Authors: Alan Judd
The phone was ringing before she returned to her desk, there was an urgent email flashing on her screen and her mobile was vibrating. She could see that the landline call was from the estate
agent who had sold Charles’s flat and who kept ringing with queries she had already answered. The email was from the managing partner asking her to stand in for him at a meeting that
afternoon. The mobile message was from Charles.
She took that first. ‘We should go out to dinner tonight,’ his voice said, ‘to celebrate the move. Somewhere good. There’s not much food here anyway and you’ve
probably had a rotten first day back, with all the house stuff on top of everything else. I’ll book somewhere unless you’re exhausted and would rather not.’
Her weariness evaporated.
Book now
, she texted.
Anywhere but Croydon. Champagne before we go
.
A
ngela Wilson was waiting at the Cabinet Office Whitehall entrance.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ Charles said. ‘Lot of people and police outside Barclays at the bottom of Victoria Street. Either a mass run on the bank or a mass raid. Getting a bit
ugly.’
‘Cash machines have stopped working.’
‘All of them? More anonymous hackers?’
‘Something like that.’ She took him to the front of the short queue and signed him in with a day-pass.
He followed her along a corridor he had once known well. ‘Not heading for a COBR, are we?’ The acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room had come, through official shorthand and
initial media misunderstanding, to stand for any ad hoc ministerial and official body summoned to take charge of crises. Charles’s few attendances in his earlier MI6 days had been in
connection with British hostages seized overseas.
‘The COBR, not a COBR, if you see what I mean,’ she said. ‘The only room that’s free. In fact, there’s just been a COBR which you should have been at but no-one
apart from me knew of your appointment in time.’ She nodded and smiled at two young women they passed. ‘No, but this cash machine business, it’s not surprising it’s getting
ugly. Accounts are debited but no cash is forthcoming. I didn’t want to say any more about it in front of people in the queue but it’s not just a case of anonymous hackers who’ve
got lucky. It’s more serious than that, as you’ll hear.’
It was a large basement room with a long table and smaller rooms opening off it, like satellite pods. There were more screens and IT paraphernalia than Charles remembered and the lighting,
though bright, was no longer the unremitting strip-lighting glare. A wall-mounted screen showed the continuous BBC news-script. There were two or three people talking at the far end of the long
table and some coming and going through the door beyond. The atmosphere was that of a place in which whatever was happening had happened. Someone at the end of the table laughed.
He followed Angela into the first pod on the right. There, at a round table festooned with plugs and leads and overlooked by three screens on the wall, sat three men. One of them he knew, Tim
Corke, new director of the newly independent GCHQ. Tall, with black hair and eyebrows, a ready smile and an easy social grace that made his past as an academic mathematician a surprise to most, he
had once worked with Charles on an operation to bug an embassy cipher room in South America.
Tim stood to shake hands. ‘Welcome to the Cabinet Office Future Estimates Committee. COFE, we call ourselves, which in our case we have not got. Nice boring title so it can appear in
calendars without attracting attention. We’re in fact a sub-committee of the National Security Committee.’
Angela introduced the others as Michael Dunton, new head of MI5, and Graham Wood, head of the Civil Contingencies Unit. ‘We’re just about a quorum but we’re lacking Home Office
and MOD. They were both at the COBR this morning, along with the money men and CNI – Critical National Infrastructure – people. I briefed them on you afterwards so everyone’s up
to date.’
They shook hands. Michael Dunton was a short, balding man with a broad red face and heavy-framed glasses that gave him an owlish look. Graham Wood was easily the youngest, probably in his
thirties, slight, with sandy hair and cheap reading glasses from Boots, the sort Charles himself used.
They sat. Tim leaned forward, elbows on table and hands clasped. ‘I don’t know how much Angela’s told you about what’s going on and what we’re here
for—’
‘Virtually nothing,’ said Angela.
‘Good, that makes it simple. I’ll keep it short so as not to waste everyone else’s time but you can follow up with me later if you like. I’m in London virtually all the
time now.’
Charles took out his black leather pocket-book. Tim shook his head. Charles put it away.
‘Intermittent power cuts, cash machines and traffic lights out of order, erratic mobile reception, banking and Internet failures, computer-driven stock market highs and lows, chaos in
international corporations, interference with police and military communications, power cuts to hospitals, water-pumping stations, gas and electricity supplies, supermarkets, airport delays,
disappearing trains, unresponsive government departments, tax and social security computers going haywire – though the two latter are nothing unexpected, perhaps.’ He smiled. ‘The
stuff you’ve seen and heard a lot of in the past few weeks, often attributed to anonymous superhackers directed by an unknown Mr Big, the devil’s version of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. You
can’t have missed it, even in your Scottish eyrie.’
Charles nodded. The past few weeks had indeed been characterised by random IT and power failures, short-lived but very disruptive. The only consistent feature was that they were confined to
Britain. Other media theories included al-Qaeda sympathisers in Birmingham and Chinese maths students in Shanghai with time on their hands. ‘I doubt I’d be here today if I’d been
up there recently. Wouldn’t have got down. The whole country seems to be stuttering to a halt.’
‘Believe it or not, it’s more serious than people think. It’s not random and it’s not hackers. It’s coordinated systematic attacks on the CNI – power, water,
gas, communications, money supply, transport, food distribution, police and military capability. Especially worrying are recent DOS – denial of service – attacks on financial systems,
especially the wholesale banking system, exchanges between banks and other banks and banks and governments. If that goes, everything goes. Worse than the near-collapse of 2008. There’d be no
money for anyone, anywhere. Fortunately, they’ve not really tried to bring it down yet. Each time they do just enough to prove to themselves – and us – that they can get in, then
they move on. If news got out it could create a run on the banks, with all that that implies. The City is doing what it can to protect itself, with advice from us, but the more people get to know
of it, the more likely it is to get out. However, their most recent tactic is this week’s attack on the Internet itself, at least the routing that covers most of the UK. You may have noticed
it went down for a while a couple of days ago. That’s what this morning’s COBR was about.’
Charles had been packing books at the time but heard about it afterwards. ‘Who’s doing it and how?’
‘Can’t say for sure but we’re pretty certain it’s state sponsored. Has to be, on this scale. No individual or group could coordinate the degree of computing power they
used the other day. Which means Russia or China.’
‘But why? Not in the run-up to war, are we? China’s got a lot of investment here, wouldn’t benefit them to bring us to our knees.’
‘Despite which they’ve been attacking our government systems for years, partly because they can and partly to refine their techniques in case they ever need to go all out.
They’ve a clever way of making it look like common hacking attacks when actually it’s technically more – I don’t suppose you’d like me to go into the technical aspects
now? Finding the light switch was about your limit, I seem to remember, Charles.’ The others smiled. ‘Also, they’ve been supplying the components of our IT infrastructure for
years, all the micro stuff you never see. We warned successive governments that they may have designed bugs into some of these things so that they can switch them on and off at will but, as ever,
cost and convenience overruled security.’
‘But why now, if that’s what they’re doing? What do they gain?’
‘That’s partly why my money’s on the Russians. They don’t much like us and don’t give a damn anyway. We’re a useful surrogate for the US. They don’t
want to take on America but they can beat us up a bit without serious consequences and see if their techniques work. Also, there are indications that they’re still feeling their way with what
they can do, still experimenting, which suggests that their ability to do it may be recently acquired. If there were a long-laid Chinese plot to turn our inbuilt on switches to off and all the rest
of it I don’t think they’d risk blowing it on a trial run.’
‘How are they doing it?’
‘I’ll explain later, save wasting everyone else’s time. Meanwhile, there are two other aspects, less obvious as yet but just as serious. One is that they could be working up to
bringing down the Internet over the British Isles for a period. It doesn’t need to be permanent to be catastrophic. If they could do that they wouldn’t have to bother with our power,
water, gas and fuel distribution and banking systems because they’re all Internet-dependent. No-one in electricity substations or telephone exchanges diverts things by throwing a few switches
any more, no-one opens valves in pumping stations. It’s all done remotely via the Net. And because we’re creating truly national grids, so that an excess in one area flows to another,
it’s much harder to seal off an area. Hitherto you could – say – isolate a region’s power or water supply because it was independent and self-sustaining. Now it isn’t.
The benefit of joining up all the different bits is that everything works better. The cost is that the whole system is much more vulnerable. Get into one little corner of it and you can get
everywhere.’
‘With the Internet, they need only bring enough of it down for long enough for the world to see the UK as vulnerable and unreliable. Investment dries up, the City is finished as a world
financial centre, government income collapses, borrowing increases and we’re in a mess. Worse mess than usual, that is. Much worse.’
Charles had long since given up any pretence of IT literacy. He was beginning to wonder whether it might now cost him his job, or whether he should resign first. Incapable of asking the kind of
informed question that might demonstrate understanding or provoke insights, he had to rely on the obvious, simple, big ones. ‘But can anyone bring the Internet down?’
‘Well, they had a pretty good trial run this week, albeit for only part of the country and for just over an hour. But they proved they can do it. We got government scientists into this
morning’s COBR and asked them whether it’s possible for anyone – any state or group or whatever – to bring down the entire Net. Yes and no, was the answer, as with many
things scientific. They reckon that a big enough attack, well thought out and organised, could probably collapse the entire Net, but not for long. That’s because it’s so big and so
uncoordinated and anarchic that, like water, if you block it here it will find its way through there. There would be massive disruption but it would recover and go on working patchily, after a
fashion. But what you could do, as the Russians demonstrated in Estonia a few years ago, is attack a country or part of a country for long enough to send it back to the pre-Internet age.
You’d stop it functioning as a modern state, with all that that implies.’
Charles could grasp that. It was detail he feared. ‘So what do we do about it?’
‘That’s what we’re here to decide. But it’s only one aspect, as I said, the one everyone knows about. Everyone in government, anyway. But there’s another aspect
that adds venom to the first.’ Tim sat back, leaving his palms flat on the desk and looking at Charles. ‘We believe – in fact, we’re convinced, though we don’t know
how they’ve done it – that there is repeated penetration of our most sensitive government systems, yours – MI6’s, that is – included.’
There was another burst of laughter from the end of the larger room. They were waiting for him to respond. ‘The Russians again?’
‘Most likely. Certainly a hostile intelligence service. We’re sure of that because of the nature of their penetration. They don’t advertise themselves, don’t want us to
know they’ve been in and are very selective in what they try to access. With your people, for example, they’re looking for sources, identities of sources. They’re most interested
in Russian or Chinese sources, which is clever because it keeps us guessing as to which they are. They want to know others too but seem least interested in terrorist sources. If it were a terrorist
group, of course, it would be the other way round.’
‘Have they identified any?’
‘Frustratingly, we can’t say. We know they’ve been into your system because they leave – if you like – an electronic version of footprints in snow. We do regular
trawls of sensitive systems, looking for footprints, and they probably don’t realise we’ve seen them. But we can’t say for sure what they could see from where they last stood, as
it were. It’s more complicated than that sounds – I’m oversimplifying.’ He smiled.
Charles smiled.
‘They’re never in for long – two hours twenty-three minutes is the longest – and access is intermittent, mostly evenings and weekends. Access to other closed systems
– MI5, our own in GCHQ, some of the MOD, Foreign Office and central government systems – is less extensive and more spasmodic. But – and this is the killer point – they
penetrate other systems only when they’re already in the MI6 system.’
They were all looking at Charles. ‘So we’re the problem?’
‘Something or someone in you is the problem. More likely someone. Someone on your system is giving them access via his or her computer. Not necessarily knowingly.’
‘But the MI6 system is a closed system. Can’t be accessed from outside.’