Wimbledon, London
ANGELA SCOTT SAT in the corner of her carriage and stared at her reflection as the train trundled through south-west London, taking her home to a pre-cooked meal waiting in the fridge. Her methodical mind was busy processing everything she had learnt in that lecture from the King’s College professor and the Q and A session that had followed. Some things she was already well versed in: the rounding up of the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, the infamous ‘re-education’ camps, ringed with barbed wire, the snuffing out of the last flickers of democracy in Hong Kong, the ever more persistent probing of Taiwan’s maritime borders. This was all common knowledge, already well covered in newspapers and by broadcasters. No, what was new to her were the extraordinary lengths the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, was going to in order to gather data and place its population under surveillance.
There was a paradox for her here. Angela was a career intelligence officer, with all the baggage that came with it. While working in the service of her country, she had on numerous occasions been privy to the innermost secrets of a Service ‘target’, covertly reading their emails, their WhatsApp messages, their texts, and trawling through their private photographs stored on their iCloud account. Some things she would rather not have seen, but it was all strictly professional, she would remind herself, all governed by the parameters of UK law; the Service lawyers saw to that. But this was different. The picture painted by that bristly-jacketed academic upstairs in the lecture room off the Strand was of a mass, state-controlled surveillance system that was obsessed with control and with hoovering up as much of everyone’s data as its servers could handle, and then some.
Thirty thousand military spies, the lecturer had said, were all working online in the service of the Party. And they were backed up by a further 150,000 ‘patriotic hackers’ going after whatever tech they could get their hands on that might give China an edge. ‘Don’t just take my word for it,’ the academic had told the room with a wry chuckle. ‘These figures come from the FBI.’ TikTok, LinkedIn and numerous forms of social media were proving rich hunting grounds for China’s online army, which was finding it all too easy to plunder the accounts of the unwary. No wonder the FBI was opening a new China-related investigation every twelve hours.
It did not occur to Angela Scott, as she stepped out at Wimbledon station, that certain people who did not wish her well were preparing to read the contents of her own phone.