David’s mind returned to the meeting. He knew, and this did make his life very complicated, that the PM and even the JIC didn’t have all of the bricks to make a wall.
There were missing bricks.
Manning and Bell were somehow inextricably linked to all of this. Their presence at the training camp and their black pickup heading up to Hajjah the day before the rescue attempt added an uncomfortable dimension to the current situation. The JIC was aware of the two Americans, but not the complete history. Nor the very latest intel. David had painted them as mercenaries, hired by the extremists to sharpen their skills. He’d purposefully not publically rekindled their involvement in the Ebola crisis of three years ago. Nor played on their CIA history. He’d kept their reemergence in Yemen purposefully low-key.
They were the missing bricks. My bricks.
And he wasn’t prepared to disclose them—yet.
Yesterday at lunchtime, he and Linden Rickenbacker, the DD and his oppo at the CIA, had made a pact.
“We’ve resurrected Op Greyshoe,” Linden had told David on the phone.
“I didn’t think it was ever closed.”
Linden had replied, “You’re right, but we’ve had our hands full with so many other things. And with no sign of Manning, we assumed that he had left West Africa and gone to live in South America, where he might have been able to find at least a couple of friends.” That had made David laugh.
David, and his boss, were the only two UK staff aware of the code word “Greyshoe.” Following the Sierra Leone incident, the CIA had set up an in-house enquiry that was on very close hold in the United States. He thought it was restricted to just the director, the DD, and maybe one other. The aim was to get to the bottom of Manning and Bell’s involvement in the Ebola crisis. The Op was run by the then DD, Miles Johnson, whom David neither liked nor trusted.
He’d not been privy to the US team’s written reports, but Johnson had given him occasional verbal updates as the Op progressed. In the end, after eighteen months of what David thought was unnecessary stalling, Johnson’s final telephone call was best summed up as: Manning was a rogue agent, working on his own without any authority or direction; Bell was dead.
That was rubbish. And bearing in mind that it was the UK that had been the subject of Manning and Bell’s attentions, David had protested. More still, he had got his boss to press the CIA’s director. The outcome of his teddies being thrown out of the cot was that the CIA had agreed to keep the Op open in case further evidence came to light.
Such as now.
“So what are you going to do now? What do you mean by ‘resurrected’ the Op?”
“I’ve been given the authority to widen the disclosure here. I have assigned three agents, two of whom are Middle East experts, and the third has field experience among the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That makes five of us in the building who are now back on the case.”
David thought Linden was expecting a round of applause. He didn’t have the energy.
“And have you uncovered anything yet?’
“No. Well . . .” The Deputy Director paused. “Can you assure me that the only two Brit staff who know about Greyshoe are you and your chief?”
David didn’t need to think through an answer.
“I can assure you, Linden, it’s just the boss and me. Not, as we both agree, that there is much to tell.”
The DD wasn’t slowed by the dig.
“OK. Here goes. Yesterday morning one of the team managed to trace a payment of $500,000 from a CIA account to a bank account in Bogota.” The phone went quiet just for a second. “The payment was made on the afternoon of the same day that your people took down the terrorist Wesley, the one carrying the atomised Ebola into that quaint metro station of yours.”
St. Pauls. David didn’t need reminding of the details.
“Paying off informers in Columbia for intel on drugs?” David offered an explanation.
“No. We had a lull in the operations at that point. We think there’s a connection between the money and the end of the operation. What is significant is that only three of us in the building have the authority to sign cheques for over $100,000.”
That narrowed it down a bit.
“But surely, if the payment were that easy to find by one of your team three years later, it would have been as plain as the nose on your face—or should I say your predecessor’s face—when Op Greyshoe was set up?”
Linden let out a sigh on the other end.
“You would have thought.”
Both of them were silent. David needed a little time to catch up with the enormity of what Linden might be suggesting: Johnson, the previous DD, was bent. Surely that was the only conclusion to half a million dollars going walkabouts to some South American account.
Linden was waiting for a response.
“Is it possible that Manning and Bell have been sleeping, keeping a low profile. And now, under the direction of Johnson—or somebody like him—they’re back in the game?” It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Possibly. As they say among our friends in the FBI, ‘we’re now following up on our leads.’ Look, David, I need to be clear that the only person you brief from here is your boss.” Linden’s tone was emphatic. But the second time around, the reminder was very dull. David didn’t let it show.
“Sure. You have my word. But you will keep me abreast with where all this is going?”
“Correct. And anything you get, you’ll let us know?”
And that was that.
The missing bricks. Possibly. Probably?
David knew that keeping it on close hold was essential. If he’d mentioned Op Greyshoe to the JIC or, worse still, the PM in his current bullish state, who knows what the outcome would have been. The old man could well have directed that someone leak that the SAS Op had failed was because rogue CIA agents had alerted so-called IS that the boys were on their way.
And that wouldn’t do.
If anyone were going to leak Op Greyshoe, it would be him. It was he and his staff who had skin in the game.
A Nondescript Office, Fourth Floor of No. 17, Third Avenue, New York
It was all go. A lot can happen in three days. Was it only three days ago that he had been watching the CNN video clip of the captured Brit soldiers? Only that long since he’d discovered the security breach on his machine?
Then, the breach had seemed like such a small thing, an inconsequential detail. Ned had interrogated his system and found nothing to put his finger on. He’d tagged on a single line to his daily report to Herbert and, almost immediately, the proverbial shit had hit the fan.
It gave him some satisfaction that Herbert read his stuff so quickly and in such depth. Within twenty minutes of him pressing the “Send” button, Herbert had come back with a long list of questions and instructions.
That was just three days ago.
In that time, a completely new suite of computers and monitors had been delivered to the office, and, according to Herbert, the company they had employed to provide the Internet routing and access had been sacked. Hey presto, a new firm had been engaged. It was strange—the longer he stayed in the job, the more everything about the place seemed a bit odd—that the routing had been replaced overnight. What was wrong with working during the day? Herbert had given Ned strict instructions to be out of the office by six thirty that night and not to return until he’d received a text to say it was OK to go back to work. He’d got that text at seven the following morning and had come in as usual. It was all very hush-hush.
The work had been done. The only discernible difference that he could see was that the old telecoms junction box had been replaced by a new one, which appeared to be tamper-proof. It was all dark grey and bright yellow stripes. “Do Not Touch” was all that was missing.
Herbert had then given him forty-eight hours to rejig his new systems and be back on task for today. Which he was. The machines were the same make and models as the originals. So that was eas
y. It had taken him a day to set up the machines exactly as he wanted them. As he looked over them now, it was as if nothing had changed.
But something had.
The oil and gas—and the nuclear and renewable energy—stocks continued to rise and fall as before. Companies merged, some went bust, and new firms raised their heads high enough for Ned to spot them and include them in the matrix. There was no change there.
No, what had changed was the atmosphere in which he was now working. It felt just slightly uncomfortable.
One moment Ned was as happy as Larry. In the office, he worked just hard enough to earn his pay. Out of the office, he enjoyed the good life. OK, so his understanding of a good life was probably more online gaming, home-delivered pizzas, and a little too much Internet porn than how others might interpret the meaning. But it was still good—to him.
But his relationship with Herbert had changed. There was nothing tangible, just something in the ether. The tone of his instructions was less light-hearted, more direct. There were no frills with their exchanges. One or two times, as he read and replied to e-mail instructions about the rebuild, he felt that Herbert’s manner had been—how best to describe it? Menacing?
Don’t be stupid, Ned.
He had just finished rereading all of the e-mails from Herbert since the breach. And, yes, they were written differently from those before the security incident. But menacing? He looked over the last line of the latest missive: “It is essential that this doesn’t happen again, otherwise we may be forced to take more conclusive action.”
What the hell did Herbert mean by conclusive action? In any case, he wasn’t responsible for the breach—was he? And what was the breach? He was a competent coder, but he couldn’t find anything that looked like an effective intrusion. Did Herbert knew better?
Oh well. He could only do what he could do. The last thing he needed was to lose this job. He’d be more careful, although he had no idea what that meant.
SIS Headquarters, Vauxhall, London
Sam was leaning over Frank’s shoulder. He was looking at his main screen, pointing at an upturned wooden table, next to which, leaned against the wall, was a long, wide-ish plank of wood. The plank had a rectangular block running along one end. It looked like a long and very gentle ramp. The plank had sturdy metal eyes on either side about halfway down. At its nonraised end there were signs of staining. The wood was pale, and under the stark lights of the soldiers’ torches and flashguns, she couldn’t give it a definite colour. The staining was a sort of dark brown.
The rest of Room One—they had labelled them from one to eight, starting on the right-hand side as you entered the compound—was empty, apart from a couple of chairs.
“What do you think the plank is for?” Frank asked.
Sam thought for a while. No idea.
“I don’t know. It’s the same room that, I think the day before yesterday, had the hose coming into it from the well outside. D’you remember? And look at the water staining on the middle of the floor, there.” Sam touched Frank’s screen and the picture zoomed in unnecessarily. Frank set it right.
“What do you think?” Sam questioned Frank.
He was scratching his nose whilst staring intently at the screen.
“I don’t know. I can’t find anything else of note among the rooms you gave me. This is the only one that shows something out of the ordinary.”
“Well, we’ll have a chance to look over each other’s rooms in a second. I’m on my last one now.”
Sam sat back at her desk and wiped the sleep from her eyes. If she didn’t get her head down soon, her body would take control and do it for her.
She and Frank had split the rooms into odd and even numbers. Frank took the odd ones, Sam the evens. They’d agreed to spend an hour looking at their rooms and then swap. They were five minutes away from the switch.
Just now she hadn’t been completely honest with Frank. Sam had looked at all of her rooms. And his. She couldn’t stop herself. She’d come up with the same anomaly that Frank had with the long plank. She couldn’t fathom it.
It all looked pretty hopeless.
The compound was clearly a Daesh base—otherwise, why booby-trap it? But there didn’t seem to be anything noteworthy from the grainy videos shot by the SF soldiers as they had advanced from room to room. Nor was there anything that caught Sam from the seventeen stills that were taken by the one member of the assault team designated to record the events with a standard, but very competent, camera.
With the emergence of ultra-lightweight low-light videocams, all SF wore them on their helmets during an operation. The designation of a stills photographer among the team, who only took photos if the operational situation permitted, provided further essential evidence—especially at key times like this when the operation asked more questions than it answered.
Sam scrolled back through the photos.
Look for the absence of normal. She was always looking for what should be there, but wasn’t. That’s how you unlock an image’s secrets.
Then something caught her eye.
All of the rooms, except Room Seven, had religious decorations or photos of prominent religious men or places hanging on the walls. It wasn’t unusual for extremist or militant strongholds to festoon the inside of their buildings with religious imagery and iconography. Think of a Christian monastery. Most walls have crucifixes, or pictures or sculptures of Jesus, Mary, or saints, proudly displayed to remind you that you are in a house of God.
What was different about Room Seven was that one of its walls, the longest one, opposite the door that opened into the centre of the compound, was bare. It was empty. Just sand-coloured brick and block. And it was a big wall—crying out for decoration of some sort.
That didn’t appear to be normal.
She had one photo and four video clips of Room Seven. She looked at all of them again in detail, but focused on the still. It was good quality.
The image must have been taken from one corner of the room. It showed all of the empty wall and part of a second wall, which had a window in it and, to one side of the window, a poorly framed photograph of Mecca.
Sam focused on the main, blank wall. Touching the screen and sweeping her fingers apart, she zoomed in. She examined the close-up of the wall, swiping gently left and right with her fingers, the enlarged brickwork following her movement. Left, right, up, down.
“There you go.” Under her breath. “Now let’s find the second one.” She moved the image some more, using gentle movements.
“Gotcha!”
She left the detail where it was and rocked back, lifting her still bandaged hand to her mouth and chewing absently on the exposed knuckles.
On the screen to her left, she quickly opened the original Daesh video of the two SRR soldiers. She froze it after about ten seconds. Sam zoomed onto the flag, looking to its top left and right corners. Thought so. It was nailed into place; that’s what it looked like. She couldn’t be completely sure, as the image had started to pixelate when enlarged, but it was a very sound assumption.
Starting at one corner she counted bricks left to right—slightly out loud, “one, two, three . . .”—this must be really annoying Frank. She got to twelve at the second corner. She counted back again. Yes, twelve.
This might be something. She felt her pulse rate quicken and her mouth suddenly ran out of saliva.
Back on her big screen showing the still from the operation, bricks filled the monitor. She swept across to the right until she found a piece of mortar that had been dislodged. In its centre was a tiny black speck. A nail hole. She scrolled slowly left, counting out loud as she did. “Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.” Perfect. Just perfect.
To be sure, she zoomed out and checked the height of the nail holes. They were about the same height as the top of the Daesh flag in the video, although it was more difficult to tell. In the video the soldiers were taking up the screen.
But it was good enough. She was sure the e
xposed wall she was looking at on her main screen once displayed a Daesh flag—the same flag in the original video clip.
“Frank!”
“Hang on . . .” A muffled response.
“No, Frank. Come here, I’ve got something to show you. Now.”
“No, Sam . . . you come here. Look at this.” Sam realised that Frank’s voice was a shadow of its usual self. It had the tone of a man who had just learned that his bank account had been raided by persons unknown.
Sam stood up and leaned over into Frank’s booth.
“Look here.”
His main screen still had Room One displayed, the upturned table and the low ramp/plank affair still visible. On Frank’s second monitor he had a Google image open. It was a childlike drawing of how you might waterboard a prisoner. It seemed simple enough, especially when Google pictured it so clearly. You needed a table, a plank raised slightly at one end, and a hosepipe. Oh, and a prisoner. And a torturer or two. The plank was raised up on the table, and the prisoner’s head was placed at the lowered end, covered with a cloth. His hands tied by his side. Next comes the water.
Sam felt her bottom lip wobble and her stomach tighten. She was determined not to cry, not to let her emotions get the better of her. Not here, in the same room, twice in the same week.
“Hello, folks. How are we getting on?”
It was David. Jane was just behind him.
Sam looked away and squeezed her eyes tightly shut and then opened them. She was relieved to feel that they were dry. There were no tears.
“I think we’ve got the evidence you need to say that the two SRR soldiers had been held captive in the compound and were certainly there until at least yesterday morning. And there’s something more disturbing that Frank needs to show you.”
Schloss Neuenburg, German/Czech Border
Wolfgang loved the circular room. Christened simply “Runden Raum” by his great grandmother, it had pride of place at the back of the family castle, with half of the room jutting out onto the main lawn. Apart from the height of the ceiling, the eight narrow full-length windows, and, at the wall’s centre, a double door leading out onto the grounds, what clinched it for Wolfgang was the acoustics.
Fuelling the Fire Page 16