Marylebone High Street, London
THE FLAT ABOVE the vegan food store had no windows. Sealed off from the outside world and any prying eyes, the place looked innocuous. Yet it concealed one of the most sophisticated self-contained laboratories for dissecting mobile phones and their digital contents. The extraordinary advances made by Israel’s NSO group in the art of phone hacking had not gone unnoticed by China. The technical arm of the Ministry of State Security was particularly impressed by NSO’s software program known as Pegasus. Delivered to an unwitting victim’s phone through the click of a button, the program had become known as ‘the nuclear option’ in phone hacking. A device infected with Pegasus gave off virtually no clues to the user that their phone had been compromised; it was undetectable to all but the most technically competent. And yet, secretly, their phone had become a miniature digital spy, relaying back to the hacker every text, every photograph, every WhatsApp message, every contact in the address book. Chillingly, the hacker could even remotely activate the phone’s microphone to listen in to conversations or even switch on its camera.
Chinese tech, which has always shown a remarkable lack of timidity when it comes to availing itself of other people’s intellectual property, wasted no time in developing its own version of Pegasus. That version, known as Tiân’é – ‘Swan’ – was now being diligently applied to the mobile phone of Angela Scott, Senior Case Officer at MI6.
The Service, like all three of Britain’s intelligence agencies, had strict rules about mobile phones. Data leaks were the Achilles’ heel of any large organization and it was also not unheard of for some hapless civil servant to leave a pile of classified documents on a train or at a bus stop. So, officers were instructed to lock away their personal phones as soon as they entered the building at Vauxhall Cross and not to use them for any classified Service business. Angela Scott was no rule-breaker – the very idea of causing a data breach sent shivers down her government-service spine. She would rather die than break protocol. No, her personal phone, the one she carried around London outside Vauxhall Cross, stayed securely in its locker while she was inside its green and sandstone walls.
But Angela Scott, first-class intelligence officer as she was, was no match for the warp-speed advances in twenty-first-century digital spyware. The vast banks of fan-cooled servers that hummed and whirred beneath the streets of Shanghai already had a massive backlog of data to process, sucked up from devices and networks across the globe, from large, multinational organizations like the African Union in Addis Ababa to the most junior employee of a French aerospace company.
The Swan program operators were now inside her personal phone. This gave them access to every private conversation she’d ever had outside Vauxhall Cross, every journey she took anywhere in the world, every photograph she snapped. And if Luke Carlton happened to call her on that phone they would be able to listen in to every word.