‘I suppose so . . .’ said Fielding warily. ‘But I’d need to think about that – and what the risks are that he’ll get in and we won’t see he’s there.’
‘If we can’t do something like that, we’ll be right where we are now in looking for this mole – which is nowhere. And he might already have got into the system.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Fielding, scratching his head. ‘I’ll have to work out the implications of all this. I can’t help thinking how weird it will be to tell Hugo that he’s screwed up so badly we want him to keep working.’
Peggy smiled at him. ‘Well, not as weird as to find that everything you’re working on was being monitored by some foreign state. Don’t take too long to work it out,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ve got much time.’
Chapter 28
‘What did you say?’ asked Liz, looking up from her plate.
Martin said with a smile, ‘I was asking if you’d like some cheese.’
‘I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else.’
‘I can see that. Do you want to talk about it?’
Normally conversation flowed easily when they were together but tonight Liz couldn’t prevent her mind from drifting back to Switzerland. She’d come straight on from there to Paris to spend the weekend with Martin but she was finding it impossible to relax. She was disappointed that the French had lost Kubiak in Marseilles, when it had seemed that they were so near to finding out what business he had there.
And underneath that worry was a continuous mixture of guilt and anxiety about what might be happening to Alexander Sorsky. Liz couldn’t help going over her meetings with the Russian, replaying everything he’d said.
She didn’t want to explain all this to Martin. He would have understood, of course, being in the same business himself, but they normally avoided talking shop, unless, as occasionally happened, they found themselves working on two ends of the same case.
He laughed. ‘I can see you don’t want to talk about it, so let me tell you my news. My old friend Milraud has been spotted back in France with his wife. I’m going down to Toulon this week to see if they’ve shown up at the shop there or their house in Bandol. Milraud’s too clever to do something so obvious, so I’m not very hopeful, but I need to check it out.’ Liz nodded. She knew Martin would never rest until he had caught his former colleague from the DGSE, who had resigned and set himself up as an arms dealer. A crooked arms dealer, in fact, who now had an Interpol warrant over his head.
‘That’s not all,’ Martin continued. ‘I spoke to Isobel Florian about the anarchists Edward’s daughter has got herself mixed up with. Isobel already knows about them – they’ve been involved in various anti-Capitalist protests. There’s concern they’ll try and disrupt a G20 meeting in Avignon next month; Isobel says they’ve got some violent people in their midst, so she’s taking the threat seriously. The DCRI office in the South has managed to put an agent in, and Isobel is going down to Cahors this week to meet him and his handler. If I’m finished at Toulon in time, I’m going to drive up and join them.’
‘That’s really kind of you. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s never a waste of time to keep in touch with the DCRI. I’ll need their help if I’m ever to catch Milraud.’
‘Talking about the DCRI in the South, are they a good outfit? Their surveillance lost a target in Marseilles I wanted followed.’
‘Is that what’s been bothering you?’
‘Partly.’ And she explained about the contact with Sorsky, and how Kubiak, the Russian Head of Security in Geneva, had been identified as the source of the information Sorsky had given her. ‘Apparently he visits Marseilles quite regularly, and we need to know what he’s doing there. I think it could be important. But the surveillance lost him, so we’re none the wiser.’
Martin thought for a moment. ‘Well, as I said, I’ll be in Toulon this week and Marseilles is only a few miles up the coast. If you think it would be useful, I could go and have a word with them and find out what happened. I’d want to ask Isobel first, but I don’t think she’d object.’
‘Could you? I got the impression that they weren’t taking it too seriously. If you could lean on them a bit, to find out what Kubiak’s doing down there, it would be a huge help. Whatever he’s up to, I can’t imagine it’s in France’s interests any more than ours.’
‘Of course. I’ll make that very clear to the DCRI in Marseilles.’
He walked over to the windows and started drawing the curtains. Outside dusk had turned to dark, the boules players in the square across the road had gone home, and lights were now turned on in the houses further down the street. He said, ‘Is there any other business to discuss?’
‘I hope not. As far as I’m concerned I’d rather talk about anything else for the rest of the weekend.’
‘I’ll hold you to that. I don’t think all this shop talk is good for either of us. Tomorrow I thought we might do something different for a change.’ There was a glint in his eyes.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. The races are on at Longchamp. ’
‘You mean, the horses?’
‘I don’t mean Formula One.’ He made a noise like a buzzing fly, and Liz laughed. Martin said, ‘I can think of nothing more boring than watching cars go round and round a track at three hundred kilometres an hour. Not when you have animals as beautiful as thoroughbreds to watch.’
‘I didn’t know you liked horses.’
‘I do, provided I don’t have to ride one. Though I imagine as a native of the countryside, you like that sort of thing,’ he said teasingly.
‘Pony Club for seven years.’
‘And rosettes?’
‘One or two,’ she said.
‘Modest as always – I’ve seen dozens of them in your room at Susan’s house. Anyway, would you like to go tomorrow? It’s in the Bois de Boulogne – and very pretty.’
‘Absolutely. My father used to take me to the races at Newbury every year. Shall we have a flutter?’
‘That goes without saying. You are looking at one of France’s leading handicappers.’
‘Really?’ Liz asked with a smile.
‘No, not really,’ Martin said with mock sadness. ‘If I ever have to make a living another way, betting on horses would not be an intelligent choice. I might as well throw money up in the air.’
‘Ah, but tomorrow will be different. I’m feeling lucky.’
‘Good. Now, you’d better join me in an Armagnac.’
Chapter 29
The waves of irritation emanating from Liz were washing over Peggy, who was sitting next to her in the MOD entrance hall, as they waited to be escorted up to Sy3A. Liz had hoped to see Charlie Fielding alone, without involving Henry Pennington any further, but she’d been told firmly that protocol required that he be kept in the loop. So here she was, about to subject herself to another hour of Pennington patronising her and flapping.
Up in the Clarity suite, true to form, he was sitting behind his desk, busying himself with some important-looking papers, while Charlie Fielding sat at the conference table with a laptop open in front of him. Liz had expected a geeky-looking boffin, but this was a rather attractive man, bespectacled and thoughtful-looking, with curly brown hair and a broad smile. Peggy introduced Charlie to Liz and they all sat down while Pennington continued his reading.
Finally, he got up from the desk and joined them, taking his place at the head of the table.
Pennington looked accusingly at Liz. ‘I gather this is all going from bad to worse.’
She replied as calmly as she could, ‘I believe we are making progress. I wanted to see Dr Fielding because I need to understand more about the project he and his colleagues are working on.’
Henry Pennington started to rub his hands together – the inevitable sign of agitation. Liz went on hastily: ‘As you know, Peggy and I are now cleared to Clarity Purple, so you don’t need to worry about security for this conver
sation.’
The hand-washing speeded up and Pennington said, ‘I made it clear that I didn’t approve of Miss Kinsolving being cleared to Purple. It seemed to me to be broadening the knowledge unnecessarily.’
Peggy flushed and Liz said determinedly, ‘Take my word for it, Henry, it was necessary or we wouldn’t have asked.’
She turned to Charlie Fielding. ‘We’ve had the Clarity briefing, but it would be helpful if you would describe what you’re actually doing at Brigham Hall.’
Fielding put his hands on the table as he gathered his thoughts. ‘How much do you know about drones?’
Peggy said, ‘Invisible planes in the sky?’
Fielding laughed. ‘That’s a start anyway, though they’re perfectly visible. I’m sure you’ve at least heard about the remotely piloted drones – the ones flown by an airman sitting in an air force base in Nevada, chewing on a Hershey bar and looking at a picture of a scene 7,000 miles away; he presses a button and thirty people are blown up outside a Pakistani village. Some of them may even have been terrorists,’ he added, raising an eyebrow. Henry Pennington tutted.
‘Then there are simpler kinds of drone, unarmed ones that fly very high and take pictures and send them back, or at the most basic level actually bring the pictures back. Practically all these drones – except the very simplest, which can be pre-programmed – depend on continuous communication, either from the ground nearby or from a huge distance away via satellite.
‘Cyber-espionage can be very sophisticated: it’s not just hacking into someone else’s computer and stealing the contents, it can also involve the continuous feeding of data to the attacker, or even the attacker controlling the computer and making it obey external commands.
‘The media assume any attack that’s detected these days is coming from China, but everyone is developing the capability – and trying to defend themselves against it. The French, the Americans, the Russians and us of course. Cyber-espionage – both conducting it and defending against it – is GCHQ’s top priority nowadays.
‘Back to drones. The cleverer the drone, the more sophisticated the communication system it needs to have. And the next generation is going to be very clever. They’ll be able to control their own family of mini-drones, making decisions for themselves according to what they find on the ground.’
‘They sound terrifying,’ said Peggy.
‘Well, yes, but it’s still a very new science,’ Fielding went on. ‘As you know, Clarity is a joint programme with the Americans. The idea is that in a limited way the drone should be able to think for itself. For example, the controller could say something like, “Go down three hundred feet, but go up again if you see a gun emplacement on the ground.” Or, “Fire your missile when the car looks as if it’s stopping, but if it speeds up hold fire.” Imagine how much more effective that would be than just being able to make it go left or go right.
‘If the programme is successful, and it’s early days yet, we’ll have an expert system on board the drone that will let it make decisions as subtle as that for itself. But for now, it has to let someone else tell it exactly what to do and when.
‘So Clarity is concerned with the communication systems and commands sent to drones. We’ve developed protocols that let us send instruction to these new drones in natural language.’
‘Natural?’ asked Liz.
‘As opposed to artificial – which is what computer languages are. Look.’ And he flipped open the top of his laptop and tapped a key. The screen was filled with row after row of numbers and symbols. ‘That’s raw ASCII, the bits and bytes that tell this machine what to do.’
‘Looks like Chinese to me,’ said Peggy. Then realising what she’d said, blushed and added, ‘Oh, sorry. Let’s hope it’s not.’
‘So where does Operation Clarity fit into all this?’ Liz was anxious to move things on now. She could see Henry Pennington shuffling in his chair, ready to make an unhelpful remark.
‘It encrypts the natural language commands in real time – which means they are protected by codes as soon as they’re spoken. If any of the communications were intercepted, the interceptor wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of them – so they’re hidden, if you like.’
Liz sat back, trying to take in his mini-lecture. ‘Then if we look at Bravado’s information, why would anyone want to infiltrate the programme?’
‘To encrypt their own counter-commands, which would be accepted because they’d be similarly encoded.’
‘How would you go about stealing the encryption code?’
‘Well, first you’d need to get into our working system at Brigham Hall.’
‘So this is where Bravado’s mole in MOD comes in? If he exists.’
‘There is no mole in the Clarity project,’ said Henry Pennington, suddenly coming to life at the end of the table. ‘I’ve told you that our vetting system in Clarity is totally reliable.’
Ignoring him, Liz went on addressing Fielding. ‘I know Peggy’s briefed you about her interviews with Cowdray and Duggan, and that you’ve agreed to keep them in play.’
‘That’s right. We’ve kept Hugo Cowdray’s machine operating as normal. I have it on my desk at Brigham Hall and I take it back to my digs at night. It’s set up as a dummy machine, so that anyone trying to get into the Brigham Hall system via the email footprint which Duggan and Hugo left, would find Hugo’s PC alive and well. But if they tried to look further at the network – and to get into the encryption work – they’d hit a dead end. I’ve put an alert on the machine, so I’ll know the minute anyone tries.’
Liz said, ‘But wouldn’t they know that, and realise they’d been sussed?’
‘Not necessarily. Hopefully, they’ll just think they’ve hit a brick wall. Even the most segregated systems have internal checks, so in theory at least, anyone coming in will feel they just haven’t cracked the internal codes.’
‘By which time,’ said Peggy cheerfully, ‘we should have nabbed the culprit.’
Fielding gave a fleeting smile. ‘Only if we’re quick enough. Or they’re not quick enough to get out before we identify them.’
‘Is there any evidence that anyone has used the Duggan footprint to try to get in?’
‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. As I said, we’ve set a trap for them, but it’s a question of whether we closed the stable door in time.’
‘I was talking to my colleague in the US Embassy the other day and he said there had been some technical hitches in the trials. Do you know what they were?’
‘Yes, I do. The most interesting was when the drone seemed to ignore the ground controller’s natural language command and do something different. Fortunately, it got back on course in the end.’
‘Could that mean external interference?’
‘Too early to say. The assumption at the moment is that it was some sort of technical failure. It’s not impossible it was something external, but if it was interference it would indicate a very advanced infiltration of the system.’
Henry Pennington looked as if he were about to faint. ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ he asked. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’
‘Oh, you will be, Henry,’ said Liz. ‘If it turns out to be anything serious.’
Chapter 30
On Tuesday, Martin Seurat left Toulon feeling disappointed but unsurprised to have found no trace of his former colleague Antoine Milraud. When he’d first known him he had rather admired Milraud, thinking him clever and resourceful. But those qualities had eventually turned to shiftiness and cunning, driven by the relentless greed that had finally made him into a crook. Martin felt glad to leave Toulon and its neighbourhood and was looking forward to visiting Marseilles again.
He hadn’t been there for ten years, but he remembered its notorious traffic jams. They were even worse now that the town had become the second largest city in France. He left his rental car in a car park in an area of the city where multinational corporations occupied grimly modern office blocks, s
urrounded by the even grimmer towers of public housing built for the large immigrant population.
A short taxi ride took him to the old quarter of the town, with its narrow slanting streets, small neighbourhood bars full of tough-looking North Africans, and alleyways festooned with clothes lines and smelly overflowing gutters. He walked through Le Panier, then joined the crowds shopping on La Canebière, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, where every shop seemed to be holding a sale, and nothing was undiscounted.
Tough times, but these were tough people, as he knew to his cost. During his six-month secondment here, tracking an Algerian extremist cell, he had been shot at twice, and once had his car run off the road. Unlike the Parisians, the Marseillais didn’t make the slightest effort to look sophisticated or chic; their clothes said you took them or left them as they were. But they were friendly, unreserved people, and when Martin stopped and asked directions from a kebab stall, the vendor, noting both his accent and the street he was enquiring for, asked cheerfully what a cop from the North was doing this far south.
The office of the Police Nationale, which contained the DCRI office, turned out to be a handsome old stone building with shuttered windows. The nail-studded wooden door was still in place at the top of the steps, but at the bottom access was gained via a metal barrier manned by an armed policeman in a flak jacket. Martin’s documents passed scrutiny and he made his way up the steps into the building where a desk sergeant in the reception area sent him upstairs with a jerk of his head.
At the top of the stairs he entered a large, open-plan room, crammed with desks and tables and unmatched chairs, most of them unoccupied. A young uniformed policeman who was busy on the phone raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and Martin mouthed the name of the person he had come to see. The man gestured with a finger at the room’s far end, where an office had been carved out in the corner. On the door a wooden sign read DCRI.
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