Darke Mission

by Scott Caladon

  Psychologically Bai Ling was still coming to terms with her career ending injury. She had gone to the NSA’s offices in Boston as ordered by Kevin Morgan, got in touch with Jane Hayden and joined the listening post team, dialling into chatter, email surveillance and all the recent communications from millions of people in and around the Boston area. By that time, the death toll had amounted to three people, including a kid, with 176 injured, some severely. The suspects emerged as two brothers of Chechen descent but who had been in the United States for several years. The call came in that one of the suspects had been shot dead by the Boston Police in the Watertown area, where the MIT campus was situated. An MIT police officer had been shot and later died in hospital. A manhunt was underway for the second brother, nineteen years old and the younger of the two Tsarnaevs as it turned out. Normally, a primarily office based surveillance team would not be sent out to a conflict zone. However, the security agencies were still smarting because they had had no warnings about the Boston bombs and, frankly, very little information about the whos, whys and wherefores of this attack. The whos were becoming clearer but the other critical information was still lacking.

  ‘Zhang, you need to go with the team.’ Bai Ling could still recall Jane Hayden telling her that although she had just arrived, she was to join her new found colleagues, Tim Peterson and Jerzy Kowalski in their technology bursting silver GMC SUV and get as near to the MIT campus as possible. Their job was to listen to all communications that were near at hand, and any inter-agency talk. Neither Jane Hayden nor Kevin Morgan wanted to be seen as doing little in the midst of what might have been the most devastating attack on American soil since 9/11.

  “Are you packing?” Tim asked Bai Ling as they parked up their truck.

  “No, I didn’t have time to go to my apartment and pick anything up. I came straight here after I got Morgan’s call,” said Bai Ling.

  “I thought as much,” said Tim. “Here,” and with that he handed Bai Ling a 357 SIG Sauer handgun, holstered. The CIA and FBI tended to equip their agents with Glocks but for some reason the listening agency often preferred semi-automatic SIG Sauers. The variant handed to Bai Ling was non-reflective black, weighed just over 30 ounces, 7 ½ inches long with a 4 ½ inch barrel. This one had 12 rounds in it though the 357 could take up to a 15 round magazine. She was comfortable enough with her borrowed firearm as she strapped it on but did not feel that there was much chance that she’d use it.

  The Boston Police, FBI and Homeland Security had locked down the Watertown area near Boston. Agents and officers were conducting house to house searches, there were roadblocks everywhere and surveillance helicopters black dotted the skies. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got out of this one, then Houdini was surely a Chechen. Bai Ling and her two colleagues parked up on Franklin Street. There was a lot of activity in the night, most of it official but the occasional local pea brain who felt the need to accost the authorities for one protest reason or the other did make the odd appearance.

  After about forty-five minutes of listening and surveying nothing very illuminating, Bai Ling said she was going to step outside for some air. Tim and Jerzy were fully in the zone of their work and Bai Ling was feeling a bit claustrophobic. She was leaning against the back of the silver SUV checking her own emails on her smartphone when suddenly there was chaos. An African American man, dressed like a rapper with no style was running amok, firing a gun at a couple of uniformed police officers and bellowing about his human rights. Bai Ling felt an agonising sharp jolt in her left leg and crumpled to the ground. Jerzy heard the commotion and Bai Ling’s screams and came hurtling out of the back of the van. Bai Ling was clutching her leg, which was now in excruciating pain, there was blood all over her trousers and spilt on the road. Jerzy comforted her, called the paramedics immediately and got Tim to call the office.

  The styleless rapper dude was shot by an FBI agent but not fatally. He was a known drug dealer who lived and dealt in the area, who was out that night doing his evil work, pissed as a newt and high as a kite. As he was publically relieving himself he came across a pistol that had been chucked in some bushes. Whatever lunacy triggered that part of his brain that he should go on a shooting spree, most likely consumption of his own product, triggered it was and bang, bang he went. To add insult to severely painful injury, Bai Ling discovered that the pistol was a Ruger 9mm semi-automatic that Tsarnaev the younger had lobbed before he was captured that very same night, hiding in a boat in a backyard. Bai Ling wasn’t prone to swearing but ‘for fuck’s sake’ did emit from her small oriental mouth more than once that night and in the following few days.

  Under normal circumstances, once Bai Ling had recovered sufficiently from her wounds and her mental and physical rehabilitation was on track, she would have gone back to her NSA job. More than unfortunately, however, the hunt for the Tsarnaevs was one high profile, real time media fest. No sloping about in some Pakistani shit hole looking for the American people’s most wanted. Oh no, grumbled Bai Ling, every media channel on the continent was in Boston, hoping to catch a televised glimpse of the tousle topped teenager, who looked way too much like a young Bob Dylan to be a murderous bastard. Well, they got their glimpse or six, but bad news bears for Bai Ling, they also got more than a glimpse of the injured NSA agent. Her strained visage was all over Sky News, Channel 5, any media outlet you could think of. The reporters and journos dug and dug over coming days. They worked out that she was not a long-standing LINEAR employee. Anyway, what would a LINEAR employee be doing with a holstered firearm – that annoyed the crap out of Bai Ling too, she never even got a shot off at the idiot druggy dude – lying on the ground, bleeding, crying in a Boston suburb in the middle of a manhunt. It didn’t take too long for the truth to out that she was an NSA agent.

  Well, that was the end of that. Spooks can be many things and they can come from all sorts of backgrounds, with all sorts of personal baggage. One thing they had to be, really really had to be was – anonymous. Bai Ling was so anonymous now that she even had to turn down an interview with Oprah. As she lay in Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she got a phone call from Kevin Morgan and flowers and a visit from Jane Hayden.

  Bai Ling’s parents and younger brother lived and worked in the Hong Kong retail business. She used to send part of her NSA monthly salary back there regularly, and they promised to visit her soon. They were extremely relieved that their beloved daughter and sister was alive and recovering. It was during Jane Hayden’s visit that Bai Ling fully realised that she could not return to the NSA. Ms Hayden was a forty-five year old NSA veteran, who looked a lot like the American actress Elizabeth Mitchell.

  “How are you holding up, Bai Ling?” asked Jane.

  “The doctors think I’ll get much of the use of my knee back in about ten weeks,” Bai Ling replied but with no positive emotion involved in her response. “It hurts a lot, I’m bored rigid lying here and I’m gutted about the whole incident. If I’d just stayed in the SUV…”

  “You can’t beat yourself up about that,” interrupted Ms Hayden. “It was a natural thing to do, step outside the hot tin can and get air. You were just extremely unlucky. As Lauren Oliver said in Before I Fall: ‘Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions’. Your knee collided with the last of the eight rounds in that Ruger. It’s changed your life and it was a shit dose of bad luck.”

  “Whatever,” retorted Bai Ling. She was in no mood for fancy quotes or a dollop of official sympathy that would be forgotten by the weekend. “What happens next?”

  Jane Hayden wasn’t too far into her explanation of what happened next before Bai Ling started to feel progressively worse. As expected, while her injury would not have prevented her returning to the NSA, even to her undercover role at LINEAR, the media attention had transformed her into a B-list celebrity. There was more or less no option but to retire her. The financial package wasn’t bad. Under the Federal Employe
es Retirement System (FERS) Bai Ling, as a permanent employee, would qualify for their three tier compensation package which covered basic benefits depending on age, length of service and average high salary over her most recent three year employment. On top of the basic benefits and disability benefits, agent Zhang also qualified for some monetary release from the Social Security Fund and a Thrift Savings Plan. In total, Bai Ling was in line for a decent stipend for life. Good enough for a twenty-nine year old, but not exactly what she had planned. Jane Hayden unloaded the rest of her information, including reminding Bai Ling of her continued commitment to The Espionage Act of 1917, a US law with similar components to the UK’s Official Secrets Act.

  Bai Ling couldn’t really get to sleep properly on the plane. Her seat was great, turned into a nearly bed easily. It wasn’t too constraining for a slim woman and the new mood lighting in the cabin was genuinely soporific. Her knee hurt though. The flight was about half way across the pond now and though it wasn’t quite the classic ‘red-eye’ she knew she was going to be drained when she arrived at Terminal 4. Bai Ling readjusted her gammy leg and positioning in the seat. She thought she’d try to get some brief shut-eye before all the cabin’s lights went on blazing and the stewardess shoogled awake anyone daring to sleep close to landing time.

  As she was dozing off she was evaluating her decision to leave the USA for the UK. There didn’t seem much for her career-wise in America, especially since she was still sometimes recognised when she was out and about. She had spent long enough bemoaning her lot and thought that a change of scenery and a less eventful job may do her convalescence of mind and body some good. Kevin Morgan had approved a change of identity. Though she wasn’t a witness protection-like candidate who often needed whole new lives, her name and image were fresh enough in the minds of media ferrets on both sides of the Atlantic that she wanted to go for disguise-lite. Bai Ling had her hair cut and coloured a bit lighter which was sufficient to change her appearance quite a lot. She changed her name to Gilian Haning, after that CERES Connection honor student, since that was the last time she remembered having a smile on her face. Brits tended not to either have or use their middle initials with the passionate frequency that Americans do, so in her fake passport produced by Jane Hayden she left out the Baz middle name of the student. It also meant that her new name wasn’t either the description of a small planet or a direct anagram of her real name and, thus, less likely to be uncovered by intrusive paparazzi.

  Now all she had to worry about was her new life in London, working for her old mentor and finding out more about somebody called Joe Ford. JJ Darke, she thought, ready or not, here I come.

  4: THE WOOLWICH FEDS

  “We need a spook with a brain,” said Chancellor Jeffrey Walker, with confidence and intent, as befitted an Eton and Cambridge man.

  “We do indeed Chancellor,” replied Neil Robson, not batting an eyelid as to their needs, mainly because it was he who had sown the seed of this outrageous idea in Jeffrey Walker’s consciousness a few hours ago. “I have just the one in mind.”

  Britain’s finances were in an unholy mess. The much vaunted recovery of 2013 seemed to have fizzled out. ‘Green shoots’, the government’s catchphrase of that and previous summers, had not developed into luscious green plants or even real grass. The Guardian had headlined the latest public sector borrowing figures and what they meant for the economy as a damp squib. Given that it was The Grauniad, as the typo prone broadsheet was known, at least they hadn’t called it a damp squid, that being perfectly reasonable in the daily life of the fast moving cephalopod.

  The UK’s overall public sector net debt was around 80% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That seemed like a lot, and indeed it was a lot, being well over £1 trillion. It was not out of line with some other countries being a little more than America’s net debt as a % of GDP and a lot less than Italy’s. Chancellor Walker would stand up at the dispatch box in the House of Commons later in the day, defend the numbers articulately and make verbal mincemeat of the Shadow Chancellor, Arthur Molloy as he laid into the hapless Labourite. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was deeper and multi-facetted. The first issue, as many households in the UK and elsewhere discovered after 2008, is that there is a difference between your stock of outstanding debt and your cash flow’s ability to pay the interest on that debt. Mortgage payments, credit cards, and personal loans can add up to a very tidy sum, but if your cash flow can handle the monthly payments then bobby bailiff will not darken your doorstep. Jeffrey Walker’s bind was partly because the government’s cash flow was drying up.

  The annual budget deficit had risen to 10% of GDP or around £150 billion. The cost of interest payments on years of accumulated debt had risen very sharply in the past two years, were already over £50 billion per annum and rising exponentially. The budget deficit had been funded by selling UK government bonds, aka gilts, to the private sector, the Bank of England and overseas investors, the latter accounting for about one third of the funding. Normally, there would be no real problem with funding the budget deficit. Walker had hosted several private meetings in recent weeks with leaders of banks, building societies, and pension funds both home and abroad. Unfotunately, they indicated that their bond holdings were completely full on a prudential risk measurement. The Governor of the Bank of England also indicated that they would not voluntarily increase their bond buying program or quantitative easing as it had become well known. That only left fickle foreigners, thought Walker, and not enough of them at that, certainly not with the required readies.

  Jeffrey Walker had witnessed the demise of Greece, Cyprus and Portugal. Their economies were dud, their government finances virtually non-existent or totally supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union (EU). There were prolonged catastrophic riots in their streets. With unemployment over 30% what else was there to do? Spain was on the brink and even France looked to be in trouble. The Chancellor had been confident that this would not occur in Britain. The English didn’t riot much he thought, unless it was too hot, the Scots were too involved with their independence, the Irish too tired of fighting and the Welsh too oblivious to most things. That thought, unfortunately, did not seem to have much of a half-life as he sat today in his office in number 11 Downing Street with his Financial Secretary to the Treasury.

  “Remind me Neil…” enquired Walker “… what’s the annual budget for the cost of the police force?”

  “Taking everything into account, and estimating the cost savings for this financial year, around £14 billion,” replied Neil smartly.

  “The armed forces?” continued Walker.

  “About £10 billion excluding equipment,” said Robson.

  “And the public sector’s wage bill?” asked Walker once more as his silvery haired head sank deeper into his pudgy white hands.

  “That would be in the region of £15 billion this year,” said Robson. The Chancellor wished, on occasion, that Neil Robson didn’t have all these facts and figures to hand, but he did.

  “When are we going to be unable to pay the police and most of the NHS, Neil?”

  “We’re basically £3 billion short, Sir. With income tax, VAT, and other tax structures that we have in place we’ll be out of cash in around six months.”

  There was to be a general election in just over a year’s time. Walker knew that there was absolutely no chance of legislating a tax hike on the population before then. The Prime Minister, John McDonald, had no idea the country’s finances were as dire as they were, mainly because his Chancellor had deliberately concealed from the PM what had been staring him in the face for several months. Even if he had known, the Coalition’s majority did not look robust enough to withstand the probable number of seats lost as a direct result of any tax increase.

  The UK had run out of borrowing options too. The EU would not lend any money to the UK without extracting commitments that were unrealistic and unacceptable. They would split the Coalition government and turn the vo
ting public against both parties. That route was an election loser if ever there was one. The IMF, in times gone by, would have been an option even though the last time Britain went there cap in hand, the media made it seem like the end of the world as we knew it. No, any money from the IMF would trigger the same electoral result as begging from the EU. In any event the Fund didn’t have any money. The financial drain of Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, Eastern Europeans and Africans to name but a few meant that the UK was firmly last in the queue, begging bowl out but nothing to put in it.

  So there it was, the UK could not sell the necessary amount of gilts to raise the funds to plug its financing gap, it couldn’t raise taxes so close to an election and it couldn’t borrow from abroad. If this perfect storm intensified and rendered the government unable to pay the police, NHS staff and the army, then widespread rioting would no longer be off the agenda. A Coalition victory at the next election, by contrast, surely would. Bereft of a single workable idea in his Chancellor head, Walker turned to Robson, with desperation written all over his face.

  “Does anybody owe us any money?” he asked.

  “Well…” began Robson who had been doing his research. ‘Well’ wasn’t ‘no’, Walker registered instantly, his head and his ears now perked up somewhat from their slumped position.

  Robson continued. “In 1984 North Korea defaulted on their government bonds, the main overseas holders being ourselves, West Germany and Switzerland. In nominal face value the DPRK bonds held by us amounted to around £460 million.”