Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  Taylor had spoken to Nicola Bannatyne on the phone shortly after the woman had been informed of her brother’s death. It hadn’t been a pleasant call to make. Taylor had introduced herself as Rory’s line manager, given her condolences, and offered herself as a point of contact. His sister sounded numb, and Taylor was guiltily relieved at the absence of questions. She felt responsible for subjecting Nicola Bannatyne to a confusing grief. It was important that any queries from the sister came directly to Taylor. The postcard remained a quiet puzzle of its own. When Taylor had called the sister that morning after leaving the police, Nicola had sounded keen to see her.

  Taylor pocketed the card. She’d been anxious since Kane had set off. A brief visit to her office after the encounter with Detective Inspector Rehman hadn’t helped Taylor regain a feeling of control. She had messages from C’s office, asking for a report on her meeting with the police, and requests from Bower at GCHQ: Any news yet? As if spying were as quick as hacking.

  The cable project, if successful, would single-handedly put Taylor in line for one of the top jobs. It had allowed old fantasies to return: of power, of success as judged in the eyes of the world. All for a cable. It was rare to return from a setback like hers. Failure now meant it had all been for nothing. Her career would peter out in sideways moves through HQ, or find itself drained of will via postings to inconsequential MI6 stations in Africa and the Far East.

  She turned her phone off, looked at the unwritten postcard, then across at the flat. What message was he intending to send you?

  The woman who answered the door startled Taylor with her resemblance to Rory—the same sheet-white skin and green eyes. She was as tall as he had been, nervous, in a cardigan and pleated skirt.

  “Nicola Bannatyne?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Kathryn. I spoke to you this morning. I worked with Rory.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you for visiting. Please, come in.”

  The flat was unnervingly neat and smelled institutional. Photos of their parents stood in frames on the dresser. A wall calendar showed a church amid snow.

  When they were settled with teas, Taylor said: “I’m so sorry about what happened, the loss you must be feeling, but also, I imagine, some uncertainty. You must have questions. I knew Rory quite well, so I wanted to meet you in person. I thought I could fill you in a little more on the details. I’d also like to learn a bit more about Rory myself. It must have been a horrible shock, and so strange when he’s been so far away. I know it was to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ever tell you much about his work?”

  “No. I understand that it was difficult for various reasons. I know he worked for the government, often helping with engineering projects abroad.”

  “He was a hugely valued member of our team. A special person. Gifted.”

  “I’m sure. And he was doing something like that on the island?” his sister asked.

  “Yes. Helping with the internet there.”

  “I was told I might be able to collect his belongings.”

  “You will. This isn’t comfortable to say, but there’s some complexity to the situation surrounding his death. Around the time he passed away, a young woman on the island went missing. It’s still not entirely clear what happened to her.”

  It took the sister a moment to process this. Taylor registered uncertainty and some caution, but not shock, exactly. She seemed to understand what this meant.

  “You think ​—”

  “I don’t. But then, I wasn’t there. You can appreciate, the police want to be thorough. And so that’s created a few complications. For example, the funeral’s going to have to be delayed for a few weeks. I can only apologize for the inconvenience. And let me know if it causes you any problems—if you need any help arranging or rearranging. We can provide assistance.”

  The sister nodded. She had become very still, holding her tea in her pale, freckled hands. Taylor tried to imagine Rory’s funeral, and it made her sad. Organizing funerals was never easy when it came to dead spies. Taylor had been at officers’ funerals, listening to eulogies for lives that weren’t theirs, and it was painful. And at the back of your mind there was always the question: Is this what mine will be like? At least, as things stood, she wouldn’t have much audience to worry about. Old friends had grown away, into family-rich lives, while she didn’t seem to be making any new friends in the service. And there was no growing family of her own to refresh the stock of mourners.

  Nicola Bannatyne lifted her eyes from her tea to meet Taylor’s gaze, but remained silent.

  “Did you have contact with him recently?” Taylor asked.

  “He sent me postcards. We wrote to each other every few weeks. Whenever possible.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say in them?”

  “He’d ask for things he couldn’t get on the island, and I’d send him clippings or printouts from the internet: sports scores, music reviews. He said he needed diversions.”

  “Diversions?”

  “Magazines. Other things . . .” Taylor caught a look of concern flash across the woman’s face.

  “Like what?”

  “He said . . . For the children on the island. I imagine life’s tough for them. Things for the kids, gifts.”

  “What kind of gifts?”

  “Clothes, makeup. Sometimes computer games. Anything teenagers would like.”

  “And you sent him those?” Taylor asked.

  “Yes.” The sister’s voice was low and cold now. She no longer met Taylor’s gaze.

  “Do you still have his postcards?”

  “I didn’t keep them.”

  Taylor imagined how DCI Rehman would have reacted to this. What had the detective said? He was seen with the victim several times over the last few months. Sometimes just with her, sometimes with other teenagers . . .

  “I have to ask—as a friend of his, as well as a colleague—has Rory had any kind of trouble in the past that you’re aware of?”

  “No. He was very private, as you know. I never knew anything about his life, really. But he was an incredibly kind, gentle person. You must see that. When will I get to see his body?” she asked, and before Taylor could think how to answer, the woman began to cry.

  Taylor went into the kitchen to find some tissues. Then she stopped. Held to the fridge door by a magnet was a postcard identical to the one in her pocket. She took it down. This one had a message but no address. In Rory’s tight handwriting it said:

  Hi Nicola. Hope you’re well. Weather here is cooling now. Work’s mostly done and I can avoid most of the daytime glare. Sea remains too rough to swim though. This week’s challenge—a psychologist called Jack Moretti—American, I think—can you find out what happened to him? Prob now in his 50s. Would be very interested to know where he is working. Anything really. Sending love as ever. Off here soon. R

  Nicola appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh. That came last week. Just after I heard.”

  “With no address?”

  “It was in an envelope.”

  “Sent from the island?”

  “Yes.”

  Taylor made a quick calculation. The Ascension post came and went on an RAF flight approximately every three weeks. If the postcard arrived last week, it had been sent a couple of weeks ago.

  “This is definitely Rory’s handwriting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s Jack Moretti? Did you look into this?”

  “No. It was too late by the time I got it.”

  “Has he made other requests like this?”

  “Not quite like this. Usually it’s just things he was curious about.”

  “What was he curious about?”

  “Everything. The history of the island, information on the plants, the birds. Sometimes he’d choose something obscure as a challenge. The library has access to all sorts of journals that no one uses. You know Rory—or, perhaps yo
u did. He was always investigating something, finding a new topic of interest.”

  Both glanced at the card in Taylor’s hand.

  “Do you think it’s connected to something on the island?” Taylor said. “Maybe he mentioned it in previous correspondence.”

  “I don’t think so. He hadn’t mentioned anything like this before.”

  “I’m going to need to keep this.”

  “Do you think it’s helpful? What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to try to find out.” Taylor gathered up her coat. “We’ll let you know when . . . everything can go ahead. I’ll be in touch.”

  “And will you tell me if you find something out?”

  “Of course.”

  7

  “Lousy weather, ma’am.” The armed guard smiled. Taylor smiled back, touched her card to the sensor, then entered her pin code and waited for the perspex airlock to admit her into Vauxhall Cross.

  Her team occupied a remote corner of the sixth floor. She’d only been leading the department for a year, since her return from sick leave. The scale worked for her. The floor was arranged by region: Russia and Eastern Europe dominating the front, a handful of Middle Eastern offices in the center. Her South Atlantic team was small, with desks at the back plus her own office. As controller, she was responsible for twelve permanent staff including operational managers, data analysts, two technical specialists, and the requirements officer reporting to Whitehall.

  Like all controllerates, it was a supply chain, collating and assessing the product brought in by officers overseas and then disseminating it in daily updates and weekly reports to the relevant customers. Their areas of responsibility centered on the Falklands, but also involved less explicitly political issues: some drug running off the coast of Brazil and oil exploration in the North Falkland basin. She had two case officers in Latin America, one handling an agent in the Argentine defense forces, one with a source in an energy company. There was a team working on the African side, concentrated on Sierra Leone, where the British embassy housed a small but busy MI6 station. And, as of last year, there was Ventriloquist: a GCHQ liaison job and hence the only one that didn’t make the paper trail.

  She glanced down a list of messages and appointments: upcoming budget meetings, IT issues, and yet another compulsory training session on new data sharing protocol with the EU. The only message she read in full came from St. Thomas’s Hospital. Rory Bannatyne’s body was in the care of a security-cleared pathologist: Dr. Alexandra Glenning. Taylor would be notified of the outcome in due course.

  She went to her own office, which had an adjoining secure communications room and a view over South London. Daniel Kudus knocked as soon as she sat down. She was always glad to see him. He had transferred from the Falklands desk specifically for the cable project when Taylor had insisted she needed one other staff member read into the operation. Kudus had been hungering for a more front-line role. He navigated the environment of MI6 with a taciturn facade she hoped contained a measure of disdain. His eyes showed experience beyond his years. He was an outsider in the service, so she trusted him, trusted his loyalty to her, and he worked hard. He had been processing Rory’s reports over the last year and had also felt the impact of Rory’s death. His bearing had become solemner, his enthusiasm more measured.

  “The deputy chief was just here,” Kudus said. “He asked to see you.”

  “Gabriel came here? Did he say about what?”

  “No.” Kudus had been around long enough to know the politics of the place, and that this spelled trouble. “How was Rory’s sister?”

  Taylor handed him the postcard. Kudus read it, puzzled, turned it over in his hands.

  “Rory sent it shortly before he died. It was in an envelope, as if he wanted to keep the contents secret. He sent her cards whenever he could, but never one like this.”

  “Jack Moretti.”

  “Rory seems confident he’s an American psychologist. His sister never got a chance to look into this. I’m curious why Rory wanted to track him down. So let’s give it a go.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s an unusual-enough name,” she said, getting up, wondering if she needed a jacket to visit the deputy chief. “See what you can find.”

  Gabriel Skinner called her in when she knocked. He stood in front of his window, reading paperwork, boyish in stature, hair thinning. They had been equals once, at the start of their careers, possibly even friends. But never equal at climbing the greasy pole. His office contained paintings of yachts and horses, although Taylor knew he grew up in a modest middle-class home in Reading. But he had molded himself to the role he wanted. She had always believed you needed in some way to be mediocre to devote the necessary energies to ascending the ranks of Vauxhall Cross, with all the office politics and cultivation of connections that involved. Now she wondered if she’d just been naïve. The boldness that had helped her in the field, and that she had spent years learning to perform, didn’t translate to HQ, where it seemed merely irresponsible.

  “Sit down.”

  Power games already. She took a seat. If they were in any kind of contest he was winning, but victory did not grant any magnanimity, in her experience. Knowledge of others’ resentment hardened the ego. He had spoken out against her receiving the South Atlantic desk—“not a departmental leader”—which hurt more than she cared to admit. It had provided a focus for her more general distaste of the man. He had made a pass at her once, a long time ago, in the artless way of cold-blooded men. She suspected that this history combined with something else aside from the standard misogyny to generate his bitterness toward her: a dislike of her time in the field; the fact that she’d recruited and run agents in Europe and North Africa whereas he’d risen through HQ. Part of the attraction of the cable op was that it had allowed her to bypass him entirely. The Vauxhall hierarchy was steep but narrow, with visibility poor both ways, and if you were clever enough you could carve out a world of your own. She thought she had achieved this.

  “What horrifies me is that I had no idea he was over there at all,” Skinner began.

  He held a police report, she saw.

  “If you’re referring to Rory Bannatyne, it was Strap 3.”

  He turned slowly, silhouetted against the green-tinted daylight.

  “You didn’t feel I had adequate clearance?”

  “It’s a GCHQ operation, Gabriel. C gave the approval. No one else was due to be read in. That’s standard.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He took his life.”

  “I’m not talking about his suicide. I’m talking about the disappearance of a child. Do you see that this slightly broadens the exposure and therefore the individuals worth alerting?”

  “I’m currently establishing what happened. There seemed no point broadcasting this across the building until I knew what the situation was.”

  He sighed, sat down opposite her. “The press are on this, Kathryn.”

  “Really?”

  “It took some hack from the Mail contacting our press center for me to find out that someone had died on a job—that they connect to the disappearance of a teenage girl. That is not ‘standard.’ ”

  Her heart sank. The service had strong connections with the press; they’d try to keep it under wraps for now, but she could see the headlines itching to surface: Teen Sex Killing on Spy Island.

  “What does Ventriloquist involve, exactly?” Skinner asked.

  “Much what you’d expect. Comms interception.”

  “What I really want to avoid is finding myself in front of the Joint Intelligence Committee being asked to explain how the program connects to Petra Wade.”

  The deputy chief never raised his voice, which made him all the more unpleasant. Maybe the service needed people like him, Taylor had once reasoned: fastidiousness as sadism. Or perhaps he was simply an outdated curiosity, and not worth being intimidated by. Which was easier to think from a distance.

  “It
was cleared through the appropriate channels,” she said. “I have followed procedure at every step.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Kathryn.”

  She felt the cool fury of a man who had hit the ceiling of his authority. This was why people like him hungered for the very top: You could piss on everyone. Was that what it felt like up there? She had the authority of magic words—Echelon, Ventriloquist—but he could still ruin her career. True seniority within the agencies came down to ears: who had the ear of C, of the F-Sec, of the PM. Skinner was close to Downing Street.

  “What do you intend to tell the Americans?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do they know about the cable plan?”

  “No. We don’t go to the White House for clearance on our own soil just yet.”

  He briefly closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was gazing wearily down at the desk.

  “Do you know what they give us for use of Ascension? Do you know their longstanding concerns about the security of the place?”

  “I’m sure Washington will approve when they see the data coming in. GCHQ have a team waiting to start. I’ve sent an officer to establish what happened. They will find out if there’s any reason to pull the operation.”

  Skinner nodded, studying her.

  “Did you have any previous connections with Rory Bannatyne?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, we’d worked together before, but only very briefly.”

  His eyes narrowed. He sensed something, like a dog sniffing. As if this was enough, Skinner got up, moved around the desk toward her.

  “What your officer will do is extract himself from that place at the earliest convenience. Suspend all operations. We’re going to need to devise a media strategy. The press are very close to sending someone out there. This is what we call an almighty cock-up.”