A spy alone, p.7
A Spy Alone, page 7
Rory looks momentarily uncomfortable, then grins. ‘Mac has fixed me up.’ He is talking about the career-enhancing opportunity that Mackenzie has arranged for him. But Simon isn’t really listening: his mind has slipped back to the hideous memory of Mackenzie’s flaccid penis flopping out of his dressing gown.
Why me? he thinks with shame and resentment. Then he steadies himself, hoping that Rory hasn’t noticed anything.
‘Anyway, have a good break.’
They part, promising to be in touch in October. In fact, they do not see one another again for nearly thirty years.
Chapter 8
London
April 2022
Simon is poring over Evie’s latest report. She has been digging into Mackenzie and the mysterious Flood 19 Limited, recipient of millions of pounds from Russian intelligence. It all makes sense, thinks Simon.
Except it doesn’t.
Nothing appears to link Peter Mackenzie to Flood 19 Limited. It is an entirely opaque shell company, registered in Malta. Its sole director is a trust registered in the Isle of Man called Costello. Simon pulls some strings to find out who owned this Costello Trust. The answer: Flood 19 Limited in Malta. It is an infinite ownership loop. An irrational incorporation.
Simon takes a look at the receiving bank for the payments to Flood 19. It, too, is a black box. A tiny Lichtenstein bank with a single branch known for utmost secrecy. Not even the Wizard has anything on it: it is rumoured that they do everything on paper, which is then fed into a furnace. Unhackable.
Simon decides to try the Isle of Man. On the flight over, he is unnerved when the small turboprop plane appears to be attempting to ditch into a grey, choppy Irish Sea. Seemingly at the last moment, it banks hard to starboard and makes a bumpy landing at Ronaldsway airport. The passengers bend their bodies into the offshore wind as they trudge across the apron to the terminal. Simon jumps into a taxi and visits the corporate service provider that administers Costello from a small office in a backstreet of Douglas. It is a shabby outfit that knows next to nothing about either Flood 19 or Costello except for the address of the lawyers that instruct them and pay the fees on time. These are a similarly second-rate firm with offices on the Loch Promenade, Douglas’s windswept corniche.
Simon speaks to an old boy who has done the business-lunch circuit in Douglas for thirty years and knows everyone. He explains that Cain, Quilliam and Kerruish are the sort of lawyers that are glad for any instruction, take payment in cash from mysterious foreigners, and generally are popular with people who have things to bury. He heads back to the airport realising he is getting nowhere.
Simon had started to wonder if there is a clue in the name. Flood 19. There is only one flood worth wondering about. Simon, not a religious man, decides to find his Bible. It had been given to him by his mother who optimistically hoped that he might find meaning in it. This hadn’t worked especially well, as she died the following day in a car accident, indelibly linking the Bible in his mind with loss and tragedy. Simon sits down one evening at his home in Kilburn, after a surprisingly pleasant bottle of Crozes-Hermitage, and starts working through the book. With unpractised fingers he leafs through Genesis, looking for Noah’s Ark. And then he sees it. Genesis, chapter seven, verse nineteen: ‘And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.’
Living on his own, Simon sometimes finds that the bottle of wine, unshared, is a barrier to effective work. But on this occasion it has given him the insight he needs. He is sure that he is onto something. The nineteenth verse of the chapter is the key, the moment when the whole world is submerged in the Great Flood. That has to be the meaning of the company’s name. Whoever had chosen that name was thinking of a world submerged, swept away. This is Mackenzie’s worldview: the impatience with the standard order, with the normal run of things. A belief in the power of great men to shape events, to bring about incredible change in a short period of time through great destruction. It is Leninism.
It is obvious: Sidorov was paying Mackenzie, through an untraceable shell company he had set up. And he paid him millions. He didn’t yet know why, but he knew what.
Excitedly, he calls Evie. ‘I think I’ve figured it out! Genesis seven, verse nineteen: “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered”. I mean, I wouldn’t have known it until a few minutes ago. Unless you’re a proper God-squadder it’s just some obscure verse. But think about it: Flood 19. The waters of the biblical flood, covering everything. Obliterating everything.’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you see, Evie?’
‘See what?’
‘Well, if it was Mackenzie’s company, this was the point behind the name. It’s like his personal manifesto.’
‘Simon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’
* * *
The following morning at eight, Evie calls Simon. Through his thick, red-wine hangover, he can hear a sort of brightness in her voice. Schadenfreude.
‘Oh. Hi, Evie. How are you?’
‘I’m great, Si. Have you opened your curtains? It’s a beautiful day.’ Of course she knows that he wouldn’t have done any such thing.
Instead, he grunts.
‘Do you want to talk about Noah’s Ark? You know, the animals went in two-by-two. And there’s a mysterious company called Flood 19 which proves… what? It proves that Mackenzie is in the pay of Russia? I mean, you knew him, not me, but last time I checked he was an out-and-out Tory, anti-communist to his fingertips and also we have no evidence beyond a largely explicable single payment from Sidorov. We know nothing at all about Flood 19 and your little bit of Bible scholarship has not changed that.’
Simon sighs. She is right. With a bottle of wine inside him, Flood 19 had made perfect sense. With a thick head and a desire for sweet tea, it is a crackpot idea. Devoid of any logic. Devoid of anything, really. Simon has hit a dead end. With the greatest reluctance, he realises he will have to contact the Pole.
* * *
The problem with being a former British intelligence officer was that you really are former. The gates at the Pole clanged shut as he left, and almost nothing seeped out afterwards. The only circumstances in which ‘formers’ like Simon got anything from the Pole was if they brought something to the table. Sometimes, Simon’s relationship with the Wizard gave him morsels to trade: paedo networks busted, drugs smugglers hacked, extremists unmasked. The Wizard let him do this purely on the basis that it was work he had completed, with no government input or oversight. In return, Simon would try to cajole whichever increasingly junior officer they sent into giving him something useful from the inside. It didn’t often deliver much of value, but it was all he had.
The meeting arrangements were baroque; the meeting was puritan. Occasionally Simon wondered whether they put all their formers through this extraordinary rigmarole. Or was it just him who was expected to ring a certain number – which wasn’t answered – from a public call box; walk to St James’s Park where a chalk mark on a tree observed exactly thirty minutes after the unanswered call signified a meeting going ahead; then use a complex numerical code relating to the date and month to determine which bench in the park he should sit on? For Simon, ever sensitive to any question regarding the quality of his tradecraft, there was a lingering fear that the complex dance around St James’s Park was put on for the amusement of a bunch of Pole officers. His paranoid mind imagined that they would wander out of their office across Trafalgar Square and into the park just for the fun of watching Simon try to calculate a complex formula for benches.
If they are doing this, they blended in well. Simon knows that he is a good spotter and he has seen no surveillance on this particular trip. There are possibles: the mother pushing a pram that doesn’t obviously contain a baby; the older guy sitting on a bench, apparently fascinated by his copy of Metro – in real life, nobody is fascinated by Metro, a thin newspaper given out for free to commuters. Simon finds his way to the requisite spot and waits for a young man of military bearing and public school vowels – they always were – to sit down next to him. He feels a wave of frustration as a middle-aged, rotund Asian woman sits down. There is a protocol for this, but it is just more complication: you had to move to a new bench for a fall-back exactly ten minutes later. He is just about to get up to leave when she says, loud enough to be completely audible to him, but definitely not to anyone else, ‘Hello STOKESAY.’ This is his personal codeword. His meeting is underway.
‘Sorry. I didn’t expect…’
‘No. They don’t, usually,’ she replies, matter-of-factly. She shifts on the bench, as if to make herself comfortable. ‘So, what can we do for you?’
‘Well, I was thinking you might find this article interesting,’ says Simon, handing over a copy of the Economist. Simon had taped a USB stick containing the latest Wizardry to one of the inside pages.
‘I’m sure we will,’ she replies. That was the easy bit. Getting blood out of the stone was the challenge. In general, what Simon found worked best was to suggest that he knew much more than he actually did. This would sometimes trick them into letting on more than they meant to.
‘So I have been doing some research on FLIGHTING. Check the codeword. Back in the nineties he was an SVR officer here in London. We took a look at him then, but he seemed pretty inactive. More recently I think I’ve found evidence of payments made from him to a senior academic at Oxford.’ Simon decides to freelance, knowing that he needs to get someone inside the Pole to take notice. ‘I think this academic may have been a recruited agent, paid through a Malta company called Flood 19. His name was Peter Mackenzie.’
There was no reason to expect the duty officer sent out to meet Simon on a bench to have any knowledge of either Sidorov or Mackenzie. But Simon has dangled enough that someone would get back to him.
‘Right. I’ll feed that back. We’ll let you know.’ She – and of course he didn’t know her name, even a workname – speaks in an unhurried monotone. The possibility that the SVR had a recruited agent would be enough to generate a response.
* * *
Talking of FLIGHTING on a St James’s Park bench had made Simon wonder about those surveillance runs by Titch he had organised on Sidorov nearly thirty years earlier. Sidorov’s regular attendance at the Oxford Diplomatic Forum could have had nothing to do with Mackenzie. The Forum’s defenders would have called it leftist, idealistic, possibly other-worldly. Mackenzie would have agreed with all of that and added with special scorn, ‘woolly minded, bloody crypto-Marxist bedwetters’. From their investigations of him at the time, Sidorov didn’t do anything else when he visited Oxford. Even if he had sat down on a bench with someone for a few seconds, or cleared a dead-letter box, they would have clocked it. And he hadn’t.
Simon decides he has to go back to Oxford. He isn’t sure what the point is, but he feels that he has to walk the ground, to get a feel for Sidorov’s route.
It is a spring day, out of term time, and Oxford’s student tribe has been replaced with tourists. Open-top buses are thronging the streets and the pavements are littered with brightly coloured electric scooters, part of a new scheme involving a clever app that allowed you, judging from what Simon can see, to steal the scooter and throw it into the canal.
Simon walks out of the station with the proprietorial air of an Oxford graduate returning to ‘his’ city. Of course, some of the landmarks have changed: the Said Business School, monument to Britain’s love of supplying Arab despots with deadly weapons, has sprung up next to the station. The shabby Westgate is now a gleaming ‘retail destination’. But the street plan of Oxford has not changed since Alfred the Great’s times, allowing Simon to walk on autopilot. To reach Wadham College from the station is basically a straight line, and he strides purposefully towards Beaumont Street. He has almost got to Worcester College when he remembers that the whole point of the visit is to retrace Sidorov’s steps. As Titch had laboriously reported, Sidorov had gone the other way, past the green mound of Oxford Castle towards Carfax.
Simon walks back to the station and restarts, repeating Sidorov’s route. The first thing that strikes him is that it is the less direct route. The second thing, odd for someone that was supposedly a lover of Oxford, is that it would have taken Sidorov through some of Oxford’s least charming streets. Why does someone voluntarily miss the elegance of Beaumont Street, the sweep of St Giles, the pathos of the Martyrs’ Memorial, for the back-end of the rundown Westgate shopping centre? Perhaps, muses Simon as he reaches Carfax, it is for the compensation of looking down the High Street, gently curving past Queen’s College towards Magdalen? The finest street in Europe, someone had said.
Once again, Simon’s autopilot has kicked in, and he strides enthusiastically towards Radcliffe Square, one of his favourite places in all the world. It is only as he reaches the corner of Turl Street that he realises two things: the first is that it was strange of Sidorov to take Turl Street as opposed to Radcliffe Square. The former a narrow, unremarkable cut-through, the latter a perfect assemblage of incredible buildings: the spire of the University Church, the elegant rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera, the looming bulk of the Old Bodleian. The second thing that Simon realises is his own natural aversion to Turl Street. It contains three little colleges and a few touristy shops. And then, almost opposite, is Jesus College, where Mackenzie had been based. As he retraces Sidorov’s steps, he finds that he has stopped involuntarily outside the corner of the college building, staring up at what had been the window of Mackenzie’s rooms.
Up until this point the Mackenzie who had featured in the Sidorov investigation was subtly different to the Mackenzie that Simon had known. It was as if he had yet to associate the intellectual puzzle with the visceral personal experience. But now they are one and the same. For all the painful memories, he finds he is thinking of something else: the highpoint of his career as a professional intelligence officer. Simon is oblivious to the people scurrying across that busy corner of Turl Street; in his mind, he is back in Vienna, twenty years earlier.
Chapter 9
Vienna
2002
A serving GRU officer reporting faithfully as an agent of British intelligence is a rare and precious thing. Vasya Morozov, codenamed WADDINGTON, was just that thing. The story of his recruitment had become a legend told by tipsy veterans from the Pole, a case study of brilliant intelligence work. As such, it had many of the common features of success: luck; an agent that was ready to be recruited; a ready-made system for running the case. Nevertheless, it remained Simon’s best effort, his tour de force, the first line of his service obituary and the point from which everything else would continue to be a bit of a let-down.
It is the early noughties, between the end of the Cold War and the start of the next one, and Vasya, a Ninth Directorate science and technology officer, is operating under cover from the UN nuclear inspectorate in Vienna, Europe’s espionage hub. His day job sees him pretend to administrate a team of inspectors as they are sent off to places like Iraq and Libya to inspect atomic research programmes for any sign of forbidden activity. This undemanding task gives him plenty of time to talent spot among the scientists, engineers and technical specialists that operate in and out of the endless alphabet soup of United Nations agencies to be found in Vienna. The Cold War might have ended, but the spy game continues.
Vasya is a natural. He attributes this to his Armenian mother, who gave him a mercurial charm that contrasted with his dour Muscovite father, a military man, if not quite GRU material. Vasya networks brilliantly across the delegations, embassies and missions, scooping up the disaffected and the indebted. He turns some of these into willing sources, happy to trade their access to classified material for payments into some of Austria’s most discreet private banks. Others prove tougher, requiring a little blackmail to get them over the line: an unpleasant business for everyone, but giving Vasya an important element of control over his sources.
* * *
Alan Ferguson is an engineer specialising in the wonderfully obscure field of hydro-acoustics – underwater sounds. He is British but has little affection for the country of his birth, having been made redundant from his job in the Marine Accident Investigations Branch when the government thought it would be a good idea to privatise the agency. Luckily for him, he is able to get a job in Vienna where his unusual expertise is turned to using a network of undersea sensors to monitor illegal nuclear weapons tests. If North Korea or Pakistan decided to launch a missile, Alan is one of the first people in the world to know about it. Perhaps more importantly, when Russia was testing its stealth missile technologies, it was vitally important that people like Alan did not know about it.
When Alan had taken up his post, he thought that his wife and children might all move with him. But the post-Habsburg charms of Vienna are lost on Doreen and the teenagers. They don’t speak German, and Sadie has a boyfriend at her sixth-form college in Southampton. They agree that Alan will try to come home on weekends and they will join him in Vienna during school holidays. It works at first, but then Alan, a keen runner, becomes active in a friendly Hash House Harriers group. He soon finds that the appeal of the Wienerwald trails are rather greater than the suburban dreariness of jogging round Shirley Pond. He also soon finds that the young Katya, a waif-like Moldovan who works as a secretary in the UN’s pensions office, is rather more accommodating of his middle-aged fantasies than Doreen ever has been. She laughs at his jokes, takes a remarkable interest in hydro-acoustics and does amazing things to him in the bedroom of his sad little bachelor apartment.
