Official Secrets

by Andrew Raymond

Stella – too terrified to speak – nodded.

  Up ahead a car had broken down and was being serviced by an AA van, blocking the lane. All the traffic on that side had backed up, waiting for oncoming traffic to yield.

  Gale floored it as cars attempted to pass the AA van, flashing their lights at him.

  ‘Get ready,’ Gale shouted.

  Then, barely fifty yards from the lane blockage, Gale pulled up the handbrake, locking up the rear wheels, then yanked hard right on the steering wheel, coming to a stop in the middle of the road. Gale’s driver side faced the Audi, which skidded to a stop so quickly the tyres smoked. The passenger shielded himself with his open door and pulled out a semiautomatic, leaning on top of his door. Both he and the driver wore woollen masks.

  ‘Go!’ Gale shouted at the women.

  Stella threw her door open and ran towards the throng of traffic, keeping the laptop case close. Rebecca followed her out the same side, but tripped on the door edge.

  If Stella thought she’d be safer in a crowd she was wrong.

  The gunman hadn’t been able to see if she was carrying anything, but he wasn’t willing to take a chance. With Gale still in the driver seat, she was now his principle target. He didn’t hesitate.

  He opened fire on her, hitting a bus stop shelter as Stella hit the deck. The few pedestrians around did the same, with screams coming from all around. People abandoned their cars, taking cover wherever they could.

  By the time Rebecca got to her feet he was already firing. All she could do now was crouch by the foot of the door and hope.

  The gunman turned his attention to Gale. ‘Get out the car!’ he shouted.

  Gale got out slowly with his hands up.

  The gunman approached swiftly, while the driver stayed in his seat with the engine still running.

  He stood some ten feet away, gun held with professional poise. ‘Where’s the laptop?’ he demanded. He was English.

  ‘What laptop?’ Gale said, his voice withdrawn and blank. He knew what was going to happen before it happened but it would at least mean the women could get away.

  Stella ran out into the street holding the case up. ‘I have it...’

  The gunman looked right at her, then his real motivation became clear. He took a single step forward, then fired two shots into Gale’s forehead.

  Stella screamed ‘No!’

  The gunman walked quickly and calmly to Gale’s lifeless body, then fired a further two shots in his head, and two in his chest.

  He marched round the other side, seeing Rebecca sitting up against the back wheel. There was nowhere for her to run to.

  The gunman pointed the gun at Rebecca’s head. ‘You know I won’t ask twice,’ he said.

  Stella shouted, ‘I have it.’ She held the case out and walked towards him.

  Rebecca shouted back, ‘Run, Stella!’

  One look at Gale and Stella knew she couldn’t let the gunman do that to Rebecca. She laid the case on the ground. ‘Please,’ Stella pleaded. ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Get up,’ the gunman told Rebecca. ‘Move.’ He gestured with his gun to go to Stella. When he was satisfied they were far enough away he took the laptop out the case, turning it upside down so the hard drive entry was exposed. He lifted his foot up and stamped his heel several times into the hard drive unit. When he was through it was in pieces, including the magnetic platter where all the data was stored. Then he took out a small bottle of lighter fluid and sprayed it over the mangled circuit boards and plastic. Then he took out a lighter and flicked it on. When he dropped it on top of the case, Rebecca looked down at the pavement.

  In a second the remains of the laptop were engulfed in flames. By then the street was deserted.

  In the distance, police sirens and blue lights came towards them.

  The gunman ran back to the car and seconds later they took off in the opposite direction.

  Rebecca tried to put out the fire, but it was too late. The platter was totally destroyed, Abbie’s most vital secrets and the decryption code lost forever.

  She stopped fighting the fire and fell to her knees.

  Stella stared at the body of Jonathan Gale, sprawled in the middle of the street. She looked down at her trembling hands then hid them in her pockets.

  ‘I told him I had it,’ Stella said. ‘He looked right at me.’

  ‘They were going to kill him anyway,’ Rebecca replied. ‘He knew too much.’ Watching the police getting closer, she asked, ‘What should we do? Maybe we should run.’

  ‘No. I can’t.’ Stella sat against the front of Gale’s car. ‘I’m done running,’ she said.

  15.

  South Audley Street, London – Wednesday, 10.45pm

  NIGEL HAWKES WAS on his way back to Westminster after an emergency meeting at the U.S. embassy, and what was already a twenty-two-hour day. He asked Charlie Fletcher beside him in the backseat of his ministerial Jaguar, ‘How the hell did Thatcher manage with only four hours sleep every night?’

  Fletcher didn’t answer. He was too busy browsing Twitter to see if Jonathan Gale’s name had leaked yet. So far it hadn’t, but it had only been a few hours.

  ‘Never mind,’ Hawkes said, closing his eyes. His brief respite was broken by a text message. As soon as he read it he called to his driver to stop the car.

  The driver didn’t particularly care that they were stopping on a double red line. No one was going to give him a ticket. The moment he pulled over an orchestra of taxi horns set off behind him, seeing only the plush Jaguar and assuming he thought he was above the law. Which was entirely the attitude Hawkes had walked around with since becoming an MP.

  Hawkes got out the car, already with his phone to his ear. When Fletcher made as if to follow him Hawkes gestured for him to stay in the car.

  Fletcher got out anyway, standing by the back door to keep watch.

  Hawkes walked briskly down an alley. The conversation he was about to have wasn’t for public consumption.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Hawkes said. ‘I was just summoned by the U.S. ambassador who tells me Jonathan Gale was shot in the street tonight. What the hell kind of operation are they running here?’

  Alexander Mackintosh at the other end replied, ‘It’s out of our hands now, Nigel. We’ve done our piece. Let them do theirs.’

  ‘Where are we with the laptop?’ asked Hawkes.

  ‘It’s been destroyed,’ said Mackintosh. ‘Without it, the reporters won’t be able to put the pieces together.’

  ‘You haven’t left anything sitting about on GCHQ systems?’

  ‘Abbie Bishop had the only records on Goldcastle. We’re in the clear.’

  Hawkes said. ‘There’s still this Stella Mitchell problem. She’s heard voicemails to me. From Abbie. It could make life difficult come the election.’

  ‘Has anyone else got them?’

  ‘Only Dan Leckie, but Bill Patterson is taking care of him.’

  ‘What do you want to do about Stella Mitchell?’ asked Mackintosh. ‘My team’s standing by.’

  Hawkes paused, thinking about what the front page of every British newspaper could look like by Sunday, all calling the end of his political career. ‘Tell them to stand down.’

  ‘Nigel, this could be our last chance to take her out in the open. The Americans have located Tom Novak: he’ll be dead this time tomorrow. We can’t afford any unfinished business.’

  Hawkes said, ‘Leave Stella Mitchell to me.’

  Central London – Wednesday, 11.23pm

  Stella had marched straight from giving her witness statement in the back of a police van on Belgrave Road to Lambeth, where she stopped at Dan Leckie’s house. The rain was lashing down, but Stella was far beyond caring.

  ‘Dan! Open up!’ she shouted whilst banging on his door. If he was in he wasn’t answering.

  She was about to start walking back towards the hotel when it occurred to her to just keep on walking to London Bridge. An hour’s walk away.

  She arriv
ed outside The Post’s HQ at Streatham House, soaked to the bone, angry, defeated, and looking for blood.

  She marched past security. When they went after her she told them, ‘I’m here to see Bill Patterson.’

  The guard chased her to the lifts. ‘Is he expecting you?’

  Stella battered the ‘Up’ button until the doors opened. ‘No. He’s not expecting this.’

  What few staff were still in the newsroom stopped their work and watched Stella beating a path straight to Patterson’s door.

  Patterson stood at his desk on his landline, tie undone. When he spied Stella approaching, he quickly ended the phone call. Whatever she was about to say to him, he didn’t want the person on the other end hearing. There was also something wild about her appearance, her hair dripping wet, eyes piercing and white, even from a distance away.

  Stella thundered through his door and bellowed, ‘Where the hell is Dan?’

  Patterson replied, ‘Where he usually is: any pub with a blackboard outside saying pints of lager for three quid.’ He remained standing, going about his business: turning through copyedits of the Thursday morning edition. ‘I thought he was with you.’

  ‘I know you two have been plotting to steal my story.’

  Patterson laughed. ‘What story?’

  ‘The affair Nigel Hawkes was having.’

  ‘I’ve done you a favour, love. Trust me.’

  Stella took out her phone and read from a message. ‘“Keep her on the hook until she finds out who done in this Abbie bird.” Sound familiar?’

  He didn’t even seem embarrassed at getting caught. ‘What do you want? An apology? Look whose house you’re in, Stella. Look who’s been keeping you company the last three days. What did you expect? We were all going to win awards for breaking a story about a bent politician who’s been knobbing a bit of classified skirt? There’s a reason this country hasn’t got an equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize: no one gives a toss about the truth. Not me and not the punters. So yeah, I told Dan to turn you over.’

  ‘He didn’t keep me on the hook,’ Stella said. ‘He’s taken off before anyone’s found out who killed Abbie Bishop.’

  ‘I’ve been in this long enough to know what you’re thinking, though,’ said Patterson.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You think Hawkes did it.’

  ‘Abbie wasn’t sleeping with Hawkes for his looks or his charm. She was sleeping with him because that’s what she was sent in by MI6 to do: spy.’

  Patterson finally sat down. ‘Say it was him who do it. Would it really surprise you that a politician had a hand in a murder? There have been thousands of MPs over the years. You think none of them ever messed about with little kids? Twenty-four Prime Ministers in the last hundred years, you think none of them ever cheated on their wives? In seventy-six Jeremy Thorpe was on the verge of becoming Prime Minister when he ordered Norman Scott be killed.’

  Stella asked, ‘So why are you covering for Nigel Hawkes?’

  ‘Once all this Angela Curtis shit has died down, all the flags hanging out people’s windows come off and we forget about Downing Street – when a snap election is called in six weeks Nigel Hawkes is going to be the next PM. You don’t make enemies like that in my game.’

  Stella laughed, the penny dropping. ‘You were never going to use Dan’s recordings, were you?’

  Patterson said, ‘Do you really think I’m dumb enough to use hacked voicemail recordings to out Hawkes as an adulterer? I won’t let this place go the way of The Herald. There’s a reason we survived that shitstorm: I don’t take chances. I just needed Dan on a leash. And I’m not going to let Nigel Hawkes’ name be dragged through the mud by hacks like Dan Leckie, or you.’

  Stella could tell when she was on a hiding to nothing. ‘Are you at least going to honour Dan’s contract?’

  ‘The recordings have all been destroyed,’ Patterson said. ‘That was part of the deal. He’s not going to work here. He’s not going to work anywhere after this. I’ve paid him a very generous amount for his services. Overly generous, in fact. I’m a fucking saint.’

  ‘A one-off story like he was contracted for wouldn’t be far into four figures. That’s barely a month’s pay. There’s no way he’d sell his story out for that.’

  ‘True.’ Patterson nodded. ‘After I broke into his safe and found the recordings, I threatened to call his probation officer for violating his release terms for hacking. Unless he got me something juicy in return.’

  ‘You blackmailed him?’ said Stella.

  Patterson shrugged, putting on a pantomime beneficent tone. ‘If that’s what you call trying to protect someone, Stella, then sue me...’

  Stella had no words left. Not tonight.

  Patterson lit a cigarette as if it were post-coital: he’d won the argument, in his eyes. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said. ‘Dan never wanted to do it. He changed after you came back. Shame, really. I’m working on a story he’d have been perfect for.’ He grinned.

  Once Stella got out the lift into the lobby she took out her phone and prepared to call New York. She had to tell Diane the story was dead.

  GTE Division, GCHQ – Thursday, 00.01am

  After giving her statement Rebecca hadn’t felt like hanging around in London – despite Stella’s offer to put her up for the night – and caught the last train back to Cheltenham. As always it was a slow one, two hours, travelling up and around the Cotswolds.

  The journey gave her time to think ahead of her night shift start at midnight. The events of the last six hours had drawn into question everything she had believed in: were her superiors really caught up in the biggest scandal to ever hit the British establishment?

  The most painful thing about it was that none of it mattered. Goldcastle’s secrets had ended in a burnt heap on Belgrave Road beside Jonathan Gale’s body. Abbie had taken her secrets to the grave with her. As far as Rebecca saw it, the perpetrators were going to get away with it.

  All that was left for Rebecca now was the past.

  As Rebecca swiped her clearance card into the GCHQ entry gate, and was processed through the “Shower” security pod, she thought about how long she’d waited for this moment.

  The memory felt at once both far away and terribly vivid. It was only a few days after her father had died in the fire at Bennington Hospital. Thirteen-year-old Rebecca had crept halfway down the stairs of her childhood home late at night. Light from the kitchen stretched across the wide hallway. In the kitchen, two voices were conferring.

  She crouched down on a stair, straining to hear.

  The first voice she recognised easily enough: Sam Sulley, her father’s closest and most trusted friend, who’d been looking after her in her father’s absence.

  The other voice was a man’s she didn’t recognise.

  She went down the stairs as far as she could without being seen. She could only make out the other man’s shadow on the linoleum floor.

  The men were passing a bottle of whisky back and forth.

  Sulley said, ‘The only way to find out what happened to Stanley is getting into GCHQ.’

  The other man replied, ‘We don’t have high enough clearance to see the report. Everything on Stanley is STRAP Three eyes only.’

  To the man it was a throwaway line. But that night Rebecca disappeared back up to her room, and as she lay in bed she felt a sense of determination brewing in her. A sense of purpose and happiness. All of which she knew she shouldn’t have been feeling. It took some hunting around on the internet to find out what exactly STRAP Three meant. In the days that followed she felt a change taking place in her: she knew what she had to do with her life.

  She would finally be able to find out the truth of how her father died.

  As she rushed to her station, Rebecca’s expression must have betrayed what she was really feeling – panic.

  Matthew asked with concern, ‘Are you OK, Rebecca?’

  She couldn’t remember the last time he called her by her full
name.

  He moved towards her station then leaned down close to her. He was almost whispering. ‘I’m not going to ask why you left that stapler on Alexander’s keyboard the other day. But I am going to tell you to be careful.’

  Rebecca tried to speak.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please. You don’t have to tell me what you’re into. I trust you. Just promise me you’re being careful.’

  She thought better than to deny his observation. ‘I’m being careful,’ she managed to say nonchalantly.

  He said, ‘I’ve lost enough colleagues this week.’ He touched her on the shoulder then returned to his desk.

  The classified systems were kept in a List X-maintained room. In GTE, this was off the main office floor, where no one could peek over shoulders at screens, or take photos of classified material.

  List X maintenance meant the contractor that had built and installed the system – and the room itself – had passed the most stringent and all-encompassing security tests that British intelligence could devise. Everything from the air-temperature regulation vents to the screws used to seal the computer units had been checked and its sourcing approved, and more importantly the people that installed them had been checked and approved, so blueprints and workarounds didn’t make their way onto the dark web.

  Rebecca had only ever seen the room during her induction tour, due to the amount of security checks on the way.

  There were no guards. Just three swipe-access doors down a long white corridor, lit by dark-green lights lining the join of the floor and walls, and up along the ceiling. The walk gave Rebecca plenty of time to think about how long she’d been trying to get there.

  After accessing the first two doors without a problem, Rebecca glanced down at her hands as she approached the third and final door. Her hands were trembling.

  All around her she felt cameras pointing at her.

  She brought her shaking ID card up to the swipe slot, seeing the glass door of the List X room tantalisingly close through the window slot.

  She swiped her ID card and waited for the light to turn green and the lock to release. A little too soon she pulled on the door.