The Widow's Son

by Daniel Kemp

  The remark Fraser had made concerning the documents and signals that landed on Sir John Scarlett's SIS desk at Vauxhall ending up on his desk in Whitehall had aroused my interest, and as I started to look at those that had transferred across, one caught my eye. It was the date that notched up my interest—November 10th 2002. Four days after Razin and Mayler met in Khost where Bernard Higgins' body was found. It was in open text, after its interception and translation at GCHQ.

  Special Collection Service F6: Signals Intelligence: Kabul: Body of F. Dubass found.

  On another open text intercepted message dated the same day was the following—Accredited Finnish Journalist Oban Raikkonen re-entered Khost compound from Kabul. Both these signals had Fraser Ughert's Joint Intelligence Committee stamped receipt on them. There were no other intercepts passed to Chairman Ughert that day. Hannah broke my concentration.

  “I have Mr Harwood on hold. He says it urgent and there's an unmistakable ruffle to his voice, sir.” What possibly could have ruffled Geoffrey on a weekend?

  “Good afternoon, Geoffrey! What brings you out to play at this time of day on a winter Saturday?”

  “I have just had the Director of the CIA post in Spring Garden congratulating me on my role as case officer to a high-powered Russian spook, code-named Raynor, Patrick. He wants to know if I'll share him! That's what has brought me out to play as you so eloquently put it. What the bloody hell is going on?”

  “Did you tell him that he must already be registered on their books as they stuck a 'Hands Off' notice on him, Geoffrey?”

  “Do you know what, Patrick, I had just struck my golf ball into the water as he called. I clean forgot in the excitement. Be my guest and tell him your bloody self.”

  * * *

  Sir John Scarlett left the words of bloody good show, Patrick, for no apparent reason ringing in my ears as he replaced the receiver at his end of the scrambled phone connection just as Michael Simmons entered my office via Hannah's with a case containing a standard issue Heckler & Koch submachine gun. The same as the Ministry of Defence security staff were armed with. There was an opened case on Hannah's desk. She was inspecting the magazine and the three others that came as standard.

  “What's wrong?” I asked, half expecting to hear that Razin and the Russian army were outside trying to kick the door in.

  “The security at Brightwalton Farm has been breached, sir. They have one dead and one critically wounded. Henry Mayler is missing. Both guards' weapons are missing as well, Mr West.”

  The look on his face as he delivered that final part of the summary exactly mirrored my innermost feelings of wretchedness and despondency. Nine days of hell had passed by, how many more were there to come?

  * * *

  With a blaring, flashing police escort we arrived at the farm to find yet another scene of chaos. The tiny falling snowflakes were more prominent beneath the yellowing light from the tall perimeter beacons painting the few dark clad figures moving laboriously along the fence line in a murky gloom of despair. I dispatched Frank to find the site commander of the Farm whilst I sent for the Berkshire police officer in charge of the headless armed response teams running everywhere. I had ordered our weapons to be left in the car.

  The police officer in charge wore a sullen pout when acknowledging my security pass and credentials. Having established that we were not under immediate threat of an invasion that justified so many weapon-carrying police members around the yard, I suggested that they concentrate their energy in trying to find how someone got beyond the outer security line.

  The tone of his voice when repositioning his men could not disguise the bitterness of rebuke, but it wasn't his failure to find Henry that depressed me. It was the continuing breakdown of security all around me. Frank found the site commander and from him I learned the injured Ministry of Defence guard had died from his wounds. Two dead bodies and two missing submachine guns. What would I give to watch a game of rugby!

  “We had what we refer to as 'weekenders', Mr West. That is not unusual. On occasions other agencies than yours use our facilities. I had formal notification from Sir Elliot Zerby's Department F, that a contingency of their own security were arriving at 16:30 hours in an armoured convoy from the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at RAF Harwell with one guest to be accommodated. As per standing orders, an hour prior to arrival at 15:30 I ordered the opening of our specialised amenity and a routine sweep of the accommodation outbuildings including where your project was housed under our aegis. The first constable was found at the rear of his building dead with his throat slit. The second was twenty yards from the open door also with his throat slit, but alive and breathing. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do to save him.”

  We had walked side by side across the snowy yard and the swept duckboards that had been laid as a path to Henry's hut with the site commander reading from a notebook at times, until we were outside the small building where I had interrogated Henry Mayler. Frank had followed. Hannah was in the site camera room reviewing tapes.

  “Before you sent out a team to open up your amenities as you put it, Commander, what time previously was the area around my project checked?”

  “It's a fifteen-minute timed sweep, sir, so 15:15 sounds right to me.”

  “Before I leave I want that timing confirmed. I will need the footage from that sweep as well others from elsewhere. I take it you have found nothing suspicious on any camera sweeps so far, Commander?”

  “No, sir, nothing,” he declared as we had arrived at Henry's hut.

  “We have left the inside as it was when my officers arrived. I'm afraid it's a mess, Mr West.”

  “Explain something to me if you would, Commander? Who asked the county constabulary to attend?”

  “It's automated, sir. Your predecessor as Director General Group, Mr Harwood, put it in place when your project was placed in our care. We had catered for other assignments but after assessing our safeguards he deemed it necessary. There were some Home Office cutbacks at the time that he said he was worried about.”

  “How many officers from Defence have you at any given moment, Commander?”

  “We have three staggered shifts of eighteen personnel.”

  “And there was only the one person in one hut being protected by those eighteen?”

  “That's correct, sir. Two static guards at all times with six patrolling the perimeter. Those eight would be changed every two hours, with one of the two commissioned officers of each contingent overseeing the duties changes. We would also have one officer inside the camera room. Unfortunate we were three officers short on this shift through illness. We had nobody on the cameras, Mr West. However, they were all fully functional.”

  Frank went inside the hut whilst I waited beside the dejected site commander who kept apologising profusely, but no amount of apologies would resolve the situation nor would a search across the fields. I didn't wait for Hannah's confirmation. To me it carried the Razinesque hallmark of slit throats. Mayler was long gone and I suspected Razin knew exactly where he would be taking him. As I was running things through in my mind the site commander's radio burst into action. One of the perimeter patrols had found a hole in the wire fence and tyre tracks that the weak snow flurries had not completely obscured. There were no cameras that covered that part of the fencing and the satellites operated from Lavington Street provided no clues. Apparently nobody had yet invented satellite cameras that could penetrate clouds.

  Although the hut was sparsely furnished every piece of furniture in the first room was overturned, or smashed and lying on its back. Henry's open packet of cigarettes lay where a boot had crushed it alongside a broken glass and a practically empty bottle of whisky on its side. The door had been on a latch that only operated from the inside, and this had come away from the doorframe when the door had been kicked in. A struggle had taken place and by the look of things Henry had put up quite a fight, but part of my life has been spent making others believe what I wanted them to be
lieve. Could this be such a situation? I called Razin's number from my burner phone, but his was switched off.

  The time it took to drive from Brightwalton in snowy Berkshire to the drizzle-infected part of London that was Lavington Street could, notwithstanding the maddening Christmas shoppers, be measured in hours and minutes, but the time it took to probe into the information that was stored in my memory could not be measured in such a way. In fact the stored material would take more than measured time to analyse, it would take a degree of wisdom I was unsure I possessed.

  * * *

  After I had grabbed a few hours' sleep, and utterly insensitive as to how time played with others' minds, I called a meeting in my office with Hannah and Michael Simmons that Saturday night to share what we knew and to make sense of it, but I had no idea what we did know for sure.

  “Okay, let's start with any ideas why the American 'Hands Off' notice on Razin came as a complete surprise to the head of the CIA stationed in this country who disturbed Geoffrey Harwood's afternoon. Who do we think posted it?” I looked from one mystified face to another and had there been a mirror in the room then I would have seen a third blank expression registered on my own. Then it happened.

  “Excuse me, sir, but it's urgent,” my head of communications announced on entering the unlocked office.

  “Command AIS notified us of unusual signal traffic emanating from the Grosvenor Square NSA station desk a minute ago. They have ears on that part of the building which GCHQ do not and they have the ability to decode.”

  I assumed that the somewhat crestfallen look of my communications officer was because the new boys on the block had replaced our main source of transmitted information. Although I was highly tempted to sympathise by adding let's hope it's only temporary, I didn't. My maturity was growing before my own ears. Geraldine flashed into my mind and was the reason for the mischievous smile that I could feel stretching across my face. Maybe that was what accounted for Hannah sweeping her long black hair away from her face. But perhaps I wasn't as mature as I thought.

  “What does Command AIS quantify as unusual when it comes to signals from the NSA desk at the American Embassy?” I asked.

  “The nature of them, sir.” His indignant expression did not alter, forcing me to re-evaluate my opinion.

  “Go on, man, tell us.”

  “Both signals refer to us having a Russian operative named Raynor who is subject to an American 'Red' notice. By using the word Red, whoever is working the desk is implying that Raynor is also an American source. AIS added it would be understandable to some degree if those signals were coded for ratification purposes to Fort Meade, or the Pentagon, or the CIA at Langley, but they're not, sir. AIS added that they are in a wrap around NSA coding with one addressed to the headquarters for the United States Armed Forces in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the other to a relay station in Erbil, Iraq.” Who wanted to blow Razin's cover, I wondered?

  “What's a NSA relay station?” I asked naively.

  “Interesting point, sir.” As I heard that reply I visualised going through a re-education process on satellites.

  “The National Security Agency have no requirement of numbers on the ground outside of the coastline of North America. To put it in plain English, the NSA is simply a monitoring and forwarding element of American security. In London for example they have only nine personnel on rotating duties. A relay station is an unmanned moving transmitter, usually mounted in a car or lorry. It looks exactly the same as a car radio which in fact it is with a slight modification. In essence, it's a short wave radio signal booster intended for local conversion. In the case of this Iraqi one it has been used before. According to AIS it was used by the NSA transmitter located at the American Embassy in Berlin fourteen days ago on the third of this month.” Although my withering attention was focused on what I was being told the date slammed my concentration into top gear.

  “What sort of range would a relay transmitter in Erbil have, do you think, young man?” I hesitated to ask.

  “Anything up to three hundred miles give or take, sir.”

  “And have you a transcript of the Berlin message?”

  I was trembling as sat alone recalling what I had read. The signal was sent from Berlin at 03:11 on the Tuesday morning over thirty-six hours before Mayler arrived in Al Hasakeh and was shot on leaving. It stated that a pro-Syrian Ba'ath Party Regional leader would be in Al Hasakeh, roughly two hundred and fifty miles from Erbil, the following day meeting a British long-term agent codenamed Karabakh and a high-ranking officer from the Pakistani intelligence service representing Al-Qaeda. Where did the British agent named Karabakh spring from? I never knew he was ours. Some of the information would be known to either Razin, Fraser, Hadad, Mayler's driver, or Mayler himself, but none would know all of it and none of those four could have been in Berlin.

  * * *

  My duty officer's inspection of the ledgers of Group at Craig Court had turned up nothing regarding visits by Fraser or Geoffrey. So it was with a lightened heart that I and Hannah went there to collect the memory stick of the destroyed Gladio B file on the way to Oliver Nathan's hastily convened COBRA meeting in a basement room at number 10 Downing Street.

  Opposite me sat Oliver Nathan with Geoffrey Harwood at his side, sheets of foolscap paper, six sharpened pencils and a Home Office monogramed pen laid out in a tidy fashion in front of them both. Sir John Scarlett sat to the left of the Home Secretary with Sir Elliot Zerby to the right. They had the same writing material but no pen. In the middle of the oblong table was a miniature recording machine looking unexpectedly at home on the vast surface on which it was placed, flanked by so many empty chairs and by the sterile painted walls which resembled an Eastern Bloc interview room. I felt lonely even though I had Hannah at my side. Oliver opened the proceedings:

  “I've read the report you submitted to Sir John, but for the life of me I can't get my head around it, West. You say you were aware of a strict Hands Off notice, and as much as I can sympathise with your frustration over that, you ignored it, and met with this Russian coded Raynor in the Savoy Hotel where you say he told you of weaponised anthrax being in terrorists' hands. Is that about the strength of it?”

  “Yes, sir, that's how I came to know. That's also where he informed of the alleged CIA duplicity.”

  “Yes, I see,” he replied running his fingers through the paper report Hannah had prepared, “but before we can proceed with any of this we will require cast-iron proof, or as near as damn it. Do you know where the Hands Off restriction originated?”

  “That's the worrying thing, Home Secretary. The only person I can trace it to is Mr Harwood when he was at Group.”

  Four pairs of eyes around the table joined the eyes belonging to Geoffrey Harwood and centred on me, who too was searching for an answer.

  “I could find nothing from Sir John or from Sir Elliot, nor from GCHQ, Minister. I now must assume that it came from Mr Harwood's AIS at Greenwich, but I have been unable to verify or discount that.”

  “And why is that, Geoffrey?” Oliver Nathan asked as all the six pairs of eyes shifted to him.

  * * *

  “What did Hardballs say to that one, Patrick?” Fraser asked as I recounted the meeting at the Home Office in Whitehall in the less unfriendly but as austere surroundings of his flat in Peckham later that Saturday night.

  “He said everything was your fault, Fraser, and if you were alive he'd kill you.”

  “Is that what the Sassenach bastard had to say, was it? Excuse my use of knowledge related to your ex-boss's birth, young lady.” With a smile etched on his face he addressed Hannah, then in more sombre voice he spoke to me.

  “There was I thinking the man had no sense of humour. I will have to ask him about that when I return to the living, laddie.”

  “And when is that going to happen?” I asked.

  “Soon, I hope. But first tell me about the rest of that meeting and where you are with Mayler and Razin?”

  It was well
past midnight by the time Hannah and I left Fraser to his thoughts. The jumbled ones that I had were quickly interrupted by Jimmy. “I don't know about you, boss, but we're all a bit hungry.”

  I apologised for my lack of consideration, asking for any known restaurants close by. As always Frank had an answer but it wasn't close, it was the other side of the river. As we would be going to pass near Lavington Street I asked to be let out at number 67 where I proposed to carry on working. Hannah offered to stay to help and although I attempted to dissuade her my objections were not that insistent.

  I hadn't stayed in the flat above the Hub for more than one night, perhaps spending a few hours during the day simply to change clothing but it still had the attention of a housekeeper who one of my PAs had instructed to stock the cupboard with soup, eggs and cereals. There was milk in the fridge, ice in the freezer and sufficient whisky on the table to quench my thirst. I grabbed two glasses and was about to pour the whisky when she stopped me.