I lay down for two minutes and felt the icy creep of depression. Hotel rooms were good for suicides and blackmail, not much more in my experience. Keep moving. Outrun the anxiety. I went back downstairs, walked to PC World and bought a cheap Toshiba laptop, then sat at the back of Starbucks, out of range of the cameras, and used their wi-fi to download privacy software.
Beyond the daylight realms of the internet were the places where people gathered anonymously, and which you could only enter by becoming encrypted yourself. The right technology routed you through a maze of servers, losing your identity in the process. Websites weren’t able to track the geolocation and IP of their users, and users couldn’t get any of this information about the host. You could talk and meet and share in pitch darkness.
I went to the file-sharing site I had used with my agent, Idrisov, entered the password, scrolled down the board looking for a file named Dalia, the name we had agreed.
November 1st, an audio-visual file had been uploaded with the title Dalia dances. The thumbnail preview showed a girl in a leotard. It was only if you looked at the file size that you’d notice it was several megabytes larger than it should have been.
Steganography was the art of concealing a message within another message. The Service’s technical department had come across a lot of men hiding images of child abuse in apparently innocent jpegs. It was an obvious enough idea to use similar technology for our own purposes.
I downloaded the file, ran it through decrypting software, braced myself for whatever revelation demanded such concealment.
Filename: Catalyst.avi
From the opening frame it looked like CCTV or a spycam: black and white, wide-angle lens, high on a wall. The room was plush: white furniture, glass coffee table. I thought maybe a hotel room, but the décor wasn’t coordinated enough. Not one I recognised. A suited man stood alone at the window, turned so that his face was obscured.
From the angle I’d guess the camera was concealed in a thermostat or vent. It looked down on the top of a chest of drawers by the far wall and a sofa directly below. There was a window through which you could see an area of roof then what may have been an adjacent wing of the same building.
I cast an eye around the café again, then clicked play.
No audio. There was a briefcase on the glass coffee table, a decanter, a heavy-looking square ashtray. There was a framed picture on the wall: a horse and rider travelling through a mountainous landscape.
He browsed a bookcase at the back, checked his watch. I still couldn’t see his face.
Watching people who think they are alone had never lost its attraction. The first few times I expected some secrets to be revealed, but now it was the very absence of secrets that appealed. The fact that humans were all the same, the thrill of their mundanity, our shared solitude.
At fifty seconds he turned, poured a drink, and you saw his face for the first time.
I hit pause. Then I studied the room that he occupied again, then I enlarged the image to see the face more clearly.
It was me.
I was clean-shaven, smart, in a suit similar to ones I owned but not exact. I stood in a room I’d never been in. It was my face, my physicality. I hit play, watched myself sit on the sofa, pick up cigarettes, change my mind and put them down. At one minute forty-five seconds another man entered.
He looked Central Asian, dark hair swept in a heavy fringe, holding an old-school Nokia 130.
I didn’t recognise him. The man said something, locked the case but left it lying on the coffee table. I appeared to offer him a drink. He went to a room at the back and returned with a glass of what looked like water. His movements were stiffer than mine. We touched glasses. You could see my jaw muscles tense. Then I checked my watch again.
He left the room with me. A second later the clip ended. The footage lasted three minutes, twenty-five seconds in total.
I remember most rooms, let alone most individuals I’ve shared them with. I’d never been in that room or met that man. I looked more closely at the shadows cast by objects, the movement of faces and hands: light reflections and skin texture. There was a mirror on a cupboard at the side with a crack across it. The reflections matched. I studied the architecture visible through the window: it looked like we were high up, in a modern skyscraper with a glimpse of an adjacent wing and the roof of a lower tier. The façade was ornamented. Neo-baroque spires fenced the rooftop off from the sky. It didn’t look Western, more like something you’d find in a former communist country.
I clicked back, watched myself again as I left. A triangle of light fanned out across the floor, two shadows disrupted it, then both were gone.
FIVE
‘Happy birthday.’
I imagined the chain of events behind this. Someone had come across the video file, illicitly or otherwise, and they felt I ought to see it. They wanted me to know I was passing through rooms I’d never been in. There were implications. They chose an ultradiscreet means of communicating: not via official channels; via a dead man’s code.
I took the wrapped box from the safe, unwrapped it and held the diamond in my palm. I closed my hand around it, then I tried Joanna’s number again. The silence was becoming loud.
Memory erodes from the inside out: beginnings and endings sharpen as the rest grows vague. My last glimpse of Joanna Lake was in a lorry drivers’ café on the M1, beside the Newport Pagnell motorway services area. She was following new security protocols. This was one of them: I couldn’t be seen within five miles of her workplace, which was a secure governmental facility with unique sensitivity.
We had spent a weekend together, shadowed by its own brevity and the dark unknown beyond it, ruined by a fight of unprecedentedly personal dimensions. I was heading back to Saudi Arabia, to live another life. She was heading back to a UK-based role she couldn’t tell me about.
We weren’t good at farewells, which aren’t easy when both of you are embarking into secrets. And it didn’t help when we tried to rescue the situation with promises we were trained not to believe in. This time, when we spoke about leaving the intelligence service I think we both meant it. We ended with a show of reconciliation but I had emailed twice in the intervening six months without reply.
I had first met Joanna fifteen years earlier, in an anonymous central London building where eight intelligence service recruits had been invited for second-round interviews. They kept us sitting in a draughty room at the back of the ground floor for more than half an hour. I had been working the room, introducing myself to the other candidates, believing it was part of the test and already enjoying the new-found liberty of a fraudster. She spoke to no one. After half an hour she opened a window, perched on the sill then swung her legs over. Seven of us watched Joanna Lake lean into the flame of her lighter before exhaling smoke at the London sky.
When she turned up again at the IONEC – the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course – I was surprised by how glad I was. And friendships forged on the IONEC tended to stick. They’re some of the last you form with people who are allowed to have a foot both in your first life and your life in the service. We got put in different streams. She was more technically attuned, grasped the psychological aspect of operations better: propaganda, information warfare. Part of me still saw intelligence work as a quest for knowledge: to be at the dark heart of things, the one who knew what was actually going on. She found that endearing and naive.
We worked together only twice, briefly, once in Kiev, in 2005, once in Turkey, three years ago, when she handed over the agent, Mescaline.
I imagined her coming across the clip, somehow. Then sending it in the most secure way possible.
I uploaded it to a secure encrypted cloud account, deleted it from my emails, called an operational data analyst at GCHQ and requested a favour. I gave the Kazakh number, asked them to check the databases, see if it came up anywhere. GCHQ processed 600 million call events a day – networks tied to several thousand individuals of interest. It was a
big net, finely meshed. I told them I was also going to email a screengrab and wanted to know if the face of the man in it connected to anyone on the system.
I watched the clip again. The room looked real. Was the other individual computer-generated? No books visible, one newspaper on a sideboard at the back – Kazakh; a word, – nation; – nation in shock. The plug sockets took two round pins. The other building, or continuation of the same building, visible from the window could have been anywhere. I enlarged the lighter in my hand. It looked like a dented Zippo given to me by a military officer in Bahrain. When did I last use that lighter? In Ukraine? With Joanna? For good CGI you needed multiple angles, to know the person from all sides. As far as I was aware, there were very few images of me available.
Deepfakes, they were called. Human Image Synthesis. Computer-generated images were being used in propaganda all the time now – Russia’s Internet Research Agency generated social media content using politicians’ faces superimposed on actors’ bodies. It had employed them in online influence operations, mostly domestic politics. You got some sophisticated stuff from Turkey on behalf of the Justice and Development Party: people making speeches they never made, etc. Otherwise it was used for faking celebrity porn. Maybe there were plenty of unknown figures being electronically manipulated as well; we just didn’t pick them up. I watched some deepfake porn posted on Reddit, then some of the political videos, and wondered how many teams were currently producing it.
I used the hotel gym, trying to work the acid out of my muscles, ran through some Vinyasa flows, which a former Marine once told me was the only way he got through five months of captivity, then ordered a plain omelette and a carafe of Pinot Noir from room service. I drank two large glasses sitting on the edge of my bed.
I browsed social media. If I’d been allowed my own I would have checked that. Instead I logged in to the Facebook account of a non-existent thirty-two-year-old woman in Afrin: photos of a child’s funeral, a glossy meme of a blonde female YPG guerrilla alongside a quote comparing their struggle to the Paris Commune of 1871. I logged out, logged in again as Yuri Cherchesov, a twenty-year-old second-rank seaman in the Russian navy; changed my status to: restless. Bohren himself had messages from people who didn’t realise he no longer existed: Christopher, I hope you don’t mind me writing. I dreamed of you last night. I know you are not superstitious but it made me worried.
I checked a couple of Middle Eastern accounts that always seemed to get news first – one, curiously, with Selena Gomez as an avatar but definitely run by the Electronic Syrian Army, posting content that looked like it came from Iranian intelligence. China sending troops to prop up Assad. There’d been another behind-closed-doors agreement between Moscow and Beijing over the future of the Middle East, details to come. European sites were heart-breaking enough: ‘You’re on your own,’ US tells rebels. I watched the news twice until I realised that the BBC presenter was saying Syrian government rather than Syrian regime. Sometimes a word is enough to tell you the game is over.
I went to the window. I’d had very little sleep in the last three days. The lingering adrenalin of the operation had got me through the debrief, but now I was slowing up. I opened the window, took a lungful of cold air, listened to London hum. The streets were still busy, men and women walking at a measured pace, knowing their home would be there when they arrived. A Porsche accelerated away from traffic lights, radio on news, the words escalation of violence fading with its engine.
My phone rang. The GCHQ analyst said she’d run the face through every database she could and no name came up, which was conspicuous in itself these days. The Kazakh landline wasn’t on their system either.
I tried it again, and again no one answered.
I called a colleague in the Counter Terrorism section, Linda French, who had worked with Joanna.
‘Are you back?’ she asked.
‘Just in,’ I said. ‘Quick query: have you heard from Joanna Lake recently?’
‘No, I haven’t seen her for years. I heard she wasn’t with Six any more.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. What happened? Why are you back?’
I tried three other people. None had seen or spoken to her in the last five months.
Intelligence services are labyrinthine and, for obvious reasons, you can rarely see much further than the room you’re in. There isn’t a human resources department where you can knock on the door and make a polite inquiry. Not for operatives.
The ‘happy birthday’ code meant danger.
I sent a message to the TutaNota account confirming I’d received the file, asking for more information.
Meanwhile, the insurrection in Saudi Arabia that had ruined several years’ worth of my work seemed to have blown over. There’d been some arrests: clerics, intellectuals, activists accused of acting on behalf of ‘deviant groups’. Fifteen women had gathered in Jeddah, calling for the release of imprisoned relatives, surrounded by a circle of green-uniformed police holding hands so it looked like a country dance. My pyromania had disappeared from UK news.
Bohren’s phone kept flashing. I couldn’t bring myself to remove the battery but it was almost dead anyway. I sent a tentative message to the chief of Saudi Intelligence regarding my captured agent, ignored calls from a CIA contact, answered calls regarding the delivery of an artwork to Singapore FreePort, the tax-free vaults next to Changi airport that housed my agent’s embryonic collection.
‘A delivery has arrived from Christie’s New York. But we can’t get an answer regarding delivery onwards.’
‘Has it been paid for?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put it in the usual vault.’
‘Yes, sir.’
I disguised my IP and logged in to email and bank accounts belonging to my former agent, Rashid bin Talal, browsed the increasing concern regarding his arrest and the swelling of his unperturbed wealth. I had a full suite of passwords obtained over two years by my cybersecurity team. I wondered what they’d make of the CGI clip.
Their chief technician, Stefan Janikowski, technically an employee of Evotec Digital Security, was still stationed in a hotel in Riyadh.
‘What’s going on?’ he answered.
‘I’ve had to go back to London. Are you able to look at a file for me, if I send it over?’
‘I’ve been told no more jobs.’
‘Who says?’
‘Head office. Apparently payments from your side have been cancelled.’
‘When were they cancelled?’
‘I don’t know. A couple of days ago.’
‘Do you know who gave that instruction?’
‘No.’
‘Stay in place for now.’
‘Get them some money or I’ll be back in Bucharest.’
That was a setback. Evotec were the legitimate daylight front of a hacking team that had been known to authorities as Hotel California, a motley and lucrative crew combining cybercriminals and former NSA analysts for the most part, based in Romania. Before they had the office and the business cards, they made their money through ransoms: they’d hack defence contractors and major infrastructure and squeeze money for fixing the situation. I liked Eastern European cybercriminals; they tended to work in small teams – not eccentric loners but still under the radar. The criminal background was good cover, and Six weren’t the only state agency using them. Outsourcing kept things deniable, which was everyone’s favourite word, and a lot of criminals jumped at the chance to work for governments, with the protection it implied. Over the last few years they’d also had increasing employment with big corporates seeking to retaliate against Russia and China over hacks. The legality of fighting back was hazy – which was why the UK government kept arm’s distance – but Evotec were good at hazy. They’d received enough work from me to reply fast to my encrypted communication.
I checked with the Evotec HQ in Bucharest and spoke to the boss there, M
arius, a charmingly malnourished, unshaven and business-savvy chainsmoker who I had eventually identified as a former colonel in the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service. The payments for my account with them had been stopped last week, he said. They couldn’t process any requests. It looked like Six had cancelled them even before my operation was pulled.
I looked at the message again: Lottery Win.
The handover of Mescaline had been as tricky as most handovers. I could see Joanna, and the venue she’d chosen, dark and sweaty and debased. Where there’s a war there’s a border, and over the border places like the Lighthouse. It was one of several neon-signed nightclubs on a new strip in the middle of Hatay province, near Turkey’s border with Syria – young girls, refugees, forced into the sex trade, wearing sequinned belly-dancing costumes, paraded for local men and bride tourists: men from Kuwait and Qatar, and the richer of the Iraqi refugees. You saw the same phenomenon on the outskirts of Damascus during the Iraq war.
All intelligence officers have superstitions. Joanna didn’t like using hotels. She had a nose for the dark corners in which rival agencies rarely ventured. The Lighthouse worked. Joanna kept a room above the club itself. Heat and music rose through the floorboards.
It all felt rushed. She had met me at Trabzon airport a few hours earlier. I hadn’t recognised her at first: she’d dyed her hair dark for the job. She wore a blouse and skirt, managing, as ever, to be imposing at 5’4”. Chameleon ways; clear, well-bred English features that transformed from glamorous to businesslike with the application of a hair clip. She was skilled at looking like a variety of Western women who made it to exotic places: intense, ambitious, outraged, well-meaning even.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 3