According to her Facebook, the wedding had been six weeks ago. It looked lovely. Neither the groom’s name nor face meant anything to me. For some reason, the image that came to mind was a Saudi facility for returnees from Guantanamo. I had been shown around, as their Chief of Intelligence explained that marriage was central to the programme of deradicalisation: a wife and a job.
I called the number listed on her page.
‘You’re back,’ Laura said.
‘Just got in.’ I smiled into the phone, wondered why I was faking a smile she couldn’t see. ‘I got your invitation. Congratulations. I’m sorry I missed it, I wish I could have been there.’ I tried to remember the cover story I’d given. North Africa; a posting on behalf of the Department for International Development. ‘How are you?’
We spoke about what she’d been up to. She taught French literature at King’s; had a doctorate in symbolist poetry. She was poised, articulate, with a life lived locally, with work and interests and friends around her, and now a husband. I found, as I always did upon returning, that without a role to play I suffered from aphasia. I opened my mouth and had nothing to say. There was that icy blankness behind the face. Perform, I thought. Imagine you’re trying to recruit her.
‘I thought of you,’ I said.
‘Really?’
And then, because I had backed myself into a corner, because I wanted something to give, I said: ‘Yes. I visited the house where Rimbaud lived, in Aden.’
It was true though, I had thought of her then. I had persuaded my fixer to show me where Rimbaud lived when the poet’s self-exile led him to this corner of the world. Laura would have been fascinated. And I thought of Rimbaud himself, and the line in his letter from Harar that had always stuck with me: Je ne compte pas rester longtemps ici. Je n’ai pas trouvé ce que je présumais. I did not find what I had expected. What had he expected in dusty Yemen? A twenty-six-year-old, picking up exotic languages and diseases and a lot of second-hand Remington rifles, waiting on the edge of the desert as he prepared to head to Abyssinia to sell guns to the king. Poet turned arms dealer. At university, when I first stumbled upon this trajectory, it seemed wondrous and inexplicable. And I had surpassed it without the slightest scrap of insight.
‘His house is still there?’ she asked.
‘Just about. It used to be something of a tourist destination.’
It had been looted, closed down, but I found the old caretaker chewing khat; when I bribed him to unlock the door, he spasmed with a cough so violent he sprayed blood over my wad of tissue-soft rials. Inside, there were empty glass cases, rotting wooden furniture, scattered papers that weren’t, to my disappointment, anything to do with Rimbaud but recent governmental directives on agriculture.
‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ she asked.
‘I was so busy.’
‘Do you have pictures?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t think to take any.’
‘And what development work were you doing in Yemen?’
‘Water,’ I said. ‘Mostly. For the refugees. The war’s caused a bit of a crisis. Also some education projects.’
‘The war,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Of course.’
We didn’t arrange to meet. I walked out, checked the parked cars, continued back to my hotel.
If Joanna had left Six, I thought, where would she go? Former spies move into banking or private intelligence. She was no more a City person than I was. I called around a few ex-colleagues now working private for the poachers: Stratfor, Kroll, Hakluyt. None had come across her on the scene.
Flax and Kerrigan’s had been open two days – a ‘soft opening’, which meant members of the public couldn’t get in but Olivia Gresham could. She was a portfolio manager who had set up her own fund around the time I started working in the Middle East. Like a lot of jobs, 95 per cent of espionage was contacts. Swapping thumb drives in underground car parks can be fun, but a remarkable amount involved simply belonging to a select group of people able to exchange information that others didn’t have. Like a journalist, you cultivated a network of off-the-record sources, only for a paper with the smallest distribution possible.
Investors were good. The exposure of several million pounds seemed to sharpen their appetite for knowledge. They, at least, knew where the wars were.
‘My favourite civil servant,’ Gresham said. ‘You look like you could do with a square meal. Go wild.’
Olivia Gresham passed the menu over, immaculate in a charcoal Dolce & Gabbana suit. She had started out trading forex for Credit Suisse, turned down a big position there to set up a fund concentrating on energy commodities. I’d put some cash in but that wasn’t why she sought me out. The mutual professional interest was enough to keep the sexual tension productive. She’d chosen the venue, which had just opened, she said. The place was bright, with wood and chrome, high ceilings and white-tiled walls like a butcher’s; light glinted everywhere you looked, as if you were inside a bubble. The menu swam in front of my eyes. I kept reading Experimental Cocktails. In Saudi Arabia that meant a bag of raw alcohol and a Coke.
We ate duck egg and asparagus, and seafood on ice. She insisted this was a thank you, which meant regularly topping up my glass, the bottle dripping water across crab shell. I’d given her a heads-up on Turkstream – a proposed line pumping gas under the Black Sea – and a Goldman Sachs fuck-up in Libya, which her fund had turned to profitable use if the crustacean still life was anything to go by. I hadn’t done it for the sake of a seafood platter but it was all part of the play.
‘Who’s big in Kazakhstan these days?’ I asked.
‘Chevron, Gazprom. PetroKazakhstan was bought by the Chinese last year. JP Morgan are trying to get hold of the financial sector. A lot’s still bound up in state-owned companies.’
‘Got a contact there? Someone who knows the scene?’
‘I can make a call. I know a guy building retail units, big box. Tesco’s moving in.’
‘Is it politically stable?’
‘It’s a dictatorship. You don’t get much more stable than that.’
SEVEN
I picked up a Zipcar Audi from Finsbury Circus, bought a black baseball cap from the Runners Need store beside it, curved the brim and pulled it down towards my eyes. The last address I had for Joanna would take me into dangerous territory, though you wouldn’t know it to look at it.
In a sleepy corner of south-east England, a few miles north of Luton and south of Bedford, you find the village of Shefford. There are flower baskets, a winding road past a Norman church, tea shops with white tablecloths, B&Bs with ivy on the walls. Drive out of the village, past fields of barley, and you get to tall fences and razor wire, with cameras every couple of hundred metres. Signs stuck into the ground behind the chain-link warn No Trespassing, but they don’t tell you it’s government property.
Shefford Park was one of the most classified sites in the UK. It housed the experimental wing of the intelligence services. That included technology, but also psychological research. Since 2002 it has housed the Psychological Operations Group, which drew on MI6, GCHQ and the British Army. After the first Gulf war, analysis revealed that a large number of Iraqi surrenders and desertions could be attributed to coalition psyops activity – leaflet campaigns, loudspeaker teams, even a radio station. This success led the UK to create a permanent capability. They took over an old airbase at the back of Shefford previously used by the US Air Force.
The facility was positioned off high-speed roads that didn’t let you get much of a look – at what looked, anyway, like any technology campus: modern blocks of beige brick and turquoise glass, arranged around the original seventeenth-century manor house.
It had been acquired by the Foreign Office after the Second World War in order to establish what it described as a ‘listening post’, a phrase that usually concealed more than it revealed. The radomes and radio masts had gone, replaced by less visible technology. While Bletchley, a few miles away, eventually gained the plaudi
ts, Shefford was happy to stay in the shadows. Which was how you knew somewhere was still important.
It made sense combining technological research and psychological operations. The world moved on from leaflets and loudspeakers at breakneck speed. More recent work included jihadi DVDs that placed trackers on users’ computers, and cyberattacks on Islamic State websites, replacing bomb-making instructions with cupcake recipes. Joanna was proud of that one. But that kind of operation barely scratched the surface of what went on at Shefford. There was more to it – sides I didn’t hear about – so I was never quite sure what Joanna was working on.
I walked past the church, past a low-ceilinged pub, to the point at which I’d usually leave her, at which she said we had to part. The edge of the village. She said they monitored the village.
I headed for her house.
Joanna didn’t explicitly talk about Shefford when we were together. We both wanted to escape thoughts of work anyway. So we just walked, often in silence, amused by the brazen beauty of the countryside.
I don’t know what she was doing, but she implied that fieldwork – the basic craft of recruiting human agents in a hostile environment – would become even more irrelevant in the future. That triggered our argument the last time I saw her. I was mentally preparing myself for a return to the Middle East. I wasn’t in the mood for someone suggesting that I was wasting my time. She presented her own removal from overseas operations as a conscious choice, which was clearly designed to get a rise out of me. And, I thought at the time, reflected personal bitterness. She had been a better field officer than me. A group of us had been selected to spend two weeks in Brunei learning advanced weapons skills, some abseiling and parachuting. She was in her element, to the extent that there had been talk of moving her to the Special Reconnaissance Service, which they were in the process of setting up, a dedicated sub-unit of the SAS designed for the new era of cyberwarfare. Unlike the SAS and SBS, it took women. Like them it was comprised of an elite with the mental and physical ability to work in small, independent teams under life-threatening pressure. She said she wasn’t one for painting her face and lying in puddles.
One fragment of that last, needling semi-drunken conversation had stayed with me more than the rest.
‘They have software that can tell you how long a relationship will last,’ she said.
‘Based on what data?’
‘Everything: geographical movement, sleep patterns, conversational rhythms, vocabulary, choices of entertainment options.’
‘What does that allow you to do? Marriage guidance?’
‘It means, theoretically, if you wanted a relationship to end, you could run the program backwards and see what steps would engineer that outcome.’
That was a somewhat loaded anecdote to share, I thought. I wondered if the ruthlessness was meant to impress me. We were on the third bottle. She looked strikingly beautiful, her eyes large and liquid, as they became when drunk, and which was sometimes a warning sign. Head held high on her long, pale neck, hair escaping its knot to hang around her face, a wildness in her echoing the woodland around us.
‘Is that what you’re doing? Breaking hearts? People seem able to ruin their own relationships.’
‘It’s knowledge. It’s intelligence.’
‘You think that’s knowing people?’ I stopped myself before saying: attitudes like that led to the mess in Turkey. ‘Knowing a community? A culture? When you have software that understands pride, hate and revenge, I’ll start job hunting.’
‘Is that what you deliver?’
‘Sometimes. Not always.’
‘A horizon watcher, connoisseur of men’s hearts and nation’s souls, removed from events, paring your fingernails.’
‘You know what I do.’
‘You fall in love with foreign places and then destroy them.’ She knocked her drink back aggressively, as if this might deflect my own anger. I was beyond anger. I felt something had broken inside her. The comment was in poor enough taste that I barely knew what she meant by it. Five minutes later I was suggesting she get professional help for what she went through. The feeling was mutual, apparently. There aren’t many places an argument can go once you reach the imperatives to seek counselling. We were both burned out in our own ways. And how would therapy work? A spy goes to a psychologist. I cannot tell you what I do, or the precise events that haunt me. My unconscious is covered by the Official Secrets Act. Obviously, the services anticipated this and wheeled in some shrinks of their own, so petrified of the confessions they received they’d close you down at the first whiff of anything classified. And, of course, they were equally concerned with assessing your risk to Six as to yourself. None of which helped the free and frank revelation of psychological turmoil you craved. If you were lucky you got some MOD psychiatrist on his way to retirement who gave good prescriptions – powerful enough to knock you out, some might say – but little by way of empathy.
And what would that free and frank revelation be, anyway? I can no longer feel the things I once felt. My dreams have become air-conditioned warehouses for the dead. I remember men and women whose fates I am entwined with, but cannot remember which war they are from, and this troubles me, but maybe not as much as it should do. Every night, when I close my eyes I see an egg-sized piece of shrapnel melting the synthetic fibres of a hotel carpet. Every morning when I wake I check the pillow for blood. The problem with trauma is that it’s a plughole, and every bad thing gets drawn towards it, towards the thought: That was where I lost the life I was meant to have.
Joanna spoke in her sleep. I would listen, of course. An agent of mine in Ukraine used to refuse general anaesthetic in case he let secrets slip while unconscious. I had told him that was unnecessary and tried not to dwell on the lives I was making people lead. Joanna’s night ramblings never made much sense, never opened the gates of Shefford Park to me. Sometimes she’d wake up screaming.
We were burned out, and after we’d kissed again we agreed to leave Six. To run away. We joked about hot countries that had no extradition treaties with Britain. I suggested Cameroon, Namibia or Venezuela.
‘Caracas has a thriving literary scene.’
‘And it would be easier to blend in,’ she said.
Neither of us had worked the South American beat. The Caribbean would be our playground: Montserrat, Grenada, St Lucia. I would ignore the drug boats, the private jets from which men emerged with briefcases chained to their wrists, the officials behind high gates. I’d stare out to sea.
We talked about unimaginable things: a home, children, jobs we could admit to. Our lives would be quiet and apolitical. Love would demarcate our cares.
‘We’d need money,’ she said.
Six months ago. I had assumed she was still here. I walked past the place she’d been living, one of a cluster of 1940s suburban semis close to the railway station. The front garden had been mowed, then strewn with plastic toys: a tricycle, a slide for a toddler. A maroon Citroën people carrier occupied the driveway. Through the windows, a woman in an apron was washing up.
I went to the end of the street and bought a pair of gardening gloves from the shop opposite the station, tore the tags off. Then I knocked on the door of her old home.
The aproned woman answered, drying her hands.
‘I live around the corner,’ I said. ‘Borrowed these off the woman here, but a while back.’
‘She’s not here any more.’
‘Oh. When did she move out?’
‘We’ve been here five months.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any forwarding details?’
‘None at all. And nor does the former landlord, apparently.’
Joanna’s parents were in the phone book. I met them once. They were mannered, English. Father ex-City, a wine trader, womaniser; mother discreetly Christian, frail. She liked me. ‘Joanna never brings anyone home,’ her mother said. Joanna’s personality with them was hilarious; all smiles and self-deprecation. The dutiful daughter with h
er rising career in the civil service. I wish they’d seen her firing an Uzi.
She was protecting them from herself, I realised. Your closest family members don’t have to be completely in the dark about an MI6 career, but you have to ask why you’d give them that to think about. I felt they deserved to know of her coolly walking into a room of Eastern European fascists, enduring enhanced interrogation training, setting up radio stations in the Afghan desert.
‘It’s Elliot,’ I said, when her mother answered.
‘Oh yes. Hello.’
‘I’ve been having difficulty tracking Joanna down. Any idea where she is, or how I could get hold of her?’
‘We’ve no idea. I’ve not heard from her for ages. I thought she was abroad. She never tells me much. Should we worry?’
‘No need to worry. I’ll tell her to give you a call. When did you last speak to her?’
‘Not for a month.’
‘Any idea where she might have been?’
‘Not in the UK. I know that much. We had another man calling up looking for her just yesterday. He couldn’t get in touch with her either.’
This didn’t feel like good news. The individual was someone who shared my anxiety or it was a professional hunt. Neither great, but a lead.
‘Did he leave a name?’ I asked. ‘Maybe we can pool resources.’
‘Hang on … Patrick Dolan. He left a mobile number. Do you know him?’
‘Rings a bell. Can I give him a call?’
I didn’t know Patrick Dolan. I ran the mobile number through Facebook and WhatsApp, then TrueCaller – a search tool that found contact details globally. No sign of Patrick. I drove to an out-of-town Sainsbury’s, bought a pay-as-you-go Nokia and messaged:
A Shadow Intelligence Page 5