Outbreak, p.28
Outbreak, page 28
She took out a cardkey from a pocket in her boiler suit, held it against the reader and keyed in a code. ‘I should warn you, Luke,’ she said, as the lock released with a soft click, ‘that most of the Service doesn’t even know this place exists so you won’t be able to talk about it upstairs. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal.’
The room they walked into looked nothing like an office space. Instead, Luke found himself inside what seemed to be some sort of garage, and a filthy, unkempt one at that. Blackened, oily car parts lay against the wall and on shelves that seemed in serious danger of collapsing. A peeling poster of a Mazda MX5 car was pinned to the wall above a moth-eaten beige armchair, and the whole place was lit by a flickering neon striplight on the ceiling. An old fridge stood in the corner with a crate of Corona beer balanced on top. The only other furniture was a worn-out workbench and a chair on casters. Three people, whom he had never seen before, stood in front of it. The woman in the middle of the group nodded to acknowledge Angela, then stepped forward to greet Luke.
‘Welcome to the Stage,’ she said. ‘I’m Dextra and I’ll be supervising your transformation.’ She looked to be in her early thirties, with designer glasses, jeans, T-shirt, clipboard and, he couldn’t help noticing, immaculate white teeth. She took off her glasses and took a pace closer to him. ‘From now on,’ she said softly, as if this were a secret to be shared with no one else in the room, ‘you’re no longer Luke Carlton. You’re Steve Keane. I want you to become him, to think like him, scratch, fart, pick your nose like him. In short, I want you to crawl inside his character and be him. Think you can do that?’
No one had spoken to Luke quite like that since basic training, but he didn’t mind one bit. ‘Got it,’ he replied. He could feel his pulse quickening. This was going to be intense, he could tell, and that suited him just fine.
‘So,’ she said, rubbing her hands together in anticipation, ‘you’re ours for the next three days while we prep you for this mission. Technically, as this is UK soil you’re going to be operating on, it now becomes an MI5 lead. But this place …’ she swept her arm around the mocked-up garage they stood in ‘… the Stage, is unique to the Service. There’s nothing like it in either Thames House or Cheltenham.’
She walked over to the workbench, turned around and jumped up so she was sitting on it, facing him. Other people in the room seemed to be busy making adjustments to the props in the room. ‘This is where we’ve conducted some of our most sensitive video calls with individuals in organizations that we need to penetrate overseas.’ She turned back to Angela. ‘I think this is the first time this year this place has been used for a domestic target, though, isn’t it, Angela?’
‘That’s correct,’ Angela replied, standing close by with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her boiler suit.
‘So,’ continued Dextra, ‘once you leave here you’ll be run out of the IOC across the river, which means—’
‘Wait, what? The IOC? The International Olympic Committee?’ Luke frowned at her. This made no sense to him.
She smiled as she replied. ‘No, not in this context. The IOC is the Intel Ops Centre inside Thames House. It’s where MI5 run the final stages of all their live ops from.’
She stepped back a pace and gave him an appraising look. ‘Right, let’s get you started. Hope you’re well rested because we’ve got an awful lot to get through in a very short time.’
90
Vauxhall Cross
Friday, 18 March, 1811hrs GMT
FOR SIX HOURS straight they were at it, down there in the surreal, hermetically sealed world of the Stage, deep beneath the MI6 headquarters building, getting him ready for the role he was to play. Luke felt like a weapon being prepped for battle, and he loved every minute of it. It wasn’t just that all this was taking his mind off the slow-motion car crash of his personal life; this was ‘training’ like he’d never experienced before. He was the receptacle and they were pouring the knowledge into him. Techies from GCHQ in Cheltenham, voice and drama coaches, experts on Europe’s extremist groups brought over from across the river in Thames House, a recently retired member of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and – from behind a screen – an operational German informant inside an active neo-Nazi group from Dresden.
Time was desperately, worryingly short, but by the end of this weekend Luke needed not just to know everything about his adopted character, Steve Keane, he needed to be Steve Keane, the Jew-hating, BAME-despising, racial supremacist, with a history of punching people whose colour he viscerally disliked. The temporary tattoo of a swastika on the side of his neck was convincing – ‘It won’t wash off in the shower for a good two weeks,’ they told him. And his back story was all there for anyone to see if they cared to trawl through his social-media profile, carefully crafted by the people from upstairs who did this stuff for a living. There were the eulogizing tributes to Anders Breivik in his Norwegian island prison, then the Berlin gunman, the Christchurch mosque attacker, Gary Sloane from Kansas, and so it went on, the trail of verifiable online digital vitriol.
Life had not treated ‘Steve Keane’ well since he had been supposedly ‘dishonourably discharged’ from the Regiment. He had, apparently, drifted from one badly paid security job to another, eventually ending up as an unsuccessful mechanic here in this ‘garage’ at Cowley, on the edge of Oxford. But the man being presented as Steve Keane had something that could be very valuable to the movement. After all those years in the SRR he was a consummate expert at covert surveillance, counter-surveillance, detection and evasion. In fact, it was said, there was not a system in operation throughout the UK that, given the right opportunity, Steve Keane did not know how to evade or disable. And that, right now, made him a very marketable commodity to certain individuals.
It also meant that if Luke was to stand any chance at all of convincing the fanatics in this movement, this cult of extremists, of his usefulness to them, he needed to know his stuff. In the Corps he had done a stint in Brigade Reconnaissance, he had mastered the art of the CTR, the close-target recce, and while at Poole with the SBS he had even done a beginners’ course in covert breaking-and-entering. Plus various types of surveillance in Belfast and the Province that he would never be able to talk about. But nothing had prepared him for what he needed now. This was a whole different game. A very large part of Luke’s day was spent ensconced with the lock-breakers, the counter-surveillance experts and even one retired burglar, all willingly supplied by MI5.
91
Battersea, London
Friday, 18 March, 1901hrs GMT
‘I AM A heartless bitch.’ There. She wrote the words out for herself on a piece of paper and stared at them for several seconds before crumpling it up and tossing it towards the bin. It missed. Elise got up from the table and arched her back, then instinctively stroked her belly. Nothing showing there yet, but it would soon.
This was awful. Six times she had tried phoning Luke and each time his phone had gone straight to voicemail. She knew he was probably still at work, but that didn’t stop her worrying. What if he had taken it so badly that he went and ‘did something stupid’? That misleadingly harmless-sounding euphemism for taking your own life. No, she couldn’t see Luke doing that, but, still, his silence worried her. They needed to talk: there was the flat to discuss, their joint bank account, all their shared possessions that would need divvying up. Oh, God, she couldn’t bear this. None of it was what she wanted. It was just that it had all gone wrong after her mother died. Luke never made it to her funeral, he was still away in Iran, and that had really hurt, especially now he’d told her what he’d been getting up to over there. Hugo Squires, on the other hand, had been at her side, a shoulder to cry on. Dependable. Reliable. A rock of support. From that moment on, she supposed, things had just taken their natural course.
On which note, where was Hugo? She had tried calling him the moment Luke left that morning, leaving her forlorn in the emptiness of their doomed flat. She had rung him twice then remembered him saying he was going to be busy for the next few days. Doing what? He hadn’t said. Damn, this was all such a mess and she hadn’t even told Hugo about the baby. That was a conversation they needed to have very soon. She tried his phone again now. Another voicemail, but different this time. Hugo had erased his own message and left an automated one, a female one with a robotic twang. Odd. Elise shook her head as if to clear it of all the negative thoughts crowding in. She went to the sink, put the kettle on and texted her friend Susie: Need some company and a heart-to-heart. Battersea Square? When suits? Looks like I’m going to be free all weekend.
92
Vauxhall Cross
Sunday, 20 March, 1555hrs GMT
BY MID-AFTERNOON ON the third day they were ready, deep beneath Vauxhall Cross in the Stage. Ready for ‘the insertion’. To Luke, this was starting to feel like he imagined a full-blown Hollywood production would be. There were just so many moving parts to this piece. While teams of people worked on his Steve Keane alias, putting in the finishing touches, the first approach to WaffenKrieg90 had been made online by the team from GCHQ, using the contact details Luke had brought back with him from Moscow.
He had slept surprisingly well both nights, kipping down in the windowless, one-bed overnight room with its grey airline-style washbag and towel laid out on the bed, ready for use at short notice. The place was so small as to be almost monastic, and the shower room was miles away down a corridor, but none of this bothered Luke. Angela had asked him for the keys to his flat, then sent someone round to collect a change of clothes. Elise had not been there when they’d called.
Luke was glad the mission was finally getting into gear. It was the distraction he needed. It meant he had successfully managed to avoid thinking about Elise for almost the entire weekend. But not quite. At one point, just past 3 a.m. on the Sunday morning, he woke up in an agony of self-recrimination as his thoughts crowded in on him. Why hadn’t he made more of an effort to get back from Iran for her mother’s funeral? Because it was obvious to him now: that glaring omission, even more than his unforgivable transgression over there, had been the single most destructive element in the slow-motion breakdown of their relationship. It was not just that he, Luke, had let her down in her hour of need. His absence at that crucial juncture had provided Hugo Squires with exactly the entrée he so craved. And Luke had no one to blame but himself.
He had lain awake for an hour, processing what had happened, what had gone wrong. On top of that, there was Jenny Li to worry about. True, he had been given no choice but to return home without her, but it still felt wrong, very wrong. And then, just after 4 a.m., he’d got a grip and reminded himself of the need to focus on the mission, the op. This was no time to be jogging backwards over all the things in his private life that could have been.
In the morning, just after breakfast, he had got straight back into character, transforming himself into the imaginary Steve Keane. Wardrobe arrived first, dressing him in black jeans with turn-ups above laced boots, thick belt with a large buckle, and a grease-stained T-shirt tight enough to show off his muscles.
‘Any update on Jenny?’ he’d asked Angela, as he sat in a chair that morning, feeling somewhat self-conscious as he was fussed over by the plastics people. They were giving his face a different look, just in case anyone on the other end of the video call should identify the real Luke Carlton from his recent trip to Lithuania.
Angela was still in the boiler suit, but she’d pulled on a sweatshirt with a big NYU logo over the top.
‘Yes! I meant to tell you,’ she replied brightly. ‘She’s out of hospital and on her way home. They’ve run some tests and whatever it was she went down with it was not Agent X, thankfully. They reckon she’ll make a full recovery.’
‘Thank God for that. So do we think this was just Petrov yanking our chain?’ Things had moved so fast since Moscow that Luke had yet to file his operational report. There were details about his trip that the Service had still to hear about.
‘It looks that way, yes,’ Angela said, her head tilted slightly to one side. ‘But we’re letting it go. Now is not the time for a bust-up with the Russians, not when they’ve helped us get inside this group. And you, Luke, have got much bigger things to worry about right now, so we all need to park it.’
At midday the Chief himself had come down to observe their progress. He had arrived just as the techies from GCHQ were going back over the format, the phrases, the jargon, everything Luke would need, to avoid arousing suspicion that this was what it really was: a sting. Fitted to the base of his throat, concealed by his T-shirt, was a small device: a VC, a voice corruptor. His voice would not sound radically different, but if anyone was checking and they chose to compare it to a recording of his real voice they would find that the sound waves simply did not match.
At 4.14 p.m. they were all set to go live with the Viber call, that being WaffenKrieg90’s preferred means of communication, according to Petrov’s prisoner. Luke sat hunched over the workbench, wearing a T-shirt that listed provincial British venues from some long-forgotten tour by a rock band almost no one would remember. His hands were blackened with engine grease, and just visible on his left bicep was a tattoo of a skull. Where his missing finger had been, the plastics team had attached a lifelike replica; his hand now looked like anyone else’s. Just in case. The earpiece was so tiny you would have had to be right up next to him to detect it.
On the workbench in front of him lay the key to success or failure of this whole enterprise: his mobile phone. Except it was not really his mobile phone, it was a highly specialized piece of digital engineering, devised with input from all three intelligence agencies. If anyone cared to trace his location – and they had to assume that would happen – then it would reveal it as a private residence next to a Big Yellow Self Storage facility in Cowley, on the south-east edge of Oxford. The phone was loaded with all the apps you would expect – WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter – but additional functions had been built in. Like the ‘panic button’ that simulated the noise of a doorbell in the background if Luke needed to abort a difficult conversation or avoid an awkward question. Meanwhile the techies from GCHQ would be trying to zero in with their scanners on the location of the people at the other end.
‘Well, I think we’re ready.’ Dextra was standing in front of him; her clipboard was gone, but now she was wearing a headset and mike. He thought she looked tense, which was hardly surprising. He was feeling pretty wound up himself. She glanced at her watch. ‘They’re expecting you to call any minute now. Operations,’ she spoke into her mike, ‘are we good to go?’
She listened, looking at Luke, and nodded. ‘They’re all set. That just leaves you, “Steve”. Any last-minute questions before I disappear behind that screen over there? Anything you’re unhappy with?’
Luke felt his head was fit to burst with everything that had been crammed into it over the last three days. He knew there were 101 things that could go wrong, that just one misplaced word could torpedo the whole operation. But he couldn’t afford to think like that. He could do this. He was ready.
‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘Let’s do it.’
93
Vauxhall Cross
Sunday, 20 March, 1624hrs GMT
LUKE WAS ALONE in the room. The only sound came from the artificially generated traffic noises from ‘outside’ – noises that emanated from the 3D surround-sound speakers embedded in the walls of the Stage. Yet he was very far from alone. He knew he was being observed by a dozen cameras and a dozen people, with every word, every syllable, every keystroke monitored and recorded.
A male voice spoke gently into his earpiece. The operational director. As calm and as measured as a Radio 4 announcer. ‘All right, Steve. I want you to take your phone and open the contacts screen. You should see a list of contacts there. Now scroll down to the one that says Methuen.’
This was hardly rocket science, and they had rehearsed it only that morning, but, still, they were taking no chances.
‘You’ve found it?’ the voice continued in his ear. ‘Just nod if you have … Okay, good. Now select that and tap the link that says free video call.’
A half-second pause, then a face swam into focus on his screen. He had not expected it to be a woman at the other end, especially not someone like this. Bespectacled, articulate and well-spoken, she introduced herself as Niamh. To Luke, she looked like a sales director for a multinational corporation, and for a moment he wondered if the boffins had blundered and given him the wrong number. But she didn’t hesitate: she got straight down to business.
‘Don’t get any ideas just yet,’ she said, in a crisp, businesslike tone. Not aggressive, just icy and to the point. ‘We need to know a lot more about you.’ Luke couldn’t remember the last time he’d found himself in an interview situation like this, but he was primed for it.
‘You got my 23andMe genetic test results I sent you, yes?’ he replied.
‘We did. Nobody’s perfect, Steve.’ Was this a joke? It was hard to tell, but no, she wasn’t smiling. ‘So your origins are four per cent Turkish,’ she continued. ‘How do you feel about that?’
Time for drama school. Luke adopted an expression of concentrated disgust. ‘Sick as a parrot, to be honest. I hadn’t expected that.’
Infinitesimally, he saw her expression soften. ‘It’s okay, Steve. Like I said, nobody’s perfect. You’re ninety per cent plus Aryan and not a trace of Yid in you, so that’s a start. And Moscow have vouched for you.’ Then, just like that, the icy stare was back. ‘But right now we don’t give a shit about any of that. We’re having this conversation because there are things in your head that we need to know.’
