There was a three-month hacker hunt. Very aware that the British equivalent of Fort Meade, known as the Government Communications Headquarters, was also of world quality and the Brits were, after all, allies, GCHQ was asked to collaborate at an early stage. The Brits created a dedicated team for that single task, headed by Dr Jeremy Hendricks, one of the best cyber-trackers they had.
Dr Hendricks was on the staff of the British National Cyber Security Centre, or NCSC, in Victoria, central London, an offshoot of the Government Communications HQ at Cheltenham. As its name implies, it specializes in hacker prevention. Like all guardians, it had to study the enemy: the hacker. That was why Sir Adrian sought the advice of Mr Ciaran Martin, the director of the NCSC. He reluctantly and nobly permitted Sir Adrian to filch Dr Hendricks from him on what he was assured was a temporary loan.
Jeremy Hendricks, in a world where teenagers were becoming leading lights, was mature. He was over forty, slim, neat and reserved. Even his colleagues knew little about his private life, which was the way he preferred it. He was gay but made no mention of it, choosing a private life of quiet celibacy. He could thus enjoy his two passions: his computers, which were also his profession, and his tropical fish, which he bred and nurtured in tanks in his flat in Victoria, walking distance from his workplace.
He had graduated from York University with a First in computer sciences, gone on to a doctorate, then another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to an immediate post with GCHQ in Britain. His particular expertise was his ability to detect the most minute traces hackers often leave behind, which reveal, eventually and inadvertently, their identity. But the cyber-terrorist who had penetrated the Fort Meade computer nearly defeated him. After the raid on the house in that suburb to the north of London he was one of the first allowed access, as he had played a major role in finding the source of the hack.
The trouble was, there had been so little to go on. There had been hackers before, but they were easily traced. That was before increased and improved firewalls had made penetration all but impossible.
This new hacker had left no trace. He had stolen nothing, sabotaged nothing, destroyed nothing. He seemed to have entered, looked around and withdrawn. There was no vital IP, the Internet Protocol that serves as an identification number, a source address.
They checked all known precedents. Had any other database been penetrated in this way? They factored in some seriously clever analytical data. They began to exclude, one by one, known hacker factories across the world. Not the Russians, working out of that skyscraper on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Not the Iranians, not the Israelis, not even the North Koreans. All were active in the hacking world, but they all had their hallmarks, like the individual ‘fist’ of a Morse code sender.
Finally, they thought they detected a half-IP in an allied database, like a smudged thumbprint discovered by a police detective. Not enough to identify anyone but enough to ‘match’ if it ever occurred again. For the third month they sat back and waited. And the thumbprint occurred once more, this time in the penetrated database of a major world bank.
This penetration posed yet another enigma. Whoever had achieved it had, for the duration of his presence inside the bank’s database, had at his disposal the means to transfer hundreds of millions to his own account far away, and then cause it to disappear for ever. But he had done no such thing. He had, as with Fort Meade, done nothing, wrecked nothing, stolen nothing.
To Dr Hendricks, the hacker was reminiscent of a curious child wandering through a toy store, satisfying their curiosity and then wandering back out again. But this time, unlike Fort Meade, they had left one tiny trace, which Hendricks had spotted. By this time the tracker team had given their quarry a nickname. He was elusive, so they called him ‘the Fox’. Still, a match was a match.
Even foxes make mistakes. Not a lot, just now and again. What Hendricks had spotted was part of an IP, and it matched the half-print discovered in the allied database. It made a whole. They reverse-engineered the trace and, to the considerable embarrassment of the British contingent, it led to England.
For the Americans, this proved that the UK had sustained an invasion of some sort, a takeover of a building by foreign saboteurs of unimaginable skill, possibly mercenaries working for a hostile government, and very likely armed. They wanted a hard building invasion.
The British, as the guilty hacker seemed to be housed in a detached suburban home in a peaceful suburb of the provincial town of Luton, in the county of Bedfordshire, just north of London, wanted a silent, invisible, no-alarm, no-publicity attack in the dark of night. They got their way.
The Americans sent over a team of six SEALs, lodged them in the US embassy under the aegis of the Defense Attaché (himself a US Marine) and insisted that two at least go in with the SAS. And so it took place, and no neighbour suspected a thing.
There were no foreigners, no mercenaries, no gunmen. Just a fast-asleep family of four. A thoroughly bewildered chartered accountant, already identified as Mr Harold Jennings, his wife, Sue, and their two sons, Luke, aged eighteen, and Marcus, thirteen.
That was what the SAS staff sergeant had meant at three in the morning. ‘You are not going to believe …’
Chapter Two
ALL THE CURTAINS on the ground floor were drawn. Light would come with dawn and there were neighbours front and back. But a house with curtains still across the windows would attract no suspicion up and down the street. Late wakers are simply envied. The downstairs team crouched below the window level, just in case someone chose to peer inside.
Upstairs, the captured family of four was instructed to dress normally and wait after packing suitcases, one each. The sun rose on a bright April day. The street began to come alive. Two early leavers drove off. A newsagent’s lad delivered the day’s papers. Three landed with a thud on the doormat, and the teenager turned and went on down the street.
At ten minutes to eight the family was escorted downstairs. They looked pale and shaken – most especially the older son – but did not resist. The two Americans, still black-masked, stared at them with enmity. These were the agents/terrorists who had caused such damage to their country. Surely no-release jail time awaited. The upstairs team, including the woman from SRR, came with them. They all waited silently in the sitting room, curtains still closed.
At eight a people-carrier clearly identified as a taxi drew up. Two of the SAS men had changed from black coveralls into formal dark suits with shirt and tie. They each had handguns under the left armpit. They escorted the family, with luggage, to the taxi. There was still no attempt to resist or escape. If any neighbour was interested, the family was simply going on holiday. The car drove away. Inside the house, the team relaxed. They knew they would have to wait out the hours of daylight, immobile and silent, then vaporize into the night the way they had come. The empty house, all systems switched off, would remain closed until much later.
The team leader received a short message to confirm that the arrested family was safely in custody elsewhere, and acknowledged it. He was a warrant officer, a very senior NCO and a veteran of operations inside the UK and abroad. He was in charge because the Regiment uses only NCOs for in-country ops. The officers, mockingly known as ‘Ruperts’, plan and supervise but do not go active inside the UK.
At ten a large van arrived. It was marked with the livery of a house-decorating company. The six men it disgorged wore white overalls. They took dustsheets and stepladders into the house. Neighbours saw it but took no real notice. The Jenningses were simply having some work done while they were on holiday.
Inside the house, the equipment was left on the floor of the hall while the men, led by Dr Hendricks, went upstairs to undertake their real task. It was to scour and gut the house of electronic equipment. They rapidly zeroed in on the attic, to discover an Aladdin’s cave of computer equipment and associated devices. The loft space seemed to have been converted into a private eyrie.
Beneath the
beams that sustained the roof someone had created a personal retreat. There was a desk, and tables and chairs, seemingly acquired cheaply from second-hand stores, ornaments, knick-knacks of some personal significance, but no pictures. Pride of place went to the desk, the chair that addressed it and the computer that stood on it. Dr Hendricks examined it carefully and was amazed.
He was accustomed to the finest and most complex equipment on the computer market, but this was simply ordinary. It was shop-bought, available in the out-of-town superstores owned and run by the common chains. It seemed a father had indulged a son with what he could afford. But how on earth had anyone defeated the best cyber-brains of the Western world with this kit? And which of the boys had it been?
The government scientist hoped he would have the time and opportunity to find out who had penetrated the database at Fort Meade, and to interview this computer geek – a wish Sir Adrian would soon fulfil.
It had taken no time to recognize that this was not a super-computer of the type they were used to out at GCHQ, the huge doughnut-shaped mini-city outside Cheltenham, in the county of Gloucestershire. But although shop-bought and available to anyone, what they discovered, examined and removed had been ingeniously altered and amended, presumably by the owner.
By late morning they were finished. The attic was what it had once been, a hollow shell beneath the rafters of the house. The cyber-team left with their booty. Behind still-drawn curtains the assault-team soldiers sat out of sight and whiled away the hours until 2 a.m. Then they, too, slipped into the darkness and vanished. No neighbour had seen them come, and none saw them go.
Adrian Weston had never, as a boy, intended to be a spy, let alone a spymaster. The son of a veterinary surgeon and raised in the countryside, he had lusted to become a soldier. As soon as age permitted, released from a minor public (boarding) school, he had volunteered for the army and, once accepted as ‘officer material’, gained entry into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
He did not get the Sword of Honour for his passing-out year but was well up the gradings and when offered the regiment of his choice selected the Parachute Regiment. He hoped it would provide more chance of combat. After two years against the IRA in Northern Ireland, he opted for a chance at university, on an army scholarship, and secured a 2:2 in history. It was after graduation that he was approached by one of the dons. A private dinner, perhaps? There were two other men present; no one else.
By the end of the melon starter he realized they were up from London, the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. The history don was a spotter, a talent scout, a trawler. Weston ticked all the boxes. Good family, good school, good exams, the Paras, one of us. He entered ‘the Firm’ a week later. There was training and, later, assignment. During school holidays he had spent time with a German family as an exchange student and now spoke fluent and rapid German. With an intensive three-month course at the Army Language School, he had added Russian. He went to the Eastern Europe desk; it was the height of the Cold War – the Brezhnev and Andropov years. Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR were still to come.
Technically, Sir Adrian was no longer on the government payroll, which had certain advantages. One of them was invisibility. Another, accorded by his retention as the Prime Minister’s personal adviser on matters concerning national security, was access. His calls were taken, his advice accepted. Before his retirement he had been deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service at Vauxhall Cross, serving under Richard Dearlove.
When Sir Richard retired in 2004 Adrian Weston chose not to make a bid for the successorship because he did not wish to serve under Prime Minister Tony Blair. He had been disgusted by the foisting upon Parliament of what came to be known as the ‘Dodgy Dossier’.
This was a document that sought to ‘prove’ that Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them so therefore his country ought to be invaded. There was, Tony Blair assured Parliament, proof ‘beyond doubt’ that these weapons existed. Parliament voted to join Britain to the American invasion of March 2003. It was a disaster, leading to chaos sweeping the entire Middle East and the birth of the terror machine ISIS, still globally active fifteen years later.
To substantiate his claim, Mr Blair quoted as the source for all this the respected Secret Intelligence Service, and the claim formed the basis of the Dodgy Dossier. It was all bunkum. All the SIS had from inside Iraq were ‘single source’ allegations and, in the world of intel, single-source claims are never acted upon unless backed by documentary evidence of huge persuasiveness. There was none.
Nor were there any such weapons, as the subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq proved. The source was a single lying Iraqi, code name Curveball, who fled to Germany, who also believed him. The British government, when the fiction was exposed, blamed MI6 for misinformation, though it had warned Downing Street repeatedly that the claims were highly unreliable.
Loyal to a fault, Sir Richard Dearlove remained silent, in the tradition of his service, until his retirement, and long after that. When he left, Adrian Weston chose also to retire. He did not even wish to remain as Number Two, knowing that the successorship would go to a Blair crony.
While Sir Richard moved on to become Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Adrian Weston took his knighthood, his ‘K’ from a grateful queen, and withdrew to his cottage in rural Dorset, reading, writing and occasionally visiting London, where he could always stay at the Special Forces Club in one of its small but comfortable and modestly priced guest rooms.
As a career-long Kremlinologist specializing in Moscow’s iron rule of the European satellites, and with several hazardous missions behind the Iron Curtain under his belt, in 2012 he wrote a paper which came to the attention of the then-newly appointed Home Secretary in the Cameron government. Out of the blue in his rustic retirement he received a handwritten letter asking him if he would lunch with her outside the ministry in a private meeting.
Mrs Marjory Graham was new to Cabinet rank but very astute. At the Carlton Club – traditionally men-only but permitting ladies as associate members – she explained that her new remit included the Security Service, or MI5. But she wished to have access to a second opinion from a different stream of the intelligence world and had been impressed by his paper on the increasingly aggressive Russian leadership. Could she consult him on a very private basis? Three years before the raid on the house in Luton, David Cameron resigned and she became Prime Minister.
The privately circulated paper that had attracted her attention was entitled simply ‘Beware the Bear’. Adrian Weston had spent a career studying the Kremlin and its successive masters. He had watched with approval the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the reforms he introduced, including the abolition of world Communism and the USSR, but had regarded with dismay the pillaging of a humiliated country under the alcoholic Boris Yeltsin.
He despised the liars, cheats, thieves, rogues and thinly veiled criminals who had stripped their homeland of its assets, made themselves billionaires, and now flaunted their stolen wealth with mega-yachts and huge mansions, many of them inside Britain.
But as Yeltsin sank deeper into booze-fuelled stupor Weston noticed in his shadow a cold-eyed little former secret-police thug with a taste for homoerotic photos of himself riding bare-chested through Siberia with a rifle across his chest. His paper warned of the substitution of Communism with a new hard-right aggressiveness posing as patriotism that appeared to be infesting the Kremlin as the ex-chekisti replaced the drunk and it noted the close links between the Vozhd – a Russian word meaning ‘the Boss’ or, in the crime world, ‘the Godfather’ – and the professional criminal underworld.
The man who had achieved the complete mastery of Russia had started as a diehard Communist and had been privileged to join the KGB in the foreign branch, the First Chief Directorate, being posted to Dresden in East Germany. But when Communism fell he returned to his native Leningrad, renamed St Petersburg
, and joined the staff of the mayor. From there he graduated to Moscow and the staff of Boris Yeltsin. Constantly at the side of the drunken giant from Siberia who took the presidency after the fall of Gorbachev, he became more and more indispensable.
As he did so, he changed. He became disillusioned with Communism, but not with fanaticism. One simply replaced the other. He swerved to hard-right politics, masked by religiosity and devotion to the Orthodox Church and to ultrapatriotism. And he noticed something.
He saw that Russia was utterly controlled by three power bases. The first was the government, with its access to the secret police, Special Forces and armed forces. The second had come after the rape of Russia and its assets under Yeltsin: the corps of opportunists who had acquired from corrupt bureaucrats all the mineral resources of their native land at give-away prices. These were the new plutocrats, the oligarchs, instant billionaires and multimillionaires. Without money and uncountable masses of it, one could be nothing in modern Russia. The third was organized crime, known as ‘thieves in law’, or Vori v Zakone. These three formed an interlinked brotherhood. After a doddering Yeltsin stepped down and handed over the reins without opposition to the man at his side, the one now known as ‘the Vozhd’ became the master of all three, using them, rewarding them and commanding them. And, with their help, he became one of the richest men in the world.
Sir Adrian noted that those who had quarrelled with the new Vozhd appeared to have very short life-spans if they stayed in Russia, and a record of fatal accidents if they settled abroad but continued to criticize. The warning he uttered was back then prophetic and not popular in all quarters, but it seemed to have impressed Mrs Graham. Over coffee he accepted her request.
He arrived at the familiar black door of Number Ten, Downing Street, at five to nine. It opened before he had time to touch the ornate brass knocker. There are watchers inside. He knew the doorman who greeted him by name and was shown up the curving staircase, which was flanked by portraits of previous occupiers. At the top he was invited into a small conference room a few yards from the Prime Minister’s working office. She joined him on the dot of nine, having been at work since six.