He protested, threatening lengthy court appeals. A photo was laid on his desk. It showed the face, eyes closed, of a gangster he had commissioned to kidnap a child. He lapsed into silence, then rang his personal pilot at Northolt and instructed that his plane be made ready.
In the darkened computer room at Chandler’s Court Luke Jennings crouched at a console, stared at the display, tapped several touch-screen symbols and stared again, locked into and lost in his private world. By his side, Dr Hendricks sat and watched. He knew what the teenager was doing, but not how he was doing it. There are moments when instinct defies and denies logic. The man from GCHQ had set a task that was deemed impossible … and yet.
Outside, it was pitch black, the middle of the night. Neither man at the console knew or cared. There are no hours in cyberspace. Somewhere, many miles away, a database silently fought back, seeking to protect its secrets. Just before dawn, it lost.
Dr Hendricks gaped in near-disbelief. Somehow, and he had no idea how, it had been achieved: Luke Jennings had crossed the air gap and entered the right algorithms. The firewalls opened, the faraway database capitulated. There was no need to go on. They had the codes. He tapped the lad on the shoulder.
‘You can close down now. We can come back. You have given us the access. Well done.’
In breaking into the database at Fort Meade, Maryland, Luke Jennings had unknowingly risked many years in an American jail. In doing the same to this one, there would be only praise. He did not care either way. There had been a challenge, and he had met it. That was all that mattered. Others could enter the foreign database and plant malware, Trojan horses, instructions that the equipment should destroy itself.
The foreign database lay under the deserts of the theocratic republic of Iran, a country that employed and propagated terrorism and wanted to build its own atomic bomb. There was another country, destined for annihilation if that atomic bomb ever became a viable weapon. If Sir Adrian had his way and could persuade the Prime Minister, the access codes to the Iranian database would be shared with the state of Israel.
But perhaps not entirely for free. The vast new natural gas field that had just been discovered off Israel’s western shore might enter into the conversation.
Sue Jennings gazed up into the darkness as the first hint of day touched the east. She knew exactly what she was feeling, and she was enjoying every second of it. It had been so long.
Her marriage had, effectively, ended ten years earlier. The strains of raising the two boys, the additional needs of the elder one, had been part of it. But that was not the main cause. There had been no single blazing row with Harold. But he had eventually made plain that he had not a flicker of interest in the physical side of their marriage. At that point, they had not made love for weeks. He had then been in his mid-forties, she a very healthy thirty.
In the intervening decade there had been, for her, brief affairs, always wholly and only physical. But she and Harold had stayed together for the sake of the boys, especially Luke. There were practical considerations: a home, a constant income and all the things an income bought. But Harold was gone; she was now a widow.
What she was feeling in the coming dawn was raw lust, and it was for the touch of the man sleeping beside her. She knew he would not have risked crossing the length of the first floor to her and, anyway, her room was in between those occupied by Luke and Marcus. So she had finally come to him.
The door had been unlocked. She had entered, let her robe slip to the floor and climbed under the duvet beside him. Very little was said. They simply made love, he with his iron-hard strength, she with the passion of long-suppressed desire.
When Captain Williams and his men had been assigned to their small community, he had joined their communal table: she, Dr Hendricks, two others from GCHQ and her sons. The civilities had been maintained, but the mutual attraction was in the eyes. Details slipped out. He was thirty-nine, single since his wife had died in a tragic canoe accident off the coast of the Algarve eight years earlier.
Sue Jennings had spent days considering what she should do. She could no longer even pretend to deny the powerful attraction she felt for the soldier who joined the family and the scientists at the meal table. When their gaze had met across the tea cups that first time, she sensed it was mutual.
But she was no skilled seductress. That had never been part of her life.
She waited for him to make a move but, scrupulously polite, he made no advances. Manners? Reserve? Damn them both. She knew she was falling in love. Why would he not make the first move? After three weeks she made her decision.
Just after midnight she had risen from her single bed, still quite naked. By moonlight, she had looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror. She was forty and her figure was full but in no way plump. She had kept herself in shape at the gym, but for whom? Not for lacklustre Harold, who had been more concerned with his golf handicap than making love.
She was still young enough to make another baby, and she wanted to do just that, but only with one man, and he was sleeping in a room at the opposite end of the house. Barefoot, she slipped a robe over her shoulders and opened the door, taking care to make no sound and wake the boys sleeping on either side of her room.
She had paused one last time outside his door, hearing the deep, regular breathing from within, before turning the knob and sliding inside. Now, they had spent their first night together. In the glimmer of dawn beyond the curtains she made up her mind. She was going to have him, and not for just a night. She intended to be the next Mrs Harry Williams, and she knew that a good-looking woman with a fixed determination would always make an Exocet missile look like a badly designed firework. As the late-June sun tipped the tops of the trees in the forest, she slipped back into her own room.
Chapter Twelve
IRAN HAS LUSTED for many years to have an atomic bomb. The idea was first mooted under the Shah, who was deposed in 1979. By then, he had been talked out of it by his friend and protector the USA. Under the ayatollahs, there was no such influence.
For many years, the technology was not the problem. A Pakistani scientist who had been at the heart of that country’s successful research into and construction of atomic bombs traitorously sold the data to Iran. The problem had long been acquiring a sufficiently large stock of weapons-grade uranium.
Uranium ore, known as yellowcake, has been purchased for many years from various suppliers around the world. But in the form of ore, uranium-235 has a purity of five per cent or less. This is far too crude to be used in the production of a nuclear weapon. It has to be refined until it is close to ninety-five per cent pure.
The excuse for its purchase has always been to build electricity-generating power stations, for which five per cent purity is enough. The world has never believed this excuse. Why, runs the argument, should a country that is virtually floating on an ocean of crude oil and does not give a fig about the environment not exploit her own free raw material to keep the lights burning? The key has long been secret chemical plants, hidden from the world and denied, their function to refine the raw yellowcake into weapons-grade uranium-235.
The nuclear club of the USA, China, France, Russia and Britain, with non-nuclear Germany and the European Union, concluded an accord in 2015 to the effect that Iran would desist in her efforts in nuclear research in exchange for the relaxation of the many economic penalties inflicted because of her nuclear ambitions. In secret, the accord was not abided by.
The ayatollahs have long decreed that the state of Israel, not endowed with oil fields but technologically extremely advanced, is destined to be wiped from the face of the Earth. Israel thus has a considerable interest in the Iranian nuclear ambition. She also has the Mossad (the ‘Institution’), her very effective secret intelligence arm. Espionage efforts to find out just what the Iranians in their dictatorship are up to and how far they have got have been unrelenting.
Iran was not the first neighbour of Israel to start a nuclear programme. That h
ad been Syria, which learned its lesson in 2007. Israeli espionage and over-flights had detected a huge square building, nicknamed in Tel Aviv the Cube, being built near Deir Ezzor at a remote site in eastern Syria. It excited too much curiosity to be ignored. Further espionage revealed it was home to a North Korean-built nuclear reactor designed to supply the Syrian dictator with plutonium – the core of an atomic bomb.
On a single night in 2007 eight Israeli jets took off from bases in the south of Israel. They flew west, out over the Mediterranean, then north, then east, flashing over the Syrian coast unseen. They were flying at a height of 300 feet or so, virtually rooftop height, and at that speed required nanosecond-accuracy. They carried a variety of bombs to ensure absolute destruction of the target.