A Shadow Intelligence Read online




  Also by Oliver Harris

  The Hollow Man

  Deep Shelter

  The House of Fame

  Copyright

  Published by Little, Brown

  ISBN: 978-1-4087-0990-0

  Copyright © by Oliver Harris

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Little, Brown

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Oliver Harris

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  The Secret Intelligence Service puts two years and over 100k into the training of new field officers. You’re shown how to steal cars, strip weapons, hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of improvised explosives, two workshops dedicated to navigating by the stars. But nothing about what I had heard one old spy call whiplash. No one tells you how to go home.

  You’re negotiating with a crime syndicate in Kabul on Thursday; Saturday night you’re at a dinner party in Holland Park. Cutlery tinkles. There is something you’ve forgotten. You lock yourself in the bathroom and call a restaurant on Sadarat Square to speak to a man you know is dead, and when the phone’s answered there is the call to prayer in the background. The worlds cannot all be real at the same time. You apologise to your hosts as you leave, blaming jet lag, then sit on the Central Line hearing mourners wail. After the first few times, officers switch to a desk-based role or they find ways of managing the transition. I can’t do desks, so I had to learn.

  I accumulated rituals, which veered between superstition and procedure. Most of all, I collected places that I could touch as if they were a charm and say: Everything’s under control, you know what you’re doing. The Premier Bar in Jordan’s Queen Alia airport was one of them. Travel between the lucky and unlucky parts of the world regularly enough and you’ll find yourself killing time in Queen Alia. The Premier Bar tucked itself away in a corner of the main terminal, a fridge and three aluminium tables, with a clear view across the departures hall. It had Arabic news on a flat-screen TV and bottles of Heineken in a fridge. I thought of it as my local.

  I had come to Queen Alia airport en route from Saudi Arabia, and was under strict instructions to proceed directly to London. This in itself was ominous – most of my debriefs were held in third countries. An operation had been pulled suddenly. I had one bag and the clothes I wore, which stank of smoke and petrol. The pale jacket and chinos of a certain type of Englishman abroad are not made for arson.

  I sipped a beer and tried to unwind and form a plan at the same time, letting the stress hormones settle, enjoying globalisation at its transient best. A Congolese family in green and purple robes filtered through a charcoal-grey swarm of Chinese businessmen. Two dazzling white sheikhs led faceless wives in gold-trimmed burkas. Eastern European sex workers pulled Samsonite cases, heading to the Gulf, South East Asian ones in denim cut-offs on their way to Europe. The skinny, bright-eyed Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan labourers clutched mobile phones and gazed at the departure boards. Staff of NGOs and media organisations sipped water, restless or exhausted depending on the direction of travel. I watched them move as flights were called: Erbil, Jeddah, Khartoum. There were other solitary individuals like me, meeting each other’s eyes but not for long. You found a lot of snapped sim cards in the bins. Private security contractors favoured duffel bags. They looked well-fed, and walked with the stiff swagger of men who’d been heavily armed until yesterday.

  Six hours earlier I’d been in an abandoned mansion on the edge of Asir province in Saudi Arabia, close to the border with Yemen. The mansion had been trashed. At some point the previous night a local group of unknown affiliation had stormed the place, looting what they could. The occupant – a notorious playboy, discreet funder of terrorism and precious agent of mine – had fled. I had about ten minutes to clear the place of anything sensitive before a more purposeful crew arrived.

  I walked through with an empty rucksack, my footsteps echoing as I searched. I’d never been inside before. It was a fifteen-bedroom, thirty-million-dollar palace: fun to trash, difficult to search. Crystal teardrops from the chandeliers littered the floor among balls from an antique snooker table. There were scattered books, broken glass, trails of blood where the intruders had cut themselves climbing through windows. They’d shot his pets, ransacked his wardrobe, slashed some dubious abstract art and one haunting Fantin-Latour still life. A single word of spray-painted Arabic livened the wallpaper: Irhal. Leave.

  Which was good advice.

  ‘Are you seeing this?’ a voice in my earpiece asked.

  The satellite image on my phone showed a convoy of five Toyota pickups heading straight towards me. Unclear who they were, but I wasn’t putting my money on Saudi forces. The barrels of the semi-automatics sticking out of the windows were clear enough.

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘Probably time to get a move on.’

  I climbed the stairs. The first floor gave a view across the grounds. Most of the buildings I used in the Gulf were built with anti-ram walls, barriers, ballistics window film. This wasn’t one of them. It had a defiant lawn, some cacti, date palms and an elaborate sprinkler system. A Ferrari belonging to the man who used to live here remained beside the gates, a white shell of carbonised metal. Silver puddles gleamed in the burnt dust beneath it, which perplexed me until I realised it was the metal of the brake pads, melted and resolidified. That was surreal and beautiful. My own driver leaned against the gatepost, binoculars raised. Two distinct lines of smoke reached up from the suburbs of Abha, the nearest city, 3.4 kilometres away.

  ‘Eajal!’ Quick, he shouted, turning.

  I estimated ten minutes before the men arrived, two more to breach the gates. The Saudi police had vanished, the SAS unit attached to the intelligence services for scenarios such as these was stuck at a vehicle checkpoint on the high
way. I was left with three temporarily loyal members of a carjacking gang high on anti-epileptic medication that they consumed by the handful, claiming it gave them courage. Maybe it hadn’t kicked in yet.

  One of my current allies, Samir, appeared in the corridor behind me: moustache and paunch, antique pistol, bulging eyes.

  ‘We go now.’ He was agitated. Beside him stood a cousin or nephew, no older than sixteen, in an FC Barcelona top, barely able to lift his Kalashnikov.

  ‘Five minutes.’

  ‘Two minutes.’

  I reached into my jacket, gave the boy my handgun, told him to forget the rifle. ‘I’ll be back down before they get here.’

  I took a breath, mixed some oxygen in with the fresh adrenalin. Nice and alert; let’s get this done. The room I wanted to find was proving elusive. I opened doors, looking for electronics and paperwork, finding abandoned Kevlar, fine china, leather-bound encyclopaedias.

  One minute.

  At the end of the second-floor corridor I located the door I needed. I punched a code into its electronic lock, saw inside, and my heart sank.

  Seven or eight crates of material filled the small, windowless space: bank statements, shipping documents, loose cash, bills of lading. I counted four laptops, seven concertina files, stacks of invoices for almost everything but the weaponry he was actually funding. No doubt, somewhere within the mess, were identifying details; lives endangered.

  Samir appeared behind me, saw the haul, swore.

  ‘We must leave it,’ he said.

  It would take half an hour to remove it all. If we had a van. A call came from downstairs: they could see the dust of the approaching convoy. I threw the rucksack into the pile.

  ‘Get a can of petrol from the fuel house.’

  ‘We don’t have time.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time. Go.’

  I began to sort through, taking the cash, ensuring the hard drives were exposed. A sheet of the South China Morning Post caught my eye. It had been folded small, tucked into a box of necklaces. I unwrapped it and saw what looked like two uncut diamonds. Even in the murky room they sparkled: yellow-tinted and unmistakable against the newsprint.

  I pocketed one diamond, wrapped the other back in the paper with half the money. When Samir returned with four jerrycans, I gave him the wrap of newspaper and told him it was a present for later; I needed him poor and wary for a few more minutes. We both splashed petrol over the hoard, then he ran down to the car. I took a final breath before dropping a match. Sometimes it’s left to you to perform the ceremony alone; to lower the flag. No call to prayer from Abha. There was a deep Sunday peace, which meant that peace was gone.

  An hour to the airbase, a flight to Medina, then another Saudi military jet into Jordan. No one had offered me a change of clothes. And petrol smoke sticks to you. Messages kept coming in on the phone belonging to Christopher Bohren, my cover identity: bankers, brokers, a fellow art dealer, a company that specialised in installing infinity pools. All wondering why I’d disappeared.

  I had no idea.

  I washed the taste of blood out of my mouth with Heineken. The situation was a mess, I didn’t doubt that. My agent had vanished, Saudi Arabia looked like it might kick off, and someone somewhere in Vauxhall Cross was worried about my own potential capture. But I had also been expecting this: the intelligence service liked to keep you moving, stop you building empires and attachments. The longer you were in the field the more vulnerable you became, so the thinking went. As well as the dangers of overexposure, the theory involved some old-school notion of going native. Operations got pulled overnight and you rarely, if ever, got an adequate explanation. I sometimes wondered about HQ’s envy of field officers, whether they created their own secrecy just to keep you in your place. Sometimes it was as simple as a budget cut.

  For now I wanted to enjoy a last moment of freedom, of being Christopher Bohren. For all the professional setback and geopolitical consequences of my departure, I was pleased to be here. The magic of returning to places never diminished – of finding them still there: the tables, the weary face behind the counter. It was a small victory, as if I’d kept a rendezvous with myself.

  On the TV screen: Militants burn playboy’s palace. Is Saudi pact with extremism over?

  That was the question posed by RT Arabic, the Kremlin’s new Arabic-language station. They had good footage: a reporter standing beside smouldering ruins, with the carbonised Ferrari visible over his shoulder. I finished my beer and got another.

  ‘You used to show Al Jazeera here,’ I said. The owner shrugged. ‘You prefer Russian TV?’

  ‘My son prefers it.’

  I took the drink to my table, feeling defeated, wondering at the way history creeps up on you. The journey from the counter gave me an opportunity to scan my immediate environment. There had been one man sitting at the Starbucks across from me for fifteen minutes now. He’d taken a seat facing in my direction, although he hadn’t looked directly at me once. He had an Arabic paper spread in front of him but his eyes didn’t track the text. Not airport security, but I thought I glimpsed a holster.

  I finished my beer, watched a group of business people speaking Russian hurry towards the flight to Damascus. After another few minutes my Starbucks friend departed, slinging a laptop bag over his shoulder. I put my phone on encrypted mode and dialled a Saudi number.

  ‘I’ve had to leave town for a few days. There’s a few bits and pieces I left behind which I won’t need any more. I’d like you to dispose of it all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then I think you should get out.’

  ‘You are leaving us.’

  ‘The situation’s become precarious.’

  ‘We are ready.’

  ‘I appreciate that. I have instructions.’

  I rested my eyes on a video screen above the concourse: a woman in a field of lavender pressing a perfume bottle to her throat. ‘I will be doing everything I can to ensure you have no problems,’ I said. ‘If you speak to Leyla, will you tell her I’ll be in touch as soon as possible?’

  He put the phone down. I closed my eyes. The fabled licence to kill is nothing beside the very real licence to die; to walk out of a life and its responsibilities. No farewell, no last confession. I picked up my phone again and called CIA’s station in Islamabad.

  ‘Courtesan’s a no-show,’ I said. ‘Everything on ice for now.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll message when I do.’

  I moved a blood-red Swiss passport from my bag to my jacket pocket, booked a night at the Mandarin Oriental in Kensington. Then I went and bought a suit and a clean phone.

  I knew from experience that in five or six hours I’d be facing men and women in ironed clothes who would determine, from how I presented myself, the level of mishap they could pin on me. Luckily, routes to and from war zones make for good shopping: Rolex, Ralph Lauren and Prada do their own sleek profiteering. The woman in the Prada concession was elegant, flirtatious, didn’t blink at a man who stank of petrol smoke digging out his money belt and buying a three-grand suit.

  ‘You have been staying in Jordan?’ she asked.

  ‘Just passing through.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘Canadian. I might get a watch as well.’

  I chose a watch.

  ‘Can you wrap this?’

  ‘Of course.’ She wrapped it, tied a ribbon and offered me a choice of message tags.

  ‘Just a blank one, thanks.’

  Doors of dark carved wood led between potted palms into the Royal Jordanian Crown Lounge. No familiar faces. At the back was a disabled toilet that had served me well over the years. I changed, tore and flushed my receipts, checked my paperwork was in order. Then I took a condom wrapper from my wallet, removed a pouch of duct tape and prised it apart. Inside was a small key, the key to my own life. I rinsed off the glue and transferred it to my pocket.

  I shaved, used the corner of my boarding p
ass to get the dirt from beneath my fingernails. Finally, I tried looking into my own eyes. I was thirty-five, 5’11”, 170 pounds, ash-brown hair faded by the Middle Eastern sun. I started operations looking well: groomed, trim but not so worked out that I could be mistaken for military. I ended them haggard, bloodshot, with an edginess that triggered attention.

  I eased the tape off the new wrapping paper and removed the gift box, took out the watch, then tucked the diamond into the velvet lining and rewrapped it. I found the tag and wrote: Let’s quit.

  At the boarding gate, the usual sunburnt crew gripped their Western passports as if they might try to wriggle away. The flight took off at 10.30 a.m. I stayed awake over Lebanon, trying to see how much power was on, caught a glimpse of western Turkey, slept through Europe.

  Heathrow was unusually quiet. No issues at the border. I walked into the UK, part of me hoping that there was no one to meet me, but I was out of luck.

  TWO

  My driver held an agreed name. You could almost believe he was a standard chauffeur if it wasn’t for the eyes that scanned the people around me as he took my bag. Square-jawed, broad-shouldered; an army physique at odds with the grey suit.

  ‘How was the journey?’

  ‘Very smooth, thank you.’

  The car was convincing too: black Audi, authentic TFL private hire licence in the window. Its bulletproof glass and run-flat tyres weren’t easily identifiable to untrained eyes. The sky above was grey, the bite of English winter refreshing.

  ‘Alastair Undercroft apologises for not being here in person to welcome you home,’ my driver said, when we were inside. ‘We’re to proceed directly to the meeting.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  He kept his eyes on the mirrors as we drove, watching security and police. After several years living the life of Christopher Bohren, the most likely source of trouble was New Scotland Yard. I let him get going before leaning forward.

  ‘I’d like to go via Marylebone High Street.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I have something to pick up.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to take you straight there.’

  ‘We have time.’

  ‘Okay.’