He removed his head and closed the door. Julian watched him walk up the slope into the light and sat there for several minutes, his gut in knots, before getting into the driver’s seat.
FIFTEEN
The doctor was sweating, despite his office being air-conditioned. Mojgan sat facing him, one buttock on the desk to give herself a height advantage, and waited. There was an examination table in the corner, a small sink and a lightbox on the wall which she assumed was to study X-rays. The doctor was balding and very thin.
‘Twelve months?’ he asked in Farsi.
‘Yes,’ she said. She’d found his name on a spreadsheet back in Tehran; known exiles abroad who had spoken out against the Republic in one form or another, either online or in print. She’d sorted the list by profession and hit upon this man in the group of doctors. A cancer specialist. He had family back in Tehran – an ageing father with health problems.
‘I don’t have to tell you that of course I disagree with many of the sanctions,’ he was saying, attempting, by way of a smile, to resurrect some of the oily charm he’d first displayed when she’d arrived at his private clinic on Harley Street pretending to be a patient. ‘They have placed an intolerable burden in terms of banking and the transfer of money back home.’ Realizing that he was complaining about his own financial situation, he tried a more professional air, moving on to a safer topic. ‘I should, of course, examine the patient and at least see her medical notes, but given the circumstances …’
‘So, a twelve-month course of Herceptin – can you get it for me?’
‘Yes, yes. To be taken every three weeks. Can she get it infused?’
‘We have hospitals and doctors in Iran, just no medicine,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from going shrill.
He reddened and nodded. ‘Of course, of course. I will get it for you, in concentrated powder form. It will be easier to transport. Can you come next week?’
‘I’ll come in two days.’
‘Of course, two days.’
She stood up and walked to the door, thinking that he might try to be a man between now and when they next met. She turned to say,’Your father has a nice flat in central Tehran, does he not? He gets a pension, healthcare. He wants for nothing?’
‘Yes, yes he does, praise be to God. No complaints.’
‘Good, then let there be no more complaints. This will put you in a good light, what you are doing. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.’
Outside, on Harley Street, feeling, as she always did after such an encounter, a little nauseated, she stood to take her bearings. She could have used her phone to locate herself but she had disabled the GPS facility on it. Oxford Street was somewhere near here, but which direction? She would like to buy some more comfortable shoes, she was doing a lot of walking. Maybe also get a new shirt for Farsheed. Her phone vibrated with the promise of a text.
Happy holidays was all it said. Time to start researching the target whose name she had memorized in Tehran. It was easy to recall because all she had to do was ask if he ‘had a fish?’ and it was forever engraved on her brain. She walked in what looked like the right direction to the shops, removing the SIM card as she went and dropping it between two parked cars into a drain.
SIXTEEN
When a long-held fear becomes reality after years of being just an unrealized fear, you would expect some release, thought Julian. A cathartic liberation from your worst imaginings. If he had expected freedom from the anxiety that had been festering in the back of his mind – festering ever since he had quit British Aerospace in 1988 and Boris had gone back to what was still the USSR – he was wrong. He had always dreaded seeing Boris again, or being confronted by someone who knew something of his past. Every time he met someone new, or was approached in the street, or asked an innocuous question (like Cassie asking if he’s been to Moscow), it was there, like a tumour in his brain. But all that seemed to have happened was that the fear had now spread to his whole being. He was going around as if in a surreal and unpleasant dream that he could not wake from. Sleep was disrupted by night sweats and his gut was worse than ever.
After meeting Boris, once home, he’d barely spoken to Sheila for fear he’d unwittingly tell her what had happened, and was able only to send a late-night text telling Rami his U-turn decision. Rami was pleased, but seemed incurious as to why, after so much argument, Julian had given in. But that was just as well, because Julian wasn’t sure how he could explain it. So the following day Rami came into his office with a happy grin on his face. He closed the door and carefully placed a Jiffy bag on Julian’s desk before sitting opposite.
Julian had been shy as a child; girls had terrified him and he hated being called on by the teacher in class. Things had improved as he’d stumbled into adulthood, but he still considered himself an introvert and was happiest working on his own. He let Rami handle the presentations for pitches, although he was always there to explain the technical stuff, but contentment came when getting into the code with the developers, or even better, having a go himself. Which is why, over the next forty-eight hours, when it became apparent what Boris wanted, part of him couldn’t help but relish the potential work involved. Besides, he had decided that the best way to get rid of Boris was to do what he asked as quickly as he could.
Within the padded safety of the Jiffy bag was a circuit board, no bigger than the size of a very thin paperback, and two pages of badly written requirements that could be boiled down to: is this system robust? In other words, could someone take over the drone using fake GPS signals and control it themselves? This rang a bell with Julian, and an Internet search revealed an article in which Iran claimed that they had taken over a pilotless CIA drone and landed it in Iran. He watched footage of it, virtually intact, shown on Iranian TV. An Iranian engineer said that they had exploited a weakness in the GPS navigation system – which is the most vulnerable part of the drone – and broadcast their own GPS coordinates to it, fooling it into landing on their territory. Boris had mentioned Iran when they’d met, but he was unclear as to whom he was now working for, if anyone. It sounded like he was trying to line his own pockets, to build a nest egg for his old age, which he seemed to be slipping into rather ungraciously. He was probably making use of his vast network and acting as a paid consultant. The best, if not only, option open to Julian was to get the job done and dusted and let Boris move on and out of his life. He plugged the circuit board into his laptop and fired up some debugging software that allowed him to see what was on it.
He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he was surprised to see Naomi standing before his desk holding a sandwich and a steaming cardboard cup; he hadn’t heard her come in despite the door being closed.
‘Sorry to bother you. You’ve been cooped up since this morning and it’s past lunch so I thought you might want something.’ She put the food and drink on his desk.
Julian looked at his watch; it was two in the afternoon. ‘Thanks, I lost track of time.’
She smiled and went to the door, where she hesitated. ‘I saw Rami in here this morning and I was just wondering whether you’d asked him about, you know, that thing we talked about. I’m keen to get them off to the accountants.’
‘The expenses. Sorry, I’ve been really busy the last couple of days. Is he there now?’
‘No, he left before lunch.’
‘OK. I promise I’ll do it as soon as I’m done with this piece of work.’
Once she was gone Julian unwrapped his freshly made sandwich. The coffee was black and sugarless, just as he liked it. He’d forgotten about the money thing, justifiably, and made a mental note to speak to Rami when he next saw him. He settled back to his reading.
Julian’s initial idea of what Boris wanted was slightly off target. What the UAV designers had done was to compensate for the possibility of GPS spoofing – i.e. taking over the GPS signal and controlling the UAV – by introducing other ways of tracking it in the form of movement detectors (gyroscopes and accelerom
eters) which were used to determine the physical path of the UAV independently from the GPS system. So if there was a discrepancy between the two systems it could adjust the flight path accordingly, or alert an operator via a data satellite link. It looked like a sensible approach, but the key thing was whether they had got the maths right and what parameters were used when this compensation was done on board, as the dangers of accumulated error could lead to drift.
Flying a drone was like blindfolding someone, setting them off in a straight line towards a door, then nudging them off their path ever so slightly. Every time you did that and the person tried to adjust their direction towards where they thought they should be going, it introduced a new error. So it was with UAVs, and a bit of mathematics was needed to minimize this error by deciding which measurements to use according to their certainty. By averaging out the errors, it could work out any corrections needed to the trajectory. As this process was recursive – measurements taken, corrections made, new measurements taken, etc. – this could all be done in real time.
So far so good, Julian thought. He had a good understanding of the overall system. He reached for his coffee. It was cold. His sandwich was half-eaten. He looked at the clock on the wall: 18.45. Through his door he could see the main office was empty except for a cleaner hoovering the carpet. He unplugged the circuit board from his laptop and put it back in its bag. Rami had said it wasn’t to leave the office, but Julian felt happier if he had it with him. Besides, he would probably want to check something later on, probably in the middle of the night when it woke him up. As he locked up and turned off the lights he felt a slight pang of disappointment that Naomi hadn’t said goodnight before she’d left.
SEVENTEEN
Mojgan lay face down on the bed in just a T-shirt, trying to forget her failed evening by sliding her right hand between her legs, thighs pressed hard together. She was thinking of Farsheed but there were voices in the hotel corridor, people passing her door. She gave up and got under the covers. She wanted desperately to ring him, to hear his voice. She pictured him in the kitchen of their small Tehran apartment, located in the Zafaraniyeh area of the city near a synagogue and just a thirty-minute walk from one of the residential houses owned by the Ministry of Intelligence. It was there that she, Farsheed and others all worked surrounded by servers, network cable and terminals.
Apart from the bedroom, it was the kitchen where Farsheed liked to spend his time, making adas polow or other dishes picked up from his father. How Farsheed had wangled the apartment – in one of the most affluent areas of Tehran – was unclear to Mojgan, but she saw it as one of the perks of his technical expertise and rapid rise in the organization. Many of their neighbours were, like them, abroad a lot of the time, and Farsheed and Mojgan informed them that they did business in Europe, and that they were in ‘computers’. This was true to an extent, and since many of their neighbours were also in business, they didn’t question it. The area was a far cry from the less well-to-do east of the city where the Ministry of Intelligence building was situated, somewhere Farsheed often had to go and report.
In the hot Tehran summer, since they were not overlooked, Farsheed would often walk around the place naked. Especially after making love. He would laugh at her for calling it that, but she could not call it what he called it, although she liked to hear his crude utterances when they were in physical union. Her hand moved down over her belly. She closed her eyes, thinking of his voice. But again, there were people in the hall, women this time, coming back from a night out, loud with alcohol, their laughter uncouth.
She got out of bed and went to the window. She had moved to a hotel on a corner of Euston Square, opposite Euston Station, and was on the top floor. She could see Euston Square down below. London seemed to be full of small patches of green like this. A steady stream of cars drove on the Euston Road despite it being after midnight. The hotel was perfectly placed; it took fifteen minutes to walk round the back streets, underneath the railway tracks leading into St Pancras – where she had arrived on the train – and emerge on to York Way, home of Hadfish Systems. She had established yesterday, via the Hadfish website, that there were two directors of Hadfish Systems. One, an Englishman with a sad face, was the technical director; the other, a Lebanese Christian, judging by his name, was head of business development. There was only one other named employee, an office manager, and apart from her the rest of the company was identified only by a photo of an open-plan office with a dozen programmers, two of them women, staring at screens. The Englishman was definitely the most likely target, or maybe one of the more experienced coders. There were no vacancies at the firm, which would have been the easiest way of getting inside the place.
So that morning she had reconnoitred the offices. The ground floor and entrance to the five-storey building consisted of a shared reception area complete with a bored-looking receptionist. From her Mojgan had established, by pretending to look for a cleaning job, that the whole building was cleaned at night by a company contracted by the building owners. Since most cleaners in Europe were dark-skinned in her experience, this had been her next plan of action: go in as one and be invisible – another brown person in a uniform ignored by everyone. If she’d had time she could have tried applying for a job with the cleaning company but there was no guarantee she would be sent to the building or, even if she was, that she would be asked to clean Hadfish rather than one of the other offices occupying the building. Sometimes, she thought, hacking into somewhere was easier than physically getting in. Realizing that she was standing at the window only in her T-shirt, she pulled the curtains across and got back into bed.
She needed to rethink her next move after her earlier failure that evening. At around seven thirty she’d taken up a position down the road from Hadfish towards King’s Cross station and waited. Gradually, in dribs and drabs, the cleaners came up York Way, walking rather than taking the short bus ride, probably to save money. They were distinguishable by the grey and blue tunics they wore over their clothes. She’d waited, looking for the right person, not sure who the right person was, except someone who looked vaguely similar, someone whose ID photo wouldn’t look too different. One of the things she’d noticed earlier in the day was that unless you had an appointment and signed in at the reception, you needed a swipe card to get through to the lifts. She’d felt nervous; she was happier sitting at a computer and probing weaknesses that way. But, as Farsheed was fond of saying, change involved action in the real world, not just the virtual.
Then she saw the young woman in the headscarf. Mojgan took out her own scarf and put it on. With her hair covered they looked similar enough.
As she approached, Mojgan smiled, saying, ‘Salaam, sister.’ The woman had slowed up but did not stop.
‘Wa ‘alaiki al-salaam,’ she’d said, smiling but alert, steetwise.
‘Are you going to work at the offices there?’ Mojgan had asked, pointing to the glass building up the road and walking alongside.
The woman had nodded warily.
‘I was wondering, sister, whether I could borrow your ID card and uniform in return for a hundred pounds?’
‘A hundred pounds?’ The woman had then said something in Arabic that Mojgan hadn’t understood.
‘I will return the card,’ Mojgan had said. ‘I just want to get into the offices and leave a message for my … sweetheart, you know? I will be twenty minutes.’
‘Where are you from?’ the woman had asked.
Mojgan had hesitated. ‘Turkey. The love of my life works in the building but I am forbidden to see him by my parents. I just want to leave a letter on his desk,’ she’d said slowly.
The woman had thought about it, studying her, then nodded. ‘I know. Why don’t you tell me which office he works in and I will leave the letter on his desk.’
The woman had spoken quickly in a strange English accent, and it had taken Mojgan a moment to be wrong-footed by what she’d heard; she hadn’t considered the possibility of a cleaner turnin
g down money with a sensible and helpful response.
‘Where does he work? Which company?’ the woman had asked.
‘Hadfish Systems,’ Mojgan had said, buying time to think.
‘Yes, I know it. On the top floor?’
Mojgan had nodded – that much she knew from the signs in reception.
‘Is he in the open-plan bit or in one of the side offices?’
Mojgan had remembered the photo of the office and calculated that the directors would have their own offices, so she’d chosen the latter. ‘But it is better if I go myself because I don’t know which office. Maybe you could give me your card. I’ll be ten minutes.’
‘No,’ the woman had said, shaking her head. ‘Anyway, the side offices are locked. We don’t have access unless there is someone from the company there. Maybe I could put it under the door for you?’ She had started to walk more quickly and Mojgan had realized she was losing the woman’s belief in her story. She’d briefly considered making some appeal to her as a Muslim, explaining what she was trying to do and how it might help Muslims everywhere, or perhaps trying one of the other cleaners, but she had already drawn too much attention to herself. Instead, she’d let her walk off. Approaching someone else no longer being an option, she’d walked the streets back to her hotel in low spirits.
Disengaged Page 6
