About to go upstairs for a hurried goodbye to his mother, Artur paused halfway up the stairs.
Someone knocked heavily, rapidly on the front door, followed by shouts of ‘Policja!’
Instead of waiting for the Biuro like they were ordered to, the local police had wanted to collar Artur themselves. But there were only two of them, and neither had wanted to be the man at the back in case they missed out on the arrest. A mistake that would cost them dearly.
Artur gently opened the letterbox window leading out into the back garden, which was clear. He had just managed to slide his feet clear of the window when the front door was broken down. The last thing he heard from his mum was her shouting, ‘My Artur’s a good boy. What do you want?’
Artur fled through the maze of back gardens and washing lines, and disappeared into the night without looking back. He couldn’t afford to listen to how exhausted his body was. He knew he had to keep moving forward. And that the next twenty-four hours would probably be the hardest of his entire life.
Camp Zero, Szymany, Poland – Monday 1.31am
‘MI6?’ said Sharp.
Such a claim raised more questions than it answered, but Sharp was going to have to park his credulity for a while.
‘You’ve been in American custody for forty-eight hours,’ Sharp said. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone at Bagram?’ He waited for Malik’s eyes to drift up and to the right, the brain’s way of looking for information. A pretty reliable “tell” for a lie.
Malik kept his eyes locked with Sharp’s. ‘I can’t trust regular U.S. Army with the information I have. I had to wait until I got CIA.’
Sharp hedged his bets. ‘You’re going to have to give me more than a few camp names, double-oh seven.’
Malik kicked under the table, his first sign of frustration. ‘For the past six months I’ve been on deep cover in and out of Nimruz. A week ago I told my contact in London about a credible threat–’
Those two words were like kerosene on a fire to an interrogator like Sharp. Not a single credible threat in an interrogation can be ignored or brushed off.
‘What’s the nature of the threat, Abdul?’ Sharp asked.
‘A U.S. target, but my source doesn’t know where yet. Three days ago they sent me a message that my cover was blown, and I should get out of Nimruz immediately.’
‘If your cover’s blown then you’re safe now.’
Malik leaned as far as he could across the table. ‘Not from the people who are after me. They’re probably on their way here right now.’
‘Who’s after you? And why would they be after an MI6 agent?’
‘The information I have? They will kill anyone, anywhere, to stop it getting out.’
‘Who is “they”?’
Malik paused. ‘Is this conversation being recorded?’
‘Bet your ass it is. Who is “they”?’ He flashed his eyes on the table in front of him then drew a question mark with his finger.
With his finger, Malik drew five letters on the table so that they faced Sharp.
Sharp’s eyes narrowed, flashing from the table back to Malik. ‘You can’t possibly be serious.’
‘The nature of my contact’s information incriminates certain people like him. People that will do anything to stop that information getting out.’
‘But why wouldn’t they want to stop a credible threat against a U.S. target?’
Malik laughed despairingly. ‘Americans: always so surprised when someone tells you who your enemies really are.’
‘If you’re stalling, I swear, you won’t see daylight for another five years.’
Malik looked up, hearing the distant chopping sound of an approaching helicopter. He was running out of time but he forced himself to remain calm. ‘Just one phone call. Article five point four of the Terrorism Cooperative Services Act specifies any friendly intelligence agents must be allowed to make contact with their agency.’
The TCSA had never been made public. Again, code word clearance only. Sharp could have possibly overlooked Malik finding out camp names, but not the TCSA as well. Most U.S. senators and British MPs didn’t know about it. If Sharp made the wrong call it could cause a diplomatic disaster.
He glanced back at the spy hole which was closed again, then took out his phone. ‘What’s your cryptonym?’
‘Tempest,’ Malik replied without hesitation. ‘You call William Blackstone at MI6 in London, and tell him that Tempest is blown and he needs to get my handler out.’
‘Where is your handler?’
‘London. They’re in danger too. Please. Hurry.’
Sharp moved away and dialled. Once connected to MI6’s European desk he gave his CIA identification number then Malik’s code word.
A voice at the other end of the phone said, ‘ID confirmed, Officer Sharp. Please hold for William Blackstone.’
There was a click on Sharp’s phone. From the bed of his countryside residence in Surrey, England, a sleep-drenched voice answered. ‘William Blackstone.’
‘This is Officer Walter Sharp with CIA. Are we secure?’
‘This is a secure line, go ahead,’ Blackstone replied.
‘Mr Blackstone, I need to confirm the identity of one of your agents. A man under the alias Abdul al-Malik. I’ve to inform you Tempest is blown.’
There was no answer.
‘Mr Blackstone, did you hear me?’
‘Sorry, I’m here. I just...he’d gone dark. We thought we’d lost him. I thought he was dead. Where is he?’
‘He’s currently in CIA custody but–’
‘Where?’
‘I can’t disclose that yet, sir. Your agent says he has a credible threat against a U.S. target. How seriously should I take this threat?’
‘If Tempest has given it to you, then I’d say very seriously. Officer Sharp, I’m going to have to put you on hold.’
Sharp shook his head. ‘Fine.’
Malik looked up again as the helicopter outside went quiet. ‘They’re stalling, aren’t they,’ he said.
Sharp remained stoic. ‘Hold tight, Abdul.’
Back in Surrey, Blackstone lit a cigarette while he called MI6 Chief Sir Lloyd Willow, who was still up entertaining the German ambassador in his Chelsea townhouse. ‘Lloyd?’ Blackstone said. ‘We’ve got a problem with Tempest.’
When Blackstone came back to Sharp, he said, ‘Officer Sharp, I’m going to get in contact with Langley to arrange Tempest’s return. I have to ask he’s kept in isolation until we can debrief him. This is a fragile situation, you understand.’
As if to point out Blackstone’s lack of interest, Sharp said, ‘He’s fine, by the way.’
‘What? Oh, of course. Good.’
‘He’s a tough son of a bitch.’
‘It would appear so.’
‘I’ll wait to hear from Langley.’
As soon as Blackstone hung up Captain Hampton started thumping on the cell door. ‘Sir, I think you better get out here!’
Sharp was about to pocket his phone, then decided to leave it on the table.
Malik looked down and smiled sadly. ‘It’s too late.’
Sharp, walking to the cell door, said, ‘You’re here under my command. No one’s taking you anywhere.’
‘You can’t stop them. They’ll kill me, you and everyone else who has the information...’ Malik’s eyes suddenly bulged white. ‘Hell is empty, all the devils are here.’
Sharp didn’t understand what he meant, but there wasn’t time to question it. ‘Hang tight, Abdul,’ he said, opening the door.
Malik looked back to say the one sentence he had been desperate to tell someone the past two days. ‘My name’s not Abdul.’
Sharp closed the cell door behind him, finding Hampton on edge, eager to walk him back to command control.
Hampton said, ‘Sir, we’ve got a bit of a situation here...’
Sharp looked down the darkened hallway at a group of uniformed officials rummaging around in the command control room. They mus
t have been practically tailing Malik’s flight from Bagram to have got to Szymany so fast.
Sharp called out from a distance as the men trawled through the command control room, turning over desks and ripping out tech gear. ‘Hey! What the hell is this?’
They were removing all the Malik interrogation audio files from the command centre hard drive, shifting them onto portable hard drives which were then bagged up. Hampton and Fahran attempted to enter the command but were held back by a soldier in non-specific military fatigues.
Sharp, enraged at the manhandling of his colleagues, charged at the man, who was six four, two hundred pounds, the same height and size as Sharp. The man grabbed for Sharp’s wrist. With a few quick flicks of his hand Sharp immobilised him with a deft Hapkido wrist lock called a reverse handshake, sending the man to his knees, his face twisted in agony.
‘Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my command?’ Sharp shouted.
The man who looked to be in charge motioned for the others to stay back. ‘Walter Sharp. I’m General McNally, I’m with Joint Special Command, JSC. I’m here on direct orders from the White House.’
Sharp had never even heard of JSC. But the three stars on McNally’s shoulders told Sharp he should probably hear him out. Sharp let the man go, putting his hands up to show he was done.
The man staggered away, nursing his wrist.
‘He’s fine,’ Sharp complained, as if the man was milking it. ‘If I wanted to break it, it would be broken.’
McNally smirked. ‘Only CIA could start a fight in a room full of friendlies.’ He was wearing Marine colours, but had no badge identifying him as such; just a plain insignia on his lapel reading ‘R01’ – a code even Sharp wasn’t familiar with.
‘General, I don’t know what this is all about, but I need this room emptied for a secure phone call.’
McNally replied, ‘I’m going to be taking over proceedings here.’
‘Last I checked this was a CIA facility, General.’
McNally eyeballed him. ‘Don’t get cute, son.’
It had been a long time since anyone had dared to call Walter Sharp ‘son’.
McNally motioned for the others to leave. He cornered Sharp in front of a plain white poster with an American flag under the words, “THE WORLD IS A BATTLEFIELD.” McNally said, ‘As of about,’ he checked his watch, ‘five minutes ago my unit has been instructed to handle Malik’s detention.’
‘On whose authority?’ Sharp asked.
McNally handed him a transfer order. ‘Malik’s on the next flight out of here.’
‘Where to?’
‘An undisclosed location. We leave within the hour.’
Sharp stared in disbelief at the order. It had been signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
An order from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was as good as from the desk of the President himself. Failure to obey such an order wouldn’t just result in disciplinary hearings, but a court martial and probable dishonourable discharge. In short: it was something Sharp could absolutely not fuck with unless he wanted reassigned as intelligence envoy to Antarctica.
‘General...’ Sharp began saying, but before he could continue his attention was broken by a shout from Fahran.
He ran down the corridor towards Sharp, and said in Arabic, ‘They’ve locked the door to Malik’s cell, sir.’
‘Hey,’ said McNally to Fahran, ‘I only want to hear English in this compound.’
Sharp answered, ‘Then you should go back to Virginia, General.’ He made his way to Malik’s cell.
Fahran followed behind Sharp, but before they could make it, the door flew open accompanied by a cry of, ‘He’s got a gun!’
The three JSC soldiers standing outside the cell pulled their weapons, pointing them at Malik.
Sharp was already running down the corridor when Malik shouted, ‘No!’ Then Sharp saw the flash of a gunshot come from inside the cell.
Sharp called to his staff, ‘Medic! MEDIC!’
Malik lay on the floor, blood seeping out from a single-shot to his temple. He was perfectly still. A JSC officer checked Malik’s vitals: no breathing, no heartbeat.
‘He took my gun,’ said one of the JSC men, hand at his open, empty holster. The man didn’t seem flustered or shaken in any way.
Sharp stared at the gun in Malik’s right hand. He thought about how Malik had drawn the letters on the desk with his left. There was no way he’d shoot with his right. Lefties made up barely ten per cent of the population. McNally’s boy had guessed wrong.
McNally stood at the cell door. ‘OK, nobody touch anything.’ He took out his phone and hit a speed dial. ‘It’s McNally. I need a clean team at Camp Zero.’
While everyone’s eyes were fixed on Malik, Sharp pocketed his phone which he’d left on the table.
Everything Malik had said would happen had happened. They’d taken him out. Which meant Malik’s contact in London would be next.
Sharp couldn’t shake the image of those five letters Malik had drawn on the table.
To an old hand like Sharp it needed no explanation. Having trained alongside several Secret Service recruits in the early nineties, he knew all their acronyms.
POTUS.
The President of the United States.
2.
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Cheltenham, England – Monday, 12:59am local time
GCHQ, OR THE DOUGHNUT as the ring-shaped building was affectionately known to its occupants, sat in the heart of the suburbs of Cheltenham. Considering its size it was well hidden behind suburban estates that took you through an endless network of roundabouts. Unlike its CIA counterpart in Langley, Virginia, that towered over the surrounding forest, GCHQ had a relatively low profile. From a distance it could be mistaken for a corporate call centre.
But inside was possibly the most powerful intelligence and surveillance agency in the world.
Orange alerts for senior staff were reserved for situations that required immediate face to face briefing, and were likely to break soon on national media. Even still, there was no expediting security protocol at the layered entrance. Badge checks were done at the three checkpoints outside the building, where Rebecca’s credentials were matched against an internal computer database that was the very definition of unhackable. As much as Hollywood wanted to portray otherwise, such a thing most definitely existed. And GCHQ’s employee database was it.
After the badge checks, Rebecca went into what they called the ‘tank’ (a glass cubicle that locked you inside until your ID was confirmed), which scanned her retinas and fingerprints, then her person, for any hidden electronic devices. She left her personal mobile at the security gate, and checked out her GCHQ-issue mobile that operated on a unique frequency and never left the premises. Even if someone were to smuggle a phone into the Doughnut it would never receive a signal.
To get to her department – Global Telecommunications Exploitation (GTE) – Rebecca walked down the “Street”, a path that looped the whole way round the ground floor, and suddenly it was as if you were in a different building. In between the sofas and bean bags sitting around in ‘creative thinking zones’, the street had its own Starbucks and other coffee shops (complete with background-checked baristas), restaurants and cafés and newsagents to serve the Doughnut’s five thousand employees.
Beyond this sweep of corridors and glass-lined hallways, two floors up, was GTE: the division responsible for monitoring internet and phone traffic on national security grounds.
Outside the double-door entrance to GTE, Rebecca swiped her ID through a scanner, which beeped and unlocked the doors for her. The office spread out the size of a football pitch, eerily quiet except for the low-end hum of air conditioning.
Slightly dimmed night lights made the place feel restful and calm, but that wasn’t to last.
Rebecca’s boss, and head of GTE, Alexander Mackintosh, paced towards her. Behind him, on a pillar in the centre of the room, hung a sign with the
department’s unofficial slogan:
DENY
DISRUPT
DEGRADE
DECEIVE
Beyond that, in the background, were two police detective inspectors and a chief inspector conferring outside Mackintosh’s office.
The nightshift team, working on computers nearby, had to alter their screens to a generic GCHQ screensaver, in case they happened to navigate to anything containing sensitive material. They might have been the police, but even a chief inspector didn’t have clearance for the sort of national security-sensitive material that ran across an analyst’s desk on a daily basis.
When one of the detectives opened Mackintosh’s office door, Rebecca saw Matthew Billington-Smith, another of GTE’s three Senior Intelligence Officers with orange alert status, holding his head in his hands.
Rebecca turned towards Mackintosh, who held his hands out, gesturing for her to remain calm.
Only two of the Senior Intelligence Officers had answered the orange alert. Rebecca didn’t need to be told.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked Mackintosh.
He didn’t talk around it, knowing that would only make it harder for them both. ‘There was an accident at Morton House in Pimlico. She fell from the balcony. I’m sorry, Rebecca. Abbie’s dead.’
An hour later, Matthew’s father, director of GCHQ Trevor Billington-Smith, was in Mackintosh’s office with two detectives from Scotland Yard.
Rebecca and Matthew looked on from their desks, staring ahead, trying to make sense of it all.
Trevor had now more than once wagged a finger aggressively at the ranking detective. Whatever was being levelled at him wasn’t appreciated by the most powerful man in GCHQ. A man who, if so inclined, could destroy a major politician’s life with one phone call. As so many previous directors of GCHQ had come into the job with a knighthood, it was sometimes joked around GCHQ staff canteens – very quietly – that Trevor Billington-Smith couldn’t have found any dirt on the Prime Minister yet. The PM had always been thought of as knowing some of the country’s darkest secrets, but that knowledge paled in comparison to the director of GCHQ.
Official Secrets Page 3