Authors: Alan Judd
Angela smiled ruefully. ‘Was, Charles, not is. You’ve been away a while. Welcome to joined-up government and joined-up Whitehall. All part of modernisation, joining the real world
– that is, the virtual world – and all that. You’ll understand why I couldn’t say any of this before you took the job.’
‘Do ministers know – George Greene?’
‘They know the obvious, of course – power cuts, threats to banks, Internet failures and so on – and they know the secret bits in outline,’ said Michael Dunton.
‘They also know we’re investigating it and that, as a security threat, it’s primarily an MI5 responsibility, though for the actual technical sleuthing we depend on Tim’s
people. And they know that this committee exists to oversee the investigation. But they don’t know all the grisly detail. We’ll have to tell them. Sometime.’
‘Before they read it in the headlines,’ said Graham Wood.
They went over the ground, with Graham giving more examples of CNI attacks. Tim leant forward again, elbows on table, hands clasped as before. ‘Of course, your immediate problem is how to
investigate your own people without any of them knowing there’s an investigation. It could be any of them, including your own security people. The only person in MI6 we know it couldn’t
be is you, since you haven’t had access to any MI6 computer systems and therefore can’t be the one who’s letting the attackers in.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’
‘Be our eyes and ears, let us know of anything remotely suspicious. I now have people in Cheltenham accessing your systems to try to find the source but it would help no end if you could
let us know of any weaknesses you spot, human or system. And keep us informed, day or night.’
Charles nodded. He had taken over a few odd jobs, he reflected, but nothing quite like this. Certainly nothing in which ignorance was an advantage.
‘There is one thing you could do, though, something that maybe only you can do. But, again, you’ll have to make sure no-one else in your service knows. You could recontact an old
friend of yours, Configure, and see if he can help. He gave us a lot of help in this area in the past. Don’t worry, everyone around this table knows about him.’
‘Everyone except me. Who’s Configure?’
‘You knew him as Lover Boy,’ said Michael. ‘Russian intelligence officer. That was his code name when you recruited him in London about a hundred years ago. It’s changed
a couple of times since. He defected not long before you left MI6, if you remember. You were brought back into the case to help with the exfiltration.’
Viktor Koslov. The then youthful KGB officer had been Charles’s first case, though it was an exaggeration to say that Charles had recruited him. He had recruited himself, more or less,
which was often the way; you had to be there to catch the falling apple. ‘He can’t still be working for us, surely? And cyber security was never his field, was it?’
‘No but it was his brother’s field. May still be. He had an amateur interest and was beginning to get good stuff from his brother – without the brother realising – at
about the time you left the case. You might even have reported some of it. It expanded exponentially afterwards and became his main contribution. It continued after his defection.’
‘How? Surely, the Russians—’
‘The Russians don’t know he’s here. Or didn’t. They may now. Nor did or does his brother. You remember how the exfiltration went at the time?’
Charles remembered. It was a rush job after the Berlin Wall came down and while the Soviet empire was disintegrating. Fortunately, it was well rehearsed and a new identity including bank
accounts, driving licence, passport and employment, built up over years in the UK, was waiting for Viktor to flesh it out.
The first indication of trouble was when Viktor was reassigned within the SVR, as the KGB was by then called. He had been working in a counter-espionage department that looked for spies within
the Russian bureaucracy, a priceless position for MI6 and even more so for the CIA, until abruptly moved to processing intelligence reports from the Middle East. This was a post normally occupied
by no-hopers, by people without patronage or by those under punishment. Then his father-in-law, an influential apparatchik, fell out with the new ruling clique over the ownership of a bank. He
escaped prison only by keeping quiet and retiring to the rented family dacha in Latvia, leaving his wife in Moscow. Finally, Viktor’s wife decided she would no longer tolerate his
philandering and demanded a divorce.
Viktor used a dead letterbox in a Moscow suburb to trigger the exfiltration, announcing that his current mistress was coming with him. That entailed emergency clearance from a reluctant foreign
secretary for the import of an unknown and possibly unreliable woman. At the last minute the mistress – fortunately still under the illusion that Viktor was proposing that they should run
away to Latvia – declared that she couldn’t leave Moscow, so Viktor travelled to Latvia alone.
His cover was that he was pleading with his father-in-law to help save his marriage. In fact, his father-in-law was interested only in Moscow gossip and having someone to shoot with in the
forest and get drunk with in the evenings. The exfiltration was to have happened when Viktor notionally returned to Moscow. He and Charles would have rendezvoused and then crossed the Finnish
border, Viktor posing as Charles’s Polish business partner. He spoke Polish as a result of a Warsaw posting and the alias passport Charles carried for him was up to date with forged entry and
exit stamps.
But the sudden death of his father-in-law – drunk and supine in an armchair, he hiccoughed twice and fell half out of it, dead – delayed everything. For the better, it turned out.
Viktor returned to Moscow where, after risky communications with London, he retired from the SVR, putting it about that he and his wife were separating and that he was taking on the dacha. His wife
was compensated for the loss of their SVR flat by moving with their two children to her mother’s much larger one, content that the major part of Viktor’s pension was sent to her monthly
from his bank in Latvia. Viktor, so far as his wife and former employers were concerned, simply faded into wooded obscurity. The exfiltration proceeded as planned.
‘Any more wives since he got here?’ asked Charles.
‘Probably but not his own. He’s still married, anyway, and neither she nor his former employers know he’s here. We think. They’re still paying his pension.’
‘That’s incredible.’
‘Incredibly useful, too, as Tim will tell you. His cryptologist brother works for the military bit of their signals outfit. Thinks Viktor’s still in Latvia, goes and stays. We
reinsert Viktor back for a couple of weeks and they gossip about the brother’s work. He doesn’t come over with the algorithms, of course, but Viktor’s pretty mathematical and a
bit of a computer geek with an amateur interest in cryptology, so he picks up a lot about directions of travel and recent access that makes Tim and the NSA happy bunnies. Luckily it’s all
very tightly held and wasn’t betrayed by Snowden, the NSA defector. They play chess with each other on the Internet, Viktor and his brother. That’s mainly how they keep in
touch.’
‘But surely his brother must be able to see from that—’
‘We’ve fixed it so that Viktor’s computer is routed through servers in the Baltics,’ said Tim. ‘Worked very well until the SIA interregnum, shall we call it, when
defectors ceased to be looked after. Your old MI6 resettlement section was disbanded. So far as the new management was concerned, defectors had told all they knew, had their pay-offs, got their
pensions and were on their own, left to themselves in this rather foreign country. Liberated and self-sustaining, they called it. Abandoned, in other words, with an emergency number to call but no
regular point of contact or support. A lot of them need that, as you know.
‘Point is, we lost contact with Viktor. His last case officer resigned after a spat with the SIA, lives with a dancer in Bangkok and is no longer vetted. We need someone to reestablish the
relationship, get Viktor to see his brother and ferret out any gossip on these cyber attacks. It’s not precisely his brother’s area but he mixes in those circles and may know whether or
not the Russians are doing it. He may even have an idea how. If he knows nothing we’ll concentrate resources on the Chinese. At present we’re having to look at them and the
Russians.’
Operational involvement was not normally expected of a head of service, but to Charles it was the sound of a trumpet, a call to arms, an echo of youth. ‘Where is Viktor?’
‘He’s your neighbour,’ said Tim. ‘Your about-to-be neighbour, anyway. He lives not far from the cottage you’re renting in Sussex. We know all about that, you
see.’ They all laughed. ‘We met your landlord-to-be recently, former colleague of yours, now an MP and serving on the Intelligence Services Committee.’
‘No—’
‘Jeremy Wheeler. Afraid so, Charles.’ They laughed again, except for Angela who smiled.
‘I’d no idea. Sarah’s been dealing with the agents and I’ve never seen the contract.’ He and Jeremy had joined the old MI6 together. They had never been close and
whenever their paths intersected it had been to their mutual dissatisfaction, though they had never actually fallen out over anything. Charles shook his head in disbelief. ‘And he’s on
the ISC already?’
‘We had to brief them last week to ask them not to go too public about what’s going on and we met him then. Seemed to think he’d got you in his power at last.’
‘He doesn’t know about Configure?’
‘Not as far as we know.’
‘Let me have Configure’s contact details and I’ll see him on Saturday when we go down to take over the cottage. Someone had better brief me on what I can say and what to ask
him.’
The meeting broke up, with Angela rushing back to the Foreign Office after a hurried discussion with Tim about
Beowulf
, which Charles only half heard and didn’t at all
understand. Anglo-Saxon verse seemed a surprising mutual interest, but Whitehall had always been full of people with surprising interests.
Michael Dunton touched his elbow. ‘One other surprise for you. News of another old friend of yours. Nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about. Peter Tew, aka Stoat.’
‘Not out already, surely?’
‘Freed himself. Walked out of the open prison he was in, a sort of halfway house for those coming up for release. Strange thing was, he hadn’t long to go, thanks to the last
government’s wizard wheeze of releasing everyone early. Must be mad.’
‘He was never mad, unless there was method in it. But he was bitter.’ He could still picture Peter’s face in the dock as he stared across the court at Charles and Frank
Heathfield, two of the four who had unmasked him. His grey eyes, so often playful, had rested on Charles’s for a long unforgiving moment. They had been friends, not just colleagues, had
toured the eastern states of the US together when Peter was in New York and Charles was visiting CIA headquarters at Langley. It later turned out that that was when Peter had begun spying for the
Russians. Charles had talked freely about what he’d learned at Langley.
‘Trouble is, he must still know stuff,’ said Michael. ‘And he never told us all he’d passed, anyway, not once he’d decided to clam up. Presumably he’ll try
and make a bolt for Russia but would he really want to spend the rest of his life there, like George Blake? Never believed in the cause, anyway, did he? Rather more personal motivation,
wasn’t it? If they’d have him now.’
‘They’d have him, they’d make a great thing of it, show the world they always look after their own. I’m not sure it was purely personal for Peter, anyway. There was a
dollop of ideology in the mixture.’
‘Maybe escaping was a spur of the moment thing and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
Charles shook his head. ‘He was a calculator, Peter, it wouldn’t have been spontaneous. I don’t think most of us realised how much his life had to be calculation in those days,
given what he was and the way things were. He should have stayed in banking, with his beloved statistics. He loved numbers.’
‘That’s what he did before he joined your lot?’
‘He thought spying would be more interesting than making a fortune. Which he’d already done, anyway. He was right, it was. Just a bit too interesting. Couldn’t stop doing
it.’
‘Well, life is going to be pretty different for him now, wherever he is. Whatever he calculates.’ They were in the corridor leading to the Whitehall entrance. ‘Bloody nuisance
from our point of view. It’s police and probation business really, of course, but we’re going to have to go back through all the files for clues as to where he might go or what he might
do, who his friends were and all that. Last thing we need, historic espionage investigations taking people away from international terrorism. Not to mention all this cyber business. At least
he’s not involved in that. Next thing we know there’ll be a terrorist bomb somewhere and we’ll get blamed. Your identity must have been blown to the Russians by Stoat, of course?
Stoat Red, as we used to say.’
Stoat, strictly speaking the code name for the investigation into Peter which had inevitably come to stand for him, had confessed to identifying Charles and many others in MI6 to the Russians.
He had also, when on remand, passed names and addresses to imprisoned IRA terrorists. ‘As Red as it gets.’
T
he next morning Charles paused before addressing the faces around the boardroom table. His five directors, three men and two women, had all been
appointed before him. They were in their forties or fifties and each of the men was bald. He had to stop himself touching his own hair for reassurance.
Simon Aldington was director of operations. Charles remembered him from the old MI6 as a youthful head of station in Cairo who had since risen through the ranks of the SIA, gaining weight and
losing hair. Clive Thatcham was director of requirements, moved from the Foreign Office for his last job before retirement with a compensating promotion. Melissa Carron was another SIA survivor,
formerly a career MI5 officer and now director of security. He had known her slightly in her MI5 days as pedantic and particular, not overly imaginative or clever, but particularity was a virtue in
security. Stephen Avery, director of cyber and technical support and also on his last posting, had been brought in from GCHQ. Michelle Blakeney, director of human resources, was the only one to
have contacted Charles before the meeting, emailing him her CV and explaining that she had been brought in from industry in order to professionalise what she called ‘the antique and amateur
human resources structures and practices that had previously characterised the agency’.