Treasonable Intent

by C Shaw Hilton

  Louise had been carefully listening throughout the debriefing. She smiled at Fawzia in a reassuring way in contrast to the look of suspicion cast in Alicia’s direction. Fawzia felt a small glow of satisfaction. She suspected that Alicia had agreed to join the briefing in order to watch her be suspended for the loss of her kit. Instead it was obvious that JCW felt she had been set up. Their suspicions lay in the direction of MI5.

  “I should start by saying that the Prime Minister has taken charge of the strategic leadership of this crisis in conjunction with the National Security Council.” She spoke in her usual measured tone. “The Cabinet Secretary will co-ordinate that work. Just as importantly she has moved operational control of Lightening to the Cabinet Office. Given the failures and uncertainties around the roles of key MI5 and MI6 officers, Dame Maude has passed command through to us at GCHQ. We pulled together an operational leadership team this lunchtime including myself and the Brigadier. It is tasked with identifying and neutralising the threat. We will be supported, as necessary, by members of the armed services.”

  Alicia looked outraged. She hadn’t even been consulted. Her voice went up an octave: “And what about the investigation and pursuit of those at who might have instigated this threat?”

  Louise raised her eyebrows and almost sighed. “Sir Alistair and the security services heads have been left with that task. I believe that you are all on notice to get a result in the next few days or resign.” She paused to emphasise the point. Alicia scowled but didn’t respond.

  Fielding broke into the frostiness. “That is Whitehall. This is Cheltenham. Whilst we are leading on this I expect full co-operation and everyone working together for a successful result.” It was aimed at the whole room but it was Louise who nodded; “Yes Brigadier.”

  Fawzia spoke: “You were going to update us on the operation?”

  Louise resumed. “It is obvious that the events of the last 48 hours have been designed to distract and confuse. We have seen the use of directed explosives in Bourton, blank ammunition and stun grenades in Gloucester and even shooting up woodland, rather than you, in Exeter. There is an intent, to minimise casualties and collateral damage. That suggests the protagonists are seeking to court public sympathy for their mission. Given the situation with Neville Benning we think the whole plan is about discrediting the government and Rose Garden.” She paused to let that concept sink in. “In contrast, our response has pandered to the sense of crisis. The Lightening plan might almost have been written to be ineffectual and make us look incompetent.” She looked at Alicia, “Who exactly wrote the plan?”

  Alicia winced again. She could see how this looked. “The original plan was written by the Threat Assessment Team, MI5 and MI6. It was refined at the morning briefing in Whitehall when the leads discussed the implementation of the three strands.”

  Louise didn’t relent. “Who exactly were the authors?”

  Alicia felt the penetrating gaze. Fawzia could sense the Head of MI5 beginning to lose confidence and with it, her veneer of calm authority. “The whole thing had many authors across services but final editorial authorisation rested with Benning, Williams and Olsson.”

  The room went silent as Louise consulted her laptop, as if checking her facts. She looked up: “So of the three principal authors, one apparently fled abroad, one has gone missing and one has been hidden by you on behalf of MI5. Strange don’t you think?”

  Alicia fought back, voicing her own suspicions. “Not as strange as this insistence that Major Wilkins led the review of sites. Who exactly pushed that idea despite objections from all and sundry?”

  The Brigadier responded: “I did. I insisted JCW undertook the review initially and were best placed to speedily execute the revisits. I persuaded the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the MOD it was the right approach.”

  Alicia came straight back. “But why the Major? There were others perfectly capable…”

  The Brigadier became frustrated: “Good God you’re surely not suggesting I wouldn’t pick the best available people? The Major is an excellent officer and had already won considerable admiration for her work. Even the National Threat Assessment Team pushed to have her lead the review.”

  “I thought it was Sir Alistair who did the pushing?” she queried.

  The Brigadier threw his hands up. “What is this nonsense? Alistair doesn’t know the Major. He trusted me to pick the team and as a loyal civil servant for the MOD he argued for our position. Whatever negative view you have of him, you are making a mistake.”

  Fawzia suddenly felt chilled. A sudden idea just popped into her head. Half formed and in need of both mental and emotional self-challenge, it still made her gasp out, “Benning!”

  Her eyes darted around the table. She looked as though she was struggling to speak and then it tumbled out as a torrent. “Benning is the common link. It was his team that pushed my appointment with you. It was Benning who organised the MOD briefing. He must have ensured I was invited and he gave Olsson the job of briefing me.” She stopped. Her brain working furiously.

  Alicia looked perplexed; “So what? It was their meeting to organise once they wrote the plan.”

  Fawzia frowned.

  The Brigadier looked confused, his debriefing was descending into wild conjecture: “Major, you seem to have something on your mind?”

  Fawzia nodded her head. “They didn’t have to invite me to that briefing. I was superfluous. They could have just dispatched me, or anyone else to do the review. It was engineered for a purpose.”

  There was another pause as everyone thought through the idea. Alicia was intrigued by her line of thinking; “What are you suggesting?”

  Louise looked alarmed. Her keen mind suddenly picked up on where this was heading. “They gave you an SSD card to upload into your tablet. What was on it?”

  Fawzia stood up. It was almost an involuntary motion. “Supposedly the briefing and my access codes!” she exclaimed, “Oh no…don’t tell me. They loaded some kind of malware into my secure tablet…”

  She got no further as Louise stepped in: “No wonder the terrorists wanted to recover it. It’s not just about the information on the site physical security. They have probably used your visits to harvest or infect all three of them from inside their firewall defences.”

  The Brigadier took a second or two to absorb the impact of the statement. “We need to alert them. At the very least we know when the tablet was introduced to each part of the Rose Garden. That should make it quicker to identify any threats. Get onto it now,” he instructed the Duty Officer who closed his notebook and hurried out of the room.

  “I don’t understand why Benning would do this?” Alicia was shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Louise and I think we know why,” said the Brigadier. “Benning has been consistently trying to deflect us from building Rose Garden. He objected, even before the decision was taken to weaponise it. He claimed it would destabilise international détente. Ludicrous, of course, to even suggest that such order and harmony exists in this day and age. He probably thinks he is fighting for world peace. It’s almost a throwback to those Stalinist double agents of the twentieth century.”

  Fawzia looked quizzical. “What do you mean weaponise?”

  Louise cut across her question. “We need more evidence to establish what his real objective is. He could be working with China and possibly others to destroy Rose Garden. On the other hand he might just want to expose it and shift opinion against it. I need to go through the threat scenarios again, if you can excuse me Brigadier.” Fielding nodded and she packed her laptop under her arm and wheeled herself out of the room.

  Fawzia repeated her question. “What did you mean by weaponise?”

  It was Alicia who spoke first, directly to Fielding: “I take it the Major doesn’t fully understand what Rose Garden is?”

  The Brigadier looked uncomfortable for a second. He then appeared to make a swift decision to include Fawzia in the conversation, rather than asking her to step
outside. “Few people are in the know. It wasn’t necessary for Major Wilkins to be one of them… now I think that has changed.”

  He turned to Fawzia. “You asked about Rose Garden being weaponised. The fact is that it always had that potential. A formal decision was taken by the Prime Minister some eight months ago. A significant number of senior people in the military and security services felt it was a mistake for all sorts of reasons. I include myself amongst them. Sir Alistair, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Heads of MI6 and MI5 and most of the Cabinet felt otherwise. They won the day.”

  Fawzia began to piece together what she had seen in her visits. “So GCHQ and the National Cyber Defence Centre are managing our defences. Rose Garden sits behind them as a weapon for attacking enemy states or institutions?”

  “Yes” said Alicia, pleased that she seemed to have some advantage over Fawzia again. “When fully operational it will be able to attack any system, anywhere, at any time. They have been running tests and simulations for months. Some of the technology is still not fully stable and there are a number of processes where outcomes are not quite as expected. Nevertheless, to all intents and purposes, it is on the cusp of being ready for use on a real target.”

  Fawzia absorbed the information. It threw up a thousand questions but she knew that she needed to focus on the immediate problem. “Why three sites? Do they all have a distinct role? It may help understand Benning’s Plan,” she asked.

  The Brigadier answered. “Oxford develops the malware specifically designed to damage each target. Corsham is the operational control for each attack. Plymouth gives the orders.”

  Alicia looked sheepish. Fawzia seemed to gasp and then spoke with disbelief: “Plymouth gives the orders??? The navy run it?”

  The Brigadier stood up. He looked tight lipped and tense. His voice was hushed. “Not quite. Once the target is selected and approved by the PM it becomes a fully autonomous weapons system. The “Cube” as they call it down there, is the leading edge of military artificial intelligence. I can’t say I like the idea but the simple fact is, that in this era of metadata, only a quantum computer can keep up. The orders come from the machine.”

  He strode out of the room. As the door closed shut behind him Fawzia looked at Alicia without speaking. Her expression was enough to communicate her deep sense of shock and horror.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The glistening tower of steel and glass stretched upwards from its riverside base in the Pudong area of Shanghai. Ostensibly a commercial building of nearly eighty floors, it was already dominated by newer, taller structures piercing the skyline. This was the symbolic heart of the new China, a nation on the cusp of becoming the dominant economic power of the 21st century. From the 16th floor upwards it was leased by one of the new giant technological companies that had emerged over the last decade. TwoBitz was a hybrid company, largely private but also state sponsored and owned in part. Few of the office workers who occupied the building on these upper floors realised that Floor 25 was the location of the liaison office for the Directorate of Network Warfare. Even if they had, they would have known better than to ask too many questions about it.

  The whole floor had been cleaned and tidied that morning in anticipation of a visit by the Director himself, General Fu. The office suites were modern and business like. The first impression would have been of young accountants working in support of the high tech company around them. They dressed in civilian clothes and the atmosphere was business-like but informal. The only concession to tradition was a large bronze jar in the corner of the main room, next to the flag of the People’s Republic.

  The General arrived at 10am sporting a sleek Armani suit. His full dress uniform was reserved for formal occasions nowadays. He had been a little disconcerted, upon his appointment, to learn that his superiors in the PLA expected him to spend months each year, touring the Directorate facilities at home and abroad. Ambitious and talented, he would have preferred spending his time close to the centre of power in Beijing but that soon dissipated. Slowly he had realised the advantage of keeping on the move. He could still lead and influence without being tied to any physical location and had thereby avoided becoming imprisoned in the rigid culture of a vast military headquarters. It gave him a sense of freedom.

  Fu was already something of a legend. Following five years in the army in which he rapidly rose to the rank of Major, he was seconded to the Ministry of State Security. After sixteen months training he had been inserted into a cell in California with the false identity papers as a US born Chinese. He attended UC Berkley and then went to work over a period of eight years for three different companies in Silicon Valley. His industrial spying was credited with giving China the necessary foundations to develop its digital technologies rapidly in the late 1990’s. Having returned to accolades at home, he worked across a number of directorates within the Ministry but always with a focus on keeping China ahead in terms of its scientific industries. When he was finally promoted to the rank of General it seemed fitting that, given his technological background, he head up the Network Warfare Directorate.

  Today his tour of the TwoBitz operation should have been one of the more pleasant and interesting aspects of his job. Unfortunately his mind was clouded by the reports describing events in the United Kingdom.

  Fu had been the person who agreed that TwoBitz should participate in the project put forward by Lansing Research. He knew full well that it had started as a shell company giving cover for MI6 operations. Over the years, however it had transformed into a legitimate business. First using stolen technology as a dividend from espionage, later building into a cutting edge research outfit. Fu recognised it was the pride and joy of Neville Benning and Section Fifteen of MI6 but he could see some strategic advantage to working on the science with others. The project focussed on the synergy around quantum data as it applied to transfers across inorganic and organic molecular structures. It offered a lot of potential benefits and Benning had been persuasive. He had even agreed to its location in China.

  The first sign of trouble came after the pleasantries of a reception party in Hong Kong. The subsequent private meeting had come as something of a shock. Benning had turned up in person. With evident embarrassment and some anger he told Fu that the British were on the verge of building an autonomous cyber weapon in secret. It was portrayed as defensive and given the distracting title of “Rose Garden”. Lansing were involved. Benning felt they were going to apply the learning from the project to complete the weapon and he should therefore withdraw.

  Fu had sensed an opportunity. Over the following days he convinced Benning to let Lansing proceed. He argued that at least their work would be visible to them and it would allow time for the British officer to challenge his own government about the weapon. As Benning found himself more and more isolated at home it was Fu who put together the plan to expose and then neutralise Rose Garden. In return for a considerable amount of money and classified information he persuaded Haller to work on the technical side for the Esterhazy Corporation. It was he who secured the co-operation of the Ministry of State Security in pulling together the necessary resources.

  By now the newly appointed Head of Threat Assessment had convinced himself that parliament, press and public needed to see the danger of what had become a cyber-arms race. Fu persuaded him of the need to take matters into his own hands and eventually Benning agreed to the plan. He told Fu that he was able to rely on a covert circle of insiders within the British security services who shared his views and were prepared to act in a one off way. Collectively they saw themselves as whistle blowers for the greater good.

  It was then that Haller went rogue. He had used the learning from the project to trial an application of organic coding on a Chinese national. All hell broke loose. Technically within his rights to apply his learning from the project, the Chinese Government felt offended and threatened by what he had done. The Ministry pulled the plug on the project. All Fu was left with was the operation against
Rose Garden. For that he needed Haller but the doctor had fled back to Switzerland at the first hint of trouble. Eventually the “Diplomat” was dispatched by the Ministry to persuade him to return. Now, as Benning launched his operation, Haller had tried to flee to the USA. It didn’t bode well.

  General Fu looked out of the windows of the office block. The smog hung across the skyline as a thin yellow mist, not untypical for the time of year. There was a polite knock at the door and a young man in a heavy, dark suit entered, clutching a folder. Emblazoned across the front were the words TOP SECRET – Highest Clearance - Level One. He placed it with two hands on the desk and with a slight bow left the room. Fu had been through the file the previous evening but wanted it close to hand. Moments later the young man reappeared and held open the door to admit the Diplomat who had returned from his visit to Haller.

  The General smiled, gave a customary slight bow and shook him warmly by the hand. “Welcome, welcome indeed.” He spoke in a Californian accent and indicated two chairs for them before he picked up the folder and sat down. “I trust you had a good flight and have had time to change and freshen up?” he enquired.

  The Diplomat spoke with great reverence, “Yes General. It is most comfortable accommodation. Thank you for arranging it and the transport to bring me here.”

  Fu waved a dismissive hand, “The least I could do.” He opened the folder and began reading from it rapidly. “Both specialist insertion teams are now active in the United Kingdom. The prime team have completed the distraction activity and are now building the weapon ready to transport to the target. The secondary team has secured the device and is relocating in preparation for the attack on Rose Garden. A remarkable achievement. You have done well to organise this in a matter of months.”

  The Diplomat nodded “It is going well so far. There are, however, problems.”

  Fu continued reading without looking up. “Yes, problems. It would appear that yet again our British colleagues have not quite delivered. The Williams woman was supposed to capture the Major but instead saved the hide of her own officer and left our team flailing about in the fog?”