by Tom Marcus
I always thought of the intelligence officers from the SVR, who are basically MI6’s counterparts, as the stealthy bank robbers. Not the sort that would stick 10kg of military-grade explosives on the safe door, blow it, and walk out with the loot, but the type that has everyone looking in one direction while they flirt with the security guards. Once the vault door is open, they leave virtually everything apart from one seemingly insignificant piece of jewellery. Then they close the door behind them and it is weeks before anyone realizes anything is missing, by which point they are either out of the country or have planted enough ‘evidence’ somewhere else to mean that everyone chases their tails for years before they truly understand what’s happened.
Stealing secrets with a feather, that’s how the Russians did it. This particular job started out following a Russian SVR officer as he left the Russian Embassy in his Mercedes S Class with the 248 diplomatic plates, but over the weeks we’d stopped our surveillance of him and changed instead to watching the woman he’d recruited to steal some information about a piece of equipment used in satellite imagery. The Russian had recruited a tall blonde in her early twenties and encouraged her to start a relationship with one of the assistant engineers on the satellite projects. She had massive debts, which he used as the hook to get her to do what he asked. It was starting to work too; we’d watched this blonde woman and the slightly overweight engineer go on a few dates, sharing some late-night drinks as they grew closer.
The Russians’ hope was that once the blonde had completely embedded herself in the engineer’s life, they could gradually start hacking his emails and phone messages. This data would be pieced together with further information the blonde would glean from him during some pillow talk about his job. This was clever, as it distanced the Russians from the situation. It was the sort of tactic that large defence contractors always tried to make their employees aware of, but many never believe that the young, attractive blonde is only interested in them for the Top Secret equipment they have access to.
We’d heard rumours of corporate espionage between two leading defence contractors who were bidding for the same piece of military work; a project worth hundreds of millions of pounds. During a budget meeting, the rival company had managed to hack into the CEO’s mobile phone, which was on the boardroom table, switched off. Using very illegal, but extremely clever techniques, they managed to switch on the CEO’s phone without activating the screen, and turned on the microphone, enabling them to listen to the whole meeting.
It had been another long shift and the whole team checked into a hotel, because we were at least three hours away from our regional Operations Centre, plus we were back on this job first thing in the morning. At reception we all signed for our room keys using our normal alias names; we all did our fake signatures and postcodes for home addresses we never visited. Walking into my hotel room, I threw my kitbag down next to the bed and headed straight for the toilet. One thing you rarely get the chance to do when you’re an operator is take a piss, so you need a bladder the size of a basketball.
Collapsing on the bed and switching the TV on in this small room, I started to take all my kit off, ready to get in the shower and get some sleep. I felt heavy; everything was an effort. This operation had us racing all over the place and I hadn’t eaten for at least eight hours, which meant I was running on empty. Leaving my trail of clothes behind me, I dragged myself to the shower, battling with the mixer tap on the wall to get the balance between freezing cold or scorching hot just right. I closed my eyes and allowed the water to warm me up.
I’m not sure how long I’d been in the shower, but I was starting to fall asleep standing up. ‘STAND BY!’ Holy shit, my radio must still be on, had I missed the call to get back on the ground? Fuck.
Diving out of the shower, I lost my footing on the tiled floor and slipped into the door frame. I had to get all my kit on quick and rush down to our vehicle in the hotel car park. Shit. I had no idea what was going on. I could hear gunfire … Gunfire? I stopped, half-naked with only one sock on, grabbing my radio. Taking a moment to listen to the transmissions, I realized it wasn’t my team. A few more seconds and it dawned on me that it wasn’t even my radio giving the commentary on all hell breaking loose. It was the TV – some action scene in a film. Sitting on the edge of the bed again, dripping wet, I felt stupid. How had I mistaken the sounds from the film as coming from my team? Maybe I was more tired and hungry than I had thought.
I began to shiver in the cold hotel room as my body desperately tried to warm itself. My one sock now soaking wet, I wrapped a towel around me and tried to find my phone to call Lucy. I needed to hear her voice and make sure my son went to sleep OK. As I pulled it out of the pocket of my crumpled jeans, I saw a text message from her saying that she was going to sleep and to text her when I’d finished to let her know I was safe. I knew I couldn’t phone her now; it wouldn’t be fair to wake her up, potentially waking up the whole house at this late hour, and she’d know I was lying if I said I was OK. How the fuck would I explain I’d just thought the TV was my team radio? I felt dizzy and disorientated and my arm was starting to sting like fuck from when I’d fallen into the door frame stumbling out of the shower.
Right, I needed to get a grip here. I was hungry, dehydrated and tired. At this time of night the only place to get food was the vending machine in the foyer. Ducking my mouth under the tap in the bathroom, I glugged down as much water as I could, threw on my jeans and trainers and headed downstairs, the key card for my room in hand. Life as an operator isn’t glamorous; it’s probably the polar opposite to what people think working for MI5 is like.
Standing at the vending machine, my clothes were sticking to my still-wet skin. I spotted one of my teammates outside the entrance smoking and using his phone, probably talking to his girlfriend. Finding myself making quick choices between chocolate bars and crisps, anything with a high calorie count, I fired all the change I had into the machine, grabbed my snacks and walked back up the stairs to my room as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why I wanted to get back up there so quickly, but all I felt was the desperate hope that I wouldn’t see anyone else from my team tonight.
Making it back to the safety of my room, I threw all the snacks on to the bed; I wasn’t even hungry any more, I was tired. Before anything else I’d need to prep my kit ready for the morning, and then I could go to sleep knowing I wouldn’t be flapping around first thing: radio batteries on charge, phone plugged in, passport and ID next to some clean socks and pants. Ready to go.
Stripping off again, I rearranged the room, pushing the bed right up against the wall that housed the small bathroom, and moving the bedside table against the door. I put my car keys on top of it so if the room door did open while I was asleep, I’d get a noisy prior warning. Grabbing a towel from the bathroom, I dried my hair and the rest of my body, which was still slightly too damp. Switching all the lights off, I climbed into bed, rearranging the pillows so that I could get as close to the wall as possible. I started to drift off, seeking comfort from resting my forehead against the ice-cold wall. This wasn’t how most people slept, I knew that, but it reminded me of being in harsh conditions as a kid, allowing myself just enough comfort to fall asleep, but not so much that I wasn’t alert. That kept me sharp back then, and I hoped the method would continue to serve me as it always had done.
Out of the darkness I could see a hand coming down towards my face. Swinging my arm out to bat it away, I sprang out of bed with an almost unnatural burst of energy and speed. Standing in the middle of the room, I tried to see who’d just tried to attack me, but couldn’t make out anything in the blackness. Backing towards the window, I ripped at the curtains to let some light in. Flashes shone in with every tug at the curtains, and eventually I managed to open them fully. I could see the whole room. Empty. The fucker must be in the bathroom.
I moved forward quietly, able to hear the low whine of the battery chargers on the table to my right. The keys were still on the bedsi
de table, which hadn’t moved. The security chain was still in place on the back of the door. As I checked the bathroom I already knew it would be empty. I’d had another nightmare. Realizing I was safe and that it was nothing more than a bad dream that had woken me up, I tried to catch my breath. My heart was racing. How the fuck had I managed to spring out of bed as quickly as that? I couldn’t do it like that when I was awake! The adrenaline that had flooded my body was now ebbing away, and I felt the harsh cold of the room again. I needed to get back to sleep, but I was frightened of having another nightmare.
I was meant to be this super-hard spook recruited from Military Special Ops, but here I was curled up in a foetal position in the corner of the room, too scared to fall sleep. Fuck’s sake. Trying something different, I grabbed the pillows and quilt off the bed and took them to the other corner of the room. Making a makeshift bed from the pillows, I wrapped myself in the quilt to keep warm. Listening to all the sounds that surrounded the hotel, I felt my eyes getting heavy again. I had to be up in three hours and the only thing ready for the job was my watch, which was emitting its luminous glow and providing the only bit of light in the pitch-black room. I knew I would be fucked if I didn’t at least get an hour’s sleep to take the edge off.
It felt like only five minutes had passed before my alarm went off. I always made sure it was incredibly loud and annoying, in order to force me to get up and switch it off. I must have set it wrong – there was no way it was 0530hrs already. Fuck’s sake, it was. My eyes felt like they were on fire. Right, I only had thirty minutes before I had to be in my car, travelling to the target’s address. I walked to the bathroom and switched on the tiny kettle, desperately needing some coffee to give me a caffeine kick. Once I was clean and my hair didn’t look like I’d been sleeping on the floor, fighting with invisible demons all night, I finished getting ready and grabbed my kitbag.
Thankfully, no one else from the team was in the car park as I left the hotel and headed towards the target’s house. I was probably the first one on the ground, but I switched my car radio on and waited for the rest of the team to start shouting up that they were coming into the area. Opening the bag of crisps I’d bought last night, I heard the team leader check if anyone else was on the net yet. I quickly swallowed a mouthful of the unhealthiest breakfast I could choose and responded quickly, ‘Yes. Yes, Charlie Six One Two is in the area.’
‘Roger and good morning, we’ll wait for everyone else to get on the net then I will brief the team on air.’
I started to feel more awake; this job was a welcome break from the Islamic extremists and Irish targets. It actually meant for the first time in ages we were allowed to drive the nicer cars and wear more normal clothes, because we were generally in more civilized areas. The blonde woman that the Russian had recruited had left university with huge debts and had been trying to support herself as an escort. She held a receptionist’s job at an executive suite within Farnborough Airport, just minutes away from the satellite engineer’s place of work.
When the Russian intelligence officer recruited her, it gave her the opportunity to live a better life without having to sell herself. He also promised her a new identity, a paid-for home and a job with the ministry in Moscow if she helped him. She had no family, so this offer was perfectly pitched to lure her, and she got to work almost immediately. We knew from the eavesdropping equipment we’d planted in her flat and at the engineer’s house that he was unwittingly revealing enough so that, once they’d pieced it together with the emails, text messages and voicemail, the Russians would be able to replicate this technology in Moscow.
As I ate the rest of my snacks in Farnborough Airport car park waiting for the team to arrive so we could start the job, I rang my wife; they’d probably be mid-breakfast now so hopefully calm enough for her to talk. As I unlocked my phone … BANG BANG BANG!
Fuck me! I moved the gear stick into reverse, piled on the revs, was about to release the handbrake to get the car out of there when I looked out of the window to see what had just battered the car. Parking attendant, cunt. I put the car back into neutral, let the engine revs die back down to idle and dropped my window about an inch.
‘What’s up, pal?’
‘Ticket, you have ticket, parking, yes?’
This guy was probably from Ghana judging by his accent. I took the parking ticket out of the cup holder in the centre console and flashed it to him. He walked off, having no clue that I wasn’t in the right mental state for him to be banging on the car windows right now. As I wound the window back up with the electric switch I could hear a faint, ‘Hello … Heeellllloooooo?’
I’d pressed ‘call’ just at the point the parking attendant nearly gave me a heart attack. Picking the phone up out of the footwell down by my feet, I heard the voice I’d needed. Ten minutes of talking about my little boy, and how he’d kept her awake at night singing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ at the top of his voice, and my wife’s plans for that day after the school run. Normality. Some people call their lives boring, mundane, but right then I would have killed for normality. I desperately wanted to be home with my family, but knew how important this job was. If the Russian managed to steal all the secrets he needed from the engineer, he’d be advancing his country’s technology research and development by at least thirty years.
‘Do you think we’ll be able to have a holiday this year? Nothing expensive, can be camping in the Peak District, just anything to get away.’
My wife was doing an amazing job raising our son and creating a home for us. She was a remarkable woman and I felt like I was failing them in some way. I was so wrapped up with my team I wasn’t focused on being a father and because I wasn’t prioritizing properly I’d let the finances slip too. This had to change, but I had absolutely no idea how to do it. How was I meant to split my time between national security and my little family? All the while I could feel myself being pulled apart, cracks starting to appear that I couldn’t plaster over and carry on. The little fractures in my armour were becoming larger.
‘Thanks, stations, everyone is now in the area. We have Charlie Six One Two close in direct on the entrance waiting for HUNGRY WORM.’
‘Just to clarify, I can see the entrance to the executive suite and the vehicle access at the barriers of the car park but can NOT go with.’
‘Roger that, Charlie Six One Two, we have stations close in to react on your stand-by.’
It was fairly unlikely that this blonde woman had any sort of anti- or counter-surveillance training by the Russian, but I still needed to be clever about this. I couldn’t follow her out of the car park if she left the building; despite her lack of operational training, people are still intuitive and she would suspect something wasn’t quite right even if she couldn’t identify exactly what was wrong.
‘Base, permission?’
‘Go ahead, no change.’
‘Stations, DIRTY BOOT has arranged to meet HUNGRY WORM. The details of the meet have been sent with a florist. We don’t have any further intelligence, just a heads-up.’
‘Charlie Six One Two, roger.’
I was now looking for two things, the blonde woman and a florist. This was a smart play by the Russian, arranging to meet HUNGRY WORM by some sort of coded message. It gave him distance and it could be argued either that he didn’t send the message or if he did it was merely a gesture of affection rather than espionage. The intelligence about DIRTY BOOT’s use of a florist was unknown; it was probably pieced together from previous surveillance and electronic intercept. We wouldn’t send anyone into the florist to see what the message was just in case the florist the Russian used was recruited too and tipped him off. We needed both HUNGRY WORM and DIRTY BOOT to be as confident as possible that we weren’t watching their every move.
The problem was we had absolutely no idea where this meeting was. We needed to cover it to gather enough actionable intelligence to present to the Russian Embassy and kick this guy out of the country for trying to steal our
tech.
Nearly twenty minutes went by before I caught my first glimpse of the blonde.
‘From Charlie Six One Two, that’s HUNGRY WORM walking towards the entrance of the executive suite, white waist-length jacket, black knee-length skirt, white shoes, hair down, carrying a black handbag.’
‘That’s HUNGRY WORM IN, IN the executive suite. For information, she walked in from the area of the barriers, she didn’t drive a vehicle into the car park.’
‘Roger, thanks, any close-in stations see how HUNGRY WORM arrived?’
‘Negative, but there’s been regular buses over the past few minutes on the main, I don’t have sight of the bus stop, though.’
‘OK, roger that.’
The close-in cars had fucked up here. The team leader’s response said it all; we had me inside the car park watching the entrance to the building, and the cars close-in outside should have been able to see the barriers from the main road and any bus stops or likely drop-off points. It was highly likely that she arrived here by vehicle – bus, taxi or car driven by someone else. It was too far for her to walk from her home address in those heels.
‘Close-in stations, can you get direct on the bus stop, the barriers and the main road north and south, please?’
Today wasn’t the day for fuck-ups.
I was getting hungry again and could start to feel my eyes getting itchy and hot. I was tired and focusing on my mirrors for this long was starting to take its toll on my sleepless body. Luckily I didn’t need to wait long until I got something else to focus on. I saw an unmarked white courier van pull up to the barriers of the car park. As it entered it made its way slowly to the entrance of the building.
