Official Secrets

by Andrew Raymond

Sharp squinted slightly, surprised by the well-spoken young English woman at the other end.

  ‘You’ve reached the phone of Abigail Bishop. Please leave your message after the beep...’

  GCHQ, GTE Division England – Monday, 3.46am

  Rebecca was alone in the office, her desk lamp seeming much brighter in the pale-green night lights above.

  Tell Alexander nothing. HE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.

  It was all Rebecca could think of while she tried to work out the angles on Abbie’s clues.

  She zeroed in on ‘STORM’ as it was the simplest clue of the five. She had a whole list of synonyms written down – gale, blizzard, hurricane, tempest, cyclone, torrent, assault, uproar – but none of them plugged into the other four clues.

  The words weren’t quite clumsy enough to be anagrams. Which Rebecca knew left only one direction to go in: they weren’t clues, they were symbols. But symbols of what? After a few minutes on number substitution she could see that was a dead end.

  She had been at it for hours and all she had to show for it was an expanded vocabulary on storms. She threw her pencil down in frustration. She’d tried the elegant solution, now it was time to try something a little less so: a dictionary attack.

  It was a program that used over two million words that plugged in as potential password combinations. Deep down, Rebecca held little optimism of it working: it was unlikely Abbie would have picked dictionary words as the password. The hints suggested something more nuanced than that, but she had to try it.

  While she let the dictionary attack run, Rebecca turned her attention to Tom Novak. Anyone who had followed the news for the last six months knew his name, but given the nature of the story that had catapulted Novak to fame and notoriety, Rebecca had shown a keener interest than most in his story.

  She turned to his Wikipedia page to check for any obvious connections with London. The page was as comprehensive as you’d expect for a famous singer or actor rather than a journalist.

  ‘Thomas Seymour Novak (born September 12, 1981), is the national security correspondent for weekly news magazine The Republic, and author of The New York Times bestseller The Hidden State: How the NSA Steals Elections, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. He is the son of former NBC Nightly News anchor Seymour Novak (August 19, 1949 - January 24, 2014). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.’

  The pictures showed him accepting his Pulitzer Prize; being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN; and one of him sitting on stage at one of his many book events.

  In Rebecca’s line of work, for forging connections between strangers, an analyst couldn’t beat what she called the Holy Trinity: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

  Novak’s Twitter was bulging. A scroll down the timeline established his posting average at around fifteen to twenty tweets a day. The only mentions of GCHQ were in reference to his NSA story. There was nothing else even vaguely British in his feed.

  The online news resource LexisNexis turned up nothing either.

  If Rebecca wanted to find out what his relationship to Abbie Bishop was she was going to have to get closer. Which meant making contact.

  Fortunately, security wasn’t something Novak mucked about with.

  On The Republic website, at the bottom of Novak’s biographical page, was his official email address, a link to his Twitter page (nearly 275,000 followers), and a link to his IronCloud. These days Novak was deluged with emails from potential whistleblowers, impressed with the magazine – and Novak’s – stance on protecting sources, even when threatened with prosecution by the U.S. government. IronCloud gave people a safe, encrypted place to leave documents or any type of computer files for potential stories. Even Republic journalists themselves reading the materials in drop boxes didn’t know who had sent them.

  Under the IronCloud link was a line of forty characters – a mix of numbers and letters – broken into groups of four. This was his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) Public Key. The ‘Pretty’ part was a case of severe underselling. PGP had become the absolute standard for encrypting online activity.

  After writing an email, the sender simply applied Novak’s public key (the forty characters). This allowed anyone to send him an encrypted email, where the sender could write anything they wanted without fear of the NSA or any other intelligence agency being able to read the message. The magic was when the public key was applied, it created a corresponding private key that let Novak decrypt the message at his end. The process that made this pair couldn’t be intercepted in any way, and it was impossible for someone to guess the private key based on the public one. Not only was it beyond the limits of earthly mathematics, there wasn’t enough energy in the world to power a computer for long enough to make it even a possibility. It would take something in the order of the energy of three suns running for billions of years, such were the huge numbers involved.

  Rebecca knew better than anyone: there was no way around PGP encryption. Her father had spent years trying – and failing – to.

  Rebecca signed in to her email. Although the content of the email would be unreadable, NSA or GCHQ would be able to track the metadata (who sent it; who received it; when; and the subject line) from the email.

  She couldn’t leave something obvious in the email’s subject line. Calling it ‘Abbie Bishop’ or anything close could raise a flag somewhere. So she opted to leave it blank. The safest method in the circumstances.

  She typed out her message, ‘Abbie Bishop seemed to think we should talk’, initiated Novak’s encryption key, then clicked send.

  A check on the dictionary attack showed it was still running, but without success. Realistically it could run overnight – or the next week – and still not work. Covering all bases, she loaded up a brute-force tool she had coded, and used only for emergencies.

  It was exactly what it sounded like, using a huge amount of consecutive guesses at the password characters through simple trial and error. While dictionary attacks were methodical and went word by word, brute-force attacks were haphazard; random stabs in the dark. The touch Rebecca added was what elevated it above regular brute-force tools. It essentially overwhelmed a password authorisation system with thousands of requests for access, and while it was busy denying the barrage, one request could sneak in undetected. She called it BACK DOOR because it worked like a burglar sneaking in your back door while you’re chasing away people throwing rocks at the front.

  Like the dictionary attack it would take time, but at least it was something that could work in the background.

  Rebecca moved her keyboard aside as she felt her eyelids get heavy. On the wall up ahead – visible from every desk in the GTE office – were fifty-inch TV screens, some showing Google Earth (ready for any computer on the floor to transmit to), others playing 24-hour news. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen read, ‘WOMAN FALLS TO DEATH FROM BALCONY OF GCHQ SAFE HOUSE IN LONDON.’

  Now that the news had finally leaked, Rebecca lay her head down and drifted into a deep sleep.

  It was the same dream she’d had since she was thirteen.

  Rebecca was lying on her front on the living room floor, doing The Times crossword in front of a crackling log fire. She was ten years old.

  ‘Daddy?’ she shouted, twirling a pen in her hand. ‘Can I have a pencil? I’m not sure about twelve across.’

  ‘Then wait until you are sure,’ Stanley Fox replied from his study next door. He didn’t sound his usual bright self. He then added what he always told her when she was struggling with a puzzle, ‘Answers don’t come to you, Rebecca. You have to find them.’

  Rebecca rolled her eyes. ‘Thanks, dad,’ she mumbled. ‘“An army rank kept to yourself?” Seven letters...’

  She always felt aware of how empty the old Georgian house was with just her and her dad. They would shout things to each other from room to room, their voices echoing around the high ceilings.

  Just as Rebecca solved the clue – smiling to herself – she heard a glass smash in the study. Abandoning the
puzzle, she found her dad collapsed in front of his blackboard, whisky and broken glass all over the wooden floor. Rebecca kneeled by his side, shaking him as hard as she could. He hardly moved and, after a long exhalation, slurred, ‘Private...’

  Rebecca leaned back. ‘Yes, daddy. I got it.’

  As he slept on the floor, Rebecca looked up at his cryptography equations written in chalk on the blackboard. Ideas were scored out violently, with notes like ‘IDIOT’ and ‘NO NO NO NO NO!’ written beside his mistakes. He had run out of space on the board, and simply started writing in pen on the wallpaper.

  Unable to move her dad, Rebecca called his closest associate from GCHQ, Sam Sulley, who lived nearby (all the senior GCHQ analysts and officers lived in Cheltenham). After Sam had helped carry Stanley to bed, he promised Rebecca her dad was just fine. He was under a lot of pressure at work.

  The next moment the dream had moved forward in time – three years – and thirteen-year-old Rebecca was being held back by Sam while her dad was led out to a white van in his dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘They can look after him there,’ Sam explained.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘He needs some time to rest. I’m going to look after you here until he comes back.’

  An orderly closed the back door to the van, which was marked ‘Bennington Hospital’. When the door slammed shut, Rebecca woke up.

  As she opened her eyes she found cleaners buzzing around in the background with hoovers. They were the only cleaners in the country that required a three-month background check, full-body scans before each shift for recording, bugging or photographic devices, and the signing of nondisclosure forms saying that anything they divulged about what they heard or saw in GCHQ was punishable under the Official Secrets Acts.

  As the office filled up throughout the morning, Rebecca kept staring over towards Mackintosh’s office.

  Tell Alexander nothing. HE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.

  Every conversation they’d ever had, every question he’d asked about Abbie, had now taken on a disarming and sinister taint. What had he been up to? Did he know someone was after Abbie? Might he even be responsible?

  Wiping the sleep from her eyes, Rebecca opened her email, looking again at the messages from the night before. She got to thinking about the timing of the messages.

  With a flurry of keystrokes she opened a tracer program, which scanned the IP location of the sender. It didn’t even require the sending device to still be active: it not only retroactively logged each sending location – like a stamped passport – it logged each location the sender had been in while composing the message.

  Whoever the sender was hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. A teenager covering up his internet-porn history would have taken more precautions. It was as if the sender had been holding a big red balloon on a string while in a crowd, waiting for Rebecca to find them.

  The message sent after Abbie’s fall hadn’t been sent from Moreton House, of course, because the police were all over the flat by that time. But the message had been started there. After that, the location kept shifting, but smoothly, incrementally. The time stamps were too fast for them to have been on foot.

  She realised they must have been in a car.

  And from there, the files were attached, and message sent. Then she had an idea.

  She noted the time when the IP locations changed, then pulled up Greater London’s CCTV system. One quick call via GCHQ’s switchboard to the Metropolitan Police gave her real-time access to all CCTV in their jurisdiction. Such requests from GCHQ were routine, coming through a dedicated caller ID system at the Met’s end to speed up the authentication process. She opened an IP/GPS tool on her computer – what looked like a regular computer calculator – and entered the last-known IP address. When she hit ‘ENTER’ it told her the precise GPS coordinates, 51° 29' 19.5" N 0° 8' 14.3" W., which she then input to the CCTV system. The camera monitoring the approach to the HM Passport Office was the nearest match. Just a few minutes away from Moreton House in Pimlico.

  She scrolled the camera clock until it matched the time stamp on the IP tracer, then hit play. The street the camera looked down on was empty, except for an old man walking a dog. Then a black Mercedes 4x4 came haring through the shot, nearly colliding with a taxi at the intersection which had to swerve out the way. She stepped the camera back one frame at a time, until she got a clear shot of the registration plate: 273D101. She played the shot backwards and forwards a minute each way, seeing no other cars. ‘Got you,’ she said to herself.

  She opened up her DVLA access page, then entered the registration plate in the database. After a few seconds of a spinning cursor, it read ‘NO MATCHES FOUND.’ Although it was a strange configuration, it certainly looked like a U.K. plate.

  She called the DVLA. After giving her clearance codes, she said, ‘I’m trying to trace a registration, but I’m not getting anything on your database. I’m wondering if it’s possibly a dummy plate. It’s two seven three delta one oh one.’

  The operator didn’t even have to search for it. She said, ‘You’re not going to get anything on that, I’m afraid.’ She paused as if it were obvious: ‘It’s diplomatic issue.’

  Rebecca hung forward in her chair. ‘Sorry, I’m not familiar with those.’

  The operator explained, ‘The first three numbers are the country’s code, then an X for accredited personnel – like an attaché – or the D you have here for diplomat. The three numbers after the D are a bit like a ranking within an embassy. Those numbers start at one oh one – which is what you have – so they must be pretty important, I guess.’

  Rebecca asked, ‘What about the code, the first three numbers? What country is two seven three?’

  The operator keyed in the code, humming and hawing as if she were checking someone’s credit rating. ‘Let’s see, I always forget these...Two seven three...that’s the Americans. Theirs are between two seven oh and two seven four.’

  As the operator called out, ‘Hello?’, Rebecca rocked gently back in her seat and dropped the phone back in its cradle. She tried to get it all straight in her head: someone using an American diplomatic car had been in Moreton House – around the time of Abbie’s death – taken Abbie’s laptop, then used it to send her an email. But if Abbie was killed for the files on her laptop, why contact Rebecca?

  She was getting a sick feeling in her stomach, of being staggeringly out her depth.

  Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. The sudden contact made her jump in her seat. When she saw who it was she rushed to close down what she had been looking at, but it was too late.

  ‘Matthew,’ she said, regaining her composure. ‘I thought you were at home.’

  His face had the drawn look of having been awake only a short while. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d be more use in here.’ He clearly looked at the CCTV still of the U.S. diplomatic car. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just some DVLA stuff,’ she tried to say casually, clicking the screen away. ‘Checking plates on streets near Moreton House. Probably a waste of time.’

  Matthew pushed his lips out. ‘Better than nothing, I guess. I’m going to go check in with upstairs.’ He walked over to the TV screens on the wall where the news was doing its preamble for the Prime Minister’s press conference.

  Rebecca’s mouth hung open, ready to say the words ‘I need to tell you something.’ But she couldn’t.

  3.

  A residential flat, Hackney, London – Monday, 8:13am

  AN HOUR AGO the man was waking up peacefully, pleased at getting ahead of his alarm. Before he could bat the blurriness out of his eyes, he saw a dark figure standing over his bed. There was no time to get out any kind of cry of shock, as the intruder pressed a strip of black power tape over his mouth.

  As the intruder whipped a black bag over the man’s head, squeezing the bottom tight around his neck, letting no air in, the man gasped at what little air remained on the inside. Now he was kic
king at the floor, seeing only darkness, wondering what he had done to deserve dying this way.

  Was he being robbed? The intruder – twenty-three – wasn’t interested in the man’s money. He was going to become a martyr.

  In the first seconds he believed he was just being hurt. Now he knew the stark truth: he was being murdered.

  He could feel the last remnants of life leaving his body. The Martyr began to smile as the man stopped kicking, having dragged him to the hallway. Now, after so many years of wishing, he had finally carried out God’s will. God will welcome him, he thought. He had noticed the Quran and book of Hadiths on the hallway table when he entered. A martyr knew what had to be done in the name of Allah. And some day, in Paradise, inshallah, his victim would thank him. Of that, and so much else, the Martyr was certain. He felt certain of so many things.

  As the dead man lay sprawled in the hallway, the Martyr made his way to the bathroom. He washed his hands, then splashed cold water on his face and through his hair. When he was done, he didn’t wipe his fingerprints from the tap, or remove the stray hairs that had fallen from his head. It didn’t matter. He would be long gone by the time forensics came back. That everyone would know his name when he was done was part of the appeal.

  The Martyr took out the dead man’s wallet, emptying out the various forms of ID, stopping at the one he wanted.

  The name on it was Riz Rizzaq. The Martyr took out an identical ID from his pocket, except with his photo printed on rather than Riz’s.

  The Martyr smiled widely. His contact had indeed created a flawless copy. And it would have to be for where he was going.

  But the Martyr couldn’t leave yet.

  If the body was discovered too early, the whole plan would fall apart. And killing him any sooner might have raised alarm bells.

  So he sat on the floor, next to the dead body, and read from his Quran for nearly three hours. Feeling the power of God’s grace upon him.

  It was nearly time.