Then stopped, turned, jogged back up the ramp. According to their conversation, the man had come from France. Was he now heading back on the Eurostar?
Giles rushed through the secondary entrance into the main station. He glanced up at the first floor, but that seemed unlikely. Who stopped in at St Pancras for a bite to eat last thing on a Monday night? He kept walking, checking, hoping he hadn’t lost his target.
And then Giles saw him, walking through passport control, the last man catching the last train to Paris. It left in two minutes, and the thickset man had timed his journey perfectly. All Giles’ doubts now disappeared. This man knew exactly what he was doing. He probably carried nothing incriminating, nothing that would look remotely suspicious if he were arrested. Now he was heading back to France, no doubt under a false ID, leaving Giles faced with a dilemma. He couldn’t board the train himself, as the only ID he carried was his driver’s licence. He hadn’t thought he’d need anything more official when he left home this evening. In theory, he could make some calls and ensure the border guards would let him through, but that might take too long.
Or, he could stop the train altogether. Ironically, that would be easier than trying to board. He could go through those same channels, order the train stopped, and commandeer the police to help him escort the man off. An even simpler solution would be to set off the fire alarm, immediately shutting down all train movement in and out of the station. But what then? What good would come of detaining the man who, Giles was now certain, acted as contact and go-between for the Exphoria mole? If this was one of Giles’ operations, he’d go dark as soon as the contact was arrested. No, arresting the thickset man now would achieve nothing. They needed to know who he was, and exactly what he was doing, before making a move.
There was a third option. Giles watched the train pull away, then approached the border security office and asked to speak to the officer in charge. Next he dialled a number from memory, a number never stored in contact address books, and apologised to the man who answered for calling at an unsociable hour.
Three minutes later, the senior border security officer arrived, talking on his own phone. He made affirmative noises, then ended the call and nodded to Giles. “Mr Finlay,” he said, “apparently I’m to let you look over all the passports we scanned for the last departed train. Any chance you could tell me why?”
Giles smiled sympathetically. “Sorry. National security, and all that. Please lead the way.”
39
At least Andrea’s target didn’t leave the country.
The young man with the sandy blond beard waited almost ten minutes after his friend had left, and Giles had followed him on the pretext of a phone call, to finish his drink. Then he abruptly walked out, perhaps hoping he would catch anyone following — like Andrea, seemingly absorbed in her phone with Giles gone — off-guard.
But Andrea wasn’t caught off-guard, and certainly wasn’t absorbed in her iPhone. If anyone had looked at her screen they would see a vacuous match-three game, something she’d first downloaded on her personal phone for her son Alex to play when he needed a distraction. She’d put a copy on her work phone specifically for use cases like this; in public, when she needed to look like her mind was elsewhere. She pretended to play, while her attention was on everything but the game she held in her hands. Her high score was a little under two thousand. Alex’s was over a million.
So as the young man approached the bottom of his glass, Andrea was ready. Giles’ joke about her being able to break into someone’s phone from across the room wasn’t entirely a joke. She couldn’t quite do that, but with the right gadget she could have cloned the young man’s mobile. Not from across the room, though. She’d have to get close, and that would almost certainly mean flirting with him. And while she’d learned over the years to feel less weird about doing that with men, and could now make a seemingly-real attempt, the bigger problem was that she and Giles had acted as if they were an item. If she played the ‘lonely businesswoman’ angle now, the young man would assume she was cheating, and that would make it almost impossible for her to subsequently tail him in the street. Besides, while cloning his mobile would give access to his GPS, that would only provide his location. It couldn’t give the context of what he was doing at those locations, which Andrea felt was sometimes more important.
But all this was moot, because she didn’t have a cloner unit. What she did have was a reversible jacket, which she turned inside-out when the young man stepped outside, and slipped on as she followed him thirty seconds later.
Of course, all of this assumed Giles was on the level. She was still annoyed at him for letting Brigitte Sharp run around Brockley like an amateur detective, and she didn’t believe for a second that SIS hadn’t scanned everything they could on Mr O’Riordan’s cloned hard drive before forwarding it to her office. On the other hand, they did forward it, and Giles had been open about why he needed help this evening. As she turned to follow the young man, who was now walking east at a fast pace, she made a mental note to have a word with Patel at GCHQ in the morning and remind them who they worked for.
Like Giles, Andrea had expected her target to go straight into the Tube. Was he heading to another meet? Perhaps, but inside the pub she hadn’t once seen him check his watch, suggesting he wasn’t on a schedule. And if these two were indeed stealing secrets from a classified MoD project, they wouldn’t leave their timing to chance.
So perhaps he was done for the day. He might live around here, though she doubted it. Arranging a meet close to your home, even a temporary one, was the last thing a professional would do. Then again, if Andrea found out her rendezvous code had been compromised by a random hacker, she also wouldn’t dream of using that code again, not even with the hacker dead. But these people had. So either they weren’t so professional, or they were so arrogant they assumed killing O’Riordan had removed the threat. And to be fair, it almost had. Without Bridge’s connection to the victim they might never have found the link to Exphoria, and they certainly wouldn’t have known about this meeting.
The young man walked east, through Hoxton and into Shoreditch. He didn’t act like a professional, and she didn’t think she’d been blown, but nevertheless she almost lost him a couple of times. After about fifteen minutes, they turned left at Old Street station. As Andrea took the corner, his grey jacket was nowhere to be seen. She kept walking, scanning intently, and soon saw him on the other side of the road with the jacket slung over his shoulder, exposing a bright blue t-shirt. Simple but effective.
Ten minutes later, weaving through the streets of Shoreditch itself, she lost sight of his cream-coloured woollen cap in a crowd. Andrea’s height was a disadvantage in crowd situations, and the daylight was fading, which didn’t help. So this time she paused, pretending to look at something on her iPhone, while scanning bodies and legs instead. She found him, resumed following, and when the crowds parted saw that he’d removed the woollen cap to free his thick, tousled sandy hair.
All of these changes could be explained. None of them definitively marked him as a professional. Once again, Andrea wondered if they really were following the right people. This was reinforced when the young man reached his destination, an anonymous door set back into the corner of an anonymous building. He used a contactless keycard to enter, and Andrea briefly caught a glimpse of a standard small business lobby — steel, glass, and trendy bare brick. No receptionist; just an elevator.
She couldn’t follow him inside. Even if she’d been able to open the door, stepping into that lobby would blow everything. But as she watched from the other side of the street, and the young man waited in the lobby, she noticed glass panes running the height of the building that showed the elevator’s progress. Andrea watched it descend from the second floor to ground level where the young man stepped inside without a care. Then she watched the elevator rise without stopping to the third floor, top of the building.
She couldn’t risk going over to look at the door for company names; the buildings around here may have been positively Victorian, but there was no question several high-tech security cameras would be watching the main door and lobby, feeding the images to every company inside. Instead she noted the address, and continued walking east until there was no chance at all that the young man could see her from his third-floor window. Then she turned south, and as the Gherkin came into view her iPhone vibrated.
GJB when safe - G
Andrea veered right, toward Liverpool Street station.
40
Lights reflected off the wide, dark water, giving the Thames a glamour and appeal that Giles had never really thought it deserved. By day, it was still just a dirty old river.
He saw Andrea approaching from the north end of the Golden Jubilee Bridge long before she reached him. He’d texted after leaving the St Pancras security office, without knowing where she might be, and had only arrived here ten minutes ago himself. “You didn’t go far, then.”
“Bloody far enough,” said Andrea, leaning on the railing. “Hipster boy walked all the way to Shoreditch, and went into an office building. I’ll check on it in the morning, but with the location and everything else, my money’s on a tech startup.”
Giles paused, considering this. “My target walked to St Pancras and hopped on the last Eurostar before I could stop him. He certainly moves like a professional, but I can’t be entirely sure if he made me or not. He didn’t seem to take any specifically evasive manoeuvres.”
“Same here. Hipster took off his coat, and then his hat, which threw me a couple of times. But it could have just been an innocent guy, taking off layers on a warm evening.”
“You mean like you just happened to be wearing a reversible jacket?”
Andrea looked down at her inside-out jacket, then back up at Giles, and laughed as she reached the same conclusion. “It’s exactly what we’d want from our own people, isn’t it? To make closing-door getaways and costume changes look like innocent actions. Yeah, this pair are professionals, all right.”
Giles pulled out his phone and unlocked it. “Here’s further proof, if we needed it.” He swiped to a photograph of an open passport and pinched to zoom in on the picture ID, recognisable as the burly man. “I got this at Eurostar border control. Marko Novak, an import-export businessman from Croatia. I’ll have the ID checked out, but if it’s not a legend I’ll eat my hat.”
“At least we have a picture.” Andrea checked her watch. “There’s still plenty of time to get someone in position to follow him after he arrives in Paris.”
“I have a man taking care of it. Now, what about this startup? Do you think we can break in?”
Andrea rolled her eyes. “I swear, you lot think you’re Mission: Impossible. How about you let me check them out first, and maybe I’ll make an appointment to look around, like a civilised person? You’re not the only ones who go undercover, you know.”
“If Bridge wasn’t away, I’d send her in with you. Might take a nerd to figure out what they’re up to.”
“We don’t know for sure that they are. At this stage, all we have is assumptions and coincidences.”
“No smoke without fire.”
Andrea sighed. “And you’re not the one who has to submit eighteen reports to the Home Office if we’re wrong. Christ, even if we’re right.” A train leaving Charing Cross rumbled past, and she shouted to be heard above the noise. “Just let me know whatever your man in Paris finds out about Novak.”
She walked away, leaving Giles alone on the bridge.
41
From one and a half metres, she could see everything. And that was just with her work phone.
Giles had told her to get some sleep, but Bridge had known that wasn’t going to happen. Her argument with Fred had put her in a bad mood since Sunday. Not just because of his comments about her lack of responsibilities, which in light of her current mission she found risible, although she could never tell him why. It was more because, without even knowing it, he was right. Her life — both real and cover story — was no model for a clever young girl like Stéphanie, who at the rate she was going would probably grow up to run the EU or something. Then the discovery of the new ASCII post, and Lisa Hebden’s incompetence, had set Bridge raging all over again. It was going to be a long night.
First, she went back over the spreadsheet. She’d picked out half a dozen potential candidates for the mole before going to Côte-d’Or, letting them stew at the back of her mind over the weekend. Now she looked at them again, discounted one, and forwarded the remaining five names and positions to Henri Mourad in Paris, for him to dig into tomorrow morning. She wondered if he’d raise an eyebrow at her sending email at this time of night.
Then she cast an eye over who she still had to interview, and saw James Montgomery’s name there at the bottom of the list. She’d missed him all day earlier, but there was something at the back of her mind, scratching to get out like an insistent cat, something she’d told herself to remember…
Oh, shit. The vineyard.
Fortalbis, Montgomery had called it. Bridge exited the secure partition and searched the name online. The first three hits were all the same place, Champagne Fortalbis. She clicked through and read the About pages. She was relieved to see it had been open at the weekend, and there was no need to book for a tour. She noted the route as an easy, uninteresting drive. One where she could say she used GPS and wasn’t really paying attention, so had no significant memory of any landmarks. Next she crammed the vineyard’s history, noting the parts a tour guide might highlight; its age and provenance, how the variety originated, that the vineyard was still owned and managed by the same Italian immigrant family who first planted it almost three hundred years ago.
Finally she checked the photo gallery, memorising features and terroir so she could bluff her way through a conversation. Then she went back to the secure partition to conduct an image search, looking for photos taken and posted by tourists that she could download to her phone, passing them off as her own. It might not fool someone who knew the Fortalbis intimately, but who ever looked closely at other people’s holiday photos anyway? In fact, she could probably just take photos of her laptop screen rather than bothering to download them. She magnified one of the search result images, a samples table of the vineyard’s bottles, to fill the screen. Then she picked up her phone and snapped a test shot. Both the screen and camera were hi-res enough that all he she had to do was crop, and it would look like she’d taken the photo herself. If she zoomed in close enough she could even just about read the sample labels…
Thirty seconds later Bridge was leaning out of the guest room window, inhaling a cigarette.
The Exphoria logs showed no indication of unauthorised data extraction from the server, and nobody’s terminal had been used to copy any code. There was one incident where a junior clerk had tried to copy a USB stick full of MP3s onto his terminal. But the junior, terminal, and USB stick were all immediately quarantined and investigated, and nothing else was found. He really had just been stupid enough to bring pirated music into work.
There was nothing else. The logs were clean, the security was intact and verified. If the mole was copying data somehow, they had to be an elite hacker in possession of world-class black hat software that could not only break into highly-secure servers, locate the data, de-encrypt it, and copy it to a second location, but do all that without anyone, or any part of the system at any time, noticing it was happening.
Or they could be taking photos of code on a terminal.
Bridge swore under her breath, coughed as she inhaled the very end of her cigarette, and lit another. It sounded crazy, so low-tech and old-school it couldn’t possibly be true. But then, this whole affair was at odds with itself. Passing coded messages online by pairing them with clues inside newspaper crosswords, transferring data by physically meeting
a contact, and now stealing bleeding-edge computer code by snapping pictures of a screen.
And yet, was it really that low-tech? This wasn’t a cat burglar sneaking in at midnight with a microscopic camera hidden inside a matchbox and only enough space for ten pictures. If she was right, the mole was using a modern phone camera to take dozens, hundreds, potentially thousands of very high-resolution images, sharp enough that someone else could read them back and type them into another computer. Hell, you could probably automate it, hand it off to an OCR program and let it transcribe the lot. Although, if Bridge were in charge she wouldn’t do that. Recent OCR was much improved from the days of getting schoolboy laughs from trying to read words like ‘flick’ and ‘burn’ from bad photocopies, but it still wasn’t perfect. And for something as error-sensitive as code, she’d want someone familiar with the language doing the typing. That meant a coder, stashed away somewhere, touch-typing what they read on pictures from a phone.
That was how she found the maximum distance: standing one and a half metres from the Dell, with a terminal window open, she could take a photo of the screen that — when zoomed in sufficiently — made every line of her bash session legible. And that was with the cheap HTC phone they’d given her to use while she was undercover. With a better model she could probably stand two, maybe three metres away and get the same results.
It still sounded absurd. She was loath to float the idea to Giles, let alone Dunston, who would probably laugh her out of the room. But the more she thought about it, the more she realised it made a perverse kind of sense. The lack of data breach, the meetings in London…if they were passing USB sticks, they could be filled with photos as easily as code. And by doing physical handovers they were bypassing the cloud completely, which was entirely sensible. Despite whatever public assurances the tech companies rattled off, it was an open secret in the intelligence community that every agency in the world was monitoring cloud activity.
The Exphoria Code Page 17
