Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  Bower closed his laptop, then excused himself and left Kane and Taylor to catch their breath and shake their heads.

  “I had no idea he’d do that,” she said, quietly, as they headed back toward the outside world.

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. Let me drive you back.”

  3

  She exhaled once they were in the car, glanced at Kane when they’d cleared the last barrier.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “The whole thing’s my fault.”

  She drove, jaw clenched, knuckles white.

  “Bower is very determined,” Kane said.

  “We all are. Fiber optic’s the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve got more data coming in than the NSA itself. He can’t see why Ascension shouldn’t be exactly the same.”

  “Nor can I.”

  “You think Rory just lost it? We should proceed as if nothing happened?”

  “He’d spent six months operating alone on a lump of rock. I suspect he was unstable to start with.”

  “He was brilliant.”

  “He wasn’t without issues, was he?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “No one else in Six working on this?” Kane said.

  “No.”

  “You’re really overseeing the whole thing alone?”

  “That was the agreement. Until the interception facility is in place, at least.”

  She seemed sensitive about talking in the car, so Kane didn’t push it any further. He thought about their previous collaboration, about a very beautiful, domed, and expensive Oman, pre–Arab Spring. Kathryn had been managing the operation, which she could have done remotely if less effectively, but she insisted on being there. Rory Bannatyne was technically brilliant. His skill with fiber optics seemed connected in some obscure way to the intensity of his green eyes, his love of music, his quiet charm. The image of him hanged felt cruelly bizarre. As ever, it was hard not to implicate the world of secrets that they served. There was a touch of Prometheus to it all: playing with godlike powers that had been loaned to you; feeling the heat of a guilt that wasn’t entirely your own but to which you were exposed. Rory Bannatyne had enabled schemes beyond the natural order of things, a mutation that could give a person troubled dreams.

  Kane had responded to his dark talent in the only way he knew how: He probed. He wanted to know what exactly was going on under the Strait of Hormuz. Eventually, over a bottle of Laphroaig, Rory opened up. Kane could see him leaning in, with his shock of wavy ginger hair and his strong, freckled arms.

  Fiber optics had arrived just as GCHQ was hitting a problem, Rory said. The British had excelled over the years at intercepting microwave satellite communications, but the dawn of universally available encryption had started making that a lot more complicated. Underground fiber-optic cables changed the game. On one hand, they were buried deep, but at the same time they were physical, which meant you could infiltrate the system at vulnerable points. When GCHQ wanted to tap a new international cable, engineers like Rory were installed in the relevant communication companies to plan where the splitter would be connected. The splitter diverted the light carried on the cables into a secret “black room” under control of GCHQ.

  The whole thing depended on having physical access to the major junction points, and, by a feat of historical felicity, this put the UK at an advantage. When fiber-optic cables began to be laid they followed the paths of the old imperial telegraph system. These, logically enough, connected the great stations of empire, with the United Kingdom at the center of the web.

  Not only did fiber-optic cables now carry more than ninety percent of the world’s data, but eighteen of the most important came ashore in Cornwall. The Americans had recognized that. They had cash, the UK had places. Over the last few years, millions had poured in from the NSA’s Foreign Partner Access budget, and windowless structures appeared on farms near Bude and Porthcurno, crammed with deep-dive processors that could turn a tsunami of data into searchable information.

  The major cable companies received tens of millions of pounds to turn a blind eye to men like Rory installing hidden connections. But when the companies weren’t cooperative, you needed other means. That was where Kane came in.

  Seeb was part of a GCHQ network in Oman, focused on cables under the Strait of Hormuz. The strait was a narrow point in the Persian Gulf, busy with undersea cables: one carrying Iranian communications, one with Iraqi traffic, another handling all Yemen’s voice and text data. The UK had a tight relationship with Oman involving three joint military training bases and a logistic support center in Duqm, but much of it was cover for GCHQ interest in the strait. This time around, because the relevant cable company was Chinese, they had to hack into their network, which brought a whole new level of complication, along with the need for Kane to run high-sensitivity human sources. So here we all are, Rory had concluded, sipping his whisky, eyes twinkling.

  The actual technical details wouldn’t have meant anything to Kane, but he now appreciated the background. On the next round they talked poetry. Rory knew a lot of poems and songs by heart, a quality Kane rated above most others. A large man, he sang with a high, delicate vibrato, his whole physicality changing as if this, not speech, was his natural medium.

  Kane returned to the UK when his own contribution had been completed. Taylor and Rory stayed on. Her marriage was already rocky, and he could see they were developing a friendship born of two people glad to be away from home. Kane had learned little about the subsequent scandal: He knew that Rory Bannatyne was caught doing something he shouldn’t, Taylor had paid some money, kept police at a distance, sent him back to the UK. Which was all standard procedure: Protect the Service at all costs.

  The operation wouldn’t have succeeded without Rory. A great success, as Bower had said. Which meant big kudos for the three of them. Rory Bannatyne helped their respective careers and disappeared back into the shadowy National Technical Assistance Centre—shamed or relieved or furious, Kane had no idea. Kane lost himself in the dog days of the Arab Spring. Taylor continued toward her incident in Algeria. None exactly lucky, now that he thought about it. Perhaps Oman had put some curse on them.

  They reached Oxford and Kane directed Taylor to his home. When they arrived, she got out of the car and looked around the small terraced street. He rented the upstairs flat of a neat, attractive house. The road was narrow, with the tightly packed houses lending a sense of both crowdedness and seclusion. Seven p.m. A mild night. Kane wondered for a moment if she wanted more from him than operational assistance. On the quiet street Taylor looked smart and successful and bigger than this provincial world. She also looked like she didn’t want to be alone just yet.

  “I can’t imagine living here,” she said.

  “It takes no imagination. This is my life. Come in for a bit.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  They went up to his rooms. His first visitor, and suddenly he felt aware of the mustiness. She studied the place much as she’d studied the street, hands in her coat pockets, head turning. Most of the pictures and decorations belonged to the landlord, a former professor now based in France, and Kane had adopted them as he would the furniture of any cover ID. He felt Taylor search for traces of a partner, a life, a past.

  “No mementos of your service to the country?”

  “No. Want a drink?”

  “More than anything. But unfortunately I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Something soft?”

  “A tea would be nice. Black, no sugar.”

  She continued to browse the shelves while he put the kettle on.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost a year. A year without spying. There should be awards: abstinence from the service. Is that tasteless?”

  “Because I’m a recovering alcoholic? No, we still have a sense of humor. Although I’m not sure anyone knows that about me anymore. I heard you had a b
it of a crazy time too.”

  Kane thought back to the events of eighteen months ago: the search for a missing colleague in Kazakhstan, a woman he’d loved and who he’d failed to save. It wasn’t a search of which his bosses approved. Having burnt his bridges with MI6, he’d holed up in Jakarta for a while. One day, he decided to try returning to the UK, to face up to things: to who he was, and to the grief. He did not trust how long it could be held at bay simply by avoiding his own life. Kane was glad to have returned on his own terms, not to have waited for them to find him. The immigration officers at Heathrow had looked troubled by whatever message appeared on their screens when they scanned his passport.

  Would you mind stepping this way, sir?

  So, they led him from his exile into three months of discussion and negotiations.

  What do you want?

  I’d like to study. I’d like to transfer careers. I have no intention of damaging the reputation of the service or compromising its operations.

  It was testament to the healing power of state secrecy that so much snow had been allowed to settle over those tracks. He had followed a trajectory that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar: from rising star to pariah. And perhaps the quiet bathos of his current existence was typical too, and sustaining notoriety was as rare as sustaining heroism. But it wasn’t without loneliness. He had lost someone special to him in that final escapade, and grief had a way of haunting you with the future you had imagined. There was a sense of strangeness about his new life that he had failed to shake, a lingering lack of faith in it, having mastered and disposed of so many personas in his professional career.

  “I heard you ran away to Kyrgyztan.”

  “Kazakhstan.”

  “No issues returning?”

  “I’m a lot easier to keep tabs on here, as you’ve discovered.”

  “I wrestled with whether to call on you.”

  Kane nodded. He made the teas and handed her one.

  “Can I smoke?” Taylor waved a packet of cigarettes.

  Kane opened the window and she propped herself on the ledge. He took the sofa.

  “Seeing anyone?” she asked, from behind the first veil of cigarette smoke.

  “No.”

  “No starry-eyed postgrad?”

  “Not allowed. You? I heard about a divorce. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. Yes. Astonishingly, I’m single.”

  “Your young sidekick seems nice.”

  She laughed.

  “Daniel’s great. He’s the first assistant I fully trust. He’s also half my age. Too good for the Service really, with an extraordinary life story. He lost his parents in Eritrea, came over here when he was fifteen. Six wanted him to work undercover, of course: surveillance, penetrating gangs, that kind of thing. But he pressed to be interviewed for HQ, and I liked him. He’s super sharp, no time for office nonsense. Part of me wonders if he’s secretly tasked with keeping an eye on me.”

  “He keeps an eye on you to see how you do the job.”

  “Sure.” She sighed. “He could choose better role models. I have a horrible feeling that if people start trying to figure out what’s behind Rory’s suicide, they’ll get to Oman. They’ll find out I covered for him.”

  “You think they will look?”

  “Maybe. Covered for him and then threw him into an isolated environment that would have been tough on anyone.”

  “What exactly happened in Oman? Was it a prostitute?”

  She closed her eyes and pressed the heel of her smoking hand to her forehead, then looked directly at Kane.

  “It wasn’t a prostitute, it was a girl and boy. Teenagers. Street kids. They were in his room and he was watching them. The hotel owner caught them and called the police. He said it wasn’t the first time.”

  She continued to watch Kane, alert to flickers of judgment. He was thinking. Of people, and sexuality, and the reservoirs of anguished desire beneath the surface of things.

  “Rory was in the police station by the time I found out,” Taylor said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Signed a piece of paper and gave them quite a lot of money on the understanding it went no further. My own money. He repaid me as soon as he was back in the UK, wanted to pay me more.”

  Kane saw the potential gravity of the situation. Intelligence work magnified transgressions, because small things could become very big things if a hostile power decided to exploit them. Your secrets were your weakness, and your weakness was the service’s weakness. That was why they tried to empty you of them before recruitment. That was why small lies in connection with the job could spell dismissal.

  “How was he, about it all?”

  “Tearful, apologetic. You can imagine. You knew Rory.”

  “Not so well, it seems. Did he try to explain it?”

  “What was there to explain? He said he wouldn’t have touched them, that wasn’t his thing. Said he never did more—that he couldn’t. Which I took to mean some kind of impotence but was maybe about a moral threshold. Or both. I know this sounds awful, but right then it didn’t strike me as the most appalling thing. He preferred the company of teenagers. He wanted to watch them fucking. That was all.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Sixteen, seventeen.” Taylor reached out to grind the cigarette against the brickwork before flicking it toward the street. She picked up her mug, moved to the sofa. “I thought he was a wonderful man. I don’t know why I protected him. It would have been the end of him, I suppose, and I didn’t believe he deserved that. In the context of everything I’d seen on this job, it seemed forgivable.”

  Kane wondered how he would have responded. Possibly the same. Possibly he would have felt more exposed, as a man, collaborating on this cover-up.

  “Know if he had previous?”

  “Obviously, if there was a history of this kind of thing he would have been dropped by the intelligence service.”

  “Not always the case.”

  “Maybe not. I went to his home once, you know?” Taylor said. She sounded surprised as she said it.

  “Really?”

  “We developed a kind of friendship. Around the time everything was falling apart for me. I went to his house, in Shepherd’s Bush. It was incredibly empty, I thought. Incredibly lonely.”

  “How had he been recently?”

  “Not entirely well.”

  “No more incidents?”

  “I really hope not.”

  Kane felt his memory of Rory Bannatyne coming into deeper focus. Like a lot of highly talented people, he didn’t entirely fit in the world of adults. He had a touch of Peter Pan to him, and perhaps the Pied Piper, too—not the first spy to draw on those personae. They were often the mercurial and charismatic ones. The service moved you from one job to another, each new mission allowing a fresh start, the fantasy of a fresh you. Rory reminded Kane of military acquaintances who gave the impression that an exterior persona had hardened so fast that it left something vulnerable inside, trapped beneath the shell. And then danger itself became a form of protection.

  “You must have had risk assessments for the island, before he went over there,” Kane said.

  “I was told to use existing ones produced for GCHQ. I couldn’t drop in a security team. Rory was experienced enough to keep an eye out as he went along. And it’s British territory. I’ve checked all travel in and out, searched for patterns that might suggest some kind of cell or hit team. There’s nothing. At the same time, obviously we’re having to check all data Rory had access to, all live projects.”

  The intelligence service didn’t like people killing themselves. It responded as if it constituted a form of defection. This wasn’t entirely irrational: suicide pointed toward trouble—that could mean guilt over some double dealing, or fear of blackmail in an ongoing recruit attempt by a foreign power. Records of what an officer knew were kept up to date in case of emergency, to avoid the panicked trawls of years gone by: what operations might be compromised,
which individuals were at risk of exposure.

  “He wasn’t well,” Taylor said. “That’s what I think. He shouldn’t have gone.”

  “Was he drinking while there?”

  She shrugged. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Where did he hang himself?”

  “Off an antenna tower.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I was. A transmitter tower belonging to the BBC, near where he was staying. There are no trees, you see. Or none tall enough. I don’t know.”

  “Any note?”

  “None that’s been found. We know nothing about his last few days. That in itself feels odd. Nothing about the hours preceding his death. I have no idea where he was, who he saw, what he was doing. You can see that that’s unsettling. I would have loved to say to the police over there: treat this as suspicious, but of course the last thing we want to do is to attract a whole load of attention.”

  “You mentioned things missing, belongings.”

  “Yes, in particular a file I know he had. I don’t believe there were sensitive documents lying around—Rory was too professional for that—but we were quite careful with maintaining an inventory, and a box file of information about the installation is missing. Nothing sensitive, but maybe someone thought it was. Or he left it somewhere. Maybe that would give us some idea of who he hung out with. I have no idea if he had friends over there, enemies, lovers.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “At the briefing for the job. He volunteered, by the way. I didn’t force him into it. But I passed the opportunity his way. He wasn’t getting much work. Obviously no one knew what happened in Seeb, but it had affected him.”

  “He said he liked islands. Do you remember? He wanted to go to Masirah Island when we were in Oman.”

  “Well, he certainly got an island. Maybe too much of one.”

  Kane tried to imagine the experience: working alone there, intermittent communication with HQ. You have isolated yourself from the rest of humanity, for humanity’s sake. Left with only your thoughts for company. But that’s the problem.

  “What else do you know about Ascension?” he asked.