A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  I returned to the case, picked it up and walked out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  FIFTY-ONE

  I got into an open lift and hit the button for the ground floor, hearing Golovkin’s steps approach. The doors closed. The feeling I had was that I’d spent a long time in a dream someone had subjected me to, and I was ready to walk out now, and that was going to involve punching through doors. I had a message from GL5: the car was ready in the basement car park. Confirm delivery. I crossed the ground floor to a doorman who held the doors open for me and my case as we walked out.

  Then I ran.

  I took the tracker out of the case, threw it into the back of a pickup waiting at traffic lights, and kept going. Half a mile south I stole a boxy old Honda Civic from beside the university. I threw the case on the back seat, put another mile between myself and the Triumph.

  An unmarked car screamed past, 50 miles per hour with a siren on and someone sitting in the back, head bowed. Police were everywhere now, stiff with live rounds. They’d turned the adverts off on the sides of buildings. Main roads were being used by the military. My instinct was to get out of the city. I kept to the back roads and sank low in my seat, cut towards the airport.

  I called Reza as I drove.

  ‘Who is Golovkin?’

  ‘Elliot, you’re on an Interpol red notice.’

  ‘Issued by who?’

  ‘The States.’

  ‘Under what name?’

  ‘Your own. If you are actually Elliot Kane.’

  A Red Notice was an instruction to locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition. It was issued by Interpol when a member country had produced a valid national arrest warrant.

  ‘I’ve been set up.’

  My phone vibrated. I had an alert from Cognizance, the facial-recognition app, which meant a face resembling my own had shown up online. I groaned.

  ‘Are you back working with Akan Satayev? Is that what this is to do with?’ Reza asked.

  The phone buzzed again. I took vibrate off.

  ‘I’m not working with anyone. Who’s Golovkin?’

  ‘One of the twenty or so cover names used by Serik Ten. He’s the money man for ISIS in Central Asia. His name just came up in connection with the truck that took the explosives to Astana.’

  Everything was coming into focus. The CGI clip showed me consorting with a terrorist linchpin: MI6 stirring Central Asia against Russia.

  I was the catalyst.

  ‘Serik Ten was seen two months ago in the company of Ibrahim Al-Salhi,’ Reza continued. ‘The bomb-maker who brought down the Raffles Hotel in Doha. We have an individual in custody talking to us. He says there will be a vehicle-borne attack in Astana today, targeting civilians. Can you confirm that?’

  ‘I don’t have that intelligence personally.’

  ‘People believe you do.’

  ‘This is verified?’

  ‘We identified seven Kazakh terror cells allied with the bomber. They’ve gone underground as of two hours ago – a surge in electronic chatter, then total silence. Something’s about to happen.’

  I said I’d call back, then braced myself and checked what the facial alert was bringing up. Online I’d gone viral. Police release footage of British citizen accused of conspiracy to provide resources to a designated foreign terrorist organisation.

  Bohren crossing the lobby of Jeddah’s Waldorf Astoria; Bohren on security cameras in the vaults of Singapore’s FreePort.

  Russian sites: Who is Christopher Bohren? Me in Queen Alia, crossing the departures hall, a red circle around my head like a halo. Then a more blurred shot at the GL5 compound. Questions must be answered regarding Bohren’s connections with GL5, the private contractor now suspended from all security work at UK military and governmental facilities …

  I stopped the car, checked the case, took out a wad of cash and ripped it open. I checked for watermarks, metallic thread, ran my finger over the print. I wasn’t convinced, but others might be. I threw it onto the back seat. Another call came in: Marius from the Evotec office, sounding uncharacteristically tense.

  ‘Where’s Stefan?’ he said.

  ‘I thought he was on his way back to you.’

  ‘He never got the flight.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘We got word via contacts: he was flown to Moscow. Russia thinks we were involved in hacking them on behalf of China.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Critical infrastructure in Russia went down a few hours ago – Sberbank, Lukoil, Rosneft: all hacked. China’s Cyberspace Administration was taken down in return.’

  ‘By the Russians?’

  ‘Not by us, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I’ll get you Stefan. I’ll sort this out.’

  ‘We can’t work with you any more.’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  I put thoughts of Stefan’s probable interrogation out of my mind and checked Aliya’s Vkontakte account. It was still putting out messages. She had moved on from conspiracy theories about the President’s death to encouraging Astana’s citizens to gather in memory and defiance.

  She was encouraging people to meet at Independence Square.

  I logged in to her phone, looked at her London photos again, then checked the phone’s current location. It came up as the Eagilik bookshop, Kenesary Street. According to social media, people were gathering there in preparation for a march or memorial or protest of some kind: no one seemed entirely sure which.

  Individuals were spilling out by the time I arrived, some with candles, others placards. I saw Aliya, pulled up alongside her, opened the passenger door.

  ‘Get in.’

  ‘Toby?’ She looked terrified. Her companions stared. ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘I doubt it. Please, get in.’

  ‘You are Christopher Bohren. You work for MI6.’

  ‘Close. You’re in trouble, Aliya. I need to know why you went to London.’

  Now she felt the heat of her friends’ attention, just as I did. Others were watching. It was a tense morning and my presence wasn’t making it any more comprehensible.

  ‘Please.’

  She got in.

  ‘Aliya?’ a young woman with a candle said. ‘It’s okay.’

  I began to drive.

  ‘I want to talk to you about Worldwide Media,’ I said. ‘I want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can.’

  ‘Let me out.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘This is what it was all about. Café Corso … ’

  ‘Not all of it.’

  She sat frozen, silent, while I drove. I didn’t want a scene in the car. I wanted her somewhere isolated.

  When we got to the motel she panicked, tried to grab the wheel. I stopped the car, persuaded her again that I wasn’t the threat, that she needed me to save her, which was sounding less convincing by the minute. She stayed in the car while I paid for a room. I bought a bottle of vodka from the shop. We went into the room and I set the vodka down, fetched tumblers from the bathroom and gave her one.

  ‘Have a drink.’

  ‘You kissed me.’ Aliya shook her head. ‘Drive me back,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I will drive you back. Now, or any time you want. But I am concerned about what you’re involved in, and I think it might place you in danger. Look at your last posts: you’re tweeting about another bomb. Is that going to happen? How do you know that’s going to happen?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But it is. I think it is, other people will think it is. That brings danger to you and your family.’

  Her glass whistled past my head and smashed against the wall. She went for the door, then changed her mind and came at me, slashing my face with her nails. I got hold of her wrists.

  ‘Look in the case,’ I said. I turned her toward
s the case. She hesitated, then opened it and stared at the money. ‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Explain why this is nothing to do with you, and tell me who it’s to do with. Then I drive you back with as much money as you want.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the one who’s going to stop you from being arrested. I can get you out of here. But I need you to trust me.’

  I poured her a drink in the remaining glass, then took a swig from the bottle. She sat down on the bed, holding the glass, staring through it to the dirty walls, finally knocking it back.

  ‘I did what they told me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Worldwide Media.’

  ‘What do Worldwide Media do?’

  ‘They said it was about helping with social media, encouraging real voices. Opening Kazakhstan up.’

  ‘What happened in London?’

  ‘It was like a job interview. They paid for me to go. I was recruited.’

  ‘To do what exactly?’

  ‘Write for them. They wanted young people in Kazakhstan. They’d read my blog. They said they were looking for young people who knew the local perspective – music, events, celebrities, places, customs. Kazakh and Russian.’

  ‘Who else did you meet while over there?’

  ‘Lots of people. Other organisers, other people being recruited.’

  ‘How many being recruited?’

  ‘Around twenty of us.’

  ‘What ethnicity?’

  ‘A mix.’

  ‘And the people in charge? Where were they from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What accents did they have?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Were they staying at the hotel?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Did you ever visit an office?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Receive any correspondence with a company address?’

  ‘No.’

  I put on a bedside lamp and turned off the neon tubes. We were talking now, and I needed her to continue. I needed to arrive at a point where I understood who was behind this, and what they wanted. I topped up her glass, then asked Aliya to lead me through the whole experience from first contact. She took a breath and began to speak.

  They’d arranged a travel visa for her. She flew British Airways, via Helsinki. Picked up at Heathrow by a woman called Natasha, who was accompanied by two men, neither of whom was introduced to Aliya. She’d spent five days total in London. Most of the recruitment and training was handled by Natasha and a man around the same age as her, who called himself Mark. Aliya described him as slick and energetic: he spoke about social media, building profiles, persuasive writing. No conspicuous security was visible during her stay, though she was accompanied on outings, which they took as a group, and they asked her not to bring her phone to the training sessions.

  ‘What else did these sessions involve?’

  ‘They wanted to know about me: what languages I spoke, what I cared about, what my passions were, how I felt politically. Did I think representations of Russia were fair? What are hot topics in Kazakhstan? I did some written exercises: short pieces about news stories they showed us.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I got the job.’

  She had signed a non-disclosure agreement but no official contract. That was the last time she met anyone involved in person.

  I asked her to talk me through the protocols they’d arranged. The first thing she did each day was to switch on an internet proxy service, which hid her IP address, then she accessed an encrypted cloud-storage service. It contained instructions from Worldwide Media: files uploaded with material, wiped after seven days. She followed the instructions; money appeared in her account.

  ‘Some of it’s just translating news articles from English to Russian. Or they ask me to leave comments on news sites.’

  ‘They tell you what to say?’

  ‘I’m allowed to say what I want. They sometimes send me graphics and videos to use; sometimes ideas and articles they want me to think about, suggestions about which websites to post on.’

  ‘All under your name?’

  ‘No. I have other names.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  She told me about Maria Zagitova, who was very anti-Chinese, and Sabina, a housewife in Shymkent who concentrated more on traditional Kazakh values. She wrote in Kazakh. The third identity Aliya controlled was a fortune teller named Cantadora. She passed on advice from the spirit world, often regarding sex or relationships, sometimes dieting, occasionally geopolitics. She believed the future lay with Russia.

  I passed Aliya my laptop and asked her to show me the dropbox. She hesitated, then logged in to a Boxcryptor online storage account.

  ‘This is just the last few days.’

  It was enough – more than forty files. I copied the lot. Then I read a few.

  Then I stopped.

  Russia’s idea of a secure border is one with Russians on both sides.

  My words to Joanna.

  I scanned through the bullet points. There were other ideas I remembered from our conversation.

  – For several years, figures close to Putin have been agitating for a more aggressive foreign policy to the south as well as to the east.

  – Kazakhstan is an attractive prospect to Russians nostalgic for the territorial reach of the Soviet Union.

  – Invasion itself would not present a problem for Russia’s military. Kazakhstan’s limited forces of some 70,000 could not offer significant resistance. Seizing their ‘rightful’ portion of Kazakhstan would bring Russia substantial resources and enormous geopolitical advantages. It would also gain control of China’s border to the west, thereby getting a monopoly of control over China’s energy imports and any manufactured exports that pass west through Kazakhstan.

  Beneath the terse prose, it was Joanna’s voice, I felt sure. I took my phone out, accessed my encrypted files and found the image of Joanna taken from the mall CCTV.

  ‘This woman,’ I said.

  ‘That’s Natasha,’ Aliya said, staring at the image, puzzled.

  ‘This is definitely Natasha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sounded certain, and calmer now; it was my turn to deal with bewilderment.

  ‘What was Natasha’s role, exactly?’

  ‘She runs the company. She was in charge.’

  I sensed a lot of pieces falling into place, without being able to see what shape they formed just yet.

  ‘What did you think it was all for?’

  ‘I thought it was to generate clicks, drive traffic. Why else?’

  I checked the latest file, dated Monday. Aliya was being prompted to tweet about people protesting. Encouraging them. Announcing the gathering in Independence Square.

  ‘Why this gathering? What do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. I need to get out of here.’

  She topped up her glass, drank again. Then she asked if I had cigarettes. I went to buy some from the front. When I returned she had vanished.

  So had the case with the money.

  No sign of her in the car park. I checked the road. She was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to suggest she’d been abducted. My laptop remained on the bed. She must have hitched a lift. Good luck to her, I thought. I hoped she was going to use that money to get herself and her family as far away from here as possible.

  The dropbox was still open on the laptop. The zip file within it contained twenty or so links, suggestions, articles and academic papers. Now I could hear Joanna’s voice in the instructions. The latest set of instructions included a map showing areas of Kazakhstan that Russia might annex in an invasion, identical to the one I’d seen in Saracen’s offices.

  I ran a reverse image search online and it came up attached to a paper by a professor at Southampton’s School of International Relations. ‘Russia’s Southern Front’.

  The writer was a Professor Romas Kleiza. He came up online: Lit
huanian-born, expert in Cold War history. A quick browse gave me a sense of Kleiza and his career. Not the world’s most successful scholar – he had one book to his name, World Without the West, regarding a plot by Russia, China and Iran to dominate the next millennium – but popular with right-wing think tanks and anti-Russian lobby groups. I recognised him as the expert who’d been on TV pontificating about Islamist terror in Central Asia.

  There was another map he’d created: June 2030. Political structures after NATO.

  Poland was misshapen, its eastern regions absorbed into the Russian Federation. Same with Estonia. Ukraine had disintegrated entirely. Turkey was pocked with Russian bases. So were Syria, Libya and Egypt.

  A lot of Western countries lay in fragments, broken rocks on the shoreline of a great sea: Central Asia and the Middle East, including the Gulf states, divided between Russia, China and Iran. Symbols indicated their ports, airfields, shipping routes, oil and gas pipelines. As a bloc, they controlled 90 per cent of energy and trade to Europe.

  According to his website, the map had been used at a conference, ‘Approaches to the New Russia–China Threat’, put on by the Eurasian Futures Foundation.

  The name rang a bell.

  A lot of his work, apparently, had been made possible by the generosity of this foundation. EFF, as it styled itself, had been active between 2013 and early 2018, funding conferences, journals and books, and supplying quotes, statistics and opinion pieces to the media. Then it closed down. Even their website was gone.

  I had a look to see who had supplied the Eurasian Futures Foundation with their money. The name that came up was Robert Carter.

  Robert Carter, it turned out after a few minutes browsing, had put millions into EFF, alongside likeminded business leaders and philanthropists. The establishment of the Foundation was recorded in the press as another front in Carter’s lobbying war. To celebrate the occasion, the Spectator ran a think piece under his name.

  We’re told NATO is coming apart, EU defence pacts are in tatters, and the West, defeated in the Middle East, will now bow out gracefully from affairs on our very own doorstep. For new powers are on the rise. Well, some of us will not stand by as the two most autocratic, undemocratic and merciless regimes gang up to make liberal democracy a mere memory. The cynical alliance between Russian and China is the greatest threat we face. Their machinations, combined with America’s absence, is bad news for the free world. It is up to all politicians and diplomats to ensure the twenty-first century won’t turn into the Sino-Russian century.