Jack was fond of his mentor. On nearly every occasion that they met, D would use the opportunity to coach him. And Jack enjoyed the man’s wisdom. It had served them both well as they entered their later years in HM Crown service. Though D looked much paler than normal.
‘Your operations are like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,’ D struck up. ‘Get me a new enigma Jack. We’re forever being hamstrung by our own people and the Russians have been getting away with murder over the years with their hybrid warfare.’
Jack threw a cursory smile, watching D rise before walking to the window and placing a hand on an oak mantelpiece where an antique wooden clock took pride of place. Underneath the mantelpiece was a black 1950s safe cemented deep into the thick wall.
‘You know what Jack? I think we’ve found our true fold with The Court. Our real mission is grasping opportunity in today’s world of disinformation, cyber-espionage and the mayhem of the Russians with our political elite not knowing how to lead this nation any more.’
The Court was not the first time MI5 had operated a deniable secret unit. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, MI5 had established an inner cadre of deniable operators known as the Inner Policy Club consisting of a group of officers who masterminded deniable operations via contracts with private security companies often run by trusted former MI5, MI6 and military personnel, and whose relationships could all be denied. The Court ran along similar lines with all the missions tasked by Jack being deniable operations outside the legality of traditional MI5 operations. D didn’t want to expose crucial intelligence to the nosey goings on of Whitehall corridors, where senior civil servants had, over the years, ensured that national secrecy was shared far too easily with ministers and committees, by way of what they called accountability. Politicians were not trusted to know of such a secret capability, given that leaks and exposés were now de rigueur in the corridors of Whitehall. The Court was the brainchild of D and remained one of Britain’s most heavily guarded secrets, the activity of which was known internally as ‘The Third Direction’.
‘Today we need to be bolder, and more innovative than ever before,’ D continued. ‘And I need you to conjure up some miraculous operation that can save this country from its own downfall, and that from its own dismissive hand. Where exactly are we right now?’
Jack fiddled with his tie, again lining it up with his shirt buttons. ‘My staff are hard at work trying to track down any Iranian sleeper agents we may have on our soil and I’ve come up with an idea on how we can mount a wider operation using The Court. We know of one assassin so far, and probably one or two sleeper agents, but there will be more being tasked. How far would you like me to go?’
‘Go far and wide Jack. Use everything we have at our disposal now. This is the beginning of a war, and whilst we’re witnessing some skirmishes right now, it will come to the boil in time and my fear is that the lid will be blown out of the stratosphere.’
Jack watched D clench his fist, walk sharply to his desk and grab his note. ‘Coffee or gin?’ he inquired.
Jack hated the coffee in the office, feeling that a stiff drink might ease the immensity of the drama ahead. ‘A small gin please, sir.’
‘Good man,’ D said, already pouring it. ‘You know, one day soon we must go for a few beers Jack. We’ve never done that. A good old-fashioned pub, what do you say?’
Jack wondered if D was softening after all these years. He was a battle-hardened grafter as much as a master spy. D had risen to the top of his game the hard way. He wasn’t one for civil servant politik, or the new breed of officers who had been coached never to take too much risk.
‘Be aware Jack that these killers may have been trained by the Russians you know. A little-known fact is that the Russian SVR trained a number of Iranian assassins and I’m guessing the Russian GRU have probably done the same.’
While Britain was still feeling the aftershocks from Russian military intelligence trying to assassinate Sergei Skripal in 2018, their GRU officers were not all as incompetent as the media made out. D was one of the country’s foremost experts on the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and its military intelligence arm, the GRU. One of his best friends was a source he had recruited in East Germany during the cold war who had provided astonishing intelligence on how the Russian intelligence services operated at a deep level. D had been warning ministers of the threat from the GRU and SVR for some years and was mightily irritated that not enough had been done to rein them in. ‘Political bollocks’ Jack had often heard him say.
D reached inside a folder on the desk and passed Jack a small black and white photograph.
‘Edmund Duff. Kidnapped. I’m not sure if it’s the Russians or the Iranians but I want you to look at this too,’ D said, pausing to lift his glasses. ‘The PM is getting a lot of grief about what’s happened to this missing diplomat and wants to know what the hell I’m doing about it. I’m briefing her later this morning and I think his kidnapping might be linked to what’s been happening with the Iranian activity we’ve seen of late. My fear is that the Russians are involved too. They’re bloody good at using proxies and this has all the hallmarks of a Russian deception plan to send us in the wrong direction. What do you think?’
‘Hard to say at this stage until we’ve looked at it a bit more. Tell her we have our best agents on this and we’re looking into Duff’s background and accomplices too. Might be nothing, might be extortion or he might have been talking too much. He might even have been recruited as an agent. He was one of the FCO’s Middle East experts you know, travelled a lot there and could easily have been tapped.’
D took a hit of gin before patting the clock, trying to get it to work again. He hit it one more time then turned to pace the room. ‘Jack. The problem we face is most grave. The Russian influence operations have crippled our politicians with fear. Fear of not knowing what to do. Of not knowing how this game of disinformation and influence is being played. To an extent, the long arm of Russian active measures has neutered our political class - and they don’t have the competence to deal with it. A breed of politicians that knows little of how Putin has changed the game – forever. Do you see that?’
Jack felt himself nodding and feeling similar dismay.
Despite the long speech and the context that he had just heard, Jack fully understood that this was his boss giving him his intent. ‘Leave this with me, sir. I’ve got a team investigating the Iranians and the missing diplomat and we’ll see if they’re linked. I’m going to bring in Sean Richardson for this job too – it’s right up his street.’
‘Very good Jack. A fine operator. Do as you need.’ D kicked the black safe with a toe punt. ‘Now, you remember when I asked you chaps to relocate this safe from the Millbank offices when we set this little place up?’
‘I do. We’ve all had bets on what’s inside.’
D roared with a deep laugh and banged the clock again. ‘Well I can tell you the secret of that Jack. Up until last week nothing existed inside it. I have never ever put anything in there. It has remained empty during my tenure for many years, until that is, last Tuesday.’
‘Go on,’ Jack uttered, knowing he was being prompted to ask.
‘It now holds some information from the cold war that has only recently come to light. From East Berlin to be precise. It came from an old friend of mine in Prague. A small snuffbox that I’m personally investigating which relates to an incident in Friedrichshain in 1986.’
‘Do you need some help?’
‘No Jack. Not just yet. You see I have quite a serious heart condition which might require you to step in should I pass away.’
Jack watched him wave his right hand to immediately quell any sympathy Jack may have voiced. Jack remained silent, but a little shocked. He could see D was teeing him up and it had become clear to Jack that his boss was not infallible to the vagaries of health. D was in his mid-sixties now and a life of hard graft, immense stress and never-ending political battles would inevitably
have taken its toll.
‘I won’t give you the key my boy, but you absolutely have my permission to blow the bloody door off if I shuffle off this mortal coil.’ D laughed again, banging the desk with his hand. ‘Hard to think that my legacy revolves around a snuffbox eh? But rest assured, only you know of this and I’ll ensure that any of my findings over the months are also put in there. I really don’t know where it’ll lead but I have an inkling it refers to some historical foul play and some equally evil bastards. I have a few more interviews to conduct to find out what happened behind the Iron Curtain back on that day.’
Jack felt honoured. Proud in fact. His lifetime coach and mentor telling him that the last days of his life were coming and that he alone would have the authority to take whatever legacy he left forward.
D indicated it was time to close. He summarised and collected his brolly from the brass case of a Second World War shell sat next to the door.
They walked together down the Strand, then turned right at Admiralty Arch to walk through St James’s Park. The rain started to fall as they walked across Horse Guards Parade and into the small courtyard where the Coldstream Guards stood fastidiously on parade.
D stopped and pointed with his umbrella to a small doorway under the arch. ‘Fond memories of that door Jack,’ he said, standing to attention, his umbrella regimentally placed by his side. ‘That was the door I passed through many years ago to hand in my military ID card. A fine summer’s day as I remember.’
Jack stood silently listening to a man he held in high regard. He was not just a senior civil servant but the first ever military officer since the Second World War to become the Director General of MI5. A highly decorated one at that. He watched D turn and begin to march off down Whitehall.
‘Oh, by the way Jack, what about this blood in the bath? What’s it all about?’
‘Most likely the assassin is showing us their mission. A blood list of his or her targets and the numbers. I’ll do some thinking on why, but star constellations and zodiac signs play a big role in Islamic scripture and even in the Quran. They were superb astronomers and mathematicians you know.’
‘Keep me updated Jack. I’m just popping in here for a short while to keep them all calm.’
Jack nodded, glancing across to Downing Street and hoping that his tactics would be up to the mark in the coming weeks and months.
Chapter 4
South of France
Sean Richardson stood on his bedroom veranda, wondering what had hit him the night before. He groaned as he walked gingerly past his artist’s easel to gaze out at the early-morning views of the Provence region of southern France. The views beyond the swimming pool encompassed glorious spring blooms and the distant forested hills of the Préalpes d’Azur National Park a few dozen kilometres from the Cote d’Azur. The magnificent scenery had all been perfectly captured on his latest canvas.
Sean was a life maker. A man who thrived living right on the edge. Full of energy with a penchant for risk taking, he wasn’t the type to be glum or solemn. He just got on with life no matter what it threw at him. A life that had bared his soul on many an occasion and thrown a whole heap of shit at him over the years. It was a life he had only just got back after several years of forced retirement from HM intelligence services, which included a stint in an Afghan jail following a journey that had almost plunged him into self-destruction. To his closest friends, he’d sum up his most recent past as being sacked from HM services for having a fling with an Iranian spy, getting banged up overseas for being an innocent weapons smuggler and being a fugitive on the run from a bunch of Russian thugs who had a price on his head. Luckily, Jack and The Court had agreed that Sean’s maverick nature warranted him having a second chance to serve the Crown but very much tucked away from the niceties of formal service.
Sean peered over the balcony to the swimming pool terrace to see his girlfriend, Melissa, sat at a table quietly reading Le Monde and taking a light breakfast in the warming French sun. Tucked away on the fourth page was a small piece hinting at Hezbollah involvement in the murder of a prominent Jewish couple in London. It suggested that the Van De Lules might have been assassinated on the orders of Iran due to their anti-Iranian rhetoric at numerous rallies, and that their murders, plus the recent outpourings of anti-Semitism in Britain, were beginning to seriously embarrass the British government. The police had released very little detail, but the paper intimated that the intelligence services were on a high-alert footing for further attacks.
‘Meurtre à Londres,’ Melissa shouted out, lifting her sunglasses momentarily to see the state of her lover.
‘D’accord. Excusez-moi mademoiselle – temps pour un bonnet de douche,’ Sean shouted back sarcastically.
Sean had always had a tinge of jealousy that Melissa could speak and read French so well and he was struggling to keep up with her vast language skills. To counter that he’d often make silly phrases up. Her superb grasp of the French language was one of the reasons the location was suggested to them by MI5 when they had both been safely relocated with new lives and new identities in the recent past.
Sean pulled both hands through his greying hair to tie it in a ponytail and walked back into the bedroom, moaning about his hangover. He was half shaven and bleary eyed as the memory of the previous night in downtown Nice began to surface. He was sure that Melissa had managed to coax him into a taxi following a raucous night at the Meridian Hotel, where she had been among her peers at the annual journalism awards. But he cursed that he couldn’t remember the journey home. There had been lavish cuisine, long speeches and vibrant dancing in the ballroom. Trays of champagne. God that was good. Stella and French wine, not too bad, he thought. Followed by hours lingering at the casino tables amongst some of their new friends and colleagues. Then there were the shots. Christ. The shots. Sean grumbled as he remembered all of them. He sat on the bed, reached for his shirt and started to look for his phone. After a few minutes searching he found it under his dinner jacket, which was sprawled across the carpet in front of the king-size bed.
There were several unread texts and one message on his TextSecure application. This intrigued him as it had been set up two months ago as the primary means of letting him know of any tasks that MI5 wanted him to carry out. He had wondered how long it would be before Jack contacted him and a wry smile glided across his face as he opened the message. Jack had given him a few clandestine roles in the south of France since he’d been relocated two years ago, but in truth, for Sean, it was just simple agent work. Developing contacts across France was another form of art that Sean enjoyed and one that he was as good at as his steady hand enabled him to be with oil paints. He’d been tasked with finding out who was susceptible to being recruited, who in Melissa’s world of journalism was also a spy. Crafting contacts and having dinner and drinks with potential sources who might give an insight into French espionage operations. Where in the world they might be focusing their intelligence efforts. To be fair, Sean had recruited a couple of human sources before formally handing them over, but he always wanted more. Something meaty rather than base-level intelligence officer work in a covert life with no formal diplomatic cover. He wanted a mission that would take him to the edge. Give him the thrills he so badly missed. Little did he know it was coming. And it was coming in a package that Jack would personally deliver.
‘Arnie Arnison,’ was all the text said. It was the codename Sean had chosen in memory of a friend and legend from the intelligence services who had died suddenly some years ago. He knew immediately that this was the code for a tasking that The Court would leave in a data file on their remote communications portal held on the dark web. Sean had been held on their books as a deniable resource to be used on missions that MI5 required through their highly secretive cabal of veteran officers who became operational only for the most discreet of special projects missions.
It gave him some solace that Jack, who led the operational aspects of The Court, had seen it fit to break Sean out
of the Afghan jail and provide him with the means to become a free man again – but only after he had tracked and traced a dead whistle-blower, resulting in a grapple with the Russian secret services before finally exposing a couple of sleeper moles deep within the British Establishment. Sean wasn’t very pleased that such a result meant an entire lifetime on the run from the Russian SVR, who had happily laid out a contract on his life after he had exposed and nearly killed their best female spy, who had operated for years within the British parliamentary system.
Sean fought with his trousers, swaying as he tried to get the second leg in, then, once successful, made his way downstairs into the living room. He fired up the computer then dived into the kitchen to make some tea and toast with a large dollop of Marmite to kick his body back into shape. Once the laptop was up and running he entered the dark web via a TOR browser and entered the link to take him into a database. Whilst the dark web was fully secure against prying eyes and provided good protection against state intelligence apparatus trying to track and trace Sean, it still had a few backdoor holes that needed some precautions. If they were able to find this secret file location, they would simply see thousands of academic databases. Rows upon rows of spreadsheets with raw IT metadata – only one specific file held the data that both parties could transmit messages through.
Sean opened the file and was disappointed to see only a very short message. He was eager for more.
‘Make your way to the safe location. Something has happened here, and we need your help.’
Sean added a new row to the spreadsheet and answered.
‘Roger. Will make headway now – estimated arrival tomorrow morning. Will send details when I’m at St Francis.’
Sean then deleted the first message in the spreadsheet row before logging off and making his way outside with his mug of tea, a wedge of Marmite toast delicately balanced in his mouth. He slipped his sunglasses on, as much to hide his reddened eyes from Melissa as to shield them from the fierce southern French sun.
The Kompromat Kill Page 4