A Shadow Intelligence Read online

  He looked uncertain, put a call in to someone announcing our change of plan. Everyone had their orders. But his was the last deference I’d get for a while and I wanted to use it.

  London looked solid, fortressed in a thick, impregnable peace. A dream that had congealed. How long was I going to be here? I directed him to a Caffe Nero across the road from Balthorne Safe Deposits and he pulled up.

  ‘How do you take your coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘Go on. Flat white?’

  ‘No sugar.’

  I crossed the road to Balthorne. A row of classical columns obscured the front window. Reception was wood-panelled. They minimised human interaction. Four cameras and a smartly suited elderly guard watched you approach the entry gate and place your palm on a glass panel that read your veins. If your veins lined up, you got to enter a six-digit PIN code and walk in.

  It became more functional inside: another desk, a brightly lit corridor and finally stairs down to the vault. By this stage the key seemed quaint.

  In my box there were a few photographs, some handwritten poems, souvenirs of past operations, and a manila envelope containing a sim card. I unlocked my briefcase and removed a couple of grand in various currencies, depositing it along with a fragment of pottery that might have come from the Temple of Artemis in what was now north-eastern Libya. I kept the diamond. Then I took the sim and placed it in my new phone.

  I crossed the road to the coffee shop. As far as I was concerned, the operation had been pulled six months early, I had half an hour for a coffee. And I needed strength for what was to come, whether or not it included re-entering my own life. I took the driver his flat white, with a pain au chocolat, which I felt should buy me ten minutes. Then I returned to the café and sat down.

  London throbs. You’re alert to threats that aren’t there any more, and the senses overload. Three young women came in, talking Cantonese. A man in the far corner of the café muttered Kurdish into a Bluetooth headset. I heard the words ‘mother’ and ‘hospital’. The coffee-shop window was bare, no defensive blocks between it and the road. But there would be no attacks. I tried to re-enter the complacency. A copy of The Times had been folded on a rack beside the tills so that you saw a strip of flames in a front-page photo, but they were somewhere far away.

  My hands looked tanned in the English light. My lips were cracked. I stared at the screen of my new phone. When you charge up a phone, you entertain the fantasy that a life will return. I’d always brace myself for the personal business but forget to brace myself for its dwindling pressure. When you expend your energy maintaining another person’s identity your own becomes neglected. In the last seven weeks I’d missed two birthdays, one wedding, several job offers. There was an invitation to lunch from an investor friend who owed me for some timely information; no message from the woman I wanted to hear from. At least, that’s what I thought at first.

  Emails likewise: irrelevant things or those I was too late for. I checked the junk folder in case that was where my life had been diverted, saw something strange.

  It was an email from a TutaNota address with a string of letters and numbers for a name. TutaNota was a German-based encrypted webmail service. This was a procedure I used for agents. Subject line: Lottery Win.

  The message had been sent twenty-two hours ago. I scanned the email for malware then opened it. The email contained two lines:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

  CLAIM YOUR PRIZE.

  ‘Happy birthday’ meant danger: I was in danger, or the agent in question was in danger, and I needed to initiate exfiltration procedures; i.e. time to get out of town. ‘Claim your prize’ meant that a file had been uploaded to a message board hidden deep within the dark side of the internet.

  When you’ve refined systems that work in the field, it’s good to stick with them. But you make sure each agent has a unique signature, procedural details that identify them so you know who’s contacting you in the absence of formal identification. I’d used this particular code with an agent in Turkey codenamed MESCALINE – Khasan Idrisov, a young man I had been fond of, with his pale eyes and thin beard; the frayed handkerchiefs with which he’d mop his brow. His decapitation was still up on YouTube last time I checked.

  So the message was a surprise.

  I looked around Caffe Nero, sipped my coffee, read the message again.

  There was no way anyone should have known the code words, let alone my personal email address as well. Now I looked through my missed calls more closely. Around the time of the email there were three attempts from a foreign landline. 8.12 p.m. last night, 8.14 p.m., then 8.21 a.m. The prefix was 87 172. A check online confirmed it was a landline in Astana, Kazakhstan.

  I’d been in the country twice, briefly – both times near the start of my career. There was little MI6 activity there; the service ran a minimal station out of the embassy. It provided some shallow cover for intelligence operatives and electronic surveillance, and enjoyed a moment of inflated importance after 9/11 – Kazakhstan was a supply route to Afghanistan – but in the resource-strapped world of MI6 nowhere retained staff without good reason. The world is big, intelligence operations are expensive and politically complicated. Nothing came up online for the number: no individual or business. I set up GPS scrambling so my location was concealed, dialled the number back. It rang but no one answered.

  My driver stood watching me beside his Audi, cigarette cupped in his palm. I needed a clean device with which to access the darknet. That wasn’t going to be easy today. As I got up, I wrestled with a thought I didn’t have the capacity to process right now. One other person alive knew the contact system, the person I wanted to hear from more than any other – but not like this.

  THREE

  I considered asking for another diversion, purchasing a laptop, retrieving whatever had been sent. But we were running late, and I was starting to feel any further action needed to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  We followed the river east, sank into the Blackwall Tunnel, through the shabby tranquillity of south-east London into Kent; bare branches, a splash of rain, suburban oblivion before the M25 reduced the world to litter-strewn verges.

  I rarely got invited into Vauxhall Cross any more. They’d have to disinfect the place afterwards. The ideal of HQ was to remain a sterile domain in which transgressions of men and women like me echoed only faintly. It was a truism in the Intelligence Service that the better you were in the field, the less London wanted to know you. On a shaded lane outside Sevenoaks, the driver stopped, checked his mirrors. When no other vehicles appeared he turned left down a rough track between stone pillars to a gate. Two men in Barbour jackets approached the car, an Alsatian straining at its leash. They let the dog sniff around, checked the driver’s papers, peered into the back and gave me a nod. They pulled puncture chains off the track and we continued.

  After another minute we arrived at a sprawling red-brick manor house with stables at the side, marshy paddocks at front and back. A Mercedes had been parked in one of the stables. Two armed men in grey suits sat in the main building’s flagstoned hallway, breath steaming.

  ‘Home again,’ one said, recognising me. ‘Phone, please.’

  That was new. I handed over my phone. He winked, nodded towards the stairs. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

  Not quite Miss Moneypenny. Still, the familiar environment offered a shred of comfort. I had been here years ago, crafting the Bohren cover in the first, optimistic flush of the Arab Spring.

  You have experience with revolutions.

  How’s your Arabic?

  Up to speed with the Muslim Brotherhood?

  Rolling coverage on, courtesy of Al Jazeera; me, fresh from Ukraine, still filled with ideas of extending the colour revolutions to Russia itself. Why not? But the Middle East was where the story was happening: freedom blossoming, a chance to remake the world. That seemed a very long time ago. I allowed myself a flicker of nostalgia as I climbed the
rickety stairs, breathing the same country air. I remembered the view of low hills and forest. A landscape for deer hunting, I had thought at the time. Tudor country: Thomas Wyatt, Kit Marlowe – men entranced by the power they served, who thought they could borrow some of its glory.

  My debrief took place in a large room, a mesh of grey conducting material over the walls rendering it a secure communications facility, but giving the air of dust sheets and decline. Three people got to their feet when I entered: Alastair Undercroft, head of the Global Issues Controllerate; Martina Lansdown, Section Chief: Libya, Syria and Yemen; finally Douglas Mitchell, an adviser to the Foreign Office, though not one you’d come across very often. Undercroft was first to shake my hand.

  ‘Good to see you, Elliot.’ The pink ridges of his bald head looked raw under the lights.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Lansdown said. Her suit was the olive-green of military fatigues. Mitchell offered his hand but didn’t smile. He sported five o’clock shadow and black hair gleaming with whatever kept it scrupulously parted. The walnut desk in the centre of the room bore two laptops sitting on their secure cases of nickel and silver-plated nylon, plus a Panasonic Toughbook showing satellite imagery. Beside this was a tray of sandwiches, untouched.

  Six years ago the Foreign Office had identified an urgent need to bolster our connections with rebels in Libya and Syria. They wanted to know about activists, but also more battle-ready opposition. I was already tuned in to some of the movements from my time in Tunis and Cairo. The plan was to monitor and control the flow of arms, men and communications equipment as much as possible. Prevent massacres, respond to cries for help, without the need for the kind of military intervention that makes news bulletins. Overseeing this was a small, ex-directory unit of MI6 set up in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, incorporating those familiar with the movement of Islamist fighters, as well as the intricacies of the diplomatic relationships that concerned them: Pakistan, Turkey, the Gulf states. CIA were on board, keen to make it a liaison operation with Six, because liaison operations didn’t need to be reported to Congress. MI6 and those Cabinet members in the know wanted it categorised as an Information Operation as these didn’t require ministerial sanction. I was needed because you can’t do everything with drones.

  They wanted me to enter that world, as someone who could befriend funding sources for rebels of all stripes, to map out the web of shifting alliances between Riyadh, Ankara and Tripoli. I thought it sounded like an opportunity to immerse myself rather than run around another desert sticking targets on backs. I would have to win trust, which took time, which was what I’d trained for. I convinced them that art dealing involved as much mysterious movement of funds as any other pursuit, and we created Bohren. I met Rashid Bin Talal six months later at Basel art fair, established that he was setting up a museum of modern art in Riyadh, that he nursed a crippling hard-on for young white men, and that he was shipping over five hundred grand a week to militant Islam. I recruited him five months later. That was quick, but still felt luxuriously gradual by the standards of the modern intelligence service. I codenamed him Courtesan and insisted no more than six individuals knew his real identity. We kept him in play for the sake of his intel, his cash, the cover he gave our own schemes, and diplomatic relations with the Saudis. It was win–win all the way around.

  ‘Courtesan was arrested, six a.m. our time, Saudi side of the border,’ Undercroft said. ‘Believed to have been taken to Ulaysha prison. Obviously we’re monitoring the situation. I know you’ll want him out. Intervening now risks drawing attention.’

  ‘So will him talking.’

  ‘It may be too late.’

  ‘Where was E-Squadron?’

  ‘Wrong side of town, it seems. Total cock-up; no one’s pretending otherwise. We think perhaps the Turks stuck an oar in. Washington’s got its new tunes, as you know, and that’s causing pressure. Things were going to come to a head sooner or later.’

  Fieldwork sometimes felt like being told to build elaborate and very fragile constructions next to the sea; one day the tide of diplomacy turns and you wonder why you bothered.

  ‘We appreciate the work you’ve put in,’ Mitchell said.

  ‘We’re all frustrated,’ Undercroft elaborated. ‘But those theatres aren’t the priority they once were. And there’s an additional problem.’

  The problem was $500 million worth of weapons supplied to Yemen’s interior ministry which had gone astray. The Foreign Office had got jumpy and instructed us to cut all ties before taxpayers’ assault rifles turned up on jihadi YouTube. They were very concerned about what ‘bore our fingerprints’.

  So that was that.

  Christopher Bohren had two homes I had decorated, friends, prospects, magazine subscriptions. Obviously, some of this would linger. His work would be reabsorbed by the legitimate art dealership housing him; his personal contacts had been primed for an unannounced departure. Operations Security would fade him out of existence over six or seven months. But it would not be me any more.

  When we’d exhausted our thoughts about the events of the last twenty-four hours they brought out lists of names. Mitchell had the air of a man who was about to deal with men even less patient than himself. He wanted me to treat former contacts ‘unsentimentally’ in order to ‘clarify the situation’. It was a phrase the Russians used to mean ‘kill someone’.

  Every deal I’d made had been cleared with the FCO, yet they had a way of asking about it as if I’d sat alone in the desert wondering how to equip the Free Syrian Army. I existed because of the things the government wasn’t allowed to do, and that brought vulnerability. I began to think through the individuals who might have been here but weren’t, and what their absence signified.

  I cooperated with Mitchell’s questioning, but you learned to give London what it needed and not much more. The Foreign Office cannot bear too much reality. When you travel between a world of reports and the one that people die in, intelligence product becomes a dubious thing. You impose order on chaos, give other people a false sense of understanding and authority. It involves the transformation of friends and brothers into agents or targets. That was the border crossing that eventually exhausted you. I wasn’t prepared to endanger someone who’d recently had my back just because of a policy change in Whitehall.

  As we moved through details – deliveries, payment chains, structures of the Qatari royal family – I kept wondering about the email contact and the missed calls. What was waiting for me on the dark web? The more my welcome home began to feel inadequate, the more this contact seemed the real business. Eventually I let the thought which I’d been fighting surface. The one other living person who knew those protocols was the officer from whom I’d inherited the agent concerned: Joanna Lake. I hadn’t seen her in six months, but the thought of a reunion had sustained me.

  On a break I went outside, asked for the temporary use of my phone, then took it as far from the house as I could go without attracting suspicion. I found the last number I had for Lake and rang it, but the line was dead.

  Kazakh news sites focused mostly on snowfall. There had been a storm for three days, beginning on the night of the calls. Roads were closed, whole villages had been buried. Other than that, the President had made a speech about diversifying the economy. Some industrial strikes continued. Nothing that brought the missed calls into focus.

  After lunch I was interviewed by a man of around sixty with the patient, lethal air of Security Branch. He gave his name as Chris. He was curious about why I’d chosen to burn the contents of the secure room rather than bring them home as instructed. Curious about a lot of things, including my visit to the safety deposit box this morning. I humoured him, answering questions accurately, without protest. At one point, I caught him staring at my new watch. I didn’t know if he was going through the motions, reminding me of my place, or if he harboured genuine suspicions. Part of me remained in far less comfortable rooms, alongside men and women who’d risked their lives for Brit
ish schemes and had been left holding empty rifles.

  At three p.m., Chris departed. Undercroft and Lansdowne returned with fresh satellite images. I talked them through the towns and alliances of Syrian Kurdistan, while making my own tour of what survived, distracted by patches of new rubble.

  ‘They’ve destroyed the old mosque,’ I said.

  I reached over and enlarged the image. A nineteenth-century mosque I’d been fond of during a brief stay in Al-Hasakah had gone, replaced by a mound of beige stone. It had been bulldozed; militiamen, enraged no doubt by the tiled calligraphy. I tried to imagine that rage. Their iconoclasm was more than just an aversion to beauty and I found it fascinating, even while the results were awful. To them, the sites themselves were blasphemous; not just art or ornament but history itself.

  As we were wrapping up for the day, exhausted, I said, ‘There’s an officer who works in I/OPs: Joanna Lake. Do you have any idea of her whereabouts?’

  They said they didn’t.

  FOUR

  We concluded the session at 7 p.m. I was told to proceed to the Mandarin Oriental. Next meeting would be in thirty-six hours at the Mayfair art dealership that provided me with cover.

  ‘Get some rest,’ Undercroft said. ‘But don’t leave the country.’ He smiled.

  I was driven to the hotel beside Kensington Palace Gardens, Bohren’s favourite when staying in London. The place was a cliff-face of red-brick Edwardian ornament facing the darkness of the park. Usual doorman, crinkly smile as I was ushered into luxury. The receptionist smiled too.

  ‘Mr Bohren, so nice to see you again. We’ve given you the Master Suite.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘Not at all. No luggage?’

  ‘It’s on its way.’

  I could feel my physicality adjust as I accompanied a bellboy to the lifts. Bohren was gregarious and slick. Not a man I personally liked, but others seemed charmed. They took to him more easily than I remembered anyone taking to me. The bellboy bowed gratefully as he received his tenner tip. I closed the door and stood among the suite’s art deco-inspired features: a chandelier like a starfish stuck to the ceiling, a brass panther on a mantelpiece above the digital fireplace. I turned the virtual fire off, put the diamond in the safe. My phone scanned for electronic surveillance devices. No detectable signals but it was best to assume you were being watched. I drew the blinds against the view of Knightsbridge. I hated west London, which always made being here somehow comforting; it told me I wasn’t in my own life.