Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap (24 page)

It was clear what Kessler thought of these upstarts, though to Bech the arrogance of the old patrician banker seemed entirely hypocritical. As his behaviour over the Bakowski account showed, Kessler himself was not choosy about the sources of the money his own bank was willing to handle.

‘However,’ he went on, ‘we do have contacts among the banks in these countries, and in two cases – Belarus and Kazakhstan – I managed to discover where the money being sent to Herr Bakowski’s account originated.’

He paused, perhaps to heighten the drama of his discovery, and Bech sat expressionless, forcing himself to wait patiently.

‘The money sent from these two countries came originally from Switzerland.’

‘
Switzerland?
’ Bech could not contain his astonishment. This meant the money was going in a loop, starting here in the cantons, heading east to the rough-and-ready commercial world of the ex-Soviet republics, then winging back west all over again.

‘It does seem rather strange,’ Kessler said. This, coming from a banker who had probably seen most financial wheezes, was a significant acknowledgement. ‘I hope the information means something to you.’

‘It does, Herr Kessler, it does.’ But, in truth, Bech was damned if he knew what.

Chapter 40

It was good to be able to work alone at his terminal again. For the first few days after the drone briefly went AWOL in the desert of Oman, Dick Cottinger had had company – lots of company. You didn’t have to be Einstein to figure out that this was the result of something going wrong with the new communications system. Which explained the presence of coders, cryptanalysts, plain analysts, the base commanding officer, big shots from the Pentagon, and a host of outsiders from the NSA and CIA and damn near every other Federal agency Cottinger had ever heard of.

But as the trials of the drone continued, entirely uneventfully, gradually all the fuss and seemingly most of the suspicion had faded away. Even his superior officer Colonel Galsworthy had started to leave him alone to get on with the remaining trials. Cottinger had been all nerves after the initial incident, but now his confidence was coming back. He looked around him, and since it was a weekday the desks were almost all occupied. Galsworthy was on the far side of the room, with a coffee cup in his hand, chatting to one of the prettier female clerks.

Now the drone was moving slowly, no more than 100 m.p.h., south towards the Arabian Sea. In the far distance the flat landscape rose sharply to a high escarpment, but much closer – probably less than five miles away – a tall tower-like construction was visible in the flat desert.

Cottinger checked the sequence of instructions on his clipboard and looked at the digital clock on the wall. Ten seconds to go. He counted down, cleared his throat, and leaning slightly forward said, in the clearest tones he could muster: ‘Descend to five hundred feet. Target is ahead of you. Look for anti-air weapons, and take evasive action if you see them. Otherwise, proceed towards the target.’

He watched as the drone began to descend and the features of the drab terrain became distinct – he could see individual outcroppings of rock now. The tower was clearly visible: it must have been fifty feet high, though it looked taller, looming out of the flat sea of sandy gravel bed. It had been put up by a squad of US marines the month before.

‘How’s it going, Lieutenant?’

Cottinger turned to find Galsworthy standing behind his chair. ‘Okay, sir. We’ll be simulating firing in about two minutes.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ he said, and walked away. Galsworthy was pretty relaxed today, thought Cottinger, but then they’d now had days of these exercises without a hitch.

He noticed that the drone had speeded up slightly, and the tower was getting alarmingly big on the screen. It was a simple affair of steel piping, put up purely for the purposes of the exercise.

‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour.’

To his surprise the drone accelerated instead, surging to 150 m.p.h. according to his console. ‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour,’ Cottinger repeated, his voice rising. He looked at the altimeter dial on the console and saw the drone was also too low – it had descended to three hundred feet and falling. On the screen below the ground was whizzing past in a blur.

‘What’s the matter, Lieutenant?’ Colonel Galsworthy was suddenly back behind him.

Cottinger pointed to the screen. ‘It’s going way too fast.’

‘Well, tell it to slow down,’ Galsworthy said, sounding edgy.

‘I have, sir.’ He leaned forward towards the microphone on the panel at the front of his desk. ‘Reduce speed. Eighty miles per hour.’

By now the drone was flying at close to 200 m.p.h., and the tower loomed less than a mile away. Looking at the altimeter, Cottinger saw the drone was down to fifty feet; on the screen its nose looked to be level with the top of the tower.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Galsworthy exclaimed. ‘What is it doing?’

‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ Cottinger shouted. Then, forgetting his carefully learned commands, ‘Get up, get up, get up!’ he shouted. He’d left his chair now and was standing up, staring at the monitor, sweat standing out on his brow as the drone hurtled towards the tower. Would it clear it? ‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ he tried again, but there was no response.

He clenched both fists and waited tensely as the drone narrowed in on the tower. Closer and closer – he closed his eyes for a second. And then suddenly, as the screen filled with an image of steel piping tied together like metal latticework, his terminal screen went blank.

‘What the hell!’ shouted Galsworthy.

Cottinger ignored him and, grabbing his keyboard, typed in a series of commands. The terminal screen refreshed, and a satellite view of Oman filled the screen – nothing came from the drone. The satellite camera zoomed, gradually magnifying. A dark smear appeared in the centre of the screen and grew in size as the camera zeroed in. The smear was an ascending trail of wispy smoke and through it, as the magnification increased, Cottinger could glimpse a tangled mess of steel on the ground where seconds before the tower had stood. Nearby a fire was blazing; he could make out the skeletal remains of the drone burning on the desert floor.

Galsworthy cursed loudly. ‘What happened?’ he demanded.

Cottinger stared at the smouldering wreckage on his screen. He knew the drone was expected to take charge of itself one day, but this had come a lot earlier than expected.

‘Well, sir, how can I put it?’ he said at last. ‘It looks as if our drone just committed suicide.’

Chapter 41

This time Bokus called on Fane, who must have alerted Liz Carlyle as she was there when the American arrived, standing by the window, looking down at the Thames at high tide. Though Bokus hadn’t asked for her to be there, he was glad she was; he could get the bad news over in one fell swoop.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down in the corner, round a table which Fane claimed had belonged to his great-grandfather. Trust him to bring his family heirlooms to work, thought Bokus sourly. Fane’s office was much smaller than his at Grosvenor Square, yet there was something undeniably impressive about it. Its elegant furniture and expensive curtains seemed to say that you didn’t need an office the size of a tennis court to show your status. It made Bokus wonder grudgingly if there wasn’t something to the British liking for understatement.

‘You said it was important,’ said Fane, going straight to the point without the usual small talk.

Bokus was sweating, slightly nervous about the news he was about to break.

He took a deep breath. ‘Operation Clarity has had a bit of a setback and it’s been temporarily suspended.’

‘What setback?’ asked Liz Carlyle. ‘We’ve heard nothing.’

‘It was in Oman. That’s where they’ve been running trials on the new control system. We’ve lost one.’

‘Lost one?’ she asked incredulously.

Bokus nodded.

‘What happened?’ Fane said, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair.

‘Nobody knows for sure. It seems one minute the test drone was flying along just fine, being directed by the voice commands, then all of a sudden it went nose down into a target it was meant to photograph. Like a dog deciding to ignore its master’s voice.’ Bokus smiled weakly, but neither Liz nor Fane smiled back. ‘So it seems you two were right to think we have a problem.’

‘Are they sure it was external interference?’ asked Fane. ‘You know, Andy, these technological marvels are so beyond the ken of us mere mortals that we sometimes forget they can foul up in the same way people do. ‘‘To err is human’’ and all that sort of thing, but the worst mistakes in my view are technical.’

Bokus shook his head regretfully. ‘It would be nice to think so, but Langley’s told me there was unauthorised intervention in the commands sent to the drone. Don’t ask me for the technical detail, but they think the Air Force commands were somehow overlaid with contradictory ones. The drone didn’t know which set to believe, so it pretty much said “what the hell”, and looked for the nearest exit sign. It’s made them look back at another glitch which they’d previously put down to a technical malfunction.’

Fane asked, ‘Could this sabotage have come from some other source? I mean, how do you know it’s connected to Operation Clarity?’

‘Unfortunately, Clarity’s the only place it could have come from. To overlay the legitimate orders, the bogus ones would have to unravel their encryption, and then duplicate it themselves. To do that they’d have to go to the source of the encryption code. That’s your MOD project.’

‘Bugger,’ said Fane, and sat further forward in his chair, crossing his arms.

‘So we need to find this mole right away,’ said Liz. ‘Has Langley come back to you about Park Woo-jin?’

‘Yes,’ said Bokus, wondering if he should mention his source Ujin Wong. Better not, he decided. They’d met again briefly in a pub near Victoria, and Wong had told him he could find nothing at all suspicious about the programmer Park Woo-jin. ‘But I’m sure it’s not Park. They’ve gone through the original vetting, and checked with the Koreans as well. Both are certain he’s clean.’

‘Well, that’s obviously not true,’ said Liz, a split second before Fane angrily said, ‘Balls.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Bokus crossly.

Liz snapped, ‘We’ve had surveillance on Park Woo-jin for the last ten days. He made a drop in St James’s Park on his way to work. It was crystal clear. Either your people aren’t looking hard enough, or the Koreans are pulling the wool.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’ asked Bokus. He was surprised by the news about Park Woo-jin. The Korean intelligence people were usually very good. They might have made a mistake the first time round, but if they’d had another look, when Ujin Wong asked for it, they should have spotted anything wrong with Park. What was going on?

‘Meaning Park Woo-jin is reporting back to Korean intelligence. That’s the only thing that makes sense.’

‘But why would he do that?’ asked Fane. He had picked up a pencil and was rocking it fast between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I mean, we all know our allies like to know what’s going on, even the genuinely friendly ones. But honestly, would the KCIA really go to the trouble of planting an agent in the project of two close allies? Think of the risk. And the information they might get couldn’t do them an iota of conceivable good, while,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘risking God knows what ructions with their largest benefactor if it were discovered.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense, I agree,’ said Bokus. ‘Unless,’ and he paused until he felt their eyes upon him, ‘Park is working for someone else. Like the Russians. Langley’s view is that this is a sabotage operation, and increasingly they feel Moscow is behind it. The people at State are talking about calling in the Russian Ambassador and making a formal protest.’

‘That would be ridiculous,’ said Liz. ‘What do they expect the Russians to say?’

‘Of course they’d just deny it,’ Fane chipped in. ‘So all that would do is raise the level of international tension quite unnecessarily.’

‘And anyway, how does Langley explain Bravado’s information, if the Russians are behind this?’ asked Liz.

‘They think it was some kind of double bluff. The theory back home is that Bravado didn’t want to go the whole road to betraying his country, so he wrapped the information up by saying the attack was being carried out by a third country.’

‘But what about Kubiak? Where does he fit in according to your theory? Did you do a trace with Langley?’

‘Yes. There’s a big file. They did have him in their sights in Delhi, same as your lot did. They did a background study then and apparently his father was a senior General in the Defence Department. So he had brilliant access, as well as the prospect of rising high in the KGB. Our Station had him surrounded with access agents, including the madam at the whorehouse. They were planning to offer a big salary but keep him in place. He’d be able to indulge his passions, knowing a golden handshake and easy retirement awaited him in the States.

‘But in the end they didn’t go ahead. Langley didn’t like his profile; our shrinks assessed him as borderline psychopathic. I think the feeling was he’d be too difficult to control. The madam told us a lot about his personal habits – one of them was that he was violent, almost casually so. Apparently he’d nearly killed one of her girls when she did something he didn’t like, or maybe she wouldn’t do something he did like. There was also an incident when we had him under surveillance, and he assaulted a taxi driver – beat him up really badly, then walked off as though nothing had happened. He was drunk at the time. It had to be hushed up by his Embassy – they paid off the driver before he could complain to the police.’