Authors: Alan Judd
Angela, who had been doodling, shook her head impatiently. ‘Of course this is all very serious and unfortunate and there’s no doubt we’ve got to find out what’s happened
to
Beowulf
. But we mustn’t get carried away by hypothetical possibilities which, however serious, remain extremely hypothetical. There is no reason at all to think that the
post-Cold War Russian state is remotely near even thinking about a nuclear strike on us or anyone else. Indeed, there’s evidence – including some from Charles’s predecessor
– to suggest the opposite, that they’re sufficiently confident now of their relations with the Americans to rule it out. So the context is benign, even though the events themselves
– what’s happened to
Beowulf
and so on – are undoubtedly serious. As I understood it, the decision we have to reach today is whether to ask ministers to ask the Russians
if they know anything about our missing submarine and whether they’ll help us find it. For what it’s worth, my feeling is that the Foreign Secretary would be decidedly against,
although’ – she shrugged – ‘he never ceases to surprise.’
‘What could have happened to
Beowulf
?’ asked Mary Cox. ‘What are the options?’
‘Chances are she has a technical fault, is on her way home and keeping quiet because she’s detected Russian submarines in unusual numbers,’ said Desmond. ‘The worst and
least likely case is that she’s suffered some catastrophe and sunk. But it would have to be unprecedentedly rapid for her not to break radio silence and get some sort of signal off. It would
have to be something drastic like collision with a Russian sub that was looking for her. Which might account for what the Russians are doing – looking for their own missing sub. The other
possibility is that our signals are not getting through and she’s waiting to find out what’s happened. She can sit around on the seabed for as long as she wants, pretty well. If she
goes on hearing nothing from us, of course, the captain might open his letter of last resort.’
He was looking questioningly at everybody. Most nodded but not Charles and Graham Wood from Civil Contingencies. Desmond explained that the letter of last resort was a sealed letter carried by
missile submarine commanders containing the Prime Minister’s wishes for what they were to do if a major nuclear strike destroyed all functioning government in Britain. Handwritten by each
prime minister on taking office, alone and without sight of his or her predecessor’s letters, they were to be opened only in the event that no signals could be raised from Britain and that no
BBC radio broadcasts – particularly Radio 4’s
Today
programme – were detectable. The letter would express the late Prime Minister’s wish as to whether the commander
should retaliate with his own nuclear missiles. Either after retaliation or without it he was then to choose between sailing to Australia and placing himself under command of the Australian
government, or sailing to America and placing himself under command of the US government.
‘So, serious stuff,’ said Desmond with a smile. ‘Actually, the Russians know all about it. We told them years ago during the Cold War. It means they can never know whether a
successful first strike would prevent retaliation.’
‘But surely,’ said Mary, ‘even assuming a complete radio blackout from Britain the commander could simply tune into radio broadcasts from other countries to find out
what’s happening. I know we don’t count for what we did in the world but I’d have thought a nuclear strike on London might make it onto most news bulletins.’ She smiled.
‘I’m rather with Angela on this. I don’t think we should assume disaster without more evidence.’
Desmond nodded. ‘Of course. Even if they had a technical fault that meant they couldn’t pick up broadcasts from anywhere, you’d expect them to realise it was their own
malfunction. I mention it only as part of the worst case scenario. But we still need to decide whether we’re going to recommend to ministers that we seek Russian assistance. It might help us
find a stricken
Beowulf
but risks exposing a possibly healthy
Beowulf
to Russian analysis and identification.’
‘My vote is that we should not,’ said Angela. ‘We should warn ministers that we may bring such a proposal to them and will have it in preparation but that – subject to
their views – we should give
Beowulf
more time.’
‘Meanwhile doing all we can to follow this Russian submarine deployment,’ said Desmond.
Nobody dissented. Tim Corke turned to Charles. ‘There is another aspect to this with which your old friend Configure may be able to help. Have you seen him yet?’
Charles glanced at Michael Dunton, who nodded. ‘I have seen him, yes. But only his corpse. He’s been murdered.’
They listened in silence, save for the hum of a generator somewhere. When he had finished Charles glanced again at Michael. ‘There’s been another murder, too. Possibly
related.’ He told them about Frank Heathfield. Michael then told them about Peter Tew.
‘Of course, it’s only Charles’s speculation,’ he concluded. ‘Tew may or may not have launched a one-man campaign of revenge. To my mind, it’s much more likely
that the Russians did Configure. They have form in that area. But they don’t generally go around knocking off retired intelligence officers, so Frank Heathfield does complicate the picture, I
admit. But Tew didn’t show signs of bitterness in prison, had one or two friends but otherwise kept himself pretty much to himself, we’re told. Apart from organising interprison chess
championships, which he persisted with despite less than overwhelming demand.’
‘No chance of getting Configure’s brother to help regain Crown Jewels?’ asked Desmond. ‘Get us back into their signals?’
Michael Dunton shook his head. ‘He’s not even remotely conscious of his brother’s relationship with us. And we’ve no way of contacting him unless we pretended to be
Configure. And that would unravel pretty quickly.’
‘Okay.’ Tim put both hands on the table, edge-on again as if holding a ruler between his palms. ‘We brief ministers on
Beowulf
and on the possibility of approaching
the Russians, but we don’t recommend it yet. We also tell them we are reserving judgement on whether the silence of
Beowulf
is connected with the multiple attacks on our CNI and with
the loss of Crown Jewels, but that it’s possible. Not all of them know we even had Crown Jewels, incidentally, so some might be upset that the Prime Minister kept them in the dark about that.
I don’t suppose that will worry him unduly. I think we should also mention the two murders, stressing however that we have no evidence of a connection either between them or with anything
else. Finally, we should tell them that the fact that the cyber attacks are confined to Britain and their frequency and duration has led us to conclude that their route in is via an MI6 computer,
which means MI6 has a serious insider problem. Which we are investigating urgently.
‘As for ourselves, we need to decide whether we’re looking for what physicists sometimes call a unified field explanation which would account for all the above. Or whether we think
that is an alarmist fantasy. Whichever line of investigation we take, ministers will be most concerned about the CNI failures because they’re slap bang in the public domain and the whole
nation notices when the lights go out. They want action on it and we’ll have to report some.’ He turned to Graham Wood. ‘Graham, update us on CNI.’
Graham pushed back his black hair, as he usually did before speaking. ‘We can’t do more than we’re doing already, which is to maintain intermittent services across the whole
range of government systems but without guaranteeing any of them. The latest to go down is the mainframe social security system in Newcastle, but with luck no-one will know about it because I had a
text on the way here saying it was down for minutes only and it’s now back up. But if it did go down for any time millions of people would see their pensions and welfare payments drying up.
There is a back-up, of course, but we don’t want to bring that on stream while the main one’s infected in case it somehow gets infected, too. Luckily, most of these infections are
short-lived, leaving everything perfectly normal afterwards. It’s like malaria – when it gets into the bloodstream you’ve got it, when it’s lying dormant in your liver or
wherever you haven’t. Except that you have really.’
‘I still don’t understand how it gets from the MI6 system into the social security system,’ said Mary. ‘They’re not linked, are they?’
Everyone looked at Charles, who had no idea how the MI6 or any other system worked. He could understand the infection analogy but that was about all. He was saved by Tim.
‘They’re not linked but there are links. A kind of reverse engineering by some of our twelve-year-olds at Cheltenham has established that someone with internal access to the MI6
system who knew what they were doing – a contractor, for example, a British Snowden – could exploit the few links there are not only to communicate with other government systems but
actually get inside them. On most MI6 terminals you couldn’t because it’s a sealed system, as Charles knows, but on some terminals you could. At one time it was literally no more than a
handful but under Charles’s predecessor the number increased, including some laptops. So we’re looking at every MI6 user with access to those terminals. But it takes time because it has
of course to be done in absolute secrecy and access lists are woefully incomplete or even unavailable. It’s essentially a cyber access problem, that’s the key to it.’
Everyone nodded, including Charles, although he was unconvinced. Of course it was a cyber access problem but if the two murders were admitted as part of it, it became something else as well. The
existence of Viktor, let alone his address and cover identity, was probably unknown to anyone within the contemporary MI6. Viktor’s details might possibly be recovered from computerised files
but only by someone who knew what to look for. Frank Heathfield’s address would be easier to find but the link between him and Viktor would be known to – whom? He could think of no-one
apart from himself and Peter Tew.
He would need more than that to convince those around him, but he had to say something. ‘The first question,’ he said, ‘is whether we adopt the unified field theory by seeking
a single explanation uniting everything that’s going wrong. Or whether we take each aspect on its own and seek separate solutions. My own hunch—’
Michael Dunton intervened. ‘They fall naturally into two groups – the murders and the escape of Peter Tew on the one hand, the cyber, Crown Jewels and communications issues on the
other. With the latter it’s easy to see how one might flow from the other through clever cyber exploitation but there’s no indication of any link between them and the murders and Tew.
In the absence of any evidence we’d be chasing a red herring to search for a unified field explanation or whatever we want to call it. That said, Charles’s theory that the murders are
linked to each other through Tew is plausible enough to offer it to the police as a possible line of inquiry. But any suggestion that Tew could also be somehow hacking into the MI6 system from
outside and getting from there into the CNI and beyond is stretching belief. I mean, I know that while in prison he acquired a reputation as a bit of a computer geek but bringing down the CNI is a
step or two up from geekery. Is it not, Tim?’
Tim and Graham nodded. Charles held up his hand as if in capitulation. ‘Michael is right, of course. There’s a clear distinction between the two elements and we mustn’t confuse
them.’ Matthew Abrahams had long ago taught him one of the secrets of success in Whitehall meetings. You had to start with an agenda, a clear idea of what you wanted to come away with, then
occupy the middle ground by presenting yourself as objective and reasonable, conceding arguments on both sides. In a culture that placed a high value on collective responsibility this ensured you a
hearing, since it was not done to attack the demonstrably reasonable man or woman. But by occupying that middle ground you had in fact advanced your own front line to your enemy’s, unopposed,
while conceding nothing.
Charles had entered this meeting without an agenda but now he had one: to leave with his freedom of action unimpaired. He would use that freedom to establish the link between Michael’s two
groups which he was now convinced must exist because, while Michael was speaking, he had remembered something else from the investigation of Peter Tew.
After Peter’s Carlton Gardens confession Charles was sent to interview members of the New York station to find out what opportunities Peter might have had to stray beyond his official
access. The head secretary asked to see him privately after the formal interviews were over.
She came to his hotel room. ‘There’s something else you should know, something I suppose I should confess. I didn’t want to say it in the station with everyone else around. I
don’t know whether it amounts to much anyway.’
‘Have a drink.’
Over a gin and tonic she described how while Peter was still on station a telegram had come in addressed to the head of the Washington station, who was visiting New York. It was an early
Configure report but the name meant nothing to her and the security classification was no higher than usual. That was a mistake by the sender, someone on the Requirements desk in London who should
normally have sent Configure traffic as DEYOU – decipher yourself – which meant that H/Washington would have had to take it from the cipher machine without even the cipher clerk being
allowed to see it.
‘It came in with a whole load of other stuff and I put it in the tray for H/Washington to see. Meanwhile Peter, who’d been in the UN all morning, came back and hung around gossiping.
I picked up the telegram again to see where it should be filed after H/Washington had seen it and he said, “You look puzzled, what is it?” I was puzzled because the file reference
wasn’t one I recognised and there seemed to be a lot of technical stuff about signal transmissions. I had a feeling it shouldn’t go on one of the ordinary liaison files that anyone can
see.