The Geneva Trap

Chapter 15

Peggy Kinsolving was beginning to panic. Holding the steering wheel with one hand and her map with the other, she was driving slowly along a track between wide fields where bright green shoots of some sort of crop were just beginning to emerge from the ground. ‘You have reached your destination,’ her SatNav kept repeating, though she could see no building of any kind, not a barn or farmhouse, far less anything that could be Brigham Hall. The last town of any size that she’d passed through was Brandon and then, as instructed by the charming-sounding lady on the SatNav, she had turned off down a narrow road. Then the road had turned into little more than a track and here she was, lost, miles from anywhere with the useless SatNav shouting at her.

The track entered a small dark wood and out of the corner of her eye Peggy spotted what looked like a drive on the left, with an open five-barred gate. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, she thought to herself, and turned the car through the gate and proceeded up the drive, bumping and rattling over the cracks in the asphalt. After about fifty yards she saw, ahead of her, a security fence and a barrier next to a small wooden guard post. Made it, she thought to herself, as she got out of the car, clutching her Ministry of Defence pass.

But the guard post was empty. The only sound was the cooing of wood pigeons and the occasional creaking call of a pheasant.

So much for security, she thought, wondering what to do next. She wished Liz had come with her, but Liz had felt obliged to stay in London, in case a call came from Geneva and she had to leave at a moment’s notice for the next rendezvous with Bravado. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she’d reassured Peggy. ‘This should be right up your alley. Just don’t let anyone try and push you around.’

Peggy hoped Liz was right. By choice she preferred deskwork, intelligence analysis and research, to dealing with people. She had always been like that. As a girl she’d been teased for her owl-like glasses and bookish ways – she used to hide in the library when it was time to play netball. But her studiousness had paid off: she’d gone to Oxford, where she’d read English and taken a good degree. After that she’d found a job in a private library in the North. At first this seemed ideal for her: there was lots of new material to catalogue and plenty of time for pursuing a research project of her own.

But after a bit it had begun to pall. The work had started to seem dry as dust, and even her own research largely pointless. Moving to London and a bigger library hadn’t helped; by then the whole world of libraries and research projects had lost its appeal. When a chance remark by a friend had led to the invitation to an interview with MI6, she’d swallowed once, swallowed twice… and gone for it. The rest was history. She’d joined MI6 as a researcher, been temporarily seconded to MI5 to assist Liz Carlyle in an investigation, and had stayed – something she didn’t regret for a moment. She liked working on cases in the UK, liked the feeling she could make a difference, and both liked and respected her boss. Liz was clear, direct, sometimes tough, yet always encouraging and supportive.

As she stood outside the guard post, considering her options, Peggy noticed a CCTV camera mounted on a metal post. Presumably someone was monitoring the camera and would turn up in a moment to find out who she was. She peered ahead down the drive, to see if she could see Brigham Hall – she had no doubt now that she’d arrived at the right place – but the drive curved sharply and all she could see was a mixed stand of oak and ash. As nothing seemed to be happening, she pushed open the guard-post door and reached for the phone.

Simultaneously a voice called out, ‘Hello!’ Looking up, Peggy saw a man coming round the bend of the drive towards her. He was slightly built, dressed in a Harris tweed jacket that had seen better days, with a tie sitting slightly askew on his blue shirt.

‘Miss Kinsolving?’ he asked, sounding breathless as he approached the booth. ‘I’m Charlie Fielding.’

‘There was no one here,’ she said, pointing vaguely at the guard post.

‘Jim’s at lunch,’ he said, looking apologetic. ‘I’m afraid we only run to one guard. Budget cuts – you know how it is. We don’t get many visitors.’

I’m not surprised, she thought, even if she was surprised about the apparently casual attitude to security. Though given the remoteness, the difficulty of finding the place, and the security fence and camera, perhaps it wasn’t as casual as it seemed.

‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thanks. I got something at a service station.’

‘Sounds a bit grim. But to be frank, you wouldn’t have done much better here,’ said Fielding with a smile. ‘We’re pretty much sandwiches and crisps only at midday. Leave your car. There’s no spare parking space up at the house. It’s not much of a walk.’

The drive ran through the woods for a couple of hundred yards until suddenly the trees stopped and the asphalt gave way to a circle of flattened gravel in front of a large Victorian house. Cars were parked all around it. The house had two Gothic gables and was built of brick that over the years had turned the colour of burned oranges. Dormer windows jutted from the heavy tiled roof, with intricate fretwork decoration. On the ground floor the wooden porch shielding the entrance was ornamented with delicately carved bargeboard trim.

‘Golly,’ said Peggy. ‘What an unlikely building to find in this spot.’

‘It was put up by a brewer who liked peace and quiet. More Betjeman than Pevsner,’ said Fielding. ‘Though neither would have approved of what we’ve done inside.’

They went through the porch into an entrance hall with a colourful tiled floor. On one wall coats hung from wooden pegs, and in the centre a dusty mahogany table stood below an elaborate crystal chandelier that dangled from a fraying cord. At one side of the hall a dark oak staircase ascended to the house’s upper floors.

Fielding opened a door and they went into a large front room that looked like an old-fashioned parlour – except that against the far windows two modern desks were covered with print-outs and several computer monitors. A man in a sweater and jeans sat at one of the desks. He turned in his swivel office chair as they came in.

‘Hugo,’ Fielding called out cheerfully, ‘meet Peggy Kinsolving.’ He turned to her. ‘Dr Cowdray is my deputy, for his sins.’

The other man stood up and shook hands. He looked to be about forty, with regular features and striking blue eyes. His hair was the colour of summer corn and very neatly cut, almost military-looking with its sharply trimmed edges. ‘Welcome to Brigham Asylum,’ he said with a smile.

Peggy laughed. ‘Well, it’s certainly got more character than most government buildings. Do you all live here as well?’

Fielding said, ‘Not really. The team’s usually based in London. They mostly drive up when they need to. If the weather gets too bad in the winter, people can stay in the upstairs bedrooms. Jim’s wife does the housekeeping.’ He pointed to Dr Cowdray, saying, ‘Alas, Hugo and I have to be here for longer hours than most of the others. We’re sharing a rented house in Downham Market. Sometimes Mrs Cowdray joins us, which improves the level of cooking dramatically,’ he added with a laugh. ‘Anyway, let me show you the rest of the place.’

Fielding opened another door and they walked down a passage towards the back of the house. What might formerly have been a study and a dining room had been gutted, and the space divided up by white shoulder-high partitions to form cubicles, most of which were occupied by serious-looking young men and women peering at computer screens. Fielding nodded as they passed, but few of them even looked up.

At the rear of the house they came to a very large room, visible through two massive new windows set either side of a door. This must once have been the kitchen, Peggy thought, but now instead of an Aga a bank of computers, each the size of an American-style refrigerator, stood lined up against the back wall. In the middle of the room a pony-tailed man, dressed in a programmer’s uniform of blue jeans and Glastonbury T-shirt, stood at a lectern, writing in a log book. Peggy noticed that he wore paper slippers on his feet.

‘That’s Luke, the data manager,’ Fielding explained. ‘And this is the machine room – MR as we call it. Dust-free, in theory anyway.’

He gestured to Luke to come out and then introduced him to Peggy. The data manager was soft-spoken and looked very young – mid-twenties, she thought, despite a trendy attempt at growing stubble on his chin. Peggy pointed to the machine room. ‘I thought computers that size went out in the nineties.’

‘Most did. But these are super-computers,’ Luke explained. ‘Not everything can be done on a PC, regardless of what Microsoft tells you.’

Fielding laughed and added, ‘Encryption in particular needs an incredible amount of calculating power.’

They said goodbye to Luke and retraced their steps to the front hall. Upstairs, on the first floor, normality returned – Fielding’s office was a former bedroom that had not been refurbished. The curtains were of faded chintz and the carpet was thin with age. He waved Peggy to a chair and they sat down on either side of a large walnut desk that was covered with stacks of paper.

Fielding said, ‘I know you’re from the Security Service and here to discuss our own security. But that’s all I know. Perhaps you could fill me in.’

His voice remained friendly, but now it had a briskness to it that belied the abstracted air he’d shown before. This might be a boffin, thought Peggy, but he had a level-headed, business-like side that explained why he was running the place.

Liz and Peggy had agreed that there was no point in obfuscating; it would merely hinder their investigation. So Peggy explained MI5’s concern that information was being leaked about Clarity, though she didn’t explain how they knew this.

‘Who’s doing it?’ asked Fielding. He looked alarmed.

‘It’s our understanding that the infiltrator is a foreign national. Unless I’ve been misinformed, all of your staff are British, so we don’t think it’s someone actually working here.’

Fielding still looked worried. ‘They say everyone’s a mongrel in this country of ours. Including yours truly,’ he added. ‘My father’s name was Feldman; he left Germany as a child on the last of the Kindertransport. So couldn’t someone have been placed here who wasn’t British, but just pretending to be?’

‘You mean an illegal?’

‘Yes. Weren’t there lots of those during the Cold War, especially in West Germany? I read somewhere that Willie Brandt had an aide who turned out to be East German.’

‘That’s all true,’ said Peggy, rather surprised that Fielding was so quick to take the situation on board, but also pleased that he was clearly concerned. ‘But I don’t think that’s an issue here. Illegals can only get by with a cover story if it isn’t scrutinised too closely. If you say you were born in Auchtermuchty when actually it was Kiev, enhanced vetting will eventually unmask you.’

‘If that’s the case, how is there a security problem here?’’

‘I’m hoping there isn’t one. But we’re worried that someone at the MOD in London has somehow accessed information about Clarity.’

‘It’s not possible.’ Fielding was shaking his head, and he seemed relieved. ‘Let me explain.’

There followed a ten-minute technical overview of the networks and systems used at Brigham Hall. To Peggy’s relief, Fielding managed to speak in ordinary English for most of the time. Aided by an intensive briefing the day before from MI5’s own computer expert, ‘Technical Ted’ Poynter, in his lower-floor den at Thames House, she found she could follow most of what Fielding was saying, though there were lengthy descriptions of ‘botnets’ and ‘attack vectors’ that made her mind reel.

‘Let me just make sure I understand you,’ said Peggy finally. ‘Because of these security provisions you’ve made for communications, it’s technically impossible for anyone to access your system here.’

Fielding hesitated almost imperceptibly, then said, ‘I can’t see how it could be done. The system here was specifically designed for Clarity. It cannot be accessed from outside – not by the Chief of the Defence Staff himself. It’s deliberately sealed off.’

‘But how do your people communicate with the MOD? Not to mention the outside world.’

‘There’s a second distinct MOD network we are part of – we sit as an extra nodule on it, a bit like a new wing on a house. As for the outside world, we have standard internet access, but we insist it takes place on completely different computers, in designated places. That way it can’t affect our security system.’

‘So it’s impossible for anyone to get in from outside?’ Peggy insisted.

‘Well,’ Fielding said with an uncertain laugh, ‘I wouldn’t say impossible. I just don’t myself see how it could be done.’

‘I’ve been told that there isn’t a system in the world that can’t be hacked into, and that your average fourteen-year-old hacker in his bedroom in Slough can get through most of them in no time.’

‘But that’s because they pose a challenge.’

‘And yours doesn’t?’

Fielding gave a mock-groan. ‘I don’t imagine there’s a hacker anywhere who even knows we exist. And if one did get in somehow by accident, I doubt they’d understand anything they found.’

‘But an infiltrator who was a computer scientist might?’

She could see Fielding was resistant to this, but it seemed right to persist. Especially when he sighed and said, ‘All right, you win. Theoretically it might be possible. I don’t know how it could be done, but that’s not a good reason to assume it can’t be done.’

Peggy admired his honesty. He went on, ‘I think if it were happening, the only way to tell would be from the outside.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘We need to look across the entire MOD network, and see if there has been any illegitimate contact between it and our system here. I will scan the internal Brigham Hall logs for any sign, but if someone’s managed to penetrate us – and as I’ve said it’s extremely unlikely – they will almost certainly have made sure there’s no evidence of it at this end.’

He was looking depressed now. Peggy tried to lighten things, saying, ‘I’m not trying to ruin your day.’

He smiled. ‘It’s not the day I’m thinking about – it’s the week, possibly the month. It will take at least that long to make a system-wide check of the MOD network. I’d better go down to London first thing in the morning.’