The phone rang just as Stanway was about to leave for work. He strode across the lounge and picked it up. ‘Yes?’
‘I wonder, sir, if you have ever considered the benefits of installing full double-glazing in your property?’ a male voice said. ‘If I could just take five minutes of your time, I can—’
‘No, thank you,’ Stanway snapped, and replaced the telephone handset. He had no idea if his phone line was tapped, though in view of what Holbeche had said it quite probably was, but he was sure that incoming call would have been safe enough. After all, everyone received junk phone calls in the same way everyone received spam emails. He had kept the line open only long enough to hear the actual number the caller had given as part of the spieclass="underline" ‘five minutes’.
That was another simple code that Lomas had instructed him to remember, right at the start of their professional relationship. Each of the digits from one to ten had a different meaning. ‘Five’ was perhaps the simplest, signifying ‘no change, no news, or nothing to report’, so obviously Lomas hadn’t found out anything from Moscow overnight.
In this case, no news, Stanway mused, might well be good news. Moscow knew exactly how valuable he was to the SVR, and he was quite sure that if anything had happened that could threaten his position at Vauxhall Cross, they would very quickly do something about it. Also they would be certain to keep his case officer, Lomas, fully informed.
In any case, Stanway knew Lomas would be getting back to him soon, and that this time they would have to actually talk. It would take more than a brief exchange of written messages in a third-rate Indian restaurant, but Stanway realized the strong possibility that he, and everybody else employed in the higher echelons of SIS, would soon be under physical as well as electronic surveillance, if not already. He felt reasonably certain that he hadn’t been followed to the Indian restaurant the previous evening but, until the present situation was resolved, any further direct physical contact between himself and Lomas would be extremely ill-advised.
The best option was the telephone but for obvious reasons not his home landline or his regular mobile. When he had visited the newsagent the previous evening, he had also purchased a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile phone. That was ideaclass="underline" no name, no address, no contract, just a phone with a number that only he knew. The SIM card inside the phone was good for twenty-five pounds’ worth of calls and, once he’d used up that credit, he could top up the card at almost any newsagent. Or he could simply buy another phone.
Lomas had two unlisted contact numbers that Stanway had memorized and, once he knew Lomas had received a reply from Moscow, he would be able to call him without any danger of interception because nobody in the British security establishment had any idea that Lomas even existed. Stanway knew that for a fact, because he himself was in the ideal position to know.
Of course, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to call Lomas directly from his apartment. As well as bugging his telephone line, it wouldn’t have surprised him if ‘The Box’ had also managed to sneak an infinity transmitter into his property somewhere, which would relay all his conversations, not just his telephone calls, to a nearby surveillance vehicle. If they had, the last thing he would do was try to find it and remove it, since that, to the suspicious eyes of the Security Service, would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.
He would just wait and act perfectly normally, and obviously for the moment Moscow would have to wait for any further data from him. In fact, Stanway wondered if it might now be time to call a halt to his operations, at least on a temporary basis. He had already ransacked the SIS database, picking out files dealing with any matters Lomas had told him the SVR had an interest in, and his production of the file structure of the London Data Centre System-Three computer had seemed the next logical step.
As a Deputy Head of Department, who was subject to positive vetting every two years, as well as an annual polygraph check, all of which he had invariably sailed through, he enjoyed virtually unrestricted access to all files on the linked databases maintained by GCHQ at Cheltenham, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the London Data Centre and, of course, the SIS. He could even access a limited number of files on the Security Service database, which he did on a regular basis merely to ensure that no hint of Andrew Lomas’s existence had been detected.
The actual mechanism he used for copying the files was as simple as it was elegant. Because of his position as a Deputy Head, his personal computer at Vauxhall Cross was not subject to keyboard logging or other forms of detailed surveillance. The machine itself was pretty much a standard IBM. At Vauxhall Cross the electronic security is embedded in the building itself, which is essentially a huge Faraday Cage, allowing no electronic emissions either in or out. The computer was fitted with a DVD-ROM drive — a read-only unit — but not a CD or DVD burner which would facilitate the copying of data, a serial port, one parallel printer port, one Firewire and two USB ports.
When Stanway had first begun copying classified files on behalf of the SVR, he had used a number of different ways of getting the copies out of the building, all of them somewhat risky, but with improvements in technology had come a safer and more reliable method. Stanway only wrote with either a fountain pen or a pencil and, just over three years earlier, Lomas had presented him with a new pen specially created to a most unusual design.
Slightly longer and fatter than most pens, it somewhat resembled a Mont Blanc. Above its 18-carat gold nib was a chamber designed to hold a normal ink cartridge, revealed by unscrewing the nib assembly, and above that was another chamber which was wide enough to accommodate three other ink cartridges at the same time. This was accessed by unscrewing a cap at the top of the pen, which would allow the cartridges to be tipped out. It was of a somewhat eccentric design but still a fully functional pen, though it had one modification not visible to the naked eye.
Stanway had taken the pen with him to Vauxhall Cross, and had walked through the entry and exit scanners every day for two weeks, and the machines had detected nothing unusual. The second day of the third week, he had made one slight alteration to the pen while still at home, but again had found himself able to enter and exit Vauxhall Cross without problems. That evening Stanway had sat at home by himself, as usual, and in celebration had drunk half a bottle of Chateau Lafitte — arguably one of the best red wines that the vineyards of Bordeaux have ever produced, which was not so usual — while the pen sat innocently on the coffee table in front of him.
The invisible modification to the pen was a thin copper sheath positioned underneath the outer plastic, and which enclosed both the internal chambers. This addition effectively screened the inside of the pen from most scanning devices, and the reason Stanway had been celebrating was that he had, that same morning, removed the three spare ink cartridges and replaced them with a single short rod-like object with an oblong socket at one end. It was a tight fit inside the pen, but the two had been designed to slot together. The rod-like object was a specially manufactured solid-state USB drive with a capacity of thirty-two megabytes. To put that into perspective, one full-length novel would occupy only around one megabyte.
That had been three years earlier, but the USB drive that Stanway had been using for the last six months — and which, as a precaution against discovery during any random search of his apartment, he was going to put in his safe-deposit box at his local bank on his way to Vauxhall Cross — was a device with a capacity of four gigabytes, or four thousand megabytes.