Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  No wonder the spooks are salivating, Nat thought. She flipped through the briefing papers that had been prepared when the investment was signed off: development pathways, risk assessments, mitigation scenarios, and enough budgets and schedules to launch a mission to Jupiter. In among the i-dotting and t-crossing, she found a document that covered the life and career of Dr James Palatine. It was more extensive than usual, because he’d been designated a level 4 risk, only one rung short of the no doubt terrifyingly perilous summit.

  While researching his doctoral thesis at UCL, she read, Palatine came to the attention of the intelligence establishment.

  He took a commission with the Intelligence Corps, and spent much of his time on assignments with the SAS in the Middle East and Kosovo. As well as training in combat and survival to the level required for an SAS secondment, he attended courses in surveillance and counter-surveillance, explosives and artillery. He also studied Arabic and is said to have an exceptional facility for languages. Palatine endured a fractious relationship with his senior officers and intelligence service liaisons, frequently questioning orders and proving resistant to the disciplines inherent in a military career. He is reported to have shown exceptional courage and cool-headedness in combat situations, but his detractors point to an aptitude for violence that is alarming even for a serving soldier. Despite successfully completing assignments that could probably not have been carried out by any other operative, he is now regarded as unreliable.

  Nat remembered him from a Grosvenor conference he’d been paid to attend: tall, rangy, with wolf-like grey eyes and an arrogant manner. He’d been standing in a group of men who seemed to be keeping their distance, as if instinctively aware that proximity to Palatine would do them no favours and might possibly be dangerous. When it was his turn to speak, he’d presented a single slide, which read:

  INFORMATION THAT IS 100% SECURE IS 100% USELESS.

  As soon as information was shared between two people, he’d explained, it became insecure; but unless it was shared, there was no point in having it. He had then, to Nat’s annoyance, delivered a lecture on the ethics of eavesdropping, warning that, if the objective was to liberate the world from the threat of terrorism, data monitoring would prove to be a red herring: the only solution was to eradicate poverty, war and oppression – most of which, he asserted, originated in policies devised by western politicians intent on serving only the short-term interests of a powerful elite. As he spoke, Nat, who spent most of her working life feeding these men’s overweight egos, set aside her irritation, the better to enjoy the spectacle of their baffled and indignant faces.

  Feeling a little fluttering resurgence of the interest he’d aroused in her at the time, she skimmed the rest of Palatine’s biography. Born 1974. Mother died in a cycling accident when he was fourteen. Father, a doctor, became a recluse – addicted to opiates, apparently – and left care of his son to various au pairs and boarding schools. A long list of cups and caps (though not quite as long, Nat decided, as the list of accolades she’d collected during her own school career). After leaving the army, he was offered a fellowship at Imperial College, where he founded a discipline called DAIMS, which stood for Data Acquisition and Interpretation on a Massive Scale – a constellation of innovative technical solutions which have transformed the once intractable problem of accurately searching the world’s data communications for evidence of hostile activity.

  My god, thought Nat, the things people do for a living. She opened her email and sent Clive Silk a message, copied in to Sir Peter Beddoes, with contact details for half a dozen of her most sluggish clients.

  ‘These are my top prospects right now,’ she wrote. ‘I’m expecting them to sign deals to a minimum value of £4.2M over the next few weeks. Don’t let them off the hook!’

  On her way out, she dropped in on Sir Peter and told him that time was of the essence and she was taking the late afternoon flight to Marrakech, where Claude Zender was based.

  ‘Well done, Natalya. Report daily, if you wouldn’t mind. I’m sorry this thing has blown up—’

  ‘I don’t think Zender’s going to co-operate,’ she interrupted, finding that she could not bear to observe the wistful expression she brought to her chairman’s drooping features for a moment longer. ‘Can you keep Clive off my back, Peter? You understand how these things work, but he really doesn’t.’

  Green slime, as Intelligence Corps officers were known to the rest of the military, didn’t usually see much combat; but in January 1999 Captain James Palatine had been assigned to a ‘no-contact’ operation with an SAS unit in Kosovo which turned bad. The things he had seen and done still slopped through his dreams. It was as if some stinking dungeon in his psyche had been breached and its inmates allowed to run amok. Afterwards, they’d offered counselling, but even the word had sounded feeble in his ears, like throwing an inflatable duck to a man drowning in sewage. He’d left the army and retreated to the lab; and, drawn by the idea that fighting might be an art rather than a compulsion whose depths he dared not plumb, he’d taken up t’ai chi.

  He could turn up at his master’s gym whenever he liked, and Sam Hu Li would make time for him, though he might have to work alongside ‘my paying students’, as Sam pointedly called them. It was two years since the Korean had charged James for his services.

  ‘You still come see me?’ he observed one day. ‘I did something wrong. I put it right. For free!’

  He emphasised the words For free! as if they must be a source of amazement and delight, the sort of thing James would want to tell his friends about. Whenever the opportunity arose, Sam would introduce James as, ‘My charity student. A very sad case.’ Time had not dulled the pleasure this tease brought him.

  Sam’s gym was a former boxing establishment in an unloved area of Kentish Town, sandwiched between a bedraggled dirt football pitch and an Edwardian council block. James elbowed open the double doors and saw Sam in the middle of the empty room, completing a form. Beneath his feet, a hundred and twenty square yards of sprung oak floor gleamed with the lustre of a racehorse’s rump on a hot summer’s day. The floor was Sam’s obsession: every morning at seven he got down on hands and knees and buffed it with a wad of threadbare dusters; and periodically throughout the rest of the day, he would glare with great loathing at the chipboard ceiling, which was blotched and stained with the story of a long succession of floor-threatening leaks.

  It wouldn’t do to interrupt Sam’s form. James walked over to the cotton rag-rug that served as a changing room and pulled on a tracksuit, then watched his teacher cycle through the sequence of movements that composed the form. Sam moved so slowly it was as if he were recalibrating time itself in order to accommodate the degree of precision he required. Finishing the form, he stood motionless for a moment, then looked up.

  ‘Charity student, you are welcome!’

  Sam was a lightly built man in his early fifties with a shock of thick black hair, forthright brown eyes and a forbidding expression that disappeared when he smiled.

  ‘Begin, please.’

  James had completed barely thirty seconds of the form before Sam began his critique.

  ‘How ugly your arms are today! Your belly won’t be still and your legs are like stepladders, clack-clack-clack. Stop. Push hands with me.’

  Pushing hands is a discipline beloved of practitioners of ‘soft’ martial arts, those that aim primarily to manage and deploy the flow of energy, or chi. Practising with a master of the classic soft art, t’ai chi, is a disconcerting experience. With a few subtle movements that originate deep in his core, he corrals the student’s chi for his own ends, exploiting the loss of balance that results when a move the student initiates dissipates into nothing, or one he anticipates never takes place. As he worked with Sam, James found himself tottering like a puppet. His pushes were really Sam’s pulls, and his pulls were like leaning on a rope tied to thin air.

  They practised in silence, enjoying the companionable synchronicity of their movem
ents, then stopped and bowed to each other.

  ‘I am a better teacher for teaching you.’

  ‘Good of you to say so, Sam.’

  ‘But a poorer one.’

  ‘Master Sam Hu Li fails yellow belt in humour,’ said James.

  Sam roared with laughter and slapped him on the back. ‘Maybe you say the jokes, I do the laughing,’ he said.

  James didn’t know if the t’ai chi had done anything to help round up the ghouls of Kosovo and lock them in again. He still felt like a man who’d volunteered to have himself shackled to a desk – for his own good and everyone else’s – but at least he hadn’t killed anyone for the last six years. And today’s session with Sam had brought some comfort. You’re right not to go chasing after this Hamed character, he told himself as he left. The fight in the Camden park was a one-off, and you saved a girl from being assaulted – what could possibly be wrong with that?

  Having got back from the Grosvenor office at midday, Nat was reclining on her aquamarine velvet sofa and wondering what to do when she arrived in Marrakech. An incurable optimist, she didn’t doubt that she could get the IPD400 back: the combination of Grosvenor’s money and her own persuasive charms would prove irresistible to Claude Zender. But what was in it for her? Nothing. . . Except a black mark against her name and the commission on this and several other excellent deals she’d recently struck absent from her pay-packet.

  The beauty of this affair, it dawned on her, was that MI6’s insistence on absolute secrecy had a side-effect Clive Silk and Sir Peter might not have considered: it gave her carte blanche to do whatever she pleased. Claude Zender had never in his life revealed anything to anyone without being extravagantly paid for it, so who could say where the IPD400 might end up next, and who would know how it had got there?

  She opened a bottle of Tokaji Aszú and took it out onto the balcony. Her apartment was on the top floor of a Modernist block in Highgate and looked west over Hampstead Heath – a charming view in sunlight, though today the slopes of Parliament Hill lay flat under a uniform mass of low cloud and the bathing ponds around the near perimeter had the colour of tarnished pewter. Still, she needed the fresh air, and the wine. A moment of decision was upon her.

  Yesterday’s meeting had reminded her that the chaps at Grosvenor had a place for her, and she was in it. At their precious board meetings, she’d found out from Sir Peter’s PA, they made smirking reference to her sexual generosity and amused themselves by trying to guess which of Grosvenor’s clients she had slept with. To which the answer was, in fact, very few – most were the sort of men who seemed to have landed up in their lucrative and monotonous careers like fat cherubs descending on a fluffy cloud, and even flirting with them was dull work. Not that she cared what the Grosvenor men thought of her: Nat enjoyed sex and in her view people made too much of a fuss about it. Besides, she wasn’t a woolly-minded north London feminist, but a tough, ambitious girl from Kiev. On the Gazprom trainee scheme in Moscow, you either crossed your legs, frowned and did the same job for thirty years; or you wore a short skirt, smiled and took it from there. London called for a more covert style: Nat favoured sleekly tailored outfits with an invitingly soft or lustrous finish; and a touch of the uniform never went amiss. But still, whether played with scarlet lipstick or slub silk skirts, the game hadn’t changed.

  Nat wasn’t sure how much further it would take her. And an idea was taking shape – a daring idea that was thrilling to contemplate, even in its infancy. She spent a moment calculating how rich it would make her, then decided that, although she could probably do this alone, it would be good to have an ally. Someone strong, resourceful and trustworthy. Someone with whom she could happily share her eventual triumph. Someone like her older brother Nikolai.

  Nikolai Kocharian made a living smuggling cigarettes into Western Europe and stolen cars back East, and was the perfect man to have at your side when contemplating a course of action somewhat adrift from the straight and narrow. Nat called him in Kiev and explained what had happened.

  ‘End result,’ she concluded, ‘I’m ordered to get the IPD400 back. If I want to keep my job, which I don’t.’

  ‘You must not say that, Natalya. Why did they not want you to sell this weapon?’

  ‘It’s not a weapon, Niko, it’s an intercept device. The key thing is, they’re ready to spend nearly fourteen million sterling to get it back,’ said Nat, knowing that her brother liked hearing big numbers.

  ‘You want me to help you, huh?’

  ‘I’d feel much safer with you there, Nikolai. People might see I’m in trouble and try and mess me around. And you’re really the only person. . . ’ she tailed off appealingly.

  ‘I’ll look after you, little one. This guy you sold it to is in London?’

  ‘You’re a star, darling Niko, I knew you wouldn’t let me down. He’s in Marrakech.’

  ‘Marrakech?’

  ‘Morocco. It’s a fabulous place, you’ll love it,’ Nat lied. ‘It’ll be like a holiday. You’ll get a winter tan and all the girls will be after you.’

  ‘All the girls are already after me. Jesus, Nat. Africa!’

  ‘Just a few days. A couple of weeks at most. Please?’

  Nikolai said OK and gave a brotherly sigh; she said he was her hero and made a succession of affectionate noises. With the recruitment of her brother successfully completed, Nat felt her idea simply could not fail. Yes, there was planning to do, detail to work out. No doubt she’d encounter obstacles that would demand all her strength and intelligence. She couldn’t at present imagine what they might be, but anyway, what were obstacles for if not to be overcome? She poured herself another glass of wine and ordered a taxi for Heathrow. Most people in her position would have been cowed by the censure and the threats, the ominous directives emanating from the upper reaches of government, but she, Natalya Kocharian, had sensed an opportunity. It was this mindset that distinguished her from the herd.

  Sarah’s phone was still signalling from Wembley when James got back to Citygate soon after eleven. Seeing it blinking away made James realise that his resolve to leave well alone was weakening with every hour that passed. Soon, the battery would die and the trail would go cold.

  He went to Imperial College and discussed progress on their current project with his research partner Hugo Vanic, an anxious, kindly Slovenian who had once been James’s doctoral supervisor, but was now very much his junior. It soon became known that Dr Palatine was in at last, and a queue of visitors formed outside his lab, most of them bearing paperwork he was supposed to have dealt with months ago. At two-thirty, he sloped out of the building and walked back to Southwark. There’d been two more calls from Beddoes’ office and he decided he ought to return them.

  ‘James, many thanks indeed for getting back to me.’ Beddoes sounded like he was already on the wrong side of a bottle of claret. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about – can you come in to the office, say Thursday?’

  ‘No. What for?’

  ‘Oh. Not ideal to talk about it over the phone. How’s your schedule for next week?’

  ‘Fully booked,’ said James. ‘Is this about the IPD400?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’

  When James didn’t reply, Beddoes cleared his throat and said: ‘Well, I suppose you ought to know. It’s gone AWOL from the warehouse. Bloody awkward business.’

  James squeezed his cellphone so hard that the battery compartment cover popped off in his hand.

  ‘You don’t know where it is?’ Even asking the question made him feel sick. ‘Was it stolen?’

  ‘Not as such. James, I don’t want to say any more over the phone. Can I put you through to my PA? She’ll clear the diary—’

  James hung up, walked over to the window and stared out at the concrete-framed oblong of brown water that, in Citygate parlance, qualified as a view of the Thames. Grosvenor had somehow managed to mislay the prototype he’d completed barely three months ago. The news hit him like a long-expected a
ct of retribution. On first conceiving the project, he’d indulged himself with the fantasy that his device would be used to expose wrongdoing. He imagined dissembling politicians sent skulking back to their families, City fatcats denounced as cheats and thieves, tyrants exposed as tyrants and torturers with no place to hide. But had he ever really believed that? One of his assistants had christened the device Big Brother, to which James had objected that there was nothing Orwellian about the project – it was primarily a theoretical challenge that sought to demonstrate how the boundaries between software and hardware might be moved so as to better expose the power of the microprocessor to the fluidity of a bespoke programming language.

  ‘We could call it Little Sister,’ the lab assistant had replied.

  James didn’t like that any better, but the name stuck and now seemed disturbingly apt. Responding to a triumphant press release issued by Grosvenor’s marketeers, an article in the New Statesman had described him as ‘a textbook example of how well-meaning scientists end up playing stooge to the forces of oppression’. The implication of nerdy naivety rankled. Because it was true. Little Sister would not be used to hold the powerful to account – it would simply make them more powerful.

  There was one minor cause for optimism: his Grosvenor contract specified that none of the technologies he developed could be patented, and that all he need deliver was a proof of concept – a working prototype rather than a device which could be put into commercial operation. As far as James was concerned, that gave him licence to bury Little Sister inside the digital-security equivalent of several cubic metres of reinforced concrete which only he knew how to penetrate. There had been a number of frosty meetings on the subject, but James knew that their association with ‘the most radically innovative computer scientist of his generation’, as their PR people liked to call him, was Grosvenor’s trump card. However commercially idiotic the terms of his contract, they’d always been careful not to fall out with him – no doubt mindful of the fact that whenever the markets were reminded of the collaboration, their share price ticked pleasingly upwards.