The Geneva Trap

Chapter 27

Hugo Cowdray had none of Belinda Duggan’s arrogance, but Peggy worried that he’d be an equally tough nut to crack. When she’d last seen him at Brigham Hall he’d been wearing the uniform of the place – shabby sweater and jeans. Now, in a dark suit and tie, his tall figure seemed to dominate the little cubicle office. He looked distinguished but bewildered as he sat down.

Peggy had decided that with Cowdray she would come straight to the point. She didn’t know whether Belinda Duggan would have already had the opportunity to contact him and warn him, but either way there was no advantage to be gained from beating about the bush.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Cowdray. We met at Brigham Hall the other day when I came up to see Charlie Fielding,’ she began. He nodded. ‘I’m from the Security Service and I’m investigating a breach of security at Brigham Hall.’

‘Really? What sort of breach?’ His surprise and alarm seemed entirely genuine.

‘An unauthorised email was sent from the house intranet to the MOD network.’ Peggy looked at the file on the desk and told him the date and time when the email had been sent. She watched a flush rise like a stain on his cheeks, and she hoped that Cowdray wasn’t going to be able to hold out for long.

Yet his voice, when he spoke, was calm. ‘I’m not sure if there’s a question behind this, but I did not commit this breach.’

Pressed by Peggy, he continued to deny point blank ever sending any emails to the MOD from Brigham Hall. His denials were emphatic – too emphatic, thought Peggy, who saw it as telling that he didn’t ask who the email had been sent to. So she asked, seemingly out of the blue, ‘What is your connection to Belinda Duggan?’

Cowdray made a great show of surprise. ‘Belinda Duggan? What do you mean, “connection”? We’re colleagues, but distant ones – we’ve never worked together. I’d say we were passing acquaintances, no more.’

This firm denial, which matched that of Belinda Duggan, rather threw Peggy. In the absence of any evidence to confront him with, she was contemplating what tack to take next when there was a tap on the office door. Annoyed, she looked up, expecting to see some member of the MOD HR Department trying to reclaim the use of the office. The battle axe who had installed her there in the first place put her head round the door and said, ‘There’s an urgent telephone call for you.’

‘All right,’ said Peggy slowly, wondering what was going on. ‘Excuse me a moment, Dr Cowdray.’ And she left the office, taking with her the file.

Charlie Fielding was on the phone. ‘Sorry to disturb you but I thought you’d want to know that I’ve managed to retrieve some of the email Hugo Cowdray sent.’

‘I’m just talking to him now. What does it say?’ Her mind was racing with possibilities.

‘Well, I wasn’t able to retrieve much of it. But what I can see reads as follows:

‘N… blank… blank… o… t… e … blank. And six p.m. I can’t get anything else.’

Peggy wrote the letters down and looked at them hard. She liked crosswords and, sure enough, an answer came to her. ‘That’s a big help,’ she said. ‘I may have more luck with Dr Cowdray now. Many thanks.’

She walked back into the interview room and sat down again. She said abruptly, ‘Just to recap, you say you barely know Belinda Duggan?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then why did you meet her in the Novotel?’

It was only a hunch, backed by the bare bones of an email, but it seemed worth the gamble.

At first it didn’t seem to work. ‘Who says I did?’ Cowdray demanded.

He stared at her defiantly, but Peggy’s hunch wouldn’t go away – and suddenly she saw what this was about. She had no evidence, but Cowdray didn’t know that, and if it didn’t work she wouldn’t have lost anything – she hadn’t got anywhere as it was. She said, ‘The French call it cinq à sept, I believe. You know, a quick rendezvous at the end of the day, then on home as if you’ve come straight from work. In your case, straight from Norfolk where you’d had a busy week.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But Peggy saw that his right hand was trembling.

‘I think you do. The Novotel is very convenient – a stone’s throw from King’s Cross, where the train from Downham Market comes in. We’ve checked the register,’ she said, her imagination in full flight. ‘You must have used a different name to sign in. But hotels have CCTV – what doesn’t these days? That’s what the interruption just now was about; they’ve been going through the tapes and they’ve found you on one of them. And on the right day of the week…’

Peggy was slightly alarmed at how easily she’d invented all this, but Cowdray looked stunned. He tried to speak, licking his lips and opening his mouth, but nothing came out. He swallowed, then swallowed again. At last he said haltingly, ‘How did you find out?’

‘Your email.’

‘But I—’ And he stopped, realising what he had admitted.

‘Yes, you deleted it, and Belinda deleted it – twice in fact, once on her laptop and once on the server.’

‘Then how did you read it?’

‘We couldn’t at first,’ Peggy admitted. ‘But finally we salvaged just enough. Why don’t you tell me what you two were up to?’

Cowdray lowered his head and pushed his fingertips against his eyebrows. When he looked up his eyes were red, slightly teary, but he gave Peggy a sheepish smile. ‘Well, I’m not going to say “it isn’t what it looks like”.’

Peggy nodded. ‘I wouldn’t believe you if you did. But your personal life is your own business, Dr Cowdray. I don’t want to know the details. It’s only the security aspect I’m concerned about.’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t have to worry about that. The one thing we never talked about was work.’

‘No pillow talk about encryption?’

Cowdray looked horrified. ‘Absolutely not. I wouldn’t talk about my work with anyone.’

She believed him, though his indignation was a little hard to take, given the alarm he’d caused. ‘Why did you send an email? You know better than I do what the risks of doing that are. I understand it could help an outsider get into the system. That’s why security is so strict – you helped set the parameters.’

‘I know. What can I say? It was a fit of madness.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘We’d had a row. Belinda threatened to stop seeing me and I… I suppose I must have been desperate.’

‘Had you ever sent an email to her by that route before?’

‘Never,’ said Cowdray, so quickly and firmly that Peggy was left wondering if he was telling the truth.

What would your wife think about it? Peggy wondered, but she said nothing. She knew that Cowdray had five children. He had a lot to lose on a personal level, as well as jeopardising his career. What on earth did he see in that cold, arrogant woman to make it worth risking all that?

As Hugo Cowdray left the office, he looked smaller than he had when he’d come in. He’d asked what would happen next but Peggy had told him that would be decided by the MOD. Her job with him was done.

Later that evening she met Charlie Fielding again in the Angler’s Arms.

When she told him what Cowdray had admitted, he was dismayed at first, then angry. ‘We’ll have to suspend him at once. There’ll be a disciplinary board, and I know what their verdict will be. It’s such a waste. Hugo’s immensely talented, and he’s gone and thrown it all away for the sake of a fling. As for Belinda Duggan, she’ll be suspended too, though she may keep her job. After all, she didn’t initiate the security violation, Hugo did.’

‘But she lied to me,’ said Peggy. ‘If you hadn’t cracked that email, Cowdray wouldn’t have admitted anything, and I don’t think we’d have got to the bottom of it. Duggan’s as unreliable as Hugo Cowdray, and that affects her vetting status. I’d like to be confident that she’s put somewhere where she doesn’t have access to highly classified information – at least for a time.’

‘I suppose your Service will be making that demand formally.’

‘I would think so. As for Cowdray, we have a bit of a dilemma. If I understand what you told me, the one possible way into the Brigham Hall system would be through the MOD intranet – which is why you were at such pains to keep the two systems separate?’

‘That’s right. I never thought anyone would breach that firewall – everyone knew it was absolutely forbidden.’

Peggy nodded, but she wasn’t interested in Cowdray’s behaviour any more; she had something more important on her mind. ‘I also understand that even if the communication between MOD and Brigham were innocent, the danger is that someone – a mole in particular – could latch on to this link and somehow get into your system.’

‘It’s possible if you know how to do it. We call it “hitching” – like hitching a lift. It’s a very remote possibility, as I think I told you, but theoretically a mole could use the email as a vehicle to get in.’

‘But does it have to hitch in via Cowdray’s machine? Because if that’s the case, then if we immediately shut that down there won’t be any way in. The gateway will be locked.’

‘Yes. That’s exactly right.’ said Fielding with relief. ‘Unless we’re too late, of course.’

‘But that’s exactly what we don’t want,’ Peggy said. Fielding looked baffled, and she explained: ‘Don’t you see? This is our best bet for catching the mole, if there is one. If he tries to get into Brigham Hall through Cowdray’s machine then we can spot him.’

‘I suppose so…’ said Fielding warily. ‘But I’d need to think about that – and what the risks are that he’ll get in and we won’t see he’s there.’

‘If we can’t do something like that, we’ll be right where we are now in looking for this mole – which is nowhere. And he might already have got into the system.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Fielding, scratching his head. ‘I’ll have to work out the implications of all this. I can’t help thinking how weird it will be to tell Hugo that he’s screwed up so badly we want him to keep working.’

Peggy smiled at him. ‘Well, not as weird as to find that everything you’re working on was being monitored by some foreign state. Don’t take too long to work it out,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ve got much time.’