The Geneva Trap

Chapter 41

This time Bokus called on Fane, who must have alerted Liz Carlyle as she was there when the American arrived, standing by the window, looking down at the Thames at high tide. Though Bokus hadn’t asked for her to be there, he was glad she was; he could get the bad news over in one fell swoop.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down in the corner, round a table which Fane claimed had belonged to his great-grandfather. Trust him to bring his family heirlooms to work, thought Bokus sourly. Fane’s office was much smaller than his at Grosvenor Square, yet there was something undeniably impressive about it. Its elegant furniture and expensive curtains seemed to say that you didn’t need an office the size of a tennis court to show your status. It made Bokus wonder grudgingly if there wasn’t something to the British liking for understatement.

‘You said it was important,’ said Fane, going straight to the point without the usual small talk.

Bokus was sweating, slightly nervous about the news he was about to break.

He took a deep breath. ‘Operation Clarity has had a bit of a setback and it’s been temporarily suspended.’

‘What setback?’ asked Liz Carlyle. ‘We’ve heard nothing.’

‘It was in Oman. That’s where they’ve been running trials on the new control system. We’ve lost one.’

‘Lost one?’ she asked incredulously.

Bokus nodded.

‘What happened?’ Fane said, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair.

‘Nobody knows for sure. It seems one minute the test drone was flying along just fine, being directed by the voice commands, then all of a sudden it went nose down into a target it was meant to photograph. Like a dog deciding to ignore its master’s voice.’ Bokus smiled weakly, but neither Liz nor Fane smiled back. ‘So it seems you two were right to think we have a problem.’

‘Are they sure it was external interference?’ asked Fane. ‘You know, Andy, these technological marvels are so beyond the ken of us mere mortals that we sometimes forget they can foul up in the same way people do. ‘‘To err is human’’ and all that sort of thing, but the worst mistakes in my view are technical.’

Bokus shook his head regretfully. ‘It would be nice to think so, but Langley’s told me there was unauthorised intervention in the commands sent to the drone. Don’t ask me for the technical detail, but they think the Air Force commands were somehow overlaid with contradictory ones. The drone didn’t know which set to believe, so it pretty much said “what the hell”, and looked for the nearest exit sign. It’s made them look back at another glitch which they’d previously put down to a technical malfunction.’

Fane asked, ‘Could this sabotage have come from some other source? I mean, how do you know it’s connected to Operation Clarity?’

‘Unfortunately, Clarity’s the only place it could have come from. To overlay the legitimate orders, the bogus ones would have to unravel their encryption, and then duplicate it themselves. To do that they’d have to go to the source of the encryption code. That’s your MOD project.’

‘Bugger,’ said Fane, and sat further forward in his chair, crossing his arms.

‘So we need to find this mole right away,’ said Liz. ‘Has Langley come back to you about Park Woo-jin?’

‘Yes,’ said Bokus, wondering if he should mention his source Ujin Wong. Better not, he decided. They’d met again briefly in a pub near Victoria, and Wong had told him he could find nothing at all suspicious about the programmer Park Woo-jin. ‘But I’m sure it’s not Park. They’ve gone through the original vetting, and checked with the Koreans as well. Both are certain he’s clean.’

‘Well, that’s obviously not true,’ said Liz, a split second before Fane angrily said, ‘Balls.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Bokus crossly.

Liz snapped, ‘We’ve had surveillance on Park Woo-jin for the last ten days. He made a drop in St James’s Park on his way to work. It was crystal clear. Either your people aren’t looking hard enough, or the Koreans are pulling the wool.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’ asked Bokus. He was surprised by the news about Park Woo-jin. The Korean intelligence people were usually very good. They might have made a mistake the first time round, but if they’d had another look, when Ujin Wong asked for it, they should have spotted anything wrong with Park. What was going on?

‘Meaning Park Woo-jin is reporting back to Korean intelligence. That’s the only thing that makes sense.’

‘But why would he do that?’ asked Fane. He had picked up a pencil and was rocking it fast between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I mean, we all know our allies like to know what’s going on, even the genuinely friendly ones. But honestly, would the KCIA really go to the trouble of planting an agent in the project of two close allies? Think of the risk. And the information they might get couldn’t do them an iota of conceivable good, while,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘risking God knows what ructions with their largest benefactor if it were discovered.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense, I agree,’ said Bokus. ‘Unless,’ and he paused until he felt their eyes upon him, ‘Park is working for someone else. Like the Russians. Langley’s view is that this is a sabotage operation, and increasingly they feel Moscow is behind it. The people at State are talking about calling in the Russian Ambassador and making a formal protest.’

‘That would be ridiculous,’ said Liz. ‘What do they expect the Russians to say?’

‘Of course they’d just deny it,’ Fane chipped in. ‘So all that would do is raise the level of international tension quite unnecessarily.’

‘And anyway, how does Langley explain Bravado’s information, if the Russians are behind this?’ asked Liz.

‘They think it was some kind of double bluff. The theory back home is that Bravado didn’t want to go the whole road to betraying his country, so he wrapped the information up by saying the attack was being carried out by a third country.’

‘But what about Kubiak? Where does he fit in according to your theory? Did you do a trace with Langley?’

‘Yes. There’s a big file. They did have him in their sights in Delhi, same as your lot did. They did a background study then and apparently his father was a senior General in the Defence Department. So he had brilliant access, as well as the prospect of rising high in the KGB. Our Station had him surrounded with access agents, including the madam at the whorehouse. They were planning to offer a big salary but keep him in place. He’d be able to indulge his passions, knowing a golden handshake and easy retirement awaited him in the States.

‘But in the end they didn’t go ahead. Langley didn’t like his profile; our shrinks assessed him as borderline psychopathic. I think the feeling was he’d be too difficult to control. The madam told us a lot about his personal habits – one of them was that he was violent, almost casually so. Apparently he’d nearly killed one of her girls when she did something he didn’t like, or maybe she wouldn’t do something he did like. There was also an incident when we had him under surveillance, and he assaulted a taxi driver – beat him up really badly, then walked off as though nothing had happened. He was drunk at the time. It had to be hushed up by his Embassy – they paid off the driver before he could complain to the police.’

‘From what Bravado said, it sounds as though he hasn’t changed a lot,’ said Carlyle.

‘No, though his career doesn’t seem to have taken off as expected,’ Fane chipped in. ‘Head of Security in Switzerland isn’t where he would have hoped to end up. But at least he survived the changes at the end of the Cold War, probably with the help of his father. ‘

‘Well, that’s all very interesting.’ Liz was looking impatient. ‘But I still can’t believe there’s any Russian connection to Park Woo-jin. He’s obviously up to something, and I’m not at all sure Korean intelligence is telling us all they know. I think our best bet is to concentrate on the man who picked up Park Woo-jin’s drop. According to the hotel where he stays when he’s in London, his name is Dong Shin-soo, but so far we have no trace of him entering the country under that name. We don’t know where he is the rest of the time; we don’t even know for sure that he’s Korean.’

‘Okay,’ said Bokus, thinking that he was the one getting the worst news. He knew Fane and Carlyle weren’t happy to find out that the MOD leak was real – Bokus himself was dismayed by the discovery. But from what he was hearing now, the situation was even more complicated than he’d thought. He’d still put his money on the Russians being involved, though the evidence was going Korea’s way. Which not only meant that one of America’s staunchest allies was doing the dirty, it also meant his old pal Ujin Wong hadn’t been telling him the truth.

‘But don’t take your eye off Kubiak,’ he said, as a parting shot. ‘Take my word for it. The Russians are in this somewhere.’