The Kompromat Kill

by Michael Jenkins

  Barrington nodded. ‘This is my favourite place in town: great cocktails, fine dining, and magnificent jazz – now complete with my wonderful British friend. Take a seat my boy.’

  Edmund Duff was considered one of the reformers of the British Foreign Office. Handsome, just turned the corner of his mid-fifties, single and with an agile inquisitive mind, Edmund had been fast tracked through the diplomatic system following his years in the Ministry of Defence and was widely touted for one of the big five overseas ambassadorships in the coming years. An expert on the Middle East with a particular penchant for Persian history, and a sharp view of Britain’s internationalist role alongside America’s, he had established a great rapport with Britain’s political elite as a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official.

  Duff’s driver, who doubled as his minder, sat at the far end of the cocktail bar above the staircase, with a perfect view of his charge at the table below him. He would be able to see the comings and goings through a single avenue of approach to his man and keep a watchful eye from a discreet position above the main hall. The minder drank lime and water with ice and the barman ensured he was always topped up, having been primed with hard cash to provide both information and drinks for him whenever he needed them.

  ‘Now, where’s your lovely Lebanese lady tonight?’ Barrington asked in his booming Arizona drawl with the faintest of very faint lisps.

  ‘Overseas I’m afraid, but she asked me to give her apologies and she hopes to meet up next time you’re in town. It never stops in her world, and makes my crazy world look like a walk in the park as your lot often say.’

  Barrington smirked, unrolled his napkin and replied whilst tapping his fingers on the table. ‘I never had such simple walks my friend. Just conflict and wars. It’s nice to walk a bit now I’m semi-retired and, anyway, that bullshit New York language is not my kind of world as you know.’

  ‘Your junior officers were always frightened of your bluntness,’ Duff said, pointing a finger. ‘It’s why they ran from you, and why we always got on.’

  ‘You had a fine mentor in me, young man,’ Barrington replied superciliously. ‘Now, let’s drink some good French wine my boy. We have a few things to discuss.’

  Fletcher Barrington the Second was the son of a mining magnate and the first in his lineage to join the CIA. He had graduated from Yale with a first in political science in 1976 and went on to earn the George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate of the CIA Command College Class of 1978 at Camp Peary – a multimillion-dollar spy complex nestling in deer-filled woods in Virginia known to CIA insiders as ‘The Farm’. A talented athlete and footballer, with a proclivity for young women, wine and classic cars, he subsequently became the CIA station chief in Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1995 - just as war was at its most savage. He was renowned for his no-nonsense, blunt style of leadership, which belied his acute political acumen. In retirement he was recruited as one of a number of retired CIA station chiefs involved in the Pentagon’s military analyst program, designed to propagate disinformation across a number of political and military campaigns. Covert propaganda was now his world.

  ‘What about Jonathon Thurlow? How is he these days?’ Duff asked.

  ‘He’s still a liability, I’m afraid. Drinks himself into depression too much. He’s holidaying in Santorini right now, spending top dollar on high-class prostitutes, knowing him.’

  ‘We need to watch him, you know,’ Duff retorted. ‘He talks too much. Not the kind of army officer I’ve ever wanted to trust with my life and career.’

  Barrington leant across to the younger Duff, just as the jazz band struck up for their first session. The lights glimmered and a pale blue spotlight drew everyone’s attention to the trombonist, who was smashing his turn as the soloist in the eight-piece band. Barrington spoke loudly into his friend’s ear with striking clarity. ‘It’s been a risk for us for many years my boy. His bloody West Point education didn’t serve him well despite him being made a US divisional chief of staff. I saved him from losing his career after our time together in the Balkans. Fear not though, I’ll make sure he knows to keep his mouth shut. The years have been OK for us and I will have no compunction about taking him out of the game if necessary.’

  Two hours later a rapturous finale came to a close on the stage. The applause for the band lasted a good three or four minutes, with the best of the cheers reserved for the bald drummer who mesmerised the audience with a string of solo slots in the last piece. He placed his hand on his heart and bowed like a metronome before disappearing through the stage door. Barrington stood and continued to clap as the chants of ‘more, more’ swirled around the magnificent amphitheatre.

  Duff looked up and gave his customary fifteen-minute signal to the minder, who was attentively observing the peripheral surroundings of his charge.

  One drink later, at the end of their evening, Barrington gave his friend a hug and slapped him on the back before pulling his head into his shoulder. Barrington was not one for tactile acts but, after a few drinks, he always reverted to machoism to show his strong regard for the closest of his friends. ‘Do give my regards to your lovely lady Edmund when she returns,’ he said. ‘Must be wonderful for her to visit her family again after all these years.’

  ‘Of course,’ Duff replied, reaching over to hear a little better. Barrington’s lisp had become more pronounced after a few glasses of Chablis and a final brandy.

  ‘She’s quite a good-looking woman you know. Keep her on your best side,’ Barrington suggested.

  ‘I know, and I will. She’s always flying around the globe and I often wonder if we’ll ever meet again,’ Duff joked, finishing his Saint-Émilion wine.

  ‘Make sure you give me some dates when you’re next in Washington now,’ Barrington said, before giving him a wide arcing handshake. ‘Great night as ever my boy – I shall send you some details of my current project on Iran, just to see what you think of it. Plenty of influence operations I’m having some fun with.’

  ‘Ah, conditioning your great American public I see.’

  ‘Bon voyage.’

  When Edmund Duff visited London clubs it was a long-standing ritual of his that he would give his minder precisely fifteen minutes before walking to the exit. The minder was on his way out of the club to collect the car when he heard an extraordinary alert on his phone. He had never expected to hear such a strange alert and was jolted by its connotation. He grappled with his phone to check the message. The Precipio counter-surveillance software had alarmed from the system installed in his car, indicating that someone had placed a metallic device on its underbelly. A bomb or a tracking device? Someone was tampering with the car – right there, right now. The minder had used the system for well over two years on all of Duff’s vehicles, but never once had he received a false alarm. This was a real alert. An alert that was transmitting directly to his phone, indicating that someone had just placed a magnetic tracker on the vehicle or, more frighteningly, an under-vehicle improvised explosive device.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered, pulling his jacket on at the same time as calling in to his ops-room staff. ‘It’s either a UVIED or a tracker,’ he growled down the phone, starting to jog briskly towards the car in Arlington Street. He ran into the street-level parking office, knocked hard on the window and demanded that the attendant look at the CCTV coverage of his car in the last five to ten minutes. The young Ghanaian waved him to the side door, releasing the maglock to let him into the control room. A fifty-pound note helped smooth the proceedings.

  The minder studied the high-definition imagery, searching vigorously for any unusual activity at 22.27, the exact time the alarm had alerted him. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he snarled, looking again at the CCTV coverage. He checked his watch. Duff would be on his way out of the club soon. He cursed, strode out of the car-park office, slammed the door and walked purposefully to the car-park entrance. He sidestepped the barrier and walked quickly down the ramp before turning the corner into
the dimly lit lower-first-level parking lot.

  Nothing. It was quiet. ‘How the fuck has this alerted?’ he grumbled. False alarm or a fault? Taking no chances, he approached the car, looked around and then crouched onto one knee to check the underside of the passenger seat. Just as he did so, he felt the hard cold steel of a muzzle on his neck, his eyes flickered and the firearm jolted, sending a bullet straight through his jugular vein.

  A couple of minutes later, Duff watched his silver Mercedes CLS approach Quaglino’s on the right-hand side of the road. Its lights flashed, the vehicle came to a steady halt and the doorman opened the rear door for Edmund to enter.

  Duff adjusted himself in the plush leather seat and started to scour his phone for any new messages. There was just one. A text from his French Lebanese girlfriend: ‘Delayed again Darling, will be another few days.’

  He sighed. Then he looked up to see a second man in the passenger seat smiling and pointing what looked like a Taser stun gun at him. It was - and it was fired right into his chest.

  Chapter 2

  London

  Jonathon and Elise Van De Lule had been planning their annual trip to Israel for several weeks, their preparations having been interrupted by a burst of glamorous social occasions amongst west London Jews. Elise, who had recently been elected the President of the Board of London Jews, had somehow managed to battle and survive cancer during this tumultuous period, but had pushed on through it, eager to keep fighting the worrying tide of anti-Semitism she felt was now infesting British shores.

  The Van de Lules had arrived at the West London Synagogue at 11am on a glorious Saturday morning, attended prayers and eaten lunch in Kensington High Street with twelve friends and family. They had been careful to choose a restaurant that offered exquisite fare to celebrate their daughter’s new role as a patent attorney. After a short walk around Kensington Gardens, they discussed the merits of a leisurely afternoon at home to confirm the itinerary that Elise had crafted earlier that week for their trip abroad. Jonathon had shared the idea of just making love for a while and they both laughed in excited anticipation of an afternoon of pure relaxation.

  Elise glanced over her shoulder as they walked to their chauffeur-driven car - an action intimating to Jonathon how exactly do we get rid of our minders for the day? No words were uttered, but they grasped hands, swinging them a little with synchronised joy, relishing the bursts of a summer breeze that cast gentle eddies across the Serpentine.

  Around 2.50pm they made their way along Chelsea Bridge Road, having decided to walk from the River Thames and make the most of the sunshine, before turning right into Sloane Gardens. They had stopped for a moment to take in the views of the new building site that was once the grandeur of Chelsea Barracks, but was now being converted to gargantuan mansions courtesy of hefty Qatari investment. They didn’t quite know what to make of the decadent monstrosities. Elise walked first up the few steps to their three-storey house, which was set back into the corner of the huge red-brick Victorian mansions. She inserted a large key and entered the house.

  It was ten hours later that the Metropolitan Police detective surmised that they had been killed by more than one assailant, and that they may well have been tortured before their deaths. It was amongst the most gruesome scenes of murder he had ever witnessed in a career just shy of thirty-four years.

  Jack H arrived at the mansion block at 7am the following morning and was chaperoned by a young female detective to the homicide team’s command vehicle. Jack was MI5’s Director of G Branch having been propelled into the role following the sacking of his previous boss, who had become the fall guy for MI5 failing to stop the Manchester Arena bombing a year earlier. He cussed that MI5 were again viewed as having failed to monitor the bomber, a twenty-two-year-old Libyan, when the secret truth of how many they had stopped that year would shock the public to the core. Nonetheless, Jack was making sure he didn’t follow suit into early retirement and so kept a tight hand on the tiller of Britain’s most potent counterterrorist intelligence arm.

  Quite a crowd had gathered at the end of the terrace, held back by the blue and white crime-scene tape that signified the police’s outer cordon. With a glance, Jack spotted the congregation of press photographers at the far end of the street and turned his face to avoid any scrutiny by sharp-eyed photographers trying to identify who he was. Just as he stepped into the police command vehicle to change into a forensic suit, he heard the punishing sounds of a helicopter hovering high above him. He didn’t look up. Jack had spent too many years on covert operations in MI6, where it had been drilled into him never to look up at airframes that might catch the perfect shot of his boyish looks on high-resolution imagery. Everything about Jack revolved around drills that had been hammered into him to stay alive and remain undetected. His life in the shadows was second nature to him but he had one attribute no other spook of his era had. A sharp intellect and an uncanny knack of plotting the most devious intelligence manoeuvres that allowed him to stay well ahead of the game. He was a genius tactician.

  Jack bore no marks on his face or any history of violence despite having spent decades nurturing the most brutal intelligence agents in the fields of Afghanistan, Iraq and, latterly, Libya. For this suited civil servant was the epitome of the modern-day spy. His craft dealt not with weapons, gadgets or high-tech equipment, but with political tactics to achieve an aim. This spy was a master of espionage operations, where deception, guile, coercion and meticulous planning were the tools of his trade. And he was bloody good at it. Or so his boss and mentor had always told him. Jack was the go-to man for the Director General of MI5, or D as Jack always referred to him. D had empowered Jack to lead in a clandestine role acting as the commander of MI5’s most secret internal unit that ran deniable operations. It was a highly capable paramilitary organisation known as ‘The Court’, which had been born out of a need to retain secrecy well beyond the probing powers of political institutions. Too many intelligence leaks over the years had, in D’s mind, severely damaged Britain’s ability to protect itself.

  Jack sat in the homicide vehicle awaiting the arrival of the Senior Investigating Officer. He had been told that the SIO at the scene was a prickly superintendent who disliked MI5 involvement. Waiting impatiently, Jack’s mind drifted back to the intelligence papers he had read the night before.

  Not a man to excessively waste his criminally low salary, Jack had been sitting in his favourite, but hideously cheap, Ikea armchair trying desperately to catch up on the intelligence of the day. He had put his two young children to bed, praying that Sophia, his eldest, might one day recover from her debilitating multiple sclerosis. It can be a cruel life, he often thought, watching his daughter suffer so badly at only nine years of age, but he countered those thoughts, as the religious man he was, with ones telling him it could be much worse. The fact that she was living – that they were both living - was enough to give this humble man the solace he needed.

  Jack had witnessed enough barbarity in his career of nearly thirty years’ service to the Crown – a service that had seen him promoted very early on each occasion, and a career that D had mentored closely to ensure Jack got all the right senior posts to groom him for one day becoming Director General.

  Jack sighed as he read through the classified file containing his written notes in the one-inch right-hand margin – just as he had been taught all those years ago when analysing high-grade intelligence. What he read saddened him. It was bad enough having the Russians running riot but now the Iranians too. Are we this far into the depths of a new war, he thought? Multiple enemies on multiple fronts, from cyberwarfare to the chaos of Russian influence operations tearing apart Western democracies.

  He flicked through the first two pages. How on earth has our world come to this, he wondered? He had long felt that the political uncertainties of 2019 were likely to lead to a deep decline in Western democracy, and the mammoth implosion that no one had yet predicted wasn’t far off. But he had. And what he was rea
ding was beginning to confirm it. The darkest days of Great Britain, as the country was faced by its gravest threat this century. It was a ‘black swan moment’, as he often told his wife, who was sat quietly reading her novel in the lounge next door. The black swan that no one had predicted. But it would come. He knew Britain’s security service needed some skin in the game to get ahead of an impending hybrid war.

  ‘Iran is mobilising,’ he muttered to himself as he read the INTSUM that D had personally provided him with earlier that day. The intelligence summary was pithy and to the point. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security affairs, the MOIS, was active in Europe and had identified targets for terrorist strikes and assassinations. The MOIS posed a massive threat. He read the third page, which provided some history on the Iranian threat.

  ‘During ancient times, the dagger was the weapon of choice by Shia Nizaris to carry out assassinations against those who were out to persecute them. A weapon which is still the preferred tool of choice by today’s MOIS assassins, often grotesquely mutilating the body of their victim to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, reminding them of what lies in store if they cross the Iranian regime.

  Today, another way a MOIS agent strikes fear into those he is tracking is to sometimes play mind games with the target. This is all about escalating the victim’s sense of fear, just as in days of old, when Nizari assassins would leave a dagger under a target’s pillow, as a threat to intimidate them.

  The Nizaris were skilled in infiltration; they would set up long-term sleeper cells to allow their operatives to observe enemy strengths and positions, which they would report back to their masters to give an indication of how the enemy operated. Methods that are still used today by MOIS agents.’