Official Secrets

by Andrew Raymond

  The driver took the note. ‘I can do that. Peace, Artur.’

  ‘Yeah, godspeed,’ the passenger added.

  Artur knew it was a risk, but it felt like one worth taking. With no other safe means of contacting Wally, his hand felt forced.

  He wandered into the night, staying out of the dim lights that lined the avenue leading towards the Golden Gate in the historic part of the city. He didn’t know where he was going to sleep that night, except that it wouldn’t be under a bush.

  The passenger asked the driver. ‘What’d he write?’

  The driver looked at the note:

  ‘Wally – I made it to Gdańsk, thanks to some friends. You can reach me on my ‘other’ email address. Stay off the phone. Tell Novak I’ll be on a bench in front of the waterfall at the Berlin Pariser Platz every day until he gets there. Stay safe.’

  12.

  Rebecca Fox residence, Cheltenham – Wednesday, 7.13am

  A SCAN OF A PHOTO of Stanley Fox slowly zoomed in and out on Rebecca’s screensaver. It had been there for the last three hours after Rebecca clicked out of Mackintosh’s files.

  To call it sleep would be overly charitable. She had rested her head on her arm next to the mouse, then drifted in and out of microsleep: her eyes still closed, but every few minutes jolting into consciousness before passing out again. Her dreams were a blizzard of Mackintosh and Abbie’s files, draining any pretence of rest from her sleep.

  She was woken by her mobile ringing, still in her jacket on the floor. The caller ID – at this time of the morning – was not a good sign: ‘Alexander Mackintosh – Work’.

  ‘This is Rebecca,’ she said, barely masking her lethargy.

  ‘Rebecca, it’s Alexander. I know it’s your day off, but I need you to come in. Just for an hour.’

  She waited for him to elaborate a little, but nothing came.

  Acid swirled in her stomach.

  Mackintosh said, ‘My office at eight.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  He hung up.

  Rebecca, still holding her phone, said quietly, ‘Shit.’

  Before she left her flat, she uploaded the stolen files to her IronCloud, then threw all the discs and memory sticks and hard drives she kept anything questionable or borderline-legal on into her microwave. A thirty-second nuke would be enough to wipe all data from them.

  At the front door she looked the place over, wondering if she would ever be back.

  The walk to GCHQ was a blur to her. Mackintosh had never sounded so grim. And if it was a work emergency she would have been pinged with a colour-coded alert. Had he been on to her long? If she hadn’t agreed to come in, would the police have descended on her flat? She was probably being tailed right now. No point looking for them, she thought. For the possible arrest of a GCHQ officer, they’d send someone good. Too good to be spotted in a Cheltenham rush hour in the dark.

  Rebecca had seen GCHQ operatives arrested twice before. They always did it in the building. Nice and quiet, with nowhere to run to. Those were for minor offences, though. Rebecca was under no illusions: there was nothing minor about what she’d done.

  At each checkpoint at GCHQ exterior Rebecca expected a pair of armed officers to come up behind her, then that would be it. She’d be history.

  But at each stage she sailed through as usual, until she got to GTE.

  The blinds in Mackintosh’s office were open just enough to show a male figure with his back to the window.

  Mackintosh beckoned Rebecca into his office from a distance away. He looked on edge. Nervous. Two things he rarely was.

  ‘What can I do?’ Rebecca asked Mackintosh. Her pace slowed as she approached his office, realising the man with his back to her was GCHQ Director Trevor Billington-Smith.

  ‘Come inside,’ Mackintosh said.

  After flashing a brief smile Trevor picked up Mackintosh’s phone and quickly dialled an outside line. ‘Yes, we’re ready,’ he said.

  Rebecca looked at Mackintosh to get a read on the situation. He winked at her, which only confused her more.

  Trevor held the phone out to her. ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  Rebecca tentatively took it. ‘Hello?’

  The voice at the other end said, ‘Miss Fox...’

  Mackintosh and Billington-Smith looked pleased with themselves, smiling at Rebecca.

  The voice continued, ‘This is Angela Curtis. I wanted to convey the government’s immense gratitude for your sterling work this week. Trevor’s told me all about it.’

  ‘Thank you, Prime Minister,’ Rebecca managed to say, widening her eyes. Now she could finally relax, exhaustion hit her like an avalanche.

  ‘I also understand you were colleagues with Abbie Bishop?’ Curtis asked.

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Rebecca said. She couldn’t help but notice Curtis’s tone had shifted. She sounded conspiratorial.

  ‘A terrible tragedy,’ Curtis added.

  Rebecca waited to see what she was getting at.

  ‘Are we speaking privately?’ Curtis asked.

  The irony of asking this of a GCHQ officer was not lost on Rebecca. There was no such thing as speaking privately. Not anymore.

  ‘I don’t quite follow,’ Rebecca said.

  Trevor squinted at Mackintosh, wondering what was being said.

  Curtis said, ‘We don’t have a lot of time, Miss Fox. Can I call you Rebecca?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘If you don’t think you can speak freely on this subject because of who’s in the room with you right now, say “it’s a tough job, but it’s a rewarding one.”’

  Rebecca – still facing the two men – said, ‘No, of course. It’s a tough job, but a rewarding one.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Curtis said. ‘You’re Stanley Fox’s girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘He was a great man. He would be proud to see you continuing his work in national security.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ve been looking into you, Rebecca. I need to talk to you about Abbie. Alone. I need someone I can trust.’

  Rebecca didn’t understand why she was the one Curtis was talking to about this. Could she not trust the upper echelons of her own GCHQ?

  Curtis went on, ‘My secretary will contact you by seven tonight to arrange the details. Now smile and nod, and tell me thank you for my time or something.’

  Rebecca smiled and nodded. ‘Thank you very much for your time, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Rebecca: I talk only to you on this. And you talk only to me. Is that clear?’

  ‘Indeed. Thank you, Prime Minister.’

  After Curtis hung up, her secretary came on the line: ‘Thank you for you call, Miss Fox. You can now hang up the line.’

  Rebecca hung up, her head in knots.

  ‘Sorry about the cloak and dagger,’ Mackintosh said. ‘Trevor thought it best to keep things quiet.’

  Billington-Smith said, ‘I know I should tow the usual line about it all being a team effort. But we couldn’t have caught the cell without you, Rebecca.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied.

  ‘You’ve done a huge amount,’ Mackintosh said. ‘All by yourself. Haven’t you?’ The smile he added at the end only made it feel more threatening. ‘I’d say no one really knows the half of what you’ve been up to.’

  Rebecca tried not to swallow hard. ‘It’s a team effort, sir,’ she said on her way out.

  The smile slid from his face once she was gone.

  Before Rebecca left for the day – and the morning shift started at eight – she took the opportunity to sign into the JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Comms System) – an intranet for United States intelligence agencies, and which certain areas of GCHQ were granted special access to.

  She then dialled into the shared NSA database which listed all Tier One Protocols: the most important actions taking place in the agency across the globe. The list ranged from most-wanted lists in cybercrime, to tracing agents and assets that had gon
e dark.

  Near the top of the list for all Eastern European agents was a ‘Black Capture’ listing (someone who can be pulled off the street and bundled into a van) for ‘ARTUR KORECKI’.

  Anyone other than Rebecca would have been impressed at the depth of their searches – and how close they’d come to capturing him. Analysis of his YouTube videos found several occurrences of filming near Jezioro Sasek, a lake that NSA had managed to identify thanks to GEOPOINT, which scanned the location from several angles in the videos. Based on the data – size of the lake, height of mountains in the distance, the surrounding landscape – they were able to identify it. It was like Google Maps on steroids. A local NSA asset had made a pass at the location late on Monday morning – missing Artur by mere minutes before he disappeared into woods and continued his way northwest.

  Since then, NSA’s trail had gone cold.

  Artur’s listing had the picture from his Dowód osobisty national ID card that everyone over eighteen in Poland by law had to have. Some stills of him from YouTube identified the clothes he was last seen wearing.

  After some brief biographical details cribbed from his ID it noted ‘of particular interest is any activity involving video files made by the suspect’.

  A link took Rebecca to the search parameters of the video. The search was doing a real-time sweep of all the data NSA and GCHQ and the other Five Eyes agencies had hoovered up since Sunday night, looking for any video files that were active in any way – being emailed, posted on YouTube, Twitter or forums.

  Based on the resolution of the mobile they thought Artur had (they found the original box back in his mum’s basement), how long they guessed the video to be (anywhere between one and four minutes), they had a reasonable range of file sizes they were looking for (about 150-300MB).

  Needless to say the search was catching a lot of hits. Mostly from Twitter and Instagram, whose video content most closely matched their search parameters. But with NSA’s processing power, if Artur felt it was safe enough to post his video on some conspiracy theory message board, the metadata could give away his location.

  In networking terms, what Rebecca needed to do was about as complex as changing your relationship status on Facebook.

  What made it possible was her knowledge that intelligence requests for Tier One Protocols weren’t made by investigating agents: they were made by entry-level graduate agents who weren’t ready for the field. It was glorified data entry. They just happened to be dealing with classified intelligence.

  All Rebecca had to do was click into ‘Edit listing’. In the field for video file size she decreased it to between 30-50MB. And shortened the length to between thirty seconds and a minute. Which would result in a huge increase in how many files NSA quarantined. With such broad search terms they could be running around for weeks, not realising they were looking for the wrong thing. Given the insane workloads and level of information changing hands between departments, let alone other agencies, Rebecca knew it was doubtful anyone would ever notice.

  She then logged out and set off quickly for the station. Her train to London would be leaving in less than thirty minutes.

  The Alamo bar, Walworth, London – Wednesday, 10.11am

  It was after midnight London time when Stella got the call from Mike Chang that there had been a shooting at Martin Fitzhenry’s. That was when Novak’s sudden departure from his Darkroom call made unsettling sense to Stella.

  Chang didn’t know much except Fitz had been taken to Mount Sinai hospital with a suspected heart attack. All Fitz had said was that a man had helped Novak get away, and had probably saved both their lives. Chang couldn’t tell from Stella’s inability to put a name to Novak’s saviour if she was stonewalling him or if she honestly didn’t know; he didn’t know her well enough yet to know when she was bluffing.

  According to Chang, Diane Schlesinger was ready to set all of New York alight to find Novak, but everyone was clueless as to where he was. Only the unnamed saviour knew that.

  Henry Self had been prowling The Republic’s office in his gym clothes and sneakers having been interrupted during a late-night touch-football game in Central Park. He’d been screaming for the culprit’s head on a spike, and had already enlisted the NYPD Commissioner and a senior agent-friend in the FBI within the hour to help with the investigation; such were the people in Self’s mobile contacts.

  Stella spent the rest of the night tapping up old contacts for information on the Downing Street bombing cell. But no one – not the Met and certainly no one at Whitehall or MI5 – was giving out any names, or any details whatsoever about the cell. She made phone calls until well past midnight.

  As for information on Goran Lipski, it was all Stella could do just to prove he existed, managing to dredge up a mortgage for a house in the early nineties in his name. After that, Goran Lipski joined GCHQ, then disappeared off the face of the earth. Until Monday morning.

  Even Dan was getting in on the act, making calls to old tabloid friends until the battery on his mobile ran out.

  He and Stella decamped to his flat rather than a hotel. No one knew Dan’s address except for the Bulgarian landlord he paid in cash each week, and given hotel demands for ID they were a less safe bet. Dan’s place at least had a bathroom window they could escape out.

  What scared Stella most was that if the occupants of the black Audi were willing to run them off the road before Stella and Dan had even found out about Lipski and the Downing Street cell, what would they be willing to do now?

  Stella straggled behind Leckie who strode comfortably into the pub. The Alamo on a midweek morning was not exactly Stella’s scene.

  She was used to the smart upmarket bars of Belgravia.

  The Alamo was definitely not in Belgravia.

  Men who had gone to the bookies at eight – and whose losing streak started at five past – sat at small round tables of their own, staring reflectively into their pints of lager. The clothes they wore suggested they had nowhere important to be later that day.

  At the far end of the pub, by the pool tables, a lone young man was breaking off – sinking two stripes as he did so. He was drinking the remnants of a protein shake. Stella noted his gym bag on a chair beside the pool table.

  ‘There’s our man,’ Leckie said, leading the way.

  After sinking three balls on the bounce, the man said, ‘You must be Dan Leckie.’ He potted another ball. ‘And this must be Stella Mitchell.’

  His handshake was firm. He wore jeans, but smart, slim-cut ones, with a snug black v-neck tee. He clearly worked out.

  Dan introduced him. ‘Stella, this is Leon Walker.’

  He added, ‘Constable Leon Walker.’

  ‘Drink, anyone?’ Dan asked.

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ Walker said.

  Stella just glared at him.

  ‘You’re up early for your day off, constable,’ Stella said. ‘Or are you late shift?’

  ‘I thought Mr Leckie had explained,’ Walker said, placing his pool cue back on the wall stand. ’As of yesterday morning, I’m currently on administrative leave.’

  ‘Why?’ Stella asked.

  ‘For continuing to investigate the Abbie Bishop murder case after I was told not to.’ He took a seat with his back to the door. He didn’t want anyone seeing him talking to reporters.

  Stella sat across from him and took her notebook out. ‘For now you’re just on background,’ she said as Dan returned holding a pint of lager. ‘Your name won’t appear in any stories I write.’ Stella glanced at Dan. ‘We write.’

  After a sip of lager, Dan said to Walker, ‘Tell her what you told me.’

  He had just turned twenty-five, a rookie PC on £22k a year. All he knew about handling the media was from TV dramas. So he put aside his reservations, and started to talk.

  Walker said, ‘I was coming to the end of a pretty uneventful beat – the bling beat they call it. Pimlico. So there’s a lot of money around. Lots of quiet residential streets. Beautiful cars. On Su
nday night I was twenty minutes from the end of my shift, when I turned onto Moreton Place. There was a group of seven gathered around a porch step. The men in black tie – their bow ties undone – and women in ball gowns. Me? I’m half-Jamaican, living in a tower block. This is my aunt’s pub. I grew up in places like this. So I found it hard not to stare at them as I went past – I couldn’t help it. There was something not quite right about them.’

  ‘Like what?’ Stella asked.

  Walker said, ‘I can’t say for sure. It seemed just like they were...acting.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Walker said, ‘From a balcony four floors up a few hundred yards down the road, I heard glass smashing followed by a woman’s scream. In the moonlight I saw a woman falling from the balcony, before landing on a silver Aston Martin DB9, setting off its alarm. Naturally I was straight on the radio for an ambulance dispatch while I ran towards her. I climbed onto the bonnet of the car and checked the woman’s vitals. She was still breathing but her head had deep lacerations. She was trying to say something, so I leaned real close and told her to hang in there.

  ‘I tapped her cheek to stop her eyes shutting, but after that she was gone. I administered CPR but by the time the ambulance came, Miss Bishop had been dead two and a half minutes. The paramedic asked me if I saw her jump. I’ll tell you what I told him: all I saw was her fall.’

  Dan egged him on, smirking. ‘Get to the good bit.’

  Walker said, ‘While I was taking statements from the eyewitnesses, this metal shutter of the residents’ underground car park opened up. A black Mercedes M-Class with blacked-out windows charged up the ramp onto the street. Then it sped off.’

  Dan and Stella looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: Lambeth Bridge.

  ‘Did you get a look at the registration?’ Stella asked. Being careful not to ask a leading question.

  ‘All I could see was it looked foreign,’ Walker replied.

  Stella looked at Dan, who nodded his approval.