‘How?’ Mark asked. ‘Everything sensitive is password protected. I was trying to get into Mack’s email system…’
‘… There is an alternative,’ Taploe interrupted.
‘An alternative?’
‘Does Libra have technical back-up? A team of troubleshooters who come in if your network goes down?’
‘Sure they do. The people we bought the computers from.’
‘And where do you keep the file server?’
‘In the basement,’ Mark said.
It was as if the idea had only in that instant fused in Taploe’s mind, regardless of the fact that Quinn had conceived the plan two days earlier. He said, ‘Then let’s kill two birds with one stone.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘Next week- we’ll set a date — at a specified time, ideally when Macklin and Roth are out of the building, my people will stage-manage a computer attack at your offices in Soho. In other words, put a virus into the network from the outside. All the computers go down. Secretaries start to panic, people lose their work. Now, in the absence of Roth and Macklin, you’re the man in charge, is that correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘So it would be you who would call in the technicians?’
‘Not necessarily. Sam would do it, the office manager. But she’s just gone on maternity leave.’
It felt like Taploe’s first stroke of luck in weeks.
‘Good. Then you’re the one who makes the call. As soon as the network goes down, inform the staff that help is on its way. Only you’ve telephoned us. Your normal technicians never need to know. Instead, we send A-Branch plumbers who fix the system, copy every hard drive in the building and get access to the basement safe, all inside three or four hours.’
‘You can do that?’
‘We can do that,’ Taploe said. ‘Closer to the time, we’ll go through it all in more detail. For now, you should be getting back to work.’
29
Jenny telephoned to say that she would be half an hour late for her appointment with Ben. It was 9.45 in the morning. Having finished his third cup of coffee of the day, he walked downstairs and retrieved the post from the metal box bolted to his front door. The number of messages of condolence he now received in relation to his father’s death had dwindled to perhaps one or two a week. And none today, it seemed. Just an electricity bill, addressed to Alice, and something from a French mail-order clothing store she liked to use from time to time. The obligatory bank statement, a takeaway flyer, and a postcard addressed to the house next door in Elgin Crescent that had obviously been delivered by mistake. Then, second from the bottom, Ben discovered an airmail envelope made out in his name containing what felt like a substantial letter. A return address had been written on the reverse side.
Robert Bone US Post Office/Box 650 Rt 12 °Cornish New Hampshire 03745 United States of America
Inside the envelope he found a typed, six-page letter written on fine, watermarked paper and folded twice with care. Only Ben’s name was handwritten, the barely legible scrawl of a hyperactive mind. He began to read:
Dear Benjamin
We met all too briefly at the service to commemorate the death of your father, Christopher, who was, as I hope I communicated to you at the time, a close and dear friend of mine. I promised as my wife and I departed that afternoon that I would write you and Mark with some of my recollections of Christopher, both the good times and the bad. However, I also believe that what I have to say may help to cast some light on the reason why your father was killed.
Ben read that last sentence twice and found himself speeding through what followed.
Your father was loyal to his friends, an erudite and sophisticated man, troublesome on occasion, at times maybe even a little impossible. The Keen temper was famous on both sides of the Atlantic! He loved Russia as his second home: its beauty, its fine tradition of literature, of poetry and music. Most of all, and this may sound odd of an Intelligence man, he loved the honesty of the people, what he described to me as ‘the lack of evasiveness in the Russian soul’. When Jock spoke at the funeral he touched on all of these things but I could sense from talking to Mark and to you even briefly on the driveway that there was a good deal missing, too many gaps left unfilled.
As you will no doubt be aware by now, Christopher worked for British Intelligence for almost twenty years. In 1977 — his first year with the SIS — he was posted to Berlin where he remained for the next four years. (Most of what I’m about to tell you is classified information, so I would ask that you bear that in mind when you consider who to speak to about it.) I first met Christopher in the winter of ’79, as one of the agency’s Station Chiefs. Liked him immediately, almost as a brother. The Foreign Office can specialize in disdain, but Christopher wasn’t arrogant in that sense. I gained the impression that he was unlike his other colleagues, just eager to do the best job he could. Anyway, that Christmas Brezhnev drank one too many egg nogs and decided to send troops into Afghanistan and for a while we all thought we might be on the brink of another global war. But the powers in Washington — I’m talking predominantly about hawks in the Reagan administration like Casey at the CIA- saw the invasion as an opportunity. Even if the Afghan resistance wasn’t ever going to be able to defeat the Soviets, they decided that at least the United States could prolong the agony and visit upon the Russians the equivalent of their own Vietnam.
To that end, and on a very clandestine basis, America began arming and supporting the mujahaddin and soon Central Asia was crawling with every intelligence outfit in the civilized world: the Chinese, the Iranians, the French, the Italians, Pakistan’s ISI, of course — and MI6. Jock, for example, because of his background in the military, was instrumental in training senior members of the resistance in combat techniques, even flying some senior mujahaddin figures to the Highlands of Scotland for exercises with the SAS. If there was a difference in the American and British approaches to the war, it lay in operations like these. While we tended to view the conflict as essentially ideological — a stepping-stone, if you like, on the way to winning the Cold War — MI6 took a more traditional approach, seeing Afghanistan as an opportunity to recruit Soviet military and government personnel as agents who would return to Moscow and bring them valuable intelligence in five or ten years’ time. Meanwhile, Reagan, Casey and later Bob Gates were still playing The Great Game, trying to manipulate the future of an entire continent by playing factions off against one another.
Ben stopped reading and took the letter upstairs. He wondered when Bone was going to get to the point. Most of what he was saying had been reported, ad nauseam, in the papers after 9/11, articles that Ben had tended to skip through laziness. Was this just another stranger promising to throw light on the mystery of Christopher Keen? At least Bone had managed to get over the page. The sheer bulk of his letter was impressive, if only because many of the others had been so inconsequential. He poured himself a glass of water and continued reading in the studio.
Your father and I were posted to Kabul in the late winter of 1984, about a year before the introduction of the American Stinger missile drastically turned the tide of the war in favor of the mujahaddin. Christopher was an undeclared SIS officer working out of the British Embassy while I operated under cover of a Dutch aid organization which was predominantly a front for American espionage activity. It was a coincidence that we were there at the same time and while I spent a lot of hours on the road, shuttling between Peshawar and Kabul, we still managed to see quite a bit of each other and I was grateful to have a friend out there. What fascinated both of us about the invasion was the opportunity it provided to see the Soviet forces at first hand — how they operated in a military situation and so forth. (Don’t forget that this is the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets were still thought of as the Great Satan by Reagan and Thatcher.) A lot of people would be embarrassed to admit this in light of what happened within five or six years, but there were still a lot of high-profile individuals who gave credence to the idea that the Soviet Empire was aggressively expansionist and posed a serious threat to Western democracy.
What we discovered was that the Soviet machine was anything but effective. The army was riddled with
