Red Station

FORTY-FIVE

Harry left the guns where they were and went back upstairs to tell the others.

Mace looked stunned and reached for a phone. ‘He’s probably gone straight home,’ he said. ‘He was worried about his girlfriend and kid.’

‘He lives with a local girl,’ Rik explained to Harry. ‘She’s got a daughter and Fitz is nuts about them. The mother’s been putting him under pressure to take her out of here. Can’t say I blame her, with everything that’s going on. I think he’s scared she might dump him if he doesn’t do something soon.’

‘Why would that be bad?’ said Harry.

Rik shrugged, his expression sombre. ‘He’s got nobody else. His wife and kids in the UK never speak to him, so this is a final posting for him.’

Harry understood. Fitzgerald wouldn’t be the first security services employee to want to retire somewhere out of the way, where his old trade wouldn’t keep coming back to haunt him. With nothing back home, it could be the only sense of belonging that he had left.

‘No answer,’ Mace announced. ‘I’ll try later.’

Harry left them to it and went back downstairs. He needed some fresh air. Being cooped up when danger threatened only increased a sense of paranoia. What he could see, he could deal with.

The streets were quiet. A few vehicles lumbered back and forth, mostly military, with smaller trucks and jeeps dotted at junctions and men in uniform standing in small groups. What civilians there were hurried along and avoided eye contact, apart from huddles of older men outside the basement shops where chacha was available.

The fabric of the town appeared to have suffered a change already. A truck had run off the road at one corner and ploughed into a grocery store, scattering a layer of broken glass, splintered wood, fruit and vegetables across the street. The shopkeeper was arguing heatedly with the driver, while an officer stood nearby, calmly ignoring them. Further on were signs of cracked paving stones where heavy trucks or APCs had parked, and other indicators of where the military presence was showing its impact on the civilian infrastructure in damaged street lamps and bent road signs. It all heightened the tension and gloom in the atmosphere, and Harry wondered how long this could continue before something broke.

He found a coffee shop and went inside. He ordered their version of liquefied mud and watched the world go by. Nobody paid him any attention. After thirty minutes, he got up and left. It was only as he stepped outside and felt the weight on his hip that he realized he was still carrying his gun. He cursed himself for being careless; he had to get off the street. If he ran into a patrol and they searched him, it would be the end of his freedom — or worse.

As he rounded the corner, he saw two men entering a basement bar across the street. They were deep in conversation and one of the men was in officer’s uniform.

The other was Carl Higgins.

Harry checked the street both ways. If Higgins really was CIA, he might have outriders in place, watching his back — such as the three men he’d seen with him in the Palace Hotel bar. He couldn’t see anyone matching their description, so he crossed the street and slowed to a dawdle as he passed the entrance to the basement.

The door was closed, but there was a gap between the numerous advertising stickers on the glass panel. He ducked his head to see inside, and saw Higgins and his companion sitting at a table. They were smiling like old friends.

The door opened and the sound of talking and laughter spilled out into the street. Harry kept walking, wondering what the CIA man was up to. Was he bolstering his cover as a journalist or working on something deeper?

He was so focussed on Higgins, he almost collided with the rear corner of a military jeep parked on the kerb. It had its bonnet raised and was covered in dust, testifying to a long journey between washes. Four men wearing local militia flashes were sitting in the back, facing each other in pairs. They were silent and watchful, and turned to eye Harry with open curiosity. One of them had his camouflage jacket opened, revealing a dark blue T-shirt stretched across a muscular chest. The garment bore the insignia of a black bat on a blue background.

Something about the men made him uneasy. They seemed different, less casual than the other soldiers he’d seen around town. More controlled. Professional.

And that insignia on the man’s T-shirt.

As he drew level with the front of the vehicle, a soldier wearing the same flashes stepped on to the kerb. He was looking at a growing pool of oil on the ground beneath the jeep. When he saw Harry, he reached up and slammed the bonnet.

Harry felt the soldier’s eyes on him all the way down the street.

Rik was alone in the office, standing by one of his monitors. Harry grabbed his arm.

‘I need you to send a message to London, high priority,’ he told him. ‘Ask them if there are any Russians serving with the local militias.’

‘What?’ Rik looked sceptical. ‘You kidding? We’d have heard, surely.’

‘Ask them anyway. It’s urgent.’ He recalled what Mace had said about the Russians, and latterly the message from Rik’s friend, Isabelle. It was possible that the soldier inside the jeep had been buying his underwear on the black market, but he doubted it. Trawling through his memory of lectures on foreign Military Intelligence unit insignia, he had recognized the black bat motif on the man’s T-shirt. It was usually worn by Glavnoye Razvedovatel’noye Upravlenie (GRU) — Central Intelligence operatives. If he was right, then everyone’s information was already out of date.

The Russians were already here.

‘Harry,’ Rik murmured to him ten minutes later. Harry was sitting at one of the monitors, checking out news channels on the internet. The situation had not changed much, but they were mostly reporting from the safety of news studios. ‘Harry, you need to see this.’ Rik was frowning at his screen and scrubbing at his hair.

Harry looked at Rik’s monitor. A long table of alphanumeric codes was scrolling down the screen. It meant nothing to him but was clearly worrying Rik.

‘What is it?’

‘I sent the message you asked me to,’ Rik replied and nodded at the screen. ‘This is a log of outgoing message tags over the past three days, all of them to Clarion in London.’

‘Clarion?’

‘Our contact server at Thames House. At least, I thought it was at Thames House. It could be anywhere. Point is, it’s an individual server set up to service this place.’ He teased at a fingernail with his teeth. ‘They probably didn’t want to sully the other stations or networks with us bad boys, so they gave us our own robot. Anyway, it’s where all our messages get processed and passed on. Housekeeping stuff, weekly data, intelligence reports, special requests like your message just now — Mace’s report about Stanbridge — everything.’

‘So?’

‘I’ve had no reason to check before. I mean, what the hell happens here normally? And I wasn’t sent here to do this kind of stuff, anyway. The opposite, in fact.’

‘If you don’t get to the point,’ Harry told him, ‘and in English, I’m going to shoot you in the leg.’

‘Sorry. Just thinking it through. Thing is, it’s usually Mace who deals with them through the secure terminal in his office, so I’ve never bothered querying it before.’ He hit a key to scroll down the screen. The list showed a consistent number of characters without change. ‘I just checked the log at our end, and there’s a list of all outgoing messages, with the acknowledgement codes coming back.’

‘Right. You send a message, you get an acknowledgement. So what?’

‘That’s the problem. I send messages, but I never see an open reply. Ever. The acknowledgement code is there, but that’s the machine talking, not an operator. It’s bugging the hell out of me. Surely at least one of the messages would initiate a human response?’

‘Like you said, Mace deals with them.’ Harry shrugged. ‘He’s the head of station; it’s the way he’s got it set up. With your record, are you surprised? They’re hardly likely to want you anywhere in the system, are they?’

‘Yeah. Fair enough.’ Rik took a deep breath, as if about to confess to something awful. ‘Only, yesterday I deliberately sent a rubbish message.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘To see what would happen. It was crap… gobbledygook. I wanted to see if anyone would ask for a re-send. That’s what you’d expect, right? Some transmissions get screwed up, the line goes down, and if the guy on the other end is awake, he’ll ask for a repeat. I mean, I would if I was on the end. It’s really annoying me.’

‘I can see that.’ Harry wondered if paranoia was getting to Rik. He’d been out here too long.

‘You don’t get it. I could have sent a copy of Das Kapital in Hindustani and they wouldn’t have noticed. Yet this morning, Mace comes in with a reply to a message he sent yesterday.’

‘So his messages are rated a higher priority.’ Harry began to move away before he also got infected by shadows and suspicions. He didn’t need it, not on top of everything else.

Rik said, ‘I think it’s a blind drop.’

Harry stopped. ‘Say again?’

‘A blind drop. It’s a server which allows files or messages to be dropped in and picked up remotely. It’s dead simple. It’s called a host, and gives out whatever automatic response they want it to — like these acknowledgement codes — and either sends on the messages automatically or holds them until the administrator or whoever wants to pick them up.’

‘Where would this administrator be sitting?’ Harry had no idea what Rik was saying but he guessed someone — a human body, at least — had to be located in an office with access to the server and incoming messages.

‘They could be anywhere in the world. All they need to do is call up the host server, input the security code and retrieve the files.’

‘And the host server isn’t in Thames House?’

‘That’s the beauty of it — it doesn’t have to be. It could be in an office in Mumbai or West Bromwich, just as long as it’s got a web connection.’

‘But someone must be reading the messages,’ insisted Harry. He was getting a headache, of the kind brought on by too much techno-speak. ‘You said yourself, Mace gets replies.’

‘That’s right. But nobody else does. I’ve never had one direct; I know Clare hasn’t — she’s bitched about it often enough. But I thought she was just being snooty about losing her place in the pecking order. All replies come through Mace. That means that whoever is monitoring our messages only responds to specifics. My rubbish message would have been dumped and wiped.’

‘So anything we send, any data, any intelligence, any files — is seen only by one person?’ Harry felt a shiver of unease. There could be only one reason for such a set up, and that was to avoid any odd-job administrative worker seeing the messages and forwarding them to the wrong person.

‘Most likely. My bet is, he calls up from a remote terminal outside the network once a day, maybe less, and responds when he feels like it.’

‘Which means?’

Rik shrugged. ‘To anyone else outside Clarion and this office, we don’t even exist.’