by Tom Bradby
‘Exactly.’
‘You’re not convinced?’
‘It feels a bit too neat, I suppose.’
‘Which part?’
‘This crisis blows up just as we need convincing that Mikhail’s offer to defect is serious.’
‘You think we should share that thought with the foreign secretary?’
‘No. You?’
‘Agreed. We need to see if this video exists and appears genuine. We can then take a sober view. But if they potentially have evidence, we have to see it.’
Sir Alan appeared lost in thought as they walked across the courtyard, up the grandiose staircase, and were ushered into the foreign secretary’s enormous office, with its magnificent array of leather-bound books and treasures from the days when the UK had bestrode the globe. Meg Simpson sat behind her mahogany desk, looking out over Horse Guards Parade and St James’s Park.
Normally, the foreign secretary received guests in the spacious red leather seating at the other end of the office, but perhaps she wanted to keep the great bulwark of the desk between her and the secrets they were about to impart. There was a single-page briefing note Sir Alan had evidently prepared on the desk before her and she plunged straight into its contents, without any reference to the strange Cobra meeting they’d all just sat through.
‘I’d like to walk back a few paces,’ the foreign secretary said. ‘I obviously understand that the allegations about the prime minister’s Russian connections first surfaced in the leadership election and have been a thorn in his side ever since, but I seem to recall that when I asked you about them in our first meeting here, you said that there was nothing to the charges and the case was closed.’
Sir Alan leant forward in his chair. In Kate’s experience, he liked to dominate politicians and clearly felt uncomfortable at the expanse of wood between them. On reflection, perhaps that had been Meg Simpson’s thinking. Kate’s respect for her crept up a notch. ‘In the end, the evidence we had was not conclusive.’
‘Walk me through it from the beginning.’
‘Kate recruited a young nanny called Lena Sabic to help us plant a bug on a super-yacht owned by Igor Borodin, who used to be the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and is – or was – a close friend of the Russian president. We planned the operation because we knew that Igor likes to keep in touch with what his successors are up to and has been in the habit of inviting them to join him on his yacht. The operation was Kate’s idea and it was one of the most successful of the past decade. We managed to record a meeting of Russia’s most senior intelligence officials, who were discussing our former prime minister’s prostate cancer before it was known to anyone back here, including us. The way in which they were discussing the leadership election that would ensue from his resignation suggested to us that one of the candidates to replace him was working for the Kremlin.’
‘I have not received a transcript of that conversation?’
‘We closed the file.’
‘Not to me.’
‘I’ll send it across later.’
Meg rewarded him with a thin smile. ‘In any event, I assume that once the prime minister had declared his prostate cancer and resigned, that reinforced your notion that the conversation you recorded was genuine.’
‘Yes.’
‘So how did you proceed?’
‘We began an investigation into the candidates.’
‘All of us?’ There was a twinkle in her eye. ‘Even me?’
‘Once the contest narrowed to Imogen Conrad and the prime minister, we focused our attentions there.’
‘Perhaps it was me the Russians were referring to all along and I just didn’t make the final cut.’
Sir Alan didn’t smile back at her. ‘Perhaps.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Nothing conclusive, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence that James Ryan was recruited by the Russians as an agent many years ago, probably while he was an army officer in Kosovo. Kate’s deputy, Ravindra, followed a lead to Geneva and may have uncovered details of the payments the PM has received over the years, but he was found hanging from the ceiling of his flat after his return. We later discovered that the woman he had gone to see in Switzerland – a former secretary to one of the Russian president’s lawyers – had been killed and dumped in a wood.’
The foreign secretary turned to gaze out over St James’s Park again. They watched the prime minister’s convoy turn out of the back of Downing Street and speed away down Horse Guards Parade.
‘As you will see from the file when I send it across,’ Sir Alan continued, ‘the original operation also pointed to a spy named Viper working somewhere in Whitehall, who had been helping their agent of influence.’
Meg Simpson turned back to face them. ‘I don’t recall you mentioning an agent in Whitehall.’
‘It was my husband,’ Kate said. ‘The Service has kept the matter top secret at my request.’
Simpson’s dark green eyes flicked from Sir Alan to Kate and back again. ‘It sounds to me as if the decision to close this file was rather too hasty.’
‘I don’t think we had any choice but to pursue the original intelligence to see where it led,’ Sir Alan said. ‘But, equally, given that we could find no proof of anything, I felt it was our duty to let the matter rest once the prime minister had taken office.’
‘I don’t understand. You just told me the operation to bug the yacht was a great success.’
Sir Alan could see immediately where this was going. He edged forward still further in his seat. ‘It yielded exactly the kind of intelligence we hoped it might.’
‘That the prime minister was working for the Russians?’
‘That our country’s security might have been compromised at the highest level.’
‘Might have been?’
‘That’s correct, yes.’
‘So you think the intelligence was accurate and that the man or woman they were originally referring to in the bugged conversation was our current prime minister?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you closed the file?’
Sir Alan wasn’t enjoying this. ‘Froze the file would be a better way of putting it. We pursued every available lead, but came to a series of dead ends. We had to take a view. He is our democratically elected leader. To put it simply, I felt we had to put up and shut up.’
‘So it doesn’t matter to you if our leader is working with – or for – the Russians? Given what is happening today and, if I’m going to be frank with you, his tendency to inaction on the subject, I should have thought it was all pretty relevant.’
‘Perhaps we should have done more to keep the investigation alive.’
‘It would seem so.’
‘But there was no proof and we had to bear in mind that the Russians might have been attempting to deliberately mislead us.’
‘Which would make the original operation less a success and more a catastrophic failure, I should have thought.’
Kate glanced at her superior, who seemed suddenly to be tying himself in intellectual knots in a very uncharacteristic manner. But, then, he looked dead tired.
‘And what do you think, Mrs Henderson?’
‘About which aspect in particular?’
‘Is the prime minister a Russian spy?’
‘Yes.’ Meg Simpson gazed at her steadily. ‘I mean, I can add caveats about what exactly we mean by that term. But if you’re asking me whether he has been compromised in some way by the Russians, then, yes, I think he has.’
‘What did you make of his behaviour in the Cobra meeting?’
‘It confirmed my suspicions.’
‘Not everyone in your organization agrees with you, I believe.’
Kate glanced at Sir Alan, whose flinty gaze gave not a hint of anger. Fucking Ian, she thought. ‘Not everyone agrees with me, no.’
‘Then what makes you so sure?’
‘I believe the original operation was well set up, so there
is very little chance the intelligence was planted. I don’t know how they could possibly have known the PM had prostate cancer—’
‘Unless Viper told them,’ the foreign secretary shot back.
‘My husband was not aware of the PM’s illness.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about some other source? Perhaps you have another traitor in your organization who picked up the information from somewhere?’
‘Perhaps, but the knowledge of the PM’s illness was kept to such a tight circle around him.’ Kate shrugged, tired of the interrogation suddenly. ‘If you’re asking me, I think the original intelligence was correct and the prime minister is very lucky we were unable to produce any direct evidence of his treachery.’
‘And yet here it now is, popped into our laps by the hands of a potential defector.’ Simpson was looking directly at her now.
‘Potentially.’
‘Do you believe it to be credible?’
‘We’ll have no idea until we see the video,’ Sir Alan said.
‘So what is it you need from me?’
Sir Alan glanced at Kate, as if he was unsure quite how to answer this.
‘Cover,’ Simpson replied for him.
‘If this video were to prove genuine and the allegations surrounding the prime minister true, the controversy and potential damage to our democracy would be incalculable,’ Sir Alan said.
‘And if it were to prove a fake, you might end up with egg all over your face, which you would much rather was our face.’
‘I don’t think you’d thank us if this blew up without warning,’ Sir Alan said.
‘I doubt I’m going to thank you either way.’ She flipped the file containing his single-page briefing note shut. ‘You should know that I’m a patriot more than a politician and I came into politics motivated more by love of country than party. And if that sounds unbearably pompous, you may yet live to be glad of it.’ She stood. ‘I recognize from your note that time is pressing, not least because the events in Estonia make it so, but I would nevertheless like the weekend to think about it. There is a lot at stake here, as I hardly need tell the pair of you.’ She nodded at them. ‘Thank you for coming over.’
They walked unescorted to the door and let themselves out. ‘She’s a lot more impressive than she looks,’ Kate said, as they descended the stairs.
‘She’s a ball-breaker.’
‘That’s a bit sexist.’
‘Why?’
‘You wouldn’t call a man a ball-breaker, would you?’
‘I might.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I’d call Ian a parasite. Does that count?’
Kate smiled. ‘No, I don’t think it does.’
They discussed Ian’s evident deceit in the car on the way back to Vauxhall, exactly how and when he had communicated his reservations about the Russians’ intentions to the foreign secretary.
They parted company at the lifts and Kate went first to the operations room, where Danny and Julie were seated in front of the screens in the corner, surrounded by empty coffee cups. It had clearly been a long night. Julie glanced up at her. ‘You’re going to want to see this.’
Kate bent closer to the screen. The video feed was of the farmhouse in Puhlova. It showed an enormous lorry, which had backed up into one of the barns. ‘I don’t know what they’re doing, but . . .’ Danny clicked a button in the corner and brought up another stream of video, which showed a group of bikers – perhaps a hundred or more – driving along a highway. ‘They left their hotel about ten minutes after your Cobra meeting ended. They drove straight to the border, which they crossed about ten minutes ago. It looks like they’re headed home to St Petersburg.’
Kate stared at the screen. This made absolutely no sense at all.
‘There’s more,’ Danny said. ‘I traced the lorry back. It took me a while.’ He was now rewinding some footage. He hit play. ‘It left this army base just outside St Petersburg at nine last night. I guess we can’t say for sure it’s a pull-out unless we can get sight of what the hell they’re loading into that lorry, but it sure looks like one.’
‘They knew we were on to them,’ Julie said, her big green eyes fixed on Kate. She didn’t need to add that, at nine last night, the circle of knowledge within MI6 had been very small indeed. Kate picked up the phone and dialled C’s extension. He answered immediately. ‘It’s Kate,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘There’s good and bad news. So far as we can tell, the Night Wolves are pulling out, with all their kit. I’ll get Danny to put the feed back on PCR2 if you want to take a look.’
She waited while he got the correct screen up. ‘Split the screen on PCR2,’ she told Danny, and he did as instructed so Sir Alan could see the lorry being loaded up and the bikers on the St Petersburg highway. ‘What’s the bad news?’ Sir Alan asked.
‘Danny tracked the lorry back to its point of origin. It left a military base just outside St Petersburg at nine last night.’ There was a long silence, as he absorbed the implications of this. ‘What time did you inform Downing Street you wanted a Cobra meeting?’ she asked.
‘I called the cabinet secretary at midnight. I wanted to reduce the risk they would leak it to the morning papers. So . . . to state the obvious, to save you the trouble, the circle of knowledge was still very small at nine p.m., and restricted entirely to people inside this building.’
‘You think Ian could have tipped off the PM, or someone close to him?’
‘I’m starting to think Ian is capable of almost anything.’
Kate bit her lip as she turned this over in her mind. Blaming Ian was reasonable – his appetite for promotion was voracious – but also, perhaps, too easy. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, though. If they were really trying to stage a coup, why back off now?’
‘Because they know we’re on to them,’ Sir Alan said. ‘Because they’ve lost the element of surprise. Because, after the car crash that was the attempted coup in Montenegro, they don’t want to look clumsy and amateur again.’
Kate glanced at Julie and Danny. Both were transfixed by the screens in front of them. ‘Or because the whole episode was designed to convince us of Mikhail’s good intentions,’ she said. ‘They stage an effective but brief theatrical show, which they know very well will be marked down as a quick win for us.’
‘A train of thought that leads us to a still darker and more confusing place, because, if they’re in a position to do that, it hardly suggests that Igor and his son have one foot in a Siberian gulag already.’
Kate didn’t know what to say to that. It felt as if, every day, her work became a more complex and confusing mental jigsaw. If the question in Operation Sigma had been simple enough – was the original bugged conversation on Igor’s super-yacht genuine or faked for their benefit? – the same could be said of this latest twist: was Igor and Mikhail’s story true and their offer real?
But how to be sure of the answer? If what everyone sought was incontrovertible proof, all they ever had to fall back on was instinct – and primarily her instinct at that.
But it didn’t waver. Not truly. She knew politicians were always going to want the comfort of proof, but intelligence rarely worked like that. Sometimes rock-solid instinct was all you were going to get. Thank God for Sir Alan. He, at least, understood this implicitly.
‘I’d better call Downing Street,’ he said. ‘I’ll place a small bet they’ll spin this as evidence of the wisdom of caution – which is, of course, another aspect we should think about carefully.’ He ended the call.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Julie said.
Kate mumbled a vague reply. She turned away and walked up to her office. Suzy was waiting for her. She had a way of addressing people – both hands on hips, her angular body tilted slightly forward – that they certainly didn’t teach in Charm School. ‘The original Operation Sigma case file is still locked,’ she said.
Kate was tempted to reply, Of course it bloody is, but her brain was clouded by the conversation she’d just had with the chief, and its implications. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because we couldn’t prove the prime minister was working for the Russians, we had exhausted all potential leads, and, under the circumstances, it felt like locking away the allegations was the responsible thing to do.’ Kate almost added that it had not been her choice, but decided against it. She sensed that, with Suzy, every word was likely to be taken down and used in evidence against her.
‘But I need to read it.’
‘I thought we went through this before you joined.’
‘The allegations are still part of the political conversation. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in the sand and prevent—’
‘I can tell you what you need to know.’ Kate dropped her bag beside her desk and sat down. Suddenly she felt shattered.
‘I need the file, Kate.’ Suzy was in the doorway. She seemed to fill it, despite her narrow frame, but perhaps that was just her demeanour. She tucked a strand of jet-black hair neatly behind her right ear. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m a stooge for the Security Service during my time here, but I’m really surprised they – we – were not called in to have a look at this. The director general would have a coronary if he knew the scale of the intelligence you’d kept from him. I mean, the prime minister potentially working for the Russians . . .’
‘Well, to be clear, that is exactly what I will think if you take that kind of tone.’
Suzy stood her ground. ‘I’m part of this team now, Kate. I’ve been around long enough now to know what that involves.’
Kate got up, went to the filing cabinet in the corner, unlocked it with the key she kept in her pocket, took out the file marked Operation Sigma and handed it to her colleague. Suzy looked pleased, as if she had expected the conversation to reach a different conclusion.
Kate logged on to her computer. She’d barely had a chance to glance through her emails when their team assistant, Maddy, put her head around the door. She had an unerring ability to gauge instantly Kate’s state of mind. ‘You all right?’
