by G D Harper
It was obvious which she believed.
I met up with Nigel the next morning.
‘So now do you think I was right to go easy on the Pavel Mikin photos? I take it you saw me on News Today last night.’
‘That man was rude to you, calling you names. Rude and childish. It was bad children at school that used to call me names. Mrs McGregor used to tell me that sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. She told me not to worry, they weren’t real. Like you didn’t have real dynamite with you on Tuesday, 27th October so you couldn’t blow me up like Wile E. Coyote tried to do to Road Runner.’
I smiled. ‘Mrs McGregor was right, Nigel. Names are just names. It was my own silly fault agreeing to the interview. I couldn’t believe they found out my real name.’
‘I found out about your Mark Jackson and Duncan Jones names after the first time I met you. Easy-peasy.’
‘What? You knew about my past?’
‘Lemon-squeezy.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
Nigel shrugged. ‘You didn’t ask me if I knew your other names.’
‘I don’t ask you a lot of things. Sometimes you shouldn’t wait to be asked. If you find something important, you should tell me. Sherlock Holmes didn’t wait to be asked.’
‘Well, if you want to know something important, you have the most rubbish security on your computer. I could see anything I want on it. Except that’s being bad as well. It’s called being a Peeping Tom. We had a talk at school about Peeping Toms once, after some boys got into trouble. I don’t want to be a Peeping Tom, but I bet Act Now! is not so well-behaved.’
I felt my skin tingle. ‘Really? Show me.’
Nigel brought up the contents of my hard drive on his computer in five minutes, my bank account in ten.
I was slack-jawed in amazement.
‘But I’ve got anti-virus, anti-hacking, firewall, you name it,’ I said. ‘I panicked about sending a compromising email the other day, but told myself later I was being paranoid. Is it really that easy to get around them? That’s shocking.’
‘You need end-to-end encryption, using open source systems that don’t share your secret key; and off-the-record messaging software that you can overlay onto the rubbish security that comes with most video conferencing software.’ Nigel opened a few more programs. ‘It doesn’t even look like you’re doing two-step verification and you haven’t encrypted your hard drive. And your passwords are rubbish. If Act Now! hasn’t already hacked into your computer, they will do soon.’
‘Shit. All that stuff you’ve just said I should do. Can you put it on my computer and show me how to use it?’
‘Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. And you’ll want to run Tor on your computer – that’s an open source program that shuffles your data through a network of volunteer servers. Will make you almost impossible to trace. Bring me your computer and I’ll make you super-safe. He-he-he-he.’
I tried to think what could already have been found out. I’d never typed anywhere that Tanya was the source of my Anton Shub story, and the only video conversation I had had about it with Bobbie was when I set up that second account after my panic attack about security. Sounded like a second account would make me safe for one or two calls, but unless I did all the stuff Nigel was suggesting, even that would be compromised in time. I’d had a lucky escape. I promised Nigel I’d bring my computer over straight away.
I got ready to leave. ‘One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to respond to that shellacking I got today by throwing more petrol on the fire. Zane challenged me to come back with proof. If I do ever call his bluff, it’s going to have to be bomb proof.’
Nigel looked startled, and I promised myself I’d start keeping my metaphors under control. ‘What I mean, Nigel, is I need more evidence before I say any more.’
‘Oh, I’ve got you that,’ Nigel replied. ‘You should have asked me. Look at this.’
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A bunch of long-deleted tweets from Mikin to our new prime minister, well before Act Now! was set up, congratulating him on business deals, wishing him happy birthday, even congratulating him on his engagement to be married. I took off my coat and sat down again.
‘This proves that the photograph was not a one-off.’ Nigel giggled. ‘Mikin and the PM have been friendly for years. You go back through the PM’s tweets and you find these have all been deleted. But they can’t destroy the ones that were retweeted; they’re indestructible. I did a search of all of the tweets of all of the prime minister’s followers and I found these on the Twitter feeds of his followers from years ago. The prime minister and Mikin knew each other; these tweets prove it. And once Act Now! got started, someone tried to erase this history. They did a good job, but not good enough to stop the amazing Nigel.’
Nigel stood up and struck his best superhero pose.
‘And this is inconvertible? Nobody can claim we’ve invented it, made it up?’
‘Yep. I’ve laid a breadcrumb trail from the PM’s personal Twitter feed from back then to every one of these personal messages from Mikin.’ He paused, and puffed out his chest in pride. ‘I was waiting till you asked me if I’d found anything else out, but now you’ve said to me I should tell you without waiting. If you’d only said that earlier, then you could have gone “ha-ha, gotcha” to that nasty man when he was rude to you.’ Nigel sat down, hooked his thumbs into his belt hooks, gave a satisfied grin and gently swayed in his seat.
I tried to conceal my exasperation.
‘Well, I’ve learned a lot this morning, Nigel. And I think you have too. No more waiting to be asked in future. If you’ve got something important, you tell me straight away. Solemn promise?’
* * *
Once Nigel had fixed my computer, I started writing up what I had just found out. I was still feeling bruised by my appearance on News Today and kept the tone of the article as even and professional as possible. All I was proving was that the prime minister had a personal relationship with a senior Russian academic and political adviser going back many years, which he had attempted to deny and hide any traces of. Whether the relationship was more than a personal friendship, whether it had any political ramifications, I left for others to speculate. Sam was delighted when I gave the story to the Chronicle. After the News Today debacle it was obvious that he thought me damaged goods, and that the paper would be tainted by association. Now Damian Zane’s taunt could be thrown back at him. He’d asked for evidence and now he’d got it.
Act Now! responded with an outright dismissal, claiming that the prime minister had always been a popular guy and avid Twitter user, and couldn’t be expected to remember every tweet that he’d ever responded to. The deletions from his feed were put down to an over-zealous junior aide deciding to tidy up his Twitter history a few years ago. Some people believed Act Now!’s version of events; for others I was the hero of the hour.
All this publicity meant that traffic to the Richard Foxe blog site had gone through the roof and I decided it was only fair that Nigel shared in the increase in site revenue. It wasn’t part of the original deal, but he deserved it. I told him when I next visited his flat. I took along a poster of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, as a thank-you for getting me out of the mess of the News Today programme and for making my computer safe. Nigel had told me he had watched every episode of the TV series over and over again. Holmes, a detective with remarkable powers of observation and memory and an ability to concentrate, someone who could link things in quite unique ways but was incapable of relating to people – he and Nigel, I couldn’t help thinking, had much in common. I told Nigel I’d be his Dr Watson, and for the first time I thought I saw genuine emotion in his eyes as he looked at the poster and shot a quick glance at me.
‘I’ll put it up for you,’ I told him. I surveyed the walls of his flat, every on
e of them painted white and completely bare. ‘That is, if I can find somewhere to hang it.’
Nigel looked confused. ‘You can hang it anywhere; there’s nothing on any of the walls.’ Then his face lit up with a grin. ‘Oh. That was a joke, right? There’s lots of space to hang it up, and you pretend there’s not so that you can be funny? He-he-he-he.’
It was the first time I didn’t find his laugh annoying.
chapter eight
I went back to my flat that evening and decided I couldn’t put off clearing out the emails from my blogger inbox any longer. I had a ‘Message Richard Foxe’ button on the site which I was thinking of switching off, as it was getting flooded with trolls, crackpots and fantasists. Comments ranging from claims that I should rot in hell for what I was writing, through to hailing me as the saviour of humanity. Then there were the ones that claimed that what I was uncovering was a plot by alien lizard kings to colonise the planet. I always prided myself in responding to the messages I received, which had been very manageable when I used to get half a dozen messages a week, but now they were in the hundreds. I struggled to read through them all, never mind reply.
That’s how I saw the message from Dmitry Vlasov. He ran a blog from Moscow in Russian and English, criticising the current regime. Didn’t have much of a profile in the UK. I had only come across him by accident when I’d researched previous Richard Foxe stories a year or so ago. We’d never been in touch, so I was intrigued to see what he wanted to talk to me about.
The message was from yesterday.
You’re onto the truth. You need to tell more. Can we talk?
Terse and intriguing. I looked at the email address and went to Dmitry’s website to check it was from him. They matched.
I emailed straight back, sending it through the Tor node that Nigel had told me to use only for extra-sensitive communications.
When? How?
I could be terse too.
I almost missed his email the next day; it was from a different email address.
Dmitry here again. Hope you get this, I’ve no doubt my emails are being monitored, so I’m using another computer to reach you. Can we talk? Maybe eight o’clock this evening, your time?
It was a buzz, the thought of a clandestine chat with someone who really was caught up in political subterfuge. For all my success, I felt a bit of an imposter, someone who had inadvertently stumbled onto something rather than a real investigator.
Eight o’clock precisely, the call alert came up on my computer. As I pressed Accept I was feeling more than a little nervous. A blotchy-faced guy appeared on the screen, not even the faintest smile of a greeting.
‘Dmitry, good to meet you. How are things in Moscow?’ I winced at my banal intro.
‘Good. We have first winter snow, like the make-up on an old whore. Hides the mess, make everything beautiful. But when it melts, Moscow will be ugly again.’
Best to ignore, I decided. ‘So, Dmitry, it’s an honour and surprise to hear from you. I first heard of you when you wrote about Litvinenko and I’ve been following your human rights articles.’
‘Yes, I know. You are on my mailing list; I checked when I saw your story. I thought, this is a man who wants to talk about what Russian government is doing and is good at looking under the stones. Finally, someone talks about Mikin. If you want to know more, I can help you.’
‘In what way?’ I asked, keeping my voice as level as possible.
‘Mikin is head of Kremlin’s asymmetric warfare. He set up Act Now! and he’s been feeding it money, power and influence ever since. Once he identified who should lead the party in every country, he made sure these people became very rich with dark money he found for them.’ Dmitry’s voice was devoid of any emotion.
His lip curled as he continued to talk. ‘Mikin set up troll factories and botnets to turn people in the West against each other, to divide and destabilise. All the fake news that explodes like a dirty bomb across the internet, it’s not from bored teenagers in Moldova trying to earn pocket money from clickbait. It is systemic. It is cognitive. It is the diplomacy of the future, and it is Russia’s revenge for losing the Cold War. This time they don’t use weapons, they use technology, to change the minds of your people so they vote the way Moscow wants. And it is working.’
I sucked in a quick breath. ‘Wow, that is a hell of a claim, Dmitry. Have you got anything to back it up?’ I leaned forward to peer at him on the screen, trying to see if I could tell from his face whether these were the ramblings of a lunatic.
He fixed me with a stare, as if he knew exactly what I was doing.
‘You need to see for yourself. I have story here, but if I put on my blog, no one in the West listens. You listen, maybe a few hundred more around the world. Then next day my server get DDOSA, Distributed Denial of Service Attack, and my voice goes silent. I see it happen. Then there will be a knock on door. I get told problem with my taxes, now my life is trying to stay out of jail. I need someone in the West to say what I know, someone who has ears for what is happening. You start reading me many years ago, when Richard Foxe first appeared, but never get in touch. That makes me decide you are not someone who could be trap for me. I think if I show you the story, you tell it well.’
I leant back in my chair. It was a lot to take in, and if it weren’t for the fact that I knew him to be a serious writer, I would have dismissed him as merely another attention seeker. People don’t email you out of the blue and promise to hand over the scandal of the century. I was sceptical, but I also wanted to know more.
‘You say you have the story? Then I promise I’ll go through everything you send me very, very carefully. If it stacks up, then yes, I’d be interested in telling it. What can you send me?’
I could see Dmitry shaking his head, a wry smile on his face. ‘No, Mr Foxe, this is too big a story for an email attachment. You want the story, then you come to Moscow. I show you places, take you to meet people. I hand you my files in person, no computer trail. You make it your story, not mine. The mysterious Richard Foxe. Safer for me that way.’
This was getting all too James Bond for my liking. I needed time to think.
‘You … want me to come to Moscow? Can you not send me some initial stuff and then we can decide what to do next?’
There was a flash of anger in Dmitry’s eyes. ‘You sit there in London, nice and safe. I offer to give you a big story and to become more famous. I don’t ask for money; I give you the story because Russia will only ever be free when the West knows the truth about us. And it too much trouble for you to come to Moscow to collect your prize? I find someone else.’ He leaned forward to terminate the call.
‘No wait, I didn’t say I wasn’t coming. I wanted to think through the logistics, that’s all. If I come over, I want to be prepared. Can you give me twenty-four hours? We can talk tomorrow. I really appreciate what you’re offering me, Dmitry; I want to make the most of it.’
‘Okay, twenty-four hours. We talk same time tomorrow.’
‘Eight o’clock tomorrow. I appreciate this, Dmitry, I won’t let you down.’
Dmitry ended the call without replying.
I was way out of my depth and had no one to talk to. Sam at the Chronicle was an obvious choice, but the story would have more impact on TV. That meant News Today. They’d been pretty tough on me after the interview because I’d kept them in the dark about my previous life as an author, but the editor, Alex Richards, had checked me out. We had had a brief email correspondence and she saw that I had been telling the truth about my involvement in the Michael Mitchell scandal.
I emailed Alex. I said we had to talk urgently, and that I had a deadline for the next evening that I needed to discuss with her. Then, exhausted by the evening’s events, I had a large scotch to settle my nerves and went for a good night’s kip.
There was an email from Alex in my inbox when I woke, giving me her
mobile number and asking me to call before her editorial meeting at ten. I was straight on the phone, trying to sound calm and professional. I took her through what Dmitry had said to me the day before. Made sure I didn’t give her an inkling of who he was, referring to him as my ‘Moscow contact’.
‘And this guy is for real?’ she asked when I’d finished. ‘You can vouch for him?’
‘I’ve never met him,’ I replied. ‘But he was one of the first bloggers I followed when I set up my own blog eight years ago. He seems like the real thing, genuinely wants to see change in Russia. Bit of a thorn in the side of the Russian government, but maybe too far down the food chain for them to do anything too heavy. And it looks like he wants to keep it that way. I guess that’s why he contacted me.’
‘I’m going into a meeting now. I’ll discuss what you’ve told me with my senior staff, only in very broad terms, and I’ll get back to you with a response early afternoon. Can you wait that long?’
I spent the next few hours frittering the morning away. I couldn’t concentrate. I thought about calling Bobbie to talk about it, even Tanya, but decided against it. The fewer people that knew, the better.
Alex called around two.
‘Okay, we’re interested. Tell your source that you’ll meet him in Moscow. We’ll pay for the trip, and we’ll send Simon Green along with you – our reporter who did the follow-up on your story. Once we see what this guy’s got to offer, we’ll take it from there.’
I knew when I was being railroaded. Simon Green was their star reporter, but rather too full of himself for my liking.
‘That’s not how I want to play it, Alex. This is my source, and it stays like that. If you’re interested in the story, I’m happy to work with you as I develop it. But if I go to Moscow, I go alone.’
I waited for her reaction. If it had got News Today that interested, I was going to Moscow with or without their help.
I heard a sigh at the other end of the phone.
‘I thought you might say that. You should say yes, Richard. This is serious stuff. Simon is an experienced hand at sensitive investigative political reporting. You need someone like him to make sure you don’t miss the story, or even worse, get taken for a ride.’