Breaking Cover

by Stella Rimington

  It took her just two days to put together a comprehensive dossier, but to her intense disappointment she found that she couldn’t fault the man. His credentials were all in order. His Norwegian passport was legit, and its details of date and place of birth (12 February 1974 in a village outside Bergen) had been officially confirmed by the Oslo Home Ministry, then (less officially) by the Lutheran Synod of Bergen, holder of the local parish records.

  So far, so clear. Entering the UK, Hansen had supplied a local London address, in a street off the City Road in Islington. It was a new flat in a small modern block, let on a short-term lease signed by Laurenz Hansen. A credit-card check had found his rating unimpeachable: he used a Visa card in the UK, and an American Express Diamond card when he travelled. He banked in London with Lloyds, where he had a little over £26,000 sitting in a variety of accounts.

  All of which was perfectly fine and untroubling, compared to the mystery Peggy uncovered when exploring Hansen’s employment record. He was a private banker – Jasminder had been clear about this when talking to Peggy about him – but it was proving awfully hard to find the bank. Each month £11,000 was deposited in his Lloyds current account from one in Zurich held by something called M. Q. Hayter & Co., but Peggy had found no record anywhere of any kind of financial institution, much less bank, operating under that name. Tellingly, too, Hansen’s lease agreement with the flat’s owner had asked for the name of his employer, but the line had been left blank.

  Peggy liked to do a thorough job and was disappointed with her failure. ‘Why wouldn’t he put his employer’s name on the form?’ She and Liz were discussing the dossier in Liz’s office. Outside a brisk wind stirred the trees along the Embankment, and on the Thames a heavy swell made progress slow for a rusty barge, which was chugging upstream.

  ‘Who knows? Bankers are very secretive sometimes. No doubt for their own protection.’

  ‘You’d think the landlord would want to know. I gather the flat’s in a nice building; the owner would want to feel confident Hansen was good for the rent.’

  ‘You’re right, but if Hansen gave him six months’ cash as a down payment, his qualms would have gone away pretty fast.’

  ‘But why bother doing that unless he was covering his tracks?’

  ‘Hard to say. Could be a dozen reasons. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.’

  ‘That means you’ve got one in your head.’

  Liz laughed. ‘You’re right! But I’m going to keep it to myself until we’ve dug around some more.’

  ‘I’m not sure where else to dig. I’ve checked every possible financial registry, but there’s no Laurenz Hansen listed in any of them. The Revenue haven’t anything on him either. He hasn’t filed for Non-Dom status here.’

  ‘Jasminder did tell you he had been moving around a lot.’

  Peggy nodded. ‘Yes, she did, though she also made it sound as if he was always on top of things. The last thing a banker would want is trouble with the Revenue.’

  ‘I’m going to make a call or two,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll let you know if I find anything out.’

  Liz had a little more experience of banks than she’d let on. Almost ten years ago – well before Martin Seurat had entered her life – she had had a relationship for almost a year with a Dutch banker called Piet. Her time with him had been fun, but never very serious – he had been in London less than in Amsterdam, and they had never spent enough continuous time together to grow close. The affair had ended when Piet met someone else in Holland, but Liz had never held that against him, and the two of them had remained friends even after Piet married his new girlfriend, Sylvia. On the rare occasions Piet came to London, he and Liz usually met up for a meal; once he had even brought Sylvia along, and Liz was pleased to find that she was extremely friendly and they all got on very well.

  Then two years ago Piet had moved to London, with Sylvia and their new baby, to take up a post with one of the UK’s leading private banks. Since then, he and Liz chatted on the phone every few months, and twice she’d gone for Sunday lunch to their roomy house in Putney.

  During their relationship, Liz had never told him what she did for a living, but Piet was intelligent and well informed and Liz could tell from their recent meetings that he had a pretty good idea. When she rang him now from her office, he was his usual cheerful, friendly self. ‘Sylvia and I were just talking about you,’ he said. ‘We want you to come to lunch soon.’

  ‘I’d love that. But I was ringing to ask a favour – a professional one. I’m trying to locate someone who’s a private banker in London, but I’m not having any luck. I’d rather not say why I want to know, except I wouldn’t want the man to learn that I was looking for him.’

  ‘Understood. What’s the name of the bank he works for?’

  ‘That’s the problem. All I know is that he’s paid from an account in Zurich held by something called M. Q. Hayter & Co. I know he works at the London office of an international bank, but if it’s this Hayter company, I can’t find any trace of it. So maybe it has another name and that’s just a salary account or something. The guy I’m looking for is apparently quite senior. He’s a Norwegian but based here. I think he may be the head of their office in London. Yet I can’t seem to find him.’

  ‘Give me a day, and give me his name. If he is a banker in London, I’ll find him for you.’

  But when Piet came back to her, he too was empty-handed. ‘I can’t find him either, Liz. There’s no bank registered here called Hayter and no sign of your man. If he’s working in London then he’s working solo. He’s not employed by any bank.’

  ‘If you don’t mind my asking, how can you be so sure?’

  ‘When I was at Lehman, before they went bust – thank God I’d got out by then – we used to keep a register of bankers. We called it the “C Book”, and C stood for the Competition. The person in charge of the C Book changed every three months, because nobody wanted to do the job for longer than that – if it turned out you failed to list a new arrival to the banking game, you had to buy champagne for all the partners that Friday. Mind you, this was pre-2008.’

  Liz laughed, remembering the mad excesses of those boom years. Bankers lighting cigars with £100 notes, or spending more than the average person’s annual wage on a single night out at a club.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Piet, ‘the C Book survived all the ructions and it’s still being kept up, and the penalty’s the same for missing a name. I called a friend of mine who has access to it and asked him to check. No Laurenz Hansen. No Hansen at all, in fact. As I said, Liz, if he’s working at a bank, I would have found him. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.’

  When Liz sat down with Peggy to review the Hansen findings, she said, ‘This man has covered all the bases very neatly. Except one. It seems he’s no more a banker than I am.’

  ‘Then why’s he pretending to be one?’

  ‘Probably because it’s quite difficult for the ordinary person to check, and it sounds impressive… I don’t know. Both perhaps. Jasminder swallowed it anyway. It’s quite a good cover – if you’re not expecting to come in contact with professionals like us. The banking world is impenetrable to most people. The City could be in Mongolia for all your average person understands it.’

  ‘But why not have a real job if it’s a cover?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly because it might get in the way of what he’s really doing – for whatever organisation or country.’

  Liz and Peggy looked at each other. They were both absorbing the implications of what they had discovered. Then Liz said, ‘We’re going to put Mr Hansen under the microscope. We need to have a look at him and what he’s up to when he’s supposed to be working in his bank. And that includes surveillance. Would you give Wally Woods a ring and warn him that we will be putting in a request for a blanket surveillance operation?’ Wally Woods was the chief controller of A4, the surveillance section. ‘Tell him I think it’s extremely important and he’s not to downgrade it just becaus
e it’s not from counter-terrorism.’ They both knew that Wally Woods was a great admirer of Liz’s and, if she said it was important, it would get priority.

  ‘OK. But what about Jasminder?’ enquired Peggy. ‘What do you think she knows about Hansen’s background?’

  ‘That’s what we’ll have to find out. I can’t believe she’s working with him. Not unless her whole life for the last few years has been some sort of myth. She’s been the face of civil liberties, Miss Freedom of Information. It can’t all have been a blind.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing sinister in it at all. Maybe whatever he’s doing has nothing to do with Jasminder.’

  ‘Come on, Peggy. You don’t believe that. But we’ll find out. You keep in touch with her, just as a friend – like before – and A4 surveillance will find out what Laurenz is up to. But we’ve got to alert Six. Someone needs to keep an eye on her over there, get alongside her, just in case she is up to something. We need to know if there’s anything odd about her behaviour, what she has access to, whether she’s asking questions that seem outside her normal sphere of work. She’s working very closely with C himself and that must give her enormous scope.’

  ‘I know you’re right, Liz, but I just can’t believe it. Jasminder is so principled. Why would she be working undercover?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Liz, ‘but I hope we’ll find out soon. Don’t forget what Mischa told me in Tallinn. If this is the pincer operation, we need to know how it’s being worked.’

  45

  Even in her most radical left-wing phase, Jasminder had felt a strong loyalty to Britain, the country she was now trying to betray. Guilt had become her constant, nagging companion. She could not find any excuse for what she was about to do, except the threat to little Ali if she refused. That was enough, but it did not diminish the guilt. She was constantly asking herself if she shouldn’t tell someone what had happened. She could tell Peggy or she could even tell C himself. Surely they would be discreet and clever enough to solve the problem. Surely they could rescue Ali before Koslov and his friends got to her. But something held her back. She knew how close Koslov’s men must be to the school and to her brothers’ shop. They must be monitoring her family all the time. It would only take one false move on the part of the police and Ali would be dead or injured for life.

  A couple of weeks ago she had looked for the photograph of Ali standing proudly beside a sandcastle on the beach where the family had gone for their last summer holiday. It had been in the back pocket of her purse for months, but suddenly it wasn’t there. She’d realised then that someone had been through her purse and taken it. Had it been done just to frighten her, or to help Koslov’s men recognise the little girl? She didn’t know, but its disappearance chilled Jasminder to the bone.

  Then there was the painful personal side of things. She had totally misread Laurenz Hansen; the man she had fallen in love with didn’t exist – Laurenz was a different man altogether and he had never loved her. She was just a tool for him to use. It was utterly humiliating, as well as heart-breaking. To add to all that, she couldn’t work out how she was going to do what her new masters wanted. At their most recent meeting Laurenz had said that the list Koslov had shown her was just a pointer to the sort of information they wanted. Her personal top target was to find out what sources MI6 had in Moscow. She had told him that that sort of information was the most closely guarded of any and there was no way she was going to be told about individual sources. He’d said she was not using her imagination; she could certainly find out which of her colleagues ran secret sources in Russia and get alongside them. She could observe who travelled to Russia and when and how often. Then she could set about cultivating someone in the right area.

  He’d tried to encourage her. No one, he’d said, was expecting instant results, but she needed to show she was cooperating. Her repeated protests that she had been recruited to liaise with the media and to present the outward face of Six to the world, not as an operational officer, were ignored by Laurenz. She’d told him that she was only briefed on operations when they became public, or when it was necessary for her to know about them for drafting C’s speeches or for other public presentations. As the face of a new, more open MI6, there was no need for her to have the most secret operational information, and if she tried to get it, it would seem odd and arouse suspicion. So how was she going to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of Laurenz and his employers?

  She tried nonetheless. She suggested to C that part of the new ‘openness’ campaign should be internal, and not just directed at the media and general public. Employees of the Service should understand what Jasminder was there for, she argued, and proposed a series of briefings to the various departments at Vauxhall Cross. C readily agreed, so she gave a programme of talks, and was gratified that so many people came and seemed to listen – they asked her lots of questions at the end. But she soon realised that though talking about her mission raised her own work’s profile, it didn’t tell her anything about the work of her colleagues.

  Then she tried the social side of things. She started eating in the canteen at lunchtime, hoping to meet people, though she felt awkward, even intrusive, joining tables where everyone already seemed to know each other. Lunch was in any case a rushed affair for most people. The public might picture James Bond feasting on lobster and chilled Chablis in a gentlemen’s club in St James’s, but the reality was that people in the Service worked too hard to waste time lunching – many just ate sandwiches at their desks.

  A sense of futility threatened to overwhelm her. Though she was trying very hard, Laurenz gave her no points for that. There was no longer even a pretence of affection in the way he talked to her, and she dreaded their meetings since she had nothing to offer him to keep him from repeating his threats.

  She felt utterly alone, and wished there were someone she could confide in. Not her brothers, who would not have understood the sort of people she was dealing with and might well rush off to the police demanding protection. Nor Emma, who wouldn’t be able to offer useful advice and might talk to colleagues about the situation. Perhaps after all she should speak to Peggy Kinsolving. Jasminder didn’t know her very well, but she liked her – she seemed level-headed and sympathetic. Unlike Emma, Peggy would understand the dangerous position Jasminder was in. Maybe she would ring her the next day and arrange to meet for a drink.

  That evening she saw Laurenz at his flat. When she’d first gone there it had seemed smart in its minimalism, a hip bachelor pad that suited the lifestyle of a high-powered international banker. Now it seemed ghastly in its lack of human touches, soulless and grim.

  To her consternation Laurenz seemed to sense quite uncannily what she had been thinking. As she sat down on the sofa, he took a seat in a straight-backed metal chair in front of her. ‘Keep your nerve, Jasminder,’ he said. ‘You’re at a stage I recognise all too well. You’re having difficulties procuring the information we need, and you’re starting to despair. You feel trapped, and very sorry for yourself. You’re even contemplating confiding in someone, to try and share the burden. But don’t worry – it’s just a phase, I promise. You all go through it.’

  ‘Who is “you all”?’ Jasminder demanded to know.

  Laurenz looked at her coolly. ‘Our agents, of course.’

  She stared at him dumbly. Was that what she was then, an agent of Laurenz and his pals? It seemed inconceivable but she had to face facts. She was employed by MI6, but she’d been recruited by the enemy.

  Then, the following day, out of the blue, her luck changed.

  She had gone, as she did most days now, to the canteen for lunch, but she was rather later than usual and found no one to eat with. In a way this was a relief, and she was actually enjoying her solitary salad when a man’s voice, speaking from behind her shoulder, announced, ‘Lady Thatcher said a man my age sitting alone on a bus represented failure, but I reckon having lunch on one’s own is just as bad. Would you mind if I joined you?’

&nbs
p; By now he had come into sight. Tallish, lean, with sandy-coloured hair and blue eyes surrounded by a network of fine lines, he looked as if he had seen more than his share of trouble. He didn’t wait for Jasminder’s reply but sat down across the table from her, offering his hand. ‘I’m Bruno.’

  She shook it and said, ‘Jasminder.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I went to one of your talks,’ he said, reaching for the jug of water on the table between them. ‘Will you have a little more?’ he asked. ‘It’s an excellent vintage.’

  Jasminder laughed, something she hadn’t done for days.

  ‘I enjoyed your talk very much,’ Bruno went on. ‘I don’t know if you realise it but you’re something of a sensation around here. First we publish our history and now we have a PR person – and a very charming one at that, if I may say so without being accused of sexism. Tell me your story. Were you a Fane find?’ he asked, his eyes smiling.

  ‘Hardly,’ said Jasminder.

  ‘Ah, I get it. He tried to blackball you? The bastard,’ added Bruno, but he was grinning and his tone was light-hearted.

  ‘Well, he didn’t actually blackball me. I got the impression that he didn’t approve of the job at all. It was C who was pushing it. Geoffrey Fane didn’t want anyone to be appointed – it wasn’t just me.’

  ‘Take heart. Fane’s reaction to anything new is invariably hostile, but it never lasts. You should view his opposition to your appointment as a merit badge.’ Bruno added in a stage whisper, ‘Between you and me, the last C before this one was opposed by Geoffrey Fane when he first applied to join the Service years ago. But when he became C, Geoffrey thought he was fantastic.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Jasminder, not sure which surprised her more – Fane’s negative reaction to a future C, or Bruno himself. She wasn’t at all sure how to take him. He seemed a bit of a clown, and rather indiscreet, which was definitely not a type she’d encountered in the Service before.