Firewall

by Andy McNab

  Petersburg train, going on to Moscow, was leaving from Platform 8 at 3:34 just over half an hour's time.

  They talked for another ten minutes and then both stood up. Liv's contact picked up her bags in one hand, his briefcase in another, and they walked toward the platform doors.

  Alarm bells started to ring in my head. Why had he picked up her bags?

  My heart started to pound even harder when they both went through the doors and out onto the snow-covered platform. Shit, was she going with him? Maybe the courier had just given her the news about what had happened at Microsoft HQ and Liv was bailing out while she could.

  I counted to ten and pushed my way out into the cold. Platform 8 was to the right of me as I headed toward the luggage lockers. The snow was falling gently and there wasn't a breath of wind. I walked with my head down, hands in pockets. Glancing sideways across the tracks, I saw they were heading for the cars about midway along the train. I walked slowly toward the left-luggage room, watching until they got on board. Then, checking my watch as if I'd just remembered something, I turned on my heels. There were about seventeen minutes to go before they left for St. Petersburg, and it looked like I'd have to go with them.

  I went past two of the Russian train staff, standing in the guard's van at the rear of the train, their high-peaked, Nazi-officer-style caps pushed onto the backs of their heads as they glumly took a swig of whatever was in their bottle.

  I climbed aboard and entered a clean, though very old car, with a corridor facing the platform and compartments all the way along to my right. I moved along the warm walkway and sat down on one of the hard, fabric-covered seats in the first empty compartment. The strong, almost-scented cigarette smell probably never left these trains.

  What now? I had money but no visa. How was I going to cross into Russia? Hiding in the rest rooms only works in Agatha Christie movies.

  Maybe a bribe could get me in. I'd play the dickhead tourist who hadn't got a clue about needing a passport, let alone a visa, and offer to be very generous with my dollars if they would just be so kind as to stamp me in or whatever they could do for me. After all, only a lunatic would want to get into Russia illegally.

  I sat and watched snow-covered Nazi hats strolling along the platforms below the windows. My carotid pulse was throbbing on both sides of my neck and there was a pain running up the center of my chest as I heard whistles being blown and the heavy car doors slamming closed.

  I checked Baby G-three minutes to go. It wasn't dealing with the guards and immigration people that was getting me stressed; it was the possibility of losing Liv, my only quick and certain link to Val.

  My compartment door was pulled open and an old woman in a long fur came in, carrying a small overnight bag. She muttered something and I gave a grunt in reply. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of black leather moving on the platform. Now what was happening? Liv carried on past with her bags, head down against the snow.

  I felt huge relief as I jumped up and moved along the corridor, but I couldn't get out yet in case the courier was watching her and wondered why someone else had decided to jump train.

  She disappeared into the station and I leaped onto the platform, not checking to see if he was looking, and headed for the doors she had just passed through. I spotted her hat above the crowd, heading for the bus station exit. She must know by now that there was no message in the box. I fell in behind, waiting for my chance to grip her. I was about twenty paces behind as she pushed her way through the bus station doors. Once through them myself, I looked out into the snowfall. All I could see were buses and lines of people trying to get on them; Liv must have turned off as soon as she hit the sidewalk.

  I was moving down the steps when there was a shout behind me. "Nick!

  Nick!"

  I stopped, spun round, and looked back up toward the doors.

  "Liv! How lovely to see you."

  She was standing by one of the pillars, left of the doors, smiling, arms outstretched, getting ready to greet another of her long-lost friends. I switched on and played the game, walking into her arms, letting her kiss me on both cheeks. She smelled great, but what I could see of her hair under her hat wasn't as well groomed as usual and was knotted at the ends.

  "I thought I would wait for you. I knew you would be around somewhere, otherwise why leave an empty container?"

  Still embracing, I looked at her with my wonderful-to see-you smile.

  "Tom is dead," I said.

  The look on her face told me she knew how I felt. She pulled back and smiled. "Come, walk with me. You have a right to be angry, but all is not lost, Nick." She invited me with her gloved hand to carry her bags. As I bent down I saw the boyfriend's light-brown briefcase.

  Still smiling at her, I gripped her arm and more or less pulled her down the stairs. Once on the sidewalk I turned right, toward the front of the station and the town center. "What the fuck's going on?

  We got hit by an American team last night. I was lifted. Then the fucking Russians hit them!"

  She nodded as I ranted away at her, doing her normal trick of knowing everything but giving very little away.

  I said, "You already know that, don't you?"

  "Of course. Valentin always finds out everything."

  "You and Val have been fucking me over big time. Enough. I want him here tomorrow, with the money. Then I'll give him what he wants. I have the Think Pad and it's downloaded with what you want." I wished I'd taken Tom up on his offer back at the lead house to let him tell me exactly what he was doing.

  She hadn't even been listening. "Are you sure Tom is dead?"

  "If he's out in this shit " I held my hand out.

  She looked exactly the same as she had done in the hotel, calm and in control, almost as if she was in another place and I wasn't talking to her.

  I increased my grip on her arm and guided her down the road, not caring what passers-by might think.

  "Listen, I have the download. But I'll only deal with Val now, not you. There will be no more fuckups."

  "Yes, Nick, I heard you the first time. Now tell me, this is very important. Valentin will not do a thing unless he has all the details.

  Did the Americans take all of the hardware with them from the house?"

  "Yes."

  "Did the Americans capture any of the occupants from the house?"

  "Yes. I saw three."

  "Did the Maliskia then manage to take any of the hardware or occupants from the Americans?"

  She was like a doctor working through a list of symptoms with a patient.

  "Not the occupants. They got one of the wagons that contained some hardware, for sure."

  She nodded slowly. We joined a small crowd at a crossing, waiting for the green man to illuminate, even though there was no traffic to stop us all crossing.

  I whispered into her ear. "This is bullshit, Liv. I want Val here, with the money, then I'll hand everything over and fuck off and leave all of you to it."

  My rhetoric was having no effect on her whatsoever. We crossed the main drag to the sound of the warbling signal, heading for the cobblestoned pedestrian shopping area.

  "That, Nick, will not happen. He will not come, for the simple reason that you haven't anything to trade, have you?" She spoke very evenly.

  "Now, please answer my questions. This is very important. For everyone, including you."

  Fuck her, I wasn't waiting for any more questions. Besides, she was right again. "Why did the Americans hit the house? Whatever we were going in for belongs to them, doesn't it? It's not commercial, it's state."

  She treated me to her best Mr. Spock look as I dragged her along.

  "Turn right here."

  I turned the corner. We were on one of the shopping streets.

  Streetcars, cars, and trucks splashed through the slush.

  "The Americans were NSA, Nick."

  Oh fuck. My heart sank to hear my suspicion confirmed and the pain returned to my chest. I wanted money, but not that ba
dly. This was a big boy fuckup. Those people were the real government of America. "Are you sure?"

  She nodded. "They also hit my house last night about two hours after you left."

  "How did you get away?"

  She flicked at the ends of her hair. "By having a very cold and long night out on the lake."

  "How did they know to hit you?"

  "They must have been guided to the house, but I don't know how. Now please, you are just wasting time and we don't have a lot of it."

  I didn't even notice a van passing and giving my jeans and her coat the good news with some slush. I was busy feeling more depressed than pissed now. The NSA. I really was in the shit.

  She gave me more directions. "Cross here."

  We waited like sheep again until a little green man told us to cross.

  Jaywalking must carry the death penalty in this country. Moving on green, it was safe to talk again.

  "Tell me, did you or Tom use e-mail, telephone, fax, or anything like that while you were at the house?"

  "Of course not, no."

  And then I remembered what had happened at the airport. "Wait. Tom did. Tom "

  She turned her head sharply. "What? What did Tom do?"

  "He used e-mail. He sent an e-mail to someone in the U.K."

  The calm, controlled look drained from her face. She stood still, pushing me away as people skipped around what looked like a domestic spat just about to erupt.

  "I told you both not to do that!"

  I pulled her back toward me, as if I was in command, leading her down the street. She composed herself, and finally, very calmly, she said, "So, it was Tom who brought the Americans here." She pointed to the right, down another cobblestoned street. "Valentin wants me to show you something, then I am to make you an offer that your pocket and conscience will not let you refuse. Come. This way."

  As we turned I decided to keep quiet about the fact that it wasn't necessarily Tom's fault. E4 might have followed me from the moment I left her apartment in London, or kept tabs on us via Tom's credit card.

  But fuck it; I couldn't do anything about that now.

  We'd ended up by the harbor. A fish and vegetable market had been set up on the dock, steam billowing from under plastic awnings that protected the traders and their merchandise from the snow.

  "Over there, Nick."

  My eyes followed hers, hitting on what looked like the world's largest Victorian conservatory a couple of hundred yards away from the market.

  "Let's go and get out of the cold, Nick. I think it's time you knew what's really going on."

  * * *

  26

  The teahouse was hot and filled with the aroma of coffee and cigarettes. We bought food and drinks from the counter and headed for a vacant table in a corner.

  With our coats over a spare seat and her hat now removed, it was even more obvious that Liv had had a bad night. We must both have looked pretty rough compared with the American tourists who were beginning to fill the place, fresh off the cruise liner I could see down in the harbor. The sharp hiss of the cappuccino machine punctuated their conversations, which for some reason were louder than everybody else's.

  The Finns seemed to speak very quietly.

  Our table was by a grand piano and partly screened by potted palms. The less conspicuous the better. Liv leaned forward and took a sip of tea from her glass while I shoved a salmon sandwich down my throat. She watched me for a while, then asked, "Nick, what do you know of the U.K./U.S.A. agreement?"

  A camera flash bounced around as the tourists posed with their tea glasses and big wedges of chocolate cake. I took a swig of tea. I knew the bones of it. Set up by Britain and America in the late 1940s, since when Canada, Australia, and New Zealand had also become part of the club, the agreement basically covered the pooling of intelligence on mutual enemies. Beyond that, however, the member countries also used their resources to spy on each other: In particular, the U.K. spied on American citizens in the U.S.A." and the Americans spied on British citizens in the U.K." and then they traded. Technically it wasn't illegal, just a very neat way of getting round strict civil liberties legislation.

  Liv's eyes followed three elderly Americans in multicolored down jackets as they squeezed past our table, loaded down with tea trays and elegant paper shopping bags full of Finnish crafts. They didn't seem able to make a decision about where to sit.

  Liv looked back at me. "Nick, the three men in the house last night were Finns. They were engaged in accessing a technology called Echelon, which is at the very heart of the agreement."

  "You mean you were trying to get Tom and me to access state secrets for the Russian mafia?"

  She looked calmly around the other tables and took another sip of tea.

  She shook her head. "It's not like that at all, Nick. I didn't explain everything to you before, for reasons that I'm sure you will understand, but Valentin wants commercial information, that's all.

  Believe me, Nick, you were not stealing secrets, state or military.

  Quite the contrary: You were helping to stop others from doing precisely that."

  "So how come the NSA were involved?"

  "They simply wanted their toy back. I promise you, Valentin has no interest in the West's military secrets. He can get those whenever he wants; it's not exactly difficult, as I'll demonstrate to you shortly."

  She glanced at the Americans to make sure they weren't listening, then back at me. "What do you know of Echelon?"

  I knew it was some kind of electronic eavesdropping system run by GCHQ, intercepting transmissions and then sifting them for information, a bit like an Internet search engine. However, I shrugged as if I knew nothing at all, I was more interested in hearing what she knew.

  Liv sounded as if she was reading from the Echelon sales brochure.

  "It's a global network of computers, run by all five nations of the U.K./U.S.A. agreement. Every second of every day, Echelon automatically sifts through millions of intercepted faxes, e-mails, and cell phone calls, searching for preprogrammed key words or numbers.

  "As a security precaution in our organization, we used to spell out certain words over the phone, but now even that has been overtaken by voice recognition. The fact is, Nick, any message sent electronically, anywhere in the world, is routinely intercepted and analyzed by Echelon.

  "The processors in the network are known as the Echelon dictionaries.

  An Echelon station, and there are at least a dozen of them around the world, contains not only its parent nation's specific dictionary, but also lists for each of the other four countries in the U.K./U.S.A. system. What Echelon does is to connect all these dictionaries together and allow all the individual listening stations to function as one integrated system.

  "For years Echelon has helped the West shape international treaties and negotiations in their favor, to know anything from the health status of Boris Yeltsin to the bottom-line position of trading partners. That's serious information to get hold of, Nick. Why do you think we are careful not to use any form of electronic communication? We know that we are tagged by Echelon. Who isn't? Princess Diana's calls were monitored because of her work against land mines Charities like Amnesty International and Christian Aid are listened to because they have access to details about controversial regimes. From the moment Tom started working at Menwith Hill, every fax and e-mail he sent, as well as phone calls, would have been intercepted and checked.

  "Those Finns had designed a system to hack into Echelon and piggyback off it. The firewall that Tom breached was their protection around that system, to stop them being detected and traced. They were online last night for the very first time."

  "Trying to do what? Hack into NSA headquarters or something?"

  She shook her head slowly, as if in disbelief at their naivete. "We knew from our sources that their sole objective was to pick up sensitive market information that they could then profit from. All they wanted was to make a few million dollars here and there; they
didn't understand the true potential of what they had created."

  "But what has all this got to do with me?" I asked. "What is Val's offer?"

  She leaned even closer, as if we were exchanging words of love. We might as well have been, the way she spoke with such passion.

  "Nick, it's very important to me that you understand Valentin's motives. Of course he wants to make money out of this, but more than that, he wants the East eventually to be an equal trading partner with the West, and that is never going to happen as long as ambitious men like him do not have access to commercial information that only Echelon can provide."

  "Ambitious?" I laughed. "I can think of plenty of other words I'd use before that one to describe ROC."

  She shook her head. "Think of America a hundred and fifty years ago and you have Russia now. Men like Vanderbilt didn't always stay within the law to achieve their aims. But they created wealth, a powerful middle class, and that, in time, creates political stability. That is how you must see Valentin; he's not a Dillinger, he's a Rockefeller."

  "Okay, Val is businessman of the year. Why didn't he just strike a deal with the Finns?"

  "It doesn't work like that. It would have alerted them to what they had, and then they'd have sold it to the highest bidder. Valentin didn't want to take that chance. He was happy for them to make access and try to play the markets while he found out where they were, and got to them before the Maliskia."

  "And the Americans?"

  "If you had been successful last night in downloading the program, Valentin would have told the Americans where the house was. They would then have gone in and closed it down without knowing that he also had access to Echelon. Remember what I said in London, that nobody must know "

  Very clever, I thought. Val would have carried on logging on to Echelon, and the West would have slept soundly in its bed.

  "But the Americans did know."

  "Yes, but our security was watertight. The only way they could have found out was through Tom."

  Before we got sidetracked into conjecture about who was to blame, there were plenty of other questions I wanted the answers to. "Liv, why Finland?"