James Barrington - Overkill

‘How will you know when you’ve got the right computer?’ Richter asked.

‘We’ll know,’ Baker said, ‘because it won’t want to let us in.’

Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

Dmitri Trushenko answered the phone immediately. He had been watching the television, expecting news of the explosion at Gibraltar, and he had become increasingly agitated when he had heard nothing. He had logged on again to the weapon control system through his computer, but that had only confirmed that the firing signal had been sent by the mainframe and presumably, therefore, received by the weapon, not that detonation had actually occurred. ‘Yes, Genady?’ he said into the mouthpiece.

He heard no voice, just a splintering sound, then heavy footsteps, loud but indistinct voices, the sound of blows and then a single piercing wail of pain, abruptly silenced. He listened intently, trying to make sense of the noises. Finally, there was nothing but the sound of breathing, and then a click as the telephone handset was replaced on its cradle. Trushenko knew that the caller had to have been Genady, and that meant that his lover had been taken by the SVR. It also meant that the SVR had discovered his communications link and that, in turn, meant that Podstava was blown.

He sat for a few minutes, his eyes filling with tears at the thought of dear, gentle Genady. Then he made a decision. Genady Arkenko had been his lover for nearly forty years – longer than most marriages – and someone was going pay for what he was suffering. He would not fail him.

Trushenko walked across to the table, sat down and switched on his computer. He connected the telephone lead, loaded the communications software, auto-dialled the number through the modem and his mobile telephone and logged on to the distant mainframe.

Thursday

Hammersmith, London

Baker took manual control of the Moscow computer, and instructed the communications module to dial the first number. The screen cleared, and the terse message ‘Dialing’ appeared in the top left-hand corner, followed by the number. There was a brief pause, and Richter heard a faint warbling sound as the two computers communicated with each other, and then a symbolic representation of a computer appeared, and under it the message, in Cyrillic script:

WELCOME TO THE SYKTYVKAR BULLETIN BOARD

Type for Help.

If this is your first log on, use Username and Password

Under that appeared ‘Enter Username’ with a flashing cursor. ‘I take it that isn’t it,’ Richter said, as he translated the Russian text for Baker.

‘No,’ Baker replied. ‘That definitely isn’t it. That’s just a bulletin board – a kind of electronic conference – run by a bunch of computer enthusiasts in Syktyvkar.’ He looked down the list. ‘I think we can skip the next number, because it’s almost certainly a second line for the same bulletin board. Let’s try the third.’

The fifth computer responded entirely differently to all the others. Once the number had dialled, there was no welcoming screen, no text at all, in fact, just a small flashing cursor in the top left of the screen. Baker looked at Richter. ‘This is probably the one,’ he said.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

The junior SVR officer knocked respectfully on the door before opening it. He looked at the men seated round the table, approached Yuri Baratov, saluted and handed him a sheet of paper. The SVR chief scanned the paper, then spoke. ‘Trushenko’s in the Crimea,’ he said, to the table at large. ‘We’ve identified the cell his phone was using, and we’ve ordered the system to disable his phone card. Konstantin Abramov has instructed local units to pick him up.’

Hammersmith, London

‘This is where I need your help,’ Baker said. ‘I don’t speak Russian, and we’ll need to use Russian to get in. Let’s see if there’s any help available.’ He pressed the ‘?’ key, followed by ‘Enter’. A line of Cyrillic script flashed up. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘It says “Bad command or filename”,’ Richter said.

‘Typical,’ Baker said, and pressed the ‘F1’ key. ‘That’s the normal “help” key,’ he added. The same message appeared. ‘It looks as if there’s no help incorporated, on the very sound premise that they don’t want anybody unauthorized gaining access to the system. It’s probably waiting for direct entry of a username and password.’

‘Try “ Podstava ”,’ Richter suggested. That didn’t work either, and almost immediately afterwards the screen went blank and the message in English ‘Connection terminated by gateway: reverse trace detected’ appeared.

Baker looked at the screen thoughtfully. ‘This is definitely the right machine,’ he said. ‘As soon as an invalid username was entered, the computer started a trace back along the telephone network to see who was calling it.’

‘Is that going to be a problem?’ Richter asked.

‘Well, it certainly isn’t going to help. I’ve programmed the Moscow computer – that’s our gateway – to sever the connection each time it detects a trace, but it means we can only try one word per connection, which is going to add minutes to the time it takes us to get in. It also means that I can’t use a password generator.’ Richter nodded as if he knew what he was talking about, but Baker wasn’t fooled. ‘A password generator,’ he said, ‘is a routine that starts off with, say, AAAAAA and runs through all possible combinations of characters, including all the numerals and punctuation symbols, until it generates a username or password that the system will accept. The trouble is, you have to stay on-line to use it, and this set-up won’t let us. So we have to get the username some other way. And the password that matches it.’

‘A username is the real name of a person who is authorized to access the computer?’

Baker nodded. ‘Normally, yes, although there’s nothing to stop somebody who has a long name using an abbreviation to log on, as long as the system manager has approved it. If the user’s real name was Oblavenkavich or something, he would probably be allowed to shorten it to Oblavo or even use a nickname.’

‘And the password,’ Richter asked. ‘Is it always a name, or can you use anything?’

‘Anything at all,’ Baker replied, ‘the more random and illogical the better. The most difficult password to crack is something like this—’ he scribbled ‘%&reT34£’ on a piece of paper ‘—but the trouble is that the user can never remember it unless he writes it down, which defeats the object of the exercise. So, as I said before, most people use names or birthdays or something like that. The other common passwords are Secret, Confidential, Keepout and Mine, all of which are moderately obvious, Fred and derf – Fred backwards.’

‘Why Fred?’ Richter asked.

Baker grinned. ‘Those letters are immediately adjacent to each other on the keyboard, and most computer users are lazy.’

Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)

Dmitri Trushenko stared at the screen of his laptop in irritation. The connection to the mainframe had failed, which meant that he had to re-dial and log on all over again. He pressed the keys angrily, and waited. The screen displayed the message ‘Dialing’ with the mainframe’s telephone number beneath it. After two minutes, the screen message ‘Connection timed out. Redial?’ appeared.

Trushenko snatched up his mobile phone and unplugged the data cable. He input a number at random, pressed the ‘Send’ key and waited. Almost immediately he heard a beeping sound in the earpiece and the message ‘Emergency calls only’ was displayed on the phone’s small screen. Instantly Trushenko knew what had happened. The SVR had identified his mobile telephone number, and disabled his phone’s card. That also, he realized, meant that they knew more or less where he was.