Official Secrets

by Andrew Raymond

  ‘I can do that,’ Stella said absently, reading through the wires. She seemed to have found something interesting. ‘I left London with a ton of unreturned favours.’

  Chang said, ‘Also, what’s the latest in Whitehall? Any friction between U.S. and British intelligence? Tom: who’s going to be a thorn in the administration’s side on the new Patriot Act? Also, what’s it going to be called? Republicans are good at naming things. The Freedom Act.’

  Stella added, ‘Or The Fuck You and Shut Up Act.’

  ‘No doubt...’ Chang went back to his phone call. ‘Hi, Greg? Give me one more minute.’ He held the phone against his chest again, his face dropping when he saw Novak’s inattention. ‘Tom?’

  Listening to Stella and Mark bouncing ideas off each other made him want to be there even less. He sat staring at the email he’d received a week ago from Bastion News CEO Nathan Rosenblatt:

  ‘Hi, Tom. Thanks for the drinks last night. I’m really excited about you coming to Bastion News. If you think your profile’s big now, wait till you come here. I’m going to get you on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Colbert, Couric. I’m going to make you a star. And a star deserves a star’s pay as you’ll see from the contract I’ve attached. Have your people look it over and get it back to me. Talk soon, buddy.’

  Rosenblatt wasn’t lying about a star’s pay. The contract was a yearly salary of $250,000.

  There was a postscript, though, that Novak hadn’t paid much mind to at the time. Now, after Diane’s advice, he kept coming back to it.

  ‘PS. I had an idea for your first piece: an expose of your experiences inside the mainstream media. We can call it “The End of The Republic”? Think about it.’

  Novak moved the cursor over the Reply button, but was wavering over the keyboard.

  Chang said, ‘Are you listening, Tom?’

  Novak closed the email, then looked at Chang. ‘Sorry. Laptop trouble.’

  Stella turned the wires monitor to face Chang. ‘Have you seen this?’

  After a quick scan of the opening paragraph, Chang said, ‘Congratulations Stella, you’ve found the one non-story happening in London right now. A woman threw herself off a balcony.’

  ‘It’s the balcony of a GCHQ safe house.’

  Chang looked at the report again, from The Post in London. Initially intrigued he corrected himself with a shake of his head. ‘No, Stella. I want British intel on the bombing.’ Chang went back on his phone. ‘Hang on, Greg...’

  Stella wouldn’t move on. ‘The report says this woman was an MI6 spy.’

  Exasperated, Chang got on his phone. ‘Greg, can I call you back? Thanks.’ He hung up then tossed his phone on his desk. ‘Can we keep our focus here, people! Jesus, it’s like shepherding cats. Now look–’

  Before Chang could get any further, Martin Fitzhenry – The Republic’s second most famous writer – burst in, holding out four new pages.

  ‘Fifteen hundred on London, as requested, Mr Chang,’ Fitz said, passing the pages over.

  Chang took it, then checked his watch. ‘I gave you the brief thirty minutes ago.’

  ‘It would have been five minutes earlier but I got a little tangled on a more obscure Thomas Jefferson quote.’ Fitz noticed Stella and held out his hand. ‘Stella Mitchell, as I live and breathe. Martin Fitzhenry, pleased to meet you. Novak, you lucky swine. How did you poach her from The Guardian? One of the best writers they had.’

  Novak grumped, ‘Diane brought her here. Nothing to do with me.’

  Beaming at meeting one of her idols, Stella said, ‘Pleasure to meet you.’

  From the age of twenty-five Fitz had already had the reputation of a Fleet Street legend, with a prodigious output in books, newspapers, magazines and essays (not to mention prodigious input of alcohol and cigarettes).

  He was the only writer Chang or anyone else in the business knew who could knock back three of four drinks at lunch and still bash out fifteen hundred flawless words, that placed an event that only happened that morning in immaculate political and cultural context. In five years of editing him Chang had never found so much as a misspelling or solecism.

  Novak said, ‘He’s our occasional guest features editor. In baseball terms it’s like having Roger Clemens as a relief pitcher, bottom of the ninth.’

  ‘There are at least three things about that sentence I didn’t understand.’ Stella said.

  Fitz explained, ‘What dear Novak means to say is this is a sunrise-sunset publication. It hires people starting their careers, and those, like me, who are on the back nine. This way our generous benefactor, Mr Self, gets some cheap young talent fresh out of Harvard, and...’ Fitz motioned for her to fill in the blank.

  ‘I never went to uni,’ Stella said. ‘When I was twenty I was covering crime for the Birmingham Courier.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Fitz said. ‘Your work has the discipline of the old school.’

  ‘What do you make of Angela Curtis?’ Novak asked.

  Fitz deferred. ‘I think Stella’s probably your man on that.’

  Eager to prove herself, Stella said, ‘It’s a sideways move, but it makes sense. Bannatyne and Hawkes cancel each other out in a leadership vote, and the Tories can’t afford to look indecisive. I knew her when she was Home Secretary. The papers got pictures of men arriving late at her flat and leaving early in the morning. All it took was three different men over the course of six months, and the scarlet letter was painted on her door. The public thought they were OK with a single woman in her early forties being in government who was as promiscuous as any man her age. The polls suggested otherwise. The party threw her to the wolves, and she was out at the next cabinet reshuffle. She once told me if she’d been married when she was thirty, she’d have been PM.’

  ‘She’s in it now,’ Fitz added, making for the door with a cigarette in his mouth waiting to be lit.

  ‘Fitz,’ Novak called out. ‘You never said what the Jefferson quote was.’

  Fitz turned around. ‘If choosing a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’ He sensed his friend was hurting in some way. Something in his eyes, his unusually slumped posture. Trying to buck him up, Fitz said, ‘After a day like today, there’s no other reporter I’d want in London more than you, Novak.’ He patted the door frame, like he was physically punctuating the end of his sentence.

  Novak smiled back. He was grateful for the compliment, but he didn’t truly agree with Fitz.

  As Fitz exited, Chang tried to get back to where he was. ‘As I was saying. Now that–’

  Then Kurt knocked on the open door. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mark.’

  ‘OK. I actually give up...’ Chang threw his phone down on his desk in despair. ‘Kurt?’

  ‘I kind of need Tom to come look at this,’ Kurt said.

  He and Stella followed Kurt to his desk, where he had the back off Novak’s phone. They gathered round it like it was a body on an operating table.

  Kurt angled his laptop screen towards them. ‘I ran a diagnostic, and at first it seemed fine. But when I rebooted it all the web browsers crashed. Then my malware program started going crazy. So I unhooked the phone, and it stopped and the web browsers all came back.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Novak asked.

  ‘There’s a virus on your phone.’

  ‘On my phone? Is that even possible?’

  Kurt gave the sort of dismissive snort only a tech-head could give. ‘It’s unbelievably easy. But it does require someone physically having the phone and connecting it to the infecting laptop. How long has it been like this?’

  ‘Like, two days? But I’m having the same problem with my laptop as well now.’

  Kurt took it from Stella and hooked it up to his own laptop. In a matter of seconds the malware program started flashing that a threat had been detected. ‘Interesting,’ Kurt mumbled. ‘Same virus.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Nothing too dangerous
. It’s not there to steal data or files, it’s what they call an irritant. Just kicks you off the internet whenever you try to use it. It’s the sort of virus that wants the user to know something’s in there.’

  ‘Like the computer equivalent of a heavy-breathing phone call?’ Stella offered.

  ‘Kind of,’ Kurt answered. ‘There are different versions of it. Some of ‘em are pretty cool actually, like there’s this one virus that makes your screen shake so you can’t read anything–’ Kurt froze as the screen went black. He tapped furiously on the F8 button. When that didn’t work, he tried random keys on the keyboard. Nothing. He dragged the mouse pad. Still nothing.

  ‘What is it?’ Stella asked.

  ‘It’s just died,’ Kurt said. ‘No, wait...’ He saw a small underscore appear in the top left corner of the screen, blinking. Then words started typing themselves. ‘Whoa!’ Kurt pulled his hands back. ‘I’m not doing that.’

  Stella and Novak crowded round to get a closer look.

  A basic networking font appeared on the screen for a few seconds:

  “Thought is free”

  The cursor blinked, then moved down a line, writing,

  “Hell is empty. And all the devils are here.”

  A few seconds later the black screen disappeared, and the laptop came back to life as if nothing had happened.

  Kurt reached for his phone, slack-jawed. ‘Cathy?’ he said in a mystified tone. ‘You better get up here.’

  Novak asked him, ‘What’s going on?’

  Kurt stared at him in bemusement. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Stella waited with Novak at his desk while Kurt and Cathy ran more checks on the laptop and phone. Stella couldn’t resist passing him her Reuters printout.

  ‘As long as we’re waiting here,’ she said, ‘maybe you could take another pass at this.’

  Novak took a quick look then tried to hand it back. ‘I know you just got here and you’re eager to make a splash, but trust me: a woman falling off a balcony isn’t the story that’s going to do it.’

  Stella refused to take the paper from him. ‘You don’t think that merits further investigation?’

  Novak reluctantly kept reading the report. After a few lines his heart felt it had moved a few inches nearer his throat. ‘Abbie Bishop...’

  ‘What is it?’ Stella asked.

  ‘I got an email this morning from someone saying they were a friend of this woman. And that Abbie thought we should talk.’

  Stella asked, ‘You’ve never heard her name before? You never had a contact at GCHQ?’

  ‘No one,’ Novak answered. ‘I’m sure they know plenty more about me than I do them.’

  Stella bundled her laptop into Novak’s lap. ‘What are you waiting for? Write back to them! We could get out ahead of The Post on this.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Novak said, reaching for the keyboard.

  ‘Um... Tom?’ Kurt appeared holding Novak’s phone up like it was about to detonate.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Novak asked, signing into his email.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I was copying out your saved contacts to your new phone when an email came through. I think you should read this.’ Kurt handed him the phone before backing off to his desk.

  After reading it Novak showed the phone to Stella.

  “We need to talk ASAP. I have proof Abbie Bishop’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  ‘That’s it,’ Stella said, hauling Novak to his feet. ‘We’re leaving for London...’ she pointed firmly at the ground, ‘tonight. We’re finding this woman.’

  Novak nodded. ‘You got a go bag?

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘Get it.’

  Kurt left the laptop on Novak’s desk. ‘You also got an email from an Artur Korecki? Looks like there’s a video attachment.’

  Novak said, ‘Thanks, Kurt.’ He didn’t recognise the name, and he was too busy getting ready to leave to take any more notice.

  On a story like Stella’s there was no time for hanging around luggage carousels, so carry-on luggage only was essential. Novak’s tech was always the same: phone, laptop, chargers. Clothes: cotton Oxford easy-iron shirts, two ties (one black, one navy), smart/casual black brogues which could be worn with either a suit or casual trousers. Everything for the city had to be versatile enough to cover formal and informal events. You never knew where you might end up: anything from an embassy dinner, to sitting about a Westminster press office or a hospital waiting room for several hours.

  Novak and Stella met each other with their bags back at the centre of the office, ready to go.

  Stella asked, ‘What do we tell Mark?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Novak said. ‘But you better think of something quick.’

  Chang was walking briskly towards them holding his phone. From a distance he said, ‘I told you to call that guy.’ He sounded angry then realised they both had go bags. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

  ‘What guy?’ asked Novak.

  He covered the mouthpiece then yelled, ‘Sharp! Walter! CIA!’

  ‘Shit,’ Novak said, remembering the note in his pocket.

  Chang passed him the phone. ‘Take the damn call so I can actually move on with my life, would you.’

  Novak turned his back on the others to answer. ‘Tom Novak.’

  The voice on the other end was all business. ‘This is Walter Sharp, I’m with CIA. I hear people in the background. I need you to move to a room where we can talk alone.’

  Novak moved towards Chang’s office, lowering his voice. ‘Are you the one who put this virus on my phone and computer–’

  ‘You have a virus on them right now?’

  Novak shut the door. ‘Yeah, my tech guy is working on them.’

  ‘Tell him to shut them down. Shut them down right now and take out the batteries.’

  Novak waved for Kurt’s attention behind the floor-to-ceiling window looking out to the office, pointing frantically at the laptop and making a “kill” gesture across his throat. ‘What is this?’ Novak asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I think that virus is designed to give them your location.’

  ‘Give who my location?’

  ‘The men who are hunting you, Mr Novak.’

  ‘What are you–’

  Sharp spoke clearly, trying to alert Novak to the danger without panicking him. ‘I need you to trust me, Mr Novak. I believe you may be in possession of a video file. A video certain people will do anything in their power to retrieve. I need you to follow my instructions. Do that, and I’ll try and keep you alive long enough to figure this thing out.’

  Video file. Novak looked in horror at his laptop, remembering the email with a video attachment.

  Sharp asked, ‘Do you know a man by the name of Artur Korecki?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus...Yeah. There’s a video he–’

  ‘Don’t say anything more, Mr Novak. This isn’t a secure line. We need to get you out of there.’

  Cabinet Office Briefing Room, Whitehall – Monday, 10.12pm

  Angela Curtis received a standing ovation from the men waiting for her in the secure Cabinet Office Briefing Room, just a few hundred yards away from bombed-out Downing Street.

  In attendance: Head of the Metropolitan Police Sir John Pringle; MI6 Chief Sir Lloyd Willow; MI5 Chief Sir Teddy King; director of GCHQ, Trevor Billington-Smith; Foreign Secretary Nigel Hawkes; and Home Secretary Ed Bannatyne.

  ‘As you were, gentlemen,’ she said, taking a seat at the head of the table. She thought, this must have been how Maggie Thatcher felt. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  Head of the Met Sir John Pringle stood in front of the video screen. ‘We’re now in a position to confirm the name of the bombing suspect. We received this video an hour ago.’ He signalled for the video to play. It showed a young British Asian man, wearing a military jacket over civilian clothes. The man spoke confidently and without aggression. ‘My name is Abdullah Hassan Mufaza, and tomorrow I will de
tonate an explosive device at Downing Street and, insh’Allah, kill Simon Ali, for perpetrating attacks on Muslims all around the world. He has denied the true message of Allah, and for this he will be slaughtered.’

  Pringle stopped the video. ‘He goes on to cite the policies of the British government in the Middle East, and an incessant stream of quotes from the Quran.’

  ‘Where did the tape come from?’ Curtis asked.

  ‘His wife, Fawzia, is a Somali national with British citizenship. She found it on their kitchen table this evening, sitting on top of a Quran. She’s being questioned in the high-profile suite at Paddington Green, but it doesn’t look like she knew what her husband was doing.’

  ‘Do we release this?’ Bannatyne wondered aloud.

  ‘No way,’ Curtis said. ‘We made that mistake on seven seven. Release stills of his face so we can get all the intel on him we can. But we’re not distributing propaganda on his behalf. Do we agree?’

  ‘I agree, Prime Minister,’ Sir Teddy said, along with everyone else.

  Sir John nodded. ‘We need everyone who knew this man to be talking to us.’

  ‘I could leak it to the BBC,’ Hawkes offered.

  ‘No,’ Curtis said. ‘A closed-door Foreign Office media briefing. That way everyone gets it at the same time. It’ll have more impact and we won’t piss anyone off by looking like we’re playing favourites.’

  Bannatyne flashed his eyebrows up at Hawkes at how cannily Curtis was conducting the meeting.

  ‘What about this guy?’ Curtis asked. ‘Is there a history there we missed?’

  Everyone at the table deferred to Sir Teddy King’s decades of experience with anti-terrorism at MI5. ‘He’s a cleanskin, Prime Minister,’ Sir Teddy said. ‘We had no intelligence on him, no history of radicalisation. No known connections.’

  ‘Was there any suspicious online activity?’ Curtis asked.