It had taken a year of persuasion, and no small amount of politics, but Giles was eventually authorised to create and recruit for the CTA. Ciaran had been his first hire, headhunted from his role as a technical analyst in another SIS department. Soon after, Giles had poached Monica from GCHQ and they’d operated as a two-person unit for a while until Bridge joined, fresh from Cambridge. She knew there had been other potential recruits along the way, both for Monica’s position and her own, that Giles had rejected. But their identities were never disclosed, and if either of her colleagues knew, they weren’t talking.
Within a few years, the CTA’s score card had amassed enough gold stars according to its original remit, including direct prevention of at least four home-target terror attacks that Bridge knew of, to satisfy Whitehall and ensure its continued existence for the time being.
But Giles’ timing turned out to be fortuitous. Digital communications rapidly became the global norm and intelligence channels were increasingly filled with ‘OC’, or Obscured Chatter; communications that were either encrypted, encoded, or both. Then came the Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, the South Korean banks hack, the Refahiye pipeline explosion triggered by online attack, the cyber assault on government computers in Estonia, the Mirai botnet that took half the internet offline for almost twenty-four hours, and more and more every week. As the world was increasingly managed through computers, so those computers increasingly came under attack, and the same old actors came into play. The UK, the USA, Russia, China — instead of messing about with nuclear missiles, now they attacked one another with endless waves of network assault, while spies on the ground exploited the same technology on physical operations. The new cold war was digital, and every bit as dangerous. As Giles had argued to the Prime Minister, with the nuclear threat of Mutually Assured Destruction the end result was horrifying, but simple; complete global annihilation. A cyberapocalypse, on the other hand, was no less horrifying but much more complex. It left everyone alive to suffer, starve, and perish through the total collapse of society, government, and infrastructure. Was one really better than the other?
Thus, as digital warfare progressed, CTA’s remit expanded accordingly. Now the unit also tracked cybersecurity developments, the latest breakthroughs in viruses, trojans, and other exploits, while also keeping a close eye on the ‘black hat’ international hacking community. Ciaran likened it to a game of whack-a-mole, except there were ten thousand moles, the mallet was operated via a remote control with sticking buttons and failing batteries, and the game never ended.
The CTA came across many items that had no real foreign component beyond communications, which were simply passed on to MI5. Others were foreign, but not international, and those were passed to the appropriate local agencies, with SIS maintaining an interest in case circumstances changed. But some items crossed borders, or threatened the UK, and those the CTA investigated itself. If a threat was purely online, they were authorised to mount their own counter-attacks where possible. If a problem spilled over into the real world, they could advise other SIS departments on the most effective deployment of officers, where to focus exploitation of local agents, and ultimately how best to take preventive action.
Not all of the cases concerned terrorists directly, but many of them used the cover of war and terror to hide their criminal enterprises. Money laundering and racketeering in the face of upheaval was common, and made up some items the CTA regularly passed on to other authorities. Undesirable arms sales were another regular feature, and an area where SIS often took a hands-on interest, sometimes to the extent of sending OITs to frustrate or redirect the vendor. The most disturbing case Bridge had seen was a sex slavery ring in Libya that used the chaos of the civil war following Qadaffi’s death to abduct, hold, and exploit children as young as two. She could live without ever trawling through a sewer quite that foul again, but nevertheless it had been necessary. If that was what Giles had in store for her, so be it.
As a final thought, she wondered if he’d called this unusual meeting to suggest she move department. The CTA was his baby, and he naturally had a soft spot for it, but he also oversaw several other departments and active response groups.
“Try me,” she said. How bad could it be?
Giles shifted in his seat. “I want you to infiltrate a startup. We suspect someone there is using foreign skillbase recruitment as a cover to bring radicals into the EU and naturalise them.”
“That’s Five’s area,” Bridge shrugged.
“Not this one. The startup is based in Zurich. You’d go in as a French native.”
She was about to ask What makes you think they’d hire me anyway, when she realised what Giles was truly proposing. Field work. A return to OIT. “Haven’t you spoken to Dr Nayar yet?”
“Mahima briefed me immediately before I came to find you, and said the same as before. You’re ready, you just don’t know it.”
“I told her to take me off the bloody list altogether.”
“So she said. But, as I reminded you before, the final decision is mine.”
Bridge looked away, trying to hide her annoyance.
“You’re not the first officer to experience trauma, you know. Mahima, me, everyone here has seen it in plenty of officers. Some of our most valued OITs have been through what you’re experiencing, but they came out the other side by easing back into the field with quiet jobs like this. It’ll restore your confidence, have you going full speed before you know it.”
“Why?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why are you so keen
