by Mark Dawson
That girl, whoever she was, was in trouble.
And he was going to help.
* * *
DAY TWO
“Just a Cook”
* * *
I shot a man in Reno
Just to watch him die
Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”
* * *
18.
“TAKE A SEAT, Miss Thackeray,” the man said.
Anna Thackeray did as she was told. The office was impressive, well-appointed, spacious and furnished in the tastefully understated fashion that said that money had not constrained the choices that had been made. There was a wide picture window that offered a view of the Thames toiling sluggishly under a gunmetal grey sky. The room was light and airy. Military prints on the walls. Silver trophies and two photographs in luxurious leather frames: one was of the man on the other side of the desk in his younger days, in full battle dress; the other was of a woman and three children. A central table held a bowl of flowers, and there were two comfortable club chairs on either side of an empty fireplace.
The international HQ for Global Logistics was on the same side of the Thames as the more imposing building in Vauxhall where the important decisions were taken but that was as far as the similarities went; it was built in the sixties, with that decade’s preference for function over form, constructed from red brick and concrete, its anonymous five floors all rather squat and dowdy when compared to the Regency splendour of its neighbours or the statement buildings of government that had been constructed more recently. A grand terrace had been smashed down the middle by a three hundred pound Luftwaffe bomb and this unpromising building had eventually sprouted from the weed-strewn bombsite that had been left. The windows were obscured with Venetian blinds that had been allowed to fade in the sunlight; the staircase that ascended the spine of the building was whitewashed concrete and bare light bulbs; the lift––when it worked––was a dusty box with four walls of faux wooden panels and dusty mirror. And yet the drab obscurity of the building was perfect to cloak its real purpose. The government organisation that did its work here lived in the shadows, a collection of operatives that was secret to all but those with the highest security clearances.
Anna had never even heard of it until yesterday and she prided herself in knowing everything.
“You asked to see me, sir?”
His codename was Control. Only a handful of people knew his real name, and even fewer his background. He was a plump, toad-like man, dressed with the immaculate good taste of the best class of public schoolboy. A well tailored suit, an inch of creamy white cuff, a regimental tie fastened with a brass pin. His hands were fleshy, his glistening nails bearing the unmistakeable signs of a recent manicure. Anna found that, above everything else, rather distasteful. He was oleaginous and slippery, undoubtedly brilliant but as far removed from trustworthiness as it was possible to be. That, of course, made him ideal for his position. Like the building from which he worked, he was perfect for his purpose. Control commanded Group Fifteen, otherwise known as the Section, Pegasus and the Department. He supervised two hundred civil servants, mostly seconded from MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office, analysts and spooks that were simply the network that facilitated the work of the twelve men and women who carried out the jobs that Group Fifteen was allocated. When the government found itself with a particularly intractable problem, and every other route had failed––commercial, diplomatic, political––Group Fifteen would occasionally be put out into the field. And, for them, all solutions were in play.
“Thank you for coming to see me, Miss Thackeray,” Control said.
“Not a problem, sir.”
She tried to project a feeling of ease, but she did not find that simple to do. The occasion was not suited to that, for one, and the formality of the place bothered her. She had already made more concessions than she was comfortable with making: she had removed her earrings, scrubbed the black nail varnish from her fingers and borrowed a trouser suit and a shirt. And, of course, there was her hair. She had dyed it red over the weekend and she was damned if she was going to spend the night before this meeting changing it to something more … conservative.
There were limits.
“Everything I tell you this morning is beyond top secret––I’m sure that goes without saying?”
“It does”
“Very good. I’ll be as brief as I can be. Six months ago, one of our most valuable agents went AWOL. Have you read the file?”
“Yes––John Milton.”
“Indeed. It is our belief that Mr. Milton suffered a mental breakdown following an unsuccessful operation in France. The decision had been taken to bring him in for observation and treatment but, as one of our agents approached him for that purpose, he opened fire on him. A member of the public was killed and the agent was badly wounded. We suppressed that from the report for obvious reasons.”
“Yes.”
“Following those events, Milton has dropped off the grid. We tracked him north to Liverpool and our working assumption is that he either found work on a boat or stowed away on one. The trail went cold from there and we have seen neither hide nor hair of him since. That is a state of affairs that we cannot allow to stand. Mr. Milton was our most experienced operative. He has intimate, first-hand knowledge of operations that would cause the government enormous embarrassment if their existence was ever to be disclosed, and that’s not even considering the operational knowledge that would be of great interest to our enemies––and to our friends.”
“You want me to find him.”
“We do. We’ve been working with your department for some time but, so far, with disappointing results. Your predecessor made no headway and so he has been reassigned and you are replacing him. I understand from your supervisor that you’re the best analyst that GCHQ has to offer.”
“No question.”
“You don’t suffer from false modesty, do you?”
“I don’t see the point in it.”
“You might come to wish you had been more circumspect because now I expect you to meet with more success.” He sipped at his cup of tea; Anna found the sight of his pursed, fleshy lips nauseating.
“I have the file. Is there anything else I need to know?”
“You should be under no disillusions, here: John Milton has been trained to be totally invisible. His profession for ten years was to be a ghost. He has operated in some of the most inhospitable, dangerous places you can imagine––if he was not as good at this as he is, he would have been captured and killed years ago. He is not married, he has no children, he has no real friends. No ties, not to anyone or anything. It will not be an easy task to find him, but I must re-emphasise: he must be found. This could be the making of your career or”––he paused and spread his hands––“not. Do I make myself clear?”
The implication was very clear.
Find him, or else.
“You do,” she said.
* * *
19.
IT WAS early the next day when Anna stooped to position her eye over the iris scanner, the laser combing up and down and left to right before her identity was confirmed and the gate opened to allow her inside. The guard, his SA80 machine-gun slung loose across his shoulder, smiled a greeting as she passed him. An exhibit in the main entrance hall contained treasures from the history of British code-breaking: the Enigma machine was her favourite but she passed it without looking and went through the further two checks before she was properly inside. GCHQ had the feel of a bustling modern airport, with open-plan offices leading off a circular thoroughfare that was known as the Street, offering cafés, a bar, a restaurant and a gym. Anna walked to the store and bought a copy of the Times and a large skinny latte with an extra shot of espresso.
Most of the staff were dressed conservatively; the squares on their morning commute might have mistaken them for workers on their way in to the office. Suits and blouses, all very proper. But they would not have mistaken Anna like t
hat. She wasn’t interested in conformity and, since she was not ambitious and didn’t care whether she impressed anyone or not, she wore whatever made her comfortable. She was wearing a grey Ministry t-shirt, a black skirt, a battered black leather jacket, ripped Converse All-Stars and red tights. She cocked an eyebrow at the attendant working at the x-ray portal; the man, beyond the point of being exasperated with her after the last six months, readied his wand and waved her through. She smiled at him and, when he smiled back, she winked. She had a sensuous mouth, a delicate nose, and well defined cheekbones that would have suited a catwalk model.
She followed the thoroughfare to the junction that, after another five minutes and a flight of stairs, led to the first floor SigInt Ops Centre where she had her desk. It was a busy, open-plan area, staffed by mathematicians, linguists and analysts scouring the internet for intel on terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy security, military support, serious organised crime and counter-espionage in different regions. Computer engineers and software developers helped make it possible; the Tempora program alone, responsible for fibre-optic interceptors attached to sub-surface internet cabling, siphoned off 10 gigabits of information every second. Twenty-one petabytes a day. The Prism and Boundless Informant programmes added petabytes more. That huge, amorphous mass of data needed to be sorted and arranged. GCHQ’s gaping larders were stuffed full of data to be harvested by their algorithm profiles against a rainy day.
There were hackers, here, too. A small team of them, including Anna.
Most of them had never considered a career in intelligence.
Anna had wanted the job specifically.
They had instructed her to get it.
And, as it turned out, it had been easy.
Thackeray was an anglicised name that she had adopted when she had moved to London. She was born Anna Vasilyevna Dubrovsky in Volgograd in 1990. Her father was a middle-ranking diplomat in the Russian diplomatic service and her mother worked for the party. She was their only child and her prodigious intelligence––obvious from a very early age––was a source of tremendous pride to them. She had been precocious in school, a genius mathematician, quickly outpacing her peers and then her teachers. There was an annual children’s chess competition in the district and she had won it for two straight years; she had been banned from entering for a third time. She had been inculcated in data and analysis almost before she could read. The day she had been given her first computer––a brand new American-built Dell––was the day that the scales had truly fallen from her eyes. She was taught everything there was to know about it and then, once again, she outpaced her teachers. Volgograd was a dreary backwater and the internet spread out like a vast, open vista, a frontier of unlimited possibility where you could do anything and be anyone. She was taught how to live online. It became her second life. She became addicted to hacking forums, the bazaars where information was exchanged, complex techniques developed and audacious hacks lauded. It became difficult to distinguish between her real self and ‘Solo’, as she soon preferred to be called.
Her instructors were pleased with her.
The family travelled with Vasily when he was assigned to the Russian embassy in London.
Her hacking continued. Questions of legality were easily ignored. Property was effectively communal; if she wanted something, she took it. She set up dummy accounts and pilfered Amazon for whatever she fancied. A PayPal hack allowed her to transfer money she did not have. She bought and sold credit card information. She joined collectives that vandalised the pages of corporations with whose politics––and often their very existence––she disagreed. After six months, they told her to draw attention to herself. She left bigger and bigger clues, not so big as to have been left obviously––or to have been the mark of an obvious amateur, which would have disqualified her from her designated future just as completely––but obvious enough to be visible to a vigilant watcher. She was just twenty-two when, from the bedroom of her boyfriend’s house, she had hacked into ninety-seven military computers in the Pentagon and NASA. She was downloading a grainy black-and-white photograph of what she thought was an alien spacecraft from a NASA server at the John Space Centre in Houston when she was caught. They tracked her down and charged her. Espionage. The Americans threatened extradition. Life imprisonment. The British pretended to co-operate, but then, at the last minute, they countered with a proposal of their own.
Come and work for us.
She appeared to be all out of options.
That was what she wanted them to think.
She had accepted.
Anna sat down at her desk. It was, as usual, a dreadful mess. The cubicle’s flimsy walls were covered with geek bric-a-brac: a sign warning DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES; a clock designed to look like an over-sized wristwatch; replicas of the Enterprise and the TARDIS; a Pacman stress ball, complete with felt ghosts; a Spiderman action figure. A rear-view mirror stuck to the edge of a monitor made sure it was impossible to approach without her knowledge.
She took a good slug of her coffee, and fired up both of her computers, high performance Macs with the large, cinema screens. On the screen to her right, she double-clicked on Milton’s file. Her credentials were checked and the classified file––marked EYES ONLY––was opened. A series of pictures were available, taken at various points throughout his life. There were pictures of him at Cambridge, dressed in cross-country gear and with mud slathered up and down his legs. Long, shaggy hair, lively eyes, a coltish look to him. A handsome boy, she caught herself thinking. Attractive. A picture of him in a tuxedo, some university ball perhaps, a pretty but ditzy-looking redhead hanging off his arm. A series of him taken at the time that he enlisted: a blank, vaguely hostile glare into the camera when he signed his papers; a press shot of him on patrol in Derry, camouflage gear, his rifle pointed down, the stock pressed to his chest; a shot of him in ceremonial dress accepting the Military Medal. Maybe a dozen pictures from that part of his life. There were just two from his time in the SAS: a group shot with his unit hanging out of the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk and another, the most recent, a head and shoulders shot: his face was smothered with camouflage cream, black war paint, his eyes were unsmiling, a comma of dark hair curled over his forehead. The relaxed, fresh-faced youngster was a distant memory; in those pictures he was coldly and efficiently handsome.
Anna turned to the data. There were eight gigabytes of material. She ran another of her homebrew algorithms to disqualify the extraneous material––she would return to review the chaff later, while she was running the first sweep––reducing it to a more manageable three gigs. Now she read carefully, cutting and pasting key information into a document she had opened on the screen to her left. When she had finished, three hours later, she had a comprehensive sketch of Milton’s background.
She went through her notes more carefully, highlighting the most useful components. He was born in 1973, making him forty. He was an orphan, his parents killed in an Autobahn smash when he was twelve, and so there would be no communications to be had with them. There had been a nomadic childhood before that, trailing his father around the Middle East as he followed a career in petrochemicals. There were no siblings, and the Aunt and Uncle who had raised him had died ten years earlier. He had never been married and not was there any suggestion that he enjoyed meaningful relationships with women. There were no children. It appeared that he had no friends, either, at least none that were obviously apparent. Milton, she thought to herself as she dragged the cursor down two lines, highlighting them in yellow, you must be a very lonely man.
David McClellan, the analyst who worked next to her, kicked away from his desk and rolled his chair in her direction. “What you working on?”
“You know better than that.”
McClellan had worked opposite Anna for the last three months. He’d been square––for a hacker, at least––but he had started to make changes in the last few weeks. He’d stopped wearing a tie. He occasionally came in wearing jeans an
d a t-shirt (although the t-shirts were so crisp and new that Anna knew he had just bought them, probably on the site that she used, after she had recommended it to him). It was obvious that he had a thing for her. He was a nice guy, brain as big as a planet, a little dull, and he tried too hard.
“Come on––throw me a bone.”
“Above your clearance,” she said, with an indulgent grin. McClellan returned her smile, faltered a little when he realised that she wasn’t joking, but then looked set to continue the conversation until she took up her noise cancelling headphones, slipped them over her ears and tapped them, with a shrug.
Sorry, she mouthed. Can’t hear you.
She turned back to her screens. Milton’s parents had left a considerable amount in trust for him, and his education had been the best that money could buy. He had gone up to Eton for three terms until he was expelled––she could not discover the reason––and then Fettes and Cambridge, where he read law. He passed through the university with barely a ripple left in his wake; Anna started to suspect that someone had been through his file, carefully airbrushing him from history.
She watched in the mirror as McClennan rolled back towards her again.
Coffee? he mouthed.
Anna nodded, if only to get him out of the way.
Milton’s army career had been spectacular. Sandhurst for officer training and then the Royal Green Jackets, posted to the Rifle Depot in Winchester, and then special forces: Air Troop, B Squadron, 22 SAS. He had served in Gibraltar, Ireland, Kosovo and the Middle East. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and that, added to the Military Medal he had been given for his service in Belfast, briefly made him the Army’s most decorated serving soldier.