Some databases are so secret and so vital that the safety of an entire nation depends upon them remaining safe from cyber-attack. The firewalls are so complicated that those who devise them regard them as impossible to breach. They involve not just a jumble of letters and figures but hieroglyphs and symbols which, if not in exactly the right order, will forbid entry to anyone but an officially ‘cleared’ operator with the precise access codes.
Such a database was at the heart of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, housing trillions of secrets vital to the safety of the entire USA.
Of course, its penetration was covered up. It had to be. This sort of scandal destroys careers – and that is the good news. It can topple ministers, gut departments, shiver the timbers of entire governments. But though it may have been hidden from the public, and above all from the media and those wretches of the investigative press, the Oval Office had to know …
As the man in the Oval Office finally comprehended the enormity of what had been done to his country he became angry – spitting angry. He issued a presidential order. Find him. Close him down. In a supermax, somewhere far beneath the rocks of Arizona. For ever.
There was a three-month hacker hunt. Very aware that the British equivalent of Fort Meade, known as the Government Communications Headquarters, was also of world quality and the Brits were, after all, allies, GCHQ was asked to collaborate at an early stage. The Brits created a dedicated team for that single task, headed by Dr Jeremy Hendricks, one of the best cyber-trackers they had.
Dr Hendricks was on the staff of the British National Cyber Security Centre, or NCSC, in Victoria, central London, an offshoot of the Government Communications HQ at Cheltenham. As its name implies, it specializes in hacker prevention. Like all guardians, it had to study the enemy: the hacker. That was why Sir Adrian sought the advice of Mr Ciaran Martin, the director of the NCSC. He reluctantly and nobly permitted Sir Adrian to filch Dr Hendricks from him on what he was assured was a temporary loan.
Jeremy Hendricks, in a world where teenagers were becoming leading lights, was mature. He was over forty, slim, neat and reserved. Even his colleagues knew little about his private life, which was the way he preferred it. He was gay but made no mention of it, choosing a private life of quiet celibacy. He could thus enjoy his two passions: his computers, which were also his profession, and his tropical fish, which he bred and nurtured in tanks in his flat in Victoria, walking distance from his workplace.
He had graduated from York University with a First in computer sciences, gone on to a doctorate, then another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to an immediate post with GCHQ in Britain. His particular expertise was his ability to detect the most minute traces hackers often leave behind, which reveal, eventually and inadvertently, their identity. But the cyber-terrorist who had penetrated the Fort Meade computer nearly defeated him. After the raid on the house in that suburb to the north of London he was one of the first allowed access, as he had played a major role in finding the source of the hack.
The trouble was, there had been so little to go on. There had been hackers before, but they were easily traced. That was before increased and improved firewalls had made penetration all but impossible.
This new hacker had left no trace. He had stolen nothing, sabotaged nothing, destroyed nothing. He seemed to have entered, looked around and withdrawn. There was no vital IP, the Internet Protocol that serves as an identification number, a source address.
They checked all known precedents. Had any other database been penetrated in this way? They factored in some seriously clever analytical data. They began to exclude, one by one, known hacker factories across the world. Not the Russians, working out of that skyscraper on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Not the Iranians, not the Israelis, not even the North Koreans. All were active in the hacking world, but they all had their hallmarks, like the individual ‘fist’ of a Morse code sender.
Finally, they thought they detected a half-IP in an allied database, like a smudged thumbprint discovered by a police detective. Not enough to identify anyone but enough to ‘match’ if it ever occurred again. For the third month they sat back and waited. And the thumbprint occurred once more, this time in the penetrated database of a major world bank.
This penetration posed yet another enigma. Whoever had achieved it had, for the duration of his presence inside the bank’s database, had at his disposal the means to transfer hundreds of millions to his own account far away, and then cause it to disappear for ever. But he had done no such thing. He had, as with Fort Meade, done nothing, wrecked nothing, stolen nothing.
To Dr Hendricks, the hacker was reminiscent of a curious child wandering through a toy store, satisfying their curiosity and then wandering back out again. But this time, unlike Fort Meade, they had left one tiny trace, which Hendricks had spotted. By this time the tracker team had given their quarry a nickname. He was elusive, so they called him ‘the Fox’. Still, a match was a match.
Even foxes make mistakes. Not a lot, just now and again. What Hendricks had spotted was part of an IP, and it matched the half-print discovered in the allied database. It made a whole. They reverse-engineered the trace and, to the considerable embarrassment of the British contingent, it led to England.
For the Americans, this proved that the UK had sustained an invasion of some sort, a takeover of a building by foreign saboteurs of unimaginable skill, possibly mercenaries working for a hostile government, and very likely armed. They wanted a hard building invasion.
The British, as the guilty hacker seemed to be housed in a detached suburban home in a peaceful suburb of the provincial town of Luton, in the county of Bedfordshire, just north of London, wanted a silent, invisible, no-alarm, no-publicity attack in the dark of night. They got their way.
The Americans sent over a team of six SEALs, lodged them in the US embassy under the aegis of the Defense Attaché (himself a US Marine) and insisted that two at least go in with the SAS. And so it took place, and no neighbour suspected a thing.
There were no foreigners, no mercenaries, no gunmen. Just a fast-asleep family of four. A thoroughly bewildered chartered accountant, already identified as Mr Harold Jennings, his wife, Sue, and their two sons, Luke, aged eighteen, and Marcus, thirteen.
That was what the SAS staff sergeant had meant at three in the morning. ‘You are not going to believe …’
Chapter Two
ALL THE CURTAINS on the ground floor were drawn. Light would come with dawn and there were neighbours front and back. But a house with curtains still across the windows would attract no suspicion up and down the street. Late wakers are simply envied. The downstairs team crouched below the window level, just in case someone chose to peer inside.
Upstairs, the captured family of four was instructed to dress normally and wait after packing suitcases, one each. The sun rose on a bright April day. The street began to come alive. Two early leavers drove off. A newsagent’s lad delivered the day’s papers. Three landed with a thud on the doormat, and the teenager turned and went on down the street.
At ten minutes to eight the family was escorted downstairs. They looked pale and shaken – most especially the older son – but did not resist. The two Americans, still black-masked, stared at them with enmity. These were the agents/terrorists who had caused such damage to their country. Surely no-release jail time awaited. The upstairs team, including the woman from SRR, came with them. They all waited silently in the sitting room, curtains still closed.
At eight a people-carrier clearly identified as a taxi drew up. Two of the SAS men had changed from black coveralls into formal dark suits with shirt and tie. They each had handguns under the left armpit. They escorted the family, with luggage, to the taxi. There was still no attempt to resist or escape. If any neighbour was interested, the family was simply going on holiday. The car drove away. Inside the house, the team relaxed. They knew they would have to wait out the hours of daylight, immobile and silent, then vaporize into the night the way they had come. The empty house, all systems switched off, would remain closed until much later.
The team leader received a short message to confirm that the arrested family was safely in custody elsewhere, and acknowledged it. He was a warrant officer, a very senior NCO and a veteran of operations inside the UK and abroad. He was in charge because the Regiment uses only NCOs for in-country ops. The officers, mockingly known as ‘Ruperts’, plan and supervise but do not go active inside the UK.
At ten a large van arrived. It was marked with the livery of a house-decorating company. The six men it disgorged wore white overalls. They took dustsheets and stepladders into the house. Neighbours saw it but took no real notice. The Jenningses were simply having some work done while they were on holiday.
Inside the house, the equipment was left on the floor of the hall while the men, led by Dr Hendricks, went upstairs to undertake their real task. It was to scour and gut the house of electronic equipment. They rapidly zeroed in on the attic, to discover an Aladdin’s cave of computer equipment and associated devices. The loft space seemed to have been converted into a private eyrie.
Beneath the
beams that sustained the roof someone had created a personal retreat. There was a desk, and tables and chairs, seemingly acquired cheaply from second-hand stores, ornaments, knick-knacks of some personal significance, but no pictures. Pride of place went to the desk, the chair that addressed it and the computer that stood on it. Dr Hendricks examined it carefully and was amazed.