“Well, this document certainly qualifies.” I passed it back.
“Only because you can’t see through the lines. EDGEHILL—and its American cousin at the NSA, BULLRUN—is, quite simply, a sabotage program. Its mission is to introduce or discover programmer errors in everyday software in computers, mobile devices, network switches, and firmware—the nebulous code that has crept into everything from insulin pumps to automobiles to thermostats—and weaponize them. All code will have errors for the same reason that all books, no matter how carefully edited, have typos, and those errors are discoverable by anyone who puts his mind to it. Even you, John.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Nonsense. A nine-year-old girl discovered a critical flaw in the iPhone operating system not so many years ago. The systems have not grown less complex and error-prone since then—the only thing that’s changed is the stakes, which keep getting higher. The latest towers erected by our offshore friends in the formerly unfashionable parts of London rely upon tuned seismic dampers whose firmware is no more or less robust than the iPhone I made you leave under a cushion in my flat. The human errors in our skyscrapers and pacemakers are festering because the jolly lads in signals intelligence want to be able to turn your phone into a roving wiretap.”
“You make it sound terribly irresponsible.”
“That’s a rather mild way of putting it. But of course, we’re discussing the unintended consequences of all this business, and my visitor had come about the intended consequences: malware implantation. Watson, allow me to draw your attention to the very bottom of the deceptively dull document in your hand.”
I read: “Could anyone take action on it without our agreement; e.g. could we be enabling the US to conduct a detention op which we would not consider permissible?” A cold grue ran down my spine.
Holmes nodded sharply and took the paper back from me. “I see from your color and demeanor that you’ve alighted upon the key phrase, ‘detention op.’ I apologize for the discomfort this thought brings to mind, but I assure you it is germane to our present predicament.”
My hands were shaking. Feigning a chill, I stuck them under my armpits, wrapping myself in a hug. My service in Afghanistan had left many scars, and not all of them showed. But the deepest one, the one that sometimes had me sitting bolt upright in the dead of night, screaming whilst tears coursed down my cheeks, could be triggered by those two words: detention op. I did not sign up to be an Army doctor expecting a pleasant enlistment. What I saw in Kandahar, though, was beyond my worst imaginings.
“Take your time.” There was a rare and gentle note in my companion’s voice. It made me ashamed of my weakness.
I cleared my throat, clasped my hands in my lap. “I’m fine, Holmes. Do go on.”
After a significant look that left me even more ashamed, he did. “I said to my visitor, ‘I presume that you are here to discuss something related to this very last point?’ For as you no doubt perceived, Watson, the page there is wrinkled and has been smoothed again, as though a thumb had been driven into it by someone holding it tightly there.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
Holmes continued his tale.
“I had done many of these insertions,” the man said, looking away from my eyes. “And the checklist had been something of a joke. Of course we knew that we could break something critical and tip off an alert systems administrator. Likewise, it was obvious that exposure would cause diplomatic embarrassment and could compromise our relationships with the tech companies who turned a blind eye to what we were doing. As to this last one, the business about detention ops, well, we always joked that the NSA was inside our decision loop, which is how the fourth-gen warfare types talk about leaks. Christ knows, we spent enough time trying to get inside their decision loop. The special relationship is all well and good, but at the end of the day, they’re them and we’re us and there’s plenty of room in that hyphen between Anglo and American.
“But the truth was, there was always a chance the Americans would act on our intel in a way that would make us all want to hide our faces. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Holmes, we’re no paragons of virtue. I’ve read the files on Sami al-Saadi and his wife, I know that we were in on that, supervising Gaddafi’s torturers. I don’t like that. But since the Troubles ended, we’ve done our evil retail, and the Americans deal wholesale. Whole airfleets devoted to ferrying people to torture camps that’re more like torture cities.
“Have you ever read an intercept from a jihadi chat room, Mr. Holmes?”