The Shadow Game

by Steve Lewis

  ‘Its aim was to guide our democracies, not usurp them.’

  He rapped the table to emphasise the argument.

  ‘We have only acted . . . should only act . . . to correct the errors of politicians who are driven by the winds of the day. Very rarely we have acted to remove those, like Bailey and Paxton, who posed a direct threat to our security.’

  Ryan was confused and wanted Dalton to end the speech and get to the point.

  ‘And Richard, that is what we have done. In hindsight, Paxton wasn’t in the clutches of the Chinese but he might as well have been the way he slashed the defence budget. Bailey is still a clear and present threat to national security. So far, the mad fucking witch has proved impossible to drown. But I haven’t given up hope.’

  Dalton shook his head, his voice now a whisper.

  ‘She is far more dangerous than you know. When she was prime minister she managed to compromise the entire defence and intelligence computer network. It was shovelling out information to the Chinese for about three months before we discovered the wormhole and shut it.’

  Ryan was stunned.

  ‘Jesus, Richard, why are you only telling me this now?’

  ‘Webster. When he discovered the breach he was petrified Washington would cut off our access to Five Eyes. We grilled the poor bastard responsible, Matthew Whelan from the ASD. There were just four people in that room: Whelan, Webster, David Joyce from DFAT. And me.’

  Ryan noticed a tremor in the intelligence chief’s right hand as it rested on the table.

  ‘Webster’s parting words are carved in my memory: “No one knows about this, ever.”’

  The spymaster shifted uneasily.

  ‘Brendan, he meant it. Three months later Whelan died from a heart attack, a fitness freak in his forties who dropped dead during a gentle jog. And the toxicology report from the autopsy disappeared. Six months later Joyce died in a car accident.’

  Ryan gazed out at the familiar and tranquil vista of the national capital, wondering if the stress of work was pushing Dalton over the edge. His extraordinary tale could not be true.

  ‘You think Webster killed them? Come on, this is Canberra, not Moscow. No, that can’t be right.’

  Ryan touched his friend’s arm, trying to reassure him.

  ‘I’m certain he did.’ Dalton was unmoved. ‘There were four men in that meeting and two are dead. And they are not the only ones, Brendan. Do you remember the security analyst who was murdered in Telopea Park some years back?’

  ‘Yes, Kimberley Gordon. You told me the Chinese killed her. That’s what I told her mate Harry Dunkley.’

  ‘It wasn’t Beijing, it was Webster.’ Dalton was shaking his head. ‘He has an acolyte in ASIS. Charles Dancer. Acts as his garbage collector and enforcer. The night Gordon was murdered, the ASD sent a message telling Dancer exactly where to find her.’

  The spy chief put his hand inside his suit jacket and pulled out a thumb drive.

  ‘It’s all on this.’

  He placed the USB on the table, then pushed it towards Ryan.

  ‘It was pulled from the gut of a Chinese defector who drowned in the lake. He’d downloaded a trove of information which he wanted to use to barter with the Americans for asylum. That’s how we discovered the wormhole.’

  Ryan picked up the USB and rolled it in his fingers as Dalton continued.

  ‘But I have added many more chapters to it. Everything I’ve gathered on Webster, using all the resources at my disposal. Like his hero, George Patton, Webster has an unshakeable sense of destiny. He believes he was ordained to rule, so killing those who threaten him isn’t just necessary, it’s moral.’

  Dalton pointed at the memory stick in Ryan’s hand.

  ‘What you hold would destroy him in an afternoon.’

  ‘What do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘Keep it. And if I die . . . if I get hit by a fucking meteor . . . then you’ll know that Jack Webster’s murdered me. If that happens, I want you to kill him with that.’

  Ryan placed the USB back on the table, eyeing it as if it were a nuclear fuel rod.

  ‘This is way over my pay grade. Why give it to me?’

  ‘Because, you are the only one left I can trust.’

  Ryan weighed up the words of his friend. He was still deeply sceptical, and even if it was true, the last thing he wanted was to be dragged into a power game where people got killed.

  He reluctantly picked up the USB, put it in his pocket and stood to leave.

  Dalton rose with him.

  ‘By the way, my friend, how safe do you feel?’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Canberra

  The codebreaker felt the crack of his knuckles as he locked his fingers together and pushed his palms outwards. For the past three hours he’d cleared the clutter from his office and wiped down his desk as a way of cleansing his mind.

  A pair of iMacs turbo-boosted to 3.9GHz waited to be cranked into action. A soundtrack of ’70s kitsch burbled from a pair of Harman Kardons while a manila folder of newspaper clippings sat on his desk.

  Trevor Harris had a plan.

  He opened the folder and pulled out a glowing Good Weekend profile of Jack Webster, written after his Press Club address. In it, the defence chief had spoken of his admiration for General George Patton and revealed that his most prized possession was the US war hero’s 1909 Patek Philippe pocket watch.

  A simple search showed that the timepiece had been sold a month earlier by Heritage Auctions in New York. Another search found the auction house’s website. It was as Harris had suspected: you needed to create an account to purchase items online.

  ‘Bingo!’

  Harris had prepared well. He’d loaded message-encrypting software onto Harry Dunkley’s phone then asked him to contact Martin Toohey to check if the former prime minister had ever received an email from Sir Jack’s private address.

  Dunkley had delivered. Harris had scribbled the address across the statesmanlike full-page shot of Webster that formed the cover of the Good Weekend: airwebster@gmail.com.

  He scrolled through icons on the first iMac, clicking on ‘John the Ripper Pro’. The program cracked passwords with brute force, running a super-fast exhaustive search using every combination of letters, symbols and numbers.

  If Harris had to find both a username and password the search could take months. But he was confident Webster’s email address would double as his username, because that’s what ninety per cent of people did. That left the password. And Harris knew that humans were creatures of habit.

  Before being driven from the career he loved, Harris had led an elite group at the old Defence Signals Directorate. The ultra-secret agency’s primary role had been to hoover up signals intelligence across the Asia–Pacific, using satellites beamed to four highly sophisticated receiving stations: Bamaga on the tip of Cape York, Shoal Bay in the Northern Territory, Kojarena in Western Australia and the Cocos Islands.

  Harris’s speciality was breaking and entering: cracking into the secure communications of foreign governments and corporations and deciphering their secrets. In this world of clandestine specialists, Harris was still considered Australia’s foremost hacker and cryptologist.

  As he keyed in instructions to ‘John the Ripper Pro’, he was reminded of the advice he’d often given budding government hackers.

  ‘Everyone hates having to remember multiple passwords and that laziness is our best friend,’ he would tell them. ‘The place to start is the target’s partner’s, child’s or pet’s name, followed by a zero or one, because most systems now demand a numerical component. If that fails, then try – and I am not kidding – 1234 or 123456 and so on, depending on the length of the password required by the site administrator.’

  Then he’d add the kicker: ‘You’d be shocked by the number of senior public servants who simply use “password”.’

  Harris reckoned he already had the basis of Webster’s password: George Patton. But the defence
chief would have been repeatedly warned that he needed to reinforce its security by adding embellishments. The simplest trick was to swap a letter for a number or symbol: a ‘3’ for ‘E’, ‘@’ for ‘a’, and so on.

  The analyst keyed in a series of options then set his brute force program running. He wanted the grunt of one computer devoted to that single task, so he turned to the other iMac for the hunt that would require his guile and finesse.

  Again, the codebreaker had an advantage. He had repeatedly raged about the Commonwealth’s lax cyber security. One of his pet hates was ICON. The Intra Government Communications Network had been set up in 1991 when the Department of Foreign Affairs ran a cable between its old headquarters in the John Gorton Building and its new premises in York Park, in order to connect its teletype machines. From small beginnings in what now seemed an absurdly innocent age, it had grown into a network that provided ‘secure communications’ across four hundred buildings in the capital.

  ‘And the security on it is shit,’ Harris mumbled as his fingers stabbed at his keyboard.

  There were more than a thousand manholes around Canberra where ICON’s cables were protected only by a plastic cover secured with a padlock. Telstra maintenance crews routinely used bolt-cutters instead of keys to open them. Then they would fit a new lock to cover their laziness. Harris had pictures of sites littered with the discarded brass locks.

  If the physical security was bad, the virtual security was worse. A Finance Department audit had shown that most agencies failed to encrypt the information transmitted on ICON’s fibres. Even a novice hacker could break in.

  Trevor Harris was no novice. Today he was going to put the cracks in the system to the test.

  The Commonwealth’s problem was gateways: there were corridors from one agency to the next and ICON left the front door wide open. Once inside, Harris was sure he could plot a pathway to the nation’s most secure files.

  He walked through the front door then set his course for the weakest link.

  Harris was aware that those who design security systems often fail because they think of them as individual units rather than one part of a larger entity, like cells in a human body. Millions of dollars were poured into forging cyber shields for sensitive sites. But putting steel-cap boots on your feet matters little if your body can be infected by a paper cut to your hand, Harris reflected.

  Within minutes the Bureau of Meteorology site lay open. Valuable intellectual property that could have been sold to other nations lay within easy reach, but this was just a way station on Harris’s journey.

  As weather forecasts are vital in military operations, he knew there would be a pathway to the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. And the people in need of this specialised weather data? The commanding officers. Child’s play, thought Harris.

  He quickly found the one commander he was looking for: ‘WebsterJ’.

  ‘Follow the yellow brick road.’ Harris smiled as the computer next to him pinged.

  The 3DR SOLO Smart Drone hovered above the oval, the high-pitched whirr of its four props barely audible.

  The operative monitored its flight path through a smartphone connected to the remote console. A hundred metres into the sky, the GoPro camera add-on was transmitting crisp high-resolution images of the nearby townhouse.

  The drone had cost $1800 online, but attached to its small chassis were tens of thousands of dollars in sophisticated circuitry, developed after tens of millions had been ploughed into R&D.

  It was mid-afternoon and the oval on the edge of Yarralumla Primary was near empty. A couple was wrestling with an errant pup and several schoolchildren had wandered towards the operative, fascinated. He smiled politely, then ignored them.

  The target had demanded specialist skills and equipment. The brief said he was a pro, and his behaviour proved it. His online connections were scant and random. When he was on the web, he used the strongest armour. And when he went offline, he disconnected every cable.

  The operative had never seen a better set of defences. But nothing was impregnable.

  There was one routine. Each day the target walked to the nearby shopping centre to pick up basics: milk, bread, newspapers. The round trip took fifteen minutes. It had been more than enough time.

  The front-door lock had been picked in a moment and the back-to-base security system easily disabled.

  The operative had walked through the mess to the two iMacs in an office facing the street. It had taken him barely a minute to prise open the power board, set his device and close it. He’d reset the security system and left. He’d checked his watch: less than five minutes.

  In that short time he’d established a link that used a covert channel of radio waves. It would be activated when the computers were turned on, irrespective of whether they were connected to the internet.

  It was the US National Security Agency that had found a way to crack ‘air gapped’ networks. Code-named Quantum, the technology was shared with only the most trusted of allies. Australia was one.

  Now, as the afternoon sun shimmered on the nearby lake, the drone picked up a strong pulse. The target was active. The operative touched an icon on his smartphone. Five seconds later he began transmitting to base.

  The routine of the day was punctured when the technician’s monitor flashed amber alert. The target was online and trawling. Expertly, she linked to Quantum which was already pumping out bytes of data.

  The target had broken into a remote system and was downloading documents at breakneck speed. She was peering over his shoulder, impressed that he’d managed to gain access through a maze of connections.

  The computer spat out the entry point: ICON. It jumped to the Bureau of Meteorology then moved up the chain: Russell Defence Weather System; Defence Internal; Secure Network; Commanders.

  The targeted profile flashed on her screen.

  She grabbed her phone and punched a name on speed dial.

  ‘Sir, we have a serious problem.’

  The iMac motors were in overdrive, and every second on the inside raised the risk of being caught. Trevor Harris moved with the calm precision of a practised criminal: quick, clean, no fingerprints.

  He had stalked many dangerous prey in his career – but this one was deadly.

  Once he’d reached Jack Webster’s profile, cracking his security wall had been ridiculously easy. The username was public service boilerplate. Harris’s second iMac had unearthed the defence chief’s auction house password: G3orgeP@tton4. It had been created two months earlier, so Harris had simply changed the last digit to ‘6’. He was in.

  Then he tunnelled deeper, sifting through Webster’s shared drives until he reached the prize: the desktop. Harris knew any gold would be stored on its hard drive.

  Within seconds he was in and began downloading every document. A thin white line moved left to right across the top of his screen, marking off the precious seconds to completion as the files marched from Webster’s world into the cyber hacker’s clutches.

  Harris took no chances. Everything was saved to his desktop, a thumb drive and to a secure virtual vault that he’d created years earlier. The system was bombproof.

  All he needed was another five minutes.

  ‘System breach. Shut down your computer.’

  Charles Dancer’s voice barked in Jack Webster’s ear, jolting the defence chief from his perusal of an intelligence brief.

  ‘Shut it down. Now!’

  ‘Hang on.’

  Webster strode to his desk with his phone in his left hand and tapped the keyboard with his right. His PC demanded his username and password before unfolding to the usual bland landscape of icons.

  ‘I can’t see anything wrong.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You’ve been compromised. Every second raises the threat.’

  Webster moved the mouse, but the cursor didn’t budge. He tapped the keyboard again.

  ‘The screen’s locked,’ he told Dancer.

  ‘Pull the plug. Quic
kly!’

  The defence chief put down his phone and wrenched the screen to the right, scrambling to find the power cord. A tangle of cables disappeared down a hole at the back of his desk.

  He tore the screen from its mooring and lifted it above his head before bringing it crashing down on the black box of the central processing unit. Metal twisted and glass showered across his desk.

  The office of the most powerful military man in the land filled with smoke.

  The connection was broken.

  There were many possible reasons, but Harris feared he’d been seen. He immediately shut down his system and yanked the power board from the wall.

  Only then did the codebreaker feel the stress of the past hour. He was drenched in sweat and his head was pounding.

  Think. This man is deadly and he commands an army.

  Harris had to assume that someone would come after the data. Or him. Or both. He was confident he’d left no fingerprints, but couldn’t risk going online again.

  The stolen documents had been backed up on a thumb drive and also sent to a secure cloud server. But his adversary was ruthless and skilled. No matter what happened, the data had to survive.

  Harry Dunkley was right: they had not started this fight and they would only find peace when the warlord was defeated.

  There is a way. An old pathway, but reliable. Hiding in plain sight.

  Harris put the thumb drive in his pocket and stood up, stretching his back, trying to relieve the stress. A quick walk to the shops would be therapeutic, then back to work, sifting through files offline.

  He’d call Dunkley if he found anything useful, but he knew from bitter experience that you had to pan a mountain of dirt to find an ounce of gold.

  He stepped from his dark townhouse into a dazzling day.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Canberra

  Harry Dunkley’s phone shook. There was a note on the Cryptocat secure messaging system. Trevor Harris had scoffed when Dunkley told him Martin Toohey used Confide.