The Geneva Trap

Chapter 34

The digs Charlie Fielding shared with Hugo Cowdray were three rooms in a Norfolk farmhouse otherwise occupied by the owner – a widow who made up for the deficiencies in her late husband’s pension by renting out her top floor. She had initially seemed suspicious of the two prospective tenants put forward by the letting agency in King’s Lynn, but Fielding’s cheerful manner had won her over in the end – along with a hefty deposit and a guaranteed rental of six months. She didn’t know exactly what had brought them there, and Fielding hadn’t told her, though the man with the badge who’d come to inspect the flat before they moved in had made it clear it was something hush-hush. She had hoped Fielding would fill her in on the secret, but in answer to her veiled enquiries, he had merely smiled.

Tonight he had the flat to himself – Cowdray had gone down to London for a long weekend, to spend time with his wife Cynthia and their children. He probably needed to; Fielding didn’t know what Cowdray would have told his wife about his adventures with Belinda Duggan, if anything at all. But Cynthia was a clever woman, and she would have sensed that something was up.

Here in the flat, he and Cowdray each had their own bedroom, but shared the large low-eaved sitting-cum-dining room, and the adjoining makeshift kitchen. Fielding was working this evening on his laptop at the dining-room table; across the room, on a small pine side table, Cowdray’s laptop was also open, powered up, ready and waiting.

Waiting for what? Fielding wondered. He was certain Cowdray had no involvement in leaking information about the work going on at Brigham Hall. His had been a personal failing, not a conscious betrayal of his country, though God knows what was going to happen to him when all this was over. Fielding felt upset about the whole business, still stunned that such a close friend and colleague had let down the side so badly. At least Cowdray was cooperating fully now, though Fielding had been strictly limited in what he could tell him about the… what precisely? Operation? Wasn’t that what these intelligence people called it? Yes, though intelligence had been the last thing Hugo Cowdray had shown.

It was just as he was feeling lowest about the situation that a red light blinked and flickered in the corner of his screen. He stood up at once, and went over to Cowdray’s machine. Conventional anti-virus programs traditionally worked behind the scenes, but the detection program he’d installed on Cowdray’s machine was not an off-the-shelf item. He watched as the screen cleared and a pop-up window appeared in the centre. External Invasion it declared, and then began to list the sectors under attack, every five seconds pausing to write the cached information to disk. Whatever was out there, Fielding realised, it was moving through Cowdray’s machine at extraordinary speed, jumping seemingly at random through his FAT files and directories, but covering so much ground that it would soon have canvassed the entire local permanent storage of the machine – all 500 gigabytes.

And then suddenly it was gone, and the pop-up window closed and the screensaver – a colour photograph from the Colorado Rockies that Cowdray had snapped during a summer holiday there – reappeared. Fielding realised his heart was beating like a metronome on speed.

He took a deep breath and pulled up a chair, then went to work on Cowdray’s machine. The tool he used was called, ironically in the circumstances, The Mole, since it burrowed like the little velvet mammal deep beneath the surface of the transactions between Cowdray’s laptop and the unknown intruder, working back along the trace left by the foreign URL, moving in nano-seconds to isolate the particular machine that had been busy snooping here. It sped unimpeded into the generic network of the MOD, then effectively turned down a side lane, emerging into the collective LAN of the unit – how could he fail to recognise the tag? – run by Cowdray himself back in less stressful times when he had been just a boffin, if a senior one, at the MOD’s HQ.

But there it stopped. No specific URLs came up on screen, nor any of the bespoke identifiers used by the MOD. Damn, it hadn’t got back to machine level; the intruder had been even cleverer than Fielding had feared. There was nothing of value now for it to steal, but what Fielding didn’t know was what it might have managed to extract before today’s invasion.

He picked up the phone and rang Peggy Kinsolving.