Bruckner retorted, ‘You’re accusing the British Foreign Secretary and chief of MI6 of conspiracy to murder.’
‘The damage has to be proven to be against the state. Our story is only damaging against a handful of individuals because they’ve committed, or been party to, a crime.’
Bruckner nodded, thinking it over. He looked at Henry and Diane. ‘Could work.’
‘Also,’ Stella added, ‘there is a precedent there with Katherine Gun.’
‘Who’s Katherine Gun?’ asked Henry.
Stella answered, ‘She was a translator at GCHQ who leaked an email from the NSA asking for help in spying on countries crucial to the United Nations Security Council vote on declaring war on Iraq. Gun admitted the leak and was about to go to trial. At the last minute the Attorney General dropped the case. Some say because Gun’s defence team was going to demand the disclosure of whether the Attorney General believed the war would be legal.’
Bruckner said, ‘This isn’t about a war and it isn’t the UN.’
‘No, but Gun’s legal team was also going to hinge their argument on the defence of necessity.’
Bruckner’s face slowly lit up. ‘Leaking the email was an attempt to stop an imminent loss of life...That’s clever.’
‘This didn’t stop after Monday morning. Jonathan Gale was shot in cold blood just last night. Novak, Officer Sharp and Artur Korecki are all lucky to be alive after Berlin. How do we know there aren’t more lives still at risk?’
‘What do you think, Vince?’ asked Henry.
Diane interjected, ‘I think we have the legal view, Henry. We’re not lawyers. We’re journalists. We’re not here to get convictions. We’re here to tell people what happened.’ She jabbed her finger on top of her notes. ‘This happened.’
Henry straightened his notes up. ‘That’s good enough for me. Let’s get this up.’
As the others cleared out the room, Mark, seeing Tom and Stella still live, winked at the webcam and gave a thumbs up. Diane was the last one left in the conference room.
‘We need to get ready now,’ Diane said. ‘Every newspaper, every commentator, every blogger and vlogger and anyone with an axe to grind is going to come after us. They’re going to question your integrity. Your reporting. It’s going to get ugly. But no matter what happens, I’m going to have your backs.’ Diane lifted the hefty pages of notes the pair had emailed her. She smiled, then – her voice filled with pride – said quietly, ‘It’s a fucking good story. Now let’s finish it.’
Golden Lane Estate, London – Friday, 8.12am
Stella had arranged to meet Sid Vickering at the Golden Café, just a few hundred yards from his house.
Golden Lane Estate had been built in the fifties, almost from scratch, after enduring some of the heaviest bombing of the Second World War. The council estate and tower blocks that now sprawled across the area appeared stuck in a time warp, immune to the vast gentrification that had taken in nearby Shoreditch and Bethnal Green.
Stella waited with a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup, her hands joined around it for warmth. Her breath turned to steam in the freezing interior. Outside, school kids ambled past, playing grime on their phones.
Sid wandered in, wearing a grey cotton tracksuit (no t-shirt under the hoodie, exposing a tuft of chest hair). He looked like he’d been woken in the middle of the night by a fire alarm. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa in front of the American horse racing the night before.
‘Stel,’ he said, plonking himself down across from her. ‘Chief Inspector says you’ve to give me something. D’you wanna know what I said?’
Stella passed a memory stick to him. ‘Was it tawdry and completely lacking in wit?’
He smiled, then waved his hand ‘no’ at the waitress who was gesturing if he wanted something.
‘He said you had some news about Dan,’ Stella said.
‘They found him this morning on the shore of Loch Lomond.’ He pronounced it “lock”. ‘They found an empty bottle of Mirtazapine with him. His prescription. No suspicious circumstances.’
Stella stared at the table and nodded metronomically, slowly. Until Sid confirmed it, she’d still been holding out for better news.
‘You said you found a note at his house?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I left it there.’
Sid nodded slowly. He held out the memory stick. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Fulfilling our legal obligations.’ Stella got up, leaving a pound coin on the table. ‘Go to The Republic dot com in about an hour, you can read all about it.’
Stella returned to News Office expecting to find Novak in good spirits, plugging in any White House comments to his sections. Whatever they had to say didn’t affect the story. So she was surprised to find him in his chair, pushed back from the desk, sitting low in the seat, lost in thought.
‘Everything, OK?’ Stella asked.
‘Sure,’ he replied, forcing a smile. ‘The White House has no official comment to make at this time.’
‘That’s...OK, right? We knew they wouldn’t bite.’
‘Yeah,’ he replied, then went back to dutifully fingering through printouts of Goldcastle accounts.
Stella could see that something wasn’t right with him.
‘Any word on Dan?’ asked Novak.
‘They found his body up north. It looks like an overdose.’
‘You don’t suspect...’
Stella shook her head. ‘No. He’d made up his mind two nights ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, passing some paperwork he’d highlighted for her. ‘Some accounts that match up with donations to Simon Ali’s “Britain First” campaign.’
Stella looked at the paperwork, realising those few seconds were all she would get to reflect on Dan’s demise. She took the paper and got back to work.
Diane had set Stella profiles to write up for the main players: Abigail Bishop, Simon Ali, Nigel Hawkes, Jonathan Gale, Sir Lloyd Willow. Then once Tom finished his own pieces on George Abassi, JSC, Artur Korecki, and Goldcastle, the pair would work together bringing the strands into one.
They got each other coffees; took turns to yawn and groan and stretch; paced the room to get their blood moving again; wiped their already red eyes; called out words as questions, looking for better alternatives, passing pages back and forth where Stella would go to town on Novak with her red pen (Stella saying things like, ‘It’s not strong enough. Make it declarative.’) He could see how good an editor she would be some day. For now, he was just thankful he was getting to work with her.
They stopped their work to watch BBC Parliament, and a special report on Angela Curtis’s first major outing as Prime Minister in the chamber. Then they made the necessary additions to the story.
They each made the other better, and as the light slowly dimmed outside as afternoon turned to evening, despite all the terror, death, and corruption they’d witnessed, as the story came together they felt good. A determination in their exhaustion, to fight through it. They could tell how proud they would be at the end of it. At how good their story was.
When it came to sending the final piece through to New York, Novak’s elation was more hidden than Stella’s. When she put her hand on the top of his shoulder and told him, ‘Good job,’ he could only purse his lips in return, then mumbled, ‘You too.’
Diane came on Darkroom and went through the whole story with them again, from start to finish. She made her own corrections to grammar (Stella was still to learn some of Republic’s house style, like their spurning of the Oxford comma, which Stella had been taught as sacred back home) and word choices, going with some neither Stella nor Tom had thought of.
When she was done, Diane took off her glasses and said, ‘You’ve got it.’
‘If I could, Diane,’ Stella said, ‘I had one thing I wanted to add if you give me a second.’ She reached for the keyboard and typed under her and Tom’s names, “Additional reporting by Dan Leckie”. She asked Tom, ‘Is that OK?’
&nbs
p; Tom nodded. ‘I think he earned it.’
Diane could see it at her end too. ‘Is that everything?’
Novak, head hanging a little low, said, ‘I need to tell you guys something.’ He lifted his head. ‘An hour after I asked the White House for comment, my lawyer got a call from the State Department. They’ve now decided to widen the scope of their investigation into the NSA papers. It now wants to include this story as part of the hearings.’
Diane looked to the ceiling.
‘They’re just trying to muscle us off,’ Stella said.
‘I know,’ Novak said calmly. ‘Included in that, though, is their intention to subpoena you.’
‘I don’t understand. How can they–’
‘They’re going to investigate whether you’ve ever broken any national security laws in the United States.’
‘Fine. Let them.’
‘Stella...’
‘No, seriously. They’re trying to get to you through me. I’m not letting them do that!’
‘OK, one question, Stella. Have you ever witnessed Mr Novak, or have you yourself, ever revealed United States classified intelligence? And the answer you’re going to have to give – unless you want to commit perjury – is yes. Because that’s exactly what we had to use to prove George Abassi was in CIA custody at Camp Zero. The CIA prisoner transfer request given to us by Officer Sharp. And if we don’t name Sharp – which I know you would never do – both of us will end up in jail.’
Stella’s eyes scoured the floor, trying to think of a solution. ‘What are we going to do? We can’t drop the story, Novak.’
‘I know.’
Diane could tell what Novak was going to do. She sat a little more upright. It was pride filling out around her spine.
‘There’s no other way.’ Novak turned his hands up. ‘You have to take my name off the story.’
Stella stared at him, not knowing whether to laugh or not. ‘You’re actually serious.’
‘Without my name on the story they can’t link me to you, in a journalistic sense, according to Kevin. It would kill their question.’
‘You’ve just sat in this room for hours writing this thing with me. Not to mention everything in Berlin and New York. I’m not letting you take your name off, Novak!’
Diane waited a moment, letting him try to convince Stella before she did.
‘Sometimes I’ll be watching a movie,’ he said. ‘And they put up old TV clips to establish what period the movie’s in, what the political climate was like. More often than not they use Walter Kronkite or Dan Rather. They never used clips of my dad. You know why? He was an anchor, not a reporter. I remember one night he came home, his face was glowing. I could tell something great had happened. I assumed he’d got hold of a great story, something important. So I asked him. He told me the station’s new ratings were so good that their ad buy was up eleven per cent. I was sixteen. That was when I knew all I wanted to do was to break stories. To bring the truth out from under a rock and tell people, here’s this thing that you didn’t know before, and now you do. This story is more important than whether my name is on it or not.’
Stella joined her hands together as if in prayer, leaning forward in her chair, imploring him. ‘Tom, you have to seriously consider what you’ve gone through to get us this far. No one will ever know you were involved.’
‘I’ll know,’ Novak said. ‘So will you guys. Diane, Mark, Henry.’
Diane said, ‘Also, Stella, the State Department could drag their investigation out for the best part of next year. Right when we’re going to need you following up on this. It’s not exactly a story that doesn’t have legs. We can just about afford to get Tom through it, but not you as well.’
Novak deleted his name from the byline and replaced it with “Republic staff writer”.
‘Is that everything?’ asked Diane.
‘That’s it,’ replied Novak.
Diane collated the files, then hit “Send” to the printers.
Novak got up and laid his hand on Stella’s shoulder. ‘It’s going to be a huge story, Stella. It’s all yours.’
20.
House of Commons, Westminster – Friday, 11.58am
ANGELA CURTIS WAS the last of the ministers to make her way to the front bench of the Commons chamber. The benches on both sides were filled to the kind of capacity more regularly found at the Chancellor’s budget meeting, or a high-octane Prime Minister’s Questions, rather than an Urgent Question for a Friday morning, when there was generally very little parliamentary business.
It had been a beautiful piece of political orchestration on Roger Milton’s part: he’d been briefing all morning that The Republic were going to publish details of Nigel Hawkes’ affair with Abigail Bishop. A story that Diane Schlesinger was all too happy to confirm when asked by rival media. She just neglected to tell them that was but a fraction of the remainder of the story.
Curtis was surrounded by her Cabinet ministers, yet she looked isolated as they talked amongst themselves, leaving her consulting her notes.
Ed Bannatyne, sitting beside Curtis, whispered to her, ‘It was good of you to come down, Angela.’
Distracted, Curtis replied, ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Good of you to come down. To show your support for Nigel. That’s who the Urgent Question will be for, won’t it? There are all sorts of rumours flying around.’
‘I expect so.’
Hawkes looked unruffled, close allies nearby, some patting him on the shoulder, telling him he’d weather whatever storm was coming, and that The Republic were just looking for lurid gossip.
Urgent Questions were an opportunity for members of Parliament to direct questions to a particular minister – usually done straight after regular Question Time sessions. It was up to the Speaker of the House’s discretion whether the question was indeed urgent enough and in the public’s interest.
The Speaker took his glasses off and announced, ‘An urgent question from Angela Curtis.’
It was highly irregular for even a minister to request an Urgent Question, let alone the Prime Minister. Hawkes sat back a little in relief, comforted that Curtis was at least going to go after someone on the opposition benches first.
Curtis rose to the despatch box. The chamber went quiet, wondering not only what she was going to ask, but who she was going to ask.
She took hold of the sides of the despatch box. ‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. To ask the Foreign Secretary to explain to the House...’
Such was the noise that erupted from all sides of the house, Curtis had to break off. The opposition was in raptures that she was about to chin her own Cabinet colleague, while her own party was reeling, waving their briefing memos in the air.
The Speaker called repeatedly for order, but the chamber simply wouldn’t listen to him.
Curtis carried on anyway. ‘To explain, what exactly was the nature of his intervention with intelligence relating to the Downing Street bombing cell?’
The noise turned to a dismayed confusion. No one had any idea about this.
She held up a stack of paper. ‘These are transcripts of phone calls made by the Right Honourable Gentleman on Sunday night, where he discusses with a senior MI6 official, about a known credible threat of a terror cell and how they might collude to let them gain access to Downing Street. Can the Right Honourable Gentlemen confirm that he is responsible for allowing the worst terror attack in British history to take place, and knowingly allow the murder of Prime Minister Simon Ali?’
It was the last part that really turned the House upside down. The Speaker had never heard noise like it in all his years. No one ever had.
Curtis sat back down again, the calmest person in the chamber.
Nigel Hawkes didn’t know what to do with himself. He half-rose, then seemed to think twice about getting up at all.
As if to encourage him, the Speaker chimed in. ‘The Right Honourable gentleman will stand to answer the question. There are no rules governing a minister asking a
n Urgent Question of his or her own party.’
Hawkes stood up, his normal resolve shot to hell.
Everyone waited for him to make his way to the microphone, where Curtis would have to make way for him. Instead, he buttoned his jacket, and walked to the exit. The speaker called repeatedly for order, but the jeers and shouting were unlike anything the Commons had heard before.
Hawkes’ allies rose from their seats to catch the Speaker’s Eye. So many rose that the Speaker had little option but to call time. He couldn’t pretend he’d seen none of them.
‘Will the Prime Minister give way for a question?’ the Speaker shouted, struggling to be heard.
‘No, I will not give way,’ Curtis shouted back, prompting a fresh barrage of waved papers and cries of ‘Give way!’
Though she wasn’t being picked up by the despatch box microphone, the microphones hanging from the ceiling did. She called back more forcefully, ‘I will not give way! I will not! The minister will answer the questions.’
It was a clip that would be replayed on news networks the world over. The stills of which would adorn every newspaper that evening.
Hawkes made his way out to the lobby, already dialling Charlie Fletcher on his mobile. Fletcher – who had watched the whole debacle at his desk in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – answered just as Hawkes saw the Metropolitan police officers waiting for him under a concrete archway.
Hawkes said, ‘It’s over, Charlie.’ Then he hung up.
GTE Division, GCHQ – Friday 3.01pm
Word had spread of Alexander’s arrest earlier that afternoon. He hadn’t made it past the main entrance before being taken in. It turned out he wasn’t such a tough nut to crack. After ninety minutes he’d given up the identities of the driver and passengers of the Black Audi that had tormented Stella and Dan and murdered Jonathan Gale.
An hour later, at seven different addresses across the capital, the police were kicking in the doors of people who in almost every technical sense didn’t exist.
Advising the search was newly reinstated PC Leon Walker, who had been instrumental in confirming the identities of all seven members of the MI6 black ops team.
Official Secrets Page 41