Now A Misdemeanour
One year and eleven months later
* * *
London and Bath, Monday, 8 April 2019
I sink onto the train’s scratchy blue seat, utterly deflated since the two police officers escorted me from the building. When we are a few minutes out of Paddington I ring Eliza. Again it goes to voicemail. I remind myself that Trudy said Alice was okay, but the attempt to comfort myself fails and the knot in my stomach tightens. I picture Zac, looming over Eliza, making her apologise ten times in a row for some infraction or slight. I picture him doing far worse than this to her, too, though he is too smart and controlled to kill two women in the same week.
With a pang, I recall Alice’s pure joy when she heard Zac’s voice. Would he deliberately hurt a child? At the very least, a child could end up as collateral damage.
I try to concentrate on other things, so I close my eyes and open my mind to any possible loose end. It is easy to let time open, too, because since Jane died, the borders between my life with Zac in St Ives and my life alone in Bath have dissolved.
The outline of the card I found in Jacinda Molinero’s dainty suitcase, sitting in a corner of my brain, fills with colour and grows clear. I can picture the silver lettering over black, and the foil edging. Albert E. Mathieson, International Tax Law. Zac’s old friend. Maxine said earlier today that when she followed this up two years ago, the information was useful. But she refused to give me the details. Why?
I make a second phone call as the train speeds through the darkening landscape. Close to the tracks are sacks of cement and the skeletons of tractors. Fifty metres beyond are some tumbledown farm buildings roofed with corrugated iron. As I look into the distance, at a field planted with rows of wooden sticks, Albert E. Mathieson’s personal assistant explains that Albert can meet with me by video link, and charges a consultation fee of $800 an hour for a minimum of two hours of his time, payable in advance and not refundable. In addition, she explains, I am in great luck, because although there is normally a wait for space in Albert’s extremely busy diary, he happens to be free today at 5 p.m. local time, which is 1 a.m. for me.
A ribbon of river winds its way around shadowy churches and castle turrets as I try to quell my panic at the thought of sticking $1,600 on my credit card to buy two hours of Albert E. Mathieson’s time. But his assistant cheerfully instructs me on how to complete and sign some engagement documents and forms, including my payment details, and reassures me that for my convenience these can all be emailed.
Bath, Monday, 8 April 2019
As I walk home from the train station, I dial Eliza’s mobile again, but there is still no answer. I leave another message. I tell her that although I know Alice must be asleep and she herself must be exhausted by now, she can phone me any time, no matter how late. I promise to ring her again first thing tomorrow. I try her landline, too, and recite the same message there, despite my fear that Zac is likely to hear it and recognise my voice. As an afterthought, I say I will come to the house to check on them in the morning if we haven’t spoken by then.
It is 8.15 when I reach the basement courtyard of my flat, the phone still in my hand. The night is coming quickly. As I make my usual checks, the silhouettes of the recycling bins look sinister. When I see a male figure sitting on the step in the shadows of my front door, I let out a startled cry.
‘Hello, Helen.’ George is statue-like in his stillness, as if he fears that to twitch even a finger will startle me more. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
I take a step back. ‘Why are you here? How did you find me?’
‘You’re not going to like the answer. A couple weeks ago – after the gym – I – kind of – followed you.’
‘You’re lying.’ I look at the bullet-style security camera trained on my door. He hasn’t covered it up or deactivated it in any way that I can see, though I suppose he could reach right in and get rid of anything he doesn’t want, anyway.
He sees me looking. ‘I’m not bothered about that. I wouldn’t interfere with your set-up.’
‘Am I supposed to be grateful?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Because you’ve clearly got big respect for my personal privacy. So you’ve found me, George. Now you can go. Would you prefer to hear that in Russian or Portuguese? I can try one of the trillion other languages you seem to speak. Chinese, maybe?’
‘Helen, I like you so much. I thought …’
‘It probably took you less than five seconds to find out where I live.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So you know where I live and you’ve clearly known it all along. Now I can tell you something you might not know. Being spied on is one of the things I hate most in the whole world. And here is another thing. I liked you too. But I don’t any more. I know people meet in all kinds of weird ways, and spies have relationships too, but you could have told me the truth. I asked you straight out on Sunday morning and you didn’t.’
‘You took me by surprise.’
‘You could have called instead of ambushing me on my doorstep.’
One corner of his mouth stretches down, bemused. ‘You still haven’t given me your number.’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t have it already.’
He pushes his floppy hair up from his forehead. ‘Okay. I’m sorry again. I do. It’s a habit. But I didn’t call because it felt wrong when the information didn’t come from you.’
I can feel myself softening towards him, though I don’t want to. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again. I thought the tradition was for you to disappear when your cover was blown.’
‘Not in this case.’
‘Don’t lie to me about a single other thing. Tell me why you’re here. If you’re not prepared to do that, leave now and stop wasting my time.’
‘I’m here because you’ve been busy today. Visiting old friends, knocking on doors.’
‘They sent you?’
‘Yes. Will you please let me in for a coffee? Maybe something stronger?’
‘No.’
‘We can talk, Helen. We can work this out.’
‘Is that what they want you to do?’
‘Yes. But I want that too. And they know I’m involved with you. I’ve disclosed it.’
‘You’re not involved with me.’
‘Okay, okay. That was presumptuous.’
‘The fact that you know so much about me, and I know so little about you, makes this impossible.’
‘That can change. I can tell you more about me.’ He tries to smile.
‘No, you can’t. And you know it.’
‘Look. I have information to share – it will interest you. Will you give me a few minutes?’
‘A few. No more than a few.’
‘Before I tell you the thing I’ve come to tell you, there’s something you should know.’
It is as if I am looking through a peephole. ‘What?’
‘I saw the photo your ex-boyfriend put on the missing person’s website. And I know it was probably him by the river on Saturday night. I know about Jane, too.’ He pauses.
Everything in the world except that tiny circle has gone black. ‘You know what happened to me in St Ives, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
My face reddens. My heart starts to race. All I can see is George’s face, which is pale.
‘I wanted you to know that I knew.’ He rests his brow on his fingers and his chin on his thumb.
‘Is that what they sent you to say?’
‘No. That was all me. What they sent me to say – what I sent myself to say, actually – is about Frederick Veliko.’
I lean against my front door. I cross my arms. I try to collect myself. I blink, knowing the tunnel vision is a stress symptom – it happened to me all the time during my first few months in Bath. ‘So tell me.’ My voice is quiet. My voice is weak.
‘You were right to be suspicious that your searches kept closing down. There’s no human way
you’d have found him. The United States government would like very much to talk to Mr Veliko, who is one of its citizens. So for that matter would we. But Mr Veliko is not making himself available.’
All at once, I think about what Mrs Hopwell said two years ago. She’d been paraphrasing Zac. What was she thinking, meeting him? I’d assumed Zac was accusing Jane of seeing another man, but I realise he must have been talking about Frederick Veliko. ‘Jane met her brother. Didn’t she? After he did whatever it was you think he did?’
George stares at me. ‘I’ll come to what that was, but how do you know they met?’
I don’t answer. I think again about the conversation I had with Mrs Hopwell as I sat beneath the handkerchief tree, doodling for Zac on my whiteboard. I didn’t feel like confiding it to Maxine this morning and I don’t feel like confiding it to George now. They have spent years refusing to answer the questions I put to them. Why should I answer theirs?
George seems to guess this, and goes on. ‘There is strong circumstantial evidence that Jane and Veliko met, yes. And that your former partner met him too.’
‘And that matters why?’
‘Because Veliko did some very bad things, and Jane and Hunter are implicated through their contact with him. There is also a likelihood of more recent contact between Hunter and Veliko.’
‘Why would Zac do that?’
‘It appears Veliko and his ex-brother-in-law share some of the same interests.’
‘Well, they shared Jane.’
‘Yes, but more than that.’
‘And you and Maxine and Martin are finally admitting this to me why?’
‘Because you’re figuring it out. Because you deserve to know. Because I’ve been authorised to tell you.’
I shake my head. ‘No. No way. That isn’t it. That isn’t why you do anything. You want something from me. You don’t give information if it doesn’t suit you to.’
‘Perhaps … At some point … Premature to discuss it now …’
‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. I won’t do anything for the Security Service ever again.’
‘Understood.’ He looks straight at me, no bashful ducks of the head, no floppy-haired charm. ‘What made you get interested in Veliko, Helen? What made you ask me to find him?’
I don’t answer this either. Why should I? I’m not going to tell him I overheard Martin mention Veliko’s name while I was crouching on wet grass above the dead. Instead, I ask a question of my own. ‘What is it that you think Frederick Veliko did?’
‘You know Edward Snowden,’ he says.
‘Not personally.’
He allows himself a smile. ‘What Veliko did is similar to what Snowden did.’
I think again about the one non-pornographic item I found in Zac’s old bag two years ago. That special-issue political magazine about Snowden’s revelations. Gruesome details about how the British and American intelligence services were intercepting our private information. It was no surprise to find that magazine mixed with Zac’s hardcore porn. Two of his great passions all in one compact container. Taboo sex, and information theft. Naked women in impossible poses, and the rights of human beings to control their own data.
‘You know what’s weird?’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Zac was forever reading books about how our future is being attacked by algorithms. He was completely fascinated by WikiLeaks. Anything to do with surveillance and privacy and data control, he was into that. Panama Papers, yes. Activist hackers, yes. Whistle-blowers, yes. Snowden, yes, yes, yes. But he was hardly alone. To read about that stuff, to talk about it, isn’t a crime. If Zac was doing something illegal, if he was involved in some Snowden-type conspiracy, why would he be so open about those interests? He’s not going to document it all for you. He’s not going to leave evidence against himself.’
‘Hunter buying and owning publicly available material is not going to get him a one-way trip on Rendition Airlines. That’s all open-source information.’ George avoids calling Zac by his first name. He is Hunter, or your former partner, or Frederick Veliko’s ex-brother-in-law. Jane, on the other hand, is Jane.
I think some more about Zac’s passion for this subject. Is it akin to my own secret obsession with anything I can find about babies who supposedly died but in reality were stolen, then given or sold to someone else? I found cases of babies who were swapped at birth, so the mothers were told their babies had died but they hadn’t. Such things have happened.
George continues. ‘Hunter needed to understand the risks and nature of what he was involved in as deeply as he could without getting in trouble, without touching anything that was directly incriminating.’
‘One man’s cyber-terrorism is another man’s heroics.’ That was something Zac said to me once, but I don’t attribute the quote.
‘True.’ George pats the empty space beside him on the step, inviting me to sit. ‘Do you want me to tell you more about Veliko?’
I nod. My legs are wobbling. I quietly lower myself beside George, and notice that his cheeks redden. I’m careful to keep half a metre between us.
‘Veliko’s professional career was similar to Snowden’s, but he’s much more skilled. He was a senior advisor for the CIA with privileged access. They farmed him out as a telecommunications systems officer for private companies. What the companies didn’t know was that he was embedding the work he did with mechanisms for harvesting all that data. Think about the things you do every day, Helen.’ George has the excitement of a man who has discovered the key to immortality. ‘Your texts and emails, the websites you visit, your bank passwords and records, the videos you watch, the books you read, the Internet searches you make, everyone you communicate with, the communications themselves. All of these things are stored and searchable, so you can be tracked in real time.’
‘Without a warrant, George. Without cause. Without my consent.’
‘Yes.’
‘For our governments to do that is criminal. Snowden thought that too – that’s why he leaked that data and told us what they were doing. Presumably Frederick Veliko felt the same. Though you clearly think it’s a good thing for every person on the planet to be under constant surveillance.’
‘I think it’s a complex thing.’
‘A necessary evil. Is that what you’d say?’
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘Well, it’s ironic, because the stuff Veliko and Snowden got up to doesn’t sound too different from the kind of stuff you do. What is it they say? You can scale any wall – that’s it. In your case helped by the fact that you’ve studded the bricks with hidden toe-holds only you can see. To save the world you need to be able to invade it. You’re all the same.’
‘I’m not a whistle-blower. I wouldn’t jeopardise the security of our country. I wouldn’t turn traitor. I wouldn’t put lives in danger.’
‘You really are one of them through and through, aren’t you?’
‘Aren’t you too? You’ve helped us.’
I straighten my legs, point my toes. ‘I’m an outsider. My motives aren’t the same as yours. MI5 knew what it was doing when they rejected me. I never thought I’d come to feel this, but I’m glad of it now. Some would say the Snowdens of this world make us safer. Zac would probably say that and I agree with him for once. They would say the ones who secretly spy on masses of innocent people, who take away our privacy, they’re the traitors.’ Again, I am struck by the contradiction in Zac, that he should care so much about protecting people from this, but do it to me. ‘We shouldn’t use the word traitor so easily.’
‘I agree. And you’re right about how Frederick Veliko sees things. It’s probably a view he persuaded your former partner to share. Because here’s the thing. Some of the leaks that have been attributed to Snowden – they had to come from a different source.’
‘You think Frederick Veliko was the source.’
‘We’re certain he was. Those error messages when you plugged Veliko’s name into US governme
nt registers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your searches pinged an alert, Helen. They knew you were making them – it got back to us. Veliko’s been missing since early 2012. That’s a year and a half before Snowden made his disclosures. The US and the UK need to find him. The hope was that Jane could tell us. And Hunter.’
From the start, I pressed Maxine to tell me the real reason why they were so interested in Jane. And Zac. Now, at last, I know.
‘Is it GCHQ, George? Is that who you work for?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the real reason they decided to tell me about Frederick Veliko after all this time? And you – why have you finally admitted what you are? Two questions, but I think they have the same answer.’
‘Partly as I said – you’ve been pushing buttons everywhere. And partly because everything changed when Jane died. Her ex-husband is our last hope now of getting Veliko. But it’s difficult to say whether the fact that he killed Jane is going to make him more or less cooperative. We think he’s been in contact with Veliko again – it started a few months before Jane came to Bath.’ A fourth alternative name for Zac. Jane’s ex-husband.
‘That makes no sense. Whatever you think he did for Frederick Veliko, Zac’s clearly got away with it for a few years. You haven’t been able to prove anything, and I know better than anyone how hard you’ve been trying. So why would Zac take such a risk now? Why would he do something to mess it all up? His killing Jane, that was personal. But getting in touch with her brother again would be too dangerous – Zac isn’t stupid.’
‘He may have felt he had no choice. If Veliko wanted something, and Hunter said no, Veliko could make things extremely unpleasant for him. Once you cross the line as Hunter did, it’s hard to go back. We think the micro SD card you saw in London a couple of years ago was probably from Veliko, and Hunter was part of a chain passing it on.
I Spy Page 24