Enigma girl, p.5
Enigma Girl, page 5
That’s some kind of acknowledgement but she understands she’s being softened up and they’re going to let her go. Gently maybe, and with a pay-off, but it’ll be a defeat all the same. Should she tell them about those twenty months as Sally Latimer, embedded in Guest’s empire? The routine and the isolation of it; being in a state of extreme alertness for months on end; the awfulness of Guest’s sadistic and suspicious personality; the insufferable people in his inner circle; the absolutely brainless snob of a wife who called her to buy sanitary products, chase down high-end bedding and complain when she was denied a sponsored sun lounger in Antibes. And this is not to forget the adjustments to her own wardrobe and hairstyle to conjure posh wholesomeness with the hint of a filthy mind. ‘You’re an English rose but you know where the monkey sleeps,’ Tom told her when they walked to the White Horse in Berkshire, on the day before she stepped into the world of Sally Latimer. ‘I have no idea what that means and I’m sure I don’t want to,’ she told him, and Tom had said, ‘You don’t.’
Maybe she should remind them that Guest was the last man standing after Ukraine. Oligarchs lost businesses, yachts, homes, football clubs, jets, and were forced into ruinous fire sales and found all lines of credit suspended. But Guest, the Harrow old boy, avoided all of it, although he was as corrupt as any of them. There was no one smarter or blessed with a more highly tuned survival instinct than Hagfish, plus he’d sprayed money at politicians in ways calculated to confuse if not totally mislead the electoral authorities. The establishment was incapable of thinking of him as anything but a good chap and upstanding patriot.
Halfknight peels the ham from his discarded sandwich and drops it into Loup’s mouth. ‘You don’t mind, do you? He seems peckish.’ He looks up. ‘How are things at home? We heard about last night’s drama. Peter Salt reports that your mother is out of danger. I hope that’s true.’
‘As of early this morning, yes. Peter probably saved her life. So, I was glad he was there. He knows what he’s doing on CPR.’
‘Good. That must all be a relief.’ He lays a hand on the table in Mark’s direction. ‘Saturday detention is over for you, dear Mark. Thank you.’ Mark departs with a finger salute to the room, and they are left alone. This makes sense if they are going to get rid of her.
Halfknight gives her a look of funereal regret. ‘We understand why you acted as you did on that plane, and most would have done the same, but your behaviour after the episode, careering all over Europe, failing to contact us, was questionable. Quite apart from anything else, searching for you was a waste of our resources.’
Rita says, ‘Unprofessional, rash, inexcusable.’ Slim has been watching Rita. She’s attractive, wears her forty-five plus years well, and has some South Asian heritage. She is always very still, is Rita without-a-surname. Slim doesn’t trust still because it’s only ever about creating an aura of power. Ivan Guest could be very still. The hoods in the Caucasus were waxworks.
She waits before replying, ‘Yes. It happened. I made mistakes—too many. I regret them.’
Halfknight glimmers a smile. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’ve had time to yourself. What did you do over the winter?’ Of course, he knows. She told Ballard where she was and what she was doing.
‘Archaeology. I was on a dig. It’s an interest I’ve had since college. I have friends who’ve made their careers in the field. They ask me along sometimes. Unpaid.’
‘Discover anything of interest?’
‘I can’t tell you what, or where it is. Secrecy is all in archaeology.’
‘Intriguing.’ He glances at Rita. ‘Aside from being my tennis partner, Rita is a distinguished member of the Service diaspora, and she has come to us with what seems to be a problem of subversion. The service tends to be sceptical about subversion, but we do keep an eye on certain areas and Rita believes she may have something for you.’
‘So, I won’t be going back to what I was doing.’
‘No, that’s out of the question, and given your vanishing act after the Skopje incident, you’re lucky to be still employed. In normal circumstances, we would regard you as burned. But this is a far less demanding assignment and relies on your previous career as a journalist.’
‘Journalist! I was a grunt on the websites of two newspapers, writing click bait about diets and pets. It was a long time ago. I wouldn’t call it journalism.’
‘But you did one serious investigation about landlords in Sheffield and Leeds. It’s in your file because you must have mentioned or submitted it during your application. Two things strike me about the article: the information is evidently accurate, and the sparseness of your writing style. We propose you now revert to your journalistic career.’
‘This is your only option for me.’
‘You’re not compelled to take it, but we don’t see this as an especially difficult assignment, and it will last only as long as it takes you to make sense of what’s going on in this organisation.’
Slim looks at them both. ‘You’re suggesting that I go undercover in a media organisation—isn’t that off limits for us? A free press in a free society, and all that.’
‘You won’t be undercover in the traditional way.’
‘I don’t expect to be telling whoever these people are that I’m a member of the Security Services, so, yes, I will be undercover, whether I use my name or not.’ She is looking unimpressed, and she doesn’t care if they see it because she’s being pushed into a dead-end assignment that’s counter to every possible convention of a liberal democracy. ‘Am I being parked? Because if I am, I can go back to my dig, and we can call it time.’
‘We want you to accept this assignment. It’s important. Everyone wants that. You understand what I’m saying?’ Does he mean the Director herself? Is that it? The meeting which they so urgently wanted her to attend might easily have been a disciplinary hearing that resulted in her sacking—after all she’d hijacked a plane and stolen 15,000 euros—but then it came to nothing, and bizarrely for an organisation addicted to protocols and codes of conduct, completely fizzled out. Form had been observed, only to be dismissed along with Stone and the lawyer. And that left her with the thought that not only might she keep her job long term, but she had some leverage, too. Yes, they really wanted her for this.
‘I’ll do it, but I need two things. The remaining money in Sally Latimer’s bank account. I recognise that you had to use some of it to pay for Sally Latimer’s last trip, but I earned that money. It’s mine.’
‘But you were being paid a salary by us,’ protests Rita.
‘I was doing two jobs and working sixteen hours a day. That’s my money.’
‘What about the money you took from Guest?’
‘Expenses while avoiding capture by a criminal organisation,’ she says, looking at Halfknight. ‘Have I got it?’
He nods.
‘Second, my brother Matthew went missing about twelve years ago.’
‘You told us about it when you joined. So, he hasn’t been found?’
‘No. It’s the reason I went to work in Leeds. We’ve tried everything. My mother’s fall made me realise that I must try to get closure for her, but I don’t have the means. You do. I will take this job if you do a proper search for Matthew.’
Halfknight says, ‘It’s unorthodox, but yes. To be arranged next week when you come in to prepare for the job. You’ll need to bring all the information you have on your brother and as many photographs as you possess. We will do what we can.’
Rita gets up and says she’s going to secure the tennis court.
‘Can you give me an idea where I’ll be based?’ she asks when Rita closes the door.
‘Milton Keynes,’ says Halfknight.
‘Milton Keynes!’
‘Fascinating place. Much underrated. Most people have no idea that Milton Keynes contains Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cypher School during the war. You know about that?’
‘Of course.’ She wonders where this is going.
‘Good. Bletchley is key to this job.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s all for next week. If you could arrive here by ten on Monday, that would be perfect.’
CHAPTER 7
Slim doesn’t revisit Sally Latimer’s life. Never lets it haunt her. But with the interview at the Cotton Studios, the sensations of that time begin to return. Guest’s oppressive and exhausting presence, his cologne, the fleeting look of malevolence, shot from deep beneath his brow while his lips spread in a broad grin. Why people never noticed what was going on in that face was a mystery to her. They just saw that monkey grin and were mesmerised by the hands that played on their own stage, by turns threatening, enticing, dismissing, submitting and seducing in a constant vaudeville of distraction. There wasn’t a man alive who used his hands to more devastating effect. One gesture amused her, an impatient twirl of his right hand that ended with it cupped and pointing to his midriff and, if only his interlocutors would look, to the sole beneficiary of the deal being hurried to conclusion.
The reason she survived those two years was that she was able to put him from her mind. Yet she did exactly the opposite for the rest of that weekend in London because, in the view of two doctors and Nurse Helen, her mother was ‘too tired for a visit’, for which she read, alcoholic withdrawal. She had the time to herself in her friend Bridie Hansen’s house in Wye Street, her bolthole for the last three years, to try to answer the question she put to Mark from SIS. Why, when the National Crime Agency was raring to go, had there been not a hint of action? No raids, no prosecutions, no whiff of a sanction or seizure. None of his businesses appeared to have suffered the slightest inconvenience. Having found nothing, late on Sunday, she sent an obliquely worded text to her old boss Tom Ballard asking to see him urgently, but got no response.
On Monday, Slim arrives half an hour early at Cotton and waits in the pickup, making calls to the kennel that has agreed to take Loup for a trial period of ten days; to a security firm in Peterborough, which she contracts to check on her mother’s house and install a temporary CCTV system; and to Nurse Helen’s mobile. Because of the irregularities in her mother’s blood pressure and heart rate, she’s still in Cardiac Care and likely to be there for another day or two.
Ten minutes later, Slim is in a former screening room in the basement of the Cotton Studios with Rob Alantree, a crisply dressed Sandhurst type in his thirties. She met him on a training programme four years before where he performed brilliantly in everything but seat-of-your-pants inspiration tests. With no correct answer, Rob was all at sea.
They sit at a table on a raised dais in front of the dozen cinema seats. Rob tucks his tie into his shirt and rolls up his sleeves like a doctor on his rounds. They are joined by a young man called Gerald who carries two laptops and a phone. From Slim’s thirty-five years, Gerald looks like a teenager. Rita without-a-surname comes in, wishes her well and underlines her ‘good luck’, as though a lot depends on the Milton Keynes job. Then as an afterthought, gives her name, Bauer—Rita Bauer.
‘So, what we’re looking at here,’ Alantree begins, ‘is a news site called Middle Kingdom.’
Gerald spins a laptop round to Slim with the home page open. He connects the other laptop to a big screen and the same home page appears. ‘Obviously, you’ll get to know it over time,’ he says, ‘but you can explore independently on your machine now.’
Gerald works his laptop. Slim looks at the one in front of her. In the menu ‘About our work’ she reads that Middle Kingdom ranges over the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.
We seek to represent the stories and experiences of the millions who make their lives in the countryside and towns between the north and south and the Midlands and East Anglia. Middle Kingdom is dedicated to quality local journalism, with an emphasis on training journalists.
She jumps to a section on the site’s financing from subscriptions, donations and advertising. She reads,
Our ads are vetted to ensure that they come from sustainable, enlightened and socially responsible organisations.
Given the primness of this statement, it’s surprising how many ads there are, and from well-known brands, too. She moves to a final paragraph on authorship and social media which says,
Readers will notice that articles on Middle Kingdom are unsigned. Bylines are only placed on certain regular columns. We take collective responsibility for everything published here. It’s not who’s writing that matters but what is written. Middle Kingdom is represented on most social media platforms, but we don’t encourage our writers to engage in social media, unless they are using it to reach out, or for research, or in a personal capacity that’s clearly distinct from their work at Middle Kingdom.
‘Sounds like a cult,’ Slim says.
‘They’re rigorous and disciplined,’ says Alantree. ‘Have a look at this from three weeks ago.’ Gerald pulls up an article with tables of figures, graphs, quotations from emails, screen grabs and headshots of businesspeople. ‘This is an exposé of British water companies. You may’ve seen it in the news.’
She shakes her head—she’s barely read the news all winter, but this seems like an old story and she says so.
‘The information about the pollution carried out with the knowledge of the water companies and their boards is a hundred per cent accurate. But, more important, were the revelations about expenses and remuneration?’ He gestures to the screen. ‘Plus, they used official data, the minister’s reports, her private correspondence, and memoranda that were only seen by a handful of senior government officials.’
‘Are they hacking into government departments?’
‘Yes, plainly, or they have inside sources, people leaking to them and breaking the Official Secrets Act in the process. But they are also good with open-source intelligence. They find a lot on the web that others don’t. We’re also interested in this person.’
A black-and-white photograph appears of a man in his early to mid sixties, with a round face, framed by black curls brushed forward and an unkempt black beard. He wears heavy black spectacles behind which his eyes are closed with pleasure; and he has a small cigar jammed into the side of his mouth. ‘This is Yoni Ross, one of the world’s first hackers. Maybe the very first. Before there were mainframe terminals in the office or home computers, this character got into the Pentagon’s system and left a masturbating Mickey Mouse for the generals to find on Monday morning. The FBI couldn’t prove it was Yoni, but he was advised that if he was ever tempted again, he would face forty years in prison. Mr Ross took the hint and moved to Britain, where he felt at home because his father, Yoni Ross Senior, had spent the last three years of the war at Bletchley Park, working on the first computers with Tommy Flowers and Alan Turing and decrypting Japanese radio traffic. Later he taught at Cambridge. Ross Junior went on to develop several early Internet protocols, then moved into financial trading software in the nineties.’
Alantree gazes at the photograph for a moment. ‘He’s rich and very smart but he’s an oddball. Crazy about rabbits, apparently.’ The door opens. Oliver Halfknight enters and settles in the front row of cinema seats. Later, Slim will give him the envelope containing everything she has on Matthew—date of birth, photos, national insurance number, last known address, and the details of two friends—but this isn’t the moment. She nods hello and puts the envelope on the table in front of her. Halfknight gestures for Alantree to carry on.
‘Middle Kingdom was up and running before Yoni Ross came into the picture. It was founded by a local journalist, a woman named Exton-White, and she was later joined by Yoni and three others, whom we don’t know a lot about. They met at an event held by the Bletchley Park Trust, which regularly reaches out to descendants of the people who worked there. We believe they all have parents or grandparents who were a key part of the Ultra operation. That’s true of Exton-White and Ross. We think the others live within twenty miles of Milton Keynes, though Ross goes between London and Berkeley, California, and a house in Hertfordshire.’
‘To be precise, Mr Alantree,’ says Halfknight, ‘Ultra was the name given to the intelligence produced by breaking Enigma encryption. Bletchley Park was known as Station X, or more informally BP. You see the difference?’
Alantree nods. ‘They originally wanted to call the site Redwood because they met in a rainstorm sheltering under the giant Californian redwood which stands in front of the old house at the park, but they stuck with the name Middle Kingdom, which has a vaguely New Age feel.’
‘How come?’ Slim asks. ‘The Middle Kingdom was a period of Egyptian history lasting two thousand years—roughly, the Bronze Age in Britain. How’s that New Age?’
Alantree looks annoyed. ‘There are aspects that are New Age-y and they are idealistic. But they are also practical, resourceful and highly motivated. This is not Woke Central, by the way: they are only interested in the facts and reporting what they see as the truth.’
‘An exceptional gene pool,’ says Halfknight. ‘So, what we need to know urgently is where they’re getting their information. It’s true that this is a small, self-satisfied outfit in Milton Keynes, but the danger to the state looks real to us. Rob is now going to take you through everything you’ll need to learn to make a success of this operation.’
She doesn’t want to broach the subject of Matthew in front of Alantree and Gerald, but Halfknight seems to have forgotten their arrangement. She jumps up with the envelope in her hand. ‘This contains everything I have on my brother. Thank you for doing this.’
He seems surprised but puts the envelope into his inside pocket, and nods to her.
CHAPTER 8
Maybe she should remind them that Guest was the last man standing after Ukraine. Oligarchs lost businesses, yachts, homes, football clubs, jets, and were forced into ruinous fire sales and found all lines of credit suspended. But Guest, the Harrow old boy, avoided all of it, although he was as corrupt as any of them. There was no one smarter or blessed with a more highly tuned survival instinct than Hagfish, plus he’d sprayed money at politicians in ways calculated to confuse if not totally mislead the electoral authorities. The establishment was incapable of thinking of him as anything but a good chap and upstanding patriot.
Halfknight peels the ham from his discarded sandwich and drops it into Loup’s mouth. ‘You don’t mind, do you? He seems peckish.’ He looks up. ‘How are things at home? We heard about last night’s drama. Peter Salt reports that your mother is out of danger. I hope that’s true.’
‘As of early this morning, yes. Peter probably saved her life. So, I was glad he was there. He knows what he’s doing on CPR.’
‘Good. That must all be a relief.’ He lays a hand on the table in Mark’s direction. ‘Saturday detention is over for you, dear Mark. Thank you.’ Mark departs with a finger salute to the room, and they are left alone. This makes sense if they are going to get rid of her.
Halfknight gives her a look of funereal regret. ‘We understand why you acted as you did on that plane, and most would have done the same, but your behaviour after the episode, careering all over Europe, failing to contact us, was questionable. Quite apart from anything else, searching for you was a waste of our resources.’
Rita says, ‘Unprofessional, rash, inexcusable.’ Slim has been watching Rita. She’s attractive, wears her forty-five plus years well, and has some South Asian heritage. She is always very still, is Rita without-a-surname. Slim doesn’t trust still because it’s only ever about creating an aura of power. Ivan Guest could be very still. The hoods in the Caucasus were waxworks.
She waits before replying, ‘Yes. It happened. I made mistakes—too many. I regret them.’
Halfknight glimmers a smile. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’ve had time to yourself. What did you do over the winter?’ Of course, he knows. She told Ballard where she was and what she was doing.
‘Archaeology. I was on a dig. It’s an interest I’ve had since college. I have friends who’ve made their careers in the field. They ask me along sometimes. Unpaid.’
‘Discover anything of interest?’
‘I can’t tell you what, or where it is. Secrecy is all in archaeology.’
‘Intriguing.’ He glances at Rita. ‘Aside from being my tennis partner, Rita is a distinguished member of the Service diaspora, and she has come to us with what seems to be a problem of subversion. The service tends to be sceptical about subversion, but we do keep an eye on certain areas and Rita believes she may have something for you.’
‘So, I won’t be going back to what I was doing.’
‘No, that’s out of the question, and given your vanishing act after the Skopje incident, you’re lucky to be still employed. In normal circumstances, we would regard you as burned. But this is a far less demanding assignment and relies on your previous career as a journalist.’
‘Journalist! I was a grunt on the websites of two newspapers, writing click bait about diets and pets. It was a long time ago. I wouldn’t call it journalism.’
‘But you did one serious investigation about landlords in Sheffield and Leeds. It’s in your file because you must have mentioned or submitted it during your application. Two things strike me about the article: the information is evidently accurate, and the sparseness of your writing style. We propose you now revert to your journalistic career.’
‘This is your only option for me.’
‘You’re not compelled to take it, but we don’t see this as an especially difficult assignment, and it will last only as long as it takes you to make sense of what’s going on in this organisation.’
Slim looks at them both. ‘You’re suggesting that I go undercover in a media organisation—isn’t that off limits for us? A free press in a free society, and all that.’
‘You won’t be undercover in the traditional way.’
‘I don’t expect to be telling whoever these people are that I’m a member of the Security Services, so, yes, I will be undercover, whether I use my name or not.’ She is looking unimpressed, and she doesn’t care if they see it because she’s being pushed into a dead-end assignment that’s counter to every possible convention of a liberal democracy. ‘Am I being parked? Because if I am, I can go back to my dig, and we can call it time.’
‘We want you to accept this assignment. It’s important. Everyone wants that. You understand what I’m saying?’ Does he mean the Director herself? Is that it? The meeting which they so urgently wanted her to attend might easily have been a disciplinary hearing that resulted in her sacking—after all she’d hijacked a plane and stolen 15,000 euros—but then it came to nothing, and bizarrely for an organisation addicted to protocols and codes of conduct, completely fizzled out. Form had been observed, only to be dismissed along with Stone and the lawyer. And that left her with the thought that not only might she keep her job long term, but she had some leverage, too. Yes, they really wanted her for this.
‘I’ll do it, but I need two things. The remaining money in Sally Latimer’s bank account. I recognise that you had to use some of it to pay for Sally Latimer’s last trip, but I earned that money. It’s mine.’
‘But you were being paid a salary by us,’ protests Rita.
‘I was doing two jobs and working sixteen hours a day. That’s my money.’
‘What about the money you took from Guest?’
‘Expenses while avoiding capture by a criminal organisation,’ she says, looking at Halfknight. ‘Have I got it?’
He nods.
‘Second, my brother Matthew went missing about twelve years ago.’
‘You told us about it when you joined. So, he hasn’t been found?’
‘No. It’s the reason I went to work in Leeds. We’ve tried everything. My mother’s fall made me realise that I must try to get closure for her, but I don’t have the means. You do. I will take this job if you do a proper search for Matthew.’
Halfknight says, ‘It’s unorthodox, but yes. To be arranged next week when you come in to prepare for the job. You’ll need to bring all the information you have on your brother and as many photographs as you possess. We will do what we can.’
Rita gets up and says she’s going to secure the tennis court.
‘Can you give me an idea where I’ll be based?’ she asks when Rita closes the door.
‘Milton Keynes,’ says Halfknight.
‘Milton Keynes!’
‘Fascinating place. Much underrated. Most people have no idea that Milton Keynes contains Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cypher School during the war. You know about that?’
‘Of course.’ She wonders where this is going.
‘Good. Bletchley is key to this job.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s all for next week. If you could arrive here by ten on Monday, that would be perfect.’
CHAPTER 7
Slim doesn’t revisit Sally Latimer’s life. Never lets it haunt her. But with the interview at the Cotton Studios, the sensations of that time begin to return. Guest’s oppressive and exhausting presence, his cologne, the fleeting look of malevolence, shot from deep beneath his brow while his lips spread in a broad grin. Why people never noticed what was going on in that face was a mystery to her. They just saw that monkey grin and were mesmerised by the hands that played on their own stage, by turns threatening, enticing, dismissing, submitting and seducing in a constant vaudeville of distraction. There wasn’t a man alive who used his hands to more devastating effect. One gesture amused her, an impatient twirl of his right hand that ended with it cupped and pointing to his midriff and, if only his interlocutors would look, to the sole beneficiary of the deal being hurried to conclusion.
The reason she survived those two years was that she was able to put him from her mind. Yet she did exactly the opposite for the rest of that weekend in London because, in the view of two doctors and Nurse Helen, her mother was ‘too tired for a visit’, for which she read, alcoholic withdrawal. She had the time to herself in her friend Bridie Hansen’s house in Wye Street, her bolthole for the last three years, to try to answer the question she put to Mark from SIS. Why, when the National Crime Agency was raring to go, had there been not a hint of action? No raids, no prosecutions, no whiff of a sanction or seizure. None of his businesses appeared to have suffered the slightest inconvenience. Having found nothing, late on Sunday, she sent an obliquely worded text to her old boss Tom Ballard asking to see him urgently, but got no response.
On Monday, Slim arrives half an hour early at Cotton and waits in the pickup, making calls to the kennel that has agreed to take Loup for a trial period of ten days; to a security firm in Peterborough, which she contracts to check on her mother’s house and install a temporary CCTV system; and to Nurse Helen’s mobile. Because of the irregularities in her mother’s blood pressure and heart rate, she’s still in Cardiac Care and likely to be there for another day or two.
Ten minutes later, Slim is in a former screening room in the basement of the Cotton Studios with Rob Alantree, a crisply dressed Sandhurst type in his thirties. She met him on a training programme four years before where he performed brilliantly in everything but seat-of-your-pants inspiration tests. With no correct answer, Rob was all at sea.
They sit at a table on a raised dais in front of the dozen cinema seats. Rob tucks his tie into his shirt and rolls up his sleeves like a doctor on his rounds. They are joined by a young man called Gerald who carries two laptops and a phone. From Slim’s thirty-five years, Gerald looks like a teenager. Rita without-a-surname comes in, wishes her well and underlines her ‘good luck’, as though a lot depends on the Milton Keynes job. Then as an afterthought, gives her name, Bauer—Rita Bauer.
‘So, what we’re looking at here,’ Alantree begins, ‘is a news site called Middle Kingdom.’
Gerald spins a laptop round to Slim with the home page open. He connects the other laptop to a big screen and the same home page appears. ‘Obviously, you’ll get to know it over time,’ he says, ‘but you can explore independently on your machine now.’
Gerald works his laptop. Slim looks at the one in front of her. In the menu ‘About our work’ she reads that Middle Kingdom ranges over the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.
We seek to represent the stories and experiences of the millions who make their lives in the countryside and towns between the north and south and the Midlands and East Anglia. Middle Kingdom is dedicated to quality local journalism, with an emphasis on training journalists.
She jumps to a section on the site’s financing from subscriptions, donations and advertising. She reads,
Our ads are vetted to ensure that they come from sustainable, enlightened and socially responsible organisations.
Given the primness of this statement, it’s surprising how many ads there are, and from well-known brands, too. She moves to a final paragraph on authorship and social media which says,
Readers will notice that articles on Middle Kingdom are unsigned. Bylines are only placed on certain regular columns. We take collective responsibility for everything published here. It’s not who’s writing that matters but what is written. Middle Kingdom is represented on most social media platforms, but we don’t encourage our writers to engage in social media, unless they are using it to reach out, or for research, or in a personal capacity that’s clearly distinct from their work at Middle Kingdom.
‘Sounds like a cult,’ Slim says.
‘They’re rigorous and disciplined,’ says Alantree. ‘Have a look at this from three weeks ago.’ Gerald pulls up an article with tables of figures, graphs, quotations from emails, screen grabs and headshots of businesspeople. ‘This is an exposé of British water companies. You may’ve seen it in the news.’
She shakes her head—she’s barely read the news all winter, but this seems like an old story and she says so.
‘The information about the pollution carried out with the knowledge of the water companies and their boards is a hundred per cent accurate. But, more important, were the revelations about expenses and remuneration?’ He gestures to the screen. ‘Plus, they used official data, the minister’s reports, her private correspondence, and memoranda that were only seen by a handful of senior government officials.’
‘Are they hacking into government departments?’
‘Yes, plainly, or they have inside sources, people leaking to them and breaking the Official Secrets Act in the process. But they are also good with open-source intelligence. They find a lot on the web that others don’t. We’re also interested in this person.’
A black-and-white photograph appears of a man in his early to mid sixties, with a round face, framed by black curls brushed forward and an unkempt black beard. He wears heavy black spectacles behind which his eyes are closed with pleasure; and he has a small cigar jammed into the side of his mouth. ‘This is Yoni Ross, one of the world’s first hackers. Maybe the very first. Before there were mainframe terminals in the office or home computers, this character got into the Pentagon’s system and left a masturbating Mickey Mouse for the generals to find on Monday morning. The FBI couldn’t prove it was Yoni, but he was advised that if he was ever tempted again, he would face forty years in prison. Mr Ross took the hint and moved to Britain, where he felt at home because his father, Yoni Ross Senior, had spent the last three years of the war at Bletchley Park, working on the first computers with Tommy Flowers and Alan Turing and decrypting Japanese radio traffic. Later he taught at Cambridge. Ross Junior went on to develop several early Internet protocols, then moved into financial trading software in the nineties.’
Alantree gazes at the photograph for a moment. ‘He’s rich and very smart but he’s an oddball. Crazy about rabbits, apparently.’ The door opens. Oliver Halfknight enters and settles in the front row of cinema seats. Later, Slim will give him the envelope containing everything she has on Matthew—date of birth, photos, national insurance number, last known address, and the details of two friends—but this isn’t the moment. She nods hello and puts the envelope on the table in front of her. Halfknight gestures for Alantree to carry on.
‘Middle Kingdom was up and running before Yoni Ross came into the picture. It was founded by a local journalist, a woman named Exton-White, and she was later joined by Yoni and three others, whom we don’t know a lot about. They met at an event held by the Bletchley Park Trust, which regularly reaches out to descendants of the people who worked there. We believe they all have parents or grandparents who were a key part of the Ultra operation. That’s true of Exton-White and Ross. We think the others live within twenty miles of Milton Keynes, though Ross goes between London and Berkeley, California, and a house in Hertfordshire.’
‘To be precise, Mr Alantree,’ says Halfknight, ‘Ultra was the name given to the intelligence produced by breaking Enigma encryption. Bletchley Park was known as Station X, or more informally BP. You see the difference?’
Alantree nods. ‘They originally wanted to call the site Redwood because they met in a rainstorm sheltering under the giant Californian redwood which stands in front of the old house at the park, but they stuck with the name Middle Kingdom, which has a vaguely New Age feel.’
‘How come?’ Slim asks. ‘The Middle Kingdom was a period of Egyptian history lasting two thousand years—roughly, the Bronze Age in Britain. How’s that New Age?’
Alantree looks annoyed. ‘There are aspects that are New Age-y and they are idealistic. But they are also practical, resourceful and highly motivated. This is not Woke Central, by the way: they are only interested in the facts and reporting what they see as the truth.’
‘An exceptional gene pool,’ says Halfknight. ‘So, what we need to know urgently is where they’re getting their information. It’s true that this is a small, self-satisfied outfit in Milton Keynes, but the danger to the state looks real to us. Rob is now going to take you through everything you’ll need to learn to make a success of this operation.’
She doesn’t want to broach the subject of Matthew in front of Alantree and Gerald, but Halfknight seems to have forgotten their arrangement. She jumps up with the envelope in her hand. ‘This contains everything I have on my brother. Thank you for doing this.’
He seems surprised but puts the envelope into his inside pocket, and nods to her.
CHAPTER 8
