A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  ‘What do you know about her last movements?’ I asked.

  ‘She filed a report at nine p.m. on the evening of Saturday 27 November. Dined alone at her hotel. Staff saw her go up to her room, leave again around ten-thirty. That’s the last we’ve got.’

  ‘No pickup on cameras? Card use? Phone signal?’

  ‘None we’ve got so far.’

  The amount of resources not being tapped was agonising.

  ‘Reported this to the police? They might know the terrain better.’

  ‘Vanessa McDonald was supposedly investigating police corruption. Joanna Lake was a private-sector spy. Which of them do you want the police looking into?’

  I thought through the legal situation. ‘Clear as an oil spill’ would be the generous way to put it: a former MI6 agent entering on fake papers, spying on Kazakh citizens, installing surveillance, hacking God knows what, and then Vectis waving guns around when it went wrong. As if sensing this – and keen for an out – Walker said, ‘You worked together. Could this be something from the past catching up?’

  What he meant was: maybe none of this is our fault. Nor need it be anything to endanger an energy deal. I’d considered this, of course. Most of the people from those days with cause to want her dead were either dead themselves, imprisoned or doing too well to cause trouble. People don’t like stirring history up, certainly not off home ground. But it was true, we had worked together – Ukraine and Turkey. Joanna had also done stints in Serbia and Belarus. That’s not a CV to help you sleep at night.

  ‘There’s no specific operation for which I think someone would still be seeking revenge. Does Vectis deal with kidnappings and rescues?’

  ‘Not directly. We work with GL5 if we need muscle. She has full K&R cover if it comes to it.’

  Fully insured for kidnap and ransom. Which could help you rustle up a holdall stuffed with used currency, or even some ex-SAS types abseiling to your rescue. It rarely happened quite like that. I thought through the various options. If she’d been killed straight off it meant she was dangerous alive, that her silence was worth the noise generated by a murder, the obliteration of whatever knowledge she contained. Alternatively, it was a message: stay away. If she was captive, it was a question of what the captors wanted: money, leverage or information. Ninety-five per cent of hostages, the public never hear about: they’re diplomatic tools, assets on the balance sheet. Companies have supposed policies on not paying ransoms and states have policies on not dealing with terrorists, but I’d never known either to be ironclad, it just means the press agree not to cover it. But situations got spun out over years. If the captors wanted money it was straightforward, although you’d expect demands sooner rather than later. If they were pressing her for information, the first you might know about it was a body dump.

  ‘Are you monitoring her family?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re keeping an ear out. There’s been no contact. No whispers internationally either. All our offices have been chasing this.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s dead.’

  ‘Nor do we.’

  It was time to get a closer look at Vectis. Walker wasn’t telling me much, but I liked a challenge and wanted to know more about his set-up over here. I didn’t believe the search for Joanna was being run out of Walker’s hotel room. I was also curious about how they’d react to the video file.

  ‘Is the cryptonym “Catalyst” one that you’re familiar with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you come across anything connected to sophisticated technological deception?’

  ‘What have you got?’ Walker watched me carefully. I knew the calculation. You can’t trust anyone, but you can’t spy alone.

  ‘Shall we adjourn somewhere less comfortable?’ I said.

  *

  They knew just the place, it seemed. We took the Renault to an address in the business district, a rectangular block of mirrored glass. Walker swiped us in. The floors housed KPMG, PwC, software and construction companies. Ours apparently belonged to a law firm called White and Chase, with a desk and logo, a smiling receptionist, and nothing else whatsoever as far as I could see. We walked past empty conference rooms to a heavy door with keypad entry, into a windowless office with three monitors and a Faraday cage to block the transmission of radio waves. It was a secure compartmentalised facility: a SCIF, in intelligence community parlance. I was searched before we went in.

  Inside I checked the technology – Dell screens, external hard drives, ethernet box on the wall. I produced my flash drive and they unlocked a safe in the corner, withdrew a Lenovo laptop with a USB port. It booted up to an empty desktop and factory settings. Walker inserted the drive. The guard stayed by the door at first. When Walker had watched the clip once he nodded consent and beckoned him over.

  They watched it together.

  ‘How did you get it?’ Walker asked.

  ‘She sent it to me.’

  ‘No audio?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Know the other man?’

  ‘No. But I think this may be a room in the Triumph of Astana.’

  ‘What do you mean “may be”?’

  ‘It’s faked.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Given that I’ve never been there, it seems likely. Did Joanna assign cryptonyms?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The video’s titled Catalyst.’

  Walker shook his head, blankly. ‘You may not be the best person to be visible here,’ he said.

  ‘Well, here I am. So far I’ve only had one gun pulled on me today.’

  ‘You say someone approached Testimony, that Joanna might have been in receipt of information from that source?’

  ‘Elena Yussopova suggested as much. I couldn’t get any more out of her.’

  ‘Does she trust you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. She’s not actively campaigning against me yet.’

  Walker reached into a desk drawer and produced a single cigarette. He used a silver lighter with a small blue flame, pressed a button and a fan under the desk sucked the smoke away in a descending stream. Then he continued to watch me, assessing.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Give me access to what you’ve got so far. I’ll find her for you.’

  He sighed. ‘Do you speak Kazakh?’

  ‘Of course. Who’d try and operate in a country without the language?’

  ‘What’s your current status with regard to Six?’

  ‘I’m on holiday.’

  ‘We would have to think how to do this.’

  ‘Sure. It’s a sensitive situation.’

  Walker sat silently for some time, eyes open and bloodshot. I tried to imagine what he was thinking: maybe it was about the beach he’d recently been on.

  ‘I’d like to send the footage for more thorough analysis,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Sure. In return for granting me access to her work while over here, the details of the set-up and information on the search for her so far.’

  He nodded slowly, mentally checking through the requests one by one.

  ‘I need to be clear,’ he said. ‘We’re not in a position to go behind the backs of the British intelligence services.’

  ‘You’ve been managing so far.’

  He sighed. ‘We’re not entirely renegade.’

  ‘Who do you liaise with at Six?’ I asked.

  ‘We have a few points of contact. I can’t give you names.’

  ‘But you haven’t told them about this?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘She came to me, not them. There was a reason for that.’

  EIGHTEEN

  I gave him my footage to send through to analysts. In return I got a glimpse of the hunt for Joanna so far. Staff in three Vectis offices, London, Berlin and Moscow, were trawling intercepts for any whisper. Walker gave the impression of big data coming in, which could leave you with a lot of haystack and no needle. He had contacts in intelligence companies that had m
ore experience in the region but he was reluctant to go begging for help, as they were all competitors for the Saracen contract.

  There were a few more complications. MI6, and the UK government generally, were unhappy about Vectis operating in Kazakhstan: a planned £2 billion sale of BAE helicopters to the Kazakh defence forces meant UK plc were putting a lot of effort into presenting Kazakhstan as a clean place to do business. Neither Saracen nor Vectis were helping.

  I got an hour to look through the reports Joanna had delivered. I had to do it in the Vectis office, at an isolated desk, no phone, watched over by Walker himself, passing over paperwork deemed not too sensitive, clicking files for me.

  It wasn’t worth the effort.

  She had spent most of her time monitoring what Vectis called IMGs – Issue Motivated Groups. As well as Testimony, these included the usual suspects: Greenpeace, Amnesty, opposition groups within Kazakhstan in so far as they were allowed to exist. Additionally, Joanna had mapped power structures: clans, families, regions, departments, all webbed around the presidential family itself; what, in Six, we referred to jokingly as bribe maps. The EU and the UN were concerned about Saracen. Laws were being thrown around by rivals and their lobbyists. Shareholders got jumpy. Alongside the IMGs was what Vectis presented as ‘Civil Unrest Analysis’: the big picture.

  Data, hacked or otherwise, was processed in the UK, analysed, written up and fed through to the PR and lobbying company who had hired Vectis on behalf of Saracen: Piper Anderson Communications. They served as the buffer between a FTSE-listed energy company and people affixing listening devices to coffee tables. I knew Piper Anderson – Lucy Piper used to be head of communications at Downing Street. First time I encountered her she was escorting the PM around Basra, corralling press as they documented a new school for girls. Piper Anderson offered an all-in-one package: lobbying, damage limitation, agenda-steering, legal muscle, cleaning of the internet and subversion of any opposition. If you wanted a think tank promoting the concept that human rights thrived on the discovery of oilfields, it would be blogging by breakfast, academics on-message, with politicians having quiet words to journalists over lunch. They had a lot of former ministers on their board.

  Piper Anderson hired spies so the corporates didn’t have to.

  I read through Joanna’s reports on political groups and systems of decision-making in the Kazakh government, and the tone was flat. A quick search revealed that a lot of it was gleaned from subscription to other intelligence companies like Stratfor, which was common enough practice but not for Joanna Lake. Some came straight from the Oil and Gas Financial Journal. I could see why Walker wasn’t worried about a sudden absence of product.

  More useful was a brief summary of those rivals with skin in the game. The US energy company Chevron had big fields in operation in Kazakhstan and had brought over at least three private intelligence firms. Turkey and China both saw Central Asia as their backyard, fielding fierce resources out of vast and well-practised intelligence services. Russia’s FSB loomed large. Then there was Kazakhstan’s own intelligence service: KGB remnants, like most post-Soviet states. That was worth remembering.

  Between their Sigint and Joanna’s inquiries they’d counted eleven other intelligence operations currently active, state and private, all in relation to Kazakhstan’s energy sector. Astana was what the Germans called an Agentsumpf, a spy swamp. Things heated up in an Agentsumpf. The chaos bred a sense of impunity, of minimal blowback. You ended up giving each other cover. It got messy.

  Potential threats to Joanna: first up, rival energy companies who knew she was Saracen-connected and wanted to stop the company’s expansion. Less likely: activists who’d rumbled her cover and felt aggrieved. Then there were always local political thugs who bought into the cover and might not have liked Vanessa McDonald nosing around. One long-shot involved individuals whose feathers she’d ruffled in the course of her MI6 career and who had chosen their moment to exact revenge. There was the possibility she’d been thrown to them by colleagues for whom she had become inconvenient; there’s always someone who’ll do your dirty work for you. It would have been quicker to establish those who didn’t want to kill her.

  I watched some of the documentary footage she’d shot. She interviewed off-camera so I was denied her face. Still, I heard her voice. She interviewed a guy called Craig Bryant. He was a subcontractor for Saracen; his company, Auracle, had been bought up by Carter around the time he purchased the oil company. It provided tech support for rigs and pipelines. He sat in a bland office with some data pinned to the wall, looking awkward, ingratiating, played. He hadn’t expected criticism, starting out on his pitch:

  … You’ve got a thousand kilometres of pipeline – no human’s going to be able to monitor …

  Then, when she started throwing around stats on environmental destruction and political corruption he spent some time trying to convince her it was all more eco now and he didn’t know about politics.

  According to her reports, in the following weeks they went on some dates. You could see from phone records that he’d been trying to call her since she went missing.

  ‘That’s bold. She interviews him and he asks her out.’

  ‘Plucky. But it seems he’s that kind of guy. Skirt chaser.’

  ‘You’ve looked into him?’ I asked.

  ‘Superficially. He’s American, born Sandpoint, Idaho, MIT grad, worked in technology all his life. Been dropped in by Carter to manage drone operations over here. He’s done some consultancy work for the NSA and spoken a couple of times at CIA-related organisations like the Brookings Institution, but that’s the extent of it as far as we can tell.’

  ‘Know what exactly these drone ops involve?’

  ‘They have high-end sensors – optical, chemical – which help with maintaining pipelines, detecting any leaks or pollution, assessing reserves.’

  If Bryant struck Walker as worth pursuing, he didn’t show it. I searched through the notes on their investigation so far. There were her recent ATM withdrawals, card payments. The repetitive, unenlightening interviews with hotel staff. A copy of her itinerary as Vanessa McDonald, making her documentary.

  I looked through for the detail that could help me and saw nothing.

  Then I found it.

  11.50 a.m. on 26 November there was a purchase on her Vanessa McDonald NatWest debit card. $11.99 at Zara, Mega Astana shopping mall, followed five minutes later by a coffee at the mall’s KFC.

  You look for things happening on the hour, the half hour. Gratuitous things. Out of character. Joanna was a coffee snob. Given the choice, she’d risk operations before accepting fast-food coffee. 800 tenge, or just under two dollars, to the Colonel. 11.55 a.m. Before going shopping she’d been at her hotel.

  I brought up a map. There were two closer shopping centres. I checked the shops on offer at those and they were pretty much the same. It was a big diversion to buy some earmuffs and an overpriced Americano.

  So, according to the map, she crossed town, past two larger malls, to be at Mega Astana as the clock struck twelve.

  She was meeting someone.

  ‘Any more from this visit?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Think it’s significant?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  If I was right, these were strange protocols. Telling nothing to your employer – no pre-contact threat analysis. No post-contact briefing. Maybe this was how they did it in the private sector, but it certainly granted an officer autonomy.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Walker asked.

  ‘Go back to my hotel, shower, think. I’m going to need money, at least thirty grand cash in dollars, tenge and rubles.’

  This got little more than a cheek-scratch out of Walker. In my experience, people trust you more when you’re pushy. They think they know what you want. Walker said he’d have to clear it.

  ‘Sure. Not with my name attached, though. You’re my sole point of contact.’

  ‘Of course. Trust me.’


  He was nervous about me asking around and suggested that I stay in or close to my hotel until he’d spoken to the Vectis board in London. We agreed that unless there were any dramatic developments we would meet the following day for lunch – I’d be picked up at a specified location and brought to the office. Finally I was dropped back at my car.

  I waited until the guard and his Renault had disappeared, then drove away from the Hilton towards the Mega Astana mall.

  NINETEEN

  It was an unattractive, large grey box that made little attempt at enticing Astana’s population. But it didn’t have to, it seemed: the car park was full. A giant inflatable snowman shook in the wind, speakers broadcasting ‘Jingle Bell Rock’.

  I walked in, checked the layout, found the shop she’d been in. The section with earmuffs gave you a clear view to the entrance, across the store; a chance to scan for watchers. She was here for a reason.

  Most of the security cameras throughout were basic domes, with a few distinctive box-style cameras at intervals. A company called MicroDigital made a lot of money around 2014 installing security cameras across Central Asia. Cameras were sold with remote internet access enabled, and default passwords that rarely got changed, and even if they were, still allowed infinite password guesses without locking you out – all of which meant you could remotely tap into the video feeds. From there, it was a back road into the whole network, including archived footage. MicroDigital’s slapdash approach to password security had opened up plenty to me over the years, from branches of AT&T in Ankara to the Golden Times Bath House in Tblisi.

  I opened my laptop, downloaded a port scanner, scanned for the ports. A quick browse gave me cameras and routers. Default passwords didn’t work, but they were susceptible to brute force attack. I found the router’s IP address and model number, sent a message to Marius at Evotec: I needed Stefan Janikowski. He confirmed that Stefan was still in Riyadh and I was authorised to make direct contact. They gave me a new job code and contact protocol.

  I called.

  ‘I hear we’re back in business,’ Stefan said. ‘Your people change their mind?’