A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  NINE

  I flew into Kazakhstan on Friday 2 December, a Ukraine Air flight from Kiev. The plane was half full, mostly business people, some families, one or two backpackers. I boarded last so I could walk the length of it and see the faces of my fellow passengers.

  I’d asked for a window seat. The desert began a few miles east of the Volga river, Caucasus mountains flattening, a flash of the Caspian. By the time we were beneath cloud again the world looked like Mars: rippled rock, pink then grey, running lifeless to the horizon. I got that ominous feeling I always got flying over deserts. You think you have diminished me, they seem to say, but it is you who are diminished.

  Kazakhstan. Eighth-biggest country in the world, over a million square miles of land, and a population smaller than London. We flew over bare planet for three hours then began to descend towards the capital. My neighbour craned to see the window, to witness civilisation erupting out of nowhere. Astana’s glass towers burned with the low sun, office blocks of iridescent blue casting turquoise shadows across the business district. In front of the Presidential Palace, two perfectly conical towers of beaten gold stood side by side. The rest was snow.

  Twenty years ago there was nothing here but a few crumbling Soviet blocks in a desert flat as the sea. After his country gained independence, the President of Kazakhstan decided to move the capital here. He renamed it Astana, meaning capital, and it appeared: ministerial buildings, business parks, futuristic shopping malls, arising from the dust on his command. Or, more accurately, from the 150-dollar barrels of oil beneath the dust. And it was only when you dropped below 1,000 feet and saw the absence of people on the wide streets that you heard the echo of the old name – Akmola – white grave. Hard to forget once you knew it.

  It had been sixty-one hours since I left London. Figuring out an inconspicuous route to Kazakhstan was complicated by the fact that UK flights routed via Kiev. Flights from London to Ukraine were closely monitored by more than one intelligence service, so I flew easyJet to Zagreb.

  It was when I walked out through Departures that the reality of it all kicked in: smiling at the air steward as he scanned the ticket and handed it back. I felt the carpet beneath my feet as I walked out of my life into renegade status.

  I used my own card and passport for the Croatia trip, booking an Airbnb for a week. The flat was up steep stairs, with a view down to a church whose red and white tiled roof formed a Croatian flag. A street beside it filled with people over the course of the afternoon, drinking at the bars that lined each side. I let myself be briefly taunted by that imagined holiday. The paperwork I used for the next leg dated back to a job in Tajikistan and had never been used. The name was Toby Bell. I went to a dark-web site that let you buy Mastercard details for twenty pounds and used one to book my flight to Kiev, and another from Kiev to Astana.

  That left me with twelve hours in Zagreb. I called Olivia Gresham and set up a meeting with her property-developer contact in Astana. Then I found a place to print while-you-wait business cards. When I had the cards in the name of Toby Bell, I printed out graphs and spreadsheets concerning the Kazakh economy. My cover was going to be a consultant for investors in Central Asia: something that put me between business and government, with plenty of room for unaccounted cash and minimal infrastructure. As far as I could tell, that was what the word ‘consultant’ had been invented for. And businessmen were unthreatening compared with other covers: universally explicable, their politics transparent.

  I set up Toby Bell’s social media, club membership, dating sites. Used the usual company in Hyderabad to stock my new life with friends and contacts. In a shopping mall on the edge of Zagreb’s old town I bought thermals, boots, a couple of pre-paid phones. I loaded up the phone with apps – privacy vault, military-grade GPS navigation, police scanner and an app that detected radio signals, including those emitted by surveillance devices. I set the phones to upload data to a cloud account and erase all contents if anyone entered the wrong password.

  Hotels in Astana were one-star or five-star. I decided to head for the very economical Lion Hotel in central Astana, but didn’t book in advance. December in Kazakhstan wasn’t going to be overcrowded.

  Evotec sent through passenger lists for all commercial flights in and out of Kazakhstan over the past week. I searched them for any females aged twenty-five to forty, but there were none of the covers I’d known Joanna use. Same with arrests and hospital records. I was going to have to take a look myself.

  I marked up a satellite map of Astana with government buildings, police stations and transport options out of the city. Then I added the address of the landline registered to Nurlan Pokatilov from which I’d been called.

  At dawn I got up, switched on some lights, tuned the TV to BBC World News, dropped the keys in the lockbox, caught a train to Zagreb airport and flew to Kiev.

  *

  I had to stay a night in Ukraine, which felt okay. I thought it would sharpen me up. And I had spent time there with Joanna. Some superstition made me want to touch base. I brushed up my Russian and Kazakh on the flight. It wasn’t so unusual in Six to have minimal time to immerse in a language before deployment, but this felt rushed. Like turning up naked.

  The huge, blocky Hotel Ukrayina had a view of the Maidan. Last time here, many years ago, we were celebrating the Orange Revolution. The hotel served as headquarters of the opposition, which was convenient for spooks and journalists. Ten years later I had seen photos of the same rooms being used as a makeshift hospital and morgue, the square around it divided between protesters and the paramilitary units cracking their skulls.

  Quieter tonight, and repainted. The scars of those events were 700 kilometres south in Donetsk and Crimea. I drank in the hotel bar, among the red and gold Soviet-era décor, and rehearsed Toby Bell, his enthusiasm for what he would describe as enabling policy environments, his knowledge of the EU’s development cooperation strategy. His sense of opportunity. A man who had never been quite as successful as he wanted to be, perhaps. Who sought approval and had few memories that kept him awake at night.

  Two or three days, I told myself. That was all I was going to spend in Kazakhstan. No need for MI6 to know I’d even left the country. Long enough to determine whether there was anything I could do, short enough to remain under the radar. I’d follow the leads I had and ensure discretion while doing it; that was what I was trained to do. If Joanna was there and needed help getting out of the country for whatever reason then a fresh presence could be invaluable. I was wary about crashing into someone else’s field of operations, though, if that was what it was. Without even knowing which direction the threat might come from. There’s always the opportunity to make things worse.

  Around 8 p.m. the bar became a strip club. I tried out Toby. I flirted with escorts, flashed some cash, got in a conversation with an Israeli who owned an IT company, telling him that Kazakhstan was the future. I left at 10 p.m. and spent a couple of hours poring over Kazakh news clippings, identifying useful social media accounts and local journalists. Then I stopped and read some of Frederick Burnaby’s nineteenth-century account of travelling in the region, spying for the British state when Tsarist troops were encroaching on the Empire. And I felt the tingle again: entering a country as a spy, your own mystery momentarily equal to the world’s.

  Few of my fellow passengers looked up to observe the miracle of Astana when it appeared. The Ishim river had frozen – a winding white road through the city – and as we got lower you could see snowmobiles and sledges scarring the ice. Expensive new apartment blocks hugged the left bank, all glass and curves, older Soviet neighbourhoods to the right: sullen, square-shouldered, like individuals who gambled on the wrong future.

  Landing was bumpy. Outside it was snow-globe frenzied. Mid-afternoon but that didn’t seem relevant. As we left the jet bridge into the terminal gate a woman in a pastel-blue suit smiled and pointed a Sony mini DV camcorder at our faces.

  Welcome to Kazakhstan.

  At im
migration control I chose a line with a young and tired-looking officer who barely glanced at my passport. I got a standard fifteen-day tourist visa on the spot, waited for the official stamp, admired a mural of horses running across the steppe.

  The warmth of the arrivals hall thawed the atmosphere as far as the taxis, then the cold bit. Exhaust fumes billowed thick as factory smoke in the freezing air. I chose an alcohol-bloated driver in a dirty Nissan who grinned at me, as if amused to find me in the back of his car. I gave an address a block away from my chosen hotel. The driver grunted as he set off and then the road vanished beneath snow.

  ‘Where from?’ he asked, speaking English.

  ‘America.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘Close by.’

  ‘First time?’

  ‘In Astana, yes.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Business.’

  ‘Hope so.’ We approached flashing lights that I thought were emergency vehicles but turned out to be a convoy of snow ploughs. ‘Quite some weather,’ I said, switching to Russian but keeping it unpolished.

  ‘This is nothing,’ he replied in Russian. ‘Last week, the snow was … ’ He gestured up to the roof lining, which was tobacco-stained. ‘Now it will get colder. Less snow, much colder.’

  Like most new cities, Astana’s roads were broad and straight. We passed large geometric sculptures, positioned around the place in the way you’d try to make an oversized flat look inhabited, then huge new residential developments. The buildings themselves were spread out. I couldn’t see many lights on. Very occasionally a human could be seen moving between them, head down against the wind.

  One face was repeatedly visible: the Kazakh President. He gazed enigmatically from billboards: Nazarbayev; wise, inscrutable, charismatic, seventy-eight years old and, given that he’d been running the place as a Moscow-loyal communist when it was still part of the Soviet Union, he’d ruled the country for longer than it had existed. He’d steered a careful path without relinquishing power, keeping Russia, China and the West sweet. Most of all keeping his own people sweet, who voted 90 per cent in his favour in relatively clean elections but still couldn’t start a magazine without governmental permission.

  A few more of these citizens appeared after we’d been driving for ten minutes. My first impression of them was that they were suicidal. They wove through the cars, which were themselves skidding, appearing from between the grey mounds of slush at the side of the road. I had no idea if somewhere underneath the black ice there were lane markings, but no one would have been able to keep to them anyway.

  Astana’s icons came in and out of view as we approached the centre: the Presidential Palace with its blue dome, flanked by two identical gold cylinders that contained governmental ministries and the offices of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Half a mile away, the Bayterek tower soared into the sky, crowned by an orb. To the south – facing the Palace across the city – a glass pyramid lit alternately pink and green. We passed three presidential billboards in a row. Across the last, in dripping red paint, someone had written Water freedom with blood.

  Two patrol cars sat in front, lights flashing. As if sensing my interest, three men in dark uniforms turned their heads to watch the taxi pass.

  ‘How are things here?’ I asked. ‘There’s a lot of police about.’

  ‘Now, yes.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Terrorism.’

  ‘Have there been terrorist attacks?’

  ‘No.’

  Lion Hotel was in a concrete block that had been painted lemon yellow from the third floor up. The hotel actually occupied the top of the building only. The lift was broken so I walked up, which afforded me a glimpse of a brothel on the floor below, VIP Massage, with women in dressing gowns checking their phones and waiting for the VIPs.

  No one on the hotel reception desk. It was brightly lit, with the city’s eager artifice continuing inside: a lot of translucent plastic furniture, an incongruous chandelier spray-painted gold. Tropical fish swam across a 27-inch screen on the wall.

  After a couple of minutes I went around the desk and leafed through the reservations book. There was no one else staying here. Eventually a young woman turned up, sleepy-eyed, apologetic, in jeans and a T-shirt; she took my details, gave me a swipe card and rustled up a smile.

  ‘You are here for work?’

  ‘Some meetings.’

  ‘But you will visit Bayterek?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘This city has many wonders,’ she said. Then: ‘Have you been to the old capital, Almaty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is very beautiful. There are mountains, trees. Perhaps you will have a chance to go.’

  My room was small, with a painting of a nomad asleep beside a camel on the wall, a view between tower blocks to the business district. I checked the window locks, then the devices currently connected to the hotel’s wi-fi network; I logged on and sent an email, unsecured, to the property developer Olivia Gresham had put me in touch with, confirming arrival, saying I was looking forward to our meeting tomorrow. I logged out, connected to a private network and checked my own messages. Nothing from Joanna, one from Six asking me to confirm my current location.

  I stood at my window and tried to understand where I was. Across the business district, entire buildings masked themselves in LED displays, others flickering up their height in coloured sequences. A lot of cities can appear utopian from a hotel window at night, but Astana is particularly dreamlike. Flakes cluttering the air added to the sense of unreality, of looking at an architectural model put together by a teenager with ADHD and a love of science fiction. Only the Central Mosque refused to blink, steadfast in its floodlights like an admonishment.

  I remembered why I had loved the country the last time I was here: its sense of newness, of gazing out to a future as unencumbered as the steppe. But it wasn’t entirely without baggage. The President’s excuse for creating a new capital was that the old one sat in an earthquake zone. One look at a map showed you the more pressing threat. Almaty was way down south, tucked into a corner near China. That left a huge tranche of northern Kazakhstan looking lonely and neglected next to Russia, and ripe for the taking. Shiny new Astana was a flag stuck firmly in the north. Ours.

  I put my less sensitive paperwork in the room’s small safe, then found a communal bathroom at the end of the corridor. There were cisterns, vent units, loose ceiling panels. I went for the ceiling, stashing six thousand dollars in cash and the more incriminating equipment up among the pipes. Back in my room, I searched online for car hire establishments and selected the one with the lowest TripAdvisor review, on the principle it would show least interest in me. Finally I mapped a route to the flat the phone calls had come from.

  TEN

  Snow filled my mouth when I tried to breathe. Skin burned with the cold anywhere it was exposed. Ears were the worst. I pulled my hat down, used the act of turning away from the wind as I zipped up my jacket to check behind, in case anyone had followed me from the hotel. I could see about two feet. My nostrils stung as the mucus began to freeze. I covered my face with my scarf, moved on. I wanted to feel out Astana’s energy.

  The big, underpopulated streets meant it was a city without cover, which was both a good and bad thing. It made you conspicuous, but also anyone trying to follow you. Anyone crazy enough to be out was wrapped up to the point of anonymity anyway. Locals called it the buran, the storm wind that came west from Xinjiang over bare planet, gathering ferocity. Nature had been reduced to occasional thin stalks demarcating car parks. Vehicles were new and high-end for the most part, with little variation: Toyotas, Subarus, Hyundais, usually white or grey. They emerged from underground car parks, driving on compacted snow with the tick-tick noise of studded tyres. They descended again beneath office blocks and shopping malls without anyone setting foot outside.

  I got to sightsee alone. In the park that ran alongside the river there was a display of ice sculptures, m
iniature wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, lit by coloured lights. All the older buildings across the water had been painted in pinks and blues and reclad. I walked three more blocks, which was as long as the exposed skin of my face could take, then hailed a gipsy cab. I got into the second car that stopped – I never took the first, as a rule, and I also tended to avoid ones that looked new, with central locking and powerfully built men at the wheel. This was a battered Daewoo, driver maybe twenty years old. I mentioned a dive bar on a street near, but not too near, the car hire. Pronounced it badly so he asked me to repeat before nodding, unimpressed.

  Just another entitled foreigner, stupid enough to be outside in these conditions. Easy money. He asked for five hundred tenge, which was comfortingly extortionate, and I got in. The car skidded onto Cosmonauts Street, wheels flailing on black ice, onto the main avenue heading away from the river into the governmental district. The windscreen wipers swept uselessly. A lone figure lost in snow dived out of the way as my driver turned.

  A black Subaru Impreza cruised behind us for four or five blocks. I watched until it U-turned at a broad, empty intersection and disappeared back into the storm. We passed some frozen water fountains and began making better progress.

  I thought of the graffiti I had seen. Water freedom with blood. The line was from a poem, but I couldn’t think which. When we were close enough I told the driver to stop, got out and walked. Someone barrelled past, mummified in a parka, scarf over their face. I waited for them to disappear then crossed the road, which gave me a chance to take a good, inconspicuous look in both directions. I was alone.

  I found the car-hire place on a back street, and picked up a white Hyundai Tucson. Half the vehicles on the road seemed to be Hyundai Tucsons. The man was indifferent as I’d hoped, hands stained with oil, writing my details with a biro he had to smack on the desk to work. Things felt like they were coming under control. I went for a drive.