The Geneva Trap

Chapter 18

As Peggy stood at the bar of the Angler’s Arms, for the very first time in her young life she felt old. The pub was a stone’s throw from Hoxton Square and most of its clientele looked as though they’d come straight from the galleries and studios that were sprouting up in the area like well-watered seeds. Among the jeans and designer T-shirts, her office skirt and jacket felt drab, and she envied the loudly cheerful mood of the Friday evening crowd which contrasted with her own feeling of anxiety. Charlie Fielding had asked to see her urgently and had chosen this pub because it was nowhere near the MOD. It was only two days since Peggy had seen him at Brigham Hall and, whatever he had to say now, she couldn’t imagine that it was good news.

She took her glass of Diet Coke over to a small alcove at the back of the pub where there were two free stools. Plonking the glass down on the little round table and her Evening Standard on the other stool, she sat down to wait for Fielding.

Peggy had been busy since her trip to Norfolk. She’d spoken to a contact in the HR department at the Ministry of Defence, who was clearly under orders to help her with any request. On the vague information that Liz had got out of Sorsky, she hadn’t really known what she was looking for or where to start. So, making a stab at it, she’d asked for a list of all the foreign nationals seconded to the Ministry of Defence whose work was in software or hardware development, since it seemed obvious to her that anyone trying to infiltrate Clarity would need considerable technical expertise.

Her contact had come up with a list of six people. There were five men and a woman: four including the female were from three NATO countries – Belgium, Germany and Canada – one was from Taiwan, and one was a South Korean. All of them had spent time in the United States, either at the Pentagon or at a military installation – two had been at the Air Force command centre in Colorado Springs.

So they must all have been thoroughly vetted already, and though Peggy was trying to double-check their credentials as best she could, it was a thankless task and she knew she was unlikely to find any discrepancy that countless pairs of FBI and US Defense Department eyes hadn’t spotted.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Fielding, putting a pint glass down on the table. He was wearing a raincoat, though the evening was mild and dry, and he took it off, folding it carefully and tucking it under the table as he sat down. He looked around the pub. ‘What a jolly bunch,’ he said, but there was little joy in his voice.

‘I was surprised to hear from you so soon,’ said Peggy.

‘I know. I expected it to take a lot longer. More fool me.’

Peggy raised her eyebrows. ‘You mean you’ve found something?’

‘I started by surveying the email traffic out of Brigham Hall. I never expected to find anything out of the ordinary, but I found a breach almost right away. An unauthorised email.’

‘Where was it going? What did it say?’

Fielding shook his head regretfully. ‘I can’t tell you what it said – not because I don’t want to, but because it was wiped from the Brigham server. I know it went to an intranet at the MOD, which it should never have done, though it was wiped there as well – double-wiped in fact, both from the server and from the laptop where it would have been read.’

He saw Peggy’s disappointment and said, ‘There’s a chance we can reconstruct it. But that will take some time.’

‘Do you know who sent it?’ Peggy tried to keep her voice down, though there was enough noise around to be confident no one could overhear her.

‘I do. And it’s almost unbelievable – to me at least.’ Fielding picked up his glass of beer, and held it for a moment, then put it down again. It was obvious to Peggy he was very upset. ‘The email was sent by Hugo Cowdray.’

She remembered the good-looking blond man she’d seen at Brigham Hall. ‘I thought he was your deputy.’

Fielding nodded. ‘He is. And my colleague and friend for the last twelve years. I would never have dreamed it…’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Peggy said gently. ‘It may not be too bad – we haven’t seen the email after all.’

‘I know. But it’s not necessarily what was in the email. It’s the fact that it was sent at all. In the security protocol we wrote, what we stressed most was that there should be no direct contact with the MOD servers from the Brigham Hall system. It’s not as if Hugo could have forgotten that – he wrote the bloody thing with me.’

‘Who did he email?’ asked Peggy.

‘That’s even odder still. A woman called Belinda Duggan – she works at the London end of our project. ‘

‘Are they friends?’

‘Not as far as I know. They know each other, of course, because we’re a fairly tightly knit outfit, but there are one hundred and seventy-five of us and they’ve never worked together before – I checked that right away. I’m sure they’d recognise each other, and know each other’s names. But that’s it.’

He picked up his beer again, and this time he took a long swig. Then he said morosely, ‘I just don’t understand it.’

‘It does seem very strange. And very stupid of him.’

‘Yes, but he must have been confident he wouldn’t get caught. What he didn’t know is that we put a secret eye on all the machines at Brigham.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a tiny application we attached to every computer – it keeps track of keyboard strokes.’

‘And Cowdray didn’t know it was there?’

‘No.’

‘But hang on, if it records keyboard strokes, then can’t you see the contents of the message?’

‘Not easily. We were worried about unauthorised traffic and therefore simply wanted to keep track of who was being emailed, not what the emails said. The application puts the addresses into a file for easy retrieval – that’s how I found Cowdray. The messages themselves just get dumped, along with all the headers and HTML coding, into a big pot – something like an average user’s Recycling Bin. To reconstruct that may be possible, but it won’t be easy.’

Peggy was thinking. This was clearly serious but did she need to act on it urgently? Her forte was assembling and analysing information, not taking direct action. That was Liz’s business, but she was in Switzerland and the last thing Peggy wanted to do was go running to her. So she told herself to think how Liz would have proceeded – calmly, without fuss, but decisively. Obviously the first thing to do was to ensure that this discovery stayed secret. She said to Fielding, trying to sound friendly but firm, ‘Does anybody else know about what you’ve found out?’

He shook his head.

‘Wasn’t Hugo curious about why you’d come down to London so suddenly?’

Again a shake of the head. ‘It happens all the time. I get called to meetings at very short notice, especially budget meetings. Hugo would have assumed I was going to one of those.’

‘Didn’t he ask what I was doing at Brigham Hall the other day?’ This was important; if Fielding had never had any reason to distrust his deputy, he might well have mentioned that someone was coming to see him about security.

‘He did, but I just said you were from the Foreign Office.’

‘What about afterwards – when I’d left?’

‘I said nothing to Hugo.’ Fielding managed a thin smile. ‘If you remember, though I pooh-poohed your concern at first, our conversation opened my eyes to the possibility of a leak.’ He added bleakly, ‘I never thought I’d find it on Hugo’s PC.’

‘Well, please keep it to yourself. I expect we’ll need to speak to him next week.’ She saw how worried Fielding looked. ‘Don’t worry – he won’t know it has anything to do with you. We’ll want to talk to this Duggan woman too. What can you tell me about her?’

‘Very able, very sharp. There aren’t many women in the field, and the ones there are have to be extra-clever – for all its pride in being cutting-edge, the computer industry’s rife with sexism. But don’t get the wrong idea – Belinda’s not your stereotypical computer nerd.’

‘What is she like then?’

‘Well, for one thing, she’s quite stunning – I don’t think anyone in the department would contest that. Not the male members of staff anyway.’

‘Hugo’s good-looking himself,’ Peggy mused.

‘Yes, and he’s got a wife and even more children than me.’

‘How many’s that?’

‘Four for me; five for Hugo.’

Hmm, thought Peggy. Maybe he is a great husband and father, but she wasn’t going to leave it at that. She said firmly, ‘Tell me a bit more about Belinda. I’ll ask HR for her file, but can you give me a quick rundown?’

Fielding thought for a moment. ‘She’s a Senior Systems Analyst, quite high up in the department; she has several teams reporting to her, working mainly on logistics. Some analysts can be a bit bogus – all flannel and no real experience of programme development. They deal in generalities their own bosses can understand, but they don’t actually know the nuts and bolts. Not Belinda – she spent five years writing code.’

‘She was a programmer?’

‘Yes, but not on any factory line. She worked in Intelligent Search – real futuristic stuff. Like having Google search for something before you’ve even asked it to.’

‘Neither sounds related to what you’re doing at Brigham Hall.’

‘They’re not,’ Fielding said. But he was looking troubled again. ‘The problem is, Belinda’s background is rather different. She’s a Cambridge graduate, took a Starred First in Pure and Applied Maths, then stayed on to do post-graduate work.’

‘In computer science?’

‘Well, not a million miles away from that. She worked on cryptography.’

‘As in encryption techniques?’

‘De-encryption techniques. She specialised in breaking codes.’