The Afghan Read Free Page B

red-flagged cellphone.
    Brian O’Dowd had been asked to wait on the stairs during the raid. He was now in the bedroom holding the damaged Toshiba laptop. Both knew this would almost certainly be the crown jewel. All the passports, all the cellphones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbours – the lot would be taken to a safe place and wrung dry for anything they could yield. But first the laptop . . .
    The dead Egyptian had been optimistic if he thought denting the frame of the Toshiba would destroy its golden harvest. Even seeking to erase the files within it would not work. There were wizards over in Britain and the USA who would painstakingly strip out the hard disk and peel away the surface chatter to uncover every word the Toshiba had ever ingested.
    ‘Pity about Whoever-he-was,’ said the SIS agent.
    Razak grunted. The choice he had made was logical. Hang on for days and the man could have disappeared. Spend hours snooping around the building and his agents would have been spotted; the bird would still have flown. So he had gone in hard and fast and for five extra seconds he would have had the mysterious suicide in handcuffs. He would prepare a statement for the public that an unknown criminal had died in a fall while resisting arrest. Until the corpse was identified. If he turned out to be an AQ high-up the Americans would insist on an all-singing, all-dancing press conference to claim the triumph. He still had no idea how high up Tewfik al-Qur had really been.
    ‘You’ll be pinned down here for a while,’ said O’Dowd. ‘Can I do you the favour of seeing the laptop safely back to your HQ?’
    Fortunately Abdul Razak possessed a wry humour. In his work it was a saving grace. In the covert world only humour keeps a man sane. It was the word ‘safely’ that he enjoyed.
    ‘That would be most kind of you,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a four-man escort back to your vehicle. Just in case. When this is all over we must share the immoral bottle you brought over this evening.’
    Clutching the precious cargo to his chest, flanked fore and aft, and on each side, by Pakistani soldiers, the SIS man was brought back to his Land Cruiser. The technology he needed was already in the back and at the wheel, protecting machinery and vehicle, was his driver, a fiercely loyal Sikh.
    They drove to a spot outside Peshawar where O’Dowd hooked up the Toshiba to his own bigger and more powerful Tecra; and the Tecra opened a line in cyberspace to the British Government Communication Headquarters at Cheltenham, deep in the Cotswold hills of England.
    O’Dowd knew how to work it, but he was still hazy about the sheer magic (to a layman) of cyber-technology. Within a few seconds, across thousands of miles of space, Cheltenham had acquired the entire contents of the Toshiba’s hard disk. It had gutted the laptop as efficiently as a spider drains the juices of a captured fly.
    The Head of Station drove the laptop to CTC headquarters and delivered it into safe hands. Before he reached the CTC office block Cheltenham had shared the treasure with America’s National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was pitch black in Peshawar, dusk in the Cotswolds and mid-afternoon in Maryland. It mattered not. Inside GCHQ and NSA the sun never shines; there is no night and no day.
    In both sprawling complexes of buildings set in rustic countryside the listening goes on from pole to pole and all points between. The trillions of words spoken by the human race every day in five hundred languages and more than a thousand dialects are heard, culled, winnowed, sorted, rejected, retained and, if interesting, studied and traced.
    Even that is just the start. Both agencies encode and decrypt in hundreds of codes and each has special divisions dedicated to file recovery and the unearthing of cyber-crime. As the planet rolled on into another day and another night, the two agencies began to strip down the