot did was feed in target parameters and activate lift-off. The evasive manoeuvres, and the ultimate firing decision, were made entirely by the UAV. The corrective targeting you mentioned is also a core part of the Exphoria system. We believe this kind of actively engaged drone will become standard in the next decade of warfare.” The image changed again, this time to a large steel building. It was wide and low, isolated and incongruous within a sunlit pastoral environment, surrounded by grassy fields and hills. The building had no windows. “The software is being developed by a joint team here, just outside Agenbeux in northern France, under cover of a company called Guichetech who make software for retail outlets. Supermarket tills, entry kiosk cash registers, that sort of thing. It’s in the Champagne region. Ms Dunston and her French counterparts selected it as the best compromise of security and access.”

  A map appeared on the video screen, and Bridge saw the facility wasn’t too far from where her sister was staying. Their childhood had been spent in the Rhône-Alpes region, and Izzy�
�s farmhouse was in Côte-d’Or, just a couple of hours’ drive north of their home town. Keep on north for another few hours and you’d be in Agenbeux.

  Dunston broke her train of thought. “It’s also suitable because the presence of British people doesn’t raise too many eyebrows in such a tourist-heavy area.”

  The slideshow moved through several images, showing the exterior of the building, the security fence surrounding the grounds perimeter, and the topography of the region.

  “How many people work there?” asked Henri, on the video link.

  “Total staff is one hundred and twenty-eight,” said Chisholme. “Just over eighty French, the remainder British — though that includes the site manager, who’s from our office. All thoroughly vetted by both us and la Défense.”

  Bridge guessed that last bit was included because the MoD was offended by the suggestion of a mole slipping through that vetting process, and was laying groundwork that would enable them to shift blame onto le Ministère de la Défense if necessary. The entente cordiale had its limits.

  Henri Mourad whistled quietly. “That’s a lot of people to sift through. Is there a deadline on this?”

  “That’s rather the kicker,” said Dunston. “As you saw from the demonstration video, Exphoria is at an advanced stage, and nearing completion. Phase one of the programme will be feature-complete in a little more than two weeks.”

  Bridge whistled. “That’s not a kicker, that’s an own goal. So our first job has to be narrowing down the candidates, filtering out people we can eliminate entirely. I can start on that as soon as I have access to personnel files.”

  “You’ll have access to everything we have, including our copies of the French vetting files, but I’m afraid that’s all,” said Giles. “We can’t be certain the mole isn’t at la Défense itself, so we’re not informing them of this operation.”

  Henri looked worried. “They won’t like that.”