The Fox

  ‘I have to have your promise, Luke.’

  ‘All right, I promise. When can I have it?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He borrowed an office, shut the door and contacted Dr Hendricks. The guru from GCHQ had now left Luton. Having gutted the attic under the rafters with his team, Hendricks now had Luke Jennings’s personal computer in front of him back at the National Cyber Security Centre in Victoria, London. He was hesitant about doing what Weston asked because he needed to examine the PC and its contents in minute detail before he could make his report. Eventually, he said:

  ‘All right. I’ll download everything on it to another machine and send it—’

  ‘No, hang on there. I’ll send a car to collect it.’

  Sir Adrian’s next call was to the Prime Minister. She was on the front bench in the House of Commons. Her Parliamentary Private Secretary whispered in her ear. When she could get away, she withdrew to her House of Commons office and called Sir Adrian back. He made his request. She listened carefully and posed a couple of questions. Finally, she said:

  ‘It is very short notice. He may not agree. But I’ll try. Stay at Latimer. I’ll call you back.’

  It was late afternoon in London, almost noon in Washington. The man she wanted was on the golf course, but he took her call. To her surprise, he agreed to her request. She had an aide ring Sir Adrian back.

  ‘If you drive to Northolt, Sir Adrian, I believe the RAF will try to help. As soon as they can. The request is in.’

  Technically, Northolt is still a Royal Air Force base on the north-western outskirts of London, just inside the M25 orbital motorway, but it has long shared its functions with the private sector as a host to the executive jets of the rich and privileged.

  Sir Adrian spent six hours in the departure lounge availing himself of the café for a very delayed lunch and the news-stand for an array of papers to read. At midnight, a young RAF man summoned him to one of the departure gates. Outside on the pan his flight was being refuelled for the transatlantic crossing. It was a BAe125 twin-jet executive airplane which could make Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in eight hours against the headwinds, but gaining five on the time zones.

  After half a lifetime of grabbing sleep where and when he could, Adrian Weston accepted a sandwich and a glass of moderate red wine from the steward, tilted back his seat and fell asleep as the jet cleared the Irish coast.

  They landed at Andrews Air Force Base at just after four in the morning. Sir Adrian thanked the steward who had served him breakfast and the crew who had flown him. The squadron leader in the left-hand seat assured him that their instructions were to wait until whatever he had come to do was done, then bring him back home.

  There were more hours to wait in the arrivals reception area for his transport. Because his entire journey was off the books, the British embassy was not involved. The White House sent an unmarked Crown Victoria with a young West Wing staffer beside the driver. There were no passport formalities, though he always carried his with him.

  The journey took an extra hour, but much of that was spent crawling in the commuter stream to cross the Potomac into downtown DC. The driver knew his trade. He had been told to minimize any chance of a stray pressman with a camera spotting the car and its passenger so he came into the White House grounds from the back.

  The limo came up Constitution Avenue and right into 17th Street, then right again on State Drive within the lee of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Here four steel pillars jutting up from the roadway withdrew into the tarmac as the escorting officer flashed his identity at the gatehouse, and they were in the short drive called West Exec that runs straight to the West Wing, where the President lives and works.

  At the awning that marked the access to the West Wing from the lower level, the car stopped and Sir Adrian descended. A new escort took over, leading him inside. They turned left and up the stairs that brought them to the door of the National Security Adviser’s office. No journalists can roam freely up here.

  He was led down another walkway to a reception area with two desks where his briefcase was passed through a scanner. He knew hidden cameras had already done a body-search, as at an airport. At the rear of the area was one last door – to the Oval itself. One of those at the desks went and tapped on it, listened, opened it and gestured Sir Adrian inside. Then he came back and closed it.

  There were four in there, all seated, and a spare chair facing the desk of the President of the United States, universally known in the building as the POTUS but, to his face, always Mr President.

  One of the seated men was the Chief of Staff, another the Defense Secretary and the third the Attorney General. The POTUS sat ahead of him, facing the door, glowering behind the Resolute desk, the ornate carved-oak bureau cut from the timbers of the British warship HMS Resolute and presented by Queen Victoria to another president over a hundred years ago. Close to his right hand was a red button, not to summon a nuclear war but a succession of Diet Cokes.

  The Chief of Staff made the unnecessary introductions. All the faces but that of Sir Adrian were well known via many camera lenses. The atmosphere was courteous but hardly convivial.

  ‘Mr President, I bring you the warmest regards of the British Prime Minister and our thanks to you for agreeing to see me at such short notice.’

  The big coiffed blond head nodded in gruff acknowledgement.

  ‘Sir Adrian, please understand it is only out of regard for my friend Marjory Graham that I have agreed to this. It seems one of your fellow countrymen has done us enormous damage and we believe he should face justice over here.’

  Sir Adrian was convinced that squirming would do no good. He simply said:

  ‘Broken glass, Mr President.’

  ‘Broken what?’

  ‘This young cyber-genius, about whose existence we had not the faintest idea, has broken into a major US database like a burglar, smashing glass to get in. But once inside he looked but then left alone. He seems to have destroyed nothing, sabotaged nothing and, above all, stolen nothing. This is not another Edward Snowden. He has offered absolutely nothing to our countries’ enemies.’

  At the mention of the name Snowden the four Americans stiffened. They recalled too well that Edward Snowden, an American working for the state, had stolen over a million classified documents in the form of a memory stick and flown to Moscow, where he was now residing.

  ‘He still did a huge amount of damage,’ snapped the Attorney General.

  ‘He did what was thought to be utterly impossible. But it was not. So, what if a diehard enemy had done it? Broken glass, gentlemen. We have glaziers. We can mend. But all your secrets are still there. I repeat: he stole nothing, took nothing away. Surely the fires of hell are for traitors?’

  ‘So you have flown across the Atlantic to ask us to repair all the damage he caused and to be merciful, Sir Adrian?’ said the President.

  ‘No, sir. I have crossed the Pond for two reasons. The first is to make a suggestion.’

  ‘Which is?’

  In answer, Sir Adrian drew a slip of paper from his breast pocket, crossed the carpet between himself and the Resolute desk and placed it in front of the leader of the Western world. Then he resumed his seat. They all watched the blond head lean forward to study the sheet of paper. The POTUS took his time. Then he straightened and stared at the British emissary. He held out the sheet to the Attorney General, who was closest to him. In sequence, all three other men read it.

  ‘Would it work?’ asked the POTUS.

  ‘Like so much in life, Mr President, we’ll never know if we don’t try.’

  ‘You mentioned two purposes to your visit,’ said the Defense Secretary. ‘What was the second?’

  ‘To try and cut a deal. I think we have all read The Art of the Deal.’

  He was referring to the President’s own book about the realities of business. The POTUS beamed. He could not get too much praise for what he regarded as his masterpie
ce.

  ‘What deal?’ he asked.

  ‘If we are allowed to go ahead with this’ – Sir Adrian gestured at his sheet of paper – ‘we will put him on the payroll. He signs the Official Secrets Act. We keep him in a sealed environment. Supervise his activities. And if it works, if there is an intel harvest, you share the product. All of it.’

  The Secretary of Defense interjected. ‘Mr President, we have not a shred of proof that this could ever work.’

  There was a deep silence. Then the big blond head rose and turned to the Attorney General.

  ‘John, I’m going to go with it. Deep-six the extradition request. Not necessarily for ever. But we’ll give this a try.’

  Two hours later Sir Adrian was back at Andrews. The return journey from there was easier, with following westerly winds. His car was waiting at Northolt. He phoned the Prime Minister from the back seat. It was nearly midnight and she was about to turn in, her bedside alarm set for 5 a.m.

  But she was sufficiently awake to give him the permissions he needed. And far away, close to Archangel, the sea ice was beginning to splinter.

  Chapter Four

  IN THE AFTERMATH of that visit to Washington things went well. From the press point of view, the story died because it had never existed, leaving those on the inside to continue repairing the damage at Fort Meade, installing a newer and better defensive system, while consideration in Britain was given to what the future held for the deeply troubled boy now known as the Fox.

  In Washington, the US kept her word and the request for extradition was quietly dropped, which made no ripples on the water because it had never been announced. But there was one downside.

  Working inside the Justice Department was a Russian agent, a low-level sleeper. It was a woman, one hundred per cent American but prepared to betray her country, like the long-imprisoned Aldrich Ames, for money.

  She noted the rescinding of the request to the British government for the extradition of a British youth for data-hacking and wrote a short report for her employers. She gave it no priority, but systems are systems and greed is greed. So she passed it on to her handler inside the Russian embassy, who passed it back to Moscow and thus to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the SVR. There it was simply filed.

  Sir Adrian had his second conference with Mrs Graham, who was much relieved that there would be no long war in the courts with the USA and agreed with the latter part of his idea. This would involve Sir Adrian moving from Dorset to London at least for the duration. He was allocated a small grace-and-favour flat not far from Admiralty Arch and a workaday saloon car with a driver on twenty-four-hour call.

  It had been years since Adrian Weston had lived in London, and he had become accustomed to the peace, the quiet, the solitude of his Dorset country life. It had been a long time since he had run an operation and, back then, it had been against the old USSR and, covering the whole Soviet empire and the Eastern European satellite states, his enemy, the KGB.

  Then came Gorbachev and the end of the USSR, but not of the Russian Federation and certainly not of the Kremlin. Until his retirement as Deputy Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, he had continued to keep an eagle eye on the sprawling land east of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

  He knew the KGB had been split up under Gorbachev but did not fool himself it had ceased to exist. The Second Chief Directorate, the internal secret police, had become the FSB, but his career opponent had been the First Chief Directorate, targeted at the West. This had become the SVR, still based at Yasenevo, south-west of Moscow city, and he knew who now ran it.

  Even during his decade in the peace of Dorset he had maintained his comprehensive list of contacts throughout the British establishment. After Downing Street he had his driver take him across the West End to the Special Forces Club and from there called a good neighbour who agreed to rent a van with a driver and clear out those items from his cottage that he would need in his government flat behind Admiralty Arch. The lady in Dorset would send two large trunks with enough possessions to turn a functional but heartless apartment into a kind of home and she would look after his dog while he was away.

  Above all, he would need his family photographs. He would, as each night before turning into sleep, gaze at the face of his late wife, five years gone to leukaemia, whom he still grieved. Staring at the departed face of that calm, wise woman, he would recall the day she had met a traumatized young Para officer back from Northern Ireland and determined within an hour to marry him and make him whole again. Which she had done.

  In a ritual no one else would ever see, he would tell her about his day, as he used to do for forty years, until the cancer took her. Beside her he would put the picture of their son, the only one the God she worshipped had allowed her. He was a naval commander on a cruiser in the Far East. With his treasures around him, Weston could again present the world with the steel-tough spymaster.

  His first visit was to Latimer, to see the Jennings family, who chafed in their detention.

  Harold and Sue Jennings had done as they had been asked. They had telephoned their friends and colleagues at Luton to explain that their son Luke had been taken unwell and that they had removed the whole family for a spring break at a rented cottage on the coast of faraway Cornwall. After that they took no phone calls, letting each of two or three further enquiries go to voicemail and stay there.

  Marcus, the younger boy, had discovered sets of bows and arrows in a storeroom, with a target, and practised archery on the front lawn, tutored by the gardener, who was an adept. Harold read the papers, which were delivered daily, did numerous crosswords and raided the manor’s copious library, puzzled that much of it was in German or Russian, the tastes of Her Majesty’s earlier guests.

  Luke was in a miserable state, pining for his room in the attic at Luton and all his old familiar surroundings. The centre of his existence was his returned computer. He had traced every single online file and restored them all to the way they had been, the way he wanted them, the way they had to be. His mother comforted him continuously, promising that soon he would have a room of his own, if not the one at Luton, then certainly an exact replica.

  Dr Jeremy Hendricks had visited from the NCSC in Victoria, so that Luke could explain step by step how he had avoided all the firewalls and supposedly impenetrable access codes to infiltrate the NSA database at Fort Meade. He was still there when Sir Adrian arrived, so he was able to explain in layman’s language some of the complexities of the only world in which it seemed the boy could exist and which was a closed galaxy to the vast majority of the human race. Also Professor Simon Baron-Cohen had kindly visited from Cambridge for a four-hour seminar with Luke. He was now back at the university preparing a copious report on both Asperger’s syndrome in general and on how it affected Luke Jennings in particular.

  The whole family had been relieved to learn that there would be no attempt to extradite the elder son to face jail time in the USA. But Sir Adrian was adamant that the Jenningses’ part of their bargain was unfulfilled. Further senior staff from GCHQ would visit to enrol Luke, who was in law fully adult, as a member of their staff to be directed as they saw fit.

  What none of them knew was that they were crucial ingredients in the contents of the slip of paper that Adrian Weston had slipped to the President of the USA the previous day; the execution of his plan, now endorsed by two heads of government.

  He named it Operation Troy in tribute to Virgil, who in his classic Aeneid had described the ancient Greek deception of the wooden horse. He had in mind to create the greatest deception in the history of the cyber-world. But it all depended on the unusual brain of a diffident British teenager, the like of which had never been seen before.

  It had become obvious within ten minutes that if Operation Troy were ever to succeed, it would be Sue Jennings, not the ineffectual father, whom Weston had to win over. She would have to accept Luke’s enrolment into the service of GCHQ. And she would also have to be engaged in a
technical role, since without her constant reassurances her fragile son did not seem able to function in the adult world. Clearly, she was a more forceful character, the one who had taken charge of the family and held it together, one of those calm but fiercely determined women who are the salt of the earth.

  Weston knew from the briefing notes handed to him by one of the Prime Minister’s staffers in Downing Street that she had been educated at Luton Grammar School, the daughter of a local printer and his wife. In her teens she had met and married her husband, who was then at accountancy college. So far, so banal. She was twenty-two when their first son was born.

  She did not look forty, apparently spending time in the gym and during the summer at the local tennis club. Once again, so far so ordinary. There was nothing about the Jennings family to attract a flicker of interest, except the pathologically shy, withdrawn boy of eighteen who sat in a corner while his parents negotiated with this man from London. He, it seemed, despite or perhaps because of his difficulties, was a computer genius.

  Sir Adrian tried to engage the youth in the adult conversation, but it proved fruitless. Luke could not, or would not, connect with him on a personal level. At all attempts, his mother answered for him, the tigress protecting her cub. Sir Adrian had no experience of Asperger’s syndrome but the briefing notes that had been rapidly put together during the morning of the family’s detention indicated that there were various levels of severity. A phone call from Professor Baron-Cohen had just confirmed that Luke was a severe case.

  Periodically, if Sue Jennings sensed that her son was becoming distressed when the adults discussed something he had done but did not know he had done, she would wrap a comforting arm around his shoulders and whisper reassurances into his ear. Only then would he calm down.

  The next stage was to find a place for that young man and his family to live and work in a safe but closed environment. Back in Whitehall, Weston began the search among hundreds of government-owned establishments. For two more days he researched and travelled. He hardly slept. Apart from snacks, he hardly ate. He had not been under such pressure since, back in the Cold War, with his fluent Russian and flawless German, he had flitted through the Iron Curtain as the deranged Yuri Andropov had almost brought the world to nuclear war. After three days he believed he had found the place.