“Is he an innocent victim?” Morton asked rhetorically.
Rather than answering him, Telford came to his feet. “Call whoever it is you’re talking to at the BBC and cancel the interview. While Oliver’s story might be printed in the Sun, I repeat, might be printed, you can rest assured an interview in which a minister claims he is the hapless victim of character assassination without a shred of evidence to support that claim will be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.” With that, Telford headed out of the room, stopping by his own office only long enough to let his secretary know he had some personal business he needed to attend to. He didn’t, of course, at least not personal business that was his. Like so much else he did, the personal business he took care of was the minister’s. In this case, it was running the source of the Twitter account to ground.
When he was once more alone in his cubbyhole, Morton took to brooding. Convinced his approach to the minister’s problem was the only way to handle it and determined to prove himself to the rest of the staff, as soon as he was sure Telford was gone, Morton called Jenny Jones’s production assistant at the BBC to confirm the time he needed to have the minister at the studio for his interview. And rather than run the risk of being interrupted by Telford, Morton decided to wait until he was alone in the car with the minister and heading over to the studio to go over the notes he was preparing for him.
On the other side of town, Telford once again found himself clutching a large Bushmills beneath the photo of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Only this time, Andy Webb had brought a colleague along. Whereas Andy was slim and unprepossessing, his colleague looked like a cross between a New York fire hydrant and a British bulldog, creating something of contrast to come to mind as the image of Little and Large popped into his head.
“Tommy, this is Edward. Edward, Tommy Tyler.” Andy made the introductions as Telford cautiously offered his hand across the table, only to find it brutally gripped in a grubby paw and pumped with all the finesse of a jackhammer whilst Tommy’s mouth took off with equal speed.
“Pleased to meet you, Eddie. Andy said the two of you served together in Ireland.” Then, without pausing, Tommy pitched headlong into the issue at hand. “Well, it seems your man’s been well and truly stitched. At first sight, he’s as guilty as sin.”
Baffled, Telford took a quick glance over at Andy before turning his full attention back to Tommy. “Excuse me?”
Whilst Telford was painfully aware that not everyone saw the need to gently open a difficult conversation as carefully as senior civil servants were wont to do, the speed of Tommy’s verbal tsunami left him shell-shocked as the stout little Welshman blithely ploughed ahead.
“I did say at first sight,” Tommy emphasized before pausing to catch his breath and take a sip of his beer. “All I can say is thank God for backups. At least your man did something right. Anyway…”
At this point, Andy placed a hand on his colleague’s arm in an effort to arrest Tommy’s runaway diatribe. “What Tommy is saying is that it’s just as you suspected. The minister was very professionally set up, after which the bad guys did a wonderful job of making it appear that they had never been there.”
“Can you tell me how you were able to confirm this?”
At the question, Tommy necked down the rest of his pint, set his glass aside, and grinned. “’Cos they’re not as good as me, that’s why,” Tommy proclaimed proudly. “Like I said, thank God for backups, ’cos they’d pretty much left his laptop cleaner than a pig’s whistle, apart from all the dodgy accounts and photos, of course.”
Sensing his colleague was about to launch into a deep technical description of his own cleverness, Andy quickly caught his attention with a crisp twenty-pound note and asked Tommy if he’d mind going to the bar for refills, hoping that whilst he was doing so, he could explain the basics to Telford in terms he would be able to understand.
Taking his cue, Tommy snatched up the note and left.
Andy explained, “The minister backed up his computer from time to time and then, thankfully, disconnected the backup drive. As a result, we were able to re-create previous states of his laptop. What we found wasn’t pretty. It all started with an innocent e-mail complaining about a planning application he’d received from a constituent who we’ll call Mr. Angry. Attached was a nice little PDF containing the local council minutes, as well as something a tad nastier. Just to be thorough, we tracked it back. Mr. Angry does exist, but he never sent the e-mail the minister received.”
“Anyway, he was well and truly rooted,” Tommy proclaimed as he barged back into the conversation even as he dumped fresh drinks on the table. “Rooted, key logger, control of the camera, microphone, the bloody works,” he declared with an almost childish relish.
“The works?” Telford asked as he turned to Andy for a translation.
Andy cleared his throat apologetically. “Let’s just say you might advise the minister not to sit in front of his laptop wearing nothing more than his vest and underpants in the future,” he said, even as he tapped a bulging brown envelope on the table, now dampened by Tommy’s beer.
“Show me.”
“Here?”
“On second thought, I can wait,” Telford mumbled as he struggled to purge a horrid image out of his mind and turn his full attention back to the issue at hand. “Who did it?”
“No idea, mate, but—” Tommy paused as if a stray thought had suddenly occurred to him even as he was ignoring the not-so-gentle jabs of his boss under the table. “Has he been pissing off the Syrians?”
Telford in turn snorted with laughter. “He’s not FCO, much as he’d like to be, and the Syrians don’t have any votes in his constituency. Why do you ask?”
“The malware we came across reported back to a C&C server in Cyprus that just may have links with the Syrian Electronic Army.”
Telford turned for a further translation to a decidedly uncomfortable-looking Andy.
“It looks like the attack was staged through Cyprus by someone with links to the Syrian Electronic Army who are a bunch of pro-Assad hackers,” Andy explained.
“And you know that because?” Telford asked warily as he and Andy turned their attention back to a suddenly blushing Tommy.
“I took a quick peek.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Telford muttered as he squirmed about in his seat before sitting up sharply. “At the moment, all I’m interested in is clearing the minister of this excrement and stopping it from happening again in the future,” he snapped.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Tommy replied, paying no heed at all to Telford’s sharp retort. “Well, stopping it in the future, anyway. You need to tell your minister he needs to patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and, most importantly, don’t use the same password for everything.”
“He had antivirus,” Telford interjected. “He spent the better part of a day going about, bragging to everyone who would listen about how he downloaded it for free.”
Tommy snorted into his beer whilst even Andy looked on, making no effort to hide his grin. “You get what you pay for, Eddie,” Tommy added before taking a long pull on his pint.
“But it was still supposed to protect him from viruses and hackers!” Telford snapped.
“He wasn’t the only one attacked,” Tommy blurted, unaware he was digging an even deeper hole with his peace offering.
Even as Tommy opened his mouth to continue, a sharp kick to his shin put paid to whatever further comments he was about to make. Instead, Andy posed a question to Telford, ignoring the reproachful look of his colleague.