by Tom Bradby
‘If I’m as ambitious as you say, I’d keep it to myself. You think my bosses want to know that you have cast-iron evidence their new prime minister is a Russian spy? They had a heart attack at the idea he might be. Certainty would kill them.’
‘Come on, Kate.’
‘You can call me Mrs Henderson.’
‘Well, whatever you want me to call you, we both know one thing is true beyond doubt. Right now, our agent in Downing Street is passing the details of every file that crosses his desk – which, since he is the prime minister, means every file of any note, secret or otherwise – straight through to Moscow Centre and the office of our president. And I am offering you the chance to stop this calamitous threat to everything you hold dear.’ Despite his polished air, a note of panic had crept into Mikhail’s voice. But, then, fifty years with hard labour in a modern Russian gulag was probably an even less enticing prospect than the KGB hellholes of old. Even Eton wasn’t preparation for that.
‘You’re a murderer.’
‘We both know I am nothing of the kind.’
‘Lena and Rav would say different if they were here.’
‘I understand how upset you have been. We will offer something in good faith: the next step in the war on the West.’
‘Which is?’
‘A revolution in Estonia. The Night Wolves have bought a farm, just over the border, close to Narva.’
‘Where?’
‘We don’t know precisely. It is a GRU operation. There will be unrest, the Wolves will burst from their lair and come to the aid of the Russian minority . . . so you will have something like war, as in Georgia and Crimea, but this time in a NATO ally. What will your prime minister do then? Will he consider himself to be bound by the famous Article Five? Is an assault on one really an attack on all?’
‘When is this going to happen?’
‘Soon. That is all I can tell you. But we will want to know you accept our offer by tomorrow night at the latest.’
‘That’s impossible, as you well know.’
‘Then make it possible, Mrs Henderson. That is your job and everyone agrees you are good at it.’
‘Show me the video.’
‘Not here, not now. First, we need to know you accept our offer in principle. Then we can agree to meet again. But we have very little time. I have been summoned back to Russia and I can hold them off only for so long.’ He shook his head. ‘We have our backs to the wall, Kate. If you won’t accept what I propose, we will go to the Americans or the Germans. And once the deal is done, your superiors in London will inevitably learn that you rejected our offer.’ Mikhail came towards her with a small scrap of paper. On it was written a number. ‘That’s how to contact me. But I ask you to be quick. I don’t think we have more than a few days at best and, whatever you might think of me or indeed my father, you may have many years to regret this opportunity being lost.’
Kate slipped the paper into her pocket. ‘Don’t ever use my children like this again,’ she warned, as she moved to the door.
‘It was not your husband’s doing. You should know that.’ Kate stopped, turned back to face Mikhail. ‘He cuts a somewhat pathetic figure in Moscow. For what it is worth, I think you are the love of his life.’
‘Goodbye, Mikhail.’
‘I think you mean “au revoir”. We’ll meet again.’
Kate walked down to the ground-floor lobby and out on to the launch. ‘Take me back to my children, please,’ she instructed the man with the pockmarked face. Her chest had constricted so violently that she felt as if she was about to have a heart attack, the anxiety that had been her constant companion for months now threatening to consume her.
3
KATE WAS MET back at the church by the implacable set of her fifteen-year-old daughter’s jaw. ‘Where the hell were you?’
‘I—’
‘You promised you weren’t going to work while you were here.’
‘How did you—’
‘Dad said you had to take a work call.’
‘Yes . . . yes. I’m really sorry.’ Kate knew better than to choose this moment to get into an argument with her daughter. She could see the hurt in her eyes. There were also scratch marks on her arm, a recent worrying indication of her tendency to self-harm. Gus, meanwhile, stared resolutely at the floor. Whatever had happened in the meeting with their father had evidently shaken them both. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can find an ice cream.’
As the children turned away, Julie whispered, ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Pas devant les enfants.’
‘I do speak French, you know,’ Fiona threw over her shoulder, ‘and in six days’ time, I’ll basically be an adult anyway.’
That sounded like a threat rather than an abstract statement of fact, but Kate let it ride. They did get ice creams on the way back, and sat on a wall by the canal in front of their hotel, eating them in silence.
Once inside, Kate left her children in their room to simmer down, and tackled Julie first. ‘Mikhail and Igor’s thugs,’ she explained. ‘They took me at gunpoint to Mikhail’s fancy palazzo.’
‘What did they want?’
‘To defect.’
Julie looked at her as if she had just gone mad, her vivid green eyes clouded by confusion.
‘They are offering us the video they claim to have been using as kompromat against the prime minister. It shows him having sex with underage girls.’
‘Did you see it?’
‘No. Only if we accept their offer in principle.’
‘What if it’s a fake?’
‘He claims we’ll know it isn’t.’
‘I thought they could fake anything, these days . . . But why would they want to defect?’ Julie couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. She sat down on her bed.
‘Mikhail says his father and Vasily Durov have fallen out with the Kremlin and been ousted in a coup orchestrated by the GRU. He says Durov is under arrest, which likely means bound for Siberia at best, execution at worst. He and his father are desperate to flee to the West before the net closes on them.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe him or not. If the video exists, if it’s real – and he promised evidence of the payments they’ve made to the prime minister, too – then we have no choice. There was more. As a gesture of goodwill, he said we should know the Kremlin is planning some kind of coup in Estonia.’
‘What?’
‘There will be a “threat” to the local Russian population in Narva – protests or riots or civil disorder. The Night Wolves have bought a farm just outside, stacked it with enough weaponry to start a war. They will come to the aid of their “countrymen”.’
‘Why the Night Wolves?’
‘Plausible deniability. A bunch of old army vet bikers. How would we prove they took their orders from the Kremlin?’
Julie contemplated that in silence. Neither of them needed to articulate the fact that this was the kind of confrontation that could spark a third world war. ‘Are you going to call London?’ she asked.
‘No. I was thinking about driving to Rome to file from the embassy, but we don’t have time. Let’s go straight to the flight. I’ll have to drop the kids off at home, but I’ll text Danny now and see what he can find out. The CIA is bound to have good coverage on the border.’
‘I’ve never actually seen the Night Wolves in action, so what—’
‘Just volume at this stage. Any farm with a lot of outbuildings or barns, any sign of lorries moving or parked on a significant scale. Motorbikes, obviously. Any recent transactions recorded in the Estonian Land Registry, otherwise a list of all properties owned by ethnic Russians.’
‘Should I talk to Karen in Tallinn?’ Karen White was their station chief in the Estonian capital.
‘No. And don’t do anything to alert the Estonians either. As soon as I’ve dropped the kids I’ll tackle Ian and the chief and we’ll go from there.’
/> Kate went next door to speak to her children. Fiona was in the loo. Gus was on his bed, playing Angry Birds on his iPad. Kate came to sit next to him. ‘Was it all right?’ she asked, caressing the back of his head. He pulled away. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Nothing happened.’
‘You both seem . . . upset.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Was it nice to see Dad?’
The bathroom door opened and Fiona stepped out. ‘Dad burst into tears. He said he was miserable in Moscow. He has no friends, no money and no life. He told us he had made one terrible mistake and he would pay for it for the rest of his life.’
Kate shook her head slowly. ‘He shouldn’t have said that.’
‘Why not? It’s true.’
‘Because it loads the burden of his mistakes on to you.’
‘He only made one.’
‘Well, that’s not quite true, is it?’
‘It’s absolutely true.’
Kate could see her daughter was spoiling for a fight. Fiona took off her hairband and shook her hair free. It was never a good sign. Kate knew she should walk away. ‘He betrayed us and chose to betray his country,’ she said quietly.
‘He didn’t betray Gus and me.’
Kate stood up. ‘I’ll meet you in Reception in twenty minutes. We’re a long way past the check-out time I agreed, so don’t be late.’
‘Why won’t you accept his apology?’ Fiona asked. She looked as if she was about to smash something or burst into tears, or both.
‘Let’s talk about this calmly when we get home.’
‘That’s just an excuse not to talk about it at all.’
‘I’ll see you in Reception in twenty minutes.’
Kate went to her own room and sat on her bed. She noticed that her hands were shaking, got to her feet and went into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her face was white, her eyes bloodshot. She looked exhausted, which was no surprise. The acute stomach and back pain that had been plaguing her had returned with a vengeance. It was as if someone had wrapped a belt around her chest and was slowly tightening it.
She felt physically terrible. She walked to her bed, lay down and tried to concentrate on the breathing exercises the psychologist she had been seeing had recommended. They seemed to make no bloody difference at all.
She forced herself upright, packed the last of her belongings and walked down the grand staircase to Reception.
They caught the four o’clock flight home, the entire journey conducted in more or less total silence. Julie had made a concerted effort to jolly the children along before they boarded the plane until she received a text at Passport Control. After that she’d retreated rapidly into herself. Kate made no headway in winkling out of her what the trouble was.
She left Fiona in theoretical charge of her brother at home in Battersea and reached MI6’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters just after eight. She stopped off at the ops room on the second floor, where she found Julie sitting next to Danny in front of a bank of computer screens. ‘I think we’ve found it,’ Julie said.
‘Grab a seat,’ Danny instructed. He had long dark hair, piercing blue eyes and pretty much always wore a black T-shirt, blue jeans and threadbare sneakers. He had a Chinese dragon tattooed around the side and back of his neck and the kind of easy smile that could stop grown women in their tracks. Or perhaps it was just Kate. She suspected he and Julie had once been an item but, if so, it was a rare outbreak of common sense on her friend’s behalf: her taste in men was usually abysmal.
Kate did as she had been told. The floor was covered with styrofoam coffee cups and takeaway food cartons that had yet to make it to the bin in the corner. In his eating habits, and the curious absence of any visible impact on his waistline, Danny provided another painful reminder of her former deputy, Rav, who’d had a similar penchant for chaining himself to his desk in a tunnel of intense concentration. It was what made Danny – and had made Rav – so good at his job.
The images streamed from the CIA satellite covering this section of Estonia were so clear you could have seen a pebble in the grass. They were looking at a collection of outbuildings, but the screen next to them had a wider view of a village. ‘Puhlova,’ Kate said.
‘You know it?’ Julie asked.
Kate had met a Russian Army colonel there about a decade previously. He’d promised information on the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal in return for very large cash payments, but she’d not believed a word he’d said and had turned down his offer flat.
‘It changed hands two months ago,’ Julie said. ‘The new owner is a business registered in Helsinki.’
Danny closed in on the tyre tracks in the mud. Kate could see exactly what he was thinking: a lot of tracks, too narrow for a tractor, much too wide for a car. ‘Hard to be sure until we see some movement,’ he said. He zoomed in on a patch of grass just outside one of the buildings. Cigarette butts lay everywhere. ‘A lot of workers for a small farm.’
‘You find anything on the firm?’
Julie shook her head. ‘A holding company in Geneva, another in Bern, then to Belize and finally Panama. If it’s not the Russians, it’s someone else with a lot of cash to spend covering their tracks.’
‘How far back can you go?’
Kate’s question was to Danny and he pulled up another screen and started to rewind the footage on it rapidly. ‘Only a week, but that’s what’s weird. I checked the Met Office records. It rained really heavily nine days ago, so these tracks would have been obliterated if they’d been there before then. They must have been made after the deluge. But there’s been no movement in or out of these barns in the past week.’ He stopped rewinding and minimized the screen, pulling up another. ‘We started casting around. We looked closer to the border . . . but neither of us could find anything. So then we went further away.’ He froze the footage and closed in on a building by the Baltic. ‘This is a hotel in Silamae on the beach. A congenial place to plan a coup.’
Beneath a lean-to beside the hotel, the rear wheels of several motorbikes were clearly visible. ‘Not an army, exactly,’ Danny concluded, ‘but maybe the vanguard.’
‘That’s great,’ Kate said. ‘What’s that on?’
‘PCR2.’
‘See what else you can find on both sides of the border.’
Kate left them to their work, then thought better of it and doubled back. She sat again, so that she was close to Danny: the people at the other end of the ops room would be out of earshot. ‘Talk me through faking a video.’
‘What kind?’
‘If someone wanted to create a fake kompromat video, is it possible to do it convincingly enough to fool us?’
‘I guess that really depends. What kind of video are we talking about exactly?’
‘A sex tape.’
‘It’s hard to know without seeing it. I guess it would depend on the quality of the lighting, the camera angles . . .’
‘But, in theory, is it possible that we could be completely convinced by a fake?’
Danny glanced over his shoulder to check no one was listening. ‘In theory, yes. Who you are talking about?’
‘The prime minister, say, or the US president.’
Danny nodded. ‘You could fake footage of either of them giving a speech they never gave saying things they never said – and people have.’
‘How?’
‘Well, they’ve given thousands of speeches, so you feed all those into a powerful piece of software called a neural network. You direct the software to learn the visual associations between particular words and their mouths as they say them. And if you want the final version to be particularly convincing, you’d get the software to compete with a copy of itself, one generating the imagery, the other trying to spot the fakes. They call them generative adversarial networks and it’s very effective. The computer goes on improving its work until it finds a way to beat the competing network that is trying to weed out the fakes, so you get pure compu
tational hallucinations.’
‘What about a sex video?’
‘Same principle, though probably easier in reality. You just need to make the statistical connections between the individual you want to focus on and the aspect of his behaviour you wish to fake – in this case movement.’
‘Could you spot a fake?’
‘Probably. The GAN images have a creepy edge, though the software is improving all the time. The Russians might be ahead of us on this.’
‘Could I spot a fake?’
‘It all depends on the clarity of the image. If there is plenty of light and the visual and audio quality are good, you’d probably have a good sense of whether it’s real or not. But the lower the quality, the easier it might be to pass off as a fake.’
Kate touched Danny’s arm. ‘Thanks.’ She made a brief phone call to their liaison officer at GCHQ in Cheltenham to check whether they had any information on the claims Mikhail had made of a coup inside Moscow Centre against his father and Vasily Durov. She said they had heard nothing of the kind.
Kate walked up to the chief’s office on the fifth floor. C, otherwise known as Sir Alan Brabazon, was waiting for her, looking out at the lights of the House of Commons twinkling on the far side of the river. As he turned to face her, she thought how much he had aged these past six months, his thick curly hair now flecked with grey and his hooded eyelids locked under a permanent frown. His wife, Alice, had seen her cancer return – this time to the liver – and her life was now almost certainly measured in weeks rather than months. He walked to his desk and picked up the phone. ‘I’ll get Ian up here.’ He dialled and waited. ‘She’s here,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.
He went to the sofa and chairs in the corner and motioned Kate to sit. He tapped his tortoiseshell reading glasses against his knee, his hands weathered from the hours he spent in the garden at his country home just north of Winchester. ‘How was Stuart?’ he asked.
‘He burst into tears when he was alone with the kids.’