Breaking Cover

9

In reorganising the internal space in Thames House to provide large open-plan floors, a few small corners had been partitioned off as meeting rooms. It was in one of these featureless, windowless rooms that the Counter-Espionage Group was to assemble for its meeting. Peggy, who was the group’s secretary, had given Liz an agenda headed ‘Counter-Espionage Assessment Committee (CEAC)’. There were four items on the agenda:

‘Do we really need to be this formal?’ enquired Liz, agenda in hand.

‘Yes,’ replied Peggy firmly. ‘I think we do. There was a bit of moaning and people saying “not another committee” when I rang round to invite them. I think if we don’t make it formal we’ll get poor attendance.’

Peggy’s forecast seemed to be borne out when Liz arrived at the meeting room dead on eleven o’clock to find there was no one there except her colleague, who had set the table with pens and paper, water and coffee in a thermos jug.

‘Where is everyone?’ Liz asked irritably. She hated hanging around waiting for people.

‘Charlie Simmons’s train from Cheltenham was delayed but he should be here in about ten minutes; DI Ferguson from Special Branch said he was coming, as did Rona Benson from the Home Office, and we’ll have the pleasure of the company of your second-favourite Six officer.’

‘Bruno Mackay?’ When Peggy nodded, Liz demanded, ‘What’s he doing here? Last I heard, he was in Libya.’

‘I gather he covered himself with glory and had some sort of nervous collapse, so he’s on light duties for a change.’

‘Hmm.’ Liz said nothing else but she knew (and she knew that Peggy knew) that she too was on ‘light duties’. No one had ever actually said so, but it was obvious to her that the decision to post her away from counter-terrorism into counter-espionage had been taken because the powers that be thought she needed a period of comparative calm after Martin’s death. Untypically, she had not complained. Counter-espionage was fascinating and important even if cases proceeded at a less hectic pace than in counter-terrorism. That suited her for now, but not for too long.

There was a loud guffaw and the door opened to admit a man in a belted raincoat, and a young woman.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked Liz.

‘I was just telling our colleague from the Home Office something she didn’t know about one of her Ministers. It’s amazing what you can learn from the Protection boys.’

Liz raised her eyebrows. She was not impressed by DI Ferguson’s indiscretion, but at least Rona Benson looked embarrassed.

Hot on their heels came Bruno Mackay of MI6. Liz and Bruno were about the same age and had worked together before, though not recently. When she’d first met him, she’d joked with her friends that he fancied himself as T. E. Lawrence – tanned face, bright blue eyes, skin taut and lined from gazing into the sun. Bruno had been in Afghanistan, where he had been running an agent against the Taliban, and was very pleased with himself – his manner towards Liz and her colleagues was one of ineffable superiority. Since then he had been Head of the MI6 Station in Paris and after that he’d been in Libya. The grapevine reported that something very unpleasant had happened to him there but no one was saying what it was.

So Liz had been half expecting Bruno to look different from the young man she’d first met, but she was still surprised by how changed he was. His face was no longer tanned but a yellowy-white, and the blue eyes seemed to have sunk into his face. He was still an elegant figure, in a beautifully cut dark blue tweed jacket worn with striped shirt and flannels, but he had lost a lot of weight and his clothes now hung on him limply.

He greeted Liz with a handshake. Instead of the teasing personal remark he would once have made, he said, ‘Good morning, Liz. It’s good to see you again. I was very sorry to hear about Martin.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, rather taken aback. ‘I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a rough time.’ He just nodded and sat down at the table.

A few moments later Charlie Simmons arrived, looking like a student who had slept in his clothes, his spiky hair standing straight up, khaki anorak undone and hanging half off his shoulders. Had Liz not known what a vital role he had played in the Paris operation, she would have found it difficult to take him seriously.

‘Sorry to be late,’ he said, dropping his backpack on the floor beside a chair and sitting down. ‘Those trains get more and more unreliable.’

Liz rattled through the first item on Peggy’s agenda and then asked Charlie to explain why he had asked for the meeting to be brought forward.

‘Well,’ he said, sitting up in his chair, rather more focused, ‘you will all remember that after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2011, police and other investigations showed without much doubt that a special operations team of at least two or three Russians had brought the polonium into the country and then administered it. We’ve assumed it was an FSB assassination, either formally or informally approved. After that was uncovered, I and a couple of colleagues looked back at our data to see whether anything might have given us a clue that a special op was going to be carried out. We thought it likely that relevant Rezidentura in countries might have been alerted in case anything went wrong and the special ops team needed assistance of some kind.

‘When we looked, we saw some traffic in the run-up to the murder that we couldn’t read, but that was unusual – because it was sent to just a few Stations. Including London of course. There was a lot more unusual activity from London during the period when Litvinenko was dying in hospital and the investigation was getting under way. We think the traffic was being sent out of St Petersburg, not the main communications centre in Moscow. That may mean that the operation was organised by a special unit outside the mainstream.

‘After that,’ Charlie went on, ‘we decided to continue to monitor, looking for any similar pattern, in case we were seeing the start of some concerted plan to eliminate critics in the West. And the reason I asked for a meeting of this committee is that in the last few weeks, beginning about a month ago, we’ve seen something similar. It’s traffic out of St Petersburg to London but it has also gone to Riga, Oslo and, rather unexpectedly, New York.’

By now everyone round the table was looking interested. Eventually it was agreed that, despite the vagueness of the intelligence, resource should be committed to trying to prevent attacks on Russians or ex-Russians living in the UK, whether they were oligarchs or political defectors (or both). It was also agreed that all UK police forces should be alerted at senior level; that Bruno would alert MI6 Stations, particularly in the Baltic and Scandinavian states, to keep their ears to the ground; and that MI5 would ensure that all domestic sources were similarly alerted. Rona Benson would discreetly report upwards in Whitehall, trying to ensure that no overreaction took place in the Home Office.

Following a quick review of current investigations, the meeting broke up, the participants leaving considerably more animated than when they had arrived. But as Liz watched them go she felt uneasy. She had a strong sense of a threat and it seemed fairly clear where it was coming from, but its precise nature and what could be done about it were not at all clear. This was very different from her recent experience in counter-terrorism where at the first sign of a threat all the cogs fell into place and started working to defeat it. With this threat she could only wait for further developments – and that worried her.