Free Betrayed: (A Financial and Conspiracies Thriller – Book 1 in the Legacy Thriller Series) by William Wield

Embassy. It would go in the next diplomatic bag to Moscow and then on to Silayev. She smiled. For all of Wheeler’s assumption that she was spying only for him, this second envelope would be worth ten -thousand pounds to her – probably five times what Wheeler would be paying her in the Antelope pub tonight. Ah well, she thought to herself, it’s not bad money for very little work, so who cares whose paying it?
    Her clandestine work successfully completed, she got up and hurried out. In a flurry of confidence in the value of this information, she left far more cash on the counter than was needed for the time she had spent on their machine.
    As she left the internet café she had no qualms of conscience or feelings that she betrayed the trust Number Eleven had placed in her when they gave her a job – to her this was just business, a lucrative side-line and she even hummed a favourite Italian song to herself as she headed for a very quick pub lunch before going back to Number Eleven.
    Strange that she had ignored some of her training from Wheeler whilst in the café. In her excitement at what she was sending, she had allowed that thrill to overcome her trained caution. In writing her long email, she had forgotten that the ever-watchful eyes of the world’s surveillance teams would be on the lookout for a number of words that she had used in it – not least “cyber-weapons” and “Athena”.

 
     
    Chapter 7
     
     
    Thursday, mid - afternoon,
    The SVR, Yesenevo, Moscow
     
    Igor Komarov had taken great care when setting up his personal links to the Federation’s various intelligence services. The arrangement meant that his assistant, Pavel Rostov, looked after all matters connected with internal affairs. This meant mainly keeping a close watch on the President’s list of dissidents. Until Angus Macrae had moved Komarov’s money this morning, both Boreyev and Mikhail Vassilov, had been on this long list of dissidents. Naturally, Komarov said nothing to anyone in the office about his financial dealings with Macrae, but hinted that it was the President’s wish that the two of them be removed from the list because of some personal rapprochement. Apart from this one instance of personal intervention, Komarov left the boring dissident matters to Rostov.
    The exciting activity, and potentially that from which the glory would come, was the hunt for the new cyber weapon and this Komarov took for himself. This hunt was almost exclusively handled by his own personally fostered connection with Danil Morozov in the SVR.
    Much of the strength of the link between Morozov and “mentor Komarov”, rested on Morozov’s near hero-worship of Komarov’s close connections to the President and, in his own mind, lifted Morozov above the rest of his co-workers. Indeed, by inference, Komarov allowed Morozov to feel that he himself was but a step and a half from the President. Thus, whereas many on electronic stake-out duties might easily have allowed the hours’ of boredom to take the edge off vigilance, Morozov’s dedication on his mentor’s behalf was devoted and meticulous.
    Danil Morozov’s main areas of his expertise were the monitoring of all foreign communications - emails, telephony – both landline and mobile. His computer surveillance programmes were also set up to keep a watch on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. All of his work had recently been greatly enhanced with yet another reorganisation of the SVR’s capabilities and was now supposedly able to match those of any of his counterparts in the UK’s GCHQ or the US at Langley and the NSA.
    Morozov’s search programmes – sophisticated algorithms - were capable of spotting words or phrases which “popped up” in emails, documents, or telephone conversations almost anywhere on the internet or over the airwaves – that is to say, anywhere in the world. It was therefore of considerable excitement when, just after three in the afternoon, a small