Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(117)
“Do you know what’s meant by third-party collection?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I don’t, Holmes.”
“Watson, you need to read your papers more closely. First-and second-party collection is data hoovered up by GCHQ and NSA and the Five Eyes, the so-called second parties. Third parties are all other collaborating nations that GCHQ and the NSA have partnerships with. Fourth-party collection is data that one security service takes by stealth from another security service. There’s fifth-party collection—one security service hacks another security service that’s hacked a third—and sixth-party collection and so forth and so on. Wheels within wheels.”
“That all seems somehow perverse,” I said.
“But it’s undeniably efficient. Why stalk your own prey when you can merely eat some other predator’s dinner out from under his nose, without him ever knowing it?”
My visitor spoke of third-party collection, and I saw immediately where this was going. “They saw what you saw, in the lads’ communications. They read what you read.”
“They did. Worse luck: they read what we wrote, what the analysts above my paygrade concluded about these idiot children, and then—”
Here he rattled that paper again.
“I see,” I said. “What, I wonder, do you suppose I might do for you at this juncture?”
“It’s life in prison if I go public, Mr. Holmes. These kids, their parents are in the long-term Xkeyscore retention, all their communications, and they’re frantic. I read their emails to their relatives and each other, and I can only think of how I’d feel if my son had gone missing without a trace. These parents, they’re thinking that their kids have been snatched by paedos and are getting the Daily Mail front-page treatment. The truth, if they knew it, might terrify them even more. Far as I can work out, the NSA sent them to a CIA black site, the kind of place you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The kind of place you build for revenge, not for intelligence.
“It’s life in prison for me, or worse. But I can’t sit by and let this happen. I have this checklist and it told me that my job was to consider this very eventuality, and I did, and it came to pass anyway, and as far as I’m concerned, I have to do something now or I’m just as culpable as anyone. So I’ve come to you, Mr. Holmes, because before I go to prison for the rest of my life, before I deprive my own sons of their dad, forever, I want to know if there’s something I’m missing, some other way I can do the right thing here. Because I was brought up right, Mr. Holmes, and that means I don’t believe that my kids’ right to their father trumps those parents’ rights to their sons.”
“What an extraordinary fellow,” I said. Holmes was never one for the storyteller’s flourish, but he had an eidetic memory for dialog, and I knew he was giving it word for word—beat for beat and tone for tone. It was as if I was in the room with the tormented soul. The hair on my neck sprang up.
“‘Leave it with me,’ I told him, and showed him out. When I returned to my study, I found that I was curiously reluctant to do what I knew I must do. I found myself delaying. Smoking a pipe. Tidying my notebooks. Cleaning up my cross-references. Finally, I could delay no further and I went down to the station taxi stand and had a black cab take me to Mycroft.”
“Mycroft!”
“Of course. When it comes to signals intelligence, my dear brother sits at the center of a global web, a point of contact between MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and the highest ministers and civil servants in Whitehall. Nothing happens but that he knows about it. Including, it seemed, my visitor.”
“Sherlock,” he said to me, once I had been ushered into his presence, “as unfortunate as this is, there’s really nothing to be done.”
The boom years since the 9/11 attacks have not been kind to my brother, I’m afraid. As his methodology has come into vogue and his power in the security services has grown, he has found himself at more unavoidable state dinners, more booze-ups at a military contractor’s expense, more high-level interagency junkets in exotic locales. Hawai’i seems a favorite with his set, and I’ve heard him complain more than once about the inevitable pig-roast and luau.
Always heavy, but now he has grown corpulent. Always grim, but now he has grown stern and impatient. Watson, my brother and I were never close, but I have always said that he was my superior in his ability to reason. The most disturbing change to come over my brother in the past fifteen years is in that keen reasoner’s faculty. By dint of circumstance and pressure, he has developed the kind of arrogant blindness he once loathed in others—a capacity for self-deception, or rather, self-justification, when it comes to excusing the sort of surveillance he oversees and the consequences of it.
“There is something obvious that can be done,” I told him. “Simply tell the Americans to let those boys go. Apologize. Investigate the circumstances that led to this regrettable error and see to it that it doesn’t happen again. If you care about excellence, about making the country secure, you should be just as concerned with learning from your failures as you are with building on your successes.”
“What makes you say that this is a failure?”
“Oh, that’s simple. These boys are a false positive. They lack both the wit and the savagery to be a threat to the nation. At most, they are a threat to themselves.”