The Cloud Collector Read online

  At another silent command, the remaining anti-terrorist specialists and police moved into place, totally surrounding the huge amphitheatre from the outside.

  The interception was perfectly coordinated. At a radio signal, the arena floodlights and those carried in earlier burst on simultaneously with those outside. Simultaneously, too, the decibel-shattering scream of psychological-warfare sirens erupted. The Special Forces and police were earplugged against the disorienting noise. The deafening cacophony drowned the brief exchange of gunfire, in which only one of the intended bombers was slightly wounded. Twelve out of the total of twenty attackers surrendered without a fight.

  The attempt to destroy Rome’s most famous antiquity created an international furor, heightened within hours—to America’s discomfort—by confirmation of the wounded man’s identity.

  * * *

  Sally Hanning got back to Thames House by nine, having showered and changed and showing no trace of only having had three hours sleep. Neither did the meticulous David Monkton, who’d slept at the MI5 headquarters. To Sally’s well-concealed bewilderment she was ushered into the anteroom in which, four hours earlier, they’d watched pornographic films. The previous night’s television table was now laid for breakfast, two chairs set in readiness.

  Looking at Sally’s overnight bag, Monkton announced, ‘I’ve decided against your going to Sellafield.’

  ‘It’s my case,’ immediately protested Sally.

  ‘Which is acknowledged in the official commendation I’m attaching to your file today.’ Monkton buttered his toast. ‘The operation becomes physical interception now: SAS Special Forces and police snatch squads.’

  Sally sat where Monkton indicated and poured coffee but ignored the food. ‘What happens if there’s no attack?’

  ‘The cordon stays in place. Cleaned-up facial photographs of the groups will be issued to Special Branch and anti-terrorist units at every port and airport exit in the country. There’s no government decision this early about publicly issuing the pictures, which is what the German anti-terrorist agency wants.…’ Monkton looked at his watch. ‘There’s a German squad getting here in two hours. They’ve been trying to get Horst Becker, aka Hasib Hussain, for the past year: he was the leader and the only one to escape from a terrorist bombing in Hamburg that killed ten people last October.’

  ‘What about territorial rivalry?’ presciently asked Sally, pouring herself more coffee.

  Monkton shook his head. ‘The arrest will be ours. It’s inevitable, I suppose, that Berlin will seek extradition, but Becker’s not an adoptive German national as far as I know. It’s a matter for the attorney-general and home secretary. We’ll certainly have a precedence claim.’

  ‘What precedence?’

  ‘The Germans are suggesting Becker might have killed Roger Bennett. Those the police did catch and arrest after the Hamburg atrocity describe Becker as someone who enjoys killing.’

  ‘What about the indistinct photograph on the first porn movie?’ demanded Sally.

  Monkton allowed a bleak smile at the persistence. ‘Forensic came back an hour ago. They’re putting the possibility that it’s Bennett at seventy percent.’

  ‘And the e-mails?’

  ‘Still being assessed.’

  ‘Why Bennett?’ reflected Sally, helping herself at last to a croissant. ‘And why kill him so publicly? If he hadn’t been murdered and his body dumped so publicly the terrorists could easily have got to Sellafield.’

  ‘They almost did,’ reminded Monkton. ‘And it’s only speculation that Becker or anyone else in the group was involved in the killing. I’m equally curious at how and why a petty criminal like Bennett—which is what he was, certainly not someone with any political ideology—came to be with these people in the first place.’

  Was this breakfast and this conversation—and not letting her complete the case, which was the normal procedure right up to a prosecution—some kind of test? wondered Sally. ‘Let’s keep in mind that forensic are stopping short of a positive identification, but run with the hypothesis that it is Bennett. The only reason for his inclusion has surely to be that he was disposable: brought in to serve some purpose but to be discarded after that purpose was achieved.’

  ‘You’ve already flawed your argument,’ insisted the Director-General. ‘Disposable, sure; but why would professional terrorists leave the body so publicly? Wouldn’t they sink it in a reservoir, bury it in a landfill, anything to avoid attracting attention until after the attack?’

  ‘He did something wrong, and he needed to be made an example of.’

  Monkton nodded cautiously. ‘Still leaves unanswered why he was involved in the first place.’

  ‘Identification,’ Sally continued to speculate. ‘Becker came from Germany, maybe with others. Let’s surmise that Bennett, who must have had a passport that we haven’t yet traced, was a link man between a terrorist group here and Becker and maybe others from Germany.’

  ‘That has possibilities. But there are still some gaping holes.’

  This had to be a bizarre test, Sally determined. ‘But then Bennett did something wrong.’

  Jeremy Dodson’s arrival stopped Monkton’s response, although the operations director did not immediately speak, clearly as surprised as Sally at the breakfast preparations. After several moments Dodson said, ‘None of our in-house specialists can make anything that’s relevant from the gambling messages. I’ve gone back to GCHQ for help and—’

  ‘I did that already,’ interrupted Sally. ‘They described these sorts of exchanges as kids’ stuff; they couldn’t determine significance.’

  ‘Kids don’t attack nuclear installations,’ rejected Dodson, not bothering to conceal the resentment.

  ‘Which is why it’s so clever: everything is done or phrased to be dismissed,’ retorted Sally, contemptuous of the man’s attitude. ‘What about the particular e-mails that I drew attention to?’

  Dodson coloured. ‘I marked them for specific attention by GCHQ.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question. Did they come from the same Cologne Internet café as the NSA intercepts!’

  ‘Those IP addresses without sender identification did come from the Cologne Internet café,’ pedantically confirmed Dodson, stone-faced.

  ‘That gives me something to work on if I’m not going to Sellafield,’ said Sally. In addition to constantly watching her back against Dodson’s retribution, she thought.

  * * *

  Just after four in the morning Jack Irvine translated sufficiently to give them a partial message. It was predicated on colloquial Gilaki—one of the predominant Iranian languages—but further disguised by Dari dialect phrases and terms. He didn’t initially wake the snoozing Singleton for help, wanting to decipher the entire encryption himself, but he admitted defeat just before dawn. Once awake, Singleton took a while to recognize the rhythm, needing the reference manuals more than the younger man, but refreshed by his rest he made quicker progress. It was Irvine, though, who guessed at a further Dari encryption as the words began to formulate.

  ‘Now all we’ve got to do is work out what it means,’ agreed Singleton, looking down at the translated message:

  Fourth first in the war and first to the brothers.

  8

  Sally Hanning was as confused as MI5’s head of operations but hid it better than Jeremy Dodson, who throughout the breakfast encounter limited himself to yes or no responses whenever possible and minimal mutterings when it wasn’t. To Monkton’s final instruction—that anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, be immediately taken to Sally—the man only just managed a head jerk, refusing verbally to acknowledge his messenger-boy function.

  Sally was irritated, too. She was officially the Sellafield case officer—which justified her receiving everything, although not that Dodson be the courier—and regulations required that if at all practicable, case officers should be present at the conclusion of an operation. Here it would have been both easy and practicable, incurring
no physical risk whatsoever, for her to remain at some safe control point. She also didn’t like being used as the pawn in whatever humiliation Monkton was inflicting upon the head of his operational division. Dodson clearly featured to some degree in the failure to respond earlier and deserved reprimand or censure, but today’s episode was childish, pulling wings off a fly to stop its annoying buzz. It was positively distracting, determined Sally, as she settled back into her unexpectedly returned office. She stored the unneeded overnight bag by her single filing cabinet, pulling out a lower drawer to accommodate the blotter, filing trays, and her favourite photograph of her dead parents from her desk to create space to arrange the printouts of the betting tips recovered from Roger Bennett’s computer. Lastly, determined against any distraction, she turned off her computer and cell phone and told the switchboard she didn’t want any interrupting external calls. Twenty-six printouts were in the computer’s standard 12-point, Times New Roman font. Additionally, overnight a second set of printouts had been greatly enhanced at MI5’s north London forensic laboratory. Neither location nor date for any of the horse or dog-track meetings had appeared on the slips, which seemed to have been scanned onto an e-mail from a selection of newspapers and tipster magazines. Obfuscation, Sally reminded herself: nothing intended to be understood as it was actually represented. What message or messages could be hidden among horse-racing and dog-track meetings? A lot. Each slip selection held variations of three to four animal names, which usually extended beyond a single word. The longest was five: sixteen horse races, ten dog-track events. All printed in English, so presumably all English meetings. No, not necessarily: animals ran under their English names at foreign events. Sally separated the horse selections from the dog recommendations and tried to make out something—anything—significant by merging or combining words or minimal phrases. She gave up on the fifth horse race. It would need a computer—and more days than they might have left—to cross-compile every possible computation and at the end still likely achieve nothing. Sally’s mind was blocked. The slips had been subjected to the highest degree of computer analysis on the state-of-the-art specialized equipment at GCHQ. The switchboard ban was against incoming, not outgoing, calls, she decided.

  It took a full thirty minutes to satisfy Cheltenham security of her identity and that she was talking on a guaranteed secure line before she was connected to the man she knew only as John.

  Before Sally was able to query the faint reception echo, he said, ‘We’ve obviously been told about Sellafield. We’re on top alert, so this call’s being recorded and simultaneously listened to.’

  Who’d raised the Cheltenham alert, Monkton or Dodson? ‘Tell me what checks you carried out on the betting slips.’

  ‘Trigger-word comparisons,’ replied the man at once. ‘We made three programs, one ASCII for Roman-letter transliteration, one Arabizi Arabic, and one classic Arabic, of familiar greetings and farewells, a range of Arab religious reference, words like Al Qaeda, Roger, and Bennett—both separately and together—Sellafield, and atomic and nuclear terminologies.’

  ‘What’s ASCII?’

  ‘Computers can read numbers, not letters,’ responded the GCHQ official, eager to display his expertise. ‘ASCII is the numeric code for Roman script. The original was IPv4, which divides into thirty-two bits that include separating decimal dots. When everyone up to and including their herders for their yaks began buying computers, capacity had to be increased to satisfy demand. IPv6 was developed in 1995 with 128 bits.’

  ‘Arabizi’s colloquial Arabic, right?’ queried Sally, wanting to make some contribution.

  ‘We call it chat-room Arabic. Classic Arabic is obviously the written version. All three were run through high-velocity supercomputers, scanning at a thousandth of a second, seeking a match or combinations of the words on the slips for an alternative translation from what they appeared to be. There was nothing.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We’re locked onto Bennett’s computer address, although we know you have it, to intercept any further messages from Germany from anyone who might not know Bennett’s dead. And we’re monitoring the Cologne Internet café.’

  ‘And?’

  There was a pause from Cheltenham. ‘What else did you expect?’

  ‘Could you build another programme from the betting slip names to find the locations and dates of the horse- and dog-racing meetings?’

  ‘That’s not how we work,’ mildly protested John.

  ‘But could you do it, with the facilities you have there?’ pressed Sally, curbing the impatience.

  ‘It’s technically possible, yes.’

  ‘And having done that—and getting the complete race cards—could you get the first-, second-, third- and fourth-place winners if the events have already taken place?’

  ‘What significance, what connection, are you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ confessed Sally emptily. ‘But there’s something. There has to be: everything on that computer has or had a purpose.’

  ‘Stay on the line,’ ordered the man.

  Sally did, straining to pick up any of the discussion obviously taking place, but heard nothing.

  ‘Your instincts have been good so far,’ said John, coming back on the line.

  ‘You’ll do it?’

  ‘I’ll come back to you if there’s anything.’

  ‘Today?’

  There was another hesitation. ‘I hope so.’

  Sally welcomed the reference to instinct, not luck, although for the first time ever she accepted that luck wouldn’t have gone amiss.

  * * *

  Luck was very much on Charles Johnston’s mind, three thousand miles away in his Langley office. Outside his door glowed the red DO NOT DISTURB warning. All calls were on hold for him to properly evaluate the heaven-sent, career-protecting approach he wouldn’t have anticipated in a million years. His response couldn’t be delayed, though. It had to be today, within the hour; because of the time difference it was already afternoon in London, and it was imperative the request wasn’t extended to anyone but him.

  E-mail or telephone? E-mails created electronic trails. Telephone conversations could—and certainly would from his end—be recorded, but security was guaranteed between sender and recipient; he felt safer with telephones. It came with another absolute essential: every exchange was strictly one-to-one.

  The connection was quicker than Johnston expected. He’d gathered up what he thought might be necessary from the minimal briefing dossier, but wasn’t properly ready with his recording system when David Monkton came on from London.

  ‘An unexpected surprise, hearing from you after so long,’ Johnston greeted, hurriedly activating the machine.

  ‘Good of you to get back so quickly. Wasn’t sure the e-mail address I had would still work after the transfer.’

  ‘It worked just fine.’ Johnston had met Monkton the previous year at a NATO security conference in Brussels, before Johnston’s transfer from the CIA’s Profiling and Analysis division to covert operations.

  ‘Congratulations at the promotion.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Johnston frowned, inherently cautious. ‘Didn’t expect the news to have reached London.’

  ‘We’ve got an efficient embassy in Washington.’

  Too efficient, thought Johnston. ‘Your e-mail referred to terrorism?’

  ‘It’s an imposition,’ apologized Monkton in advance. ‘You’re the only person I know at the proper level. What I’m looking for is an introduction to whomever I need to talk with in the FBI, Homeland Security, or NSA. And I’d appreciate guidance on which of the three I should go to.’

  It had to be the UK alert from the National Security Agency, decided Johnston, satisfaction at his initial guess surging through him. ‘That’s a pretty wide canvas. You want to be a little more specific?’

  ‘From one of your NSA intercepts we’re now going to be able to prevent a terrorist attack on one of our nuclear installations. I’ve got a
n idea I want to talk through with the person in Washington who’s controlling those intercepts. I’m guessing NSA, but I don’t want to waste time going to the wrong place. There’ve been too many public problems involving all of us, haven’t there?’

  It was scarcely taking a chance, reasoned Johnston, picking the slip from the open dossier. He could always row back, excusing what he said as a misunderstanding about another totally different operation. ‘Did that intercept read, “Invite the brothers to the celebration?”’

  The silence from London lasted several moments. ‘That’s exactly how it read.’

  ‘You’re talking to the person who’s controlling those intercepts.’

  Johnston had correctly guessed the subject of Monkton’s call, but the thirty-minute conversation that followed was completely different from what Johnston had imagined, so much so that to keep the eagerness from his voice he at times stayed with single-word responses to reassure Monkton that he was still on the line. Johnston’s longest contribution was to insist that his co-operation was dependent upon everything’s remaining strictly between the two of them and conducted solely by telephone until he decreed otherwise.

  ‘Your project, your rules,’ agreed Monkton.

  * * *

  The thwarted attempt to kill hundreds of tourists in the destruction of one of the world’s greatest antiquities was obviously the biggest international news story of the day. It escalated with the mid-morning journalistic scoop disclosing the wounded man’s identity and escalated even further with Al Jazeera showing on both its Arabic and English-language channels a terrorist video sent to the station in advance of the Rome attack.

  The film opened on a split screen, one-half showing an official portrait of Giovanni Moro to establish that the long-haired, tightly bearded man on the opposite half of the picture was unquestionably the grandson of Aldo Moro, the two-time Italian prime minister assassinated in May 1978 by Italy’s Red Brigade terrorists.