The Kompromat Kill

by Michael Jenkins

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Sean screamed loudly. ‘Bastard.’

  He drank his bottle of beer, then opened another. He had no idea his mother had been an MI6 officer. He drifted back to those dark days in Berlin where he had lived with his mother and father from the age of ten on Bronteweg. His father was a captain in the Royal Engineers and a specialist officer recruited specifically for his map-making and cartography skills. Sean had always been told they had been posted to Berlin as part of the British Mission in Berlin, BRIXMIS as it was known, because of his father - but now he could see that it was his mother who probably had the primary reason for such a posting. BRIXMIS was The British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany and was formed in 1946 under the agreement between the chiefs of staff of the British and Soviet forces in occupied East Germany. The agreement called for the reciprocal exchange of liaison missions in order to foster good working relations between the military occupation authorities in the two zones.

  He loved his teenage days in Berlin and often revelled at his father’s stories of cold war spying under official cover and of wearing the British Army uniform wherever they went in East Germany. During the cold war, the right of the Mission to travel relatively freely throughout East German territory was used for gathering intelligence on Warsaw Pact forces based there. This included collecting intelligence on installations, troop movements, equipment, morale and weaponry.

  He knew his mother was involved in BRIXMIS but he had no idea she had been an MI6 agent. He needed to find out more very quickly. This was family. Something he’d never really had over the years after running away. He needed to know much more. He needed to know what his mother had done in those days. Sean had kept in touch with his father on a few occasions, but he’d never had a great relationship with him. He knew he needed to find his own way in life after his mother had died so he joined the army at eighteen. He just wanted to be by himself. No family. A loner. And a man who would fend for himself thereafter. Up until that point, he had loved Berlin. He had fond memories of his school, where he played rugby and cricket, and of the Grunewald, where he would walk with his mother. He loved the stories of adventure told by his father, who told him of his forays into East Germany, when he had once been stopped by the Stasi police and detained until the local soviet officers came to release them.

  BRIXMIS was a legitimate spying operation. Its missions into East Germany involved enormous risk for the men and women who conducted overt travel to collect covert intelligence. As the British Army's secret unit behind enemy lines in the cold war, incidents with Soviet forces were regular and at times brutal. Sean recalled how his father was allowed to take him and his mother into East Germany as part of cultural tours of the East. His dad had to wear service dress and not the combat dress he’d wear on operations, and Sean remembered visiting Leipzig and Colditz. Dresden remained etched in his memory because it was his mother’s favourite city, and they went to the opera there on a few occasions. His father had told him that he enjoyed these trips because he didn’t have to sleep in a ditch as he did on his normal tours across the border.

  The BRIXMIS tours, as they were called, took place in Mercedes G-Wagens and the three-person teams would collect intelligence and, on occasion, even break into Soviet command bunkers. The tours were made up of a tour officer like his father, a tour sergeant and a driver. Sean remembered his father showing him pictures and telling stories of how they were self-sufficient, cooking their own meals and sleeping in the countryside, either in the vehicle, as the driver always had to, or, as the other two normally did, in bivouacs or one-man tents. His father had told him that once they had left the Mission house in Potsdam they were entirely out of contact with their headquarters and were left to their own devices to deal with any incidents, arrests, or even attacks against them.

  The secure video app started to ring. It was Jack again.

  ‘Hi Jack. I’ve just read it. What the actual fuck is going on here? It is utterly bizarre that this has come out after so many years.’

  Jack looked quite white, Sean thought. No doubt nervous about having such emotional conversations over a satellite video link. He watched Jack hold up an old snuffbox. Quite an antique, Sean thought.

  ‘Your mother placed an encrypted message in this snuffbox the night she died Sean. It was hidden in a dead-letter drop for her handler to pick up if anything went wrong.’

  ‘What the hell did it say?’

  ‘We still don’t know yet. It’s being looked into. What we do know is the man who collected it ended up in a mental institution and only recently handed it over to D. He lives in Prague, where D has visited him on a few occasions.’

  ‘Bloody hell Jack. I need to get onto this and find out more. Where do I start?’

  ‘I agree Sean. Which is why I’m taking you off this entire operation. I’m pulling you in and Samantha will take over.’

  ‘Not a bloody hope. I’m staying right here.’

  ‘That simply won’t work. Surely you want to come off this job? You know as well as I do your mind won’t be on the job and you can start investigating your mother’s links to these modern-day events.’

  Sean’s mind was a mixture of confusion, fear, sadness and anger. It was the anger at the bastard who had killed his mother that festered the most.

  ‘What about this bloke Barrington?’ Sean asked, raising his voice.

  ‘He was dining with the Foreign Office diplomat who was kidnapped in Quaglino’s. An American, quite elderly now, but a former CIA station chief who is very close to the President’s National Security Advisor, John Redman. He was in London at the meeting with D on the very day he died.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake Jack. This is bloody messy now. You’re telling me this CIA bastard killed my mother and is now somehow linked to this saga we’re all fighting?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. We really don’t know in what capacity. Melissa has been investigating the background of the FCO diplomat and this ex-CIA chief. She’ll call you later with the details and I’ll send a note out shortly on where D had got to. It’s a big puzzle Sean. Melissa is expecting you home and you can work on it together from there.’

  ‘Jack, you’re not listening to me. I’m not coming in. I’m staying right here.’

  ‘I can’t allow that Sean, it’s all been decided.’

  ‘By fucking who?’

  ‘The acting Director General, D’s deputy. He doesn’t want any conflicts of interest or distractions.’

  ‘Well you can tell him to go and fuck himself. I’m staying, and I’ll get this done with Nadège too. You know I don’t just throw the towel in. I’ll cope.’

  With that, Sean clicked on the button to terminate the call.

  What the hell was going on, he wondered? How the fuck was his mother’s murderer linked to the FCO diplomat who had been mysteriously kidnapped? What was their connection? He finished his beer and paced the room vigorously. His mind was a mess. He couldn’t think straight at all.

  He decided to draw all the linkages on his sketchpad, just as he normally did to rationalise the relationships of people and their connections during intelligence investigations. Intelligence-linkage maps that he had been creating on every job he’d done for years. He started sketching, hoping Melissa could fill in the gaps during the call later.

  He placed a circle in the centre of the sketch pad with the name of the CIA killer. BARRINGTON. Then he drew three circles. In one he placed the name of the FCO diplomat – DUFF. In the next circle he put the name of the US National Security Advisor, REDMAN, carefully drawing a dotted line to D, who had died shortly after briefing the man. Then he put Nadège in another circle using the codename NIGHTOWL, with a link to her blonde lover whose name he didn’t know yet. He drew a few curved lines with arrows to a large blank space on the paper. He wrote the words background connections. He added the names of the Jews who were murdered in Chelsea, VAN DE LULE, wondering how their deaths were linked, if at all.

  What is
it that connects all these people, he asked himself? He simply didn’t know. He remembered the mission at hand. To recruit Nadège and find the bomber she had recruited, wondering about the extent of her tentacles.

  He drew a circle directly below Nadège with the name of the bomber – Wilson HEWITT. And finally he wrote the words BOMBER TARGETS at the bottom of the paper in large capitals followed by three question marks. He simply didn’t know. Finally, he typed his sketch into the i2 intelligence software which displayed images of the people, their linkages and their backgrounds. He would add to this as the intelligence picture became clearer.

  It wasn’t long before he found himself reliving the images and memories of his times with his mother. Each image and memory starting to layer the trauma he had carried for decades. His mind was numb, his body exerting all the manifestations of severe stress. Scratching incessantly. Sweating in the groin.

  He decided enough was enough and that he needed a good drink. Within fifteen minutes he was in a taxi heading into downtown Istanbul.

  Chapter 24

  Raffles Hotel, Istanbul

  Sean started the night thinking just a few drinks would do the job before he returned to the villa the next day but, as ever, the second led to a third, and the third to a fourth.

  He had booked himself into the Raffles Hotel. Pure decadence for a night of debauchery. A hotel rising elegantly above the hustle and bustle of the ancient metropolis, sat prominently in the expensive Zorlu Centre where high fashion, glamorous arcades and art galleries converged with gourmet restaurants. Having the spirit and design of its famous Singapore cousin, Sean chose the opulent Long Bar in which to bury his mind in alcohol. An old-fashioned bender as he’d call it.

  Sean was at home with tradition. He sat in a lavish maze-like parlour of crystal, choosing a barstool in the far corner, from where he could watch the comings and goings of the night. The evocative nature of Raffles drove him to begin the night with a Tiger beer, followed by a couple of Singapore slings, which he demolished at speed.

  He was reminiscing about his childhood days before taking a journey in his mind to the way he had entered the dark, seductive world of intelligence. He’d spent time on an east London building site as a hod-carrier for a year before joining the British Army where, many years later, he had majored as a Defence Intelligence officer. Despite not having a great relationship with his father, the man did have the fortitude to build emotional strength into Sean during his teenage years, knowing that one day he would need to draw on such resilience given everything the world would throw at him after his mother’s disappearance.

  Sean wondered how much his father knew of his mother’s murder? Probably nothing. No one had known until now. How on earth would he break it to him now?

  In-between his thoughts, Sean joshed with the bartenders, tasted different mixologist’s potions, and watched them prepare a Yıldız Spritz inspired by the symbols of the Yıldız pavilions and the colourful collections in the Topkapı Palace. He picked at red beetroot chips and had the occasional gorge on tuna sushi to mop up the cocktails. It wasn’t long before he had the urge for a bit of weed, and maybe a woman or two. A party, he thought. That would be good.

  He needed to drown the sorrow of forever feeling abandoned by his mother, an irrational thought but that was how it was. He had never recovered from her loss, and yet here he was now, having just found out she had been brutally murdered at the hands of an American CIA agent. Murdered, for fuck’s sake. By a Yank.

  ‘Where do I get some good-looking women in Istanbul?’ he asked the barman, who thought he was still joshing. He wasn’t. Sean was still compos mentis, but only just. He needed something to take his mind off things and drugs and women were the forbidden fruits that would sort him out for the night. He needed to go wild for a while. Not for too long, just long enough to get some satisfaction and blow his mind a bit. He felt excited at the prospect as the barman gave him a card with a few numbers on.

  Jack was fuming. He knew Sean would blatantly ignore his requests and if there was one thing Jack needed to make his complex plots work it was control – control of what was happening on the ground. He felt he was losing that control and Sean might now enter one of his renegade periods. Who could blame him though? He needed Sean off the case and taken out of the country before he caused any damage to the mission. His mind would be wayward from this point on and not suited to the vagaries of a complex mission – he began to wish he’d extracted him first before telling him who the murderer of his mother was over a wobbly video call.

  ‘I want him out on the next CIA plane and into Prague as soon as possible,’ he barked to Samantha over a secure phone call. ‘I’ll sort him out from there and within a few days he’ll recognise it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘But he’s gone Jack. Vamoosed. No one knows where he’s gone. I checked his room earlier and all his kit has gone too.’

  ‘OK, I’ll get onto Melissa and see if she’s heard from him. You’ll need to track his credit cards using the CIA station staff, track him down, hold him and get him on a plane before he creates a diplomatic fucking incident.’

  Samantha had never ever heard Jack swear, and it caused her to wonder what the hell was going on.

  ‘Why Jack? What’s causing all this?’

  ‘Let’s just say his mind is about to go into meltdown. I know him.’

  ‘But why? Is he in trouble?’

  ‘That’s the point Sam. We need to keep him out of trouble. His ability to deal with stress has been stripped bare over the last few years and he’ll teeter over the edge again if we don’t get hold of him quickly. I misjudged it.’

  ‘OK Jack. I’ll get the CIA station to help us if you can contact them now. It might get a bit messy as he’s a stubborn bastard at times, unless of course he’s totally drunk, in which case we’ll find him and get him on a plane asap.’

  ‘Make sure you do. I don’t want him anywhere near Nadège as there’s a danger he’ll blurt everything out and blow the cover of my GRU agent. Then we’re really fucked.’

  Jack explained the background of Colonel Sergei and how he was the most important Russian agent MI5 had recruited in decades. Sergei was one of only four known GRU officers ever to have defected to the West in over fifty years and two were already dead – killed by GRU assassination squads on British soil. He didn’t want a third on his hands. If Sean got drunk with Nadège, the risk of that now being high, he might inadvertently leak information that would put Colonel Sergei immediately under the microscope. It was Sergei who had made sure that Sean would be tasked as the weapons smuggler for Nadège, which was a crucial part of the deception plan Jack had conjured. A lure to provide her with the fissile material she needed to accomplish the terrorist mission. A high-risk strategy that Jack was now seeing could go badly wrong.

  Jack sent a classified message to his CIA contact in Istanbul asking for all possible assistance, and making it clear that force could be used on Sean if necessary.

  Sean knew when danger was lurking. He had an innate sense for it. Even when he’d been drinking. Sean had spotted the three men take a seat in the lounge area just as he returned from the toilet. An uncommon number, he thought, for a classy hotel. Couples yes, families yes. Three men, dubious. They could be on the piss, he thought, maybe even waiting for their other halves. He’d keep an eye on them anyway, remembering the SVR still had a contract on his head. He had no idea at the time that Jack was very serious about pulling him off the mission. It being an order, not a request.

  Sean played out in his mind who they might be and how they might avenge him. How on earth could the SVR know he was here? He had not entered Istanbul through any formal port authority, hadn’t shown any passports and had retained a suitable disguise that didn’t resemble his appearance from two years ago when he’d captured the SVR’s most prolific sleeper agent.

  Might be an insider in the CIA, he thought. Their Special Activities Division were, after all, closely enmeshed with Th
e Court’s operations. It was possible someone had tipped them off. Or could it be Colonel Sergei? Christ, that would be a savage blow if it was. A Russian GRU agent right in the heart of MI5’s most secretive operation. The permutations of that particular scenario were too devastating to rationalise in his semi-drunken state.

  He’d have to put his night of debauchery on hold whilst he dealt with them and needed to lose them. He mulled the options over in his mind. He could easily lose them if needed in the meandering malls of the shopping centre, or trap one of them in the toilet to find out who they were. Or was he just being paranoid, and everything was fine?

  He came up with a plan. He made a call to an agency and asked them to send their best two girls for the night. An overnight stay. Then he’d watch to see if any of the men decided to follow him. If they did, he’d exit his room, create a few counter-surveillance moves and take them out one by one. Bold and brash but the beginnings of a plan. If they didn’t follow him? Well, he’d have that night of depravity instead. Simple, he said in his semi-drunken mind, knowing no such plan survived contact with the enemy.

  Two hours later he sat in the room entertaining two attractive women, popping the corks on two of the four bottles of champagne he’d ordered and keeping an ear out for room service, which he hadn’t called. If they came after him he knew they’d be armed but he planned on a commotion to subdue that threat. He told the women he’d be back in twenty minutes perhaps with another friend, if that was OK? The smaller of the mini-skirted hookers said it was. He left the room and turned left, heading for the lift. Sure enough, one of the men stood at the end of the corridor amateurishly looking at the room numbers on the wall. Sean clocked his demeanour. A bowlegged man with Mediterranean features wearing a black blazer and an identically coloured shirt and trousers. He pinged the lift and headed down to the ground floor, knowing the man would remain upstairs. Sure as mud was mud, the second and third men were in the lobby, tall with hard faces, but oddly they seemed to be chatting to another man with the look of authority. The security manager perhaps?