‘The NDS must have had a few turns on him,’ Sharp said, remembering the casualty report on the checkpoint blast.
Afghanistan’s recently assembled National Directorate of Security – a kind of FBI meets CIA – would have had officers at the IED blast checkpoint. Any suspect was bound to take a beating from them.
‘Any notes from the agents on escort?’
Hampton said, ‘They caught a guy hiding in bushes filming nearby. They got his phone, but it’s encrypted so they’re not going to get anything off it.’
‘That’s the Biuro’s problem not ours,’ Sharp replied. He took a long look at Malik. ‘You turn up the AC in there?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. It’s barely thirty,’ Hampton confirmed.
Testing him, Sharp asked, ‘Does his current physical state surprise you, Captain?’
‘Most civilians or innocents would have deteriorated more by now. They’re also more likely to strike out, voice their innocence in some way. He’s shown no signs of defiance or anger. Enemy combatants are usually more serene. Suggests Malik’s had military training. Maybe in Pakistan. That would fit given the location of the IED attack.’
Sharp often posed such questions to Hampton, helping him on his way towards becoming an SSO like him. It could sometimes take weeks before Hampton worked out if he’d given the correct answer.
Hoping to prompt him a little, Hampton asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘He’s had training, alright.’ Sharp passed Hampton the file then made for the cell door. ‘Whoever he is, he’s not just some guy.’
A thin Afghan interpreter, Fahran, stood against the opposite wall, dressed in U.S. Army uniform, a black scarf round his neck, wraparound sunglasses perched on top of his head, casually smoking a roll-up cigarette. He was one of the nine thousand Afghan civilians put on the Army payroll as interpreters since the American invasion in 2003, and was one of the few to stay on after the American pull-out. He wasn’t in any great hurry to return. Everyone he knew or loved had been killed. Now he had decided to just walk the earth, going wherever Sharp went, for as long as he needed him.
Sharp put out a fist to Fahran, then said, ‘Takbir.’
Fahran pulled the scarf up over his mouth and nose, and the sunglasses down over his eyes. He bumped fists with Sharp, then replied, ‘Allahu Akbar.’
A lifelong atheist, Sharp only did it to put Fahran at ease, and to remind him he was no apostate for assisting white Western ‘infidels’: those men in the cells who claimed to be messengers of Allah were the real enemy, and Fahran had nothing to fear in this life or the next.
Sharp opened the cell door just as Metallica’s “Through the Never” was starting, a rush of cold air hitting him. He couldn’t help but be impressed at how Malik had handled the conditions. Still with his arms out, Malik jerked his head from side to side, hearing Sharp’s footsteps nearby, anticipating his goggles being taken off. Under the spotlight, Sharp could see the contusions all over Malik’s body more closely. The NDS hadn’t messed around to inflict such damage after only forty-eight hours in custody.
Sharp nodded to Hampton, who pushed Malik’s arms down. At first he thought he was being tested, and tried to keep his arms raised, until Fahran said in Arabic, ‘Lower your arms.’ Hampton guided Malik towards a wooden table with two metal loops nailed onto it at one end, while Sharp switched off the AC. He wanted Malik on edge, thinking: were things about to get easier or harder?
‘I love reading about history,’ Sharp said, pausing for Fahran to interpret. ‘There’s a lot you can learn. For example, the monks of Castillo la Coroño. They were some real sickos back in the Inquisition. But damn it if they didn’t get results.’ Sharp nodded again to Hampton, who took Malik’s goggles off.
Malik flinched, his eyes darting around the room to get his bearings.
Sharp prowled around in front of him, his long beard making him look like a feral animal, thick neck and shoulders bulging under the wide, baggy neck of his t-shirt. Before Malik could accustom himself to the stark surroundings, Hampton chained Malik’s hands to the metal table loops and pushed him into a wooden chair with no underside to it, only the wooden border. Which left him squirming on the edge the whole time. Such a thing by itself wouldn’t break someone, but when combined with all the other humiliations could make the difference. Enhanced interrogation wasn’t about just one thing at a time. It was about a lot of things at once.
Hampton stepped back towards the cell door beside Fahran, as Sharp took a seat at the table opposite Malik.
‘They’d take a piece of cloth,’ Sharp said, then pulled out a small white piece of linen and put it on the table. ‘They’d put it down the guy’s throat, then they’d fill his mouth with water and hold his nose. The only way for the guy to breathe was to swallow the water. Problem is, the water soaked the cloth which stuck it to the guy’s throat and made him choke.’
Fahran translated the information dispassionately, in a neutral tone.
Sharp sprang out his chair and, holding Malik’s head from behind, shoved the cloth deep into his mouth while holding Malik’s nose. ‘The genius of it was that it choked you just enough for it to be agony, but not quite enough to kill you. A man in reasonable shape like yourself could handle it for, oh, I don’t know, a couple hours. A guy could say he believed in anything after that.’
Malik closed his eyes, and kicked his feet up and down, heels slamming into the ground. His eyes bulged as he tried to invent some breath for himself.
Hampton looked at his feet, as if this somehow absolved him of complicity in what was going on.
Sharp spoke slowly. And clearly. ‘The only thing. I want you to believe in. Is me. And that I’ll do anything. To find out what I need to know.’ He pulled the cloth back out and let go of Malik’s nose.
As Malik spluttered and caught his breath, it seemed he was trying to say something. Sharp leaned close, his ear up at Malik’s mouth. Sharp heard him whisper in a soft English accent, ‘Get rid of the others.’ The cloth trick seemed to have had little effect on his faculties. His eyes were clear and still held their focus.
As Sharp pulled back, Malik looked up at the mouldy ceiling. Trying to maintain the performance of the stubborn jihadi to Hampton and Fahran, he cried out, ‘La il laha il Allah, Muhamma!’
Fahran interpreted, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.’
After a few paces back to his chair, Sharp said to Hampton, ‘Give me a few minutes alone.’
‘I’ll be right outside,’ Hampton said, then motioned to Fahran. Interpreters names were never to be used in front of detainees. Not even aliases.
Sharp waited until they were alone. ‘I got three Brits down the hall, so right now you’re only mildly interesting to me. What else you got, al-Britani?’
Malik craned his neck, trying to stretch it out. He whispered, keeping his head low. ‘You’ve got to get me out.’
Sharp laughed. ‘Of course, why didn’t you say so.’
‘I’m in danger here.’
‘You don’t know where you are, Abdul. What makes you think you’re in danger?’
‘Judging by the flight time from Bagram, I’d say we were either in Camp Zero, Poland, or Camp Romeo, Romania.’
The names of the camps, let alone their locations, were classified. Code word clearance only. Sharp stared hard at Malik. OK, he thought. You have my attention.
‘Your pupils are dilated,’ Malik said. His speech was quickening. Sensing time was running out. ‘I know what you’re thinking: how does he know the names of CIA black sites? Because that would mean the detainee in front of you has code word clearance.’
Sharp gave nothing away, but a solution to all the puzzles he’d seen that night was becoming clear to him. The inconsistencies in Malik’s file, the heightened awareness of his surroundings, his physical and mental fortitude under conditions that would already have broken most men.
Sharp asked, ‘What am I thinking right now?’
Malik answered, ‘You’re thinking, why has this guy not cracked yet? Normally, I would sit here and wait for your phone to ring. But that’s not going to happen tonight. Not for the kind of trouble I’m in.’ Malik smiled ever so faintly, knowing that Sharp had already worked it out.
Sharp held Malik’s gaze. ‘You know I need to hear you say it.’
Malik nodded. ‘I’m MI6.’
Cheltenham, England – Sunday, 11.23pm local time
Twenty-five-year-old Rebecca Fox sat alone in the living room of her small flat, a pair of PC monitors in front of her filled with hours’ worth of LINUX code. Her face was blank as she typed – fingers flying around the keyboard: she had been able to touch type since she was twelve – consumed with her task. She showed no sense of irritation at the sound of her neighbours through the wall, laughing drunkenly, singing karaoke to eighties power ballads. She was used to it by now.
She didn’t feel envy at her neighbours’ happiness, or that she was missing out on life. She didn’t feel anything. This was the life she had chosen.
She put in the earplugs she always kept on her desk, and continued her work.
Nothing about what made other people happy made sense to her. The drinks with co-workers, standing in crammed bars, their faces lit up by their phone screens. The only time they really shared anything was on social media. Which made Rebecca’s job much easier.
The hack she’d been working on that night had started several weeks earlier. Thousands of lines of code and many all-nighters, her program was finally complete. Now it was time for its first real-world test run.
Earlier in the day the unsuspecting Dr Annette Hopkins had opened an email seemingly from the Inland Revenue, but was in fact a phishing email loaded with malware from Rebecca. It was an innocuous enough email with a subject line that would intrigue most people (‘An update in your tax status’) replete with official logo and warnings at the bottom to beware of fake emails, and to never give out personal details to senders you don’t know. Dr Hopkins just didn’t notice the sender wasn’t an official .gov address. Rebecca found people were rarely fooled in modern times by emails claiming they’d won prizes or were due rebates. The key was to keep them innocuous and promise nothing.
Dr Hopkins had clicked a link which claimed to take her to “www.inland-revenue.gov”, a page that didn’t exist but looked and sounded like it did. A quick Google check would have revealed that the Inland Revenue didn’t use a dash in their web addresses, but all people ever saw was the ‘inland revenue’ and ‘.gov’ part. Trust in authority, and fear of not complying with instructions filled in the rest. Most major websites owned close derivations of their web addresses (typing theguardian.co.uk took you to its actual address of theguardian.com/uk), but the U.K. government hadn’t bothered to invest in such things.
Using what she called a web masker, Rebecca could create a webpage full of malware, but call the address something that sounded trustworthy. This was where the government’s laziness came in: the web address couldn’t be exactly the same as the genuine one, but by simply adding a dash she got a much more believable address than most of the spam that flooded the public’s inboxes.
Dr Hopkins thought little of it when the link took her to a blank white page. She closed the window, and thinking herself diligent ran a scan of her anti-virus software – just to be on the safe side. But against Rebecca’s malware that was like trying to push a breeze back out your open front door. The damage had already been done: silent, untraceable.
Now Rebecca had remote access to Hopkins’ computer.
She clicked and scrolled past bank details, financial records, and website log-ins where credit card information would have been easy to come by, coming to rest at a folder marked ‘Bennington Patient Records.’
It was password protected. Which was where her new program, OPEN WINDOW, came in.
The idea for it came from Rebecca’s first ever hack: logging keyboard strokes via a USB stick attached to the back of a laptop. The tech equivalent of sliding tracing paper under the keyboard while someone types in their password. Rebecca had just found a way to do it now without physical access to the target’s computer.
OPEN WINDOW scanned for the most commonly typed words on Dr Hopkins’ computer. There, wedged in the middle of words like ‘for’ ‘it’ and ‘if’ was ‘Banana54’. And Hopkins had thought herself so clever pairing a random noun with a random number.
Rebecca tapped the password in, then the files opened up.
Each record had a header – ‘Dr Annette Hopkins. Chief psychiatrist, Bennington Hospital’ – with records running from 1989 to 2001.
Rebecca pressed Control+F and typed in: ‘Stanley Fox’.
When the patient records appeared on screen Rebecca said, ‘Told you I’d find you.’ She started printing the documents, hundreds of pages of conversations between Stanley and Dr Hopkins, as well as her personal follow-up notes.
When the printing finished Rebecca took the first page and pinned it to her living room wall.
What had started as just a picture of her and her dad taken when she was eight years old – Rebecca sitting on his knee, her smile showing a gap in her front teeth – now ran the entire length and height of the wall.
A cursory glance at the wall suggested a randomly assorted mess of photos, newspaper cuttings, questions written by Rebecca on sticky notes, and Facebook profile printouts. A closer look, however, revealed the intricate links of her work.
The top half meticulously reconstructed her dad’s movements and employment history in chronological order: from Cambridge University where he was Visiting Professor of Applied Mathematics at the age of just twenty-three, to his work as a cryptographer for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British intelligence agency, three years later. The timeline stopped suddenly with a question mark against the year 2001.
The bottom half of the wall was filled with pictures and schematics of Bennington Hospital, and maps of the surrounding area. To the right were a series of overlapping newspaper clippings from 2001 (‘Fire crews battle deadly blaze at hospital’; ‘Hospital fire kills seven’; ‘Celebrated mathematician among dead in hospital fire’; ‘Enquiry rules hospital fire accidental’).
On the left of the wall were various printouts of Bennington employees, surrounding the newest addition: Dr Annette Hopkins.
Ten years of research, combing the internet and libraries; hundreds of hours of phone calls; tracking down people who didn’t want to be found...
And there at the centre of all the chaos, the thing she always came back to: the time when she was happiest, sitting on her dad’s knee, smiling, her tiny arms around his neck. The last known photo of Stanley Fox.
Then, across the room, she heard the muffled sound of her phone ringing. When she took out her earplugs the tone seemed shriller than usual.
The phone screen said ‘Work calling’.
She tapped the green phone icon. ‘Rebecca Fox,’ she said, expecting it to be the switchboard. Instead it was her boss.
‘Rebecca,’ he said. ‘This is Alexander. We’ve got an orange alert. You need to come in.’
Korecki residence, Szymany – Monday, 1.13am
Artur wiped beads of cold sweat from his forehead before carefully opening the front door – his hand trembling with the afterburn of adrenaline.
His mother – as expected – had passed out drunk on the living room couch.
On his way past the living room Artur noticed a cigarette still burning between his mother’s fingers. He stubbed it out in the ashtray. Watching her so peaceful there made him realise how close he’d come to losing her.
He whispered, ‘Goodnight, mum.’ Then he kissed her forehead.
He made his way to his bedroom in the basement, and stood at his computer desk. A copy of The Republic magazine sat on top of his laptop keyboard, lying open at a journalist profile for Tom Novak, the magazine’s national security correspondent.
He put the magazine aside, the
n woke up the screen on his laptop. His webcam had been covered with black tape after reading a Tom Novak story about the NSA’s ability to patch into any laptop connected to the internet, anywhere in the world and watch you in real-time.
Given his current situation he needed to remove as much of himself from the internet as possible. Starting with YouTube.
He didn’t have time to discriminate against the occasional video where he didn’t actually appear on camera. For now, they would all have to go. He doubted they would be missed: after three years he only had three hundred and sixteen subscribers.
His problems started on the log-in screen: instead of taking him to his home page it showed a message at the centre of the screen.
“This account has been terminated for repeated or serious violations of our Terms of Service.”
Artur’s stomach churned. ‘No, no, no, no...’
He clicked to the YouTube homepage and searched manually for his most recent video, ‘How To Encrypt Your Emails (NSA CAN’T HACK THIS!)’ But it was gone. His account was definitely dead.
He decided it was too much of a coincidence that tonight of all nights his account had been deleted for no clear reason. This way they could at least stop him from posting the video on the world’s most popular video site, and start reeling back in any and all copies of the clip. Because once it went online, getting it back would be like trying to un-knit a sweater. The issue for Artur was that if the authorities had tracked him down online then it wouldn’t be long before they found him in person.
Before he could start packing his things up, his spare phone and laptop both beeped with the same email.
It was from Wally:
‘Get out. RUN. RIGHT NOW!’
Artur slammed his laptop shut and bundled it into a backpack, along with a spare phone, a flash drive, and his passport. Wherever he was going – and he had no idea beyond “as far away as possible” – he needed to pack light so he could move quickly, but also blend in and not look like a tourist.
Official Secrets Page 2
