The Geneva Trap

by Stella Rimington

  Seeming to take her silence for tacit agreement, Sorsky continued: ‘Now he’s away again. Which gives me an opportunity to find out more. Perhaps I can find out which other country is involved.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘His secretary has the keys to his office and to his filing cabinet. At least, she thinks she does.’ He jingled something in his hand. ‘I managed to borrow them without her knowing – I don’t want her involved. So when we’re done here, I’m going back to the office. Something must be documented that would give us a clue, and I should be able to find it.’

  ‘That sounds risky. There may well be nothing to find. I don’t think it’s a good idea at all.’

  ‘The risk is minimal.’ He stretched suddenly, then stood up. ‘I will meet you tomorrow morning at the café in Place du Bourg-de-Four. Eleven o’clock sharp.’ He stood up suddenly and started to walk away.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Liz to his retreating back.

  Chapter 18

  As Peggy stood at the bar of the Angler’s Arms, for the very first time in her young life she felt old. The pub was a stone’s throw from Hoxton Square and most of its clientele looked as though they’d come straight from the galleries and studios that were sprouting up in the area like well-watered seeds. Among the jeans and designer T-shirts, her office skirt and jacket felt drab, and she envied the loudly cheerful mood of the Friday evening crowd which contrasted with her own feeling of anxiety. Charlie Fielding had asked to see her urgently and had chosen this pub because it was nowhere near the MOD. It was only two days since Peggy had seen him at Brigham Hall and, whatever he had to say now, she couldn’t imagine that it was good news.

  She took her glass of Diet Coke over to a small alcove at the back of the pub where there were two free stools. Plonking the glass down on the little round table and her Evening Standard on the other stool, she sat down to wait for Fielding.

  Peggy had been busy since her trip to Norfolk. She’d spoken to a contact in the HR department at the Ministry of Defence, who was clearly under orders to help her with any request. On the vague information that Liz had got out of Sorsky, she hadn’t really known what she was looking for or where to start. So, making a stab at it, she’d asked for a list of all the foreign nationals seconded to the Ministry of Defence whose work was in software or hardware development, since it seemed obvious to her that anyone trying to infiltrate Clarity would need considerable technical expertise.

  Her contact had come up with a list of six people. There were five men and a woman: four including the female were from three NATO countries – Belgium, Germany and Canada – one was from Taiwan, and one was a South Korean. All of them had spent time in the United States, either at the Pentagon or at a military installation – two had been at the Air Force command centre in Colorado Springs.

  So they must all have been thoroughly vetted already, and though Peggy was trying to double-check their credentials as best she could, it was a thankless task and she knew she was unlikely to find any discrepancy that countless pairs of FBI and US Defense Department eyes hadn’t spotted.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Fielding, putting a pint glass down on the table. He was wearing a raincoat, though the evening was mild and dry, and he took it off, folding it carefully and tucking it under the table as he sat down. He looked around the pub. ‘What a jolly bunch,’ he said, but there was little joy in his voice.

  ‘I was surprised to hear from you so soon,’ said Peggy.

  ‘I know. I expected it to take a lot longer. More fool me.’

  Peggy raised her eyebrows. ‘You mean you’ve found something?’

  ‘I started by surveying the email traffic out of Brigham Hall. I never expected to find anything out of the ordinary, but I found a breach almost right away. An unauthorised email.’

  ‘Where was it going? What did it say?’

  Fielding shook his head regretfully. ‘I can’t tell you what it said – not because I don’t want to, but because it was wiped from the Brigham server. I know it went to an intranet at the MOD, which it should never have done, though it was wiped there as well – double-wiped in fact, both from the server and from the laptop where it would have been read.’

  He saw Peggy’s disappointment and said, ‘There’s a chance we can reconstruct it. But that will take some time.’

  ‘Do you know who sent it?’ Peggy tried to keep her voice down, though there was enough noise around to be confident no one could overhear her.

  ‘I do. And it’s almost unbelievable – to me at least.’ Fielding picked up his glass of beer, and held it for a moment, then put it down again. It was obvious to Peggy he was very upset. ‘The email was sent by Hugo Cowdray.’

  She remembered the good-looking blond man she’d seen at Brigham Hall. ‘I thought he was your deputy.’

  Fielding nodded. ‘He is. And my colleague and friend for the last twelve years. I would never have dreamed it . . .’

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Peggy said gently. ‘It may not be too bad – we haven’t seen the email after all.’

  ‘I know. But it’s not necessarily what was in the email. It’s the fact that it was sent at all. In the security protocol we wrote, what we stressed most was that there should be no direct contact with the MOD servers from the Brigham Hall system. It’s not as if Hugo could have forgotten that – he wrote the bloody thing with me.’

  ‘Who did he email?’ asked Peggy.

  ‘That’s even odder still. A woman called Belinda Duggan – she works at the London end of our project. ‘

  ‘Are they friends?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. They know each other, of course, because we’re a fairly tightly knit outfit, but there are one hundred and seventy-five of us and they’ve never worked together before – I checked that right away. I’m sure they’d recognise each other, and know each other’s names. But that’s it.’

  He picked up his beer again, and this time he took a long swig. Then he said morosely, ‘I just don’t understand it.’

  ‘It does seem very strange. And very stupid of him.’

  ‘Yes, but he must have been confident he wouldn’t get caught. What he didn’t know is that we put a secret eye on all the machines at Brigham.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a tiny application we attached to every computer – it keeps track of keyboard strokes.’

  ‘And Cowdray didn’t know it was there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But hang on, if it records keyboard strokes, then can’t you see the contents of the message?’

  ‘Not easily. We were worried about unauthorised traffic and therefore simply wanted to keep track of who was being emailed, not what the emails said. The application puts the addresses into a file for easy retrieval – that’s how I found Cowdray. The messages themselves just get dumped, along with all the headers and HTML coding, into a big pot – something like an average user’s Recycling Bin. To reconstruct that may be possible, but it won’t be easy.’

  Peggy was thinking. This was clearly serious but did she need to act on it urgently? Her forte was assembling and analysing information, not taking direct action. That was Liz’s business, but she was in Switzerland and the last thing Peggy wanted to do was go running to her. So she told herself to think how Liz would have proceeded – calmly, without fuss, but decisively. Obviously the first thing to do was to ensure that this discovery stayed secret. She said to Fielding, trying to sound friendly but firm, ‘Does anybody else know about what you’ve found out?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Wasn’t Hugo curious about why you’d come down to London so suddenly?’

  Again a shake of the head. ‘It happens all the time. I get called to meetings at very short notice, especially budget meetings. Hugo would have assumed I was going to one of those.’

  ‘Didn’t he ask what I was doing at Brigham Hall the other day?’ This was important; if Fielding had never had any reason to distrust his deputy, he m
ight well have mentioned that someone was coming to see him about security.

  ‘He did, but I just said you were from the Foreign Office.’

  ‘What about afterwards – when I’d left?’

  ‘I said nothing to Hugo.’ Fielding managed a thin smile. ‘If you remember, though I pooh-poohed your concern at first, our conversation opened my eyes to the possibility of a leak.’ He added bleakly, ‘I never thought I’d find it on Hugo’s PC.’

  ‘Well, please keep it to yourself. I expect we’ll need to speak to him next week.’ She saw how worried Fielding looked. ‘Don’t worry – he won’t know it has anything to do with you. We’ll want to talk to this Duggan woman too. What can you tell me about her?’

  ‘Very able, very sharp. There aren’t many women in the field, and the ones there are have to be extra-clever – for all its pride in being cutting-edge, the computer industry’s rife with sexism. But don’t get the wrong idea – Belinda’s not your stereotypical computer nerd.’

  ‘What is she like then?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, she’s quite stunning – I don’t think anyone in the department would contest that. Not the male members of staff anyway.’

  ‘Hugo’s good-looking himself,’ Peggy mused.

  ‘Yes, and he’s got a wife and even more children than me.’

  ‘How many’s that?’

  ‘Four for me; five for Hugo.’

  Hmm, thought Peggy. Maybe he is a great husband and father, but she wasn’t going to leave it at that. She said firmly, ‘Tell me a bit more about Belinda. I’ll ask HR for her file, but can you give me a quick rundown?’

  Fielding thought for a moment. ‘She’s a Senior Systems Analyst, quite high up in the department; she has several teams reporting to her, working mainly on logistics. Some analysts can be a bit bogus – all flannel and no real experience of programme development. They deal in generalities their own bosses can understand, but they don’t actually know the nuts and bolts. Not Belinda – she spent five years writing code.’

  ‘She was a programmer?’

  ‘Yes, but not on any factory line. She worked in Intelligent Search – real futuristic stuff. Like having Google search for something before you’ve even asked it to.’

  ‘Neither sounds related to what you’re doing at Brigham Hall.’

  ‘They’re not,’ Fielding said. But he was looking troubled again. ‘The problem is, Belinda’s background is rather different. She’s a Cambridge graduate, took a Starred First in Pure and Applied Maths, then stayed on to do post-graduate work.’

  ‘In computer science?’

  ‘Well, not a million miles away from that. She worked on cryptography.’

  ‘As in encryption techniques?’

  ‘De-encryption techniques. She specialised in breaking codes.’

  Chapter 19

  Dick Cottinger yawned. It had been a rough night. His old schoolfriend Joey Pettleman was getting married, and the stag night had been an hour’s drive to a club south of Las Vegas. They’d gone in a rented minivan so nobody had to worry about driving. It had been a lot of fun, until one of the guys had vomited all over a lap dancer and the manager had thrown them out, but it would have been better if it had been any other night than Friday since Cottinger had drawn the short straw and was working the Saturday/Sunday shift.

  He looked around to see if there was anyone he could cadge an Advil from, but none of the nearby seats was occupied. This station at Creech Air Force Base was 24/7, but the weekends were kind of slow. A far cry from when they’d first started these tests three weeks before. Then this vast communications room, the size of half a football field, had been full of top brass. At the briefing he’d learned that he was helping to test some new software that regulated communications between him, a pilotless drone thousands of miles away, and a ComSat orbiting 250 miles above the surface of the earth.

  Cottinger sat in the second of three rows of desks that swept almost the entire length of the room. Mounted on the wall in front of him were banks of oversized television monitors, but now he stared at his own terminal screen, which was showing a map of the earth. He double-clicked his mouse and the screen shifted at once to a real-time view taken from the nose of a drone, which the console told him was flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet. The view from the drone’s camera was over 120 degrees, extending from the surface of the terrain below to the thin clouds in front of and above the aircraft. When Cottinger nudged an icon on his touch screen, the focus automatically sharpened.

  The trials of the drone were taking place somewhere deep inside the Gulf state of Oman – Cottinger could have supplied the precise coordinates of its location but it didn’t mean a hill of beans to him. On the screen, Oman looked as parched as his throat right now – an endless expanse of gravel-coloured desert. The only vegetation visible was the occasional patch of desert grass, little more than large ink dots on his screen; in ten minutes of watching, Cottinger hadn’t seen a single tree, or a human being.

  He knew that one day soon he wouldn’t be able to tell the drone what to do, but for now he was still in charge. Which would have suited Cottinger just fine, if his head weren’t throbbing so much.

  ‘Stay at one thousand feet,’ he said into the mouthpiece of the mic strapped around his neck.

  Now came the one interesting manoeuvre of the exercise – a sharp turn and a communication with a unit on the ground, three soldiers shaded from the blazing sun in a small bivouac in the packed gravel and sand of the Omani heartland. ‘Alpha One, turn ninety degrees west and stay at a thousand feet.’

  He watched as the drone turned sharply, its long, wide wing dipping to facilitate its turn. He started to nod, but then he realised that the drone had turned completely the wrong way and was descending rapidly. ‘West,’ he said sharply. ‘Ninety degrees west. Not east.’ He realised he was talking to the vehicle as if it were human, but after all, that was the point of the exercise. Around him in the open-plan surroundings everyone had gone quiet.

  He watched as the drone ignored him and headed east towards the sea – and towards the nearest habitations. It was still descending, without losing speed; in ten minutes it would be on the ground – crashed most likely, it seemed, since it showed no signs of lowering its landing wheels.

  ‘Alpha One, go back to a thousand feet. Climb!’ he commanded, resisting the temptation to stand up himself. That wouldn’t do any good. To make matters worse, Colonel Galsworthy was striding towards him, red in the face, and already shouting. ‘What is it? Cottinger, what’s wrong?’

  But Cottinger barely heard him. He was busy on his keyboard, entering the drone’s current coordinates, its airspeed, and then the calculated rate of its descent. Within seconds a small window appeared at the corner of his screen, showing a magnified area of the corner of Oman, marking one point in particular with a large red star. The projected trajectory of the drone had it landing in eight – no, now it was seven – minutes, smack in the middle of Salalah. Population 197,169, read a small line in the window on his screen.

  Christ, thought Cottinger. At least the drone was unarmed. But even so, for it to land on some house or shack or hovel – Cottinger had only the haziest idea of how Omanis lived – would be disastrous. Three tons of polymer and a tankful of fuel – the explosion and resulting fire could kill dozens of people. Innocent people, completely unaware that their government – in fact the Sultan himself – had lent their homeland like a game board for the Americans to play war on.

  He continued talking to the drone, trying to put urgency into his voice, as if an unmanned aircraft would sense that its master was saying, enough was enough, you’ve had your fun, now cut it out. He realised Galsworthy was standing next to him, and one glance showed that his commanding officer had seen the little window on his screen and taken in its ominous forecast. ‘Can we shoot it down?’ he asked, his voice only faintly hopeful.

  ‘No, sir. The Omanis didn’t grant additional air space. If the drone makes it to the Arabia
n Sea, we could send something from a carrier, but there wouldn’t be much point if it’s going to crash in the water anyway.’

  ‘How much time have we got left?’

  Cottinger looked at the digital clock on his terminal. ‘Five minutes, maybe six.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Galsworthy helpfully. ‘I’d better go call the Pentagon.’

  He moved off at speed, and Cottinger kept talking: ‘Back off, Alpha One. Turn around, Alpha One.’ Then, in frustration, ‘Behave, you goddamn’ drone!’

  Suddenly, like a naughty child that finally listens to its parent, Alpha One lifted a wing sharply, and began to turn round. Cottinger watched sceptically and decided not to give any orders for a moment. His hopes started to rise, and soon he began to smile in relief – Alpha One was on course again, heading back at speed for the safe environs of the desert.

  Three minutes later, now gradually descending, the drone sent a message to the sweltering trio of American soldiers camped out below it, a message which they successfully relayed back to Cottinger at base. And ninety seconds after that, wheels down, the drone landed smoothly on the hard-packed temporary runway created by the Army Corps of Engineers six weeks before.

  In relief, Cottinger put a hand on the back of his neck and found it covered in sweat. He turned to Galsworthy and said, ‘I don’t understand. One minute it was out of control, then suddenly it was a pussycat again.’

  Chapter 20

  Henri Leplan sat down at a desk in the SFI office at Geneva airport and signed the attendance book. It was his turn to do the morning shift, a job he disliked; there was rarely much excitement and you could spend the entire shift in the Immigration hall, just waiting for an alert from one of the desks when they thought they recognised a face or a dodgy passport. But too often nothing at all cropped up to relieve the boredom.

  Today he particularly begrudged the time spent at the airport since his own inquiry into Steinmetz’s accident had reached an interesting stage. The previous evening, just before he’d left the office, he’d had a message from a contact in the German forensic service. The paint scrape along the driver’s side of Steinmetz’s car had matched a sample in their paint library. It had turned out to be a special hand-blended colour called Black Onyx. Most people would think it was just a shiny black paint, his contact had added, but in fact it contained finely ground gemstone, which made it particularly translucent. It was only available on top-of-the-range models, Audis, BMWs and Mercedes. What interested Leplan particularly was the information that any car with this paint would have had to be ordered specially. If this had been done in Switzerland, it shouldn’t be difficult to trace the person who had ordered it. Leplan was becoming more and more convinced that there was something sinister about Steinmetz’s accident and he couldn’t wait to get on with the next stage of his researches.