The Moscow Sleepers

16

Autumn was coming to New England, and even on this sunny afternoon there was a slight edge to the air. It was still too early for the annual fireworks display of the region’s maple trees – with their palette of vivid scarlet and gold – that drew visitors from all over the world, but the advantage for Harry Fitzpatrick was that he didn’t have to wait in a queue at Burlington airport’s car-hire desk, and there was virtually no traffic as he drove to the university for a second time.

He was following up a request from the FBI office in the London Embassy that had originated from MI5. They’d learned that a young immigrant living in Germany, who had been on a school educational visit to an American university, had not returned to Germany with the other students. For some reason, they seemed to think there was something sinister in his disappearance. It seemed that some bright spark in MI5 had read Harry’s report of his enquiries at the university following the death of the man called Petersen, the man suspected of having been a Russian Illegal. They had noted what Harry had learned, that Petersen taught on a summer course for visiting foreign schoolchildren. Now they were wondering if the course the missing student had been on might possibly have been the course in Vermont. It all seemed a very long shot to Harry but he was secretly rather flattered that his initial report had aroused such interest and so he was happy to do as he was asked and try to find out more.

He had started by ringing the head of Petersen’s department from his office in FBI HQ in Washington, but had found him impossible to reach – thanks to a Cerberus-like secretary, a dry old stick from the sound of her voice, who on three separate occasions was adamant that the professor was too busy to speak to him. The fourth time he rang, Cerberus announced that the professor had left on a recruiting trip to the West Coast, and had asked Angie Emerson, the woman Harry had met previously, to deal with him. Emerson was also away, at a conference in Cleveland, but due back on Tuesday. Taking no chances on further delays, Fitzpatrick had made an appointment to see Emerson on Tuesday and booked a flight to Burlington.

This time, Angie Emerson was more smartly dressed than on their previous encounter – in neat black trousers and shiny black loafers, though her hair was still precariously secured in a fragile bun with wisps poking out. She got up from her desk to shake Harry’s hand, then motioned him to sit down. She said, ‘I’m sorry the boss isn’t here.’

‘Well, I have to say he didn’t seem very eager to see me.’ He explained about the rebuffed phone calls.

Angie Emerson looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Miss Thurston – that’s his secretary – can be a bit off-putting. And I’m not surprised the prof didn’t want to see you. He’s strongly socialist. I think he was a communist in his younger days. He’s probably allergic to the FBI; he may have thought you wanted to see him about that.’

‘Well, he’d have been wrong. Hoover’s been dead a long time. This is a follow-up to what we were talking about when we met last time. So I’m glad to be talking to you again rather than having to explain it all to him. If you remember, when I called on you, you told me that sometimes high-school students came here to take IT courses during the summer vacation.’

‘That’s right. It’s a good use of the facilities, since otherwise they’d just sit unused for three months of the year. And, frankly, for some of us it’s a much-needed supplement to our salaries. You don’t become an academic to get rich,’ she said with a grin.

‘And some of these students come from abroad?’

‘Absolutely. They’re not the majority, but there’s always a group from overseas. This year they were from a high school in Germany – I’m pretty sure it was Hamburg. Though they weren’t German-born – refugees from the Middle East. Syrian mainly.’

‘So they all went back to Hamburg?’

‘That’s right. They flew from JFK so they could have a couple of days to see the sights in New York.’

‘Did any of them stay on?’

Angie looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You know, stay on for further studies, enrol as students in the university.’

‘No, they’re too young – only sixteen, maybe seventeen. They’d have had to apply for next year, not this one. Presumably they would have to get visas, leave to remain, something.’

‘So no one connected with the summer course stayed on?’

Angie shook her head. ‘No one stayed as a student here.’

He hadn’t flown up here to leave stones unturned, so he persisted. ‘Or stayed to do anything else?’

She began to shake her head again, then stopped. ‘Well, no one,’ she conceded, ‘unless you mean Aziz. But he’s not a student: he works in IT. He’s the assistant to the division’s tech head. He was a bit older than the others. He’s probably twenty now.’

‘Where can I find him?

It proved easier to learn about Aziz than to locate him. His office was on the top floor of an adjacent building and easy to miss. By the time Harry Fitzpatrick found it and knocked on the door he was almost breathless, having gone up and down the stairs several times in his search.

To his relief, a voice called out from inside, ‘Enter please,’ in accented English. He pushed open the door, which just missed colliding with the chair on which a youth was sitting, his back to the door, in front of an oversized Apple monitor. The room was tiny.

The young man turned to face Harry and smiled shyly. Even sitting, he looked small, quite frail, with short black hair and thick glasses. He wore a sweater over a white shirt with a frayed and crumpled collar. ‘Professor Galloway? I’m sorry you’ve been having problems with your machine. Did you bring it with you?’

Harry shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But that’s because I’m not Professor Galloway.’

Aziz looked surprised. Harry said, ‘I’m from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the FBI.’ He took his badge from the side pocket of his suit jacket and flipped it open. ‘My name’s Fitzpatrick and you, I take it, are Aziz.’

‘That’s right,’ the youth said, attempting a smile.

‘OK, Aziz. I’d like to ask you some questions. That all right with you?’

For a moment, Fitzpatrick thought Aziz might actually say no. So obvious was his agitation that if the path to the door hadn’t been blocked, Harry thought he might have made a run for it. Aziz put both hands on the desk and clasped them tensely. ‘OK,’ he said, as if sentence had already been passed.

Over the next twenty minutes the story that emerged was harrowing, though it grew vaguer and less dramatic the closer it came to Vermont. Aziz had been among the first refugees from the civil war in Syria; he fled with his parents and siblings after their village had been among the recipients of an Assad-ordered air strike. On the coast, Aziz’s father paid with the last of their savings for the family to join a fishing boat that would take them across the Mediterranean. When the time came, there was only room for one of them in the packed craft; as the eldest boy, Aziz was delegated by his father to take the sole place – the family would follow in another small boat due to arrive the following day.

The journey took two fraught days. It rained throughout and the boat leaked; the soaked passengers were forced continuously to bail the accumulating water. Then a squall blew up in the pitch black and the boat was thrown about like a toy on a spring. For the second time in his life, Aziz had been afraid he would die, and this seemed confirmed when the boat collided in the dark with something hard and immoveable. But it was the beach on Lesbos. Aziz had survived.

He waited the next day for the rest of his family to arrive in the second boat. Waited and waited and waited some more. It took three days for the news to arrive: the boat had set sail as planned, but sank in the tail-end of the squall that Aziz’s own transport had barely survived. There were no survivors.

For a month he had lived in a refugee camp on the island, then he’d been moved to another larger camp on the mainland. Aziz was consumed by grief and confusion over what now awaited him. No one suggested he or any of his fellow immigrants were welcome in Greece; instead, local members of Golden Dawn harassed the inmates of the camp continuously, and one afternoon Aziz saw a fellow Syrian beaten to death by the Greek fascists. It was then that he decided to escape from the camp and take his chances.

After that, his account grew hazy – Harry Fitzpatrick gathered that the boy had worked his way north, then crossed the German border illegally. He had been passed around various German agencies until he landed up at an orphanage on the edge of Hamburg, a world away from the small Syrian village where his life had begun.

Here Aziz had a stroke of luck. A staff member at the orphanage who spoke Arabic and English had befriended him and lent him a computer and they had talked about his interests and ambitions. This man had found him a place at a school that specialised in teaching refugee children who had a special talent for IT. In response to a question from Harry, Aziz said it was called the Freitang school.

Aziz told Fitzpatrick with obvious pride how he had come top of his year in coding HTML. He was hoping to go to university, and after graduating from the school had spent the previous year studying to get his German to a sufficient standard, while working as an assistant at the school.

By now Harry Fitzpatrick’s investigative antennae were alive and alert. ‘Why were you included in the group of students who came here last summer?’

Aziz replied, ‘I have always wanted to see America.’

‘Yes, but it couldn’t have been your decision. You weren’t paying, after all. So why send someone older, someone who’d already graduated?’

Aziz shrugged. ‘The headmistress asked me if I’d like to go. I said, “You bet.”’

Harry tried not to smile. It was hard not to like the boy, especially when you considered what he’d been through. ‘So did you enjoy the course here?’

‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, and Harry Fitzpatrick saw that his nervousness, which had subsided while he told the story of his flight from Syria, had now returned. ‘I already knew much of the curriculum.’

‘Really? So you came all this way only to find you knew what they were teaching already? Bit of a waste of time then, for you and the university.’

‘No,’ Aziz said sharply, stung by this. ‘I was given special tuition.’

‘I see. Who with?’

‘Professor Petersen.’

Bingo, thought Fitzpatrick, now persuaded he’d been right to come in person. He would not have found this out over the phone. ‘I’ve heard of him,’ he said neutrally.

‘He died last month,’ said Aziz.

‘Yes, I know that. But tell me what you expected when the headmistress at Freitang asked if you wanted to come here.’

‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ said Aziz, his eyes widening. There was a dark spot of sweat on his shirt collar now. ‘But when Mr Petersen saw that I already knew what the others were learning, he gave me a test for software developers to see if I had a special skill. He said it showed I had a natural gift for cyber surveillance – or counter-surveillance.’

He’s talking about hacking, thought Harry. That’s what this is about. Cyber attacks. Perhaps this young man really did have a special talent – he was obviously very clever – or perhaps Petersen just wanted to make him think he was special, so he could control him. That was half the battle in suborning someone like this innocent kid; if he was told he had a special gift for something, he would be much more inclined to go along with any instructions to use that talent…

Aziz explained, ‘You would know it as hacking.’

‘Is that what he was teaching you to do?’ Fitzpatrick asked with feigned surprise. ‘That’s illegal.’

‘No, no,’ the boy protested. ‘It was to detect hacking, and expose it.’ He continued anxiously, ‘It was anti-hacking work.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Harry, hiding his scepticism. There was no point in making the boy feel too nervous or he would clam up. ‘So tell me exactly what he taught you.’

Harry Fitzpatrick could not in a month of Sundays have begun to recount with any accuracy what followed as Aziz launched into what Harry thought of as techno-babble. He seemed entirely unable to explain to a layman what he was talking about. But Harry was pretty sure he was getting the gist and it was very worrying.

It appeared that under the guise of teaching Aziz to detect unauthorised computer intrusions, Petersen had actually been teaching him to penetrate networks without leaving any trace. They had even set up a dummy corporation, Aziz told him proudly, for Aziz to practise on. If indeed the dead Petersen was a Russian Illegal, as seemed to be the opinion of FBI HQ and the Brits, then something very sinister seemed to have been taking place, involving not only the university but also the school in Germany. What and why and whether it was still going on, given Petersen’s death, Harry wasn’t in a position to say. But as he listened to the young man in front of him it seemed to him improbable that he was a knowing accomplice.

Finally, Aziz finished his account. Fitzpatrick said, ‘Thank you. That’s all very clear. But let me ask you, who were you doing this for? I mean, was it just to give you some skills so you could get a job back in Germany?’

Aziz looked offended by the suggestion that his training was nothing but a certification process. ‘The professor said he was doing confidential work and wanted me to assist him. He was the one who first said it might be possible for me to stay on.’

‘What, here in Vermont?’

Aziz nodded. ‘Yes, he said I could become an American.’

‘He would get you a green card?’

‘In time,’ said Aziz. ‘If my work was satisfactory.’

Fitzpatrick could imagine the situation; how Petersen would have played the boy along, offering the carrot of a green card with the stick of deportation should he fail to comply with his instructions. Fitzpatrick sensed that any mention of his employment status now would be unnerving. Aziz would probably be here on a one-year student permit, and Petersen’s death made his future status uncertain. Presumably he could always go back to Germany, but the situation there was becoming more difficult for immigrants by the day.

‘You mean, the work you were doing here on hacking?’

‘Yes, though I would need to have a position in the department. He arranged that – helping teachers and students with their computers is my job. And printers – printers seem to be very difficult for everybody,’ he added, with a shaky smile.

Fitzpatrick didn’t smile. ‘So your job here would be a cover for the work he wanted you to do.’

Aziz stared sadly at him. ‘I had not thought of it that way. It is real work. I do help people with their computers.’

‘Did Professor Petersen say who he was working for? And who you would be helping?’

Aziz shook his head. ‘I did not think it was for me to ask. But…’ He paused while Fitzpatrick waited, barely concealing his impatience.

At last Aziz said with obvious reluctance, ‘Since I am in America, I thought it must be the FBI.’