by G D Harper
‘I gave you missing piece of jigsaw,’ she said, her voice a mixture of dread and wonderment.
‘Exactly. It’s a first, tiny bit of proof that all of this conjecture is not pure paranoia. But even if I don’t reveal why Anton Shub’s company is getting a government contract, you are too close to the story. And if the press find out who I am, and that I know you, it would put you in a dangerous position. I don’t know why I even thought about writing this story. The more I think about it, the more I know I could never publish it.’
She gave me a surprised look, like a child catching an older person in a foolish statement. ‘But if you think it’s true you must publish it. What are the Russians going to do, give me sushi full of polonium? I don’t think so.’ Her face lit up with the fire of conviction. ‘These bastards in the Kremlin killed my brother. If they are trying to do to Britain even a little bit of what they did in Ukraine, they should be stopped. If you think your story is true, tell it.’
I pressed my hand against my chest; fingers splayed out. ‘Let’s both think about this for the next couple of days,’ I said in a weakened voice. ‘My blog is pretty high profile at the moment, after the first story I wrote about Shub. This story would be bound to get noticed. I’m not even sure it’s not libel the way it’s written at the moment. I’ve been in the eye of a media storm once in my life already; I’m not sure I can do it again. I never expected you to say all this. Let me think about it.’
The next day I set up the new accounts and I reached Bobbie that evening. I chose the username ‘Duncansnewphone’ so she’d know it was me. I told her about my new security measures and gave her an update.
‘Things have taken an unexpected turn,’ I said. ‘I told Tanya about Richard Foxe and the article I was thinking of writing. She didn’t mince her words about what she thought. Now I really am in a dilemma about what to do next.’
‘Some things are more important than writing a story, Duncan. If she’s told you not to publish the story, then you should respect that. I wish I’d been less supportive of you writing my story all those years ago.’
‘That’s just it. Tanya didn’t object; she insisted I went ahead. Her brother died in a riot a few years ago in Ukraine and Tanya blames the Russians. She sees my story as revenge for her brother.’
Bobbie gave a slow shake of the head. ‘She has no idea what she’s getting herself into, Duncan. You need to tell her. This could ruin her life.’
‘I did – and the conversation turned surreal. She tried to convince me to write the story and it was me doing all the arguing against. If I’m honest with myself, telling Tanya wasn’t just about me doing the right thing for a friend. Deep down I was having cold feet about going ahead and needed an excuse to pull the plug.’
Bobbie laughed. ‘God, Duncan, you do get yourself into a pickle, don’t you? You plunge headlong into being an intrepid reporter, stopping at nothing to get your story. Then as soon as you do come up with the goods, you get the heebie-jeebies about going ahead. I’m pleased you’re scared. It shows you’ve finally got some common sense in your old age. It’s only complete idiots that aren’t afraid of anything.’
‘So I’m not a complete idiot, then? I suppose that’s something.’ I paused to think for a second. ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t rush into this. I’ll take Tanya through what happened to you again, use it as an example of what the consequences of something like this can be. If she’s still okay with it, I’ll show it to the Chronicle. They’ve got lawyers and editors who can tell me whether it’s even something I’d be allowed to publish. That is, if you’re okay with it. Don’t want any publicity about me to reverberate back to you again.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ Bobbie said, with a quick laugh. ‘If anyone does show up in Scoraig, Davie and a couple of the lads here will make sure they’re soon on their way. We had a journalist turn up last year on the anniversary of Michael’s acquittal, wanting to do a “Where are they now?” story. Let’s just say they didn’t stay long. If you want to run the story, I won’t stand in your way.’
I lay in bed that night wondering what sort of monster I had created. I’d make absolutely sure that Tanya knew every single ramification of what being involved in a story like this could potentially do to her. I wanted her to be the one to say no.
But the trouble was, she didn’t. Taking Tanya through the repercussions one more time only strengthened her resolve to see the story come out.
favouritism claims over russian nuclear contract, screamed the headline in the Chronicle. Tanya was referred to as ‘a source close to Axos CEO, Anton Shub’.
This time it wouldn’t get pushed off the front page by the next news story to come along. Act Now! and Russia was shaping up to be the political scandal of the year, and I was going to try to make sure I was right in the middle of it.
chapter seven
I stared at the photographs Nigel was showing me. The same person, Zelig-like, showing up in every shot. An anonymous, middle-aged man with a pencil moustache, looking like a grey accountant, the sort of person you’d forget five minutes after meeting him. But you wouldn’t forget the others. A picture of him in the background of a news photo of the Russian president meeting IT technocrats in the noughties; pictures of him with a British businessman, a French newsreader and a German environmentalist, all taken about ten or fifteen years ago. All three of them, the current leaders of Act Now! in their respective countries. Two of them had already won an election and formed a government.
Nigel was spinning in his chair with barely contained glee.
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘Pavel Mikin. He was a professor of neuropolitics at Moscow State University when he came to the attention of the Russian government. He has a moustache. I don’t like people with moustaches.’
‘And apart from his moustache, do you know anything else about him?’
‘Oh, yes, everything. He was a teacher. I don’t like teachers either, apart from Mrs McGregor. But Mikin wasn’t like a normal teacher, who tells you to be quiet all the time or you don’t get to go on field trips. He wrote stories that were published in technical journals, just like you and your newspaper stories that get published in newspapers.’
‘And what were his stories about?’ Slowly, slowly, one step at a time, I told myself.
‘Dunno. They’re in Russian. But there were other stories written about him at the beginning of the century, and they were in English. About how he was saying that in the new millennium, more and more people in the West would be living in filter bubbles where they used social media to live in a community that reinforced and radicalised their beliefs.’ Nigel had slipped into the trance-like voice he used when he was reciting something by heart. ‘A community that made no distinction between who you knew online and who you knew in real life.’
He paused for a second, stuck his lips out in a pout. ‘That’s silly, isn’t it? You’re standing there breathing oxygen and turning it into carbon dioxide, and Ian is on my computer. I can tell the difference between you. You haven’t got wires coming out of you, and you’re not powered by electricity. And you’re not just breathing oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. You’re breathing in 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen and breathing out 6% water vapour, 74% nitrogen, 15% oxygen, 4% carbon dioxide and 1% argon. Plus some small quantities of other gases, but I guess you don’t want to know about them.’
‘That’s right. That’s because they’re irrelevant, which means they’re not important to what we’re talking about. What Professor Mikin means is that you think of both … Ian? and me as people you know, even though you’ve never seen Ian in person.’ I paused to let Nigel take in this information. Particularly the meaning of the word ‘irrelevant’. ‘What else did the stories say?’
‘That Professor Mikin had said the political establishment had failed to notice this, and he predicted that it would mean that “certain groups woul
d reject the messages of mainstream media in favour of their own, self-generated opinion formers”. That’s what they said in the article. Not sure what it means, though.’
‘It’s why so many countries have got the governments they have now. A massive rejection of the status quo. People putting two fingers up to the great and the good when they tried to tell them what was best.’
‘You shouldn’t put two fingers up. That’s rude.’
‘That’s right.’ I laughed. ‘Very rude. That’s why we got Brexit, Trump, Five Star in Italy. Lots of rude things happened a few years later.’
Nigel didn’t get the joke. ‘Professor Mikin published one final article, calling social media “the soft underbelly of democracy in the west”. Yuck. It was in Russian, but I got the gist of it from Translate. He said that if the Kremlin recruited an army of what he called anthropological technologists, Russia could use them to influence Western elections, divide and destabilise the West. That was around the time that first photo was taken. Do you think that’s important?’
‘Yes, Nigel, it’s important. Where did you get these photos?’
Nigel frowned. ‘That’s another thing that’s not right. They should have been easy to find, what with face recognition software and the metadata. But they were hidden away. You’d never find them using a search engine or trawling for keywords. You’ve got to get into deleted caches, use searchbots, all that sort of stuff. Tricky.’
‘So, these photos have been airbrushed out of the web’s history? Interesting. And how exactly did you … Oh, don’t bother to explain. A Russian academic comes up with a theory as to how to overthrow the West, disappears for ten years and then pops up again as a powerbroker for the future leaders of Western governments? That’s a hell of a story.’
‘Oh good. I knew Mikin was a nasty man when I saw his moustache. But you shouldn’t say hell.’
‘You know, all this is starting to make sense.’ I was speed talking now; I couldn’t help myself. ‘There was a scandal back in 2017 when Russia was accused of meddling in Western elections. There were enquiries into Trump’s connection with Russia and the social media campaigns supporting Brexit. “Seeking to weaponise information”, it was called. That was small beer in comparison to this; ten, twenty thousand tweets, a couple of hundred grand spent planting fake news, and real amateur-hour stuff like paying for ad campaigns in roubles, stupid incriminating mistakes like that.’ I was talking as much to clarify my thoughts as to explain to Nigel. ‘What if 2017 was a test programme, to see if Mikin’s ideas could pay off? Then after the Brexit and Trump votes went the Kremlin’s way, he got the green light to scale everything up, make the whole thing much more sophisticated? It all went underground, and the result is Act Now!.’
And Tanya’s ex-lover was one of the beneficiaries, I realised. I had a flash of panic, like when you’re swimming in the sea and you find your feet don’t touch the ground. My imagination was running away with me, surely. This was too ridiculous to be believable. I was spending too much time in Nigel’s company. I needed to drag myself back to reality.
‘Nigel, we have to take a deep breath here. This Mikin guy does seem to raise a lot of questions. But we can’t go from him having his photograph taken with our future prime minister to accusing the PM of being a Russian spy. That’s being ridiculous.’
Nigel jutted out his chin. ‘But it all makes sense. You said yourself that everything Act Now! does seems to be for Russia’s benefit.’ His eyes were blinking rapidly, his movements becoming jerky. ‘You’re annoyed that I found this out rather than your Russian girlfriend. If you don’t want the story, I’ll find someone else who does.’
His sudden change of mood was unsettling.
‘She’s not my girlfriend. And she’s Ukrainian, not Russian.’
Nigel snorted. ‘Same difference.’
‘No, it’s not the same. Tanya accidentally discovered something she shouldn’t have, and I took advantage of that. I need to start acting more responsibly if we’re going to keep going with this story. That means not accusing the people running the country of being in the pockets of the Russians until we’ve got more proof than what could be a perfectly innocent photograph.’ I was getting worked up too, and forced myself to calm down. ‘Because otherwise, people would say we were telling lies. And we don’t want to be liars, do we? To be sure we’re not liars, we need proof.’
‘Proof? Like Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Exactly. Sherlock Holmes always had his proof before he accused anyone. We need to be like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.’
Nigel obviously liked this analogy as he calmed down just as suddenly as he’d got animated. ‘More proof? Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Something else. We could put the photographs out there and ask Act Now! for an explanation, but likely as not they’d brush it off as a coincidence. Let’s hold our fire on this for the moment. These photos are more than a decade old, and no one else has ever found them. They can stay hidden for a few weeks more.’
But I didn’t want to leave it too long. Sooner or later Nigel would blurt out what he’d found in one of his chat rooms or sidle up to another journalist who wouldn’t have the same scruples. I was aching to talk to someone about it: Tanya, Bobbie, maybe even Sam at the Chronicle. But that was a cop-out. No one else should be involved. This was a dilemma I had to resolve myself.
Then I made the mistake of appearing on News Today. A flagship current affairs programme, they wanted to do an in-depth discussion about the issues my article on Russian favouritism had raised. They agreed they would interview an Act Now! spokesman and me together, and I was guaranteed anonymity, sitting in a separate darkened studio. As long as I stuck to the facts, I reasoned, I wouldn’t come to any harm.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Act Now! guy was Damian Zane, a real political Rottweiler, and he went on the offensive from the word go. After an avuncular introduction from the show’s presenter, Fiona Wallace, he was asked for his reaction to my story.
‘Well, Fiona, I see you’ve persuaded “Richard Foxe” to come out of the shadows.’ He said my name with dripping disdain and almost theatrical exaggeration. He looked at my darkened profile on the TV screen in the studio. ‘To an extent at least. I think your viewers should know he’s skulking in the next studio, too afraid to come in here and discuss this with me face-to-face. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Fiona baulked a little. ‘Mr Foxe agreed to come on this programme if we respected his anonymity. That’s why we have this set-up, which you knew about and agreed to in advance.’
I went to speak, but Zane got in first. ‘I’m not sure why he should be afforded such a privilege, particularly as he believes in revealing everyone else’s secrets. So, let me tell your viewers who Richard Foxe really is. Duncan Jones, better known as Mark Jackson. A failed novelist. If the name sounds familiar it’s not because of his books, I can assure you. They’re poorly written trash. It’s because he was at the centre of a scandal a few years ago. An innocent man was put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, because Duncan Jones told the police a pack of lies.’ Zane jabbed his finger towards my profile on the screen. ‘He’s a man who was recently fired as a columnist by his newspaper and is so desperate to earn some money that he’ll write anything to get paid; the more outlandish, the better. That’s who you’ve got on this programme attacking the credibility of the government. An unemployed fantasist whose stories have been proven in court to be a pack of lies.’
I sunk back in my seat, stunned at my naivety. I hadn’t thought through that Act Now! would come prepared to destroy me, not the story. Through the roar of blood rushing through my head, I could hear the interviewer’s question.
‘Richard Foxe, care to comment?’
I hesitated for a second, debating whether to deny everything, but that would make it worse.
‘Yes, I wrote novels under the name Mark Jacks
on. And one of them was indirectly linked to a miscarriage of justice in the 1990s. I wrote it as a work of fiction, based on events that happened to a friend of mine. It spurred the police on to launch an investigation that we now know was both misguided and corrupt. But that investigation was nothing to do with me. I did nothing unethical or illegal, and neither did my friend. And we were completely exonerated at the enquiry that was held afterwards.’ I straightened up, tried to regain my composure. ‘I think we should focus on what we’re here to discuss. Why has Act Now! awarded a nuclear power contract to a company whose technology is based on that used at Chernobyl, and why are they so secretive about it?’
I tried to turn the tables, but the damage was done. Anton Shub had denied ever telling anyone that Act Now! owed Russia any favours. Without bringing Tanya into the story, all I could argue was that the number of dirty tricks played on Act Now!’s opponents at the last election, and the party’s seemingly inexplicable about-turn on being opposed to foreign involvement in building power stations in the UK, must somehow be linked. It was all speculation and any chance of support from the presenter had evaporated after Zane had revealed my less than illustrious past.
Zane stonewalled every question, lacing his replies with taunts for me to come out from hiding and join them in the studio. The slot lasted six minutes. A total car crash, and when the interview came to an end Zane was given the final word.
‘Nothing this known liar has said today or in his newspaper story is backed up by a single shred of proof. Unless he comes up with something more substantial, he should keep quiet and crawl back into the shadows where he obviously feels most comfortable.’
I tried not to wince.
‘And there we must leave it,’ said Wallace. Her tone betrayed the fact that keeping quiet about my past until it was revealed on air still rankled. ‘Maybe we’ve heard the last of the story, maybe not.’