It showed a large hall, with tables lined up. Old paintings and busts and dried flowers. The tables were laid out with what looked like conference packs, lanyards. No name or sign was legible to suggest the nature of this event.
I went in to her messages and scrolled back to April; there were several to a girl called Sabina.
I’ve arrived.
Still don’t really know what this is about!
They’ve asked us not to use our phones while here. No pictures! See you when back!
The cutlery of her home clinked. The family conversation involved Semey: how many dead, what the protest meant. The image from her phone camera moved as Aliya picked it up. I killed the connection. A minute later my own message light blinked.
Good night, Toby. Thank you for this evening. See you soon. x
London.
Smartphones embed GPS coordinates in each photo they take. The information is stored as metadata embedded in the photo files themselves. All you had to do was view the file’s properties and look for it.
I opened the hotel jpeg, went to Info, clicked on the GPS tab. Latitude and longitude coordinates appeared in the header. Lat – N 33.00, 56.00, 17.82, Long – E 19.00, 9.00, 39.85. I entered the coordinates into our mapping software and arrived at the Millennium London Hotel, Earl’s Court.
I gave them a call. ‘Hi. I don’t know if you’ll be able to help me. I attended an event at your hotel in April last year, 23rd April. I need to speak to the organisers but have lost their contact details.’
‘What event was it?’
‘I can’t remember the exact name.’
‘Hang on … We had several events that day.’
‘Could you read them out?’
‘Asperian Retirement, The Association of Vice Chancellors, Worldwide Media.’
‘Worldwide Media, I think.’
She gave me a phone number, but it didn’t connect when I tried to call. There were a lot of ‘Worldwide Medias’ online but none that seemed more dubious than any other marketing company.
Why London? I wondered. It seemed to point towards whoever was behind this, but there was a range of options: UK government, a UK company, an outsider trying to make it look like that. Plenty of Russians in London. Plenty of offices of global companies.
Hacking a hotel was easy enough. You could just email as a current supplier, a guest, or a wedding planner, with malware-infected specs attached. A conference would leave plenty of traces.
I sat on the edge of the bed, handling one of the listening devices, thinking through options. Then I looked at Aliya’s photograph of London again, then at videos of the shooting in Semey going up and getting taken down.
FORTY-ONE
People in the crowd had guns. That was the first deflection used by officials in Semey: Salafi jihadists running amok. It attracted widespread derision, cracking the surface of Kazakhstan’s usually respectful social media. The President, as ever, played a smarter game, announcing an immediate investigation and calling for unity. He identified a spiritual crisis in society. WhatsApp and YouTube were down. Tumblr had vanished amidst claims that the platform hosted pornography.
In photos on surviving message boards you could see volunteers tending to the wounded in what looked like a mosque, padding around in socks, oxygen cylinders and plasma bags set up between stone arches. People had formed human chains in front of Semey’s police station, while solidarity protests erupted in three other cities. This was it: the point of no turning back. I felt that dizzying, glorious fascination of being there; seeing what happens when the limits of what is possible are breached. Spring again. I used to hear the chants in my dreams: The people demand the fall of the regime. It was slicker in Arabic but still had something wistful about it, even when there was hope – something measured and legalistic. Chanted by people who hadn’t chanted before, spreading across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, carried by a shared language, the language of the Koran, suddenly become a vehicle for this democratic virus.
News of Stevenson’s death had gained a note of caution: Question marks over intelligence officer’s murder. That would turn the heat up. One Astana news site had reported an incident at Khan Shatyr’s indoor beach before the story was taken down.
Sirens outside.
For the sake of not keeping still, I went for a drive.
I drove past the Kiber Sports café. There were police vehicles parked outside. It looked like it had been broken into. So we’d been beaten to it, I thought. I wondered who had the data. That was a precious lead gone.
I continued past the places you might expect protests in Astana: the main square, government buildings, Bayterek. In the long, landscaped park that stretched from Bayterek to Khan Shatyr, the committed had turned up, in clusters of eight or nine, wrapped against the cold. I recognised a handful of individuals from Elena Yussopova’s flat. They held up handwritten signs and two laminated prints showing a man and woman’s faces. Riot police stood across the road, hands behind their backs. No sign of Yussopova herself.
But it only made the absence of other protests conspicuous. A city without a past does not really have a population; everyone is dependent on keeping the fantasy alive. It felt like being swaddled in one man’s dream, which was a generous way to describe dictatorship but had some truth here.
When I logged in to Aliya’s phone, I could see her also searching for protests. She’d caught the bug. Where and when are people meeting?
I logged out, sent a text message:
Awful news about Semey.
Really awful. Did you get back ok last night?
Yes. Can I see you later?
Of course.
Will be in touch. Stay safe. I wrote: Keep clear of crowds, then deleted it. A message came in from Stefan. He was still stuck in the St Regis waiting for a flight. He had something I might be interested in.
I drove over to the airport hotel. Stefan answered, looking unslept and unshaven.
There was a hard drive on the carpet, connected to his laptop, the beige case of the PC it had belonged to beside it.
‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You took it?’
‘I couldn’t sleep so I went out. The door was practically open. They have everything on here. This must be her, right?’
On the screen of his laptop was a Google search history from the time Joanna had been in the internet café. It included the search strings: Elliot Kane; Elliot Kane Kazakhstan; Elliot Kane MI6. There were also four different cover names I’d used on operations.
‘She’s trying to see if you’re out there, what you’re up to. Less than a minute later someone goes to the Earth Explorer site.’
He showed me: the user checked through a series of sites that let you search recent satellite imagery: Digital Globe, the European Space Agency, finally Earth Explorer, which gave you access to NASA’s Land Data feeds. In each, she typed in the same coordinates.
‘She’s trying to get up-to-date imagery of a particular region,’ Stefan said.
I punched in the GPS coordinates she’d been searching. They took me to white spaces in the east of Kazakhstan. I heard Shomko’s voice – I saw them studying a map, talking about the possibility she went east – then thought of the chain of events he had suggested: before disappearing, she stole a Chevy Equinox.
I looked at the imagery again. What I had taken for blank had a faint pattern visible: roads, that appeared to have faded. I cross-checked with Google Maps, then official Kazakh maps. Neither recorded anything for the area. But, zooming in on satellite view, I could make out right angles suggesting man-made structures.
‘You think she’s there?’ Stefan asked.
‘Something is. Can you check to see if anything with a nearby geotag has been uploaded? Photos, video, anything.’
My phone screen lit up. It was Callum Walker. I didn’t answer. I considered speaking to Aliya, asking straight out what was going on, what took her to London. Instead
I studied the photograph of Joanna that Reza had sent through, feeling increasingly sure this connected to the location in the east. Ten minutes later, Stefan said, ‘It’s wrong.’ He had the satellite images up again.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The weather doesn’t fit current reports.’ He showed me two current weather reports. ‘I think someone’s hacked the feed.’
‘What about local uploads?’
‘Nothing at all. Not even a phone call.’
‘Someone’s trying to hide something.’
‘They’ve succeeded. This is advanced cyber. The people trying to hide something are state-level, possibly military.’
I clicked ‘directions’ on Google Maps: 240 miles.
‘Google doesn’t allow for people trying to kill you on the way,’ Stefan said.
FORTY-TWO
I filled the tank at a petrol station with a supermarket attached, then filled two spare jerrycans. I estimated I could cover 240 miles in six hours with my foot down. I bought a new shirt, eight litres of water, three days’ worth of food, and spare batteries. I put the gun under the seat.
The only plausible destinations in this direction were Pavlodar and Karaganda, although it was still insane to be driving across the desert. Karaganda had a football stadium and a power plant. Pavlodar had Sary-Arka airport 14 miles to its south. I went online and bought a plane ticket to Istanbul, then kept going east.
A Toyota Yaris passed in the opposite direction, seemed to slow. I watched the mirror as it continued away from me. Then I left the last construction sites behind and plunged into a landscape like a white sea. The city receded behind me – civilisation, other humans – the elastic stretching until the view in the mirrors was as empty as the one through the windscreen, and I was alone.
Desert rules: beware men flagging you down. Give lorry drivers a wide berth – most are wrecked on crystal meth. Don’t lose the road: it was level with the desert either side, no barriers, no lights. An old Soviet road, potholed, bleeding into the landscape. I focused on its line. There was something comforting in being able to see endlessly in each direction. I had escaped, for now. I had no idea what I was heading towards.
A few miles further and the road became white gravel. A rusted line of containers stretched along the horizon. I passed one dust-coated lorry marked Dong Feng, driver expressionless behind shades. Around 2 p.m. I saw a settlement a couple of miles to the east. They cropped up at intervals along the railway: track gangs, who might try to rob you, but would possibly sell you some stale food and black-market fuel. The railway itself was invisible but would be a single track carrying cargos of oil and gas from the Caspian to Druzhba on the border of China. I could smell the diesel fumes when I opened my window a crack. After another five miles I could see the oil tanks themselves, stained black and smeared with rail grease.
The railway veered away, replaced by mountains alongside me, then the mountains retreated. No landmarks apart from the road itself. Sometimes that vanished beneath snow and I had to check coordinates and pray. I’d read of intrepid Roman travellers who had reached these parts trying to navigate by the stars like sailors. I’d been trained in astral navigation but it was a long time ago and I hadn’t had to call upon it recently.
Any variation meant a lot: small shifts in gradient, the appearance of a ruined fort on the horizon, occasional nomad tombs: domes a few metres high, made of well-preserved mud brick. Then the gradual appearance of low blunt mountains to the east, striped in bands of pink and grey. The snow thinned, and I realised the dirty white landscape beside me was salt. A hunter near the Uzbek border had once told me about centuries-old corpses brought up perfectly preserved.
I made out the horsemen ten minutes before I reached them. Two figures, rugged as the land around them, leading horses visibly starving beneath blankets. They seemed inexplicable, and you had to remind yourself this was the scale of their world.
They came over when I stopped. The horses were gaunt, ribs vivid. I greeted them in Kazakh and explained where I was going, asked if there’d been any trouble. They shook their heads.
‘Where have you come from?’ I asked.
They had come from a village 30 miles to the east, looking for pasture. That was the only trouble they were aware of: starvation. I drove on, wondering what they knew of the country around them. If there was a war, would they realise? There would be signs and portents; people like me passing through their emptiness, loaded with a meaning we carried away with us. The hunter I’d met in the south of the country ten years ago had spoken as if the Soviet Union still existed. He knew that England had once invaded India, that the English were bloodthirsty, but wasn’t convinced the country still existed. Events reached them like the light from dead stars.
I didn’t pass any other vehicles. The road surface was reasonable. I had five hours of daylight left. The nearest town was over 100 miles away. At 3 p.m. I passed a 12-ton China Transport Shipping lorry crashed on its side, a day’s snow on it. The windscreen was cracked but not by a bullet. Jiangxi plates, straps for the canvas sides hanging loose. Beyond it, pylons thickened across the landscape towards a town as if catching it in a web.
I checked the GPS. I was heading in the right direction. Heading into gulag territory. Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. Kok-Terek, where Solzhenitsyn had been locked up and where he was released into exile, lay 30 miles to the east. There were towns around here where men freed from the gulags had settled, too exhausted to go further. Or unwilling, for reasons that never quite clarified for me, but made me think of Solzhenitsyn’s advice for survival in the camps: let go of the idea that your life ahead will be anything like the one behind. A new range appeared on the horizon, all grey shards. Then I hit a problem.
Two vehicles appeared in the distance, parked across the road. I touched the brakes. There was still half a mile before I reached them. One was a black Subaru Outback, the other a UAZ minibus of the kind you see being used as dirt-cheap public transport. They’d seen me. There was nothing else around for miles.
They had radios and possible backup and would most likely be armed. I’d driven almost six hours and wasn’t inclined to turn around.
I advanced slowly, stopping 20 metres short of the checkpoint. The closer you were, the fewer options you had. I left the engine running. The signals on my phone indicated they were using radios, but not police band.
Three men climbed out of the Subaru. One of them, the oldest, was in a heavy ankle-length winter coat. The other two wore desert fatigues under fur-trimmed bomber jackets and carried Kalashnikovs. They moved with the stiff caution of men who are bored, cold but prepared to kill you if it comes to it. The older man was craggy, thick-featured, with an unpleasant stare. A black-handled pistol nestled in his holster.
He approached my window shaking his head and wagging a finger. Then he saw my face and peered closer. ‘No further,’ he said in Russian.
‘Why?’ I asked. His men stepped either side of my vehicle.
‘Papers, please.’
I handed over my papers, gave my story about the flight and showed the e-ticket on my phone.
‘I need to get to Pavlodar,’ I said.
‘The road’s closed.’
I offered money. The captain rejected it sullenly, like someone taunted. Which meant there was a big old chain of command beyond them. It had them scared. One of the younger men wore a ten-inch hunting knife on his hip. That wasn’t a style I’d seen in Kazakhstan. It would have looked more at home two or three countries further south.
I steered the car around, making a show of irritation, and wondered what I’d encountered. The mixed uniforms and weaponry suggested a militia. The younger men had the determined eyes of insurgents. I drove half a mile back until they were out of my rear-view then turned off-road. According to the map I could loop them. If I went a mile east I could rejoin the road beyond the block, unseen. I could also lose my bearings and never find another road again.
I marked my GPS position a
nd set off. After twenty minutes of rough driving I found myself back at something approximating a path, but it was not the same road. I’d gone wrong somewhere. According to the GPS I was getting closer to my destination, but I wasn’t going to get there over raw desert. I had half a tank of petrol left. I swigged some water, got out and checked the tyres. There was a faint pall of smoke a mile or so away.
After ten minutes’ driving in the direction of the smoke I found another track. It was heading towards a cluster of makeshift buildings. There was a chance I was about to be robbed, but I didn’t have much choice. I continued, past a starved-looking dog chasing a carrier bag, into a herdsmen’s village. The houses were low and misshapen: rough walls of mud bricks, occasionally plastered over and painted white; small windows; roofs of corrugated iron weighed down by bricks. A grotesque parody of a nomadic camp: winter cattle sheds had been built from whatever lay to hand – fragments from dismembered trucks, old tyres, rusted bedposts.
The smoke led to a shack. Two men lay among empty vodka bottles beside a stove filled with ash. They looked up at me as if I was a hallucination not worth responding to. Past the shack was an adobe house behind a fence made of flattened drums that, according to their markings, had once held sodium chlorate. I walked around to the back, past an ice-encrusted water tank to a pile of scrap metal. No one responded when I called.
I was leaving when I felt eyes on me. A girl, nine or ten years old, appeared among the scrap.
‘Hello,’ I said. An identical girl appeared. They were twins, clothes faded and patched beneath their coats. One whispered something to the other and they giggled. I searched my pockets and gave them a protein bar. Then the mother appeared, saw me and began scolding them.
I showed her the map on my phone and asked where we were. It was too cold to be outside, she said, and invited me in.
The home had a warm, damp, close smell. Wall-hung carpets hid the dirt. Furniture was a double mattress and cushions. An antique sewing machine took centre stage. A stove poked its chimney through the roof. A man’s boots hung off a nail along with a rusted horse bridle.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 28