The Kompromat Kill

by Michael Jenkins

  ‘Yes,’ Sean said, opening his rucksack. ‘A quick initial briefing, nothing too much, you guys all know the drills. I’ll set up the maps.’

  Sean spent a few minutes taking his documents and maps from his rucksack, placing them on the table along with the small file on Nadège. He had his old team back together. His mates. Plus Samantha to keep them all on the straight and narrow.

  Jugsy was a former Royal Marine and an expert in imagery analysis, and Billy Phish was his go-to man for anything to do with canine detection and somewhat bizarrely, cyber-hacking. Sean could never get his head around how Billy Phish had become a cyber-sleuth and part-time digital forensics analyst with the FBI, yet his talent and passion were for dogs. Training dogs to detect anything from dead bodies to explosives, weapons and even bedbugs in hotel rooms. Quite a lucrative trade, he had once told Sean.

  ‘What’s the target then?’ Jugsy asked, impatient as ever.

  ‘Iranians,’ Sean answered, checking through his photos of the cache from the night before.

  ‘Weren’t you knocking off an Iranian bird all those years ago? I remember you going dark for months on end when you were with her. Got you in deep shit as I remember.’

  Jugsy was never one to be diplomatic and always went for the jugular. It was part of the reason for his nickname, that and his huge ears. Jugsy was one of Sean’s best mates, and knew everything about him. Sean had known Jugsy for about eighteen years. Hawkeye, as he was also known, was a leading expert in imagery analysis, most often conducting highly secret terrorist surveillance from helicopters and using drones.

  ‘You know it got me in the shit big time,’ Sean replied, pointing to the file on Nadège. ‘Have a little look inside that file for a wee shock. She’s our target.’

  ‘Fucking hell mate. You never ever do things by halves do you? Jeez.’ Sean chuckled, slapping Jugsy on the back. Sean thought Jugsy was looking thinner in the face but noticed he was still in good shape. Jugsy was now smack on fifty years of age, with a full shock of grey hair, a noticeably radiant red face and a prominent nose. His lean, strong figure gave some indication of a fit man who had formerly achieved military excellence with the Special Boat Service, but his active social life always took a toll on his facial features. He was the best in the world though at what he did with imagery intelligence.

  Ten minutes later, Billy Phish made an entrance. He walked in wearing shorts and a vest with an unlit pipe in his mouth. He said nothing but simply threw Sean a groan and a V-sign before shaking his hand limply. He was clearly still dozy and not in much of a mood for small chat. Billy Phish waved at Jugsy and sat down to light his pipe. Jugsy laughed and started the teasing. ‘The grumpy old bugger’s just been woken up, so you’ll get nowt out of him for at least an hour mate!’

  Sean chuckled, watching Samantha place a cup of coffee in front of Billy Phish on a small round table. She tapped the spoon on the table, indicating for him to start drinking his coffee. Billy Phish groaned again and lifted his pipe to show appreciation for her help. He slurped noisily as everyone sat waiting for him to stir.

  ‘Right, let’s get on with it you lot,’ Samantha barked. ‘I’ll give you the background then Sean will add the detailed tasks going forward. I can see that getting a grip of you lot will be necessary all the time. So be prepared for that. Now grab some coffee and listen in.’

  Jugsy rolled his eyes at Sean and sat next to Billy Phish. Samantha pointed where Sean should sit then gave a short briefing, displaying some photos and maps from her laptop. Sean enjoyed watching her when she briefed staff, admiring the pace of her oratory and her expert precision. He was impressed by her charisma and style and took a few moments to study her face. A face that could melt a man’s soul when she talked, whilst she made occasional gestures with her manicured hands. Her nails were not too long, painted bright red, and she used her long fingers to delicately tap the keyboard that brought up the slides.

  Samantha explained the assassinations in London, accentuating the savagery of Iranian terrorists and their possible linkage to the Russians too. She covered the Iranian Intelligence Services, the MOIS and gave the background to their active-measures campaigns across the globe. Then she moved onto the US’s position which, for the Brits, was stoking too many Iranian fires. She explained that the US President’s new economic sanctions were designed to seriously harm the Iranian regime, and so MOIS assassins were ready to strike, with hundreds of worldwide agents and terrorist proxies under their wing. Most of whom had already entered their target countries under the guise of immigrants, students, journalists, lecturers or construction workers, ready now to strike anywhere across the globe.

  Samantha paused for coffee and took a few questions before outlining the intelligence requirements for this operation: to identify the smuggling routes, any weapons caches that might be used and for Sean to connect with one of their top agents, Nadège. That line in particular drew a few murmurs from Jugsy and Billy Phish.

  ‘We’ve been monitoring signals traffic in Turkey and across Iraq and Kuwait,’ she continued, flicking a map of the region onto the LCD screen. ‘We’ve had some really unusual SIGINT signatures emanating from the deserts of Kuwait, with replica signals here in Istanbul. There’s much more we need to analyse but Sean managed to retrieve some vital intelligence from his exploits last night.’

  ‘You mean he’s been with Nadège already,’ Jugsy chipped in, smirking. Samantha threw him an admonishing look before continuing.

  ‘He was busy penetrating, I’ll give you that,’ she said cheekily, knowing how to hold court with these men. ‘Entry into a warehouse with the front of being a freight-forwarding company. All yours Sean.’

  ‘OK. So we now have something to work on. The warehouse is being used as a factory to make precision parts for IEDs, it’s effectively a bomb-making factory but without assembly of the components. They’ll be moving those parts and assembling the IEDs elsewhere. At the moment our intelligence suggests into Europe, so we need to find their routing and their methods of moving the kit. This is where your drones come in Jugsy.’

  ‘Full surveillance on the warehouse then?’ Jugsy asked.

  ‘Exactly right. The cyber-team back at Bentwaters have taken control of the CCTV coverage inside and around the port, but I need you to carry out airborne surveillance on the warehouse and hack into their stand-alone IT servers with Billy Phish. He’ll need your drones to get him close enough to the RF transmitters I fitted last night.’

  Billy Phish raised his hand. ‘Have we got a payload on the drone to receive the signals?’

  ‘Exactly right Billy. There are also a few RF keyloggers in place for you to exploit. Do you think you can get into the data?’

  Billy nodded. ‘Are they networked?’ he asked. ‘Linked to the Internet too?’

  ‘I think it’s a mixture. Possibly a local-area LAN within the warehouse which you can look at while the team back at Bentwaters analyse the Internet-based traffic. I’m looking for anything that leads us to where they’re transporting the telemetry that they’re manufacturing inside the warehouse. Their MO is to build the technology in different places, then bring them all together to assemble the circuitry and explosives in a single location. Probably in the target country.’

  Sean leant over the captain’s table and passed a small covert camera to Jugsy. It was about the size of a bottle top. ‘I’ve hidden these in their workshop, so we can see who’s coming and going. I swabbed the place and the findings were positive for explosives.’ He pointed to the mini mass spectrometer.

  ‘What’s your thinking then?’ Jugsy asked.

  ‘Well, it’s a long shot, but I think this lot may be moving the parts to a site that also has the explosives. But that’s where you come in Jugsy. Have a look at the covert-camera imagery, get some photo IDs of the bravos and follow them with your drones to wherever they’re moving the stuff.’

  ‘Type of explosive?’

  ‘Pentolite.’

  ‘Big stuff th
en. Moving into Europe or the Middle East?’

  ‘Possibly being moved through the Balkans and into Europe, so that gives you a good steer to the north-west of Istanbul.’

  ‘OK. I’ll get onto that with Billy. I assume you’ve fitted routers to the cameras with an IP we can tap into from their Internet?’

  ‘All done. Yes.’

  ‘OK. I’ll land the mini drone on the roof of the warehouse and use that as a repeater station. We can get close enough using our vehicle to cover the transmissions for a short distance. I don’t want the big drones in the air for too long until we have something to follow.’

  Sean paused and stood up to stretch. Each of the team stayed silent, knowing that when he stretched there was invariably a ‘but’ coming. It came. ‘But the insertion last night didn’t go totally to plan, and whilst I don’t think I was compromised, we’ll need to be mindful of that. Make sure our OPSEC is spot on and, Jugsy, start monitoring the cameras as soon as possible just to see if their activity is normalised or heightened after last night. One of their operators may have gone missing in action.’

  ‘Shit,’ Samantha said. ‘May have? What the fuck happened?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it was taken care of. All you need to know is that they are missing one bloke, he won’t turn up for work, will be presumed missing, but we have enough time on our hands to conduct the surveillance activities and get a few leads to follow.’

  ‘Anything else you’re not telling us? What about this bird Nadège?’ Billy Phish asked, puffing on his pipe furiously now.

  Sean explained the mission he had been given by Jack but omitted the part about getting her to turn, which would make it plain to them all how barking mad a mission it actually was.

  ‘We think Nadège is leading this operation,’ Samantha chipped in, looking to take control of this phase of the operation. ‘She’s due back into Istanbul tonight.’

  ‘Do we know where she’ll be yet?’ Sean inquired.

  ‘We do and it’s all set for you and I to watch her tonight. Jack’s source has told us which hotel suite she’s staying in – she uses the same suite every time she visits Istanbul but it’s regularly swept for bugs by her minder. I’ve got a CIA fixer making sure we have a room next door. And some tech kit to see what she gets up to.’

  Chapter 16

  Istanbul

  Sean sat opposite the hotel, waiting to catch his first glimpse of Nadège in well over ten years. He watched her arrive in a silver Mercedes, which pulled up just in front of the large marble façade of the Çırağan Palace Kempinski Hotel.

  The Çırağan Palace had formerly been an Ottoman palace located on the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul and is famed for having one of the world's fifteen most expensive hotel suites. A beautiful marble bridge connects the palace to the Yıldız Palace on the hill behind, with the grounds protected from the outer world by a very high garden wall.

  ‘NIGHTOWL at the entrance now,’ Sean texted to Samantha, who was sat in the room next door to Nadège’s studio suite on the second floor, which overlooked the magnificent palace gardens. NIGHTOWL, Nadège’s codename, was to be used for all operational correspondence between the teams on the ground and for the technical staff back at The Court’s HQ at RAF Bentwaters.

  Because her minders had swept her suite, Sean couldn’t fit listening devices and pinhole cameras directly into NIGHTOWL’S room so they had to make do with new technology in the room next door. Sean suspected that the first few hours of NIGHTOWL being in Istanbul would yield crucial intelligence from her meetings and telephone calls. These were the vital hours for his initial surveillance on the woman he somehow had to turn and convince to become a British intelligence agent. Yet everything in Sean’s body told him she was loyal to her country. Or was she? What was her Achilles heel, he wondered?

  ‘NIGHTOWL in situ,’ came the reply on Sean’s phone, giving him the signal to make his way to the room where they would conduct the surveillance. He had verified that it was Nadège who had arrived at the hotel and would now check the covert CCTV imagery to make sure it was her who had entered the suite and not someone else. There could be no mistakes from this point onwards.

  Sean walked past the long reception and made his way calmly to the lift lobby, which was crammed with an elderly American party waiting for the elevators to arrive. He checked his phone as he waited, noticing a text from Melissa back home.

  ‘Can you call me tonight around 10pm – I’m beginning to find some useful information on Fletcher Barrington.’

  The dodgy CIA officer, he thought, as the lift doors opened. He had wondered for some days about this man and the link to the missing FCO diplomat, Edmund Duff, but had been too busy focusing on this operation to delve into any detail on the kidnapping. He suspected something wasn’t quite right about the ex-CIA station chief who Duff had been dining with in St James’s, but didn’t know how all this would link together. Had he known at the time he’d have probed Jack much deeper on the connection between these incidents.

  Sean exited the lift on the second floor. He was dressed in a light grey suit with white shirt and red tie, making sure he was suitably dressed to follow Nadège wherever she went in the Palace Hotel. The Palace boasted a number of high-class restaurants, multiple cocktail bars and a casino, where he enjoyed the ambience of operating surreptitiously in one of the finest hotels in the world. He turned right and walked past a small table laden with a bulbous flower pot and a bunch of sunflowers in a separate jug. He glanced at one of the central sunflowers to check that his concealed covert camera was indeed concealed. Anyone entering the floor would be captured on this camera and viewed on his laptop in the surveillance room. He placed his room card on the suite console, watched the entry light go green and quietly entered the room. He closed the door, bolting it shut.

  ‘She doesn’t appear to have any minders with her,’ Sean said, throwing the key card on the bed.

  ‘Good. Now let me listen. No more interruptions please.’

  Sean watched Samantha move her stethoscope probe on the wall in a circular motion – trying no doubt to get a better signal to listen into any activity in Nadège’s room. Samantha had a set of small headphones on her head and was sitting in a chair with her back to the bed, moving her probe gently in small movements with her left hand.

  In front of her was a long dressing table that normally had the television on it. This had been removed and replaced by three laptops. The first was used to capture any sounds and speech from Samantha’s highly sensitive microphone. The second laptop was displaying imagery from the covert camera placed in the centre of the sunflower. It gave an excellent picture of anyone exiting or entering the lifts. And the third laptop had a very strange image on it consisting of what looked like a stickman in yellow, blue and red colours.

  Sean sat down in front of the third laptop to monitor the movements of Nadège in the room next door. The screen showed a dark grey background with the stickman moving around, replicating the movements of the human body on the other side of the wall. It wasn’t a picture. Rather it was a series of small circles and blobs, with the head showing as red, the arms blue and the torso and legs yellow. Astonishing stuff, he thought. The wires on the back of the laptop led to a series of ten or so probes that were nailed into the plasterboard. Just like acupuncture needles in the skin of a body.

  The equipment had been designed by scientists to use artificial intelligence to teach a wireless device to detect a person’s precise actions and gestures, even when they were behind cover. The signals received by the needles were able to analyse radio signals a thousand times less powerful than home Wi-Fi that were bounced off the bodies inside to create animated stick figures that walked, sat and moved their limbs on the screen in sync with the targets. A different way to see through walls.

  ‘How’s it work?’ Sean asked pointing at the blobs on the screen that were replicating Nadège’s movements as she walked around the room.

  ‘A bit like a
ircraft radar. But instead of bouncing off planes and returning to the ground, the signal travels through the wall, bounces off her body, which of course is full of water, and comes back through the wall and into our detectors.’

  ‘British tech?’

  ‘No. American. The artificial intelligence associates the labelled body parts with subtle radio reflections coming back through the wall. This ends up with a human visualised as blobs, which correspond to points on the body such as her knees and shoulders. The AI then turns this into a stick figure that shows Nadège moving in great detail. Such great detail, in fact, that the system can identify individuals eighty-three percent of the time by first determining their unique features and movement style.’

  ‘Nice tech. What’s she doing now then?’

  ‘She’s heading for the shower by the looks of it,’ Samantha said, placing her headphones on the desk. ‘Can’t hear fuck all but hey, you can see your ex naked soon as a stick woman.’

  ‘She’s not my ex Sam. Never was. Just a bit of a stupid fling.’

  ‘Same as me then, eh?’ Samantha teased, looking Sean right in the eye. ‘Is that how you see us all, just a fling?’

  Sean decided not to answer that and stood up. He walked to the large double-glazed windows with a balcony beyond overlooking the city. ‘Who exactly is this source that’s close to Nadège then? Jack’s source? Any idea?’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. You always do that. You know, we might just find a little time together later tonight when she’s asleep.’

  Sean turned and smiled at her, rubbing his chin with his hand again. The pain had subsided, helped by the ibuprofen he had been taking for the last day. ‘You know I have a girlfriend now.’

  ‘Or is she just a fling?’ Samantha proffered, putting her hands through her hair. ‘You know I’m still pissed off she beat me to it, but I’ll bide my time as you know.’