Treasonable Intent

by C Shaw Hilton

  Benning’s face was a picture. A mask of twitching incredulity and horror. Haller looked impassive but was the first to respond to her. “I can’t do anything without that laptop. What about the reserve one?”

  Fawzia was taken aback; “What reserve?”

  Benning spoke in a whisper: “Forget it. It’s gone. The Chinese have it.”

  Haller looked crestfallen for a few seconds then was struck by a fresh idea. He stood up and turned to the CERT officers who had been working with him. “If I could get back to Zurich then perhaps I could be of use. It would take a little time but if I had a couple of you with me?”

  His brief excitement at the prospect of escaping the UK quickly evaporated as Fawzia spoke: “I’m afraid not. The only place you are going is a high security facility in China. You have nothing left to offer us.”

  Both Benning and Haller simultaneously began to bluster their objections. Bob moved swiftly to secure the doctor in an arm lock as he headed for the door. The guard had already begun to put handcuffs on Benning. “This is an outrage!” shouted Haller, “I have done nothing wrong. I demand access to the Swiss Embassy.” Bob held him steady whilst the guard put a second pair of handcuffs on him.

  “Sit down!” shouted Fawzia. Both men were pushed onto the chairs placed against the far wall of the office. She noted that for the first time she could see fear in Benning’s face. Haller was still blustering.

  Benning looked at her directly: “You realise you will have to destroy all three sites?”

  Fawzia didn’t want to be drawn into the conversation but before she could reply the door swung open and the Brigadier and Alicia Court walked in. The Brigadier glanced at the two prisoners; “All packaged and ready to go I see.”

  “Yes sir” replied the Major. “Haller suggested he might be able to help us if he can be released to return to Zurich. It appears he had a reserve laptop which Mr Benning has already handed over to the Chinese.”

  Alicia snorted. “It is a bit late for that. We have run out of time. The Brigadier and I agree that we will have to end this now. We are recommending to the National Security Council that Rose Garden is evacuated and destroyed.”

  “At long bloody last” exclaimed Benning, “the only way to stop this monster is to destroy it.”

  The Brigadier gave him a long, hard look. “Let’s be clear about this Benning. This situation wasn’t inevitable. You have manufactured the circumstances in which our artificial intelligence has been provoked into defending itself by any means necessary. This is down to you. You will not be seeing the light of day for a very long time.”

  In the pause that followed, Haller slowly stood to his feet. He looked detached and calm. “I’m afraid Mr Benning is wrong. The system has acquired enough capability to clone itself into other systems. You can destroy all the Rose Garden sites and even here and GCHQ. It will live on.”

  Fawzia pushed him back into his seat and leaned over him: “So you are smugly telling us that there is no solution to this?”

  Haller looked stunned and then angry: “Don’t push me around Major. I am not some paid mercenary or delusional psychotic. I have been instrumental in creating the most advanced weapons technology on the planet. I deserve some respect!”

  Fawzia grabbed his lapel with one hand and his throat with the other. Alicia stepped forward to intervene but the Brigadier stepped in front to block her.

  “You are a failure” snarled the Major, inches from his face, “you tried to bring these technologies together and simply created something you cannot control. It’s like lighting a fire and burning your house down. Only now you are burning the whole village. The whole country. Possibly the whole world. Failure doctor. Failure.”

  Haller was apoplectic. His faced flushed red and his breathing came in short pants. “You know nothing,” he puffed, “I have achieved more than you and your establishments could even imagine!”

  Fawzia went straight back at him. The Brigadier looked at Alicia. She returned his glance with a look of understanding. Fawzia was trying to provoke the doctor into yielding a solution. “Failure doctor. A litany of unfinished business and duplicity. Look at the project in Hong Kong. Hardly covered yourself in glory there, did you? Have you actually finished anything successfully?”

  “Go to Hell!” Haller was almost screaming. “You and your JCW Unit are amateurs. This is a quantum leap in technology beyond your understanding.”

  “Enlighten me then,” shouted Fawzia, “prove you know what you are doing and find a way of sorting another mess you have created!”

  You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Benning looked dumbstruck but it was obvious his mind was working frantically. The Brigadier and Alicia looked impassive. Haller stared with hatred at Fawzia but slowly his flushed face and breathing began to return to near normality. It seemed minutes passed before he spoke. No one else moved a muscle.

  “It might be possible.” The words came as though extracted painfully, like a tooth at the dentist. No one responded. Few breathed.

  Haller looked hard at the Brigadier, “If I help you sort this, I want to go back to Switzerland.”

  The Brigadier nodded. Alicia took a seat by one of the desk stations and Fawzia stepped away from the doctor; releasing him to flop back onto the chair. Haller paused momentarily to compose himself. “I will need information held within the cells embedded in the Major and I will upload some cyber tools from my Swiss institute to access it. With any luck I can recreate the relevant part of the SSD card programme and adapt it. We can then put it in a mobile phone.”

  The Brigadier stepped across the room to stand over him. “What are you going to do to the AI?”

  Haller sat back in the chair. His eyes seemed bright and steely. It was obvious he felt a growing excitement at the prospect of using his technological masterpiece again. “I intend to make it attack and neutralise itself. A war of the roses.” He almost smiled.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  In Corsham, Wing Commander Josey Ndidi watched the screens in the cave with increasing alarm. The system was setting up another operation and, as before, there was little they could do about it. She picked up the secure phone to the officers supervising the Cube in Plymouth. “Are you seeing this?”

  In the small room outside of the argon chamber, the navy commander spoke thorough his headset as he frantically punched in the over-ride codes to no effect. “I see it,” he replied. “Do you think it is going after Air Traffic Control?”

  The Wing Commander wasn’t convinced: “I don’t think so. The pilots, the alternative comms, the plane systems that are isolated from the grid…it would just be too difficult to mount a precision attack using commercial airlines. I think this is a red herring.” She paused for a few moments; “If that is the case then it has moved its approach forward to include subterfuge and deception. That alone should worry us.”

  In the main operations room of the National Cyber Security Centre the Brigadier was monitoring the conversation. On the level below, Fawzia and CERT officers were assembling more equipment to add to the file servers already acquired from Lansing Research. Doctor Haller had spent nearly an hour on the phone with Miss Morelli. Various programmes stored at the institute were accessed and sent in encrypted form through a series of linked fileservers to end up in London. Haller was mostly concerned that Rose Garden would spot what was happening and intercept his programme codes. In the event the complex transfers seemed to go unnoticed.

  Alicia was interrogating Benning in a room further along the corridor. He had clearly decided that holding back information had little purpose and was resigned to trying to persuade her that his sister was an innocent party. She focussed on getting a full understanding of the plan he tried to carry out. What was the plan at the safe house? Why had they gone to Exmoor when they hadn’t captured the Major? What had they planned for Plymouth? The questions were simple but the answers came as confused statements. At first Alicia though Benning was being difficult but gradually
it dawned that he had never understood the detail. It was an attack plan very much left to the operational control of the Chinese and the two team leaders. Fatima Ali was still in a critical condition and well beyond interrogation, her husband was already en route to the continent with the rest of his cell. She began to reason that she might never know the full plan, if indeed, it ever existed as such. There was a sense the plot had reached a phase of spontaneous innovation as it had begun to unravel. Eventually she folded her papers and laptop and placed them in her briefcase. She stood up to leave; “I think we are done here Neville.”

  Benning rose to his feet; “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more specific.” It was the only time he even sounded apologetic. Alicia was impassive. She nodded to the guard on the door. “Take Mr Benning to the assessment centre please,” she ordered. A few seconds later he door closed behind them and the architect of the greatest treason in modern times, disappeared into one of the darkest places of all.

  Alicia quickly reviewed her notes and then went to meet the Brigadier in the operations room. Fawzia and Haller were both there with the full complement of CERT officers.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t much time” said the Brigadier. ”Something is afoot in Rose Garden. It is being watched carefully but we think it has started to create its own distractions and subterfuge. It is reasonable to assume it knows we are a threat and that we will come after it.”

  “No clues as to its intentions?” asked Fawzia. “Surely it has limited options for acting against us?”

  The Brigadier sighed, “I wouldn’t be so sure. We have covered a lot of bases in the last few hours but the train wreck shows that it will stop at nothing. Over two hundred dead and nearly five hundred injured. On top of that there are seventy plus still missing. Just to destroy a laptop.” He looked forlorn.

  Alicia turned to the Head of CERT. “So how are we going to do this?”

  He stood up to address the room. You could have heard a pin drop except for the background whirr of air conditioning units. “We only get one shot at this. It requires us to implant a complex mirror code into Rose Garden. It will see itself as the enemy and attack its own system. If all goes as planned then it will shut itself down. We can then physically take it apart without a risk of cloning or displacement elsewhere.”

  The Brigadier looked at Haller: “This will work?”

  The doctor looked almost affronted, “Yes, it will work. We just need access.”

  Fawzia looked at him with distain. “Where do I fit into this?” She had watched the preparations over the last hour and was none the wiser as to either the science that was being employed or exactly how she would be involved. Haller raised his hands in a gesture intended to appease and calm the Major. It had the opposite effect.

  “Tell me, don’t patronise me” Fawzia shouted at him.

  Haller turned to the Brigadier, “We have to get it inside Rose Garden. It means the Major will have to carry the programme and mirror code, it is the only way of accessing it undetected. I have constructed a variant of the interface that can be installed via a mobile phone. In theory the insertion should be simple if you can get to a terminal within one of the sites. If it is a control terminal for the Cube then so much the better.”

  Alicia looked at the Head of CERT. He nodded. “I concur. I would recommend we do this in Plymouth. Be under no illusion. Rose Garden will put a stop to this by any means necessary if it can. If we don’t succeed then we won’t get another chance. We will face an Armageddon of our own making. A new era of autonomous warfare ending in mass destruction.”

  The Brigadier looked at Fawzia, “I take it you are prepared to do this Major?”

  She stood to attention. “I have to put my own emotions aside for now and do my duty.”

  He turned to Alicia.” So we must get the Major and her phone into the ante-room by the Cube. The AI must not realise what is happening. How long to connect up to the terminal and deliver the programme and code?”

  Haller spoke with some assurance; “I have enabled this to transfer without the need for hard wiring. The phone can be placed within a metre of the terminal and she must be holding it. After that…well…our calculation is that it can be uploaded in ninety seconds.”

  Alicia chipped in: “That just leaves the problem of getting the Major in play without detection.”

  Fawzia responded. “I think that anything we try to set up from here or elsewhere will just tip off Rose Garden. That was part of the problem with what Benning was planning. My instinct is to get there literally under the radar and use speed and surprise.”

  Alicia looked bemused. “Just walk in the front door?”

  The Major smiled for the first time in many hours. “Yes, and to use the house key, so to speak.”

  In Corsham the screens were beginning to run sequences of theoretical attacks on various infrastructure and computer systems. It was as if Rose Garden was thinking out loud. Every so often it commissioned malware from the facility in Oxford only to have that countermanded by the army officers there. It issued orders to mobilise assets such as the nuclear power plants only to have the RAF officers in Corsham block it. Finally the Naval and Royal Marines officers were spending more and more time unpicking targeting codes issued from the Cube itself. The wing commander spoke to both the other sites and consulted with both CERT and GCHQ. The consensus was that Rose Garden was testing its capability with one thing in mind. The removal of all threats against it.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Fawzia had asked that Bob Christie join her for the mission. She needed the confidence he brought her and the events of the last few days had cemented and strengthened both their friendship and trust in each other. As they waited on the helipad near the embankment, both were in reflective mood.

  “Alicia couldn’t get much detail out of Benning,” she mused. “I guess it must have been a blow that they didn’t capture or kill me in that service station.”

  “Bloody lucky for all of us” exclaimed Bob. “It left them with fewer options and a half-baked plan to steal the AI from the Cube.”

  “All they did was draw attention to themselves.” she reflected.

  “As I said, half-baked,” he responded, “but some valuable lessons for us.”

  She sighed, “Yes a lot of lessons from all of this. Some have been particularly difficult to take. I still struggle to get that image of the Manchester train out of my mind.”

  “One hell of a day,” said Bob. “I just wish we could have nailed Olsson earlier or at least done something to stop all that carnage.”

  Fawzia had rarely seen him display anything near to regret or misgivings. He was the one who always moved on, the man who was fixed on the next goal, the next operation. Before she could respond there was a sudden rush of air and low beat of rotors coming over the trees from behind them. Only the Dark Squadron could move undetected. Even the SAS helicopters carried transponders and other systems linked to the defence network and that meant a risk of access by Rose Garden. The dull grey composite body of the specially adapted Dauphin helicopter touched down for only a few seconds. Behind the two crew were four seats. The front row was already occupied by two squadron members, fully kitted out in assault gear. The Major and Captain jumped in through the side door and saw the ground spring away as the rotors whisked the dark shape up and westwards along the river Thames.

  The pilot followed a course that made maximum use of topography and kept the helicopter as close to the ground as he dare risk. They covered the two hundred miles in just over an hour. As they skimmed the rooftops approaching the barracks the speed suddenly slowed and the rotors became hushed. Over their headsets they heard the pilot warn “Two minutes to touchdown.” The squadron troops went through their well-practiced equipment check whilst Bob simply loaded ammunition clips into his belt and jacket pockets. Fawzia had her pistol but her focus was on the phone, double checking it was working and had plenty of battery power.

  In a small café near the barracks t
he base security officer Captain Forrester finished his coffee and paid the bill. It was a sixty second walk to the main entrance but he jogged and covered it in half the time. He could faintly make out the approaching rotors of the helicopter and now knew exactly what to do. His covert briefing over the gingham table cloth had been arranged at short notice by MI5. An unexpected invitation he could not refuse. As he had sipped his drink he was handed a handwritten paper order. The instructions were simple. Major Wilkins would arrive without warning and he was to ensure she was given direct access to the ante room. Speed would be essential.

  The drop off was as swift and precise as the pickup. The helicopter touched down momentarily on the parade square and four figures stepped out. Within seconds it was up and away. Fawzia ran to where the Captain was waiting. He had already commandeered two marines to join with the group and together they ran into the headquarters building, flashing their ID and passes at the guards. He spoke urgently to her as they ran. “With our authorisation it will take two minutes to get through the barriers and to the door of the ante-room. I just hope it is quick enough.” She nodded but was already wondering whether the element of surprise would be enough. The AI was busy creating threat options on an increasingly complex scale and she hoped that was fully occupying its attention. Nothing had been done with the security on site that might alert it. That would all change when she entered the ante-room.