Luke was in a miserable state, pining for his room in the attic at Luton and all his old familiar surroundings. The centre of his existence was his returned computer. He had traced every single online file and restored them all to the way they had been, the way he wanted them, the way they had to be. His mother comforted him continuously, promising that soon he would have a room of his own, if not the one at Luton, then certainly an exact replica.
Dr Jeremy Hendricks had visited from the NCSC in Victoria, so that Luke could explain step by step how he had avoided all the firewalls and supposedly impenetrable access codes to infiltrate the NSA database at Fort Meade. He was still there when Sir Adrian arrived, so he was able to explain in layman’s language some of the complexities of the only world in which it seemed the boy could exist and which was a closed galaxy to the vast majority of the human race. Also Professor Simon Baron-Cohen had kindly visited from Cambridge for a four-hour seminar with Luke. He was now back at the university preparing a copious report on both Asperger’s syndrome in general and on how it affected Luke Jennings in particular.
The whole family had been relieved to learn that there would be no attempt to extradite the elder son to face jail time in the USA. But Sir Adrian was adamant that the Jenningses’ part of their bargain was unfulfilled. Further senior staff from GCHQ would visit to enrol Luke, who was in law fully adult, as a member of their staff to be directed as they saw fit.
What none of them knew was that they were crucial ingredients in the contents of the slip of paper that Adrian Weston had slipped to the President of the USA the previous day; the execution of his plan, now endorsed by two heads of government.
He named it Operation Troy in tribute to Virgil, who in his classic Aeneid had described the ancient Greek deception of the wooden horse. He had in mind to create the greatest deception in the history of the cyber-world. But it all depended on the unusual brain of a diffident British teenager, the like of which had never been seen before.
It had become obvious within ten minutes that if Operation Troy were ever to succeed, it would be Sue Jennings, not the ineffectual father, whom Weston had to win over. She would have to accept Luke’s enrolment into the service of GCHQ. And she would also have to be engaged in a
technical role, since without her constant reassurances her fragile son did not seem able to function in the adult world. Clearly, she was a more forceful character, the one who had taken charge of the family and held it together, one of those calm but fiercely determined women who are the salt of the earth.
Weston knew from the briefing notes handed to him by one of the Prime Minister’s staffers in Downing Street that she had been educated at Luton Grammar School, the daughter of a local printer and his wife. In her teens she had met and married her husband, who was then at accountancy college. So far, so banal. She was twenty-two when their first son was born.
She did not look forty, apparently spending time in the gym and during the summer at the local tennis club. Once again, so far so ordinary. There was nothing about the Jennings family to attract a flicker of interest, except the pathologically shy, withdrawn boy of eighteen who sat in a corner while his parents negotiated with this man from London. He, it seemed, despite or perhaps because of his difficulties, was a computer genius.
Sir Adrian tried to engage the youth in the adult conversation, but it proved fruitless. Luke could not, or would not, connect with him on a personal level. At all attempts, his mother answered for him, the tigress protecting her cub. Sir Adrian had no experience of Asperger’s syndrome but the briefing notes that had been rapidly put together during the morning of the family’s detention indicated that there were various levels of severity. A phone call from Professor Baron-Cohen had just confirmed that Luke was a severe case.
Periodically, if Sue Jennings sensed that her son was becoming distressed when the adults discussed something he had done but did not know he had done, she would wrap a comforting arm around his shoulders and whisper reassurances into his ear. Only then would he calm down.
The next stage was to find a place for that young man and his family to live and work in a safe but closed environment. Back in Whitehall, Weston began the search among hundreds of government-owned establishments. For two more days he researched and travelled. He hardly slept. Apart from snacks, he hardly ate. He had not been under such pressure since, back in the Cold War, with his fluent Russian and flawless German, he had flitted through the Iron Curtain as the deranged Yuri Andropov had almost brought the world to nuclear war. After three days he believed he had found the place.
Stopping passers-by on any British street, the number discovered who had ever even heard of Chandler’s Court would have been about zero. It was a very clandestine place indeed.
In the First World War its owner had been a cloth manufacturer who had obtained a contract to supply khaki serge uniforms to the British Army. That was when it was confidently expected the war would be over by Christmas 1914. As the slaughter mounted, the contracts for more uniforms became bigger and bigger. The manufacturer got very rich indeed and, in 1918, as a multimillionaire, he purchased the seventeenth-century manor house set in a forest in Warwickshire.
During the Great Depression, when the queues of unemployed snaked for miles, he created work by having teams of workless bricklayers and labourers build an eight-foot wall to surround the entire 200 acres. Dubbed a war profiteer, he was not a popular figure, and he wanted and needed his privacy. With his wall and just two guarded gates, he got it.
When he died in the early fifties, having neither widow nor offspring, he gifted Chandler’s Court to the nation. It became a retirement home for badly wounded ex-soldiers. Then it was abandoned. In the late eighties it achieved a new use. It was converted into a research laboratory, shrouded in secrecy and banned to the public because it delved into some of the most fearsome toxins known to man.
Much more recently, after the poisoning with Novichok of the former Soviet spy Colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, it was Chandler’s Court rather than the much better known Porton Down that came up with the antidote that saved their lives. For obvious reasons, the credit in the media went to Porton Down.
The sprawling manor at Chandler’s Court had been allowed to stand idle, maintained but not inhabited. The research laboratories were scattered through the woodland, as were the comfortable modern apartment blocks where the junior staff lived. Only senior scientists lived off site. There were two gates in the wall, one for commercial deliveries and the main gate for personnel. Both were manned and guarded.
Within a week, teams of artisans and decorators arrived to work on shifts spread throughout the twenty-four-hour day to restore the manor to human habitation. The Jennings family was shown around and, just over three weeks after the White House meeting, moved in. Dr Hendricks had agreed that the huge mini-city of GCHQ Cheltenham would not be right for Operation Troy. Too big, too confusing; for Luke Jennings, too intimidating and too populated. He and a team of two would also transfer to Chandler’s Court to monitor the programmes and mentor the juvenile genius at the centre of it.
There was one flaw, and Sir Adrian had attended a tense family parting at Latimer the day before the Jenningses left for Chandler’s Court. For a decade, the marriage had been on the rocks. The parents had tried to shelter their sons from the breakdown of the relationship between them, but it had become harder and harder, up till the point of impossibility. In short, they wished to part.
It had been decided that, at Chandler’s Court, Luke would live and work on assignments issued by GCHQ. His mother would live with him and assist in his dealings with others. The younger brother, Marcus, could attend any of two or three excellent local schools within easy driving distance. Harold Jennings did not wish to live there and, with the marriage at an end, did not even wish to return to Luton to resume work at his old accountancy practice.
What he really wanted had surprised Sir Adrian. He wished to emigrate to the USA and become a citizen of New York. It was a dream he had nurtured for years, since attending a conference there.
Sir Adrian had mentioned that he had friendly contacts in the USA and might be able to help by arranging some official assistance in fast-tracking the bureaucracy and formalities of residence and work permits.
With great speed, it was done. Harold Jennings had left his Luton practice and resigned from his golf club. The house was put in the hands of a local estate agent. In New York, he had a post with a British finance company just off Wall Street with a good salary. After a period in a hotel he would acquire a comfortable apartment and start his new life.
And now came the parting. It would have appeared unusual to a stranger inasmuch as it was so unemotional, as indeed was Harold Jennings. Had he had feelings and been prepared to show them, he might have saved his marriage years earlier. But it seemed the man’s spirit was as dry and lifeless as the accounts and figures that he had spent his career poring over.
He forced himself to embrace his two sons and, finally, his wife, but awkwardly, as if they were acquaintances at a cocktail party. His sons had caught the mood many times before and responded in kind.
Marcus, the younger boy, said, ‘Goodbye, Dad, and good luck in America,’ which evoked a panicky smile from his father and an assurance of ‘I’ll be fine.’ The lack of warmth in the embrace of the parents indicated why the soldiers a month earlier had found separate beds for the parents on the first floor of the Luton house.
There was a cab waiting in the forecourt of the manor. He left his family in the hallway, went outside and was gone to the airport.
Sir Adrian, hearing this later that evening, presumed that this was the last he would hear of Harold Jennings. He was wrong.
The following morning Sue Jennings and her sons moved into a spacious suite on the first floor of the manor at Chandler’s Court. It still smelt of fresh paint, but the weather was mild for the beginning of May and, with the windows open, the odour soon evaporated.