My Name Is Nobody

by Matthew Richardson

  He longs to admit that he has been without suspicion, allowing himself to trust. But paranoia is too much part of who he is, a muscle memory.

  She pauses and takes another sip. ‘There’s just one other thing.’

  He feels dizzy with the flow of revelation. ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Well, technically, you see, the legal adviser in the Director-General’s Office is only ever meant to tell their spouse.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Which presents something of a dilemma.’

  Vine nods. His heart thuds unsteadily against his chest, throat clamping tighter. He has thought about a situation like this too many times. ‘And it’s a good job, is it? Not one to give up.’

  ‘Very good. Extraordinary, in fact.’

  ‘Well …’ he says, trying to feign calm. ‘It would be a shame to ruin it on account of a technicality.’

  ‘A real shame.’

  ‘If only there was something we could do to rectify the situation.’

  ‘If only …’

  He stares down at her. Despite himself, he feels seized by a sudden desire to grasp the opportunity before it fizzles back into the everyday. He is momentarily sick of caution, of watchfulness. The world around them seems to lose definition. The echo of voices and cars outside melts away. There is only the two of them, together forming their own self-sufficient universe, if just for a moment. ‘There is one way that springs to mind … though it comes with conditions.’

  Rose raises her eyebrows. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Till death us do part.’

  ‘Though I hear intelligence work can be deadly.’

  ‘There’s always hope …’

  ‘Lots of foreign travel.’

  He realizes that he can’t bear the thought of a day not looking at her, not waking up beside her, feeling her touch, the scent and expressions that make up this new life. He has broken his vow. He has become dependent on another human being.

  ‘… so what do you say?’

  She moves her hand up from his chest, tracing the map of his face and flattening the worry lines on his brow. Her palm is hot. The tips of her fingers feel like fire on his skin.

  She leans forwards, hovering at his lips and narrowing her eyes as if deep in thought. ‘I think I say yes.’

  20

  It was an inconspicuous place to die. Vine looked at the crumbling white front of Cheltenham train station and felt the unreality of it all grip him. Why had Cosmo Newton ended up breathing his last breath here? He tried to imagine Newton walking down this street and taking in the same view. The station would have been almost empty, the surroundings puddled with the honeyish glow of streetlamps.

  His immediate thought was that it must be related to GCHQ. The Doughnut, as the main building was called, was hard to miss. Signs dotted the town centre advertising the direction. Buses branded the name across their sides. Among the creamy Regency buildings with their air of muted gentility, the rash of wire fencing and armed patrols was impossible to miss. As Chair of the JIC, Newton was a regular visitor. Signals intelligence was embedded in virtually every British espionage and military operation across all corners of the globe. Was this part of some routine work assignment? It was possible. But somehow it didn’t feel probable.

  He walked on, through the car park and into the station. The lines from Newton’s folder repeated themselves in his mind: I know for certain that there is a mole somewhere within the intelligence services … His codename is Nobody. And then that other clue from the transcript, the name obscured by the title: CSIS. Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. In a stroke, so many things made sense. Yousef had divulged his great secret personally to Alexander Cecil. Vine could hear Cecil’s voice on the phone that day in Istanbul ordering him to let Yousef free. Yousef’s secret had been all too real. The knowledge was weapons-grade, more than enough to secure immunity from prosecution. If it was even an approximation of the truth, it could corrode the very foundations of Vauxhall Cross. It was what every Chief most feared: a double within their own ranks.

  He had taken the coach down for greater anonymity, so paused now at the ticket machine and bought a single to Paddington, before passing through the barriers. The station was smaller than it looked from the outside. A short bridge lay directly ahead of him towards the second platform. There were two flights of stairs to his left, leading down to the first platform. Vine had half-expected to find the place filled with cordons and busy with fluorescent police jackets. But it looked like just another day. The speaker overhead crackled with the arrival of the next train to Bristol Parkway. Two train guards chuckled behind him; car doors slammed in rhythm.

  They weren’t treating the death as suspicious. That was the first obvious conclusion. If anything more had been done – and, as yet, it was still conditional – it was professional enough to fool a preliminary inspection by medics. Vine had received the news just before midnight. The reports still hadn’t put a name to the body. If Whitehall’s lawyers had anything to do with it, the unfortunate passenger would remain eternally anonymous. Newton would never have been foolish enough to advertise his identity. As Chair of the JIC, he didn’t merit any personal security detail, unlike the Chief of MI6 or Director-General of MI5. To the initiated, he was part of Whitehall’s institutional memory, schooled in the forgotten arts of Moscow and East Berlin. To the outside observer, he had the faintly distressed air of a retired don.

  Vine had used the same burner phone for both calls. It had been pay as you go, bought with cash. It was virtually untraceable. If the police ever did begin a fuller inquiry they would try and track the number. But Vine didn’t want to get snagged by officialdom yet. If there was something else going on here, he needed the freedom to find out what.

  The only data he had to work with were the time of Newton’s first call and the sketchy details from the news reports online. Newton had called at 9.02. Local media reported that medics had arrived at Cheltenham train station just before 10. That suggested the incident had occurred within a one-hour timeframe, sometime between 9 and 10 p.m.

  Vine walked down the flights of stairs to platform 1. The platform was empty and grey, speckled with chewing gum and hollow coffee cups. Vine walked through the emptiness to the middle of the platform and crouched down on his heels. He inspected the edge of the platform, noticing the debris of tape that had festooned this area only hours earlier. So this was where he had died, an old man tumbling forwards on to the tracks. Vine didn’t move for a moment. The breeze whistled around him, nipping fiercely at his face. After a respectful pause, he took in the immediate view.

  He spotted a single CCTV camera above the doorway to the station café. It was positioned almost exactly in line with the spot. It appeared as if Newton had chosen the angle with a calculating eye to make sure everything was recorded for posterity. But Vine knew that would be another false lead. The cameras within all regional train stations linked to classified sites – GCHQ, Menwith Hill, Porton Down – had stopped recording years ago. It had been a favourite tactic of the PLA and GRU to hack into the insecure CCTV feeds to try and assemble an accurate picture of government employees. Members of each service regularly used the train station, the one place they all passed through which wasn’t wrapped in security. The feed had puttered out a decade ago. There would be no joy there.

  Newton would have known that too. Vine stood up and drank in the rest of the station. Cosmo Newton had arrived at around nine o’ clock, having discovered something that shed new light on the disappearance of Gabriel Wilde. It was obviously of strategic importance, given his reluctance to speak on an open line. It had to be something that was connected with the information he had left behind in the safe deposit box, a thread that linked Yousef’s revelations about a mole codenamed Nobody with the other words written on the sheet of paper – MIDAS, Hermes, Caesar. Newton would have had an almost preternatural awareness that he could be followed. If this was more sinister than a heart attack, there was no way h
e would have been caught off guard. Age had made him sharper, alive to every shade of danger.

  The track was to the right. Further across lay platform 2. Straight ahead was the long expanse of uncluttered concrete. The long-stay car park stood beyond a fringe of scrubby grass to the left, sectioned off by a metal railing. What would Newton have done? This was a man who trained at the height of the Cold War. He had been one of the last to be inducted into the full bevy of analogue tricks: secret inks, ciphers, one-time pads, microfilm. His great boast was an immaculate tradecraft, handwriting in the field that won even the enemy’s respect. That meant he always had a plan and a fallback. Cosmo Newton wouldn’t have gone to his death with an evidence trail left on ice.

  Vine walked back to the start of the platform. He stood for a moment, then moved forwards. He paced his stride deliberately, echoing the rhythms of his own narrow escapes. He was a third of the way down now. Adrenaline would begin to build at this point. Thoughts started to quicken. He looked around at the options in front of him. If he were Newton, where would he go? How would he lay the clue path for others to follow? It had to be somewhere discreet enough not to be foiled by casual passers-by or police, yet obvious enough to be found.

  The training manuals suggested taping files to the back of cisterns, or cleverly disguising them as trash. But Newton would know that the trash would be removed and the bathrooms scrubbed before Vine had the chance to inspect them for clues. He would have needed to find somewhere that would remain intact for long enough. Vine continued walking, scouring every inch of ground on either side to try and spot anything.

  He passed the waiting room. Then he stopped and decided to go inside for a moment. The floor was still drying from a recent mopping and the seats had been spritzed with cleaning fluid carelessly wiped off with a cloth. Vine looked for anything Newton could have used to disguise a document or note, though he saw nothing. He crouched down and peered around the undersides of the seats. But the tradecraft seemed too inelegant for Newton. He would have known he only had moments to live. A trained operative was hustling him. Trying to engineer something in this room would have taken time. The pattern didn’t fit. It was too fussy.

  Vine left the waiting room and continued down the platform. He passed the toilets and then stopped outside the rickety door to the station café, creaking it open and stepping inside to the warmth. The café was a small square with four wooden tables bunched down the middle and a counter up ahead. A stand with newspapers was on the left, rows of drinks and packaged sandwiches lining the rest of the wall.

  Vine took a moment to imagine Newton walking in here. He would know he had just seconds to execute his fallback and ensure that Vine could disinter the trail and continue. Vine walked in the direction of the counter and then saw the shelving on his right. It was different from the newspaper stand. This was a riot of gloss and colour, loud weeklies screaming at him from their front pages. There were three rows, each one getting progressively noisier. The bottom hosted the dustier titles like the Spectator, the Week and New Statesman. Row two moved into fitness and lifestyle magazines: GQ, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair. The third exploded with headlines: Closer, Reveal, OK!.

  Vine imagined Newton reaching this spot and removing the product from his jacket pocket. The criteria for the fallback was much the same as any dead drop: somewhere unremarkable, hiding in plain sight. Vine scanned the titles again. Newton would have had to pick a title that would last the week at most, if not longer. The title couldn’t be so popular it risked being snapped up by the first commuter to arrive for their morning coffee. That discounted the top row. The second row could be a counter-intuitive choice, yet risked being popular enough to be bought quickly. The paper type was wrong as well. The pages were too thick and shiny. Any product hidden there would be painfully apparent.

  The right title needed a newspaper texture, large enough to effectively disguise another document but without the popularity of a broadsheet or tabloid. Vine thumbed through the better-known magazines until he reached older weather-beaten titles at the back. He inched one of them out of place and looked down at it. He thought back to Newton’s study and remembered the publication on top of the desk: The Times Literary Supplement. It met every requirement: the paper, the rectangular shape, the space inside.

  Vine turned to make sure the barista wasn’t glaring at him. She was tidying up the row of drinks and sandwiches. He began flicking through the pages. Part of him wondered whether he had spent too long immersed in the footnotes of the secret world. Was this absurd? Was it not possible that Cosmo Newton had simply died of a heart attack, staggering forwards on to the tracks as his body gave way? He could hear all the arguments, and yet he kept flicking. He had nearly reached page ten and was about to close the paper and return it to the shelf when he stopped.

  He saw a jaggedness pushing through from the next page. He turned to it slowly, part of him sure he would find nothing more than a flyer or flimsy piece of advertising.

  Instead, he found himself staring at a neatly folded piece of A4 paper. He reached inside and carefully drew it out like a precious object that could shatter at any moment. He controlled his breathing and unfolded the sheet slowly so it didn’t tear. He looked at the middle of it and felt a respectful smile pull at the corners of his lips. It was a printout of a map with directions trailing down the page. This was Cosmo Newton’s final act on earth, providing a route for others to follow.

  But there was only one word that Vine really needed to know. He read it again and then tucked the piece of paper into his jacket pocket.

  He had his next destination. It was known to only a select few in the corridors of Whitehall, tucked away in a leafy Cotswold village. Officially it didn’t exist, hoarding anonymity like a virtue.

  BUCKLAND (MOD).

  21

  The satnav pulsed ominously, the digital brain of the vehicle tipping into incoherence. The shrewish voice gave another order for a U-turn, obscured by the clank of a tractor passing on the opposite side of the road. It was soon replaced by the rustle of the trees, so different from the whines and rattles of a city.

  After two further repetitions, the taxi driver jabbed the off button. The screen fizzled blank. Vine asked the driver to stop at the next right turning and then eased back into his seat and tried to banish the thought of Cosmo Newton undertaking a similar journey. The words from Newton’s file came to him again: MIDAS, Hermes, Caesar.

  He had tried crunching all possible permutations again, but still had nothing. MIDAS, Hermes and Caesar were all classical allusions, though two of them were Greek and only one Roman. He thought of Wilde’s copy of The Odyssey again and Ahmed Yousef’s revelations of a mole codenamed Nobody. Somewhere within that riddle lay a truth that Cosmo Newton had discovered, a truth that was potentially fatal. Yet, so far, Vine could only see the cipher, taut with hidden meaning.

  The taxi stopped, and Vine got out and paid. As he watched the car leave, he removed the printout and stared again at the different colours winding their way across the page. Buckland was straight on down the narrow lane in front of him. He walked on, the path narrowing as he snaked further into the village. As the procession of cottages began to thicken, he saw a sign saying MINISTRY OF DEFENCE – RESTRICTED ENTRY in bold white letters, pointing to the right.

  The building was originally a manor house, requisitioned by the government during the Second World War and taken over permanently by the Ministry of Defence in the fifties. As Vine continued down the thin country lane, there was no obvious sign of security. The whorls of wire that guarded GCHQ or the subtle barriers outside Thames House and Vauxhall Cross were replaced instead by a simple pair of black iron gates. There was one member of Special Branch out front. This was not a place visited regularly.

  Vine tucked away the map and reached into his jacket pocket as he slowed his pace. He knew this was the moment he could be found out. Newton had authorized a JIC card for him which would gain entry to a place like this. But, as wi
th the laptop, it would have been officially de-authorized as soon as he was declared dead. Vine was relying purely on the fact that the Special Branch officer would only require a visual ID rather than running it through any wider checks. If they connected this with his visit to the train station, questions would start to be asked about his involvement in Newton’s death. He had covered himself as best he could, but the possibility pinched at him now. He was skirting the edge of something here, amorphous and indistinct, but dangerous. If Newton had stepped on anything toxic to those in Whitehall, there was no limit to what they might do to keep that secret quiet. They had the full might of the state at their disposal.

  He calmed his breathing, drawing out the JIC card. Then he began the approach. He kept his gaze level, posture casual. She would only run further checks if she spotted any obvious symptoms of guilt. He must look like he belonged.

  The Special Branch officer took the card and gave it a bored glance. Her head seemed to remain tilted downwards for minutes on end. Slowly, her left hand began twitching in the direction of the radio clipped on her belt. Vine waited for her to reach for it, could already imagine the tread of others closing in around him. Once again, he wondered what Newton had stumbled upon. What secret had he found out? What if they had already picked him up at Cheltenham and simply tagged him here? There was a chance all this could be a trap, the quietness designed to lure him in before they struck. For a minute, Vine found his eyes taking in all feasible exit routes. He could feel his muscles tense, readying for a possible escape. Newton had been here the previous day. Now he was dead. Vine wondered if he was condemning himself by picking up his trail.

  He watched carefully as the officer’s hand continued to hover over her belt. There was a screech of noise from the radio, but she ignored it. Finally, she looked up and nodded, handing back the card and waving him through.

  The iron gates began to pivot backwards. Vine felt his heartbeat slow as he started to move forwards, careful to keep an even stride. The car park was relatively clear, just a sprinkling of dusty SUVs. He crunched across the gravel and then made his way inside, a last flash of the JIC card as he was buzzed through the security barrier.