The Geneva Trap

Chapter 29

The waves of irritation emanating from Liz were washing over Peggy, who was sitting next to her in the MOD entrance hall, as they waited to be escorted up to Sy3A. Liz had hoped to see Charlie Fielding alone, without involving Henry Pennington any further, but she’d been told firmly that protocol required that he be kept in the loop. So here she was, about to subject herself to another hour of Pennington patronising her and flapping.

Up in the Clarity suite, true to form, he was sitting behind his desk, busying himself with some important-looking papers, while Charlie Fielding sat at the conference table with a laptop open in front of him. Liz had expected a geeky-looking boffin, but this was a rather attractive man, bespectacled and thoughtful-looking, with curly brown hair and a broad smile. Peggy introduced Charlie to Liz and they all sat down while Pennington continued his reading.

Finally, he got up from the desk and joined them, taking his place at the head of the table.

Pennington looked accusingly at Liz. ‘I gather this is all going from bad to worse.’

She replied as calmly as she could, ‘I believe we are making progress. I wanted to see Dr Fielding because I need to understand more about the project he and his colleagues are working on.’

Henry Pennington started to rub his hands together – the inevitable sign of agitation. Liz went on hastily: ‘As you know, Peggy and I are now cleared to Clarity Purple, so you don’t need to worry about security for this conversation.’

The hand-washing speeded up and Pennington said, ‘I made it clear that I didn’t approve of Miss Kinsolving being cleared to Purple. It seemed to me to be broadening the knowledge unnecessarily.’

Peggy flushed and Liz said determinedly, ‘Take my word for it, Henry, it was necessary or we wouldn’t have asked.’

She turned to Charlie Fielding. ‘We’ve had the Clarity briefing, but it would be helpful if you would describe what you’re actually doing at Brigham Hall.’

Fielding put his hands on the table as he gathered his thoughts. ‘How much do you know about drones?’

Peggy said, ‘Invisible planes in the sky?’

Fielding laughed. ‘That’s a start anyway, though they’re perfectly visible. I’m sure you’ve at least heard about the remotely piloted drones – the ones flown by an airman sitting in an air force base in Nevada, chewing on a Hershey bar and looking at a picture of a scene 7,000 miles away; he presses a button and thirty people are blown up outside a Pakistani village. Some of them may even have been terrorists,’ he added, raising an eyebrow. Henry Pennington tutted.

‘Then there are simpler kinds of drone, unarmed ones that fly very high and take pictures and send them back, or at the most basic level actually bring the pictures back. Practically all these drones – except the very simplest, which can be pre-programmed – depend on continuous communication, either from the ground nearby or from a huge distance away via satellite.

‘Cyber-espionage can be very sophisticated: it’s not just hacking into someone else’s computer and stealing the contents, it can also involve the continuous feeding of data to the attacker, or even the attacker controlling the computer and making it obey external commands.

‘The media assume any attack that’s detected these days is coming from China, but everyone is developing the capability – and trying to defend themselves against it. The French, the Americans, the Russians and us of course. Cyber-espionage – both conducting it and defending against it – is GCHQ’s top priority nowadays.

‘Back to drones. The cleverer the drone, the more sophisticated the communication system it needs to have. And the next generation is going to be very clever. They’ll be able to control their own family of mini-drones, making decisions for themselves according to what they find on the ground.’

‘They sound terrifying,’ said Peggy.

‘Well, yes, but it’s still a very new science,’ Fielding went on. ‘As you know, Clarity is a joint programme with the Americans. The idea is that in a limited way the drone should be able to think for itself. For example, the controller could say something like, “Go down three hundred feet, but go up again if you see a gun emplacement on the ground.” Or, “Fire your missile when the car looks as if it’s stopping, but if it speeds up hold fire.” Imagine how much more effective that would be than just being able to make it go left or go right.

‘If the programme is successful, and it’s early days yet, we’ll have an expert system on board the drone that will let it make decisions as subtle as that for itself. But for now, it has to let someone else tell it exactly what to do and when.

‘So Clarity is concerned with the communication systems and commands sent to drones. We’ve developed protocols that let us send instruction to these new drones in natural language.’

‘Natural?’ asked Liz.

‘As opposed to artificial – which is what computer languages are. Look.’ And he flipped open the top of his laptop and tapped a key. The screen was filled with row after row of numbers and symbols. ‘That’s raw ASCII, the bits and bytes that tell this machine what to do.’

‘Looks like Chinese to me,’ said Peggy. Then realising what she’d said, blushed and added, ‘Oh, sorry. Let’s hope it’s not.’

‘So where does Operation Clarity fit into all this?’ Liz was anxious to move things on now. She could see Henry Pennington shuffling in his chair, ready to make an unhelpful remark.

‘It encrypts the natural language commands in real time – which means they are protected by codes as soon as they’re spoken. If any of the communications were intercepted, the interceptor wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of them – so they’re hidden, if you like.’

Liz sat back, trying to take in his mini-lecture. ‘Then if we look at Bravado’s information, why would anyone want to infiltrate the programme?’

‘To encrypt their own counter-commands, which would be accepted because they’d be similarly encoded.’

‘How would you go about stealing the encryption code?’

‘Well, first you’d need to get into our working system at Brigham Hall.’

‘So this is where Bravado’s mole in MOD comes in? If he exists.’

‘There is no mole in the Clarity project,’ said Henry Pennington, suddenly coming to life at the end of the table. ‘I’ve told you that our vetting system in Clarity is totally reliable.’

Ignoring him, Liz went on addressing Fielding. ‘I know Peggy’s briefed you about her interviews with Cowdray and Duggan, and that you’ve agreed to keep them in play.’

‘That’s right. We’ve kept Hugo Cowdray’s machine operating as normal. I have it on my desk at Brigham Hall and I take it back to my digs at night. It’s set up as a dummy machine, so that anyone trying to get into the Brigham Hall system via the email footprint which Duggan and Hugo left, would find Hugo’s PC alive and well. But if they tried to look further at the network – and to get into the encryption work – they’d hit a dead end. I’ve put an alert on the machine, so I’ll know the minute anyone tries.’

Liz said, ‘But wouldn’t they know that, and realise they’d been sussed?’

‘Not necessarily. Hopefully, they’ll just think they’ve hit a brick wall. Even the most segregated systems have internal checks, so in theory at least, anyone coming in will feel they just haven’t cracked the internal codes.’

‘By which time,’ said Peggy cheerfully, ‘we should have nabbed the culprit.’

Fielding gave a fleeting smile. ‘Only if we’re quick enough. Or they’re not quick enough to get out before we identify them.’

‘Is there any evidence that anyone has used the Duggan footprint to try to get in?’

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. As I said, we’ve set a trap for them, but it’s a question of whether we closed the stable door in time.’

‘I was talking to my colleague in the US Embassy the other day and he said there had been some technical hitches in the trials. Do you know what they were?’

‘Yes, I do. The most interesting was when the drone seemed to ignore the ground controller’s natural language command and do something different. Fortunately, it got back on course in the end.’

‘Could that mean external interference?’

‘Too early to say. The assumption at the moment is that it was some sort of technical failure. It’s not impossible it was something external, but if it was interference it would indicate a very advanced infiltration of the system.’

Henry Pennington looked as if he were about to faint. ‘Why don’t I know about this?’ he asked. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

‘Oh, you will be, Henry,’ said Liz. ‘If it turns out to be anything serious.’