by J. S. Monroe
I’m still not sure I’ve done the right thing. I shouldn’t even be writing about it here, but as no one’s ever going to read this, I guess it’s OK. (And I’m soon going to be taught encryption skills, making this diary even more private.)
Karen said everything would become clear shortly. And I suppose it has. In short, next term will be my last at Cambridge. (It feels so good to be writing that.) Instead, I’ve got an opportunity to work abroad for a while – with plenty of time to grieve. Then I’ll see how I feel – about the job I’ve been offered, university, Dad.
It was after the meditation session that Karen found me, said she wanted to have a chat. She took me to a small room near the kitchens, overlooking what was once a walled garden, closed the heavy oak door and we both sat down. She pulled out a sheaf of paper – the Official Secrets Act – and put it on the round table between us.
Outside, a wood pigeon was calling. Dad loved birds, was a bit of a twitcher. ‘You know what a wood pigeon is saying?’ he asked me once, as we lay on the newly mown back lawn.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘“My toe bleeds, Betty. My toe bleeds, Betty.”’
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Karen began, observing me look from the window to the formal paper, the crown symbol. She touched my forearm and left it there for a moment. ‘A very special opportunity has arisen,’ she said.
‘What sort of opportunity?’
‘I must ask you to sign this before we can continue.’
‘Are you serious?’ I turned the paper around so I could read it.
‘It’s an indication of how highly they rate you.’
‘Who’s they?’
Karen didn’t say anything.
‘You mean you can’t tell me?’ I laughed, hoping that a smile would break over Karen’s face, that she would explain all this was a joke, some new kind of treatment – espionage therapy – but she remained silent, her features set. I returned her gaze, stilled by its seriousness, glanced back down at the paper and read the first paragraph:
A person who is or has been a member of the security and intelligence services, or a person notified that he is subject to the provisions of this subsection, is guilty of an offence if without lawful authority he discloses any information, document or other article relating to security or intelligence which is or has been in his possession by virtue of his position as a member of any of those services or in the course of his work while the notification is or was in force.
‘It’s just a precaution,’ she said.
So I signed it and listened to the wood pigeon again, wondering what I’d done, what this retreat in Herefordshire was really about. I told myself that Dad must have signed it a hundred times. My toe bleeds, Betty. My toe bleeds, Betty. Had Sejal, my roommate, signed it, too? Was that why we weren’t allowed to talk to each other?
Over the next ten minutes, Karen gave me a few basic details about the opportunity, explaining that I would be based abroad, on American territory, and would spend the first six months after the end of the summer term undergoing tests and training. The salary, in her words, was ‘competitive’ – something of an understatement. I won’t be maxing out on my credit card again.
‘Once your core competencies have been established and analysed, you will be given a more specific brief,’ Karen added, sounding more like a management consultant than a counsellor.
‘Would I be working for the intelligence services?’ I asked, looking at the Official Secrets Act again. The opaqueness of the information she’d given me was frustrating, as was the wording of the Act.
Karen ignored my question. ‘If you’re happy with what I’ve told you, you will shortly be taken to another place, not far from here, where you will be given more information. If not, you’ll be returned to college, where you will explain that you’ve been on bereavement leave. At this stage, it’s my job to establish your basic compliance with the offer that’s been made to you.’
‘And remind me exactly what that offer is?’
Karen could have been annoyed by my tone, but she was happy to run over the details again, like a waiter repeating the daily specials. ‘You will leave Cambridge at the end of next term and spend a year abroad, first being trained, and then, as you embark on your new life, working in a role that cannot be discussed with anyone – friends or family, boyfriends.’
I’m sure she knew the effect her words would have on me, my delight at never having to return to university again.
‘If you accept, you will have to break off contact with everyone,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. Did I blush? ‘Are you close to anyone at the moment?’
I paused. ‘No,’ I said. My toe bleeds, Betty.
29
‘Jar, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. Can I come round?’
‘What, now?’
Jar knows he’s asking a lot of Carl, but he needs to talk about the latest entries from Rosa’s diary. And, despite himself, he can’t shake off the nagging thought that Carl is more involved with Kirsten than he’s letting on. Why did he invite her to join them for a drink?
Half an hour later, he’s sitting on the floor of Carl’s flat. It’s a small space, made more cramped by the records that take up every inch of the place: stacked on Ikea shelves, rising up from the floor like vinyl stalagmites. There’s a faint smell of weed.
‘Do you remember her ever mentioning a retreat in Herefordshire?’ Carl asks, handing Jar a mug of tea. He’s wearing a Congo Natty T-shirt and boxer shorts.
‘Possibly. I remember her telling me she once went away from college for a few days, to clear her head. I think it was a mindfulness retreat of some kind. And Herefordshire rings a vague bell. It was before we met, her second term.’
‘Are you surprised by how depressed she says she was?’
Jar glances across at Carl. It’s a question that’s troubled him for the past five years, how he might have missed her depression, mistaken it for grief.
‘There were times when she was not herself. Her moods were up and down, for sure.’
‘But you never thought she was suicidal?’
‘It wasn’t in her nature.’
‘But it was in her mother’s.’
‘She was more like her dad.’
Jar turns away, thinking again about the latest diary entry. Rosa had been protecting them both from something else, a new beginning. It fits with the email she left him – I just wish I didn’t have to leave you behind, babe, the first true love of my life and my last – and is a less painful reason than suicide. She’d been swept up in something that she couldn’t get out of.
‘Her counsellor made her sign the Official Secrets Act, Carl. Tell me that’s not weird.’
‘Patient confidentiality.’
Jar looks up at him, his childish smile, and then casts his eyes down, ashamed that he ever doubted his friend.
‘I don’t know what to think here, bro,’ Carl says, sitting at the table. He starts to read Rosa’s diary on his laptop. Jar emailed him the last few entries, about the Herefordshire retreat, before coming over. ‘Does it really change anything? Rosa was offered a job. Usually that happens when you graduate, but in this case they went two years early. She was a talented student, one of the best. And it wouldn’t be the first time that the intelligence services recruited from Oxbridge. But Rosa didn’t take up the job, because she died, Jar; because she chose, tragically, to take her own life. Nothing changes.’
For a moment, Jar knows that Carl could be right, but he pushes the thought away. ‘I met someone today who was investigating Rosa’s dad before he died. He used to be a journalist, now works in crisis PR.’
‘And?’
‘He wrote a story that none of the newspapers would publish. It was about the number of student suicides at Oxbridge and other top universities. Rosa’s body wasn’t the only one that was never found. There were others.’
‘And why didn’t anyone publish the story?�
��
‘He couldn’t stand it up.’
‘Maybe because it was bollocks.’
Again, Jar knows that Carl could be right. He understands where his friend is coming from, can’t blame him for his scepticism.
‘He thought the student suicides were connected in some way with Rosa’s father, that they had all met him in the months before their deaths.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because they were being given an opportunity to begin again, make fresh starts, new lives. Just like Rosa says in her diary.’
‘The story wasn’t published, Jar, because it sounds far-fetched. The intelligence services do a lot of dodgy things, but they don’t go around faking student suicides and giving them new identities.’
‘Rosa’s father worked for the Foreign Office, the Political Unit. It’s a common cover for spies.’
‘So?’
‘The article was published.’
‘I thought you just said it wasn’t.’
‘On the dark web. And I need you to help me find it.’
‘That’s not how it works. You can’t google things on the dark web, Jar. That’s the whole point.’
‘There must be a way. Please?’
‘The dark web gets such a crap press,’ Carl continues. ‘Sure, it’s full of assassins and arms dealers, drug smugglers and grotesque human dolls, child abusers and Silk Road black marketeers – they’re all down there. But there are plenty of things that aren’t so bad about it. The Arab Spring began on the dark web. Bloggers in Beijing use it to get round the Great Firewall of China. The New Yorker has a site – StrongBox – for whistleblowers. And if you’re into Stravinsky, there are fifty thousand pages dedicated to “emancipated dissonance” – I wrote about it last week.’
‘The journalist mentioned something about a hidden site with an onion-suffix address.’
‘That’s a start.’
Jar watches as Carl minimises his email window, sighs and fires up his Tor software.
‘Welcome to onionland,’ he says, rubbing his hands on the sides of his boxer shorts in anticipation.
‘Onionland?’ Jar asks.
Carl gives him a withering look. ‘Where every domain name ends in “dot onion”.’
Jar was hoping that his friend might rise to the challenge. He’s heard a bit about Tor (‘The Onion Router’), how it conceals IP addresses, allows people to communicate anonymously over the internet, but he’s never tried it. Edward Snowden used it to spill the beans – ironic, given Tor was originally developed in the 1990s with funding from the US Navy.
Two minutes later, Carl is diving the dark web, looking through various index pages of Tor hidden services – the Hidden Wiki, TorDir and TorLinks – that list an array of websites. As far as Jar can tell, it looks like the ‘surface web’ he’s familiar with.
‘The spooks hate the anonymity of Tor, of course,’ Carl says, to himself as much as Jar. ‘One of the NSA documents Snowden revealed – using Tor, natch – was a slideshow entitled “Tor Stinks”. But it’s not infallible. Sure, it can protect your site from traffic analysis – analysing patterns in communication – but it can’t do shit about correlation attacks, if someone can see both ends of the communications channel, you and the destination website.’
Not for the first time, Jar hasn’t a clue what his friend is going on about, but he is happy to let him talk. ‘If there’s a whistleblower element to this spy site, then it might also be accessible with a standard web browser using Tor2Web.’
*
It’s just after 4 a.m. when Carl finally finds the article. Jar is asleep on the sofa.
‘Yes, boy!’ Carl shouts, slapping his leg. ‘Got you.’
Jar sits up and stares across at the screen, bleary eyed.
‘It’s on a Tor hidden site for spy junkies,’ Carl continues. ‘Membership required, restricted access. Took a while, but I got us in. Do you want me to print the article out?’
‘I do. Thanks.’ Jar is standing beside Carl, staring at a passport photo of Rosa on the screen. She’s one of six people in a grid entitled ‘Student Suicides’. Next to her is an Asian girl called Sejal Shah – the same name as Rosa’s roommate in Herefordshire.
Jar hasn’t seen this photo of Rosa before and wonders where it was taken. He looks at it for a moment longer before turning to read the text below:
A high-ranking British Foreign Office official has links to a covert US intelligence programme that is suspected of recruiting some of Britain’s brightest – and unhappiest – Oxbridge students with the promise of giving them new identities, Max Eadie reports. Suitable students are identified by college counsellors and then sent on a ‘retreat’ to Herefordshire, home to the headquarters of the SAS, before their suicides are faked and they are set up with new lives.
Taken on its own, it sounds far-fetched – ‘bollocks’, according to Carl – playing to its online audience of conspiratorial spy junkies. But there are too many similarities with Rosa’s diary for Jar to dismiss the story outright: the mention of a possible recruitment centre at a military base in Herefordshire, the use of counsellors and student welfare services at top universities to identify suicidal students who might be ripe for recruitment. And the naming of six students, including Rosa and Sejal, as possible recruits.
None of the students’ bodies has ever been found.
30
Silent Retreat, Herefordshire, Spring Term, 2012
Things moved quickly after I agreed to sign the Official Secrets Act. Karen told me to pack my bag and left the room with the document.
Ten minutes later, a black car picked me up at the back of the country house, in a courtyard that was once, presumably, reserved for servants and tradesmen. There was just a driver, and Karen and me in the back.
No one saw the car arrive, and no one, as far as I could tell, noticed us leaving. The rest of the students were deeply relaxed – sleeping, perhaps – in one of Maggs’ meditation sessions in the main library at the front of the house.
‘Have you taken everything from your room?’ Karen asked. She was distracted, looking out the window as if checking to see if anyone had seen us leave.
‘It’s all in my bag,’ I said. Except the chocolate, which I’d finished off with Sejal last night. I wondered again if she had also signed the Official Secrets Act. She’d left first thing in the morning. I hadn’t thought to ask where she was going and she hadn’t offered an explanation.
‘Are we going far?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Karen was no longer herself: distant, on edge.
Soon the car was waiting for a barrier to be raised at the entrance to what looked like army barracks.
‘Where are we?’ I wasn’t expecting an answer.
‘Don’t worry. You’re not joining the army.’
The barrier closed and a man in uniform with a moustache and a weapon at his waist watched us drive past. He wasn’t smiling.
It certainly beat turning up to a lecture, but there was still a strong air of the sort of institutional orderliness that I was hoping to have left behind. I’m not suited to orders, uniforms, acronyms. There were Ministry of Defence signs everywhere I looked, displaying unintelligible letters and numbers.
‘This is the only time you’ll be in a military environment,’ Karen said, sensing my anxiety. I need to work on my acting skills.
Ten minutes later I was sitting in what felt like a classroom with five other students: the only one I recognised was Sejal. I’m not sure any of the others were at the retreat.
Karen was standing in front of us, with a man I was sure I’d seen before, but I couldn’t think where. He glanced around the room, his eyes resting on mine for what seemed like a long time. There was something about him that was vaguely familiar. Had he been at the garden party that Dad took me to at Buckingham Palace?
‘I want you all to meet Todd,’ Karen said. ‘I know the last few days have been kind of strange, but I think you’ll realise what safe hands you�
�re in once Todd has explained a little more.’
Todd smiled, pausing before he spoke. Late forties, chinos, open-necked shirt; looked like nothing could faze him. Time on the ball, as Dad would have said.
‘It’s very good to see you all,’ he began. ‘Truly.’ For some reason, I was expecting him to be British, but he spoke with an East Coast accent, much like Karen’s. ‘I’m going to keep this short as there will be a lot for you to take in today. First off, welcome. Welcome to the Eutychus programme. Seriously, it’s a privilege to be among such gifted students.’
A slight shuffle of feet, hands through hair. What’s Eutychus? I caught Sejal’s eye. She smiled.
‘A unique opportunity lies ahead of you all, a second chance, something that very few of us are given in life. You will shortly have a choice: whether to embrace that chance wholeheartedly, or return to your old lives. It’s a big decision, the biggest you’ll ever make. In the meantime, put it out of your minds. You’ve all come recommended by your colleges, by Karen, but we’ve also been watching you over the past few months, analysing your mental strengths and weaknesses, your spiritual wellbeing, demeanour, character. Believe me, no one’s gotten here by chance.’
We didn’t look at each other that time. I think we were all taken aback at the thought of having been watched.
Dr Lance has had more of a hand in all this than I realised. I’m not worried, though. Todd’s a reassuring presence. And I can’t help but feel flattered that I’ve been chosen.
‘We’ll be running some more tests over the coming days. We’re confident we’ve got the right people, but there’s a chance that one or two of you will have to leave us. It would be a tragedy if anyone took that personally: you’ve done exceptionally well to get this far, trust me.’
Sejal had raised her hand. ‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Be my guest. There’ll be a lot of questions in the coming days.’
‘Are we going to be working for the American or UK government?’
‘Do you have a preference?’ Todd’s manner was light and breezy, but I could see that underneath he was irked by Sejal’s question. ‘Last time I checked, we were allies.’
