A spy alone, p.17
A Spy Alone, page 17
‘It’s very difficult,’ says Howard, breaking the silence, ‘trying to arrange everything. Repatriation, you know.’
‘Yes, I want to help with that,’ says Simon, desperate to make it better, but knowing it never would be. ‘There’s a good man at the embassy. Charles Quint.’ Simon reads out Charles’s details. ‘He knows the right people, is expecting your call. He will sort it out.’
Simon stops again. He is getting flashbacks to the awful sight of Evie’s body cartwheeling in the air, having been smashed by the car.
‘Sir, I should like, once the coast is clear, so to speak, to come to pay my respects, tell you more about what your wonderful daughter did.’
Howard lets out a huge sigh. Clearly with some effort, he says, ‘We would like that. Thank you. I know she loved the work she did with you.’
This is as much as Simon can bear to hear. He ends the call as quickly as is polite and leans against the side of the phone box, tears streaming down his cheeks.
* * *
Simon’s pile of pound coins is much diminished, and he doesn’t want to be in one place for too long. He returns to the hotel, via a circuitous route designed to smoke out surveillance. He thinks he has seen a possible: an older woman who keeps popping up in different places. But he has not slept properly for weeks and sees hostile surveillance everywhere. And he can’t stop thinking about Evie’s parents, preparing to bury their child.
* * *
Thursday comes. Simon has not left his hotel room for an entire day. He reasons that the COSTELLO organisation probably does not know where he is, but the moment he goes to Paddington for the train he could easily trigger an alert via a hacked CCTV camera. He wonders about getting a dodgy minicab to take him most of the way, but concludes that the lowest risk is to get there quickly in a train. At Reading, he switches platforms, deliberately leaving his burner phone on the first train to act as a decoy. But he hangs on to his unregistered laptop.
A bald man, thick-set with an Eastern European, wide face and a shabby denim jacket is standing in a queue at a coffee kiosk on the platform. He seems to flash a glance at Simon before looking away, too quickly. Simon christens him Igor and takes a look at his shoes – navy blue Converse, new, the white rubber sole gleaming in the dull light. Remember the shoes. They never change.
He picks up the shoes, and their owner, later on. Igor’s associates, Reg and Usha make a surveillance box that follows Simon to Christ Church. They know he’s in Oxford, but do they know what he’s doing? Who he’s meeting?
* * *
The door to Sarah du Cane’s rooms swings open and Simon suddenly realises he is nervous. A long time ago, as her friend, confidant and onetime lover, he had always felt butterfly-stomach excitement when with her. He knew that she was out of his league, that their friendship was basically improbable. Other people regularly reminded him of this fact.
‘Well, hello, Si. I wondered when we’d be seeing you.’ Sarah has aged, of course, but she still has the magnetic brown eyes and luscious long hair that she plays with, absent-mindedly. Features that Simon had stared at for months before he’d ever spoken a word to her. The only clue to her secret secondary career is her clothing: she’s dressed smarter than the average academic, in a black suit jacket and collared shirt. You could mistake her for a lawyer. Not for the first time in her presence, Simon is dumbstruck. What is he doing here? And how does she know to expect him? He doesn’t have answers to either question.
‘Er. You don’t seem surprised to see me.’
She is all elegant poise and he is wearing clothes he picked up from a Pimlico market stall to avoid going inside any shops. Simon isn’t sure if he should be kissing her on the cheeks, hugging her or shaking hands. There is an awkward pause.
‘Come here,’ she says, putting out both arms and pulling Simon into a hug. He feels relief and release. Deep, painful emotion from days of stress, Evie’s death, the chase through Prague’s sewers, travelling in a car boot, constant hiding, watching his back, thinking twice before he takes any action and not being able to communicate with anyone he cares about. And now someone who has loved him is holding him tight and he feels like crying.
They walk into Sarah’s study, a classic Oxford don’s room with high ceilings, thousands of books on cream-painted shelves and leather furniture. Simon flops into an armchair without waiting to be invited, involuntarily letting out a deep sigh.
‘Cup of tea?’ Sarah asks, busying herself with a kettle.
‘Got anything stronger?’ replies Simon, who has stretched out his legs, trying to squeeze the tension out of his body.
Sarah says nothing but hands him a tumbler of whisky. Simon recognises the soft fruitiness of Glenmorangie. He takes a sip and lets out another sigh, that is almost a sob. Sarah has sat down, opposite him. Simon realises he’s in the chair that students would sit in for their tutorials with Professor du Cane, and she is in hers. And it dawns on him that he is here to present his assignment.
Sarah confirms this: ‘Simon. I know you’re here to talk about Sidorov, Mackenzie and Gough. Where do you want to start?’ Her voice has the calm authority that he had always found so attractive.
Perhaps the whisky is doing its job: things are clicking together in Simon’s brain. Has he been working for Peebles and O’Brien, or has he, all along, been working for Sarah? ‘O’Brien, he was yours, wasn’t he?’ asks Simon, recalling his notional client.
‘No, he’s Marcus’s. Well, I think we paid him a day-rate, sort of bonus. Kemi is ours.’ Of course. Kemi, who had never given Simon her surname, clearly the brains of the operation: cool, sharp as a knife. Not so different to Sarah, really.
Simon has spent his life devising sophisticated intelligence operations, designed to mislead targets, to manipulate them into doing something for him. And now he has been the target of a sophisticated intelligence operation. And he can’t figure out how much of it fooled him.
‘Is Oxford even reviewing Sidorov’s donation?’
‘Sidorov? They bloody well should be, but I doubt it,’ says Sarah. ‘I mean, that was about the only risk: that you’d get a source telling you the university definitely wasn’t planning on handing anything back. But in general, the cover fitted well: everyone is talking about whether it’s still acceptable.’ Sarah says this as if it were an interesting question, worthy of further study, rather than a burning geopolitical controversy.
And how many people knew he’d been fooled? That was almost the worst part: the thought of a group of people at the Pole, watching Simon as if from behind a two-way mirror. ‘Does Marcus Peebles know all this?’ he asks, a sudden sharpness in his voice. The thought of Marcus being part of some complicated scheme to mislead him is particularly frustrating.
‘Marcus is an important supporter of this work: like I said, O’Brien is one of his. I told him we were lending him someone. He had to admit to Kemi if anyone asked, but she didn’t even go to his office. You never met them at Grosvenor’s offices, did you? He probably thinks you were conscious to the operation from the start.’ Simon feels the annoyance rise inside him: he realises now that they had never discussed the Sidorov work in Marcus’s normal office, and he hadn’t figured out that something else was going on.
‘What about the Pole?’ For some reason, the answer to this matters more than the others.
‘Well that’s where it gets a little complicated. They seem to think you’ve gone rogue.’
Simon wants to be in control of the conversation. ‘Well, it seems like you know it all already. Is there anything I have to tell you?’
‘Simon.’ Sarah’s voice is firm, but also patient, perhaps the tone that she takes with bolshie students. The ones she knows are worth the trouble. ‘I only know what you have said to Kemi, and that’s only a small part of the story. I knew that you wouldn’t tell her or O’Brien the things that you felt were national security issues. So, please, I am listening.’
Simon tells her everything, from the beginning. He tells her about Sidorov’s strange walks through Oxford, on an inexplicable route past Mackenzie’s window. He tells her about the payments from something called Costello Limited in the Isle of Man to Mackenzie’s company, Flood 19, payments that stopped the month Mackenzie died. He tells her about his secret journey to Switzerland, and Vasya’s account of Kleshnyov, visiting a hotel room booked by the Costello Trust. And the existence of a completely unknown Russian intelligence organisation that existed solely to run the COSTELLO network.
He tells her that the Pole tried to get him to drop it. Which was when he knew he was on to something. And when he started to see people. Were they the Pole’s or COSTELLO’s?
And then he tells her about Prague. About the snatched sightings of followers, and about his failure to do anything about it. And then he stops. He doesn’t tell her about the last hours with Evie. He doesn’t tell her about the sight of Evie’s back disappearing down a narrow street and the awful seconds that followed.
There is a silence. Simon has stopped talking. ‘We know about Evie Howard,’ says Sarah. ‘I am very sorry.’ She pauses again. ‘I doubt it will help very much, but we made sure the embassy did the right thing. They’re sorting out the repatriation.’
Simon gulps at his whisky, trying to banish the mental image of Evie’s body, floating through the Prague air on its final flight.
Sarah regains focus. ‘Carry on, Simon.’
And Simon realises that the intelligence agencies have done what they always do: they use, they discard and they move on. Evie had played a role. Britain was grateful for her service. But the job needed completing. And Simon wants to show that he can complete it. Wants to show Sarah that he is tough, focused. Ruthless, if necessary. He feels desperate pain whenever he thinks about Evie. But he is determined not to show it. He is also determined that Sarah learns what else he has figured out. He, too, wants to complete the job.
So he tells her about Rudi and his network. And about the brush contact in Frankfurt. And, finally, he tells her about Sidorov’s visitor logs.
He gets to the names.
Sarah, who has been taking notes and nodding along, politely interested, is now leaning forward, her shoulders stiffened, her usually soft eyes narrowed, sharper. Simon mentions Von der Wittenberg and she nods, knowingly. Camondo, who pursued Sarah as a lover during their time in Oxford, elicits a frisson. But she doesn’t say anything. Simon gets to Patel. Perhaps because he’s a fellow academic, she breaks her silence.
‘Kamran? Really?’
‘Don’t forget, these are just the meetings. We don’t know whether they became full COSTELLO agents.’ He continues, mentioning Archbold and Harkness. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s much of a surprise with Ben: he was always defending Russia, calling NATO a neo-colonialist militaristic alliance, or blaming the Ukrainians for being too aggressive. And Harkness: think about it, which world leader was popping the champagne corks on the morning of the Brexit result? It was a victory for Putin. And back when he got into this stuff as an undergraduate, the whole “British sovereignty” campaign, it seemed like a joke in those days. Only a few ancient Tories and folk who hated foreigners were anti-Europeans at that time. How did someone back in the early nineties think that this would be a thing to get into? Unless someone was telling them to get into it.’
‘Carry on,’ says Sarah. This is still the part of the tutorial where the student gives his presentation. Her feedback comes later.
‘And then there’s Gough. I know that Mackenzie set him up with some kind of job in Moscow, because he told me so. Over a pint in Turl Street. But we now know that Rory had a meeting with Sidorov at the embassy, before he went out to Russia.
‘So, what remains to figure out? I still don’t understand the significance of Flood 19. And we have the dates of Kleshnyov’s travel – so we have to see if that matches with the travel patterns of any of the COSTELLO people. But –’ Simon is reaching the end of his presentation and has to stop himself from saying, in conclusion, like a pompous undergraduate ‘– we have confirmed the existence of a Russian intelligence network based around Sidorov and Mackenzie, called COSTELLO and including Rory Gough among its likely members.’ Simon folds his arms and looks up expectantly.
There is a long pause. Then Sarah starts speaking. Is Simon supposed to take notes? She’s got a lecture-room delivery, her eyes focused on an imaginary audience member in the middle distance.
‘Simon, let’s start with genesis. Small “g”,’ she clarifies unnecessarily. ‘About a year ago I was invited to talk to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee about Russian influence in the UK. Secret meeting. You know the background: they did a report on all the Russian interference here, the fact the government wasn’t taking it seriously. The fact that the government never even asked MI5 to investigate the Russians’ interference activities over Brexit. And they asked for my views. Well, that coincided with some discussions I’d been having in various bits of the secret state.’
Simon knows what she is going to say next. ‘This is the fact that the politicians are too dependent on Russian donors to do anything serious about their influence.’
‘Yes, Simon, that’s right. But there’s more: Gough. He’s the problem. Makes no secret of the fact he’s had lots of investments in Russia, but he’s pretty evasive about what he did when he lived there. Who he worked for, what interactions he had with the authorities, that sort of thing. And when you scratch the surface, there are some pretty troubling details: all the people he worked for in Russia had a link to the intelligence world. You know, so-called “former” KGB officers in a country where nobody gets to be former anything. Plenty of people passed through Russia at that time, looking for adventure and fortune. But most of them weren’t in business with the intelligence services.
‘At the beginning, we thought it might be containable. Gough’s just a party donor – doesn’t have any official position. But the government kept bringing him onto things! You know they actually gave him a Number Ten email address? He has this business card calling him a “senior adviser” in the Prime Minister’s Office but he’s never been vetted, doesn’t have a formal job, or a line manager, or anything. Basically, nobody knows anything about him. He seems to believe that the entire British system has to be torn apart – just to make it easier for his bloody hedge fund to keep printing money. He wants to reshape the Civil Service, privatise the BBC, sell off the NHS. And then he starts getting interested in high-security stuff. Porton Down, SAS, SBS, Cardross. Talks to the prime minister about “reshaping national security architecture so it’s leaner, more results-oriented”. And the prime minister bloody listens! That’s the bad bit. Gough was all over the strategic defence review. Has ideas that the nuclear deterrent can be run by a private consortium, for God’s sake. And nobody actually knows anything about him!’
Sarah’s lecture-room voice has risen. She was always coolly unflappable, but now Simon can feel her frustration. ‘In any normal situation,’ she continues, ‘MI5 would take a look. Full investigation, get to the bottom of things. But this isn’t normal. MI5 won’t touch it without a clear directive from the Cabinet Office. Cabinet Office says they need a specific instruction from the National Security Adviser. The National Security Adviser says, well, he says nothing, in fact. Because he’s too busy trying not to be fired. Because all it takes now is a nod from Gough. And everybody knows the PM doesn’t do difficult decisions and is short of money. And some of the people keeping the PM’s head above water happen to be strangely generous Russian oligarchs, who have invested in Gough’s funds.’ She pauses, frowns slightly, and Simon is wondering if he’s supposed to say something. But she fills the gap. ‘And then Ukraine happened. And that’s when I knew we had to do something. Gough is running credit structures that are funding the Russian war machine. It’s all behind shell companies and cut-outs, but we know what it is. So we, the people in government who care about the integrity of our national security, we decide to get to the bottom of what Gough is up to without the official structures knowing about it.’
‘So you hired me? Keep it off the government’s books?’
‘Well, yes. That’s it. Some of the people on the Committee were able to establish a discreet funding mechanism. And they lent me one of their people. That’s Kemi. And then I got Marcus to lend me O’Brien.’
‘But how did you know that I’d end up coming to you?’
Sarah clicked out of lecture-hall mode, put her head slightly to one side and fiddled with her long hair so that it was falling in front of one shoulder. Looking directly at Simon, she smiled. Nothing really needed saying.
‘But that’s all admin, really. It’s what you’ve found that matters. COSTELLO. I mean,’ she almost chuckles, ‘it’s an incredible piece of intelligence work. I don’t know what else I can say. Brilliant.’
Simon needs this validation, pushes his luck. ‘Working mostly alone, I figured out more than the Pole have managed in years. They’ll wish they never let me go. This is bigger than anything they’ve got.’
Sarah looks impatient. ‘Simon, this doesn’t have to be about you. Or the Pole. Or about who is better. The point is what do we do with this intelligence? How do we complete the job?’
And then they start talking practicalities, just like in the old days. They’re back in that brief, happy period when Sarah had worked at the Pole as an analyst and Simon was the young operations officer.
‘Who knows you’re here today?’ asks Sarah.
‘Nobody. Except for Moscow Centre,’ replies Simon with a grimace. He explains that since he had travelled back to the UK he had gone dark. But he had seen a surveillance team out in Oxford today. Clearly not Russians – except possibly Igor. ‘Probably just contractors working for some kind of COSTELLO cut-out, but I think there’s a reasonable chance they’ll eventually connect my visit to Christ Church with you. And the Pole seems to want me off the scent, too.’
