He was accustomed to the finest and most complex equipment on the computer market, but this was simply ordinary. It was shop-bought, available in the out-of-town superstores owned and run by the common chains. It seemed a father had indulged a son with what he could afford. But how on earth had anyone defeated the best cyber-brains of the Western world with this kit? And which of the boys had it been?
The government scientist hoped he would have the time and opportunity to find out who had penetrated the database at Fort Meade, and to interview this computer geek – a wish Sir Adrian would soon fulfil.
It had taken no time to recognize that this was not a super-computer of the type they were used to out at GCHQ, the huge doughnut-shaped mini-city outside Cheltenham, in the county of Gloucestershire. But although shop-bought and available to anyone, what they discovered, examined and removed had been ingeniously altered and amended, presumably by the owner.
By late morning they were finished. The attic was what it had once been, a hollow shell beneath the rafters of the house. The cyber-team left with their booty. Behind still-drawn curtains the assault-team soldiers sat out of sight and whiled away the hours until 2 a.m. Then they, too, slipped into the darkness and vanished. No neighbour had seen them come, and none saw them go.
Adrian Weston had never, as a boy, intended to be a spy, let alone a spymaster. The son of a veterinary surgeon and raised in the countryside, he had lusted to become a soldier. As soon as age permitted, released from a minor public (boarding) school, he had volunteered for the army and, once accepted as ‘officer material’, gained entry into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
He did not get the Sword of Honour for his passing-out year but was well up the gradings and when offered the regiment of his choice selected the Parachute Regiment. He hoped it would provide more chance of combat. After two years against the IRA in Northern Ireland, he opted for a chance at university, on an army scholarship, and secured a 2:2 in history. It was after graduation that he was approached by one of the dons. A private dinner, perhaps? There were two other men present; no one else.
By the end of the melon starter he realized they were up from London, the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. The history don was a spotter, a talent scout, a trawler. Weston ticked all the boxes. Good family, good school, good exams, the Paras, one of us. He entered ‘the Firm’ a week later. There was training and, later, assignment. During school holidays he had spent time with a German family as an exchange student and now spoke fluent and rapid German. With an intensive three-month course at the Army Language School, he had added Russian. He went to the Eastern Europe desk; it was the height of the Cold War – the Brezhnev and Andropov years. Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR were still to come.
Technically, Sir Adrian was no longer on the government payroll, which had certain advantages. One of them was invisibility. Another, accorded by his retention as the Prime Minister’s personal adviser on matters concerning national security, was access. His calls were taken, his advice accepted. Before his retirement he had been deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service at Vauxhall Cross, serving under Richard Dearlove.
When Sir Richard retired in 2004 Adrian Weston chose not to make a bid for the successorship because he did not wish to serve under Prime Minister Tony Blair. He had been disgusted by the foisting upon Parliament of what came to be known as the ‘Dodgy Dossier’.
This was a document that sought to ‘prove’ that Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them so therefore his country ought to be invaded. There was, Tony Blair assured Parliament, proof ‘beyond doubt’ that these weapons existed. Parliament voted to join Britain to the American invasion of March 2003. It was a disaster, leading to chaos sweeping the entire Middle East and the birth of the terror machine ISIS, still globally active fifteen years later.
To substantiate his claim, Mr Blair quoted as the source for all this the respected Secret Intelligence Service, and the claim formed the basis of the Dodgy Dossier. It was all bunkum. All the SIS had from inside Iraq were ‘single source’ allegations and, in the world of intel, single-source claims are never acted upon unless backed by documentary evidence of huge persuasiveness. There was none.
Nor were there any such weapons, as the subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq proved. The source was a single lying Iraqi, code name Curveball, who fled to Germany, who also believed him. The British government, when the fiction was exposed, blamed MI6 for misinformation, though it had warned Downing Street repeatedly that the claims were highly unreliable.
Loyal to a fault, Sir Richard Dearlove remained silent, in the tradition of his service, until his retirement, and long after that. When he left, Adrian Weston chose also to retire. He did not even wish to remain as Number Two, knowing that the successorship would go to a Blair crony.
While Sir Richard moved on to become Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Adrian Weston took his knighthood, his ‘K’ from a grateful queen, and withdrew to his cottage in rural Dorset, reading, writing and occasionally visiting London, where he could always stay at the Special Forces Club in one of its small but comfortable and modestly priced guest rooms.
As a career-long Kremlinologist specializing in Moscow’s iron rule of the European satellites, and with several hazardous missions behind the Iron Curtain under his belt, in 2012 he wrote a paper which came to the attention of the then-newly appointed Home Secretary in the Cameron government. Out of the blue in his rustic retirement he received a handwritten letter asking him if he would lunch with her outside the ministry in a private meeting.
Mrs Marjory Graham was new to Cabinet rank but very astute. At the Carlton Club – traditionally men-only but permitting ladies as associate members – she explained that her new remit included the Security Service, or MI5. But she wished to have access to a second opinion from a different stream of the intelligence world and had been impressed by his paper on the increasingly aggressive Russian leadership. Could she consult him on a very private basis? Three years before the raid on the house in Luton, David Cameron resigned and she became Prime Minister.
The privately circulated paper that had attracted her attention was entitled simply ‘Beware the Bear’. Adrian Weston had spent a career studying the Kremlin and its successive masters. He had watched with approval the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the reforms he introduced, including the abolition of world Communism and the USSR, but had regarded with dismay the pillaging of a humiliated country under the alcoholic Boris Yeltsin.
He despised the liars, cheats, thieves, rogues and thinly veiled criminals who had stripped their homeland of its assets, made themselves billionaires, and now flaunted their stolen wealth with mega-yachts and huge mansions, many of them inside Britain.
But as Yeltsin sank deeper into booze-fuelled stupor Weston noticed in his shadow a cold-eyed little former secret-police thug with a taste for homoerotic photos of himself riding bare-chested through Siberia with a rifle across his chest. His paper warned of the substitution of Communism with a new hard-right aggressiveness posing as patriotism that appeared to be infesting the Kremlin as the ex-chekisti replaced the drunk and it noted the close links between the Vozhd – a Russian word meaning ‘the Boss’ or, in the crime world, ‘the Godfather’ – and the professional criminal underworld.
The man who had achieved the complete mastery of Russia had started as a diehard Communist and had been privileged to join the KGB in the foreign branch, the First Chief Directorate, being posted to Dresden in East Germany. But when Communism fell he returned to his native Leningrad, renamed St Petersburg
, and joined the staff of the mayor. From there he graduated to Moscow and the staff of Boris Yeltsin. Constantly at the side of the drunken giant from Siberia who took the presidency after the fall of Gorbachev, he became more and more indispensable.
As he did so, he changed. He became disillusioned with Communism, but not with fanaticism. One simply replaced the other. He swerved to hard-right politics, masked by religiosity and devotion to the Orthodox Church and to ultrapatriotism. And he noticed something.
He saw that Russia was utterly controlled by three power bases. The first was the government, with its access to the secret police, Special Forces and armed forces. The second had come after the rape of Russia and its assets under Yeltsin: the corps of opportunists who had acquired from corrupt bureaucrats all the mineral resources of their native land at give-away prices. These were the new plutocrats, the oligarchs, instant billionaires and multimillionaires. Without money and uncountable masses of it, one could be nothing in modern Russia. The third was organized crime, known as ‘thieves in law’, or Vori v Zakone. These three formed an interlinked brotherhood. After a doddering Yeltsin stepped down and handed over the reins without opposition to the man at his side, the one now known as ‘the Vozhd’ became the master of all three, using them, rewarding them and commanding them. And, with their help, he became one of the richest men in the world.
Sir Adrian noted that those who had quarrelled with the new Vozhd appeared to have very short life-spans if they stayed in Russia, and a record of fatal accidents if they settled abroad but continued to criticize. The warning he uttered was back then prophetic and not popular in all quarters, but it seemed to have impressed Mrs Graham. Over coffee he accepted her request.
He arrived at the familiar black door of Number Ten, Downing Street, at five to nine. It opened before he had time to touch the ornate brass knocker. There are watchers inside. He knew the doorman who greeted him by name and was shown up the curving staircase, which was flanked by portraits of previous occupiers. At the top he was invited into a small conference room a few yards from the Prime Minister’s working office. She joined him on the dot of nine, having been at work since six.
Marjory Graham did not waste time, explaining that the American ambassador was due at ten and Sir Adrian needed to be brought ‘up to speed’. He already knew about the breaching of US cyber-security three months earlier but not about the recent events on his home territory. She gave him a short but thorough run-down on what had happened in a northern suburb of Luton.
‘This family, where are they now? he asked.
‘At Latimer.’
He was familiar with the small and picturesque village on the border of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Just outside the village limits is an old manor, taken over by the government during the Second World War as a lodgement for captured senior German officers. They had lived in genteel surroundings and chatted among themselves out of sheer boredom. Every word had been recorded and the information had proved very useful. After 1945 the manor was retained and operated as a safe house for Eastern Bloc defectors of importance and as such was run by MI5. In that world the word ‘Latimer’ was enough.
Sir Adrian wondered if the Director General of MI5 would be best pleased to have a problem family with no security clearance dumped upon him at short notice. He doubted it.