Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  “Until now it seemed you were going to break every promise you made.”

  He spoke softly, with a non-native precision.

  “Things have been far from ideal, and we apologize for that. Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”

  “I need my security to be present.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  Lau spoke with the guards alone. He returned and nodded acceptance, leading them into a dining room with a table set with candelabras. Lau shut the double doors behind them and they sat down on cushioned chairs.

  “Something has gone wrong at our end,” Taylor began. “We don’t deny that, and we want to apologize. The records that should be there are no longer there. On our side, there’s an inquiry under way. But obviously a lot of people are scratching their heads—whatever you were involved in was such high secrecy that even senior members of the service have not been fully briefed. That’s why we’re here: We need to know exactly what happened before we can begin arranging appropriate protection and compensation. Ultimately we need to know where the threat lies and how we can keep you and your family safe.”

  “We need to know everything,” Kudus said.

  “How much do you know already?”

  “Imagine we know nothing.”

  Lau exhaled, ran a hand through his hair, then stared at Taylor.

  “Are you aware of the cemetery?”

  “Which cemetery?”

  “In the Pacific.”

  Taylor and Kudus glanced at each other.

  “No,” Kudus said, finally. “Tell us about the cemetery in the Pacific.”

  Lau gathered himself, gazing toward the shutters before turning his bright eyes upon them.

  “May 2016, I was searching for a Second World War ship, the SS Mi­nerva, in the South China Sea, the Lingayen Gulf, to be precise. I had spent years compiling a database, tracking the gold shipped by the British government to pay for weapons and goods during the World Wars. There were around seven and a half thousand merchant ships sunk, and my team have identified more than five hundred that were carrying vast quantities of precious metals. Twenty are in the South China Sea.

  “The Minerva had been carrying platinum, gold, and industrial diamonds when it was torpedoed in July 1942. That’s all still down there. But if it was easy to access it would have been salvaged by now. Our mission to find it was the conclusion of two years’ preparation. We’d been sailing for almost a week. On the sixth morning, just before dawn, my crew saw what looked like three fishing boats approaching, but moving way too fast. They got closer and we could see they were more like military craft: very low, ten men per boat, all masked up. And heavily armed. We knew they were either special forces or very well equipped pirates. We were outnumbered. They boarded, all speaking Chinese. Claimed we were in Chinese territorial waters, which we weren’t. We were arrested, blindfolded, taken onto their boats. Next thing I know, I’m being interviewed in a secure facility.

  “I spent three days in a cell. I had no idea where I was. I was accused of being a spy. They said I was in their waters illegally, wanted to know what I was doing there, wanted to know about my work, my connections. On the third day they came to me with a deal, and it became clear what they were after. They wanted to see what my equipment could do. They wanted me to take them out, find a wreck they thought was down there, show them my technology and how it works.”

  “Your technology?”

  “Mapping shipwrecks at great depths with any kind of precision involves a lot of sensors—acoustic, hyperspectral, stereo. But done well it means you don’t need to carry out endless inspection dives. You fit a stereo camera on an ROV, and you can have high-res 3D models in front of you on dry land.”

  “ROV?”

  “Remotely operated underwater vehicle. An underwater robot. These things can collect and analyze the data on their own, which means they can decide whether to investigate further: what to document, what to map. I was the only one who’d combined the whole package on a single underwater vessel. It had taken years of development.

  “The Chinese threatened my family. They were willing to arrest relatives of mine. My father’s business would have been destroyed. So, I agreed. And when I was taken out of the interrogation facility, I was on what I believe to have been an artificial island. There was something very odd about the shoreline, the way it met the sea. The island itself was perfectly flat. I saw buildings that might have been labs, some more like military HQs. And there, finally, was my boat and crew, who had been through a similar experience to me, and were waiting for instructions.”

  “Do you know where this island was?”

  “Not for sure, but I suspect Paracel.”

  That sounded right. The Paracel Islands included some of China’s largest military outposts in the South China Sea. A lot of them were newly made—dredged-up miracles, studded with long-range sensor arrays, port facilities, runways, reinforced bunkers for fuel and weapons. Lau had got a glimpse of one of the most secret places on earth.

  “And where did you go then?” Taylor asked.

  “The next day we sailed past Guam into the Pacific. Heading into the cemetery. You really don’t know about it?”

  “Tell us.”

  He took a breath as if wondering where to start, joined his hands, pressed them against his lips, then, gazing straight at them, began again.

  “Satellites die. Spacecraft die. Then you’ve got two choices: direct them farther away into outer space forever or let them return to earth.” He looked from one intelligence officer to the other to ensure they were following. “Only, you don’t want them falling on anyone, right? And maybe you don’t want anyone falling onto them.

  “The spacecraft cemetery is where they’re dropped. It’s the center of the South Pacific, about as far from land as you can get on this planet, somewhere between Easter Island and Antarctica. There’s been around three hundred spacecraft sunk there over the years. The Mir space station’s down there, various resupply craft belonging to the ISS, some transfer vehicles from the European Space Agency. It’s a junkyard over thousands of square kilometers, as deep under the sea as you can go.

  “Obviously, none of them is just sitting neatly on the ocean floor. Re-entering the atmosphere is like being hit by a bomb. The heat generated can burn metal. But that’s not to say you don’t get some interesting fragments. And piloted vehicles like the Space Shuttle or Russia’s Soyuz capsules have thermal shielding to protect them. The Chinese wanted to know what they could find, but also what of theirs the Americans might be able to find. I was instructed to help prepare an assessment, show them how it could work. I told them it was near impossible—looking for a satellite the size of a car in the Pacific, trying to retrieve a sea drop. You needed razor-sharp trajectory prediction followed by ultrafast response using vehicles that could go deep.

  “I don’t know if you know how deep the ocean goes. The Spacecraft Cemetery is down in the abyssal zone. That’s about four to six thousand meters below the surface. There’s no life down there. Maybe sponges, the odd octopus or viperfish. The water pressure means diving’s impossible. But if anyone could do this work, it was me. The underwater vehicle I use has speed and, more importantly, thermographic cameras. For recent drops you’re not looking for something cold but something hot. And the Chinese were improving their location estimates. A couple of days before a spacecraft drops, whichever space agency is in charge of it has to notify authorities in Chile and New Zealand. Those countries share responsibility for the cemetery, and they publicize expected re-entry times and where debris is likely to fall. The Chinese had access to all that. They also had extensive systems of submerged microphones each with a range of several hundred miles. And for a while, of course, you have heat, a lot of heat. But satellites sink fast.”

  As Lau described it, they’d set off—sometimes from Easter Island, sometimes from Concepión in Chile—sail three or four days, anchor at designated coordinates until instruc
tions came in. At that point you were already above the abyss; nothing but water beneath you for thousands of feet.

  “Then, as soon as we had word of impact, we’d begin searching.”

  At three thousand feet you were entering what he called the midnight zone, light fading, six thousand pounds of pressure per square inch.

  “There’s a Soyuz trapped on a ledge at around this depth. One time I saw parts of the Japanese H-II rocket. We know of more than eighty Russian cargo vehicles scattered over one particular area. Then, past three thousand feet down, you’re in the dark zone. Pitch black, close to freezing—a few invertebrates: starfish, eels. Then the trenches and the abyss, twenty thousand feet and beyond, into the unknown.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “There was stuff going down there that wasn’t what it was meant to be. That’s pretty much as close as I got to understanding the situation. Things that looked wrong, or suspicious.”

  “Have you been down there?”

  “Sure. The shallower regions.”

  “You dive?

  “Right.”

  “Down to satellites?”

  “Most of my diving was in wrecks. But once or twice I took a look at the debris down there; not satellites—part of the Mir space station. It had got encrusted, but a door was intact and you could see the airlock.”

  In the depth of his cold eyes was a gleam.

  “Must be quite something,” Taylor said.

  Lau nodded, but her curiosity had made him uneasy. He sat forward, both hands pointed toward her as if to channel his message.

  “The first thing you said when I agreed to work with you was that I’d be protected. From the very start, Andrew promised me protection, precisely for a situation like this.”

  “Andrew.”

  “The guy who met with me.”

  At the end of September 2016, a man walked up to Jerry Lau in the hotel he was staying at in Kuala Lumpur and suggested they have a drink together. This was “Andrew,” the MI6 officer who would be Lau’s handler for the next eighteen months. He said he knew Lau needed help and could provide it, extricate him from the situation in which he’d found himself with the Chinese, if he was willing to work for the British government.

  Lau was keen. He didn’t hear anything more for six weeks, thought they’d changed their mind. Taylor knew what would have really been going on: intensified analysis to ensure he wasn’t a double agent; heavy surveillance to determine whether anyone else knew they’d made an approach. Assessment of his value; assessment of the risk. Then a plan would be painstakingly constructed regarding the best way to run him.

  In November, Andrew appeared again, same place. He drove Lau to an office behind the Pudu night market, with a secure room at the back. The conversation was very much a rehash of what they’d already been through, but it concluded with arrangements including payment and secure means of communication.

  “I wanted to get out of the whole situation immediately, but I was told that wasn’t the plan.” Lau sighed. “I was given means of communicating with Andrew. He made a promise—my family would be resettled eventually. But he wanted me to continue working with the Chinese. And that was how it kept going for the next year and a half.”

  Of course, Taylor thought. An agent’s no use in retirement. There are people in Vauxhall Cross breathing down your neck for product, finance asking you to justify operational costs. If you weren’t prepared to risk lives, you didn’t become an agent handler.

  “What was Andrew interested in?”

  “Everything. But most of all space. Chinese space tech, their knowledge of Western space tech.”

  “And you were able to access that information?”

  “Not much. I’m a treasure hunter, not a rocket engineer. I couldn’t tell him what they were looking for. I didn’t know what they had. I said to him: It’s not going to work like this. But he said not to worry. The next two meetings were in Bali and then once in Macau. Andrew started asking about who came on board the ship, all the details of the Chinese I dealt with.”

  “What kind of details, exactly?” Taylor said.

  “Everything. Their ages, their technical skills, whether I heard any names or ranks, whether they brought devices with them. He asked if they swept it for bugs, if they seemed to trust me. He wanted to bug the boat. He said when I was next in Malaysia some inspectors would come on board, and I should go along with it, just do whatever they said. At Port Klang the following week, it happened. They said they were Customs and asked to see my papers. They checked all over. I assume that some of them rigged devices into the boat. I was never told what or how.

  “Next search mission was in December, just before Christmas. I was told by Andrew that a similar thing would happen when I got to New Zealand. It went on like that. Very few meetings. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it with technology.”

  “Did you sense that Andrew was getting something from all this?”

  “I can only assume it was successful, since you continued risking my life. You subsidized me quite healthily for the privilege. Then, one day, nothing. No communication. I waited for some kind of message, and there was silence. Next thing I know my men have been slaughtered. For all I know the equipment is still installed on that ship. If they found that, my family is dead. I was told six months at first, then two years. I was told that there was a system in place for emergencies. What if I was in a Chinese prison right now? You used me. Something went wrong your end—fine—but I believed the British government was better than that.”

  “Did Andrew ever ask about a company called Quadrant?”

  “No. The space company? Why would he ask about Quadrant?”

  “I believe he was interested in them.”

  Lau looked blank. He shook his head.

  “When did you last see him?” Kudus asked.

  “In Melbourne, late June last year.”

  “What did he say? Was there anything to suggest the situation might be changing?”

  “He told me to be prepared—the game might move. He asked about a place called Ascension Island.”

  Both Kudus and Taylor nodded, restraining their expressions of interest and resisting the temptation to look at each other.

  “What did he ask about Ascension Island?” Kudus asked.

  “Whether I had heard it mentioned. Whether I knew anything.”

  “Had you heard it mentioned?”

  “No. And I didn’t know anything, either.”

  “Did he say why he was interested in Ascension?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever sailed around there?”

  “No.”

  Taylor could see that Lau wasn’t going to throw much more light for now. She needed to find Andrew himself, if he was still alive.

  “One challenge we’ve got is that Andrew may have left the service or moved roles,” she said, registering Lau’s expression of disbelief.

  “You don’t know where he is?”

  “We’re struggling to locate him. Andrew probably wasn’t his real name. Can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “He was very tall, with fair hair going gray. Probably fifty or so. At least.”

  “What else do you remember about him?”

  “One time he told me he had briefly lived in Russia. That’s pretty much it.”

  “Ever meet him with anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Where was he currently based?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you say he seemed confident handling this operation?”

  “Yes.”

  “What languages did he speak?”

  “English, Chinese. I don’t know what else.”

  “And he asked about Ascension Island.”

  “The last time I saw him, yes.”

  “And then?”

  “A message canceling the next meeting.”

  “From him?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Any furt
her contact from anyone?”

  “Until now, absolutely nothing. That is what I am trying to explain to you: My life is in danger and I need the help you promised. I never asked for any of this. All I wanted to do was explore wrecks.”

  “We’ll do what we can. Have you noticed anything that makes you believe you may be under threat right now?”

  “Aside from my crew being slaughtered? No.”

  “How long have you been based in this house?”

  “Three hours.”

  “Okay. We’ll be in touch very soon with arrangements. In the meantime, keep moving.”

  27

  “He said Ascension might be a new area of interest, then disappeared into thin air forever.”

  “Just like that.”

  Taylor and Kudus sat in the car, looking out over Hyde Park. No update on Kane. Taylor wondered if he was physically safe, if he was sweating in a cell, if he was wondering what she was doing for him, and what she could do. Meanwhile, from what Kudus could establish from a call into the office, there were a lot of people looking for Taylor, from the police to her seniors in MI6.

  She needed to get legitimate security precautions in place for Lau. She needed to find Andrew, if he was still alive and able to talk. The next time she stepped into HQ, it would be her last; she wouldn’t be leaving it a free woman. There had always been rumors of interrogation rooms on the second basement level. She’d have a chance to find out.

  Taylor tore the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes. She checked her phone. Her sister was calling, from a life far away.

  “I’m meant to be at a birthday party,” Taylor said. Kudus studied her.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Disappoint my family once again.”

  “I mean, about this. What’s your theory?”

  “My theory is that Andrew got something he shouldn’t have, something about Ascension, and then he was shut down, painted out of the picture before it could spread.”

  A white transit van rolled in behind them. It parked and the driver made a call on his mobile. Kudus saw it too. A few seconds later it drove off again.

  “Are we being paranoid?”