The protocols of spying, p.1
The Protocols of Spying, page 1
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Also by Merle Nygate
Honour Among Spies
The Righteous Spy
Praise for Merle Nygate
‘Intriguing and atmospheric. Merle Nygate is a writer to watch’
Charles Cumming, Sunday Times Bestselling author of Box 88 on The Righteous Spy
‘There is no black and white just varying shades of grey, this is the twilight zone all good spy novels should reflect. Gripping and well written, fans of a serious spy fiction will love this’
Paul Burke, Editor of Crime Time FM on The Righteous Spy
‘For all her deft delineation of character, of spies as people not superheroes, Nygate is not afraid to get her hands bloody, and this is shaping up to be a series with heft’
James Owen, The Times on Honour Among Spies
‘Merle Nygate writes intelligent and genuinely thrilling spy novels’
Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph on Honour Among Spies
‘Absolutely gripping and so well written. A strong plot which sustained itself right through to the final page and a great cast of characters’
Alex Gerlis, best-selling spy fiction author on Honour Among Spies
‘Modern day espionage served with a side of geopolitics and lashings of tension, suspense, believable characters and dialogue. Nygate writes realistic yet thrilling espionage suspense’
Shane Whaley, Editor of Spybrary on The Protocols of Spying
‘Merle Nygate has created some of the very best characters in contemporary spy fiction. The Protocols of Spying is a fine addition to an excellent series which combines realistic tradecraft and plots. As a response to the horrors of October 7 it is intelligent, nuanced and frequently rather moving. Highly recommended’
Tim Shipman, Political Editor, The Spectator on The Protocols of Spying
‘Set in the aftermath of October 7, this outing for Mossad London Station chief Eli Amiram is a politically astute thriller, which captures the sense of horror and dislocation felt by his countrymen after the attack. The characters are vividly drawn, and the prose sparkles. This series continues to impress’
Antonia Senior, Editor of Spymasters podcast on The Protocols of Spying
‘Simply put, Merle Nygate is one of the best spy novelists writing today’
I. S. Berry, Author and winner of New Yorker & NPR Best Book of the Year and Edgar Award for Best First Novel on The Protocols of Spying
‘Completely excellent, pacy, believable, gripping and humane’
Charles Beaumont, best selling author of A Spy Alone and A Spy at War on The Protocols of Spying
THE
PROTOCOLS
OF
SPYING
MERLE NYGATE
Contents
Cover
Also by Merle Nygate
Praise for Merle Nygate
Title Page
PART ONE: Anger
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART TWO: Wounded
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART THREE: Lies
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
PART FOUR: Truth
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Author’s Notes & Thanks
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Anger
Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them.
Deuteronomy 31:17
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor Rome, 121–180
Chapter 1
‘Is that for real?’ Eli leaned over the rail and pointed at a small cruiser that was sailing parallel with the ferry. Trance music blared out from the cabin and, in the darkness, Eli could see the wash as the driver ramped up the speed and the small boat skittered and scudded over the waves.
‘Isn’t this a shipping lane? Stupid kids, that’s a great way of getting killed. They think they’re immortal, nothing bad is ever going to happen to them,’ Eli said as the boat veered sharply away and bounced over the wake.
Twenty-five-year-old Segev, head watcher and also lead in charge of tech at the Mossad’s London Station, ignored the comment. Eli knew he would. It was one of the perks of being head of station, Eli could muse unchallenged.
‘Paper Doll is on board,’ Segev said. ‘His car parked forward, his wife and kids at a table in the lounge on deck three. He’s on the way up here. Lev is in position.’
‘Thanks.’ Eli felt behind his ear for the listening device and he pressed the button to open the comms channel and at the same time watched the screen on his phone engage.
There he was. Lev, planted at a table on the outside deck. Alone in the dark, as the ferry juddered through the choppy Solent.
‘You there, Lev? Ready to rock and roll?’ Eli said.
‘All set.’ The voice in Eli’s ear sounded about as ready to rock and roll as a coma patient but Lev was Paper Doll’s katsa, his case officer, and as such, it was his job to meet the agent and do the debrief.
It was bad enough that Eli was on the ferry on a Friday night, there to observe the debrief in real time, worse that this contact location was both expensive and inconvenient; they’d had to allocate two motorbikes and one car to tail Paper Doll on the journey between London and Portsmouth, all to make sure the agent was clean. For one meeting. If Lev hadn’t been such a lazy bastard, he would have found a way of insisting that the meeting was somewhere more convenient and at a better time.
Eli glanced around the deck and saw the watchers. They were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. No doubt these overpriced props would end up on their heshbon too.
‘Eyes on Paper Doll,’ Eli heard in his ear. ‘He has his son with him.’
‘His son?’ Eli said. This was exactly what they needed, a curious nine-year-old telling anyone who might listen that Daddy talked to a strange man on the ferry as the family went for their weekend away on the Isle of Wight.
‘Abort?’ Segev said.
‘No. Give him a few minutes. Paper Doll might take the kid inside after he’s thrown up over the side of the ferry.’
As he watched Paper Doll walk back and forth along the deck, hand in hand with the child, something nagged at Eli. Maybe the situation was more complicated than a lazy agent meeting a lazy case officer. The agent had missed the last two of his meetings with Lev. While that wasn’t unusual for Paper Doll, who was systemically disorganised, maybe there really was an issue. When the agent had surfaced to pick up his retainer, Paper Doll told Lev that the reason he’d missed the meetings was because his wife was becoming suspicious about the extra money. Money he’d been spending on her and the kids. He said that he’d even caught her going through his workbag, which was never a good sign. This meant Eli was there, on a Friday night in early October, to observe the meeting. To see if he, the head of the Mossad’s London Station, with his superlative spy-running skills, could identify what the issue was, and whether indeed the agent was lying and perhaps trying to get out of the relationship with Lev because he’d had enough. If so, he wouldn’t be the first agent to claim, whether it was genuine or not, that a partner was suspicious. It was such a constant that the Office had developed a number of slang expressions for it. Lichporkaki, angry shit-dropping bird was just one of them. The unsolvable problem was that when you sleep with someone for years, when you eat with them, talk to them, experience both joy and pain with them, they know when you’re lying.
Eli shrugged off the thought about his betrayal of his own wife and looked out into the darkness as the ferry chugged along. That was past. They were on a relatively even trajectory now and he wanted to keep it that way. Eli concentrated on the small screen in his hand, where he could see Lev, still sitting at the table at
the other end of the ferry, on the outside deck. The only other people in the space were a couple of men, drinking beer from bottles and surreptitiously vaping – and Paper Doll. He was holding his son’s hand and the boy seemed to be excited as the lights of Fishbourne got closer, a black mass speckled with light.
But, as yet, there was no contact between agent and case officer.
Maybe the wife had put the fear of God into Paper Doll and she’d got the kid to keep an eye on him. Not impossible. A popular tactic in authoritarian regimes, and Qatar was hardly California. Eli’s finger hovered over the call channel at the base of his screen. Abort or no?
He was there to observe the meeting and protocol dictated that, if conditions were suboptimal, then a contact should be aborted. But that would mean the entire effort to come down here would have been wasted and made worse because Eli should have been hosting a Simchat Torah party at the apartment and he was missing it. But for all Eli’s complaining, there remained the unshakable sense that this meeting was important, and Eli needed to give it every possible chance to succeed.
Paper Doll was a Human Resources manager at the Qatari Embassy. Lev, who Eli considered to be the laziest and most inept case officer he had ever had the misfortune to meet, let alone have on his team, had been running Paper Doll for three years, so far without mishap, beyond the agent’s apparent inability to meet for regular debriefs.
A face-to-face debrief was always the first-choice contact, an opportunity to check in with the agent, but failing that, the compromise with Paper Doll was USB chips with the contents of his computer and a document summarising changes in personnel and noteworthy events within the Qatari Embassy. Besides the contact issue, it was the type of account that ran on tram rails, so it was suitable for a deadweight like Lev, whose only claim to fame was his ability to pass himself off as a Syrian to a Syrian. So authentic was Lev’s grasp of the language and the nuances of the culture, and the Byzantine internal politics of the Assad regime, that Lev had held on to his job through multiple HR assessments. Perhaps it was Lev’s background in Shabak, the internal intelligence service, an organisation renowned for its slow thinking and slow action, that made him so thorough. Perhaps he had sucked in his Syrian alter ego with his mother’s milk, a Syrian Jew from Qamishli. Whatever it was, in that one area Lev shone like the bright light of the lighthouse on the headland up ahead, and he even showed glimpses of not just enthusiasm, but actual intellect, as he kept up to date with the shifting sands in the one-party state. What’s more, nobody had ever challenged Lev’s cover story. Nobody could. When he was working, he was transformed. He became that creature: a Syrian businessman, an Alawite loyalist, who was distantly connected to the Assad family, with broad interests in industry, technology, consumer electronics, minerals, textiles, medical equipment and construction. Wanting to know what the mood was in Qatar in terms of their economic plans.
However, although economic intelligence about Qatar gave the analysts back home product to feed the insatiable appetite of their algorithms, what was more enticing for the Mossad was the geographical location of Paper Doll’s office within the Qatari Embassy. Human Resources at the Qatari Embassy was situated on the second floor, right at the back of the property in South Audley Street. The office itself, which comprised two rooms and overlooked a brick wall, was conveniently right across the passage from the suite that the UK political wing of Hamas had been occupying for the last twenty years. They even shared the same coffee station, which was supplied daily with an assortment of the choicest delicacies from nearby Selfridges food hall.
That’s why Eli was on a ferry crossing the Solent towards Fishbourne. That’s why Paper Doll was so important.
Glancing down at his phone, Eli saw the bodycam images, and Paper Doll take his child by the hand and coax him towards the sliding doors into the lounge. He disappeared into the light, leaving Lev at his table, alone, on deck. If the agent came out again, there just might be a chance for contact, but the likelihood was fading the closer they got to shore.
What was going on? There could only be two possibilities: the agent either had something significant to say to Lev and he was nervous, or he was giving them the runaround. Given his profile, Eli didn’t think the man was bold enough to play them. He was also strongly motivated by money and, as noticed by his wife, had developed expensive tastes for everything from the finest caviar and £500 bottles of whisky to Savile Row suits. All of Eli’s instincts and his experience told him that Paper Doll wasn’t going to turn off the money tap without a good reason.
Behind Eli, a PA system sprang to life. ‘We will shortly be arriving at Fishbourne. Would passengers return to their cars on the car decks, making sure they have left none of their belongings behind. Thank you for—’
‘He’s back,’ Eli heard in his ear. ‘He’s back. No kid.’
He must have been waiting for the bustle of travellers preparing to get off the ferry.
Gripping his phone, Eli watched as Paper Doll approached Lev. The agent wasted no time and Eli saw an outstretched hand slip something into Lev’s pocket. Then the agent leaned down over Lev, who was still sitting, and muttered something. His voice was soft, urgent. Eli could only make out one word. He said it twice, ‘i’tidaa’. Immediately, Paper Doll swivelled around and marched back towards the door into the lounge. And that was it. Lev was left sitting at the table like an unloved date on a night out. They were going home with one word, and what looked like a USB chip slipped into Lev’s pocket.
If they’d brought the Techtruck with them, they might have washed and debugged the chip before examining its contents, but the truck with several million dollars of high-end toys was in the lock-up in Ladbroke Grove. Eli had decided it was only to be used when absolutely necessary, because it ruffled too many British feathers. That was a mistake. It would now take them another four hours to get the ferry back to Portsmouth and drive into London.
Theoretically, this might have waited until the next day, but the word ‘i’tidaa’, combined with the tension in the man’s body and the way that he’d possibly used his child to shield further interrogation by Lev, bothered Eli. Why would the agent make such a drama out of this meeting? Was it really just a case of his wife getting suspicious and wanting to meet out of London or was there something else?
Eli strode into the lounge and joined Segev on the steps with the rest of the crowd, heading towards the car decks.
‘We’re not going straight home, Segev,’ Eli said. ‘We get the next ferry back to Portsmouth as planned but then we go straight to the embassy and decrypt the chip. And Lev is coming with us.’
Lev was nearby.
‘What did Paper Doll say?’ Eli said.
‘Just the one word. I’tidaa attack.’
Chapter 2
Later the same night, Petra sat in front of her laptop, at the kitchen island. The night was still, with only the hum of the fridge and some light snoring that drifted down from upstairs to disturb her. There was order at her perch on the bar stool: the laptop at right angles to the notepad and pen, the pendulum lighting that directed pools of task illumination onto the granite worktop. Everything was within reach, everything well organised, no surprises.
Since Petra hadn’t been able to sleep and had lain awake in the dark for over an hour, listening to the rhythm of Matt’s breathing, she’d figured that she might as well get up and do some work. Now was as good a time as any to get her report done. The dark silence of the pre-dawn hours might aid concentration.
Petra was trying to write up a report on behalf of a consortium client, who wanted to invest in a subsidiary company within the National Grid. It was part of what she did for Corudon, the intelligence and security company. The report was based in part on her interview with the Internal Communications Director. Under the pretext of an article for Finance Times, a cover magazine owned by Corudon, Petra had said she wanted to write a piece about new initiatives in developing corporate culture. It was boring business bollocks and of course, the comms manager agreed to the interview. Finance Times was considered to be a prestigious magazine distributed throughout the City and it also had an international online presence. But Petra had had a second agenda.
Over a fancy lunch that included a bottle of rosé plus two extra glasses, Petra had not only gleaned everything she needed for the article, but she’d extracted the information she really wanted – the background of the target company that was in the iron sights of the client. And Petra had opened a rich vein; it seemed that the company was covering up a small matter of embezzlement by the Finance Director. The middle-aged accountant had developed a taste for hookers and cocaine. Of course, these things happen and listed companies were bound to cover up the truth, but it was exactly the type of information that a potential buyer wanted. Not only would it help with negotiations but it meant that due diligence would be escalated so there’d be no further nasty surprises if the deal went ahead.
