A Damned Serious Business Read online

  The eldest of them, on the third floor of the ‘safe house’ in Pimlico, and an easy walk across the bridge from the south side of the Thames and the VBX building, was Harry. His long hair nestled on his shoulders and layered over his collar; he wore a sweater that had been knitted by his mother. Late twenties, regarded as an authority in matters of cyber intelligence, chosen by Boot, given a cryptic brief, then sent to work. He had the floor, did not expect to tell any of them what they did not know already, but still felt the need for repetition of the obvious and heavily travelled routes.

  He said, ‘There is here, all around us, critical infrastructure. Start with utilities. Go to any of the major providers of electricity, gas, water. Are they being probed, phished? Yes. Can the power grid be shut down? Yes. Can airliners be disabled so they are unable to fly above communities that can’t light their homes, heat them or cook in them, and can’t flush their toilets unless they happen to have a rain-water butt? Yes. Does this happen? Yes, every day. An American city loses power and blacks out tens of thousands of households and storms are blamed or overloads or some hapless technician. They are never going to admit that a foreign government, unfriendly with its intentions, just wanted to test the skills and abilities of its foot soldiers, the script kiddies. A Scandinavian attack leaves thousands shivering in the dark and the authorities blame a gust of wind knocking over a tree that falls on a particular cable strung between pylons. Bullshit. They did it, and sent a message, loud and clear, despatched it First Class, Next Day Delivery. Why are they pushing against the inadequate counter-measures of our supermarket chains, infiltrating the machines that dictate what product goes where, and when? Why? They can screw the delivery systems, disable the software, and in three days our people go hungry. Food is as much a part of critical infrastructure as water, and the rest of what we take for granted. Most terrifying is that each year we put greater reliance on the web, hand over new functions to it. But we have not yet learned how to keep it safe from predators. They run us ragged, we are losing.’

  Working her encrypted phone, Daff prised out names. Russian language, of course. Knowledge of the terrain, a necessity. Familiarity with the requirements and culture of matters covert, essential. Deniability, taken for granted. On a separate sheet of paper in front of her, under a hovering pencil, were the initials G F H, but they were left to lie as she searched out the men who would be the foot soldiers. She could call in favours.

  She’d tried the Lithuanian agencies, and the Latvians, and the Ukrainians in Kursk, and Bulgarian intelligence. The favours might be granted because many of those countries’ officers had flirted with her over the years and might have assumed that with one more drink, one more confidence and indiscretion and joke and laughter, she would head for the elevator doors of her hotel and they might follow and be rewarded. She had admirers because she was a well-kept, curvaceous mid-thirties, had good bottle-blonde hair in a fly-whisk pony-tail, bronzed skin on her cheeks and neck, and stood straight. For the last seven years Daff – Daphne inside the building but not within the walls of Boot’s fiefdom – had been his fixer within matters of the ‘Field’. Office administration stayed, well guarded, in the Maid’s hands.

  The break for her was from the Poles, and an out-station in Gdansk which had responsibility for matters, the sensitive ones, originating inside the Russian-militarised enclave of Kaliningrad. She was given names, and contact points. Putting a cart before a horse might have been an accusation levelled at her that morning. She would have countered with a blunt negative if anyone had dared put that assumption, and with the added weight of an obscenity. Boot had his pecker up, and when it was there he could drain milk from the udders of a barren she-goat, certainly from the Big Boss three floors above. Running before she could walk? In no way. Underneath those initials, G F H, she wrote a name: Martin. The Poles were not fulsome in his praise. If he had been from the top drawer they would not have shared his identity; he was classified as ‘adequate’. They’d be shipping her, electronically, a redacted file on him and two others. The most she could hope for, but the major catch would be the man whose initials she had written down. It was good to feel the eddy and excitement of the chase in the cramped office space where Boot held court; and so rare to sense it.

  He loitered at her shoulder. Her question: ‘Getting there?’

  His answer: ‘I think so.’

  Leanne had chosen clothes that were drab, poorly fitting and black. No make-up, no jewellery, no polish on her fingernails. Her hair was cut short. She was employed in the private sector, headed the cyber-threat response unit of a heavily funded accountancy firm. She earned more per year, probably, than the combined salaries of the three men with her in the Pimlico room. Her voice was North Wales, her ability legendary in a small circuit of those who needed to know, and she was twenty-four.

  Leanne said, ‘Let’s stop fucking around the issue, give it straight to the customer. They are Black Hat. Maybe today it is organised crime Black Hat. Maybe tomorrow it is state-sponsored Black Hat. It is interchangeable. The same people in Russia – Moscow or St Petersburg, or any crap little city in the arse end of nowhere – do the business in both camps. Very expert, and often they know their way round our conduits better than we do. The criminal attacks are about loot, cash. They can strip out the assets from our bank accounts, from our credit cards. They have enormous resources. This is not like holding up a bank, having a couple of getaway drivers, and a tame banker for laundering. Planning, research, psychologists to help recruit the right material, are across international frontiers, are more careful and more covert than the blundering Chinese, and they pose a massive hazard. Imagine big housing estates in any northern city of the UK. Benefit day is coming up, except that the bank branches that supply the Social Security payments have crashed. The money is needed so the mob can get drunk, shoot up, feed themselves, but there is no money – it’s gone, anywhere between Vladivostock and Irkutsk. The result would be civil disobedience. Violence on the streets, a society there that has no financial reserves, inability to get credit, pockets empty. There’s no requirement for tanks and strike planes and nerve gas. Collapse is less than a week away. Russia, if the leadership gets angry enough, can close us down, make us go dark. What can we do about it? It is apocalypse time, and the threat is being yanked up. Organised crime in the Russian state is allowed because the intelligence agencies permit it – joined at the hip, a Siamese job. Sorry and all that, not a bag of laughs. We need to inflict some drama, instead we’re dull as ditches. Something has to change.’

  The phone rang. He was up a ladder, painting a ceiling. He came down the steps. They shook as his weight transferred and the tin swayed enough to spill paint on to his trainers He picked up the phone. A distant voice. A woman’s. Speaking Russian. Was he Martin? Who wanted to know? A friend: he had been recommended . . . a joke. He laughed. Was he recommended as a painter, a decorator, or for . . .? He was not required to go any further. His name had come, he was told, from Polish friends, in Gdansk. He shivered, and his hand shook, and more paint flicked from the bristles of the brush he was still holding. He said that he now lived in the Estonian coastal town of Haapsalu and that what he had done for the Poles was more than fifteen years ago, and he was a middle-aged man now. He realised quickly enough that the woman at the end of this international call was ignoring his rejection of a summons to go to work, took no notice of it – steamed ahead . . .

  For him, and for the other two, it had all begun in this town, Haapsalu, where there was a big railway station – no trains running to it now – and the Czars of Imperial Russia had come from their court in St Petersburg believing that the mud of the beaches and swamps would preserve their health. They had made Haapsalu fashionable. And many years later the same town, reached by an inlet sheltered by pine forests and heavily reeded banks had become fashionable again for a more clandestine trade. Fast boats came here in the dead of night, having supposedly evaded the radar of the occupying Soviet military, had lande
d spies, saboteurs, those who believed the shit given them by plausible ringmasters. The craft that carried them were from Germany’s wartime navy, but the British controlled the ferrying of these men – patriots or traitors? – and their mission was to fight a guerrilla war against the new communist régime, and carry out espionage in between sniping Red Army troops. The town, famous for the spa and for the fishermen’s brightly painted little wooden homes, and a collapsing mediaeval castle, had become a Cold War front line. It was where Martin’s grandfather had been reared, and where he had died, shot down in the reed beds within five minutes of wading ashore. And it was where his daughter had been born. Martin was now on the wrong side of Haapsalu, the part tourists did not care to visit. He asked his caller who she represented. She said her clients were a security firm based in the Brazilian city of São Paolo.

  What trust could he put in her? A clear, crisp answer – the daily rate, when it would start, what would be required of him, and the sum of 5000 euros, as an advance, would be sent within half an hour to any account he named. Life was not easy for him. The Polish money was long exhausted. He lived hand to mouth. He pulled his wallet out of his jacket. He gave his bank details, and was told he should check his account within three hours.

  Martin, an Estonian citizen and fluent in Russian, a former asset of occasional Polish-funded operations, was recruited.

  Fresh off the early train from the west country was Dunc. New at Cheltenham but well thought of in the doughnut building that housed the boffins, analysts, translators and interpreters – the cyber family of GCHQ – and part of a campaign to give youth its head. A week short of his twenty-third birthday and with a First Class degree from Cambridge. His first job and it was likely that the Government Communications Head Quarters would be his only employers. He took a deep breath and launched, had no particular idea what was wanted from him, so latched on to what he thought to be the central matter of Russia’s hack industry, and rolled his tongue on the word.

  ‘?“Attribution”. It’s what we talk about at our place. To whom do we attribute an attack? Endless, repetitive and almost boring, but the only subject in town. Where are they? Where to find them? We are attacked night and day – every night and every day – by Russia. Attacks for theft, for reconnaissance, for espionage, neverending. They are all over us, and we are running to stand still. To hit them you have to have a target. Can’t find it . . . Can have a district, a suburb, a neighbourhood. Cannot say it is this block of cheap housing, this floor, this room off the lift-shaft lobby on the right-hand side and between the bathroom and the kitchen, where the kid sits with his laptop. We don’t have that ability. Or maybe he is routed through his mother’s desk top. He is costing us billions of sterling equivalent each year, but we don’t have a face on him. Whether it is state-sponsored or Organised Crime, it is criminality. Can we go to Moscow and the Ministry of Justice and demand action? Can, but we won’t get it. You know all this. And the word krysha, which I translate as the “roof”. The “roof” is protection. The criminal is sheltered by the intelligence agency, and the agency kingpins take a cut, a generous one. They are in bed together. Assume we identify an individual hacktivist, trace a line to his computer, make a target of it. We fry it, burn it, we wipe it, maybe we even get inside and sit and watch. He can get a new one. He can go down to the shopping mall and buy one for four hundred American dollars. Cheap stuff is good enough. We have no possibility of retribution, creating a viable threat of retaliation. They are immune to punishment. They must wake up each day and laugh themselves stupid at us. You can’t strike back if you don’t know who to hit. But you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘We do,’ Bob said.

  ‘A good summary,’ Harry chimed.

  ‘This man, this Boot, who tasked us originally – my impression – has no idea of the science of computers, probably challenged changing a light bulb.’ Leanne’s voice had the melody of a chapel choir, might have been chanting psalms. ‘I said he was to imagine worms going up pipes for the spread of malware, but worms with sharp teeth for destruction, and with shopping bags for taking away goodies. That seemed to strike a chord with Boot. We’ve talked in generalities, the language of a kindergarten, and that’s probably right for him, and for where he’ll pass our paper. God alone knows the relevance of this confessional – we’re neither winning nor punishing. Why would he need to know that? Or the Directors? I reckon we fulfil no useful purpose, not unless something radical is on the table, which it isn’t. Something has to change.’

  Nikki was the passenger, front seat, and they crawled in early morning traffic.

  His sister drove. They owned, between them, a VW Polo, Thirteen years old and 150,000 on the clock. It rattled crazily and the steering was poor, and when the snow came next month the tyre traction would be rubbish. Nikki could have bought Kat a Maserati or a Ferrari or a high-performance Porsche, but that would have drawn attention to himself, and attention carried the smell of danger. Ridiculous to think, driving from the airport where the delayed flight out of Stockholm had finally landed, heading for the factory estate in the Kupchino district, because he sat in a seat covered by a dirty towel, his feet on a crushed carpet of pizza boxes, that he avoided danger.

  She knew nothing. She was Yekaterina, and in the music school where she had studied before dismissal she had been Katcha. Now the name she answered to was Kat. They had passed the Park of the Internationalists. Tower blocks were shrouded in mist to their left, fumes spewed from the traffic, and she edged towards the building where he worked. She did not know about the money he had taken from the bank accounts in the city of Krasnodar. Did not know that the story of a friend in Stockholm was a tale of convenience. Certainly did not know that the last three times he had been to the Swedish capital he had met with an officer of a foreign intelligence agency. She would have noted his restlessness, his impatience with the traffic, and that he hissed through his teeth and spittle was on his lips, but did not imagine that his freedom of action and thought was now controlled by a distant and threatening force.

  He loved his sister. The only girl he loved was the sister who was a year and a half older than himself. She would drop him off and then double back to get to the block where her piano teacher lived. His work was a priority for him and for her. She would starve without the money he was paid by the GangMaster, and the piano lessons would have been a distant dream. He loved her and she was the only family he acknowledged. He sat tensed in the seat, smoked hard and flicked ash from the window, letting in the chill air. Their father was dead, poisoned by vodka, and their mother loathed him and it was mutual. His sister, alone, mattered to him. But he had told her nothing. She would go to the woman, a greedy bitch and without sufficient talent to be a teacher, and try to enrich her talent with the piano, because she had been dismissed twenty-one months before from the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory. Denied the reputation of the Conservatory she would never receive the recognition required to play in public. Perhaps that evening he would tell her, or perhaps the next day. Tell her he had sold himself, that he was in danger.

  She took the car into the warren of small factories, warehouses and vehicle repair yards. At the end of an unmade road was the two-storey complex where the GangMaster did business. If they knew where he had been, whom he had met, what he had said, he would have been beaten and kicked until he was near death and then they might have chopped off limbs with a chain saw, or might have used electrodes on him, or might have fed him to a chipper, or thrown him, alive, into a furnace that supplied central heating to a public office complex. They lurched forward. She was hunched over the wheel, weaving between the potholes, flush with rain-water.

  He hated them. Hated most things and most people. Hated the man he worked for, and his supposed colleagues – the other Black Hats – and hated the political police who had closed the Conservatory doors behind his sister, and hated the man who had come three times to Stockholm and who had fed him with candy and threatened him with a club. Loved
only his sister. Might tell her that night, or might put it off until the morning. Might tell her about the assignation in the supermarket car–park . . . not knowing who he would meet, nor what would be asked of him, nor the consequences – knew that he had told them of a meeting of importance in the building where he worked and it was due to start within a few hours of the rendezvous.

  She stopped the car. They were far from the sight of any main artery. Lanes ran inside an outer wall of apartment blocks, eight floors high, and one led them towards a cluster of two-storey buildings, some with their own perimeter fences and guarded gates, and some open. They were sandwiched between Plovdivskaya ul, and Dunayskiy pr, and it was a backwater to which nobody would have come without purpose. This building was surrounded by a chain-link fence that was topped with coiled barbed wire. A dog – might have been a mix of mastiff breeding – was on a running wire and had worn a muddied trail short of the main fence. He sometimes threw it the remnant of a sandwich but had a good enough aim to ensure that the bait fell short and the dog could not reach the food, only slaver for it. There were delivery trucks beyond the gate, and parked up on a rutted waste area were half a dozen cars but there was no sign to tell a stranger why this complex warranted the protection of the wire, the high gates, and the two men who shared a booth that sheltered them from the weather. Nikki reached across, kissed his sister’s cheek, but his lips were dry and chapped. He smeared his tongue across them, then tried to kiss her again, but she turned her head away. He thought she probably despised him. She might have regarded him as a parasite; he did not have the talent to play the piano, nor the fervour she brought to her protest work and which had cost her the place in a praised music school. He believed in little, and the keys that brought light to his eyes, calm to his mind, were those on his laptop.