Kompromat

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mark Cooper, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, answered on the first ring.

‘Oh, hello, Edward. I was expecting to hear from you, though not perhaps quite this late. I hear you had some interesting meetings in Xian with our friend Zhang Fu-Sheng.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Hang up for a moment. I’ll call you back on another line. I have the number. It’s come up on my screen.’

I’ll bet it has, Barnard thought. He was fairly sure that Cooper, when he called back, would switch through to the CX system, which the MI6 boffins claimed provided state-of-the-art security against electronic eavesdropping.

Moments later, Cooper rang back. ‘Ah, that’s better.’

The two men didn’t need to talk long. They were both professionals.

‘We’ll send a bike to pick the disk up first thing,’ Cooper said, rounding the conversation off. ‘Around 7:00a.m. Are you at home? How are the azaleas?’

‘Everything in the garden is lovely,’ Barnard replied. ‘Best time of year.’

Except everything in the garden wasn’t lovely. Barnard knew he faced a grilling. He tried to reconstruct precisely what had happened that evening in St Petersburg? He remembered being in the bar at the Kempinski. He remembered talking to the two Russian women in the lift. But after that?

Just because they were both members of Whites didn’t mean that Cooper wouldn’t put him on the rack.

And, later that day that was precisely what Cooper did. He wasn’t some political appointee. He had worked his way up through the ranks during his career in the Secret Intelligence Service. He’d applied a few thumbscrews in his time. Metaphorically at least.

There were four of them in the interrogation room. Mark Cooper had brought along his deputy, James Armitage, to enjoy the fun. Shirley Wilson, head of SIS’s China Desk, had been hurriedly briefed. So had Roger Wales, head of the Russia Desk.

‘You’ve all seen the material, haven’t you?’ Cooper began. ‘But it may be helpful to take another look now. Our technicians downstairs are looking at the original, but we’ve run off a copy for the purposes of today’s proceedings. I can assure you that copy will be destroyed when we’re through.’

He turned to Shirley Wilson. ‘I’m sorry if you found some of the acts and actions depicted on the video to be distasteful and upsetting? I should have sent out a spoiler alert.’

‘Why just me, Mark? Are you telling me you chaps can handle that kind of stuff, but I can’t?’

Cooper took the point. It had taken MI5 quite a while to put both male and female employees on an equal footing but they had got there in the end. Or hoped they had.

‘Point taken. Anyway, well, why don’t you kick off, Shirley?’

‘Okay, I will.’ Shirley Wilson turned to Barnard. She didn’t particularly like Barnard or the class he came from and she didn’t take the trouble to deny it.

‘So did you fuck those two Russian tarts, Mr Barnard?’

Of course, Shirley Wilson was only following the standard interrogation manual. Throw them off balance, make them angry. You couldn’t strike them – not any longer. Not officially anyway. But there were other ways of hitting them where it hurts.

Barnard was beginning to wonder whether he should have insisted on having a lawyer present. ‘Just a friendly chat,’ Mark Cooper had promised, ‘once we’ve had a chance to look at what you’ve given us.’

Before he had a chance to reply to Shirley Wilson, Roger Wales chipped in. ‘This was classic Kompromat stuff, Mr Barnard. Ministers who go to Russia surely know the drill: don’t talk to strange blonde women in hotel lobbies. Don’t go upstairs with them. Above all, don’t go to bed with them. Why the hell did you do it? Were you drunk?’

‘I guess I must have been.’ Barnard sounded defeated. Totally defeated. Suddenly his world had been turned upside down. He wondered if Melissa would leave him. ‘The truth of the matter,’ he continued, ‘is that I don’t actually remember what happened. I admit I’d drunk a certain amount at the dinner in the Winter Palace. This is Russia, remember. And it was a festive occasion. Drinking is what you do, unless you want to give offence to your hosts. Then we came back to the bar in the Kempinski. Did someone slip something in my drink at some point? Perhaps. I remember being in the lift with the two women. I remember punching the button for the eighth floor. But after that my memory is blank, I’m afraid, totally blank. I admit it looks like it could be me on the bed there, though you can’t see my face.’

Mark Cooper let it run on. The way he saw it, Barnard deserved to suffer, for being careless, if for nothing else. But he realized that it was time to call a halt. They’d all had their bit of fun. It wasn’t every day you had ministers, or former ministers, in the dock wondering where the next blow was coming from.

‘I’m going to get the technicians in here now. I’ve just heard they’ve finished their analysis of the video.’

He pressed a buzzer beneath the table and two young men, one bearded, the other clean-shaven, entered the room.

‘Gentlemen, don’t keep us waiting. Are these tapes fake or not? If they are fake, fabricated or whatever, can we prove it? If the man in question looks like Mr Barnard, talks like Mr Barnard and fucks like Mr Barnard, can we plausibly say this is not Mr Barnard? If we can’t say – and say convincingly – that it’s not Mr Barnard, then the tapes can show up anytime, anywhere with devastating effect.’

‘I’m sure that my wife could be of some help,’ Barnard interjected, in a still small voice. ‘When Melissa had calmed down, eventually, she told me that she realized all along it couldn’t be me. “Wow, Edward.” she said. “I’d love to think you could do all that, but I know you can’t!” ’

It was a feeble joke but it served to defuse the tension. On the crucial issue, the verdict of the young technicians was clear. The tapes were fake.

James the Beard explained: ‘The images of the two Russian ladies are genuine, no doubt about that. The image of Mr Barnard in the lift is genuine, though he is – it must be said – looking a bit worse for wear. The three of them appear to walk seamlessly into the room. But they don’t actually enter the room. Mr Barnard enters the room by himself.’

‘You’re absolutely sure of that?’

‘We got in touch with Moscow as soon as those tapes came in to us. Our people there know the Kempinski well, and it’s not the first time they’ve asked our contacts for some CCTV output from the hotel. On this particular occasion, we knew the day Barnard had been there, we knew the time, we knew the hotel floor, and the number of the room: the CCTV clips they sent over to us earlier today tell the whole story. Barnard gets out at the 8th floor, but the two Russian ladies go on up to the 12th floor, the penthouse suite.’

‘And?’ Mark Cooper pressed him. ‘What next?’

‘There is no next,’ the other young man chipped in. ‘Mr Barnard goes to bed alone and wakes up alone. There are no shenanigans of any kind.’

Edward Barnard felt so relieved he could have cried. Disaster had for a time loomed, but now help was at hand. ‘So who’s the chap in bed with the two Russian ladies, pretending to be me?’

‘He’s not pretending to be you, Edward, for heaven’s sake. He’s doing whatever he’s doing, then someone takes that image and makes out it’s you.’ Mark Cooper sounded irritated. Didn’t these politicians understand what they were dealing with? They used to say the camera didn’t lie. Balderdash. The camera lied all the time. You could scramble the pixels just like you could scramble eggs.

‘Well, who is he then anyway?’ Barnard persisted. ‘I know who was in the penthouse at the Kempinski that evening.’

Mark Cooper raised a warning hand.

‘I think we had better leave that question for the time being.’

The meeting went on for another hour. These were Britain’s top security officials. They couldn’t afford to leave stones unturned or avenues unexplored.

Eventually Mark Cooper summed things up. ‘We need to consider how the Chinese acquired that tape. If the tape was made by the Russians officially, as it were, say by the KGB/FSB, then why would they have passed it to the Chinese? Why would they help the Chinese discredit our friend, Edward Barnard, when Edward’s actions, namely to help the Leave campaign, appear to be in Russia’s interest? Isn’t it more probable that the Chinese spy network in Russia – and that is a very substantial network indeed – got hold of the tapes from some freelance source and then spliced it all together with a view to persuading Barnard here to jump ship of his own accord and ditch the Leave campaign? Which by any reckoning could be a fatal blow for that campaign and very good news for China. So they try a little gentle persuasion instead. Does that make sense? It does to me.’

Barnard had had enough. They could speculate as much as they liked. It wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever the Chinese thought they might be doing by making that tape, they had picked the wrong man.

If he had been sure, when he was talking to Minister Zhang in Xian that he was on the right path, he was doubly sure now. A line from Shakespeare came to mind. Macbeth, surely? ‘Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going.’

Good old Shakespeare, he thought, as he picked up his notes, you could always rely on the Bard for a pertinent quote.

Mark Cooper walked out with him.

‘We’re taking another look at the Kempinski,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to track down those two Russian women. Whatever they put in your drink could have been very dangerous. Glad it wasn’t polonium, anyway.’ Cooper put out his hand. ‘By the way, I wanted to tell you we haven’t made much progress with that other file you brought back. The home secretary’s rather sitting on it. Some of the emails to and from Number 10 seem to be genuine, not fakes, as we supposed. We’ve got a bit more digging to do.’

‘Dig away,’ Barnard urged. ‘But please let me know when and if you turn something up.’

‘Your car’s waiting for you in the underground car park,’ Cooper said. ‘We can’t have you leaving through the front door. The opposition keeps very close tabs on the comings and goings here.’

‘And who’s the opposition in this particular case?’

‘Good question. We’re still trying to work that one out.’