A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  ‘How was the debrief?’ Stevenson asked.

  ‘They’re covering their backs. I’m starting to feel somewhat isolated. What’s going on?’

  ‘All I know is there’s changes: changes in priorities, in tactics maybe. Heads have rolled, morale is low. Russia’s got the wind in their sails, seems to be the common belief. Syria’s a test bed.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe Joanna knows.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Think Russia’s got penetration of Vauxhall?’

  Stevenson shrugged – the kind of shrug that says: of course, who can say, what do you think, where does one start?

  ‘They’ve penetrated people’s minds,’ I said.

  ‘That’s paranoid.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘Why would they isolate you? You’re celebrated.’

  ‘As what? Their gun runner?’

  ‘You delivered.’

  ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  What I meant: success is never straightforward in intelligence work. You sink deep, you produce invaluable product. It also means people will do deals with you. They prosper, and you become irreplaceable to both ends. You get an aura, a reputation for making things happen. Then you become a repository of other people’s guilt.

  ‘It was fun while it lasted, but you know how that goes. You do people’s dirty work and it just means you’re the last to be cleaned away.’

  Six years of work, I thought. This was meant to be the one that went well, that meant I could retire with my head held high, even if no one knew anything about what I’d done. The absurd image that wouldn’t go away involved somewhere homely, where I was talking to a child, possibly my grandchild. He held a yellowed clipping while I said something like: I played a part in this. This is who I was, even if you won’t read about me anywhere, except between the lines. In this old shoebox is an MBE. No, I don’t feel any need to display it. The Queen leaned close to my ear and said she understood I had contributed a huge amount behind the scenes.

  ‘I’m moving on,’ I said. ‘Leaving Six.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘I have notes for a book: the poetry of Islamic Spain, the invention of love. I want to retrace the steps of the troubadours, lose myself somewhere foreign that I don’t have to spy on.’

  But as I said it I realised, with a chilling clarity, that I wasn’t leaving anything without Joanna. Certainly not with her missing. Stevenson checked his watch, wrapped the leash around his hand.

  ‘Listen, Elliot, I should go. Sunil will be wondering where I am. But will you keep in touch? And not do anything reckless, for anyone’s sake?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’ve been through a lot. I know it’s all a day’s work for you, but you deserve a break.’

  ‘Can you sniff around?’ I said. ‘Keep an ear open?’

  ‘They don’t close any more.’

  He placed a hand on my shoulder then returned towards the streetlights. I watched for other silhouettes but none came. I stayed on the bench, enjoying the darkness and the sensation of being alone.

  AWOL. Where would she go? She was impulsive, a thrill seeker. Given how ill-advised our relationship was, it’s a wonder she hadn’t initiated it sooner. But I had always thought there was an unspoken agreement, an understanding that this final step would destroy us. We found alternative kicks. We would slip into improvisations while out, snap covers, games we’d developed during training; introduce one another by names made up on the spot, choose ridiculous environments to penetrate: a meeting of Quakers, a protest against undercover police, a far-right march.

  ‘It will be interesting,’ Joanna said, pulling me into the thin flow of marchers, adjusting her hair, her voice, ending up three hours later almost being glassed by a coked-up skinhead in East Ham. All of which was exhilarating and made you feel like you were both special, and deferred the awkward honesty of a relationship.

  Two years after training, I was back from Chechnya. She invited me to Christmas with her family. She had always depicted her own life as a home counties nightmare of perfection: Cheltenham Ladies College, parents trying to marry her to stockbrokers, doctors, clergy. I mean, fucking clergy …

  They didn’t seem too nightmarish to me. After lunch she showed me how to pick the locked drawers in her father’s study, which contained photographs of his lovers, some teenage, some sadomasochistic.

  ‘So which locks do I pick for you?’ she asked. ‘You don’t talk about your background. Is that some stupid Six thing? I don’t know how you got here. You were in Cambridge, you were playing soldiers on the side, got a tap on the shoulder … ’

  Boxing Day, we borrowed her father’s Aston Martin and drove to where I grew up, a former local authority house in Croxley Green on the edge of London, empty since my mother’s death two years earlier. I kept up with bills, never slept there, let the maintenance go. I hadn’t been back in a while. Joanna wandered the place, picking up vodka bottles, blister packs. There were few traces of my mother’s succession of boyfriends, who evaporated once the pillow needed to be pressed. Most of the bulbs had gone and the winter light was hard.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Left when I was four. I don’t really remember him.’

  ‘Of course. I should have guessed.’

  She lifted an unopened pack of oral syringes and gave me a quizzical look. I filled one with vodka.

  ‘Open your mouth.’

  I described my mother’s late embrace of alcoholism, and the six months spent feeding her vodka and orange as her body closed down, a scene that wasn’t without its own raw beauty. It brought me a cool, enveloping nihilism that later became entwined with what others perceived as courage and determination. I could survive anything after that.

  I found a candle, lit it.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘It feels like Christmas.’

  It took me a long while, taking out the memory of those two days and handling it, before I realised why she had invited me to her parents’ place. She wasn’t using me to deflect attention. She liked me. She picked through books in my old room – German medieval poetry, critiques of Thomas Mann – found some old photographs.

  ‘P Coy?’

  ‘Pegasus Company. Training for the Parachute Regiment. Playing soldiers, as you said.’

  ‘You look like you’ve been boxing.’

  ‘They call it milling. It’s part of the selection process.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Punch your opponent in the face as hard and as frequently as you can. One minute, no pausing, no trying to defend yourself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see if you’re as dark and troubled as they are, perhaps. I don’t know. It made sense at the time. When they can, the officers pair friends, brothers, get them to knock each other unconscious.’

  ‘Lovely. Why did you choose the Paras?’

  ‘More class-free, less hierarchical.’

  ‘And you ended up in Six.’

  ‘I know.’

  Joanna was the only person I had told any of this. I remember, at the time, thinking we were old. We were twenty-four. We survived several years’ acquaintance before succumbing to the inevitable. Other partners helped. Joanna used to say: this one had better work or we will end up together. It was a joke and not a joke, brought to comic perfection when we were assigned cover as a married couple in Ukraine.

  There was a drunken one-night stand in Kiev, but I think of us getting together in Turkey. And then she returned to the UK, to ignominy, and the distance allowed us to begin a relationship. That we could only see each other every few weeks made it easier. We should have notified our line managers. I didn’t; I can’t imagine Joanna having that conversation.

  It’s a mixed feeling when someone’s turn for the worse involves agreeing to a relationship with you. I had been worried about her,
post-Turkey. Shame can drive people to all sorts of things, and it had driven her to secrecy. And I recognised, in some uneasy way, that it was bound to her desire for me. There was a current of rage and humiliation sweeping her. I understood something of that. Her reputation was destroyed but she had survived, emerged intact on the other side of ruin, and that brings a disconcerting freedom.

  We’re half-dressed on the dusty ground in Turkey when Joanna’s phone buzzes, one of her contacts saying Kurds had tapped into a pipeline beside the camp. It had been going on for weeks, Turkish intelligence claiming the PKK were conducting sabotage operations. We both suspected it was the gangs running the camps. Under cover of night, they’d drill into the line, stretch a hose to a rusty tanker then drive off when they’d finished, leaving the oil flowing into the ground until the place was swimming in it – and the villagers would come out and start scooping up fuel.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ she said, already dressing.

  We were approaching slowly when a flame danced through the darkness ahead. Someone was crossing towards the spillage with a kerosene lamp. Joanna swore. That’s a naked flame. I was trying to decide whether to intervene or turn around when the place lit up, sudden as a camera flash, only the illumination held and I could see all their faces, the people who’d been hiding. The fuel was flowing down into the stream, igniting through the trees, the night suddenly wild like a storm. Then there was a scream: a girl with her clothes on fire was running. I couldn’t understand where she was running to. We were getting closer, Joanna unclipping her gun hopelessly, and I saw the girl running to the stream to dive in, only the stream was on fire.

  Over the past six months I had thought of that night a lot. I had imagined the many places in the world Joanna might be, the many reasons it was best to maintain radio silence. No news was most certainly good news. I understood she would get in touch on her own terms.

  Now she had.

  EIGHT

  When I woke the next morning there was a message from Evotec. They had accessed a recent internal directory compiled by Kaztelecom. The landline I’d been called from came up registered to Nurlan Pokatilov, Apartment 603, 9/1 Malakhov St, Astana 050059, Kazakhstan. It was listed online as a holiday rental.

  The TutaNova address used for the Catalyst link had been set up just before the message was sent, on a machine with an IP address that belonged to a PC in Kazakhstan. Evotec had gone one step better: the PC itself belonged to a café going by the initials KS, on Kaldayakov Street, Astana.

  The resolution of the clip conformed to several models of concealed camera. The level of compression suggested it had been copied twice. There was no form of watermark on the video clip aside from a time and date stamp. Like the newspaper, it had been set two weeks ahead. In terms of CGI, it wasn’t like anything they’d seen before.

  I brought up a satellite view, found the street address. The café was on a back street. Nurlan Pokatilov’s address was one of many large apartment blocks in the north of the city. I tried calling his landline again but no one answered.

  I sent new instructions to Evotec: Kazakh hospital records for the last week, plus recent arrests in Astana, then flight manifests in and out of the country for the days around the contact. My guess was that Kazakhstan’s bloated bureaucracy used outdated technology that wouldn’t prove too much of a challenge for the hackers.

  I looked up routes to Astana.

  Breakfast was brought to the suite, which let me spend half an hour browsing Kazakh websites and seeing how much of the language I remembered. Like a lot of the former Soviet Union republics, Russian had remained the lingua franca, but Kazakh still held on strong, especially once you were out of the cities. My Russian was okay; Kazakh itself was a Turkic language, not quite as close to Turkish as some, but plenty of crossover.

  Most of my time in Kazakhstan had been spent around Aktau, in the far west of the country, on the coast of the Caspian. My job was to assess routes between Aktau and Baku in Azerbaijan, on the other side of that contested body of water. Aktau was pure ennui and I loved it: I had always sought out places that felt as remote as possible, which wasn’t just a question of distance. Aktau had been built in 1962 as a camp for oil workers in one of the world’s most lifeless deserts. There were no addresses, just three-digit numbers assigned to each home. The place was dependent on seawater desalinated with the help of a nuclear reactor, and the few trees that clung to existence had been planted using pneumatic drills. The town’s main statue was of a Ukrainian poet exiled there by Russia in the nineteenth century, who wrote: There is only sand and stones. You would gaze around and feel so dreary that you might as well hang yourself. In the 1960s they briefly named the town after him. I spent most of my time watching oil-service vessels heading for the platforms, wondering when the water froze. Kazakhstan had the biggest extremes of temperature in the world, and this seemed responsible for its stark beauty.

  I checked their local news, local bulletin boards, then went to an open-source search tool for videos and skimmed through all recently uploaded footage geotagged to the region. People were filming the snow. Right now it was minus 5 degrees. Workers at a metals factory had gone on strike. Presidential initiatives had been introduced regarding the environment, the economy and social values. I noted what people were wearing, styles of coat and boots and hair.

  Perhaps because I knew I was going to go, because I knew this constituted a severance from which there would be no straightforward return, I went to Croxley Green. I still considered it home although there was nothing much there, and I no longer even felt numb, just a wonder at how emotions fade.

  The house was now occupied by a cousin who I had met twice, who was grateful for the space and left my old room untouched. I don’t know why I didn’t sell the place. There was some superstition around maintaining it, a sense that if I jettisoned this final connection with my own biography the cover lives themselves wouldn’t work. What would they be? The centre would not hold.

  When I’d been in Kabul, children wandered between cars selling gum and phone cards, chanting ‘No mother, no father’. They chanted in English, beelining to the white SUVs of Western organisations, and I had begun to wonder if they even knew what it meant. No mother, no father. I still heard them, their small voices, especially in Croxley Green. I got a BMW chauffeur-driven from the Mandarin Oriental to St Pancras, where I walked through the station out to York Way and hailed a black cab.

  Croxley was on the north-west edge of London, just inside the M25 but over the border of Hertfordshire. Its low suburban streets constricted around my heart. The historic windmill, the flat common, the interwar high street; a world without a horizon.

  Even before she’d seen the house, Joanna had looked around and said: Do you think every life is a form of revenge?

  Shops and pubs had closed, a new beauty parlour arrived. The public toilets, with their scrawled lists of times for cottaging, appeared to be open for business. The modern, red-brick church had a new notice board carrying photos of refugees.

  I walked past my old secondary school where I had fallen in love with languages because they belonged to places utterly different from here. How benign that had seemed, to foster a relationship with places that were not yours. A love of history too, which also seemed to happen elsewhere, and was somewhere to which you might escape. I cleared some broken glass from the children’s playground, as an opportunity to check the road behind me. No one there except for a small boy on a bike, who yelled ‘Paedo’ and cycled off. I had been right at fourteen: this was the edge of the universe.

  No one home. I went to the back, climbed into the garden, found the spare keys and let myself in. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke and floor polish. Figurines crowded the window ledges. I thought of Christopher Bohren’s living room, up above Montreux, glass looking out over the Swiss town to Lake Geneva.

  The bathroom was unchanged, the strip light harsh. I looked at my hands, the scar in the left palm where a woman extr
acted from the rubble of Baghdad’s police station had dug her nails through my skin. I lifted the blind. There were new locks on the windows, and what looked like traces of powder used by a forensics team.

  I went back to the kitchen and sifted the post until I found one from Hertfordshire Constabulary regarding a break-in on 27 November, two days ago. It seemed a strange house to target.

  I went to my old room. Books had been taken from the shelves and opened, a file of essays emptied out and hurriedly crammed back in.

  I turned on the PC and logged into my TutaNota account. The coded email wasn’t there. I checked the deleted folder, then the junk, then sent mail. All traces of it, including my own response, had been wiped.

  A car passed, stopped at the end of the road. It was a van with a ladder on the roof. Parked for two minutes, disappeared again.

  I called a contact in Visas and Immigration, read them my passport number.

  ‘What’s the status on this individual?’

  ‘Red-flagged.’

  ‘Any details?’

  ‘Instructions are to detain and notify Special Branch.’

  I felt a hand grip my arm suddenly. Step this way, please. I didn’t have the authority to do anything about it over a phone call. I thanked the contact, went to the shed, took a trowel, left through the back gate.

  Five minutes walking took me past a postal depot and the first grey-brown fields to a municipal cemetery. I stopped at a clean, new headstone, bowed my head then looked around. No one. I continued to the far end of the cemetery, over the fence, into the woods.

  I remembered the forms of specific trees. Ash and beech trees planted twenty years ago. After ten minutes I stopped and began to dig. Just as I was thinking I’d chosen the wrong spot I hit thick black plastic. A couple of moments later I was able to retrieve the canister. The top was stiff but opened eventually. Inside: two passports, papers, hair dye, cash in five currencies totalling ten grand, plus a few basic items of kit: bump keys, skeleton keys, tracking devices. Most field agents organise their own emergency stash: contraband and leftovers. Few entirely trust their wellbeing to anyone else. I checked the dates on the passports, then returned to the house. I sat on the sofa and brought up a map of Kazakhstan on my phone. Vast and blank. The empty centre of the world. I wasn’t the first to feel it calling.