‘I guess so. I want you to take a look at something.’
Within half an hour Stefan had control of the router and was reconfiguring the network rules. Another fifteen minutes and I was sitting in my Hyundai Tucson with the control board of the security operations centre on my laptop. Twenty-one cameras in total. Archived recordings went back two weeks. I checked for KFC. Three cameras covered the area around the fast-food restaurant. It was straightforward enough to search by time and date.
I didn’t notice her at first. She wore a short blonde wig beneath a knitted hat, with heavy-framed glasses. She carried a shoulder bag and the package from Zara. She bought her coffee and sat down, opened a HP notebook, glanced towards the entrance.
No one came.
Five minutes later she was still sitting there, scanning the place from behind her laptop. She checked her watch, then closed the device, got up and left.
I watched it again, disappointed and puzzled. Then I went back to the control board.
Several years ago MI6 realised physical brush passes – an agent handing a file over hand to hand – could be unnecessary in an age of short-range wireless data transfer. They devised technology akin to Bluetooth, using a particular radio frequency to transmit the data. It gained popularity when encryption became strong enough to neutralise the risk of interception, and receivers became small enough to fit into regular-looking devices. Enabled devices needed to be within a range of twenty metres.
Who was around?
We’d been taught that if a hostile party is watching for an officer to make a brush pass they’ll check the people in your vicinity. But surveillance teams rarely think – or have the means – to look vertically. And in a shopping centre, twenty-metre radius in all directions can give you a hundred people to profile.
There were a lot of candidates, but after half an hour I had a favourite.
Directly above the KFC, on the upper-level food court, was a Dunkin’ Donuts. At one minute past midday a man walked in. He was in his twenties and jumpy. He wore an identical blue puffa jacket to the corpse I’d seen last night.
He bought food and a drink, sat down, set up his laptop. Grey, brimmed cap pulled low, scarf up. As close as you could get to obscuring your face without becoming conspicuous.
The timing synced closely with Joanna’s. They left within a few minutes of each other. He got to his feet, looked around, moved off fast. The tray remained on his table, food untouched.
I watched three more times and then I was sure. Her man delivered information. He’d got something. He was a source that required extreme caution, one that she’d decided not to disclose to her employer.
Plenty of potential reasons for reticence. Certainly in Six, where potential agents required a complete risk-profile and managerial clearance before you could engage them, it was worth sidestepping bureaucracy at first. And then, even buried under codenames, they were on the system, and systems leaked.
Who was he?
No news of any individuals reported missing.
I speculated a timeline: the next day they meet at the rented apartment. He’s packed quickly, ready to leave. Something’s gone wrong. They’ve been discovered. She tries to call me before leaving. Perhaps they know their phones are compromised.
But only she got away.
She fled, injured, sent me the video file then ran. Where would she run?
I drove out, towards the block I’d visited last night. As I was approaching I saw police parked outside. A full forensics team was active. I kept driving in the direction of the internet café. She’d been heading due north. I stopped and checked a map. I was heading beyond the edge of the city. There was an hour or so of daylight left and I thought I’d make use of it.
Time spooled backwards as you left Astana, shiny buildings becoming construction sites, bare frames, then grey foundations, then rubble. I passed a police car sitting in the shelter of a billboard with the President’s face and the words: Project Astana 2050. Then you reached the desert.
It took a while to adjust. With the city still in the rear-view, the emptiness stretching to the horizon on either side was less inhuman. You couldn’t tell if it was snow or stone or dust, the landscape was just pale grey and lifeless, strewn with loose rocks like a seabed. A sign warned that it was 200 kilometres to the next town. Tufts of grass and the occasional tamarisk bush stubbled the emptiness, then even these died out. The road divided a lunar landscape and was the only thing in it.
Did she run this way?
After ten miles I turned the radio off. The silence was seductive. I stopped the car and felt my soul expand – stretching – searching for other life. The possibility that the rest of existence was a fantasy flickered and grew. I zipped my jacket up and stepped out of the car, turned around. An eagle hung in the air, as still as the landscape beneath it. I crouched and pinched some of the lifeless rock dust, thought of Mongol hordes pouring across it. Lives adapted to the uninhabitable. No wonder, when they reached the civilised glories of thirteenth-century Baghdad, its mosques and libraries and courts, they burned the place to the ground.
When I got back inside the car there was a message from Tom Marsh.
They’re looking for you. They know we met.
TWENTY
No answer when I tried to contact him. I sent a message to Stevenson. He sent through an ID for Threema, an app that encrypted voice calls. Plenty did, but Threema was the one that didn’t require a phone number or email address. I downloaded the app, entered his ID and he answered in seconds.
‘Where are you?’
‘I took a holiday.’
There was a long pause. I could hear a soft exhalation that constituted various entreaties. Eventually he said: ‘How does it look?’
‘She was working for Vectis Global Insight,’ I said. ‘Under cover as an activist. Client’s an energy company, Saracen. Would you ask around? She may have come here because it’s a good place to hide. She may have had other reasons. I think she started working off her own bat, recruiting sources. She was on to something.’
‘I was about to warn you not to go over there.’
‘Why?’
‘Astana’s coming up high on global risk assessments. The Foreign Office has been debating travel advice. I can’t establish the source or details. I don’t know what, if anything, it has to do with Joanna.’
‘Any word on the trouble in Shefford?’
‘I’m still trying to find out. I’m in touch with Tom Marsh. He’s been questioned again.’
‘Is he okay?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Have you had any trouble?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’ve made contact with Vectis?’
‘Yes. The boss is over here: Callum Walker. I’d be interested to know if he’s ever had anything to do with Russia, and who he’s in contact with in Six.’
We agreed to speak again in twenty-four hours. I looked into Vectis, using a combination of open-source research and calls to acquaintances working at some of their rivals. Beyond its oak-panelled façade, Vectis was a global company with a staff of over three hundred analysts and seventy technology specialists. As well as the Mayfair HQ and some Gloucestershire labs there was an office on Madison Avenue and one in Berlin on the south-east corner of the Zoological Garden with a dedicated cyber-monitoring station. The firm had recently acquired a leading computer forensics and data-recovery company, which meant it had its own hackers.
I knew how it worked. Data would be processed and written up by a team of analysts in the UK, some with technical backgrounds, some experts in relevant industries or regions. Finished reports could be seen by anything up to fifteen people: there were the founders, who were mostly former MI6, then an international advisory board comprised of senior figures from industry and government. Far too many former spooks for my liking. Several of the names were familiar: an ex-chief of MI6’s counterterrorism branch; another SAS man who became Six’s head of commercial lia
ison. Vectis’s co-founder, Fergus Chatwell, was former head of station in Germany. Its management board included two Conservative MPs, both whom had sat on the Joint Intelligence Committee.
I called the Hilton where Walker was staying, and inquired about rooms on the floor above his own. They had one which, by my estimation, should be directly above Walker’s room. I booked it, then called Stefan.
‘I need you in Astana, Kazakhstan. Bring your kit.’
‘Kazakhstan?’
‘It’s peaceful here. And everyone uses Windows 95.’
I confirmed fees for the job and he said he’d be on a flight that evening.
I was left to think about Joanna’s double life as Vanessa McDonald. The interview with Craig Bryant had stuck with me. So had the following courtship. Both Joanna and I knew that things happened on operations, through boredom or necessity or both. Neither of us pretended that made anything easy for a partner, or even excusable. Our general philosophy was that sleeping with individuals while under cover was bad form unless really necessary.
She’d interviewed him. Footage showed a keen, optimistic technocrat. Her reports for Vectis suggested a womaniser with a drink problem. They’d had a meal at Le Dessert near Bayterek, drinks a couple of times at somewhere called Restobar, even gone to the cinema.
Then came Bryant’s repeated calls and messages:
Drink? I’ll be at the usual.
I hope I haven’t done something to upset you.
You okay? Let me know you’re okay.
I checked his company online. Auracle Geospatial Science was a technology start-up that collected and analysed data from satellite, aircraft and drone platforms. There were examples of their work on the website: locating and surveying leaks, monitoring gas emissions, security, detection of oil spills and damage, the inspection of offshore oil platforms and flare stacks.
The Auracle office was in Astana’s Special Economic Zone, an industrial park in the heart of the capital: ten acres of tax-free start-ups occupying low, windowless units, the whole place surrounded by corrugated fencing and razor wire. According to the list of businesses at the front gate, Auracle shared it with a lot of warehousing and manufacturing plants for everything from pharmaceuticals to diesel engines.
I couldn’t get in without the kind of high jinks that were liable to see me arrested, but I suspected Auracle kept most of its business out of the office anyway: the production of satellites and lenses, the drones themselves. They’d need an office to arrange bribes for launch licences, somewhere to shoot the vodka, get the tax benefits.
From what I could tell, a lot of their work involved what, in the service, we called MASINT: Measurement and Signature Intelligence. I first saw the phrase in training, as we were familiarising ourselves with the various acronyms. MASINT was where it got weird. MASINT covered the data that human senses weren’t able to receive: ultraviolet and infrared radiation, alterations in the electromagnetic spectrum, variations in the gravitational pull of the Earth. These were monitored using hyperspectral sensors. All sorts of things revealed themselves.
Most of the interest for Six was in relation to collecting data on weaponry and bomb tests. It was only when I saw it being used by BP in Azerbaijan that I became fascinated by the imagery produced. I used to stay behind in the offices, scrolling across the data maps of Central Asia. Oil miles underground showed up as hydrocarbon particles in surface soil and water, but the more recent past was down there too. You could see the outlines of destroyed cities thousands of years old, make out mass graves, the Stalinist ones identifiable by their regular shape, then the fainter sites of what must have been Mongol and Scythian massacres.
Bryant’s geographical routine had been mapped by Joanna first, then Vectis as they searched for her. It didn’t deviate much; expats cling to routine and Astana offered few temptations. Office from 9 to 5, then an address on Saryarka Avenue which turned out to be a bar called The Rocks. After eight hours roaming the hyperspectrum, he hit the bottle hard.
I liked the sound of The Rocks. It was the sort of place I would have sought out eventually anyway. A city has currents like any sea. It was useful for a spy to know the places where loneliness swept a man. Whenever I arrived on a new posting I let myself be carried.
It was almost 5 p.m. Bryant would be getting thirsty.
The Rocks had a four-leaf clover in neon above blacked-out windows. Inside it was dim, cramped, walls painted black between mirrors. The space was divided equally between a square dance floor and a darker, UV-lit bar area with stools around barrels. Clientele were nearly all students, starting to trickle in wearing miniskirts beneath fake fur-lined parkas. You could be pretty much anywhere.
Irish pubs were lucky places. The Guinness sign served as a beacon for intelligence agents around the world, looking for corruptible locals and homesick Westerners. My favourites included McGettigan’s in Jumeira, The Blacksmiths in Moscow, Molly Bloom’s in Tel Aviv – high times, career-defining recruits. You found CEOs and construction workers democratically levelled by alcoholism; local men and women estranged from their own kind for whatever reason, offered refuge by Celtic tat. And locals drinking with Westerners were halfway recruited already. You found prostitutes and pickpockets, just occasionally an actual pint of Guinness. In short, everything you could want.
The young man behind the bar noticed me as soon as I came in. He was tall, muscled beneath a white T-shirt, with sharp eyes and a quick smile, the bearing of someone running things.
‘Hello,’ he said in English.
‘Evening,’ I replied, happy to play the foreigner.
‘American?’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Do I not look Russian?’
‘Your clothes don’t look Russian.’
‘English.’
‘Pint of beer?’ His English was good. Good English in a place like this usually signalled frustrated ambitions. Fixer material.
‘You read my mind.’
My beer came in a frosted glass with a puck of ice in the bottom. The barman welcomed me to Kazakhstan. I imagined him in a country at war, where his combination of charm and street knowledge would come into its own. I tipped well and hoped I did not play a part in his life.
A guy beside me with a ponytail was busy on his phone. I saw Twitter, checked his handle, then looked him up on my own phone. He was Dimash Nurtas, a guitarist. Some of his tweets were in English, mostly about music, some politics: retweets about a pro-democracy demonstration by students in Uzbekistan. He had a few international followers.
‘Twitter working?’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get it.’
‘With a VPN.’
‘Which do you recommend?’
‘Cloudflare.’
‘A lot of people using that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do people get angry about the restrictions?’
‘Everyone.’
I leaned back against the bar and watched the room. Too early for the dancefloor, but the music was loud. It was Western in style – electronic beats, bassline – with lyrics in Russian and sometimes Kazakh. I tried to hear the lyrics, gauge what the youth of Kazakhstan were dreaming of.
‘Been in Astana long?’ the barman asked when I got my next drink.
‘I’ve just got here.’
‘If you want a bar with girls, you know, a nice place, I can recommend one.’ He lowered his voice. ‘In London it is like a party town. Yes?’
‘Non-stop.’
A suited man at the end of the bar got his attention. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the barman slipped him a small package in exchange for several notes. Then I saw who was buying.
Bryant was tall and too smartly dressed for The Rocks, but younger than he seemed in Joanna’s interviews. He could have walked straight out of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Blue shirt, frameless glasses; bright smile with a touch of desperation. Deal done, he got a round in for a lot of the men at the bar, some of whom knew him.
I positioned myself beside him
in the queue for the bar and let him hear me order.
‘Someone with the Queen’s English,’ he said. ‘That’s music to my ears.’ He shook my hand. ‘Craig.’
‘Toby.’
‘What brings you here?’
‘To The Rocks, or to Kazakhstan?’
‘Both.’
‘Kazakhstan for business. Got in yesterday. The Rocks for fun.’
‘One day in and you found The Rocks already!’ He clapped me on the back. ‘You chose a fine time of year to visit Kazakhstan. What’s the business?’
‘I’m looking around for some investors.’
‘Let me guess, hungry for untapped markets. Exploring this exciting new part of the world.’
‘Something like that.’
He grinned knowingly, drank deeply. His cufflinks were sand timers.
‘How’s it working out for you?’
‘Seems an interesting time to be here. What about you? What brings you to Astana?’
‘I do tech stuff. For the oil industry mostly.’
‘Good industry to do that for.’
‘It has its moments.’
I bought us more drinks. We grabbed a barrel with stools around it. I wanted to steer him towards revelations, the dark side of this place, his relationship with Vanessa McDonald.
‘The oil work ever bring you any issues?’ I said. ‘I mean, is it still the wild east – gangsters, oligarchs? You get exposed to that?’
‘The company I work for does. It’s just a question of—’ He rubbed his thumb and finger together. ‘Bakshish. Whatever.’
‘Pretty corrupt?’
He shrugged. ‘In the US they only call a place corrupt when the bribes stop working.’
He talked about different nationalities in the city – Saudis, Turkish, Iranians – and about good places to eat and drink, where to find the political class and where to avoid them. He had a story about the President’s daughter demanding satellites from an oil company so she could run a TV station. I could see why he was good for background intelligence: atmospherics, as the Americans called it. I could see other reasons Joanna might have taken solace in his company. He was good-looking and overconfident, and a bad choice in terms of her operation, all of which had piqued her interest in the past. There was a wryness to him that I liked, a dark shadow to the optimism. I had come across unadulterated optimism all too often in Iraq and Afghanistan: American men with the same Brooks Brothers suits, fuelled by a faith that the world wanted to grow towards the innocence of their childhoods. It grew sour in the end. Bryant drank with a thirst I suspected had developed since he arrived.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 14