Outbreak, p.8
Outbreak, page 8
‘What I’m saying,’ he replied, ‘is that it seems a bit implausible they’d try something like this again when they keep getting rumbled. I mean, what if it turns out to be a rogue op?’ Luke looked around the table, searching for support.
It was the man with white stubble who answered him. ‘I should have introduced myself earlier, Luke. I’m Denys Kovalenko from the Russian section. And, yes, that’s a Ukrainian name. My parents both grew up in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the West. So, what do I think?’ He spread his hands wide. ‘I think there is no such thing as a rogue op in twenty-first-century Russia. Nothing, but nothing, gets done without sign-off from the top.’
‘Precisely,’ Khan concurred, ‘but I do like the way you’re thinking, Luke. Intelligence is, as we all know, nearly always an incomplete picture, a case of putting together the pieces and moving them around until they fit. That’s why we have the JIC.’
‘Right. So we do have other pieces?’ Luke tried not to make it sound like a challenge, but that was exactly what it came out as.
‘We do.’ Khan indicated the ginger-haired young man next to him in a green cardigan, wearing spectacles that Luke thought were just slightly too big for his face. ‘Damian here has something I’d like you to hear. He’s just joined us on secondment from Cheltenham and is helping process the raw CX intel coming in from all our overseas stations.’
Damian cleared his throat, looked up from a notepad in front of him and glanced nervously at Khan before launching in. ‘Right. So, yes, our station chief in Oslo has been in contact with our Norwegian partners, the NIS. They have a SIGINT ship, the Marjata – I’m not sure I’ve pronounced that right. It’s on-post just off Svalbard where the outbreak has occurred.’ SIGINT. Signals Intelligence. The big ugly rival to HUMINT, human intelligence. The Americans loved it; plenty of people on this side of the Atlantic were wary of it. Luke had already spent long enough in MI6 to know that some in the Service considered it to pose an existential threat to their jobs. Well, the reasoning went, if you could hack into someone’s phone or their encrypted comms and steal their secrets, why bother risking someone’s life by sending in an agent? There was a good reason why GCHQ’s headcount had risen a great deal faster than MI6’s had in recent years. But, no, the head honchos in Whitehall had decided there was still a need for solid, old-fashioned human spying: finding, recruiting and exploiting people on the inside with access to the secrets Britain needed. Luke reckoned he might still be in his job for a few more years. That was if he didn’t screw it up.
‘The Marjata,’ continued Damian, ‘picked up a burst transmission coming out of Barentsburg two days ago.’ He stopped there, as if waiting for Luke to catch up. Luke glanced round the room, but was met by knowing stares. Clearly everyone else in the room had already heard this. Now he had the distinct feeling he was arriving late to this party.
‘And?’ said Luke, thinking, Just get to the point, will you?
‘Well, Barentsburg is to all intents and purposes a Russian colony on Norwegian-administered territory in the Arctic,’ Damian replied defensively, checking his notes as he spoke. ‘GCHQ are still working on the transcript, but … from what’s been decrypted so far, the conclusion is …’ He paused, as if waiting for a green light to proceed.
Oh, for God’s sake, Luke thought, you’re not announcing the next winner of X Factor, just get on with it.
But it was Sid Khan who finished the sentence for him. MI6’s director of International Counter-Terrorism folded his hands, leaned forward on the table and looked Luke straight in the eye. Gone were the habitual bonhomie and the casual slang. He spoke slowly and deliberately.
‘Our assessment, Luke, with a high degree of probability, is that Moscow is behind this outbreak. We conclude that the GRU has been secretly testing a new biological weapon up on Svalbard.’
23
Near Braintree, Essex, England
Wednesday, 9 March, 1121hrs GMT
THE MEETING WAS held in an attractive converted barn. Red-tiled roof, black wooden slatted walls, a quaint covered porch. True, there was an unpleasant smell of silage outside, wafting over from the adjacent farm, but once doors were shut and the meeting was under way it was soon forgotten. Mobiles were left outside in a box, guarded by one of the trusted members, while another kept watch beside the gate at the end of the drive. This meeting was strictly by invitation only.
When everyone was assembled indoors they sat in a semi-circle on chairs whose metal legs scraped abrasively on the stone flooring. All eyes were on the man who stood facing them. He was large, heavily built, with sideburns and a receding hairline. His paunch protruded unapologetically from behind the flaps of his Barbour jacket. Below that, he wore baggy cargo pants with bulging pockets and a bunch of keys on a chain attached to his belt. A man with important responsibilities. A man of standing. A man with the right connections.
When he spoke, his voice was low and authoritative. It carried the gravitas of an Oxford don or perhaps a lawyer-turned-politician. Yet his words dripped with venom and vitriol as he reminded them of the numerous enemies they faced: the Jews, the Muslims, the freeloading migrants from Africa, the Chinese with their disgusting wet markets … The list went on. Heads were nodding vigorously as people turned to each other and smiled in agreement. There were no dissenters here.
And now his voice was rising in pitch as he reminded them of the solution at hand, of the very reason they were all there on that March morning. He raised a nicotine-stained finger in the air and held it there as everyone fell silent, waiting for his next words.
‘The wheels of the machine are turning,’ he told them enigmatically. ‘Deliveries will soon be arriving, and you’ – he stopped and jabbed a finger at no one in particular ‘– you all have a role to play in what is coming. This is your future,’ he told them. ‘This is your destiny. And nothing’ – his voice rose now in a crescendo – ‘nothing is going to get in our way!’
24
Paddington Station, London
Wednesday, 9 March, 1215hrs GMT
LUKE CARLTON DRAINED the last of his coffee and tossed the empty cup into the bin. It was time to board the train to Cheltenham. A lot had happened in the few hours since he had walked into that early-morning meeting in Vauxhall Cross. The Svalbard outbreak had now been declared a Level One priority and an entire cross-agency team had been assembled at short notice, pulling in expertise from all three UK intelligence agencies: MI6, MI5 and GCHQ. They were tasked with uncovering everything they could possibly find out about the Moscow connection. For Luke, that meant an urgent visit to the West Country, to GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, to get briefed on the SIGINT and cyber intercepts.
‘You’ll also be working with someone you know,’ Angela had told him breezily, as they filed out of the briefing room.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Jenny Li. From Snuffbox.’ Luke smiled at hearing the quaint MI6 slang for their sister agency, MI5, across the river. ‘She’s their CBRN specialist, remember? She knows more about chemical and biological weapons than anyone else in the agencies. C’s happy to let her be in the lead on this one so she’s running the show. Learn all you can from her. We need you to get up to speed on this pretty fast. Cabinet Office are demanding answers …’ She rolled her eyes slightly. ‘Like, yesterday.’
Luke remembered Jenny Li all too well from the Colombia op. They had had the shared experience of going into University College London Hospital to interview a man suffering the hideous effects of acute radiation sickness. Jenny, he recalled, could be quite condescending at times, but Luke was the first to admit she knew her subject inside out and was scarily well informed when it came to dangerous substances.
Jenny met him at the ticket barrier, wearing a white silk scarf and a fawn overcoat tied tightly at the waist. Luke could see she was scrolling through her phone messages while periodically looking up and scanning the crowd.
‘Good. You’re on time,’ she said briskly, putting the phone into her pocket. ‘Shall we go?’
As the Great Western Railway 12.25 to Cheltenham Spa slid westwards out of Paddington, Jenny folded her hands across the table between them and leaned towards him. Her dark hair was cut short, shorter than he remembered from last time, but it still framed her face, with her soft, hazel eyes, perfectly. Luke noticed a circle of paler skin on her finger where a ring might recently have been removed. He thought better of making any comment. She glanced once behind her, checking that no one else was in earshot, then looked Luke in the eye as she spoke. He had forgotten how intense she could be.
‘How much do you know, Luke, about Russia’s biological-weapons programmes, past and present?’ she asked him.
‘Not a lot.’
‘I thought so. I need you to listen carefully, because this could have a direct bearing on everything we’re going to be working on here.’
If Luke had thought he might use this journey to catch up on his mounting sleep deficit he quickly put that thought aside. For the next two hours Jenny took him on a terrifying journey, starting with how, during the Cold War, Soviet scientists had managed to weaponize smallpox, anthrax and a disease called tularaemia, eventually loading these lethal germs in powder form into the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles, all aimed at the most densely populated Western cities, including London.
‘Ever heard of a place called Vozrozhdeniya Island?’ she asked, as the damp March landscape of Berkshire flashed past the window. He shook his head. ‘It means “Rebirth Island”. It’s an island on the Aral Sea in southern Russia – or at least it was before the Aral Sea practically dried up. It was where they shipped in hundreds of monkeys from Africa, then exploded chemical and biological bombs upwind of them to study the effects.’ She stopped. ‘Luke, you’re frowning?’
‘No shit I am. That’s horrendous.’
‘Well, it gets worse. There were some human casualties too. On one of their programmes a scientist got a fatal needlestick injury. He pricked his thumb while he was working with Marburg. He took three weeks to die. Painfully. Then as recently as 2004 a researcher died in Siberia after pricking herself with Ebola.’
He could see she was looking at him quizzically, studying his face for a reaction.
‘You don’t know what Marburg is, do you?’ she said.
‘A virus? Named after a town in Germany.’
‘Spot on. Marburg is a particularly nasty haemorrhagic fever, like Ebola. Which means your organs start dissolving and you end up bleeding from every orifice. It’s sometimes been described as “human soup”.’
Luke grimaced and she noticed.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Not pretty, right?’
Luke held up his hand to stop her before she continued with her catalogue of horrors. ‘Okay, hang on,’ he said. ‘Let me get this straight. I’ve read the report from Svalbard and the guy who died up there – Yevgeny – he was bleeding from the mouth and nose. So does that mean—’
‘That he was infected with a haemorrhagic fever? No, not necessarily, it could still be other things. But you’re thinking on the right lines.’ That was the second time today someone had said that to him. Perhaps this was the intelligence community’s way of saying, ‘Noted, but I disagree with you.’
Jenny sat back in her seat and turned to the window. They had crossed into Gloucestershire now and the River Frome was running parallel to the train line. There were flooded fields on both sides and half-submerged fence posts. Clouds scudded across the sky, threatening more rain.
She turned back. ‘Look,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘We won’t know exactly what we’re dealing with until all the lab results come in, but I did make a call to Porton Down yesterday. They’ve got live samples down there, from the patient brought in from Svalbard.’
‘You mean Dr Mackenzie?’
‘Yes. She’s a medical doctor attached to the Arctic Research Station up there. She must have known the risks, so for this virus to have infected her …’ Jenny left her sentence unfinished. Instead, she sighed and looked out of the window again. ‘Whatever this pathogen turns out to be, it’s Dr Mackenzie who holds the clue to the answers. That’s if – if – they can keep her alive for long enough.’
25
GCHQ, Cheltenham
Wednesday, 9 March, 1517hrs GMT
LANYARDS. ALWAYS THE coloured lanyards, thought Luke, with those hard plastic ID tags that indicated you were entering a government building with classified intelligence on the inside. A small reception committee was waiting for him and Jenny as they entered the outer ring of the Doughnut, the name given to the vast, circular, futuristic headquarters of GCHQ, the secret intelligence listening station on the outskirts of Cheltenham. A weak spring sun was doing its best to break through as they strode past the serried ranks of neatly parked cars, CCTV cameras on poles and razor-tipped perimeter wire. This place was huge: the biggest, the most expensive employer in the galaxy of Britain’s secret intelligence universe. In pictures taken from the air it looked as if a giant spacecraft had landed on the edge of Cheltenham; from ground level its green, sandstone and steel-grey walls soared into the pale sky of Gloucestershire, like some impregnable digital fortress.
A thin man in a navy-blue pullover and jeans stepped forward in the entrance lobby and introduced himself with the briefest of smiles. ‘Welcome, both! I’m Ian. I’m the senior operations officer on all this,’ he said, sweeping an arm towards the steel panels that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. ‘Let’s take you straight to the EMC to get you briefed. The Norwegians have only just got here too.’
‘The EMC?’ asked Luke. He was well used to a world of acronyms in the military, but in the three years he’d been with MI6 he’d discovered he’d only just turned the first few pages of a whole new lexicon.
‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ said Pullover. ‘It’s the Event Management Centre. Our ops room, if you like.’
Luke turned to Jenny as they walked and said quietly, ‘You didn’t know what EMC stood for either, did you?’
She looked straight ahead, pursing her lips. She didn’t reply.
They crossed a short, wind-blown patch of open ground to the main building and entered the busy circular concourse. Luke had been there before, as a serving captain in his SBS days, but it never failed to strike him how impossibly young everyone looked. As they strode along, there was hardly a suit to be seen – in fact, nearly half the people he was looking at were wearing trainers. That’s applied mathematicians, linguists and codebreakers for you, he supposed.
‘Can we offer you both a coffee? A chai latte, perhaps, or a green tea?’ suggested Pullover, steering them towards a Costa Coffee kiosk.
A Costa? At the heart of GCHQ? Over there he could see a Greggs and, beyond that, a Starbucks. To Luke, this place felt more like a Californian campus.
‘Luke Carlton! As I live and breathe!’ an Ulsterman’s voice boomed from somewhere behind them, and he turned to see a broad-shouldered man with a scraggly beard. Luke had no recollection of ever seeing him before.
‘Conor Beattie,’ he introduced himself. ‘We haven’t met, but, hey, nice work on that rescue op in Iran!’ He looked Luke up and down as if committing his image to memory. ‘I was one of those trying to keep track of your movements from here. Have to say, you’re a hard man to keep up with. Anyways, must dash. Things are hotting up a bit across the water in the Province.’ Luke nodded politely, somewhat embarrassed by this effusive encounter. He wondered how many more unseen people in this building had been quietly tracking his movements every time he went live on an op.
‘One of your many fans?’ remarked Jenny, with a raised eyebrow, when the Ulsterman had moved out of earshot. It was Luke’s turn not to answer.
They rode up in the lift, then went along a narrow walkway, carpeted in red and grey, past rows of men and women working away at their screens. It could have been a call centre, a media newsroom or, at a pinch, a City trading room. Except that these analysts were working on largely classified intelligence, tracking anything from North Korean military hacking centres to proxy servers used by ISIS jihadists, from Chinese cyber hackers to internet troll farms in St Petersburg to American child-porn pedlars hiding in the recesses of the dark web.
A large sign welcomed them to the Events Management Centre. ‘GCHQ Never Stops’, it read. How original, thought Luke. He wondered if some management consultancy firm had pocketed a small fortune to come up with that one. They met up with the Norwegian team as they clustered around a bank of screens, talking in low voices. As the introductions were made, Luke hoped none of them would make the connection between him and their dead colleague, Kristian Berge; he decided he wouldn’t mention the subject unless they did.
Above the Norwegians was a large digital display screen, which, as far as Luke could see, was just a stream of code. Clearly, he had entered a different world here in Cheltenham.
‘Yes, we’re a twenty-four/seven operation here,’ announced Pullover, when they were all gathered in one place. ‘We normally operate on a shift system around the clock, but this week is – how can I say it? – somewhat out of the ordinary. A decision was taken at our daily leadership meeting yesterday morning to declare Svalbard “an event”. That triggers a certain response, so you’ll see a lot of extra bodies in here today.’ He swept his arm around the darkened operations room where every chair was occupied.
‘So … Svalbard …’ He rubbed his hands together, as if somehow relishing the challenge presented by the horrors that had taken place in the Arctic. ‘Well, I can tell you, it didn’t come out of the blue. Along with our Norwegian friends …’ he nodded to the group of smartly dressed visitors ‘… we’ve been aware of covert Russian activity there for some time. But this event is of a wholly different magnitude. Today we’ve been asking ourselves: who has the capability to do this? Who was in that vicinity at almost exactly this time two days ago? Well, thanks to some fast work by our friends in Oslo we already knew the name of the victim who died in the hut – Yevgeny Vasiliev. And thanks to Mr Carlton here, we now know his parent organization in Moscow.’
