Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  Assistant Chief Constable Richard Boston had no idea about any of this and wouldn’t have cared if he had known. He had other things on his mind and was at Lewisham Central purely because it was a convenient location for the meeting he had planned. It had the space and the facilities, it was only a short walk from the railway station and there were plenty of spaces in the multi-storey car park on site. Parking was not his personal concern, because although he would be arriving by car he had a driver, but it was always good to know that it wouldn’t be a problem.

  The room he’d been allocated was more like a biggish office than a conference room, but that didn’t matter because there would only be three other people attending the meeting. A civilian staff member escorted him to the door, pointed out where the nearest lavatories were located and checked that the refreshments (two large Thermos flasks, one of black coffee and the other filled with tea, several individual cartons of milk and wrapped sugar cubes along with a predictably uninspiring selection of biscuits in cellophane packets) had been delivered and then left him to it. The room was fully equipped with the usual visual and audio aids, a projection screen, speakers, whiteboards, cork boards and so on, but without any of the normal posters, notices, pictures and notes that would have suggested the room was in regular use. Maybe it had been cleaned out in preparation for his meeting.

  Boston had deliberately arrived about fifteen minutes early to give him time to make sure his laptop would talk to whatever projection system the room contained. He was by any standards a computer expert, but just because he knew what he was doing didn’t mean some kind of electronic gremlin wouldn’t strike and simply refuse to allow him to connect to the system, so he always liked to have a little time in hand.

  He was a solidly built man, standing just over six feet three inches tall, his dark hair cut short, perhaps to minimise the onset of typical male pattern baldness. Or maybe he just liked it that way. His square jaw and determined expression suggested he was a man who knew what he was doing, where he was going and how he was going to get there, an impression confirmed by the impressive speed with which he had ascended the ranks to the position he now held.

  In the event, it only took him about five minutes to hitch up his lightweight Dell and by the time the first attendees arrived the title slide of his presentation was ready to be displayed on the screen at one end of the room, and Boston was sitting at the head of the table sipping coffee from a chipped china mug and nibbling on a shortbread biscuit.

  He heard a brisk double tap on the door and two men walked in. Boston already knew Chief Inspector Tim Inskip, having worked with him before, and he knew the second man’s name but not his face.

  ‘Good to see you again, Tim,’ he said, shaking hands with the burly, fair-haired officer who was a couple of inches shorter but quite a few kilos heavier than him. Inskip’s face was dominated by his large and crooked nose, a legacy of his rugby-playing past and specifically of one memorable match when the scrum had collapsed with him at the bottom of it and the boot of one of the opposition front row forwards had made violent contact with his face. It had taken three operations to fix his nose so that he could breathe through it again, but the surgeons had never been able to get it completely straight. It wasn’t pretty but it did work, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘Afternoon, Richard,’ Inskip said, his voice as usual sounding slightly nasal. ‘It’s been a while. Now, I don’t think you know Ian Mitchell,’ he added, turning slightly to introduce the man beside him. ‘Ian, this is Assistant Chief Constable Richard Boston, who’s organised this little soirée.’

  ‘I know your name, Ian,’ Boston said, ‘but we’ve never met.’

  The two police officers were wearing civilian clothes, but they both wore them as if they carried badges of rank while Mitchell, who was also in civvies, held himself in an indefinably different way, a kind of casually relaxed poise that suggested he had never worn a uniform. His fair hair was also just a shade too long and there was more than a hint of five o’clock shadow on his chin, as if he had shaved the previous night rather than that morning. He had piercing blue eyes deep-set below a wide forehead and he looked quite athletic, as if he was the kind of man who would enjoy a game of tennis or who perhaps went jogging each morning before work, an impression that was entirely erroneous in every single respect. Mitchell loathed all sport and subscribed to the view that hard physical activity as a young man led inevitably to a broken and crippled middle and old age. And he possessed an almost encyclopedic mental database of facts and figures and anecdotes to demolish the arguments of anybody who disagreed with this point of view.

  ‘Commander,’ Mitchell said, extending his hand.

  ‘I’m not in the Met or the City forces,’ Boston said, ‘and I prefer to keep it informal. Just “Richard” will do nicely.’

  In both the Metropolitan and City of London police forces, the rank of commander is equivalent to assistant chief constable, and much less of a conversational mouthful.

  ‘Is anyone else coming?’ Inskip asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Boston nodded. ‘Superintendent Simpson should be here any minute. She called me to say her train was running about five minutes late.’

  ‘Ah, the Nutcracker,’ Inskip murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

  Mitchell looked puzzled.

  ‘What? Is she a fan of the ballet?’

  Inskip shook his head and Boston just smiled.

  ‘Nope, and she doesn’t look like the Sugar Plum Fairy either,’ Inskip replied. ‘She’s a very impressive woman who takes no crap from anyone, at any time or for any reason. She acquired the nickname because it’s slightly more polite than ball-breaker, but that’s what she is. On the other hand, she believes in equal opportunities, which means she frightens her superiors almost as much as she terrifies her subordinates.’

  As he finished speaking there was a single knock on the door, and then a statuesque and attractive black woman, her appearance dominated by a halo of curly black hair styled as a kind of restrained afro, stepped into the office and looked, without any particular appearance of pleasure or even interest, at the three men standing there.

  ‘Richard, Tim,’ she said shortly by way of greeting, with a Geordie accent, then pointed a long and elegant forefinger at Ian Mitchell. ‘You I don’t know,’ she added, ‘so who are you?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Barbara,’ Boston said smoothly. ‘Come and take a seat, pour yourself a coffee and I’ll do the introductions.’

  When the four of them were seated around the table, he began.

  ‘Mainly for the benefit of Ian here, I’ll just explain who we are and why we’re here. My name is Richard Boston and I’m currently the Head of Cyber Criminal Operations for the United Kingdom based within the Home Office. I also wear a couple of international hats as the cybercrime liaison officer between UK law enforcement, Interpol, the United Nations and – most relevant today – the CIA and FBI.’

  He shifted his gaze to look at Barbara Simpson.

  ‘Superintendent Simpson and I have worked on covert operations in the past. Her unique skills have led to a very interesting career, if “interesting” really is the right word to describe it. She was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal and a couple of Home Secretary’s commendations and has spent most of the last two decades working undercover, much of that time down in South America. You don’t, obviously, need to be a detective to work out that she was helping to combat the drugs trade.’

  ‘Which, as I’ve said before, on every committee I’ve ever sat on,’ Barbara Simpson interjected, ‘was, is, and always will be a total and complete waste of time and effort. Trying to stop the supply of illegal drugs is about as sensible and as likely to work as passing a law that would make it illegal for it to rain at the weekend. As long as there’s a demand for narcotics there will be criminal gangs out there doing their very best to meet that demand. The only way to stop it happening is to legalise the whole lot of them so that your local neighbourhood jakie
s can pop into Boots and buy what they need for the weekend with their dole money.’

  ‘Jakies?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘Junkies. Or druggies or addicts if you prefer. If we did that, they wouldn’t have to break into your house or your car to steal something to get enough cash to score their next fix. The number of street crimes and burglaries that are positively linked to jakies is massive. Most of them need to steal goods worth about a grand every single day, which means stuff like your computer, your phone or your watch or jewellery, so they can sell them for about a hundred quid and buy a few wraps of whatever they need from their local dealer. Drugs that, in reality, probably cost well under a fiver to produce. Ten years ago street crime and burglary directly attributed to drug addicts cost the economy about thirteen billion pounds every year. Today it’s a twenty-billion-pound industry, so the real cost has nearly doubled.’

  Ian Mitchell raised his eyebrows slightly at the obvious passion and vehemence in the superintendent’s words.

  ‘As you might have gathered, Barbara has quite strong views about this,’ Richard Boston said, stating the obvious and directing his remarks towards Mitchell, ‘but she has both the experience and the knowledge to back up her argument. As she frequently tells me, the American DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, has an annual budget of over two billion dollars and at no point since its formation have its activities had any measurable effect on the supply of illegal drugs on the streets of America.’

  ‘But I thought the DEA seized hundreds of tons of drugs from dealers every year,’ Mitchell said.

  ‘It does,’ Simpson replied, ‘and they pat themselves on the back and tell the American public that they’re winning the fight against drugs and driving the dealers off the streets. But it’s all PR and spin. The only criterion that actually matters when you’re assessing the success of an organisation charged with stopping the supply of illegal narcotics is the availability of drugs, and nothing the DEA has ever done has had any effect on that. For every ton of cocaine or whatever that the organisation manages to seize, the cartels in Colombia and Mexico manage to deliver ten or a hundred times as much. The reality is that for the narco-economies of South America the DEA is nothing more than a minor inconvenience, just another business expense, something they need to budget for in the shipping costs incurred by their incredibly lucrative business.’

  ‘Quite,’ Boston said. ‘But interesting though it might be to explore this, we’re not here to talk about drugs.’ He looked across the table. ‘Tim Inskip here is a chief inspector, and for the last decade he’s been working at the sharp end of Britain’s counterterrorism operations and he’s heavily involved with both the Home Office and MI5, the Security Service, based at Millbank.’

  Boston shifted his attention to Mitchell.

  ‘Which brings us to the last member of this group, Ian Mitchell. He’s the UK’s top official legal hacker. Right, that’s who we all are, so the next matter is why we’re here.’

  Boston woke up his laptop and pressed a key. Immediately, the projection screen mounted on the wall at one end of the room sprang into life. The information it conveyed was neither comprehensive nor readily intelligible: all the screen showed were the words ‘Operation Leif’ in block capitals and the word ‘Confidential’ in red at the top and bottom of the screen, the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

  ‘Looks like you’ve got a small typo there, Richard,’ Barbara Simpson said, pointing at the screen.

  ‘I might have guessed that you’d be the one to pick that up,’ Boston replied, ‘but actually that is the correct spelling, because you’re thinking about the wrong kind of leaf. This is a reference to a man named Leif Erikson, who was almost certainly the first European to discover America, half a millennium before Christopher Columbus started his first westbound voyage. And of course Erikson actually found America, which Columbus comprehensively failed to do. I was going to call it Operation Cabot after John Cabot – Giovanni Caboto – who was probably the first European to set foot in North America after the Vikings, but I couldn’t do that because Operation Cabot had already been bagged by the Surrey police for an anti-drugs operation they ran in 2015.’

  ‘I know you love your history, Richard,’ Inskip commented. ‘Anyone else would have just picked a name at random. And that would have been quicker. And easier.’

  ‘Now I may not be the sharpest tool in this particular shed,’ Barbara Simpson said, ‘but would I be right in assuming that this has something to do with America?’

  Boston grinned at her.

  ‘Obviously,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s probably going to end up as something of a joint operation between us and the Americans, because what we think we’re seeing is the beginning of a widespread, coordinated and sophisticated case of cyber terrorism. And that,’ he finished, ‘is why we’re all sitting here in this room.’

  ‘Before we get too deeply into this,’ Barbara Simpson said, as Boston opened the second slide of his presentation, ‘can I just remind you that I know sod all about cyber. I can barely even spell the word.’

  ‘That’s not why you’re here,’ Boston replied. ‘You’ve got other talents and abilities that will be vitally important to this operation.’ He shifted his attention to the rest of his audience. ‘Now, as I’m sure you’re aware, GCHQ out at Cheltenham works very closely with the American National Security Agency. In fact, you could almost say that their functions are identical, and between them they provide invaluable intelligence about potential terrorist and criminal activities on both sides of the Pond. What you may not know is that we have a separate and dedicated small counterterrorism unit right here in London with links to Cheltenham, Westminster, Hereford and other places. Basically, if there’s a joint national problem that no single agency or department can handle and no one knows where to place it, this lot pick it up.’

  ‘You mean C-TAC,’ Ian Mitchell stated. ‘The Counter-Terrorism Advisory Committee. I know it’s supposed to be covert, but these days not a hell of a lot really is. And I know Ben Morgan very well. He’s one of the wheels in C-TAC, and the cyber world is quite small when you get down to it. Rumour has it he was instrumental in saving the UK banking system last year from some kind of a meltdown.’

  ‘I expected you to be well informed, Ian,’ Boston said, displaying another slide on the screen, ‘but perhaps not quite that well informed. All that is still classified. You’re right, but officially he’s simply an academic working on cyber stuff. Now, we have a problem. It’s not really made the papers or the media generally, but there’s been a worrying increase in the number of determined hacking attempts directed against the UK’s infrastructure, the gas, electricity and water suppliers, companies like that. You don’t need me to tell you that the effects of a successful hack that shut down electric power to Greater London, say, for anything more than a few hours would be utterly catastrophic, because not every company or building has backup power supplies. But what’s really concerning us is that utility companies in America have also been targeted. According to my opposite number in the FBI, they’re not seeing weekly or monthly attacks, but daily and sometimes hourly attempts to breach their firewalls and enter their systems. And because most of these attacks use the same suites of hacking tools and tend to follow the same pattern, the uncomfortable conclusion is that we may have a single group of hackers out there aiming to cause massive disruption in both America and here in the UK, possibly at the same time. It looks like it’s all coordinated, and the frequency of the attacks is increasing. And there’s one further conclusion that we can tentatively draw about this.’

  Boston paused and looked round expectantly at the attendees.

  Once again, it was Mitchell who replied. ‘You think it’s a national actor, not some bunch of spotty teenagers living on pizza and Coke and benefits?’

  ‘What the hell’s a national actor?’ Simpson demanded. ‘You don’t mean somebody who’s appeared on the stage at the Old Vic, presumably.’


  ‘No,’ Boston said. ‘He means a group of hackers directed by a nation or a nation-state, like the bloody Chinese. The Red Army – the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, I mean – has employed vast platoons of hackers over the last couple of decades to spy on the West, and more importantly to steal technical and other data to save Chinese scientists from having to bother to invent or develop stuff themselves. Pretty much every major advance in the Chinese military and industrial complex since the start of this century has been entirely or largely based on data stolen from the West. But what the Chinese hackers don’t normally do is cause any damage, because their agenda is entirely different. They work their way in to somewhere like NASA or Berkeley or MIT or Boeing and steal what they can and then they do their best to get out without leaving any traces. These people are nothing like that. EDF and British Gas don’t have any secrets worth stealing. Their computer networks are primarily used just to make sure their electricity and gas supply systems are working properly, so almost by definition any attack on them has to be intended to disrupt or interfere with the operations of the companies. These hackers don’t care about leaving a trail and it’s fairly obvious that causing damage is precisely what they intend to do.’

  ‘So who are the players this time?’ Tim Inskip asked. ‘Are you looking at Russia, or North Korea, or where?’

  ‘This is where things get slightly murky,’ Boston replied, ‘or rather murkier. The feedback I’ve had from GCHQ and the FBI, and from C-TAC in fact, suggests that most of the attacks have been domestic. As usual, the locations of the attempted intrusions have been carefully concealed, the origin of the attack bounced around the world from one nation to another before reaching the target, but the one place they always seem to come back to is America. Even those attacks mounted here in Britain seem to have the same path, which is another reason why we think we’re looking at a single group rather than a bunch of individuals.’