He protested, threatening lengthy court appeals. A photo was laid on his desk. It showed the face, eyes closed, of a gangster he had commissioned to kidnap a child. He lapsed into silence, then rang his personal pilot at Northolt and instructed that his plane be made ready.
In the darkened computer room at Chandler’s Court Luke Jennings crouched at a console, stared at the display, tapped several touch-screen symbols and stared again, locked into and lost in his private world. By his side, Dr Hendricks sat and watched. He knew what the teenager was doing, but not how he was doing it. There are moments when instinct defies and denies logic. The man from GCHQ had set a task that was deemed impossible … and yet.
Outside, it was pitch black, the middle of the night. Neither man at the console knew or cared. There are no hours in cyberspace. Somewhere, many miles away, a database silently fought back, seeking to protect its secrets. Just before dawn, it lost.
Dr Hendricks gaped in near-disbelief. Somehow, and he had no idea how, it had been achieved: Luke Jennings had crossed the air gap and entered the right algorithms. The firewalls opened, the faraway database capitulated. There was no need to go on. They had the codes. He tapped the lad on the shoulder.
‘You can close down now. We can come back. You have given us the access. Well done.’
In breaking into the database at Fort Meade, Maryland, Luke Jennings had unknowingly risked many years in an American jail. In doing the same to this one, there would be only praise. He did not care either way. There had been a challenge, and he had met it. That was all that mattered. Others could enter the foreign database and plant malware, Trojan horses, instructions that the equipment should destroy itself.
The foreign database lay under the deserts of the theocratic republic of Iran, a country that employed and propagated terrorism and wanted to build its own atomic bomb. There was another country, destined for annihilation if that atomic bomb ever became a viable weapon. If Sir Adrian had his way and could persuade the Prime Minister, the access codes to the Iranian database would be shared with the state of Israel.
But perhaps not entirely for free. The vast new natural gas field that had just been discovered off Israel’s western shore might enter into the conversation.
Sue Jennings gazed up into the darkness as the first hint of day touched the east. She knew exactly what she was feeling, and she was enjoying every second of it. It had been so long.
Her marriage had, effectively, ended ten years earlier. The strains of raising the two boys, the additional needs of the elder one, had been part of it. But that was not the main cause. There had been no single blazing row with Harold. But he had eventually made plain that he had not a flicker of interest in the physical side of their marriage. At that point, they had not made love for weeks. He had then been in his mid-forties, she a very healthy thirty.
In the intervening decade there had been, for her, brief affairs, always wholly and only physical. But she and Harold had stayed together for the sake of the boys, especially Luke. There were practical considerations: a home, a constant income and all the things an income bought. But Harold was gone; she was now a widow.
What she was feeling in the coming dawn was raw lust, and it was for the touch of the man sleeping beside her. She knew he would not have risked crossing the length of the first floor to her and, anyway, her room was in between those occupied by Luke and Marcus. So she had finally come to him.
The door had been unlocked. She had entered, let her robe slip to the floor and climbed under the duvet beside him. Very little was said. They simply made love, he with his iron-hard strength, she with the passion of long-suppressed desire.
When Captain Williams and his men had been assigned to their small community, he had joined their communal table: she, Dr Hendricks, two others from GCHQ and her sons. The civilities had been maintained, but the mutual attraction was in the eyes. Details slipped out. He was thirty-nine, single since his wife had died in a tragic canoe accident off the coast of the Algarve eight years earlier.
Sue Jennings had spent days considering what she should do. She could no longer even pretend to deny the powerful attraction she felt for the soldier who joined the family and the scientists at the meal table. When their gaze had met across the tea cups that first time, she sensed it was mutual.
But she was no skilled seductress. That had never been part of her life.
She waited for him to make a move but, scrupulously polite, he made no advances. Manners? Reserve? Damn them both. She knew she was falling in love. Why would he not make the first move? After three weeks she made her decision.
Just after midnight she had risen from her single bed, still quite naked. By moonlight, she had looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror. She was forty and her figure was full but in no way plump. She had kept herself in shape at the gym, but for whom? Not for lacklustre Harold, who had been more concerned with his golf handicap than making love.
She was still young enough to make another baby, and she wanted to do just that, but only with one man, and he was sleeping in a room at the opposite end of the house. Barefoot, she slipped a robe over her shoulders and opened the door, taking care to make no sound and wake the boys sleeping on either side of her room.
She had paused one last time outside his door, hearing the deep, regular breathing from within, before turning the knob and sliding inside. Now, they had spent their first night together. In the glimmer of dawn beyond the curtains she made up her mind. She was going to have him, and not for just a night. She intended to be the next Mrs Harry Williams, and she knew that a good-looking woman with a fixed determination would always make an Exocet missile look like a badly designed firework. As the late-June sun tipped the tops of the trees in the forest, she slipped back into her own room.
Chapter Twelve
IRAN HAS LUSTED for many years to have an atomic bomb. The idea was first mooted under the Shah, who was deposed in 1979. By then, he had been talked out of it by his friend and protector the USA. Under the ayatollahs, there was no such influence.
For many years, the technology was not the problem. A Pakistani scientist who had been at the heart of that country’s successful research into and construction of atomic bombs traitorously sold the data to Iran. The problem had long been acquiring a sufficiently large stock of weapons-grade uranium.
Uranium ore, known as yellowcake, has been purchased for many years from various suppliers around the world. But in the form of ore, uranium-235 has a purity of five per cent or less. This is far too crude to be used in the production of a nuclear weapon. It has to be refined until it is close to ninety-five per cent pure.
The excuse for its purchase has always been to build electricity-generating power stations, for which five per cent purity is enough. The world has never believed this excuse. Why, runs the argument, should a country that is virtually floating on an ocean of crude oil and does not give a fig about the environment not exploit her own free raw material to keep the lights burning? The key has long been secret chemical plants, hidden from the world and denied, their function to refine the raw yellowcake into weapons-grade uranium-235.
The nuclear club of the USA, China, France, Russia and Britain, with non-nuclear Germany and the European Union, concluded an accord in 2015 to the effect that Iran would desist in her efforts in nuclear research in exchange for the relaxation of the many economic penalties inflicted because of her nuclear ambitions. In secret, the accord was not abided by.
The ayatollahs have long decreed that the state of Israel, not endowed with oil fields but technologically extremely advanced, is destined to be wiped from the face of the Earth. Israel thus has a considerable interest in the Iranian nuclear ambition. She also has the Mossad (the ‘Institution’), her very effective secret intelligence arm. Espionage efforts to find out just what the Iranians in their dictatorship are up to and how far they have got have been unrelenting.
Iran was not the first neighbour of Israel to start a nuclear programme. That h
ad been Syria, which learned its lesson in 2007. Israeli espionage and over-flights had detected a huge square building, nicknamed in Tel Aviv the Cube, being built near Deir Ezzor at a remote site in eastern Syria. It excited too much curiosity to be ignored. Further espionage revealed it was home to a North Korean-built nuclear reactor designed to supply the Syrian dictator with plutonium – the core of an atomic bomb.
On a single night in 2007 eight Israeli jets took off from bases in the south of Israel. They flew west, out over the Mediterranean, then north, then east, flashing over the Syrian coast unseen. They were flying at a height of 300 feet or so, virtually rooftop height, and at that speed required nanosecond-accuracy. They carried a variety of bombs to ensure absolute destruction of the target.
At 00.42 all eight launched their payloads. None missed. At 00.45 the team leader radioed the single word ‘Arizona’ – target obliterated. The squadron turned north, made the Turkish border and followed it west until they were back over the sea. Then they turned again for home, still hugging ‘the deck’.
The destruction of the Cube did not concern Iran directly, but it taught a lesson. When the Iranians began a nuclear-bomb programme, they went deep underground, into a series of bomb-proof caverns. In these they began to purify uranium-235 to create a stock of bomb-grade uranium.
It is known that there were two purification plants. The smaller, called Natanz, was inside a hollowed-out mountain in the north of the country. The far bigger one was called Fordow, deep under the desert, so far down as to be immune to the most powerful of deep-penetration bombs.
Row upon row of centrifuges, called cyclotrons in the early days, are employed in the purification process. These are extremely dangerous machines to operate. They are vertical columns six to eight feet tall whose cores spin at a staggering 50,000 revolutions per minute. They stand in ranks called cascades. The estimate was that Iran had 20,000 of them, linked in cascades of 128 each in the main centrifuge hall.
The reason for having so many is that they purify the uranium ore extremely slowly, extracting only a few precious grains per day, which are carefully stored. The reason they are so dangerous is that they spin on bearings which have to be delicately balanced. The slightest variation in spin-speed or balance can cause them to either overheat or rip themselves off their bearings, or both. In that event, the entire hall would become a charnel house, with body parts of the attendant technicians flying in all directions and the deranged centrifuges tearing themselves and their neighbouring machines to molten fragments.
To prevent this, the entire operation was controlled by a master computer, guided by a database so skilfully protected by layer after layer of firewall that only the on-site Iranian operators, armed with the access codes, could enter it. It was these impossible-to-obtain access codes that the teenager sitting beside Dr Hendricks at Chandler’s Court had secured.
No warning was spotted at Fordow, so nothing needed to be done. The possession of the access codes was enough. It was these that Sir Adrian, with the permission of the Prime Minister, handed over to a senior nuclear official in the Israeli embassy at Palace Green, London.
A week or so later, at the beginning of July, something very strange happened far beneath the Iranian desert. A minuscule variation appeared on the master computer. The rotating speed of the bearings in one cascade of centrifuges began to increase. A white-coated engineer at the master console instructed the database to correct it. The technology took no notice. Other hands, in the Negev Desert, were issuing new orders. The rotation speed continued to accelerate.
The worried engineer at Fordow called a superior. Puzzled, the senior technician entered the corrector codes. They were ignored. The gauge monitoring the temperatures of the bearings began to rise. Concern became worry, then, finally, panic. The database refused to obey. The spin-rate escalated, as did the temperature of the bearings. A red line was passed. The senior technician punched a red button. In the vast hall housing the centrifuges a klaxon blared. Men in white coats scurried towards the enormous steel doors. The wail of the klaxon persisted. The scurry became a mad run, a life-saving race as the first cascade was wrenched from its bearings. Metal glowed scarlet from the uncontainable friction. The running men fought each other for the now open doors.
The initial report that reached the supreme authority of the republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, related that the last technician made it out just in time. The doors hissed and began to close, sealing the inferno in the hangar-sized hall. The men were saved, but the centrifuges, cascade by cascade, destroyed themselves as they spun from their bearings to bring down the next cascade in line.
The Ayatollah, venerated and bent with age, forced himself to read the last line of the report as a row of ashen-faced scientists stood in front of him in his modest residence on Pasteur Street in Tehran.
Twenty years was the estimate. Twenty years of unrelenting hard work and expenditure had been wiped out in one catastrophic hour. There would be an inquiry, of course. He would order it. The finest brains in Iran would delve and probe. They would report to him. They would tell him what had happened, how, why and, most importantly, at whose hand. He dismissed the scientists before him and retired to his private mosque to pray.
Of course, behind it must have been the Israelis, may Allah damn them to hell. But how had they gained access to the codes? They had tried for years and failed. The malware Stuxnet, developed by the Israelis and the Americans years earlier, had done damage, but it had not got past the codes. Now, someone had. Could it have been the Israelis themselves? The Iranians could not know it was in fact someone else far away, the greatest hacker the world had ever seen – or, in this case, never seen.
The Supreme Leader had not the faintest idea about computers and was thus wholly dependent on his experts. What they told him after the detailed inquiry was that the hands that had typed the order into the master computer to instruct the bearings in the centrifuges to increase their spin-speed to manic levels, causing the centrifuges to auto-destruct, were probably Israeli.
But the key quandary concerned the access codes. These would have been vital. Without them, no one could give suicidal instructions to the controlling master computer. With them, all was possible.
The Iranian disaster did not remain secret for long. The news could not be contained. Men, even scientists, who have been subjected to a traumatic experience, talk. They talk to their colleagues, those present and those who were not there. They tell their families. Word spread. It leaked into that worldwide community of scientists whose life’s work is to study, on behalf of their governments, the progress of others in the same field. What had happened at Fordow was too similar to the computer disaster at Murmansk.
In the end, the enigma was not solved in Tehran, but in Moscow: Moscow knew who it was and where he was.
Two days later the Russian ambassador in Tehran sought a private audience with the Supreme Leader. He bore a personal message from the Vozhd. It concerned an isolated manor house in the countryside of England and a teenage hacker who could do the impossible.
In fulfilment of a promise made by Sir Adrian a copious report reached the man in the White House. A similar report saying much the same thing also arrived via the CIA. Each confirmed the contents of the other. The President realized he had been lied to. He had in any case long denounced the treaty which had caused the US to relax the financial penalties imposed on Iran in exchange for a cessation of nuclear research, let alone uranium purification. He tore up the treaty and reimposed the ruinous economic sanctions.
At about that hour, Sir Adrian received a letter at his Admiralty Arch apartment. It intrigued him. Very few people knew that address, and the envelope had been hand-delivered. The contents were brief and courteous. The writer suggested that a meeting might be mutually valuable and invited Sir Adrian to visit him for a discussion. The letterhead was that of the Israeli embassy. The signature was of Avigdor Hirsch, a name he did not know.
In his time with MI6,
Sir Adrian had been a specialist on Russia, the USSR and the Soviet empire’s East European satellites. The Middle East had not been his terrain and over a decade had now passed since his retirement. Others had also retired, and there had been promotions, postings, departures – some voluntary, some encouraged. But he still had contacts, and one was the man who had ‘run’ the Middle East and who, being younger, was still in post at Vauxhall Cross. Name of Christopher.
‘Avi Hirsch? Of course I know him,’ said the voice on the secure line. ‘Been here three years, head of station for Mossad. Very bright.’
‘Anything more?’
‘Well, he started as a lawyer after national service in their Special Forces. Qualified in three jurisdictions – his own, ours and the USA. Got his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. Absolutely not a horny-handed kibbutznik. We regard him as a rather good egg. What does he want?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Sir Adrian.
‘You’ve heard about the disaster at Fordow?’
‘Of course. And the US response.’
‘Well, my department is working round the clock. Good luck with Avi.’
The Israeli embassy in London has extreme security. It needs it. There have been attempts at attack and numerous placard-waving demonstrations outside. Sir Adrian’s car drew up at the wrought-iron gates and his identification was minutely examined. Calls were made from the gatehouse. Then he was waved inside. Another security officer pointed to a parking place and when his driver had parked he was escorted into the building.
There was no intrusive checking, as at an airport, but he knew that hidden scanners would have examined every inch of him. He carried no luggage, not even a briefcase. The chosen meeting room was in the basement, certainly a conference space scanned and sterilized to be totally secure.
Weston having been forewarned, Avi Hirsch was as he expected: mid-forties, athletic, tanned, urbane and very fluent in the language of Shakespeare. Coffee was offered, and declined. Then they were alone. Sir Adrian knew that this conversation would not be taking place without extensive briefing from Mossad high command at their HQ on the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv.