My Name Is Nobody

by Matthew Richardson

  Vine smiles. ‘I don’t know how familiar you are with state-run care homes, Mr Newton. But not many have budgets for foreign holidays. Blame the government rather than me on that one.’

  Newton looks up, an interested crease on his heavy face. ‘You’re political, then, are you?’

  Vine takes a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, removing one and scrabbling for a lighter. ‘Hardly. I’m a mathematician, not a politician. I believe in evidence, not words.’

  Letting Vine search for a moment longer, Newton slips a lighter out of his jacket pocket and throws it over. Vine catches it, lights his cigarette and relaxes as he puffs.

  ‘And how do you imagine my world has changed in the last few years?’ asks Newton. ‘If that’s not too hypothetical for you …’

  ‘Berlin Wall fallen, Soviet Union dismantled, EU promising a century of peace and Northern Ireland over the worst of the troubles. Must be rather boring now, I’d have thought.’ He chucks the lighter back to Newton and admires the deft way he cups it in one of his bearish hands.

  ‘So you don’t subscribe to the view that every war breeds the next one?’

  ‘I don’t subscribe to anything.’

  ‘Excellent …’ Newton crosses his legs. ‘We are currently in limbo, watching the world change around us. The Cold War has gone, some new threat will replace it. Of that we can be sure. New modes of warfare too. Not the old guard like me. We need codebreakers, people with a head for numbers, technology too. Are you any good with computers?’

  ‘Good enough,’ says Vine.

  ‘And what about loyalty?’ says Newton, brushing a crumb off his trouser leg. ‘I can see that you’re clever, not afraid to speak your mind. But are you loyal enough to serve your country, to obey every command no matter what?’

  Vine is about to answer when he checks himself. It’s a trick, a final question to weed out sloppy thinking. ‘I would be loyal to the values of my country, never to those who seek to override them. Loyalty under the law, never no matter what.’

  Newton smiles, nods appreciatively. ‘Well, preliminaries over, I think we’re back to where we started. Why do you want to be a spy?’

  3

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying Gabriel Wilde has just … disappeared?’

  Cosmo Newton sighed. ‘Left the station in Istanbul at approximately 1915 on the evening of Thursday 3 November. According to the CCTV feed, at least. The first sign of trouble was when he didn’t show up for work the next morning. The station alert went out at 0800 and the Ambassador was informed. From witness statements, we think any incident took place roughly between 0100 and around 0200. Forensics found evidence of a struggle. Impossible to judge exactly how many hostiles we could be talking about. From some initial work, we think not more than three. The kitchen was covered in Wilde’s blood. But the snatch team were good. We recovered no other DNA matches. It bears all the signs of a professional take-out.’

  ‘Any clues about the identities of the hostiles?’

  ‘No, they were good. Too good.’

  Vine coughed lightly and continued to stare ahead. He wrapped his upturned collar tighter around his neck, wincing slightly at the cold. He felt numb at the news, as if the full impact would only hit him hours later. For now, he was content to drift on the guilty thrill of the diversion.

  St James’s Park was emptying. When they’d first arrived it was dotted with parents pushing buggies, replaced now with a scattering of joggers immune to the chill.

  Vine stared up for a minute at the sky. ‘What was the follow-up?’

  ‘The Ambassador ordered an immediate search party, unsurprisingly. A team were dispatched to comb the area. Tentative mention was made of trying to use the Cousins and track him by drone, but the relationship has been patchy of late.’

  ‘And the reaction at Vauxhall Cross?’

  ‘Well, there’s the rub. That’s where the story stops.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Newton transferred his umbrella between hands, his pace slowing a fraction. ‘Cecil won’t let so much as a whisper about it penetrate the walls of Whitehall,’ he said. ‘Wilde was replaced as Head of Station almost instantly, and normal service has been resumed.’

  ‘And the Americans?’

  ‘As far as I know, the drone request was never authorized. They’ll have picked up mutterings, of course, but Vauxhall Cross has kept quiet otherwise. Cecil’s best plan is to sit pretty and hope Brexit helps sweep it all away.’

  ‘And you? The JIC?’

  ‘We live by rumours alone. Cecil has been consolidating his grip. It isn’t worth the while of any staffer to blab. Everyone’s too frightened of him. The lessons of the past are there for all to see. I don’t need to remind you of that.’

  ‘No … so why have you summoned me?’

  ‘I’ve been shut out,’ Newton said. ‘Vauxhall Cross has gone into lockdown. Cecil has always seen the JIC as an irrelevance. The Foreign Office doesn’t want to know. Whitehall instinctively looks the other way when this sort of scandal breaks. But something’s not right. And I need to find out what.’

  ‘Why the fallout?’

  Newton grimaced. ‘The new Public Accountability Bill, extending the thirty-year rule on public files to all branches of Whitehall.’

  Vine laughed. ‘Open government.’

  ‘Indeed. If we can read Cabinet minutes, why not what Five, Six and GCHQ got up to? Even so, none of this makes sense. The Public Accountability Bill has been in the works for years. There’s something else Cecil’s trying to hide. He knows he can’t keep Whitehall in the dark about Wilde’s situation for ever. Perhaps in the old days, but not now. This is him freelancing, I’m sure of it. Whatever game he’s playing, he obviously thinks it is worth the risk.’

  ‘And he thinks he can win.’

  Newton stopped. ‘The truth is, I want you to do something for me. Something that only you can do.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  Newton sighed, a greyish plume forming. ‘Have a good sniff,’ he said. ‘Inhale the flavours. Swirl it around the glass and see what impression you get. Until the Yousef case is cleared up, you’re not going to be back at Vauxhall Cross any time soon. Might help keep you busy.’

  ‘Thanks for the thought.’

  Newton looked up at Vine. ‘No one else knows Wilde like you did,’ he said. ‘And I can’t trust anyone on the inside. The greatest hope for MI6 in a generation – a man prepared to one day clutch the green pen as Chief – is snatched in the middle of the night, and we’re all meant to pretend it never happened.’

  Vine pressed his hands deeper into his furred coat pockets. ‘So what is my brief?’ he said.

  ‘I want you to go and interview the key people. See what was happening at the embassy, within the station. Go through Wilde’s history and see if you can find me some answers. There were endless rumours about something he might be working on. He was about to be handpicked as the next Director of Global Operations, then seemed to pack it all in. Everyone thought it was personal problems, but see if it was something more. Go back to the start. Talk to Turnbull at Oxford. His Deputy Head of Station is back in London. Get their thoughts. Here’s one name to get you started.’ He handed across a card.

  Vine took the card and scanned the name. Olivia Cartier MP, Member of Parliament for Kensington.

  ‘One of the last people to see Gabriel Wilde before his disappearance,’ said Newton. ‘She was at a dinner at the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a call and she’s expecting you.’

  Vine stowed it in his coat pocket. He waited for a second before he asked it. Then he gabbled it out, nervous about the consequences. ‘The report of the scene. Did anyone see or hear him being taken?’

  ‘The report said two witnesses in the complex heard some movement outside, but there was nothing unusual in that. Wilde was often called in to the embassy at odd hours. He moved out of official accommodation after the separation with Cecil’s blessing, claimed
it gave him greater cover. No one saw anything or had reason to raise the alarm.’

  ‘And CCTV? Emergency protocol from Wilde?’

  Newton swallowed, hesitating slightly. ‘What little there was had been down for weeks. You know what it’s like out in the field. The on-site team ran all the tests they could, but there was nothing further on the forensics front. He wouldn’t have had time to activate any emergency protocol. The snatch teams have been getting better. They’ll have shadowed him, found out his routine. It will have been clinical, all mobiles and electronic devices the first thing they destroy. Easier for them, given it wasn’t an official embassy residence. It would have been over in a minute.’

  Vine removed his hands from his pockets now and folded his arms. ‘But we’re assuming he was alive when they grabbed him?’

  ‘Probably unconscious, but that’s the working assumption. Drugged and bundled into the boot is the best guess. In terms of past experience, there’s still some hope that they want to leverage the kidnap for all it’s worth, probably a prisoner exchange. If not, use it as a media opportunity. The public execution of an MI6 Head of Station. One hell of a front page.’

  ‘And has there been any communication since?’

  Newton shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. With every day that passes …’

  ‘… the worse it gets.’

  ‘Yes. We both know no one comes back from this. Not really.’ Newton turned to him. ‘I’ve been sidelined officially. That’s why I need you.’

  Vine looked around. It was the fear that lurked behind the self-imposed armoury of every MI6 officer, the deadly implications of falling into enemy hands. Despite all that had come between them, he felt sick as he thought of Wilde locked in darkness, the colourful possibilities of the future now fast diminishing, replaced instead by the ghoulish certainty of what lay ahead. They had all undergone hostage training at the Fort, savage interrogation sessions with an SAS team. They had been told how to prepare mentally and physically for torture. But practice was no match for reality.

  ‘… and wider implications?’ Vine shifted uncomfortably. As he stood here in the park everything that had come between him and Wilde seemed redundant. Instead, he felt the initial kick of friendship return, the irrepressibility of Wilde that he had once so cherished. He realized that he had never had the chance to make it right. Now he probably never would.

  Newton’s voice quickly regained an operational briskness. ‘The consequences are unthinkable,’ he said. ‘Our most important assets in the Middle East potentially compromised. Our on-going relationship with every Western intelligence agency doomed.’ He lowered his voice. ‘No matter how long he tries to resist, they all talk eventually. I’m afraid, in some ways, the best we can hope for now is that they killed him quickly.’

  Vine felt a shudder at the clinical way he said it, no doubt echoed in the conference rooms of Vauxhall Cross, Cecil and the rest of the fifth floor secretly wishing Wilde away. That was what they were in the end, Vine realized: just so much collateral damage. He was tired of it all. ‘And what if I’ve left this behind? What if I don’t want to play this game any more?’

  ‘Because you have no other choice,’ said Newton. ‘Until your investigation is concluded, you are in limbo.’ He fixed Vine another knowing stare. ‘And you realize she’s back, don’t you? Returned to Thames House after the separation.’

  Vine found his concentration lost in the swirl of noise around them. He hated the smallness of this world, the claustrophobia of old regrets. Yet something else burned too, the better part of him drawn to the case despite himself. As he forced his gaze back towards Newton, he wondered whether redemption came in such an unlikely disguise. ‘Who’s back?’ he said.

  Newton smiled. ‘Rose, of course.’

  4

  Vine looked at the screen again: he was up by a couple of thousand on the day. As the graphs and numbers flickered back at him, he could feel his anxieties recede. It acted as a form of relief. On the markets there was just the formal purity of numbers. He had been an addict ever since Cambridge, long mornings propped up in bed flicking through the pages of the Financial Times.

  His record spoke for itself. He had played it well just before the dotcom crash, then inched his way into behavioural economics, seeing the madness and shifting his money accordingly in the run-up to the financial crisis. He had taken out any loan available and bet it all against the over-leveraged banking sector. With the property market tanking and the rest of the world haemorrhaging money, he had upgraded from his roomy flat in Pimlico to this place in Wellington Square, Chelsea.

  Six months later, he had enough to redecorate the library. It was his temple, a vast rectangular space with polished wooden flooring, a high Regency ceiling frosted with decorative twirls and ornamentation. Each part of the room housed a different collection: general reading on the right, intelligence history on the left, and then the collection up ahead, constantly added to, his newly revived work on Enlightenment mathematics. The rest of the room was bare, a nirvana of nothingness.

  He clicked off the screen and turned instead to the secure laptop that Cosmo Newton had biked round following their meeting. He lifted the lid and tapped his way through the multiple layers of security with Newton’s own login details. The screen flared into life with a large, searchable JIC database, the Cabinet Office logo filling the top of the screen.

  Vine clicked through until he found the folder he needed. He drew up the file containing the brief report from Istanbul Station into Wilde’s disappearance. He started reading through it again. The prose was dry and colourless, but the facts were clear. The embassy CCTV feed showed Wilde leaving the premises at 1915 on the evening of Thursday 3 November. The first alert had sounded from the Deputy Head of Station at 0800 on the morning of Friday the 4th. A station team visited Wilde’s flat at 0900, before full search protocol was initiated at 1000 on the orders of the Ambassador. A forensic team were helicoptered in and conducted an initial sweep of the flat, before Wilde was officially declared missing.

  Vine read through the details for a second time. He clicked on the attachment to the file and made his way through the CCTV photos. He began trying to reconstruct the scenario in his mind. He could see Gabriel Wilde leave, careful as always to notice any watcher stepping into rhythm behind him. The embassy regulations preferred staff to stay within their vehicles as much as possible. But Wilde knew as well as anyone that vehicles were too easy a target for tracking devices and electronic surveillance. He always preferred to risk it on foot, dodging his way through the crowds, a change from muggy days cocooned within the station.

  He would make his way back to his flat. Despite himself, he would feel the same nostalgic bite as he contemplated his new arrangements: a single-bed flat, Rose permanently back in the UK, wrestling the electrics to life in the hope of a decent supper. And, always, there was the paranoia of constant suspicion. There were ears everywhere, informants surrounding him. Each movement was logged, listened to and sieved for advantage. It was the new normal of life in the field.

  Vine closed the lid of the laptop. He paced back to the large rectangular windows that looked down on the tidy square of lawn below, trying to stop himself thinking of the rest. He had seen enough case reports to last a lifetime. The clinical precision disguised the brutal reality. Shock usually numbed you to begin with. Once you had time to assess the scale of the threat, it was too late. By the amount of blood the forensic team had found, Wilde had marshalled impressive resistance. But it came down to numbers in the end. No one stood a chance against a trained snatch team.

  He breathed deeply, the thoughts pounding at him. He closed his eyes and tried to shake them off. Instead, he found himself mulling over the past. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever be able to escape that world of rivalries and jealousies. The cast list was still with him somehow: Wilde, Newton, Cecil, Rose. He felt a familiar nausea dig at him, the same feeling he had experienced in the park. He knew deep down that Newt
on was right. He would agree to his request. He longed to be back in the action, a chance to walk the halls of Vauxhall Cross one last time with his head held high. But more than that: whatever the consequence of his relationship with Wilde, in that past life he had once been more brother than friend. They had been through too much together. The thought of Wilde being tortured to death would leave him no comfort; he would be restless until he knew why.

  The silence held for a second longer, then broke. Vine turned, wondering for a moment if he was imagining it. Then the sound echoed again, puncturing the stillness.

  The doorbell was ringing.

  5

  The rules around the identities of members of the Secret Intelligence Service – more commonly known as MI6 – were clear. To the world at large, they were invisible.

  The stringent vetting process took a year before you gained STRAP 3 clearance. Once you had survived training at Fort Monckton, you were then inducted into numerous layers of anonymity. There were two principal ways to hide: official cover and a selection of aliases. The official cover was used within the environs of Whitehall, armed with a card proclaiming allegiance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. An alias was for outside the manicured streets of SW1. Surnames and backgrounds were slyly altered. The technicians in the basement of Vauxhall Cross produced the props – fake passports, business cards, copycat national insurance numbers. When you bought a property, took out a mortgage or opened a bank account, the trail was obscured behind the scenes, while physical security required constant personal vigilance. Whenever Vine approached Wellington Square, he unconsciously checked his tail. A team from Vauxhall Cross had installed a security camera above his front door and a panic button on the second floor. Paranoia wasn’t an add-on. It infected every second of life.

  Vine checked on the security feed relayed directly to his computer. On the steps of the house was a man in a red Royal Mail top with a brown package balanced uneasily in his right hand. He zoomed in a fraction and studied the face: an angular jaw, narrow emerald-green eyes and a fuzz of toffee-brown hair greying at the edges. There should be no way that any foreign intelligence service could know about his recent suspension from duty. He regularly had the house swept for bugs, and all personnel information at Vauxhall Cross was fortressed behind the thorniest possible encryption methods. But if they did, they would know that now was the optimum time to strike. The panic button on the second floor would be met by shrugs in the techier rooms of Vauxhall Cross. There would be no immediate search party sent out if he was abducted, no clamour to let teams loose on the streets of London. The paperwork would be quietly edited and the suspension transformed to severance. He would be cast adrift, doomed to wear out his vocal cords pleading for help that would never arrive.