simple security – although the level of crime in rural France was commendably low, an unoccupied property was still a target and the one thing they couldn’t risk was some French low-life breaking in and stealing any of the equipment or, worse, talking about what he had seen inside.
Actually, there wasn’t very much to attract a thief to the house. No readily saleable items like TV sets or hi-fi equipment. There was a TV set, but it was at least ten years old, big and bulky, and of little or no value. Hassan Abbas had bought it second-hand from an electrical shop in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the local town where they did most of their shopping. There wasn’t even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated prayer mats.
There were no curtains at the windows, because the faded wooden shutters were always kept closed, and no signs of anything that might be described as the comforts of home. In fact, the only items of real value lay behind the door of the third and smallest bedroom, at the back of the house. The door to this room was the only one with a lock – a five-lever exterior quality Chubb which had been fitted within a week of the signing of the tenancy agreement at the agency in Aire-sur-l’Adour – and it was always kept locked unless the equipment in the room was actually being used. The room’s single exterior window was, like all the other windows, kept firmly closed, as were the external shutters. What was not visible from the outside was the steel grille bolted to the wall inside the room and which completely covered the window opening – another unofficial addition to the property which Abbas had organized.
The other invisible deterrents to a thief were the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols always carried by each of the four men, and the two AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines fully charged, which were kept propped up behind each of the two outside doors. They had also spent some time carefully positioning plastic explosive charges on the inside of the ground-floor doors and windows, to be actuated by trip-wires, and installing a number of high-wattage floodlights under the eaves, powerful enough to illuminate the entire grounds.
There were two reasons why the old mill had been chosen, rather than either of the two other houses that had been on the short list. The first was a unique architectural feature of the property that Abbas had stumbled on almost by accident, and which he devoutly hoped he would never have to use. Just over two miles from the house was the second reason; a small nondescript grey concrete building, it was the automated telephone exchange which served the properties in the shallow valley which opened up to the south of St Medard.
When Abdullah Mahmoud – the name in the genuine Moroccan passport carried by Hassan Abbas when he had stepped off the ferry from Tangier at Algeciras – had decided on the location of the property they needed, he had planned to have an ADSL line installed. An Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line would have provided a permanent Internet connection, but technical requirements meant that the user had to live within about four miles of the local exchange. The other two houses he had been considering were each over ten miles from their respective exchanges, hence the choice of the St Medard property.
In the event, Sadoun Khamil, who had first supported Abbas’ decision, had later vetoed the idea of ADSL, simply because it would have been an unusual request in that area and might have attracted attention. So instead Abbas had signed up for Internet access with Wanadoo, one of the French service providers, and relied on a dial- up connection through the V92 internal modem in the 2GHz IBM desktop computer that sat on a rough square table against the wall in the locked rear bedroom of the house.
The PC had been supplied with Microsoft Windows XP, but Abbas had stripped that off because of the potential ‘spyware’ implications of the Product Activation routine, and had installed Windows ME and Office 2000 instead. The machine had come with Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, which worked well enough despite various security loopholes and which Abbas had left alone, but he had added an anti-virus suite and a firewall for safety. He’d also installed a copy of the PGP – Pretty Good Privacy – file encryption program.
Next to the computer was a small-footprint Hewlett-Packard laser printer, which was used only to print the very rare email messages intended for the group, rather than just Abbas, to see. On the floor next to the table was a large uninterruptible power supply – a UPS – which would provide back-up power to the computer for about half an hour in the event of a mains power failure. Beside the UPS was a black leather Samsonite case containing a powerful laptop computer to be used as a back-up to the IBM machine in case of some kind of major software or hardware crash, and a mobile telephone in case the landline ever failed. And apart from two upright chairs, the room contained nothing else.
Every afternoon Abbas unlocked the door of the back bedroom, switched on the computer, opened Internet Explorer and surfed the Internet for a couple of hours, concentrating on pornographic sites. This he had done ever since they had taken the house, establishing a routine that served to cloak his real activity on the web. He had no interest whatsoever in the lurid images that flashed across the screen, and barely even glanced at them. All he was interested in was one site that he himself had created and that was hosted on a low-cost server in Arizona. He had done nothing to promote the site, so very few people knew it existed, and fewer still bothered to visit it because it was, even by the low standards normally applied to sex sites, remarkably badly constructed and, frankly, boring.
One link on the site generated a 404 error – page not found – but pressing the ‘Refresh’ button three times within two seconds ran a small piece of code Abbas had embedded in the site. This action didn’t produce a new page but simply dialled the classified number of a distant mainframe computer, which Abbas logged on to at least once every week.
As well as surfing the net, Abbas had established himself on several email mailing lists, and every day had to wade through some fifty advertising messages. The majority of these he deleted immediately, but he always read the messages from one advertiser in Germany completely. Some of these messages he deleted after reading, but some he didn’t. Although the originating address was German, these emails had actually been sent from a different country, using a series of redirection sites to conceal their true origin.
That morning, Abbas downloaded the overnight messages and found only one from the German email address. He scanned through it carefully, then grunted with satisfaction. About halfway down the page were a few lines of what appeared to be corrupted text. Abbas highlighted the text and copied it into the word processor, then closed his Internet connection and shut down Outlook Express. Then he ran the decryption routine in the 128-bit PGP encryption program on the copied text, using his private key, and read the message twice. Its contents disturbed him, and he knew Khamil had to be told at once.
Abbas spent forty minutes working at the computer, composing and encoding a message for Sadoun Khamil’s eyes only, which he embedded in another advertising email, this one with a Spanish originating address. As with the incoming message, Abbas arranged for it to be bounced from server to server before finally being delivered to Saudi Arabia.
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi
It was, Sokolov thought, as he surveyed the pile of folders and files on the desk in front of him, an almost impossible task. He was not even sure that Nicolai Modin was right, that one of the records he was studying was that of a traitor. It was surely possible that the Americans had flown their spy-plane just because they wanted to photograph the weapon test site.
Time was a further problem. Sokolov checked his desk calendar; there were just three weeks to go before the implementation date of
Sokolov pressed the intercom button and ordered more of the strong black tea that he enjoyed. Then he picked up the draft action plan he had agreed with General Modin and glanced over it. Telephone taps were in place on the home and office telephone lines of all twenty-one officers – that, no doubt, was a complete waste of time, as only an idiot would use his own telephone to pass classified information to a foreign power or agent. Mail intercepts had also been ordered, but again Sokolov had no illusions about the likely results of that. If there was a traitor, Sokolov was sure that the only way he could be detected would be through physical surveillance, by watching where he went and whom he talked to or passed close to in the street or stood next to. The watchers
