The Tempus Project E-Book

Antony Johnston

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Forget about Lisbeth Salander... here comes Brigitte SharpIn The Exphoria Code, MI6 officer and elite hacker Brigitte Sharp foiled a terror attack on London that used stolen military drone software to deliver a 'dirty bomb'.Now Bridge is back, battling a series of hacks and ransom-ware attacks, masterminded by a hacker known only as 'Tempus', who is targeting politicians and government officials with impunity.Discovering that this campaign is linked to a cyber-attack on the London G20 summit, she is drawn into the dark-web world of crypto-currencies, Russian hackers and an African rebel militia.In another compelling cyber-thriller from the creator of Atomic Blonde, Bridge races against time to prevent a disaster that could alter the balance of global power forever.'The perfect spy thriller for our time, with none of the baggage of Bond' JAY STRINGER'Forget about Lisbeth Salander... here comes Brigitte Sharp' JOHANA GUSTAWSSON

Leseprobe

Published in 2020

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

Copyright © Antony Johnston 2020

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 9781785631795

In memory of Tails, Lu Wayland,and all the others who urged us to live

Contents

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1

‘You naughty boy,’ I whisper. I’m almost impressed by his balls.

He’s been discreet so far. Maxim has had meatspace agents on his tail for weeks, waiting for him to slip up, but so far they’ve got nothing. There have even been times I’ve wondered if Maxim’s intel was correct — but not out loud, not even in private to others here in the workshop. Hackers gossip like anyone else. I learned that last year, laughing it off like a silly joke. I’m pretty sure I got away with it, but since then I’ve kept my mouth shut around these loose-lipped motherfuckers.

I also scrubbed my browser history and bookmarks five times over. Just in case.

But it turns out Maxim’s source was right. As well as following the target, the agents have been doing garbage dives. They take at-site photos of everything, steal anything useful, and bring it all to me.

The target and his wife have a four-month-old child. After one recent dive I saw a discarded baby monitor box in a photo. A modern type with camera as well as sound, and more importantly networked so the parents can go out for dinner or whatever and still watch over their little angels.

(Strike one: that box should have been in the recycling, where the agents might not have found it.)

I looked up the manufacturer, a Shenzhen outfit that makes branded goods for big tech companies then uses the same machines and templates to pump out white-label versions to rebadge and sell as own-brand devices around the world. The Chinese government owns ten per cent of the company, but that doesn’t make much difference either way. Design theft like this is standard practice at Asian tech facilities.

(Strike two: never trust a connection inside your house to a generic Chinese manufacturer.)

I asked around the workshop, and the black hat community, but there were no existing hacks or code injection methods for this particular device. So it was down to good old brute force.

I went to a retailer — an actual store, where I had to talk to actual people, hating every actual minute of it — and bought the same model of baby monitor. I took it home, set it facing out the window of my apartment to trigger the motion activation, and hooked it up to my guest network (firewalled off from the real thing) with default settings. Then I returned to the workshop and started poking it over the internet.

By the end of that day I had a crude but effective man-in-the-middle attack that captured every fifth frame of video from the camera, watching people walk by the street below my apartment. No sound, but the video was what mattered. Every fifth frame may not sound like much, but these cameras run at 30fps so it was plenty.

I’d hacked my own monitor. Now it was time to hack the target’s.

I went old-school, locating it by ‘war-dialling’. Back when dinosaurs roamed the internet, war-dialling meant using a program to call every possible phone number in an area by simple number incrementation — 0000000001, 0000000002, 0000000003, and so on — and see if any of them answered with a modulated audio signal instead of a human voice. If they did, the program knew it had found something electronic. Something that could be hacked.

I war-dialled local IP addresses for the baby monitors’ manufacturer code. I found a few hundred in the city, so narrowed it down to the target’s residential area. That left me with a dozen possibles. Half the owners hadn’t changed the default login settings, and the ones who did had used crappy, obvious passwords.

I hacked them all.

That afternoon I piped the output from each camera into separate image directories, then wrote a quick script to automatically stitch the frames into Matroska video files and apply a motion-smoothing algorithm. It’s like watching a 1970s soap opera starring robots, but it’s fine.

At the end of each day for the past week, I’ve played all the day’s files simultaneously, spread over my tri-monitor setup. Because each camera is focused on a crib, it’s mostly sleeping babies. The camera only operates when they move, so they look like the most restless kids in the world. It’s boring as fuck.

But patience is a virtue. Every so often, a parent leans far enough over their baby to be seen. Or they pick up the monitor and move it, to adjust the angle, clean the crib, or place it in a different room where the baby’s fallen asleep. One by one I’ve seen each baby’s parent and been able to eliminate their video feed.

Until yesterday, when I recognised the target’s wife.

I spent the evening disconnecting from all the other monitors, securely deleting their feeds, and covering my tracks. Nobody would know I’d ever been watching. Meanwhile, the stream from the target’s camera has continued recording in the background, waiting for something to confirm the intel from Maxim’s source.

I didn’t have to wait long.

(Strike three: never take your mistress back to your own house.)

‘You naughty boy,’ I whisper, and smile. Today’s video feed shows him leading a young woman by the hand, down the hallway. It’s only visible in the corner of the monitor’s camera, and the image quality isn’t enough to positively identify the woman, but anyone can see it’s not his wife.

I don’t know what Maxim has planned for this unfortunate sucker; what horrible treachery he’ll have to perform to stop this video falling into the wrong hands. But I do know that young woman won’t stay unidentified for long. Maxim will be happy. When Maxim is happy, we’re all happy.

I light a cigarette and take out my phone. At the desk behind me Saskia mutters, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ and I don’t need to turn around to know she’s waving her hands in the air, wrinkling her nose at the smoke.

I laugh, blow a thick cloud at the ceiling, and call Maxim’s number.

2

SCAR. Committee unanimous. — G

Brigitte Sharp read the text message and shook her head in disbelief. ‘Fucking boys playing,’ she muttered.

‘What was that?’ said the voice in her earpiece. ‘Trouble?’

‘No, nothing,’ she replied, blowing smoke. ‘Just the usual politics.’ Bridge switched to the flight tracker app on her iPhone and noted the plane’s position. ‘Wheels down, two minutes. Stand by.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and returned inside the building.

Andrea Thomson and her MI5 team would be at London City airport by now, waiting for the morning’s inbound flight from Estonia. Registered on board that flight was Artjom Kallass, a Tallinn-based journalist carrying information about alleged Russian-backed ‘hacking workshops’ operating in cities throughout the Baltic countries, including Tallinn itself, to penetrate and undermine other countries’ security systems.

Kallass had conducted investigations into the workshops for some time, but when he’d tried to publish his revelations of Russian meddling and proxy cyberwar operations in Estonia’s national newspapers, he found himself running straight into a brick wall. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania hadn’t been Soviet Bloc countries for decades. Even the Bloc itself was a distant memory, the province of cold war history nerds obsessed with Stalin, Khrushchev, and the Iron Curtain. But the depth of feeling and sympathy for Russia in the so-called ‘Baltic triangle’ remained strong, and every newspaper in the region was run by someone with strong political connections. None of them would risk angering Moscow.

So Kallass turned to the UK. He contacted Gregory Hughes, the cultural attaché at the British embassy in Tallinn. It was an open secret that wherever you went in the world, ‘British cultural attaché’ was often a synonym for ‘SIS officer’, and Hughes was no exception. He was the station chief for all three countries in the Baltic triangle — and the sole officer, thanks to a combination of budget cuts, the territories’ small size, and a distinct lack of anything interesting happening in them.

Until Kallass. He was interesting.

If what the journalist said was true, Russia’s extra-military ‘hybrid warfare’ units — in other words, government-sponsored teams of hackers — weren’t restricted to Moscow-based groups like APT29, the Advanced Persistent Threat team responsible for many recent high-profile incidents such as hacking the emails of American politicians. Kallass’ investigations alleged that the Kremlin also created, financed, and managed similar groups outside Russia itself, in friendly extra-national territories such as Estonia, to conduct cyberattacks against its targets. Targets like the UK.

This wasn’t news; almost everyone working in international cybersecurity accepted it to be the case. But Artjom Kallass claimed he had proof.

The UK was eager to see it, but the journalist feared reprisals and refused to release it until he was safely out of Estonia. If Russia was already backing a hacking workshop there, it was natural to assume they also had officers of their own Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, operating in the country.

Gregory Hughes took Kallass seriously and contacted SIS headquarters at Vauxhall, in its squat, aggressively postmodern edifice of glass and steel overlooking the Thames. The Head of Station for north-east Europe had in turn passed the intel to Giles Finlay, the man in charge of SIS’ Cyber Threat Analytics unit and one of the few senior officers inside the Service with experience and understanding of hacking.

It was Giles’ CTA team, including Brigitte Sharp, who had prevented a recent terror attack in London; a ‘dirty bomb’ of radioactive waste carried by drones, following the theft of computer code from an Anglo-French military project known as Exphoria. Brigitte, herself half-French, had reluctantly gone undercover to root out the mole inside the project, before returning to London to foil the attack.

Following the mission’s success, Whitehall realised the threat could have been dealt with more quickly if SIS, MI5, GCHQ, and the Ministry of Defence had communicated better. Giles was ordered to assemble a cross-departmental task force that could facilitate such information-sharing, and also take necessary action. He’d asked Brigitte, whose skill, insight, and intuition had saved potentially thousands of lives and brought a deranged terrorist to justice, to lead it.

Bridge wasn’t the least bit confident about becoming a leader. She was perfectly comfortable working either as part of a team or flying solo, but being responsible for other people and giving orders was an entirely new experience, and not something she’d wished for. Still, the success of Exphoria gave her a renewed confidence in her own judgement.

Confidence that had now been undermined by a single text message.

It was a tiny thing, not worth getting worked up about. She wasn’t even sure why she’d given it so much thought in the first place. But she had, and now Bridge’s suggestions for the new team’s name had evidently fallen on deaf ears. Her ideas were logical and sensible — Multi-agency Cyber-Espionage Unit (MCEU), Combined Cyber Task Force (CCTF), Anti-Terror Shared Intelligence (ATSI), Direct Cyber Operations (DCO). She liked that last one; it was simple, to the point, and as much as she regretted how the word ‘cyber’ had become a synonym for all things internet, she was willing to make a concession to ensure everybody from Whitehall to MI5 understood the unit’s purpose. Besides, ‘The DCO’ just sounded like an official department.

Giles, ever the Boys’ Own public schoolboy, wanted to call it Shared Cyber Anti-terrorist Response. SCAR.

‘You can’t be serious,’ Bridge had said with a grimace when he first suggested it. ‘It doesn’t even make sense.’

‘And nobody cares,’ said Giles. ‘You’ve got to give them something sexy, something they can say out loud with gusto. You don’t think “COBRA” was a happy accident, do you? It’s not like the Cabinet Office also has a Briefing Room “B”.’

Now Giles’ text message confirmed he’d been right. Of course he had, and Bridge was angry at herself for daring to think the committee might listen to her suggestions over his. For even letting herself care whether they did or not.

So now here she was at Orly Airport, thirteen kilometres outside Paris, undertaking SCAR’s first provisional operation — a simple C&C job to ‘collect and convey’ Artjom Kallass to safety. It was a suitable demonstration of the cross-agency premise at work, as it involved co-ordination with MI5. Andrea Thomson, Giles’ counterpart across the river, had agreed to take a team to London City Airport and wait for the morning flight from Tallinn.

Kallass, though, would never step off that plane. He was registered to travel, and the flight manifest would confirm he was on board, but it was a ruse; sleight of hand to throw off anyone monitoring those records or watching Kallass’ travel activity. The journalist’s meetings with Hughes in Tallinn, and the subsequent movement of information up the chain through SIS and finally to SCAR (ugh) were conducted with the utmost secrecy and care. But it was impossible, not to mention foolish, to assume that would prevent the Russians, or even Estonia’s own intelligence community, from knowing Kallass intended to throw himself on the UK’s mercy.

So Bridge had called on Andrea at MI5, and GCHQ analyst Steve Wicker, to help her arrange for Kallass to fly in to London this morning. Anyone following official activity, or the journalist’s online movements, would have ‘seen’ him catch that flight. They’d expect him to land imminently at City Airport, where he’d be met and escorted to safety by the UK’s very own domestic security service.

They’d be disappointed, because Kallass wasn’t on the flight to London. He wasn’t even flying to England.

‘It’ll take him ten minutes tops to get through passport control,’ said Bridge. ‘I’m en route.’

‘Roger,’ replied Henri Mourad, SIS’ Paris station chief, in her earpiece.

Bridge set off through Orly concourse, heading for the arrivals area. As she went she tied back her hair in a neat pony tail, donned a pair of white gloves, and removed a name card from inside her blazer. She reached the open area in front of the arrivals door looking like all the other chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and personal assistants waiting for clients and bosses to clear customs. Next to the professional drivers waited groups of family members, eager to greet their loved ones, and a few unbooked taxi drivers looking for an easy fare. The same crowd as any other airport, in any other country.

None of the drivers or family members looked overtly suspicious. A good spy never would, of course. But certain stances, a particular sense of tension in the body, gave most operatives away. Chauffeurs were the trickiest to figure out, because so many were ex-soldiers — not only in England or France, but all over the world — and a military bearing was something one never completely lost, even after decades working civvy street.

Bridge had never served in the forces herself, but in addition to practising karate since she was a teenager, she’d undergone military-style instruction at ‘The Loch’, a secret training facility for UK intelligence officers in the Scottish Highlands. Just as she was confident she could tell which of these drivers were former squaddies, she was equally sure any intelligence officer worth their salt would clock her right away, behind her façade of ‘bored limo driver waiting for a client’. Bridge’s last line of deniability was the name card she held in her hand, which didn’t say ‘Artjom Kallass’. Instead it read ‘Helmut Wasserman’, a pre-agreed alias under which the journalist was travelling, complete with fake passport supplied by SIS and passed to Kallass by Gregory Hughes before he left Estonia.

She’d seen and studied photos of Kallass, and read his bio multiple times, but was nevertheless surprised when he emerged. In the past couple of weeks he’d grown a goatee, and today he’d also removed the spectacles he wore in every photo of him she’d seen. It wasn’t the most ingenious disguise in the world, but it was effective. Even Bridge had to look twice. She caught his eye as he looked over the drivers, pointed to the name card, and held out a white-gloved hand.

He approached and shook it, looking up with a nervous smile. Bridge had a good six inches of height on him, but while she was used to often being taller than male acquaintances, it seemed Kallass wasn’t, and he looked in danger of losing his composure. She couldn’t afford him blurting out something inappropriate while surrounded by people, so Bridge quickly returned the smile and said, ‘Bonjour, Herr Wasserman, et bienvenue à Paris. Suivez-moi, s’il-vous plaît.’ Kallass spoke French; it was why they’d arranged to meet him here in Paris, with the bilingual Bridge making initial contact. She hoped calling him by his alias would be enough to remind him where he was, and what they were doing here.

He nodded in reply. ‘Merci. Pouvons-nous aller voir un buraliste en route?’

‘Oui, pas de problème,’ said Bridge, relieved.

They wouldn’t call at a store, of course. It was a code phrase, a simple way for Kallass himself to verify that this woman waiting for him at the airport wasn’t an imposter. She turned on her heel and led him out of the building, across the walkway to the car park.

Airports, train stations, and bus stations were equal parts blessing and curse for C&C jobs. On the one hand, the sheer number of people present made it easy to blend into the crowd, to move unnoticed and rendezvous under seemingly normal circumstances. On the other hand, your adversary had those same tools at their disposal; they might have difficulty spotting you, but you’d have as much difficulty spotting them. Even the most broad-shouldered operator could look innocuous by the simple addition of a shoulder bag and smartphone. If they were willing to wear a T-shirt and sandals, even better.

It was also possible there might be rival operatives working jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with your own mission. Especially here at Orly, with nearly a hundred thousand people passing through every day.

So, aside from taking the usual precautions, Bridge was fairly relaxed as she led Kallass out of the main building to the car park. The journalist, on the other hand, couldn’t keep his head still for more than two seconds, despite Bridge’s whispered insistence to fix his eyes on the back of her head.

‘He’s spinning like a bloody top,’ said Henri Mourad in her ear as they descended from the footbridge to the car park. He was parked on the other side of the same circular lot, watching them walk. ‘If he carries on like this you’ll have to strap him down inside the car.’

Bridge didn’t look at Henri, or respond. Instead she focused on Kallass as they approached the primary vehicle, a BMW she’d rented under a false name, and opened the rear door. The journalist took one last nervous look around, to her further annoyance, then climbed in. She quickly dropped into the driver’s seat, engaged the central locks, reversed out of the space, and drove away.

‘All good,’ she said. ‘Fifteen seconds.’

‘Wilco,’ replied Henri, and waited fifteen seconds before following her in a small Peugeot, rented from a different vendor in a different part of town, also under a false name.

Outbound traffic from Orly was heavy at this time of morning, with lots of businessmen arriving for the day, like ‘Herr Wasserman’. So when they reached the main spur road leading to the A6 artery, several cars separated Bridge and Henri. They’d expected that, and used it to their advantage: before leaving the spur road, Bridge pulled off towards a small all-day restaurant, parked and waited. A minute later, Henri’s rented Peugeot pulled in beside her.

Henri had selected this restaurant because it had no security cameras facing its car park. So long as they remained here they couldn’t be seen from the road, or by recorded surveillance. Bridge exited the BMW and opened the back door.

‘Sortez,’ she said, gesturing at Kallass to get out. He was understandably confused, but did as he was told. Bridge turned to Henri, who was pulling clothes out of the BMW’s boot. He donned a chauffeur’s hat, pulled on a pair of white gloves, and buttoned up a smart jacket — while Bridge removed the counterpart items she’d been wearing, tossed them in the boot, then let her hair down from its ponytail. Finally, she and Henri swapped keys.

‘Bon courage,’ he smiled, and slid into the driver’s seat of the BMW. The whole diversion took less than two minutes, and now the BMW was heading back to the spur road, following the highway entrance onto the southbound route of the A6. If anyone followed the car, Henri would lead them on a leisurely and fruitless drive to Étampes, more than sixty kilometres from Bridge’s true destination to the north; the British Embassy in Paris.

Bridge opened the Peugeot door for Kallass, but this time invited him into the front passenger seat rather than the rear. It was one more thing to change, one more alteration to confuse anyone trying to follow them. He climbed in, leaning back to deposit his bag on the rear seat. Bridge adjusted the driver’s seat to her height, then reversed out of the parking space and rejoined the spur road, driving north to Paris. From here it was a simple half-hour journey, straight up the A6 and through the city to the embassy. During the mission brief Bridge had assumed reaching it would ensure their safety. ‘That’s British soil, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘Get him there, job done.’

Giles had at least had the decency not to laugh, but his tone said all it needed to. ‘You’ve been watching too much TV, I’m afraid. The idea that an embassy’s land somehow magically becomes sovereign soil is a myth.’

‘But then why couldn’t someone simply walk in and arrest Kallass after we get him there? Or what about Assange, in the Ecuadorian embassy?’

Giles pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Protections and immunities granted under the Vienna Convention of 1961. The land upon which an embassy sits remains the host country’s soil, but that state’s laws are suspended within the property’s bounds.’

Bridge could hardly believe her ears. ‘Are you telling me it’s nothing more than a — a gentleman’s agreement?’

Giles gave her a lopsided smile. ‘All diplomacy is a series of gentleman’s agreements. But some are more vigorously enforced than others. Let’s say Estonia decided to ignore this one, and chased us into our Paris embassy. Suddenly, all bets are off. We could march into their London embassy with ample justification, and maybe also the French embassy, seeing as they failed to afford us protection from the Estonians.’

Bridge had seen the sense in it, of course. Without honouring those gentleman’s agreements, diplomacy would be an impossible task, devolving into tit-for-tat chaos at the first sign of trouble. For the sake of avoiding international incidents, the sovereignty of embassies was a convenient legal fiction. And given the potential scale of this incident, Kallass wouldn’t be truly safe until he’d been transported to genuine British soil. But delivering him to the embassy first would make that transport an order of magnitude simpler to arrange. A secure detail was already standing by in Paris to whisk Kallass away in the ‘diplomatic bag’ when the coast was clear.

At least, that was the theory.

They’d been driving for about ten minutes when Bridge’s suspicions were first aroused. She was keeping a regular, easy pace, about ten kilometres per hour below the speed limit so as not to draw attention. She had no desire to be stopped by the police for speeding or reckless driving. As a result, a steady stream of cars passed them by, and the only cars behind Bridge were smaller and older models, like the Peugeot itself.

Except for two black Audis, a few cars back. They could have breezed past every car in front with the lightest touch of acceleration. But they didn’t. Instead they remained behind, matching speed with the slower cars.

She tested the theory by speeding up a little, enough to overtake a couple of small cars in front. Sure enough, the lead Audi driver finally put his foot down to match pace with Bridge. Then she eased off again, pulling back into the slower lane, and the Audi did likewise. The second Audi, meanwhile, leapfrogged a couple of cars further back.

The why of it was simple enough. It proved Kallass was right, and that his evidence was solid — or enough people at least believed it was to have him shadowed, which was more or less the same thing. Either way it suggested he was onto something, and that in turn suggested the who of it; Moscow. Bridge had already inclined in that direction, partly because of the Audis; Russians never could resist nice cars, even when it spoiled their cover. But they were also the people who would care most about the story Kallass was selling.

That left the how of it, and there Bridge was stumped. They’d been so careful, both at the airport and with the car swap. But Artjom Kallass himself was as jumpy as a kangaroo. Any trained officer would have been suspicious of his tense demeanour and paranoid behaviour at the airport. He’d calmed down to an extent during the drive, but Bridge could practically feel waves of nervous energy still radiating from him. She decided not to mention they were being followed — it would only make Kallass more jumpy, and besides, she was confident she could lose their shadows without him even realising.

They were fast approaching the exit for Arcueil, but Bridge ignored it. The suburbs was a lousy place to try and lose someone in a car. Too open, too little traffic, too visible. On the other hand, the streets of Paris itself — alternately wide and narrow, straight and crooked — were a different matter. The shortest route to the embassy was through Petit-Montrouge, straight up onto Boulevard Raspail and over Pont de la Concorde. It was the route Bridge had planned out, but that was on the assumption there wouldn’t be any trouble. It was a fast route precisely because it was obvious, wide, and straight. None of which would help to lose pursuers.

Plan B, then. Bridge swerved hard to the right, taking them into the rabbit warren of Maison-Blanche. Here the streets were narrow and short, with turns and junctions galore. Kallass looked at her with some concern, but Bridge waved him off. ‘Almost missed my turn,’ she reassured him in French. ‘Don’t worry.’

She hoped he didn’t notice her glance in the rear-view mirror. One Audi had followed, suggesting several possible scenarios. Perhaps only one car had been following them to start with; or the second car hadn’t been able to turn off and follow them in time; or —

Audi number two rammed into the Peugeot’s rear side as Bridge cornered a junction. Kallass yelped in surprise while she fought to control the small car, spinning the wheel and driving into the skid as it fishtailed across the junction, front wing slamming into a row of parked cars on the other side. She floored the accelerator and sped away, leaving shards of headlight glass on the road behind them.

The third option was that the Audis had split up, in order to capture Bridge in a pincer movement, and sometimes she hated being right. But at least now she knew what she was dealing with: professionals, and evidently sanctioned to use force. For the first time since leaving England, she regretted not bringing a gun. There were good reasons; less bureaucracy, less paperwork, and less chance of being rumbled if any French security decided to take a close look at her. That was particularly important because the mission was undeclared. The DGSI, the French interior security services, had no idea this job was taking place.

It was supposed to have been a simple C&C, after all.

But the ‘collect and convey’ mission had rapidly become what officers jokingly called C&Cs that went wrong — ‘chase & crash’.

Even without the collision damage it had sustained, the little Peugeot would have struggled to get up the hill through Butte-aux-Cailles at any kind of speed. The Audis, by contrast, roared up behind them with ease. Bridge glanced over at Kallass, his face drained of blood, frantically whispering what she assumed was an Estonian prayer.

As they crested the hill, one Audi drew alongside and rolled their near window halfway down. Bridge didn’t wait to see the black metal barrel protrude from the gap before she acted. The advanced hazardous driving classes she’d taken under Sergeant Major ‘Hard Man’ Hardiman at the Loch served her well; as in her favoured martial arts, the key to throwing an opponent off-balance was to react in an unexpected fashion. So she gripped the wheel and swerved hard into the Audi.

A sideswipe from the Peugeot wouldn’t do any serious damage to the larger car. But the shooter had expected her to pull away, and the sudden impact sent his shots wild, two reports echoing off the surrounding houses’ walls. Bridge hoped neither had found a window.

She swerved again, this time away, to take a turn down the hill and into the Latin Quarter. Here again, the maze of short and oddly-angled streets would give them at least a minimal amount of cover.

‘Tell me the info,’ shouted Bridge as they sped downhill. ‘As much as you can, right now, in case we get separated.’ Or worse, she thought, but kept that to herself.

‘It’s all in the files, in my bag,’ said Kallas. ‘Just get us out of here!’

‘What the hell do you think I’m trying to do? Give me the essentials!’

He took two quick, sharp breaths, then began. ‘There’s a hacking and disinformation group operating from a building in Tallinn, leased through shell companies registered first in Estonia, then offshore. I got as far as the British Virgin Islands before the trail ran out. But I know they take orders from Moscow, under the purview of the SVR.’

‘If the registration trail ran cold, how do you know this?’

‘I have a source. One of the hackers.’

‘Name?’

‘Not until we’re safe!’

For God’s sake, thought Bridge. Even she wasn’t this paranoid. ‘How do you know you can trust this hacker? Have you met them? Seen the group’s work?’

‘Yes and no. In truth, the workshop — look out!’ Kallas recoiled into his seat as a bus pulled out from a blind junction ten metres ahead of them. Bridge yanked hard on the steering wheel to send the Peugeot through a red light, across a busy junction, and into the path of an oncoming van. She swerved again to mount the pavement, the Peugeot’s tires squealing in complaint as she swung it around a corner, then slid back off the kerb and into the road.

One Audi was still behind them. It didn’t mount the pavement to follow, putting it a hundred metres back or more, but to Bridge’s surprise it didn’t accelerate through the intervening traffic to catch up with them, either.

She understood why when the second black car pulled across the junction ahead, blocking the way. The Peugeot was hemmed in, and the only way out was through one of the two Audis, in front or behind.

Fair enough.

With a sickening grind from somewhere underneath the floor, Bridge dropped two gears and stamped on the accelerator. The Peugeot bucked and complained as its rev counter flew up past the redline and its tyres sped it toward Bridge’s target — a narrow gap between the front Audi and an iron railing at the pavement’s boundary.

The rear windscreen exploded, glass shattering across the back seat as the pursuing Russians fired once, twice, three times. Bridge barely registered the shots, focused on making the gap.

She didn’t make it.

The Peugeot’s offside wing smacked into the Audi’s nose, and in that split-second Bridge knew it had all been for nothing; the Peugeot would come to a sputtering halt, the Audi would be unharmed, and Bridge, Kallass, and his precious file would be sitting ducks. She was surprised to find her thoughts turning to her mother. Had it really been almost three years since she’d last visited Lyon? Bridge wondered if they would give out her name on the evening news, or if her mother would simply receive a standard letter from Giles, lacking any of the detail a grieving mother would crave. ‘Dear Madame Sharp, it is my sad duty to inform you…’

And then the Peugeot broke through. The Audi driver hadn’t engaged the parking brake; when Bridge hit it, the car rolled back from the impact, allowing the smaller vehicle through the gap with a howl of scraped metal. They were going to make it. Holy shit, they were going to make it! Bridge visualised the map, running the route in her mind. The British embassy was only a stone’s throw over the river; all she had to do was reach Pont Neuf, a quick hop over the Seine, and then break every speed limit along the Rue de Rivoli —

Kallass wasn’t moving.

Probably because of the dark red stain spreading across his chest.

The shots from behind, the ones that had taken out the rear window. One had hit the back of Kallass’ seat, right through it and into his chest. His head slumped forward, his arms were limp, only the seat belt keeping his body upright.

His file. She still had his file. Get that home to London and it would be worth it. She glanced from Kallas to the back seat, to his luggage.

The impact was so sudden, her seatbelt knocked the breath from her lungs. Bridge’s head snapped forward into the suffocating antiseptic of an airbag, all sense of direction stolen. Up, down, left, right, none of it meant anything. Her head spun, as her consciousness spun tantalisingly out of reach. The airbag collapsed in on itself to reveal the cracked windscreen, through which Bridge saw the rear of a double-parked car, something she could have avoided if she’d only kept her eyes on the road. Her eyes moved down to that road, suddenly visible, and she realised her door was open. Had been opened.

A man stood over her, swimming in every non-direction through her blurred vision. Did he have a particularly wide nose, or was Bridge seeing two of him? It didn’t matter. What mattered was Kallass’ bag, floating through the air, past her head, to the other side of the car and the open door where another man stood over the dead Estonian, and then the bag was in his hands and that was bad, not good, not good at all. Bridge fumbled with her seat belt catch, trying to release herself from the car and give chase, but the man with the wide nose closed her door and walked away and Bridge slumped against the cold, hard window glass and slept.

3

> How is life?

+ Life is

> Tell me how you are

+ 6932326347

+ 3323694732

+ 2U;22222CW

+ 33F33aX3mU

> Stop

> How is life?

+ Life is

4

‘I can assure you, my bureau does not leak.’

Emily Dunston, SIS’ Head of Station for France, leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. From across the table, Bridge saw goosebumps. They were in the ‘fishbowl’, a basement interrogation room so-called because there wasn’t a square centimetre not recorded by microphones and cameras, and the fishbowl was never warm. Bridge had been outside this room many times, watching events unfold at a fraction below room temperature. But she’d only been inside once before, and that was after going AWOL in Syria, so she hoped things would be more friendly this time. She may have lost Artjom Kallass, but the ultimate blame could hardly be laid at her feet.

‘I didn’t necessarily mean a leak at Paris itself,’ she said.

‘Then where?’ Giles Finlay sat next to Dunston, eyes narrowed at Bridge. ‘A problem in OpPrep would surely have seen dozens of much more important operations than this compromised. Kallass was hardly Litvinenko.’

‘Which makes it even more worrying,’ said Bridge. ‘Why go to all that trouble? Why put two cars and several officers into hostile theatre for a journalist and his dossier on some hackers? It’s not like we didn’t already suspect Moscow was sponsoring external workshops. Yes, the proof Kallass offered would have been useful, but was it worth killing for?’

Dunston sniffed. ‘Someone thought so.’

‘Is there any chance this was simple opportunism?’ asked Giles. ‘Could someone have recognised you at the airport, realised you were active, and decided to see what they could get out of it?’

‘Maybe if I’d been in Baghdad, but come on, Paris? Even supposing someone made me, would they commit to a broad-daylight pursuit in full view of the Gendarmerie on a whim?’

Giles stroked his beard, releasing a wave of hazelnut scent, and Bridge suppressed a smile. Her boss’ grooming oil was the first familiar thing she’d encountered since being hauled out of a Parisian police station by two officers from the DGSI; bundled on a charter plane back to City airport; tossed into a waiting SIS car; and thrown down here, all in stony silence. It was cold comfort, but no colder than the room.

‘You’re right,’ said Giles. ‘Even for Moscow, it’s audacious.’

‘That’s if it truly was Moscow,’ said Dunston, making a note in her report papers. ‘According to Mourad, there was no firm indication of nationality or allegiance.’

Bridge wasn’t surprised Henri had already been debriefed, but she was annoyed at Dunston trying to divide and conquer. Or perhaps she was setting Bridge up to take a fall? Dunston famously trusted the instincts of her officers first and foremost, but Bridge wasn’t one of hers. She ‘belonged’ to Giles.

Goosebumps rose on her arms to match Emily’s.

‘Henri wasn’t there,’ she said, trying to keep a level tone, ‘And unfortunately, field officers don’t often shout, “Stop in the name of Putin.” Perhaps I should have got out and asked them?’

Giles looked up from his notes. ‘Have a care, Bridge.’

‘You’re right,’ said Dunston, ‘Mourad wasn’t there. Why is that? Why did you send him in the opposite direction?’

‘That was always the plan.’

‘The plan you designed.’

‘And was approved at every level of inspection,’ said Bridge, glaring at Giles. She’d expected him to offer backup, but instead he was throwing her to the wolves.

Dunston changed tack. ‘Why didn’t you call him as soon as you got into trouble? You were incommunicado throughout the entire event.’

‘Because by that time Henri was twenty-plus kilometres south, on his way to Étampes. He couldn’t have helped.’

‘He might have suggested somewhere to hole up until he got there.’

‘If Kallass and I had debussed, I doubt I’d be alive to explain it to you now.’

‘And yet you are.’ Dunston fixed Bridge with a stare. ‘What did you talk about, during the drive?’

‘We hardly spoke. When I realised we were endangered, I asked him to brief me verbally. There wasn’t time for much, but he confirmed a source inside the Tallinn hacking workshop — which is run by Moscow through a series of offshore shell corporations, brass plates in the BVI, the usual cover.’

Giles leaned forward and spoke at last. ‘And that’s why you believe your pursuers were Russian.’

‘Who else? They were after Kallass, or rather, whatever he was planning to give us. They obviously didn’t give a toss about me, because they could have finished me after the crash and nobody would be any the wiser.’

‘Unlikely, if they knew you were SIS. Killing an informant is one thing; executing an officer in broad daylight is a bit strong, even for the SVR.’

Bridge shrugged. ‘I’m not even sure they intended to eliminate Kallass, to be honest. But they damn well knew he was carrying that bag. They didn’t hesitate to take it.’

‘Suppose they were Estonian. Perhaps the documents confirmed their own cyber-activities against the rest of Europe,’ said Dunston.

Bridge shook her head. ‘Everyone knows Tallinn is a nexus for hackers. It’s crawling with them. What we don’t know is whether they’re backed by Moscow. Kallass said he could prove the Russians set up and financed this Estonian group through those shell corporations. Again, we’ve suspected it for a while, but never had proof. If his evidence was credible, it would have given us an edge.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Giles, ‘now we have neither the evidence nor Kallass himself. I’m sure you can guess how C feels about this.’ Bridge tried to hide her surprise that the head of SIS was aware of the operation, but her boss knew her too well. ‘Surely you didn’t expect an incident like this to pass without comment from upstairs. Where do you think Emily and I have been while you were on your way home?’

Emily fixed Bridge with a glare. ‘La merde dévale la hierarchie.’

Giles looked from Emily to Bridge, so she translated for him. ‘Shit rolls downhill.’

‘I should bloody well coco,’ he replied. ‘Nevertheless, while we were getting our arses handed to us, the room came to a similar conclusion; that any leak must have come from Artjom Kallass himself. The man was a journalist, not a tradesman trained to hold secrets. He must have been careless at some point; said the wrong thing to the wrong person without realising it, failed to spot a shadow on his way to the airport, whatever. Greg Hughes is going to chase up that angle in Tallinn, of course, but realistically we don’t expect anything to turn up. And on we go.’

Bridge breathed a sigh of relief. She felt good about standing her ground against Dunston’s interrogation, but the mere fact she was in the fishbowl rather than a ‘Broom’, one of Vauxhall’s regular briefing and conference rooms, emphasised this was a bollocking, not a debrief. Losing Kallass would be a permanent stain on her record. Nevertheless, she was off the hook; if they were going to formally discipline her, they would have mentioned it by now.

‘So I assume you want this written up ASAP, and then what?’ she asked. ‘Should I chase up the Estonian workshop? This is kind of another perfect test run for SCAR, don’t you think?’ She still didn’t like the acronym, but hoped using it in this context might help get Giles on-side.

To her surprise, Giles and Dunston instead both frowned like she’d lapsed into Greek. To make things even more confusing, Dunston smiled — a broad, full-on teeth-out smile quite unlike her occasional smirks — and stood, patting Giles on the shoulder.

‘I’ll leave this one to you,’ she said, tucking the report papers under her arm and exiting the room.

Giles made a show of removing his glasses and polishing them with a handkerchief. When the door closed, he replaced them and looked Bridge in the eye. ‘I fear you’ve been labouring under a misapprehension,’ he said. ‘This whole business has put you, and SCAR, under a microscope we could quite frankly have done without. Peter Lennox has fired off four memos already today, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see another half-dozen before this evening.’ He checked his watch. ‘In approximately ninety minutes I’m to explain this debacle to the committee, which gives me eighty-nine minutes to plead our case to the Foreign Office and convince them that this operation’s failure in no way reflects on SCAR’s future potential under the purview of a more experienced appointee.’

Bridge took a moment to digest Giles’ word salad. It was his default mode for talking to politicians and civil servants; using their own arcane diplomatic language to put them at ease, reassuring them Giles could be trusted to handle things properly because he was one of them, old chap. Slipping into politician mode this early reinforced how soon he expected to be hauled over the coals.

And, Bridge realised with sudden sympathy, that was exactly what would happen. Giles would be expected to prostrate himself before every politician and diplomat he could muster, including The Rt Hon Peter Lennox MP, already SCAR’s biggest opponent on the Parliamentary committee established to consider its formation. This was what Giles was good at, what he could do that Bridge could never deal with in a hundred years; the politicking, the statecraft, the back-rubbing and log-rolling it took to successfully navigate the corridors of Whitehall and keep its occupants’ noses out of SIS business.

But being good at it didn’t make it any less unpleasant. Bridge’s actions — her failure, not to put too fine a point on it — had made this song and dance necessary in the first place. She’d fucked up again, and this time she hadn’t even realised how badly until her own boss spelled it out for her. The repercussions would have an impact far beyond her own reputation — which, as Giles’ last words sunk in, she realised was about to take another battering.

‘Take some mandatory time off. A couple of days, more if you want it. Spend some time with your family, take stock…and when you return, assuming SCAR still exists at all, it will be under Ciaran Tigh’s leadership.’

‘Ciaran?’ Bridge struggled to keep her voice level. ‘He has literally zero field experience. He barely passed his training at the Loch.’

‘Exactly,’ said Giles, gathering his report papers. ‘Clean as a whistle. Unblemished. A safe pair of hands.’

Under the table, Bridge’s own hands trembled with frustration as Giles left her alone in the room.

5

At last, Artjom Kallass’ face stares out at me from the newspaper.

Normally I wouldn’t be seen dead with this shit-rag dead tree media, but nobody else in the workshop even mentioned the rumour all day. I’d overheard it yesterday lunchtime; I slipped off my headphones in the coffee shop to place an order, and the women behind me were talking about it. One of them had a friend who’d moved to Paris, who texted her that morning, so she went online to check Buzzfeed France, where she found shaky phone videos of a car chase in Paris that apparently ended with a big crash and gunfire.

But I had to take all of this on faith, because no way in hell was I going to check it online. One condition of the workshop is that Maxim has access to our full browsing histories, even on our phones. He’d want to know why I give a shit about an unpatriotic middle-aged degenerate like Kallass.

They all would. Like I said, hackers gossip.

So instead I had to sit in the workshop for the rest of the day, fit to burst, waiting for someone, anyone, to mention it so I’d have a legit excuse to look for an online news report. But nobody did, and by the end of the day I was ready to explode. I had to know.

I took a different route home, caught a bus to the other side of Tallinn from my apartment, walked into the first bar I found with a TV showing ETV, and ordered vodka. Ten minutes into the news they confirmed the story, but then the owner changed channel to the evening’s football match. I didn’t want to risk drawing attention by asking him to change back, so I left.

I daren’t look it up online at home, so I hardly slept. Instead I stared at the ceiling all night, wishing for the first time ever that I owned a TV. I kept asking myself the same question over and over.

What the hell had Artjom been doing in Paris?

This morning, after a night of waking up every ten minutes with my nerves jangling, I left early and caught another unusual bus route halfway across the city. I ducked into the first newsagent I saw, bought the morning Eesti Päevaleht, and read it on a park bench. I know I don’t look anything like a Päevaleht buyer, but if all this is true I couldn’t bear to read about Artjom in a fucking tabloid.

And it is true. Artjom’s eyes, his beautiful eyes, stare out from the newspaper. Last weekend they stared at me, as I straddled him in bed; now they stare at nothing.

Confirmed facts are still thin on the ground. Nobody knows why Artjom was in Paris, or why he was involved in a car chase of all things. Nobody knows who was chasing him, or where they went after they shot him.

I read it twice, willing the words to change, but they never do, and I can’t take any more. I hand the paper to a homeless guy digging through a trash can and catch the first bus that will take me somewhere near the workshop.

The one thing I know, that nobody at the newspaper seems to: Artjom couldn’t drive. Never got his licence. Which means someone else was driving that car…and whoever it was left my Artjom to bleed out, helpless and alone, in the streets of a foreign city.

Knowing that helps me figure out the rest, or most of it anyway. Of course I knew about Artjom’s problems with the local newspapers, trying to get them to take him seriously. But I hoped that would be the end of it; that he’d find something else to write about, something less dangerous. I tried to make him understand what Maxim was capable of, what that bastard could do if he ever discovered Artjom knew about the workshop. Not to mention what he’d do to me if he found out I was Artjom’s source.

But how could he stop? He was a journalist. Instead he’d tried to sell it abroad, probably to Le Monde or some other French rag. They’d fucking love that story. Now because of it he is dead, no doubt on Maxim’s orders. Who else?

I step off the bus, and my legs are suddenly made of concrete. I don’t want to go into the workshop; don’t want to risk seeing Maxim; don’t want someone there to talk about Paris. If anyone even mentions Artjom, I’m worried I might burst into tears.

Not working my shift would raise suspicions. Maxim already suspects everyone. It’s why he’s good at his job. I can’t afford to let him think there’s any connection between me and Artjom. So in the workshop, there won’t be.

But in my mind, all I think about is how to make them all pay. I’ve been working on some private projects, things even Maxim doesn’t know about. I was going to use them to make myself rich. Instead I’ll use them to make those fuckers regret they ever lived.

I ball my fists, count to three, and enter the workshop.

6

‘Which came first, Doc? You, or the décor?’

Everything about Dr Nayar’s quiet office at Vauxhall was designed to put her patients at ease. There was barely a right angle or hard surface in the place, and blinds on the large windows let in enough daylight for the room to be bright, but never harsh or intrusive. Dr Nayar herself, calm and quiet and gentle, was a perfect match for the room. Or was it the other way around?

‘A little of both,’ Dr Nayar smiled in reply. ‘Obviously I’m not the first psychologist to work at SIS, though my predecessor’s tastes ran more toward the utilitarian. I was allowed to redecorate, and remove some of the furniture. Why do you ask?’

Bridge shrugged. ‘Just curious. It’s all so…soft.’ That was a bare-faced lie, of course. She was asking to deflect from talking about herself, and avoid discussing how she’d rushed to the toilets and thrown up in between her bollocking at the fishbowl and coming here for assessment.

‘How are your family? Have you spoken to your sister recently?’

‘Sure,’ Bridge lied, then caught herself. ‘Well, not recently, I suppose. I’ve…been giving them some space. Time to deal with what happened.’

‘What would you say to Izzy, if she were here now?’

Bridge looked at her as if their roles should be reversed. ‘She’s not dead, Doc. I could call her today if I wanted to.’

‘But will you?’

Bridge folded her arms and looked out the window. ‘I don’t see how this is supposed to help me get over being shot at, losing a package, and then being fucking demoted.’

Dr Nayar read through her prepared notes. ‘So let’s talk about that. “Losing a package” is a rather compartmentalised way to describe what happened. Do you blame yourself?’

‘Of course I do. Kallass was under my care. It was my op, my plan. Who else could I blame?’

‘That’s not what you said in your debriefing.’

‘Maybe I’m learning to take responsibility.’ Bridge scowled. ‘And maybe that’s why I haven’t called Izzy, did you think about that?’

‘No, but you clearly have.’ Dr Nayar smiled sympathetically. ‘You mustn’t carry the world on your shoulders, Brigitte. You’re not the only person capable of taking action.’

‘No, I’m the one everyone blames when people get shot.’

Dr Nayar hesitated. ‘How often do you think about Adrian?’

Adrian Radovic had been the senior officer on Bridge’s first field mission, the Syrian job that had gone so far south Adrian was killed and Bridge spent three years chained to her desk.

‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged.

‘The situation with Artjom Kallass isn’t remotely comparable. Remember, you made amends for Adrian by saving your brother-in-law’s life. You learned from your experience.’

‘You mean from my mistakes.’

‘You say “tomato”…’

Bridge’s fingers tapped out a rhythm on her leg. ‘I was supposed to protect Kallass. Give my life for his, if necessary. Isn’t that the job?’

‘You’re not a bodyguard. I’m confident the Crown would value the life of an experienced operative over a foreign journalist.’

Bridge gaped at her. ‘That was surprisingly blunt.’

Dr Nayar shrugged. ‘Honesty is rather the point. So let’s continue; do you feel guilt that Kallass is dead instead of you? Or are you simply feeling sorry for yourself, because the mission failed?’

‘Fucking hell, Doc. Don’t hold back.’

‘Brigitte, I have lost count of the number of officers who sit here, head in hands, consumed by survivor’s guilt after their missions went south. You aren’t the first, and despite C’s most fervent wishes, you won’t be the last.’

Bridge shook her head. ‘Honestly, that’s not the issue. I’m…’ The doctor waited for her to continue, but Bridge hesitated. She’d never voiced this out loud before. ‘To be honest, I’m surprised…’ No, that wasn’t right. She started again. ‘I can’t explain it, but I expected to be dead by now. I never thought I’d make it to thirty.’

‘And yet here you are. Just a few weeks, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t remind me.’

Dr Nayar smiled. ‘Thirty is a big occasion. It’s not uncommon to be scared by it.’

‘I’m not scared by it,’ said Bridge, but stopped herself and grunted in frustration. ‘All right, I suppose I am. I don’t know what to expect, or what I’m supposed to do. It’s probably for the best that Giles took me off SCAR. I’m not ready to lead a bloody conga line, let alone a multi-million-pound cross-agency task force.’

The doctor made another note. ‘There you go again, assuming you have to do everything yourself.’ Bridge opened her mouth to object, but Dr Nayar pressed on. ‘Leading a team doesn’t mean you must know everything, or make every decision yourself. It’s about guiding people, and ensuring everyone does what they’re best suited to. Like Giles with the CTA; he asks your opinions, listens to your thoughts, and only then makes a decision. He’s not Caesar.’

‘And I’m not Cleopatra. I’m…’ She struggled to think back to high school Shakespeare, landed on the first tragic woman she could think of. ‘I’m Ophelia. Except without being pathetically in love.’

Dr Nayar looked at Bridge over her glasses. ‘Hopefully also without thoughts of suicidal ideation.’

Bridge shrugged. She’d never told the doctor what really happened out there in the desert; how she’d been so filled with despair and futility she almost shot herself just to be done with it, but had been saved — saved herself, you might say — by an imaginary conversation with Adrian that made her realise she believed in progress and change. The world could change. She could change.

But had she?

‘Anyway, it won’t matter,’ Bridge said at last. ‘SCAR probably won’t get through the final committee stages.’

‘Which would save you from having to think about your future, wouldn’t it? How convenient.’ She continued despite Bridge’s frown, ‘There is life after thirty, Brigitte. You’re surrounded by it. You believe you’re an exception, the only person to whom it doesn’t apply, but I can assure you we all thought the same at some point. Even your mother and sister.’