Kompromat

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Rt. Hon. Mabel Killick, who had been the United Kingdom’s home secretary for the unusually long period of seven years, decided to chair the meeting of the specially convened COBRA Security subcommittee herself. The name COBRA had, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with poisonous snakes. It actually stood, rather prosaically, for Cabinet Office Meeting Room A. Nonetheless, Mrs Killick enjoyed the connotation. Though cool, calm and collected for most of the day, the home secretary, if roused, was ready to strike and strike hard.

In summoning the meeting at short notice, Mrs Killick had given some firm instructions to Giles Mortimer, her chief aide, as to the cast of characters she expected to see.

‘We don’t want the full Monty,’ she warned. ‘Keep it down if you can. I’d like to see Jane Porter from 5 and Mark Cooper from 6 if they are available at short notice.’

When Mrs Killick spoke about ‘5’ and ‘6’, she was referring to MI5, the government department responsible for counter-intelligence operations (homeland security) and to MI6, Britain’s own espionage agency, the UK’s equivalent of the CIA. Until recently, MI5 and MI6 were officially non-existent and couldn’t be referred to. People who worked for them had cover jobs. If asked what they actually did, they were trained to give non-committal replies. ‘Oh, you know, this and that, one thing or another, here and there…’

In the last few years the agencies had come in out of the cold. There was no need any longer for the quiet ‘Psst!’ of recruiters on darkened streets and the whispered enticement: ‘Fancy a job as a spy?’ They even had websites. With the current wave of cyber-attacks, technically competent graduates were being enticed by attractive salaries and job conditions to join the fray on a new and challenging field of combat, the cyber battlefield.

Giles Mortimer smoothed his dark, bushy beard. In the early days of his career, well-meaning superiors had suggested that it might be a good idea to prune the luxurious growth, or even get rid of it altogether. But Mortimer had resisted all such entreaties.

‘People with beards are not all terrorists,’ he would reply. That was when he was being polite.

Actually, strictly speaking, Mortimer was the home secretary’s joint-chief of staff, since he shared the honour with Holly Percy. Together they made a formidable team. They were, so the press surmised, ‘fiercely protective’ of their boss and she in turn was devoted to them.

‘We had better have Sir Oliver Holmes, too, hadn’t we?’ Holly Percy said.

Sir Oliver Holmes was chief of the Metropolitan Police and therefore the man responsible for investigating, within his area of jurisdiction, crimes of every sort, including cyber-crimes. Tall, fit, and good-humoured, Holmes was within a year of retirement. It would be his job to pass incriminating evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service which would in turn have to decide how best justice could be served.

The home secretary saw Holly Percy’s point at once. ‘Yes, of course. There may be a criminal investigation; in fact I’d say there’s bound to be a criminal investigation. We don’t want ministers to get wind of this enquiry and start destroying evidence.’

Of course, both Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy knew which ‘ministers’ she was referring to.

Giles Mortimer had one last suggestion. ‘Why don’t we ask Edward Barnard to open the batting, even though he’s resigned from the Cabinet? We’ve had the ambassador’s report from Moscow. We have all had a summary of the material on the flash-drive. But surely Barnard can give us the flavour of the matter, not to speak of filling us in on his contact with President Popov.’

Mabel Killick sniffed derisively. ‘I think Barnard’s been doing a bit of off-piste skiing. But, yes, I agree it will be useful to have him.’

The special meeting of the Cobra Security sub-committee was set for 11:00a.m. and it began precisely on time.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mrs Killick began, ‘I want to explain why I have called you together this morning. The reason is simple: as the minister responsible for all Home Office business, including security and terrorism, I suspect that we have experienced, and are possibly still experiencing, a major breach of security as far as communications in and out of Number 10 Downing Street are concerned. Of course, that is of great concern to me. It has happened and is possibly still happening on my watch.

‘But the issue we have to consider today has even wider implications than any breach of security that may already have occurred. Each of you has in front of you a bound dossier, in which my people have reproduced some of the most important and significant communications from what I am going to from now on refer to as the “Referendum dossier”. Each of these volumes is numbered. Please be good enough to leave the bound folders on the table when you leave this room.’

The home secretary permitted herself a little joke. ‘I have counted them all out, and I shall count them back in.’

Mabel Killick paused to give her next words the emphasis they deserved. ‘I cannot stress how essential it is that you should treat this material with the greatest discretion.’

She turned to the commissioner of police, sitting beside her. ‘Sir Oliver, perhaps you could take a moment to explain what we are dealing with in legal terms, in other words going beyond the security issues.’

‘Thank you, Home Secretary.’

As the highest ranking police officer in the country, Sir Oliver Holmes was proud to wear on his epaulettes the insignia of rank – the crown above a Bath star, above crossed tipstaves within a wreath. As much at home on a police horse as he was in a police car, he had placed his cap, with its chequered peak and distinctive silver braids, on the table in front of him when he sat down, and now he pushed it to one side.

‘My job, as you know, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sir Oliver began, ‘is to fight crime whenever and wherever it occurs. It is my duty to tell each and every one of you today that if you were to divulge to a third party information about what you read here today, or about the discussion which will shortly take place, you could be charged with aiding and abetting the commission of a serious crime, or with helping to conceal or cover up that crime, or assisting others to do so. I have absolutely no wish, as I come to the end of my career, to go out with a bang, but I have to remind you that when I took the Oath of Office on being appointed Commissioner of Police, I swore that I would discharge my duties – and I quote “without favour or affection, malice or ill will”.

‘I take that oath very seriously. So I want to tell you all, without beating about the bush, that we will probably be seeking search warrants as we pursue this case and those warrants may very well include the office or premises of the prime minister himself, as well as those of the chancellor of the exchequer and other concerned parties.’

Sir Oliver wondered, as he pressed on, whether he was laying it on a bit thick. Was anyone, he asked himself, really going to rush out of the room to warn Jeremy Hartley, the prime minister, and Tom Milbourne, the chancellor, to burn any incriminating documents as soon as possible?

Well, yes, he immediately reconsidered, it was precisely what they might very well do, unless he gave them the sternest possible warning.

How far, he wondered, had the stain and stench of corruption actually spread, if corruption was what they were dealing with? Were some of these actually in the room today implicated? He couldn’t rule that out. Indeed, at this point in the proceedings he couldn’t rule anything out.

‘Let me be clear,’ Sir Oliver laid it out for them in no uncertain terms. ‘If the authenticity of the material in front of you is conclusively established, then frankly we will be confronted with a scandal of massive proportions, a scandal which could – and I believe should – rock the government to its very foundation.’

Sir Oliver looked pointedly at the home secretary. ‘I imagine we would need a clean sweep at the highest levels of government, Home Secretary. Others would have to step in.’

‘The election lights on Fortinbras,’ Barnard murmured to himself. There were some lines from Hamlet he always remembered.

‘Good heavens, Commissioner, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Mrs Killick said.

She finally to Edward Barnard. Though he was no longer a member of the Cabinet, everyone in the room recognized the central role he had played in the current crisis.

For the next few minutes Edward Barnard summarized, as concisely as he could, the events of the previous few days: the World Tiger Summit in St Petersburg, the trip to the Russian Far East, the dinner in Khabarovsk with President Popov and Yuri Yasonov.

When Barnard had finished, it was MI5’s turn.

‘From the Russian point of view,’ Jane Porter began, ‘this must look like a win-win situation. They hand the tape to Edward Barnard, knowing that if it becomes public the prime minister is finished. And if Jeremy Hartley goes down the drain, his cause goes down the drain too. He is committed, politically and personally, to achieve victory for the Remain camp in the Referendum. If he is out on his ear and possibly heading for jail, and if these documents become public, the prospects of Remain winning the vote will suddenly look much thinner than they do today. Precisely the objective the Russians are aiming at. They are fed up with the EU. They would like to get rid of it. Brexit is off to a good start.’

‘So what do we do?’ Mabel Killick was beginning to sound impatient. ‘Do we just sit on this Referendum dossier and hope it doesn’t emerge before the next election? Do we pretend to the PM that we know nothing and suspect nothing?’

Sir Oliver Holmes stood up suddenly. He picked up his chequered cap and solemnly placed it on his head.

‘There is no way I could be party to that kind of proceeding. With respect, Madam Chair, you have only one possible course of action. And that is to investigate the documents as quickly and as thoroughly as you can. If those documents show, upon examination, that the prime minister has instigated or cooperated in illegal acts, then you have no alternative except to institute proceedings. That is my view now, and it will remain my view to my dying day.’

To say Sir Oliver Holmes stormed out of Room A of the Cabinet office would be an overstatement. But he certainly swept out majestically. The doorman saluted. What was going on in there, he wondered?

In the end, the meeting sided with Sir Oliver. His opinion, so strongly voiced, carried the day, even though he wasn’t present.

Mabel Killick summed up. ‘There will be no minutes of this meeting. I will not be reporting to the PM or anyone else. If the matter comes up, the agreed answer must be that the subcommittee met informally to discuss various logistical questions. That should be quite enough. As to the substance, I take it we are all agreed that that there will be an enquiry and I shall hold myself responsible, together with Sir Oliver Holmes, for seeing that such an enquiry is properly carried out and its conclusions are fully ventilated.’

The home secretary then walked briskly out of the room with her two aides.

The others followed her, looking around for their drivers as they emerged into the street.

Edward Barnard, who no longer had a driver, felt a momentary pang. He missed being a minister of the Crown and a member of the Cabinet. He had liked the feeling of being important even if, in reality, he wasn’t very important. Who was it who said: ‘nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all’? Whoever it was, was spot on.

When he got home, Melissa had a large drink waiting for him.

‘Cheer up, darling. You’re the leader now, leader of the Leavers. People are going to expect great things of you. At the moment, the government has everything in its favour. They’ve got the funding; they’ve got the BBC; the polls give them a clear lead. What are you going to do, Edward? You haven’t got much time to pull the rabbit out of the hat.’

Edward Barnard felt suddenly confident. More confident than he had felt in a long time, even when he was swaggering around with his ministerial red box.

‘I’ll take the dogs out before I come up,’ he said, as he reached for the whisky decanter.