Читать книгу Dirty Little Secret - Jon Stock - Страница 16

Omar Rashid wasn’t comfortable with promotion. For a start, he had too many people in his SIGINT unit who were twice his age. It was just plain awkward asking a fortysomething analyst at the National Security Agency to work a bit harder. It was like a freshman telling a senior how to hit on girls. But the new job had its perks. Instead of trawling through the real-time night traffic in AfPak, hoping to nail some careless jihadi in an internet café in Karachi, he could sit back in his small office and catch a bit of girl-on-girl action on RedTube while others did the hard work.

He blamed Salim Dhar, whose voice he had picked up in North Waziristan a few weeks earlier. Only it hadn’t been his voice. Dhar had duped them, strapped a tape recorder to his cell phone and planted it with six kidnapped US Marines. None of them had stood a chance when the Reaper deployed its Hellfire missiles twenty minutes later. His boss had taken the drop, leaving the unit without a leader.

In all the confusion and recriminations that followed, someone seemed to overlook the fact that it was Rashid who had made the original intercept, and he was given the job. Promotion by incompetence, that’s what he called it. What fiasco would it take for him to reach the top of the NSA?

‘Sir, we have a priority level five,’ his PA said, putting her head around the door. He switched browser windows, confident she had seen nothing, and checked out her rear as he followed her into the main room. One day he would be brave enough to ask her out for a drink, maybe the Havana Club in Baltimore.

‘What’ve we got?’ Rashid said, an awful sense of déjà vu washing over him. His unit normally sat at separate terminals. Now, though, most of them were gathered around one analyst’s screen. Like everyone else in his department, he had been told to temporarily redirect his unit’s efforts to the UK, where GCHQ was in need of cover after Salim Dhar had run amok. His last known act had been to eject from a Russian jet over the Bristol Channel, from where he was thought to have been picked up by a Russian sub, but nobody was sure. Who said the Cold War was over?

‘One hundred per cent voiceprint recognition,’ the analyst said.

‘Salim Dhar?’ Rashid’s tentative words hung in the air. For a few brief minutes, the name had brought him fame and the promise of fortune, but now he had come to dread it. They all had.

‘On a watchlist number. Calling a cell phone in Portsmouth, UK.’ And then he added, for Rashid’s benefit: ‘Real time two-way.’ This time, in other words, a tape-recorded Dhar was almost impossible.

‘Cell IDs?’

‘Receiver handset’s encrypted. We’re working on it.’ The analyst looked across at a colleague who was crunching numbers on his screen.

‘What about Dhar’s?’

‘Sir, signature and profile of a secure hard line. So far no number.’

‘A hard line? What the hell’s he playing at? And no number ID? I thought you said it was on our watchlist.’

‘It’s got some heavy-duty masking encryption at the local level. Looks like it’s been rerouted at source. The Brits may have a better idea. Somebody call down to GCHQ?’

Rashid had seen the images of ‘the doughnut’, and the bomb damage to its central courtyard. It had been showing on the news channels all afternoon. The iconic building had stood up well to the attack, and there had only been one casualty, but its operational capabilities had been affected. GCHQ had a large contingent working on the floor below, where morale had taken a nosedive. He had been down there earlier for a chat, and had returned with one eye on the window, scanning the skies for rogue Russian jets, wondering if the NSA might be next.

‘Sir, the cell ID’s location.’

Rashid walked over to the analyst who was sitting on his own.

‘Fort Monckton, MI6 training centre,’ Rashid said, reading from the screen, which was now showing a crystal-clear satellite image of Portsmouth harbour, a pulsating blue icon radiating out from the southern end of the Gosport peninsula.

‘And we’ve got the hard-line number for Dhar. It’s presenting as the main switchboard for MI6 headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, central London. Seems like the entire MI6 phone network is on our watchlist.’

Rashid didn’t want to think about the ethics of eavesdropping on their closest ally. There were other things on his mind. He ran a hand through his hair and wondered what he’d done to deserve Dhar. It was beginning to feel personal between them.

‘Is it just me, or does anyone else sense the Brits aren’t being entirely straight with us? Hold that call to GCHQ, and get me the DCIA’s office.’