by Alan Judd
There was no need to make conversation in the lift as he was engrossed by his phone. Only when they reached the revolving glass doors did he look at her once more. ‘He uses a computer, another computer, not his.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Tew. He uses the computer of Mr Jeremy Wheeler who is the master of Katya. She works for him.’
‘Jeremy Wheeler, yes, I know him. Well, Katya could ask him where Mr Tew is, couldn’t she?’
‘They do not meet, Mr Wheeler does not know, we are sure of this. Katya study him. It is only his computer that is used. Mr Tew has his own computer which can use Mr Wheeler’s. We want to know where are Mr Tew and his computer. If your husband can discover where is his computer or the numbers to identify it, you can tell me. Moscow would be very pleased with this information.’
‘I’ll do my best, Mr Mayakovsky.’ That was important, Charles would be pleased. It made it almost easy to tell Mr Mayakovsky that she looked forward to seeing him again.
The porter grinned as she walked back past his desk. ‘You unglued his eyes from his phone, then, Ms Bourne?’
‘But not his brain, I suspect.’
She rang Charles but his phone was off. His statement must be taking a long time. She worked for an hour until she found she was reading every sentence twice, then switched off and left.
‘Gentleman just called for you, Ms Bourne,’ said the porter. ‘Not the same one, different one. Asked for you as Mrs Thoroughgood. I said you were in and offered to ring but he said not to disturb you but would see you later.’
It was presumably Charles, returned unexpectedly. Odd of him not to have rung.
‘Two gentlemen in one evening,’ said the porter. ‘Must be good for business.’
‘I’m not sure about that.’
The rain which had started as she parked was steady now, forming puddles in the gutters She stood in the entrance, putting up her umbrella, then walked quickly round the corner towards her car. It was the umbrella that made her unaware of the man approaching from behind her right shoulder until his hand slipped under her arm and gripped her wrist with sudden painful tightness. Almost at the same time something hard jabbed her ribcage.
‘This is a gun, Mrs Thoroughgood. It’s cocked and ready to fire. Just keep walking and don’t say anything and you’ll be all right. We’re going to your car.’
He was taller than her and lifted her half off her feet so that she was propelled along almost on her toes, much faster than usual. For the few seconds it took to round the corner she was too shocked to speak and didn’t even turn her head to look properly at him. It was difficult anyway with the umbrella. She thought afterwards she should have dropped it and struggled – he might have tripped over it – but he held her tightly and the pain in her ribs prevented her from thinking.
They were standing by her car. ‘Give me the car keys.’ He was well-spoken and deliberate.
‘I can’t, they’re in my bag.’ She heard herself as if from outside. He still gripped her right wrist. She couldn’t open her handbag and search it with one hand.
‘Put it on the bonnet.’
She managed it, with some fumbling. Her hair kept falling in front of her face and she couldn’t brush it back. ‘You’re hurting my wrist.’
‘Leave the key on the bonnet.’ She did that, struggling to close her bag with her left hand. ‘Now get in the driver’s seat.’ He walked her round to the driver’s door, took the umbrella from her and held it as she got in. Then he pocketed the gun, which she still hadn’t seen, and walked swiftly round to the other side, scooping the key from the bonnet.
He was quickly beside her, the dripping umbrella folded between his legs. Again, she thought afterwards, she could have done something then, she should have got out and run. But she was shaking and still not fully able to believe what was happening.
He took the gun from his pocket and held it in his left hand, resting it on his lap and pointing it at her. ‘Just follow my directions and you’ll come to no harm, you’ll be all right.’
His voice was gentler now but she could still feel where he had pressed the gun in her ribs. There’d be a bruise. And her wrist hurt where he had gripped it. ‘What are you doing this for? What do you want?’
‘I’m taking you hostage. Just for a while. Start the car and head for Waterloo Bridge.’
‘Hostage for what? What for?’ She looked at him properly for the first time. He was thin-faced and pale, clean-shaven, with greying dark hair. He looked intelligent and alert. Almost distractingly good-looking, in fact. But the way he looked at her made her feel like the umbrella or the car, an object to be used, of no interest in herself.
‘For your husband. Do as I said. Get going.’
16
Charles got up to go to the loo in the early hours. Parting from the camp-bed involved a degree of leverage and calculation he didn’t recall from his army days, another sign of youth’s silent desertion. His phone showed no text from Sarah. Odd, because even if she finished very late she would surely have sent something in response to his message. But it was too late to ring her now. Perhaps her battery was flat and she feared to wake him by ringing from a landline.
He reinstalled himself in the camp-bed and lay waiting for the feathers of sleep to fall again. There was no wind, no street noise, no background hum of traffic as in London. Once, distantly, the sound of a motorbike penetrated the mothy silence, fading like a very long, very thin tail. Then, quite suddenly, the word ‘toast’ lit up his mind, the word itself, unencumbered by Proustian associations of taste or smell or occasion. Toast was the nickname Jeremy’s chess opponent had chosen for himself. Toast was also an anagram of stoat and stoat was the code name for the investigation of Peter Tew, which Peter had discovered through papers disclosed to his leaky lawyers. He had always had a fondness for inventing simple nicknames for colleagues, often concealed beneath harmless anagrams but sometimes cruelly apt. Charles levered himself out of bed again.
The Head Office duty officer had been asleep, as was permitted provided he could be summoned immediately. So, judging by his initial incomprehension, was the GCHQ duty officer. Torn between wanting to do what Charles asked and fearing to act outside the usual channels with GCHQ authority, he hesitated. ‘Not sure of the best way to do this, sir –’
‘You can either ring your Director at home and ask him or give me his home number and I’ll ring him. It’s important. He won’t mind being woken.’
‘Can it really not wait until the morning, sir? It really requires a warrant from the Secretary of State, you see—’
‘That’s fine. I’ll ring George Greene myself and get him to ring your Director. They’ll both agree, I’m quite sure of that.’
Alarmed now, the duty officer struggled to help while wanting the cup of responsibility taken from him.
‘I’m sure we can find a way through this,’ said Charles, trying to sound considerate and sympathetic. ‘I’m asking for two things. One concerns a target you’re monitoring already. I just need to know when a particular communication stream within that target started, and when it finished. The other, because it means live interception of an individual’s laptop, requires a warrant. If you’re prepared to get interception going now, I’ll seek retrospective authorisation from the Foreign Secretary first thing in the morning as one of our operations, not one of yours. Thus, you’ll be responding to a tasking request on the understanding that it is being authorised. I’ll get our duty officer to email you on his channels, confirming it in writing and saying that I take full responsibility. Will that help?’
It helped. Next it was the MI6 duty officer’s turn to become uneasy. ‘Sorry, sir, but may I – may I just check I’ve got this right? The laptop whose traffic you wish to read belongs to a member of parliament who is also a member of the ISC and used to be a senior officer here. The reason for urgency is that the laptop may be transmitting from his home now. Also, you believe we should have a record of which laptop it is because
we supplied the individual concerned with it while he was with us and it might therefore not be on the list of ISC laptops?’
‘Correct.’
There was a pause. ‘I – don’t want to be awkward, sir – but I believe operations or investigations involving members of parliament require prime ministerial authorisation, don’t they? And that a case like this would fall more properly to MI5—’
‘You’re absolutely right and if necessary I shall seek authorisation from the Prime Minister. But it needs to be done very quickly while the thing might be live. We may not get another chance. If we’re doing wrong, on my head be it. Now, would you like me to dictate the Cheltenham email for you?’
It was insecure to do it over the phone but needs must. By the time he finished it was ten to four and not yet light. He made a cup of tea, washed, dressed, ate toast with Marmite and packed the Bristol. His phone rang as he was walking back down the garden path to lock up. The sky was lightening to the east but overhead there was still a great bomb-burst of stars. He looked up as he answered, wondering as always how astronomers could ever heed merely human considerations.
This time it was Joyce, the GCHQ operational night shift manager. They had details of Jeremy Wheeler’s laptop from the MI6 duty officer but it would help to know roughly where it was. Charles gave her Jeremy’s Battle postcode. She said they should be able to pick it up if it were live now, otherwise they would have to trawl through metadata they stored to see if that yielded anything. They wouldn’t be able to recover content but they would establish usage. She was putting the word ‘toast’ into their Star system. Charles looked up again. They’d probably get as many hits in the next hour as he could see stars in the heavens. He briefly considered waking Jeremy and getting him to check his laptop but didn’t want to alert him. After all, he could be part of it. Unlikely, but anything was possible.
Before six, it was possible to move on the M25 and he made good time. But when he turned into the Office underground car park, shared with an insurance company, a firm of solicitors, a department store and a company that made porn films, the barrier stayed down. He waited, knowing he was on camera. No-one came. He didn’t want to leave the car blocking the ramp so he reversed and parked on double yellow lines over the road.
The guard in the entrance hall was an overweight middle-aged man. He did not put aside his newspaper.
‘Have to use your swipe card,’ he said.
‘I don’t yet have one. Could you open it for me?’
‘Need it in writing from your line manager to park without a swipe card.’
‘I don’t have a line manager. I’m the boss.’
‘Still need written permission.’
‘From whom?’
The door behind the desk opened and another overweight man appeared, looking as if he had swallowed something unpleasant. ‘Got to have written permission,’ he said.
Charles was patient. It would be undignified for the Chief to get into a row with the guards. ‘Can we do it retrospectively? I’ll get someone to write it for me when the staff arrive and send it down.’
‘Long as your car stays outside.’
He had another idea. ‘Let me just check to see if I’ve got something.’ He sat in the waiting area and took some Foreign Office headed notepaper from his briefcase. He wrote to the effect that the bearer had permission to park pending issue of his swipe card, signed in his own name and dated it the week before. The second man had disappeared when he handed it to the guard. ‘I found I had got this.’
The guard put his finger on Charles’s signature. ‘Who is this?’
‘The line manager. The top one.’
The guard handed it back. ‘You can lift the barrier yourself. It’s broken.’
The cleaners were still there, chatting in the open-plan area outside his office. It had been suggested that he would set a good egalitarian example by making his office part of the open plan. He had tried to think of plausible reasons for not but now, energised by what was happening and what he was about to do, he decided he would simply say no. He would say he didn’t want it, with no further explanation. Attlee was like that, he remembered reading. When a sacked minister asked why he had been dismissed, Attlee had reputedly replied, ‘Because you’re not up to the job,’ and carried on writing. Charles had a weakness for grand historical comparisons.
He had brought his mobile in with him because that was the number Cheltenham would use but still he hesitated to ring Sarah. He would give her another half-hour. There was power today so he made a coffee and turned on his computer, only to realise he could not get into the system. So far Elaine had logged him on before he arrived. He didn’t know his user name or password, though he had an uneasy feeling he had been told them, and couldn’t access even his diary. He sipped the coffee, staring at the screen-saver and recalling Sarah’s recent scolding about his futile resistance to the computer age. He was in fact less resistant than he allowed himself to appear but took a private pleasure in being the object of protest and concern. Now, cradling his coffee in both hands, he reflected that if his theory was right it was no bad thing to be out of the system. He would be the only person whose thoughts and actions were unreadable.
At half past six he got out his address book. There were no numbers stored in his phone, something he could now present as a security decision. He rang George Greene first, hoping he held to the working habits of his youth. In Vienna he always did two hours’ work before the rest of the embassy was awake, which meant he could have long lunches and give the impression of being effortlessly on top of things.
It was no different now; George was at home in Pimlico, working on his red box. ‘Even earlier these days,’ he said. ‘Competition from the Prime Minister. He rises at five, into his box by 5.30. Not one of your vices, I seem to remember. Must be world war three to have got you out of your cot at this hour.’
Charles explained. When he finished there was a pause.
‘Did I meet Peter Tew?’ asked George. ‘Name’s familiar.’
‘Not through me. After your time. You probably read about him.’
‘Got it in for you, by the sound of it. Two down and one to go, if your theory’s correct.’ He chuckled. ‘Vintage Agatha Christie.’
‘You’re the third person who’s said that.’
‘Won’t be the last, especially if he tops you.’
‘But will the warrant be okay? Will you authorise it?’
‘Suppose so, though it may not be for me. Sounds more like one for Five and the Home Secretary.’
‘That’ll take for ever, especially if it has to go up to the Prime Minister.’
‘All right, I’ll do it and square him when I see him this morning. You just make sure someone sets it in motion. Get Angela on to it. You’d better tell her what’s going on anyway, otherwise she’ll throw all her toys out of the pram when she finds out.’
Charles wasn’t convinced that George appreciated the full import of his theory. ‘You do see that if I’m right about all this it could be the answer to our cyber attacks as well—’
‘Interesting if true. Keep your head down.’ George Greene never found it difficult to end conversations.
Charles caught Angela as she was about to leave for work. She cut him off soon after he started. ‘Charles, can’t this wait until I get into the office? Also, should you be talking about it over the phone?’
‘No and yes, Angela. I can’t get in to explain and we’ve got to set things in motion quickly.’
She heard him out and sighed. ‘Oh God, this is all we need. Sorry – not your fault, I know. We’d better have a COFE later. I hope to God Tim Corke is in London. Will you be able to get to it? I take that back – you will, you’ll have to, just have to. I’ll get my office to set it up.’
‘Make it this afternoon.’
‘George Greene having a word with the PM is all very well but we’ve been here before on other matters. Neither of them will put anything in writing or even thi
nk to tell anyone unless they’re asked. And then they’ll give wildly different accounts. It’s no way to run a country.’
‘We’re not running anything, we’re being run. Up to now we’ve been reacting, that’s the point. This is our chance to get ahead of the game, provided we act fast.’
He next rang Sarah. There was no answer from home or her mobile. He tried her direct line at work, finally her secretary. She was baffled. ‘Can’t find her anywhere, I’ve tried everywhere, she was to chair an early meeting that was supposed to start ten minutes ago and I’ve had to put everyone off, including two people over specially from New York about the London Bridge project. It’s a nightmare, I can’t think where she is, I’m sure she’d have rung in, she’s so – you know – thoughtful and organised. The log at reception says she had two visitors yesterday evening when she was working late. She saw one of them but the other left without leaving a name and didn’t come back. Then she left. Did she not come home, then?’
Her office night guard was at home asleep and couldn’t be disturbed. The CCTV system was controlled by security who were difficult about access. Charles told her to keep trying and to keep in touch. He meanwhile would go home to check. His unspoken thought, which he sensed the secretary shared, was that Sarah might have fallen ill, or even died. Things happened, including unlikely things. He had an image, more vivid than he wanted, of her sprawling on the bathroom floor. His other unspoken thought concerned the mystery caller. So far the outbreak of war had been theoretical, his own theory, not proven. But if this was what he feared, it was war.
Elaine arrived just as he was packing up. She had a black eye. He hurried out, giving her instructions as he went and saying he was off to an urgent Cabinet Office meeting. She tried to pass messages lurking in his emails and wanted to know when he’d be back. He was abrupt, telling her he couldn’t say and that she was to sort out what she could. By the time he got downstairs he felt guilty and rang her from reception.