Jack was able to set the operation up very quickly using predetermined high-readiness teams thanks to Dominic’s stealth strategy, which enabled tasking without the direct oversight of ministers. It was underhand stuff, and a frenzied and intense operation. Jack had the authority to permit this covert activity, knowing full well Dominic backed him to the hilt.
GCHQ had a few leads that were being verified and data-mined. The teams would close in fast.
Chapter 34
The Pyrenees, 23 April 2016
Sean returned to the search site late in the afternoon to see the team hard at work examining in detail each of the potential burial sites they had identified. As he walked closer to the team, he saw Billy Phish was using ground-penetrating radar to provide alerts of anomalies under the ground at the likely burial sites. His LED screen showed a series of blue, yellow and red streaming bands which would indicate whether anything of large enough volume was buried beneath.
Sean watched Billy Phish mark the sites with metal pegs and blue tape before Jugsy dug through the peat to a depth of about one and a half metres. Sean kept his own counsel and let the team continue without alerting them to the fact that Melissa had gone. He simply explained that Jane had returned to take Melissa for safe keeping.
Sean was eventually alerted to Jane’s death by Jack and learnt that the safe house had been trashed. He now knew that Jane had never actually replied in person to Jack’s texts and this added to his despair. He had got so close but now had a dead operator to answer for and had seen his charge kidnapped. He knew he had to fight back and be dogged in his next moves and also that he had to conjure up a master plan if he was to regain any semblance of self-respect.
Sean pondered the options. Could it be Russians, or a team from MI6? Or were the Americans in play, as Billy Phish had said all along? Who the hell was Natalie working for?
He began to see it didn’t really matter at this stage. And he realised in his quiet moments on the moor that Jack held all the cards to shape the entire operation and was no mug where classic extortion ops were concerned. Any rescue op that was mounted would again be deniable, with no links to the service, Jack or Dominic.
Sean thought about Melissa on and off during the day on the hills. Gentle sleet began to spiral across the moors and his turmoil increased as he thought about the connection he had with Melissa. Her absence felt like torture, and he finally opened up his drawer of emotions. He heard her nagging and teasing him and, in his mind’s eye, saw her being sad with him. He wished now that he hadn’t retreated from the clumsy embrace she had thrown at him. He felt the chemistry and knew they had a curious, but unique, bond.
He stayed quiet out on the hill but, inside him, a steely edge of retaliation was beginning to return. His internal anger sharpened his mind as he plotted his options and he felt an edge coming back to him. The best way out was to take the money, nail the reprisal, get the hell away from the country and run as fast and deep as possible. Why should he stay loyal to the agencies he served now? He pondered Natalie’s offer again.
Billy Phish came over to Sean on the windswept hill. The sun was occasionally popping out from behind the clouds and the sleet was subsiding. ‘I’ve got another five sites that have shown something big under the peat. The trouble is the radar is picking up all the voids in the peat too – probably because the water table is high.’
‘Mate – we’re now at the point where we need to dig and dig fast. That’s where we are now. Time has run out.’
‘OK. We’re not far off but it’ll be bloody hard graft, mate.’ Billy Phish put an arm around Sean’s shoulder. ‘It’s gonna work out, mate. I know about these things, so keep your chin up. We’re all here for you, you know that.’
Billy Phish wasn’t normally one for emotion, but it gave Sean a lift. ‘You’re looking bloody gaunt right now. Do you need anything?’
‘I’ll be fine Billy. How do you think the scent trail might have dispersed around here then? I don’t understand how Mike could hit near the cascade of water but not here?’
‘Could be that they buried the body not in a shallow grave, but a deep one, and the scent is making its way through the aerated ground to that spot. My money is on him being buried near those rocks over there.’ Sean turned to face Billy Phish and looked him straight in the eye.
‘Mate – you’re damn right. It’s easy to dig so they may well have dug very deep. Right, let’s get on with it. Let’s get to the rocks, probe the ground and get Mike to go over the area again.’
Billy Phish and Jugsy used long, black, metal probing rods to burrow deep into the peat. Mike came over from where he had been basking in the sun out of the wind and went wild when he walked over the area they had just probed. He barked incessantly, as crazy as ever, and Sean knew instinctively they had found Alfie.
It was a good area and very easy to dig as well as being out of sight of any walkers. But Sean couldn’t see any ground signs, not even a dip in the ground, that could be a possible sign of a shallow grave. Jugsy put his magnetometer and radar over the area. Nothing on either instrument. After a brief discussion and a long chat about why Mike had hit, with different views about why other equipment hadn’t picked anything up, Sean stood and thought hard.
‘Right boys, let’s dig and let’s dig deep here. I know this is it.’
It was Jugsy who dug the hardest – he loved the grunt of physical work. It wasn’t long before he had burrowed down a full metre and Sean stepped in to take over. Sean probed the peat again and again, and felt a twinge of excitement as the rod hit something and stopped.
‘I’ve hit something boys,’ Sean shouted. ‘The rod has stopped. I think we bloody well have something here.’ He moved the rod and thrust it into the peat again, this time giving it a short sharp tap with a mallet as he stood on the tips of his toes. The same thing. The rod was stuck and had hit something below.
‘It could be bedrock,’ Billy Phish said out loud.
‘No, this is a body.’
‘Wow,’ Billy Phish said, looking for his pipe.
‘Right, no excitement here, boys. I need composure because there’s every chance we are being watched. If we find Alfie we need to stay calm and not give anything away with our body language. I need you to trust me on this. If we find him, we leave him here, re-turf the trench and move on to the next site. OK? I can’t afford for anyone to know we have found him.’
He looked at them sternly, feeling the sweat dripping from his forehead. They both gave a whispered agreement and Sean asked Billy Phish to carry on with the magnetometer at another area they had previously marked out.
Sean and Jugsy would finish this one off. They dug down another half a metre until Sean moved some peat and saw what appeared to be blackened white cloth. He used his hands to peel away the remaining layers, which were compacted. He then uncovered Alfie’s torso – dressed in a peat-stained white shirt.
‘Fucking hell Sean, we’ve only gone and done it,’ whispered Jugsy. ‘What’s your thinking now?’
Sean used his hands to try and uncover Alfie’s head and shoulders by pushing the peat clumps to the side of his body.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ Sean said. ‘All I know is we can’t give away the fact that we have found him. Those fuckers are watching us, and I need to buy some time.’
Alfie’s corpse was rigid, ingrained with peat, and his eyes were closed. The body appeared to be miraculously preserved because it had been buried so deep in the peat. Sean noticed the bullet wound in Alfie’s temple and then used his phone to discreetly take a few pictures. He then removed more peat and soil to uncover his legs.
Alfie was still fully dressed, except his shoes were missing. Sean pulled out a small scalpel blade, cut the shirt and carefully made an incision under Alfie’s left armpit. He felt around for a tiny data transmitter, then made another incision to cut it out. Using a pair of tweezers, he removed the tiny electronic device, which was only a few thousand microns thick and used Bluetooth technology
, and tucked it into his breast pocket. He then stood up, with only his chest and head visible above the trench.
‘OK Jugsy, can you start replacing the peat? Replace it all carefully – I’ll explain later.’
Jugsy nodded and just got on with the job. ‘Poor bastard,’ he muttered.
PART THREE
REPRISAL
Chapter 35
The Pyrenees, 23 April 2016
Sean called it a day on the dig at 6pm and made his way back to the hotel – alone. He was gripped by this case. And astonished at finding the body after all the false positives – he had trusted in his resolve and it had paid off. He felt sure he now had the clues to find the files.
It had taken a series of attentive questions from Sean using neuro-linguistic techniques to tease out what appeared to be an innocuous piece of information from Melissa. She didn’t really recognise it as being important during her recollection of her conversations with Alfie. It had been buried deep in her subconscious mind. The clue she had uttered related to Alfie putting his hand under his armpit regularly. And grimacing as if in pain. She always thought it was a foible but, each time Sean asked where Alfie had put his hands, she recalled this curious habit of keeping his hand under his armpit. It had taken Sean many hours of interrogation to reveal these innocuous clues, but they came out eventually and he immediately recognised them as being the keys to Pandora’s box.
The anticipation of opening the files from an ultra-slim electronic implant was thrilling for Sean. Before he left the hills, Sean briefed the team on the moor to keep searching the other areas. This deception would provide the cover and time he needed with Natalie. The safest plan right now was to carry on with the search as if nothing had been found.
*
Sean arrived back at the hotel at 7pm. He took his laptop out of his rucksack, plugged it in and waited for it to boot up. Meanwhile, he took Alfie’s data transmitter, cleaned it up and laid it on the desk next to the laptop.
Sean turned on the Bluetooth technology on his laptop and let it search for any local devices. It seemed to take an age to him but eventually the laptop identified the tiny transmitter, which Alfie had given the name ‘CHIME’. Sean’s excitement peaked as the devices paired, and the transmitter requested a password. Sean scrabbled around for the papers he had found at the Baker Street flat. The passwords were a mixture of letters and numbers, tight enough security to stop a password generator cracking the code. The second one on the list gave him access to the data. He was in.
Alfie had somehow managed to find a bioengineer, a so-called flesh engineer, to insert the biomedical implant into his skin. It had probably been done in Germany, Sean thought. This novel electronic device had a Bluetooth connector and a computer chip and could connect wirelessly to any device. Alfie would simply have pointed his arm at any device, let them pair and then the data he had inside his body could have been accessed.
Sean wondered in how many places Alfie might have stored the files in the cloud. He still hadn’t heard from the cryptographer about the obituary and suspected that the transmitter also held a code for entry into another account. He assumed that Alfie would not stick all his Crown jewels in one basket.
Sean clicked the data link and watched a screen pop up with large red file icons, each of them given a name. A second password was needed to enter these, which he again found on the list from the Baker Street flat. Sean began to scan each folder. There were literally thousands of files, most of which appeared to have different classifications, but in the main the tops and bottoms of the pages were marked ‘SECRET’. Many were marked ‘TOP SECRET’. Some of the documents used different caveats for release and disclosure, such as ‘SECRET UK EYES ONLY’ or ‘SECRET US/UK EYES ONLY’. He flicked through a few files and scan-read some of the information, just to get a feel for the story in each file. He felt tired but knew he would need to research the files through the night. It would be an exhausting trawl. He made his first coffee and stripped down to just a T-shirt and shorts.
Sean took a break and then looked inside a file that provided all the cloud locations in which Alfie had stored his caches. The implant could only hold so much data. Sean then went to the main cloud site to delve deeper into Alfie’s secret hoard.
What he read astonished him. Alfie had been meticulous in keeping notes on his detailed research and he gave specific locations of where he had found the data – all of it obtained by Alfie trawling and searching online intelligence systems, which he clearly had full access to. Sean began to see that Alfie had conducted brute-force hacking to get directly into digital compartments he didn’t have access to. The more files Sean uncovered, the more he could see they were part of a compartmentalised operation, where each person only knew a small part of the entire intelligence collection operation. It was high-grade intelligence on multiple British and American operations that Alfie had uncovered – and he had then hacked into other areas of intelligence to retrieve follow-up information. He had put together a huge jigsaw puzzle.
Sean felt a chill and a shiver went down his spine as he recognised the scale and scope of what Alfie had wanted to do. It was phenomenal.
There were a few files that stood out for Sean because of the capital letters that Alfie had used in his file-naming convention. One was called ‘MPS and LAWYER corruption’, and related to the Metropolitan Police and legal firms. It contained hacked emails as likely evidence of endemic corruption that was rife amongst many senior officers who had ingratiated themselves with lawyers. A quick glance showed Sean that Alfie had hacked into key senior officers’ voicemails, emails and personal files, some of which related to the Iraqi inquiries and paedophile rings.
He made a mental note to contact Samantha to find out how she and One-Eyed Damon were getting on with investigating his own quarry, Frazer, the bent ex-copper who had framed him and who haunted him at night.
There was one particular file marked ‘Wilshaw’ that provided Alfie’s own intelligence and investigations into the death of the scientist Professor Margaret Wilshaw before the Iraq war, transcripts of which the government would certainly not want released. They all related to the dodgy dossier, the precursor intelligence record that had eventually led to the war in Iraq. This began to get personal for Sean.
What Sean read worried him. He read about his own intelligence gathered back in 2002 surrounding the Iranian missions in Central Asia to find and collect radiological sources, the focus of his very own undercover operation in Uzbekistan. This began to make him feel queasy as he recalled his memories of tracking and tracing the passage of isotopes across the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and finally into Iran. The folly of it all was that Sean’s own mission had been to verify that it was the Iraqis who were actually buying the material – in order for the US and UK governments to justify on intelligence grounds that Saddam Hussein was in the forefront of developing terrorist-related weapons of mass destruction. Sean knew otherwise: it was actually the Iranians and this had disturbed him for many years. But it had all been kept under wraps.
What Sean did know was that US forces in Iraq had eventually found very old – pre-1991 – chemical weapons after 2004. But that was a very different story to the one that had been pushed out to the UN to justify war. Sean pondered the oddity that there had theoretically been enough of a casus belli with the verified intelligence of Iraq’s deep links to Al-Qaeda without the need to spin WMD intelligence.
Sean then read how Alfie had undertaken a lengthy investigation to uncover the depths of deceit regarding Iraqi intelligence and the more sordid details surrounding the death of Wilshaw. Alfie had explained in his investigative files how he had been able to hack and crack personal accounts of those involved in the affair, in order to expose the killing of Wilshaw by the Americans. This was staggering stuff – and the evidence Alfie had revealed was platinum grade.
Alfie had uncovered evidence that indicated that Wilshaw may have been murdered, instead of taking her own life. Alfie had s
urmised in his notes that this was because she was regarded as a traitor by someone in the MoD or British Intelligence, or because the Americans feared she would disclose the Pentagon’s fabrications intended to influence British government’s opinion over the war in Iraq.
Alfie had written about this. The bottom line is that Margaret Wilshaw was probably killed because she somehow cocked up the secret avenues of communications between American military intelligence and the British government whereby lies, not just those involving Iraq, were fed to the British government to influence British actions along lines that helped the Pentagon.
Alfie had provided some hyperlinks to documents he felt gave direct evidence of his claims and were from American intelligence systems. Alfie had added notes below this. It looked to the Americans that Wilshaw had evidence about a plot to plant evidence of nuclear weapons in the deserts of Iraq, and that Wilshaw might reveal such deception in an article she was writing. The Americans couldn’t allow that. Politicians covered it up and forced a public inquiry instead of an inquest into Margaret Wilshaw’s death and this was the first time an inquest had not been held on the death of someone in Britain for decades. It was a whitewash.
Sean moved on to another file highlighted in yellow. He read through it for a while before lurching back into his chair – this was gripping stuff. It took Sean back to his forays into Central Asia over twelve years ago. He was reading how Alfie had hacked into the personal files of a foreign spy. Sean read Alfie’s written transcripts of the affair. …the extent of emails and personal files shown on his computer, often in hidden areas, provides total and unambiguous proof that he was leaking classified intelligence documents to the enemy via a third party. From the evidence I have uncovered, he had been doing this for many years,leaking data to the host country and other Asian and Middle Eastern states by dead letter drops using Bluetooth technology to transmitters & receivers hidden across the city. He had been conversing personally with their Head of Service intelligence, and kept photo shots of the information he was passing on from London-generated intelligence through the Foreign Office. The leaked documents can be seen here. Alfie had embedded a link in the Word document.
Failsafe Query Page 21