Giles shook his head. “Monica can do that. No, you have a rather more important meeting to attend. I’m going to read you in on Exphoria.”
24
While Monica made a second clone of Declan O’Riordan’s hard drive, Giles left Bridge alone inside Broom Eleven, a tiny two-person cupboard, for ten minutes. Then he returned and led her downstairs to Broom Three, one of Vauxhall’s larger briefing rooms. Two people were waiting for them inside, and a third looked out from a wall-mounted screen.
Giles indicated the older person of the two in the room, a white-haired and straight-backed man in the greyest of grey suits. “Brigitte, this is Devon Chisholme, SEO at the MoD.” She nodded at the civil servant as Giles turned to the second person, a large middle-aged woman she recognised. “And you know Emily Dunston, our head of Paris bureau.” Dunston had been H/PAR since before Bridge had entered the Service, and grew up in the Cold War era, giving her what could charitably be called an ‘old school’ approach to espionage. She especially disdained computers and data analytics, as Bridge had found the first time she tried to discuss the topic, and relations between them had been cool ever since. Now Dunston gestured at the man on the video screen, who smiled. He was slim, handsome, with dark skin and alert brown eyes. Something of the Berber about him, thought Bridge.
“This is Henri Mourad,” said Dunston, confirming her hunch. “One of my men in Paris.”
“Enchanté,” he waved at Bridge.
“Algerian,” she replied, recognising his accent. “Native?”
Henri shook his head. “Only my dad,” he said with a surprisingly strong south coast twang, and smiled again. “Born in sunny Brighton.”
“And this is Brigitte Sharp, one of my CTA officers,” Giles said, indicating her to the room. “She found the material that indicates a leak in Exphoria.”
Chisholme raised an eyebrow. “Indicates? We’re not certain?”
Giles sat down across the table from Chisholme and Dunston. Bridge took the hint and sat next to him, still a little confused as to what exactly was going on. “The probability is high,” said Giles, “and that’s why we’re here. I’m proposing a mole hunt.”
“You mean a fishing expedition,” said Dunston, peering down at her notes with disdain. “ ‘Source embedded’? ‘Handoff’? This is paper-thin, Giles.”
“I’d say someone merely knowing the project codename justifies a certain amount of digging, Ems,” said Giles, and Bridge resisted a smile at his needling. He knew as well as she did that Dunston hated that diminutive, especially in formal circumstances.
Chisholme nodded in agreement. “The fact these messages appear to have come from France is very unsettling.”
Bridge cleared her throat. Giles hadn’t said if he expected her to speak at this meeting, or if she was supposed to be quiet and listen. But then, she’d never been very good at that. “That’s not confirmed,” she said to Chisholme. “The posts were made to a French-language newsgroup, but they decode to English, and anyone can post to that group from anywhere. I could do it right now.”
The civil servant frowned. “What about that tracing thing, where you work out someone’s location on the internet?”
Bridge didn’t need to see Giles’ expression to know he was praying she wouldn’t patronise Chisholme for his obvious ignorance of the internet. In fact, she was relieved the civil servant wasn’t actively dismissive, or accusing her of being a “jumped-up computer game expert,” both of which had happened before in dealings with the MoD. “The sender obscured their internet address, and posted with a false email,” she explained, “which means no, we can’t back-trace them. Unfortunately, these methods are widespread among hackers, and even security personnel. All of our own traffic does the same thing, for example.”
Dunston sighed. “So not only could these posts have been made from anywhere, they could have been made by anyone.”
“That’s correct.” Bridge decided to go out on a limb, guessing this was part of Giles’ game plan. “And that’s why we need a mole hunt. We can monitor these posts till we’re blue in the face, but right now we have no way to connect them to a source.”
“Exactly so,” Giles nodded, and Bridge relaxed. Now she knew why she was here.
Chisholme pushed again. “But you’ve worked out how to decode the messages, yes? So why not sit back and read their conversations?”
“Because there may not be any more,” said Dunston. “Since Ms Sharp’s friend interrupted what we presume was a handoff, we must also assume they, whoever ‘they’ are, know their code is compromised.”
“I thought this man wasn’t connected to the security services.”
“He wasn’t,” said Bridge. “But I think Ms Dunston’s point is that his killer didn’t know that.”
“We can continue monitoring that group,” said Giles. “But even if more messages are sent, they may not lead us anywhere. We need to gather physical evidence.”
Henri Mourad, the Paris officer on the video link, spoke up. “Which needs a physical investigation. So you want me to start questioning people?”
Giles held up a hand before Dunston could respond. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first thing we need to do is read both of you in on Exphoria.” He pulled the room’s keyboard towards him, and looked to Chisholme. “I’ll bring up the slides. Devon, would you be so kind as to walk us through it?”
The civil servant took a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and propped them on his nose, while Giles logged in and called up a document. A crude project logo filled the screen: the Union Jack and Tricolour flags side by side in the background, with the word EXPHORIA superimposed in bold black letters.
Chisholme opened the files in front of him and read from them. “Exphoria is a joint UK-France defence project to design the next generation of control software for unmanned combat aerial vehicles.” On the screen, Giles brought up a photograph, and Bridge noticed Henri Mourad look down from the video
