A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  It’s me. Can you meet?

  Five minutes later he messaged back.

  You ok?

  Possibly not. Where can you get to quickly?

  New Pag caff? 5.30?

  That was our café: the one where Joanna and I used to have a last breakfast before parting. It gave me a kick of jealousy alongside relief. Was this someone else she trusted? The incautious approach to arrangements told me he wasn’t a trained field officer, at least. Unless I was being lured. He’d chosen 5.30, an after-work stop for someone who worked locally – a few minutes’ drive from Shefford Park.

  See you there, I messaged.

  The caff was ageing, in need of a lick of paint, attached to a ten-pump truck stop, with grumpy staff, filthy toilets, and signs advertising beds and showers for thirty pounds a night. I got there early, took a seat at the back, near a rear exit, just in case.

  The man arrived cautiously, looking around – which only made him more conspicuous. As did the hi-vis cycling jacket. He was tall, early thirties, clean-shaven with a mop of brown hair. He held a bicycle helmet under his arm, phone in hand.

  I recognised him from the birthday of a mutual friend last year. I had a memory of him flirting with Joanna outside a restaurant in Clapham. One of the tech wizards. Tom someone. Tom Marsh.

  ‘Tom.’

  He glanced over, eyes narrowed. Then he looked around again, still searching for Joanna, slowly putting two and two together. He turned back to me and walked over.

  ‘It was me who messaged you,’ I said. I waited for one final beat of comprehension. ‘We’re both concerned about Joanna. Get a coffee, take the battery out of your phone.’

  He considered this, then put his helmet on the table and joined the queue. At the party, he’d struck me as hyper-intelligent, if a little sheltered. He was working on the technology for mass holographic deception. Talent leads you on strange journeys. At the party he had shown us a photo on his phone: it was Tehran’s skyline at dusk, only with a face denoting the Prophet Muhammad rising a mile high over the downtown office blocks. Joanna seemed impressed. I had bridled, ignoring the jawdropping aspects of this and arguing that most Iranians were too secular and astute to care. ‘Well, this was what we were tasked with,’ he said.

  By the time he returned, splashing down a mug of Nescafe, his memory had done some work.

  ‘You’re Elliot.’

  ‘That’s right. We met at Hugh Stevenson’s fortieth.’

  ‘Do you know where Joanna is?’

  ‘No. I’d like to find out. Why did you contact her parents?’

  Marsh breathed deeply. I smelled fresh aftershave.

  ‘I was questioned about her, at work. On Monday afternoon. I was taken for what they said was a routine security check. They were very interested in Joanna, whether I’d had contact with her since she left, the nature of our relationship.’

  There it was, I thought: the creep of an intelligence agency turning against you. My suspicion was that they knew the answers to those questions. They were shaking him up to see what came out. I had no idea why.

  ‘And have you had contact?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s the nature of your relationship?’

  ‘We’re friends,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘April.’

  ‘Know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Escorted out? Leaving party?’

  ‘Definitely no party. I don’t know if she was escorted. Next week her unit was shut down.’

  ‘What unit?’

  ‘I really don’t know much, and I can’t say much. I didn’t work with her. And … You know what it’s like.’

  ‘Shut down suddenly?’

  ‘Overnight.’

  ‘Do you think it had been compromised?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where did Joanna go after leaving?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. That’s what got me worried. That and the interrogation.’

  ‘You’d tried to contact her.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What’s your involvement? Why did they think you were connected?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The security officer asked about you.’

  That gave me a lurch. Something ominous was coming into focus, but it was focus I wanted.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He asked whether Joanna had mentioned you, if I thought the two of you were in contact. I said I had no idea. What’s going on?’

  I thought of the tension around my recent debrief, the security interview, the confiscated phone.

  ‘Was the man who questioned you someone you’d seen before?’ I asked.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Quite old; maybe sixty or so. No name.’

  ‘Did it seem like in-house security?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He didn’t sound like he knew the place well.’

  ‘Did he have paperwork? A file?’

  Marsh considered this.

  ‘I don’t remember seeing any.’

  ‘Was the interview filmed?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Anything else strange that you’ve noticed? Break-ins? Computer viruses?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  We finished our coffees.

  ‘Does the codename Catalyst mean anything to you?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  It had been a long shot. But people always know more than they think they do; they have seen or heard things that mean nothing to them but hold the keys to understanding a situation.

  ‘What was Joanna working on?’

  ‘A research group, I think.’

  ‘Researching what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When was it set up?’

  ‘Mid-2014.’

  After Ukraine, I thought. Russia in Crimea. It had been a febrile time in the intelligence service.

  ‘Targeting anyone in particular?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Who else in it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He looked around, lowered his voice.

  ‘Strict isolation from all other units. They even had their own canteen.’

  ‘Housed where?’

  ‘The old house. Building D.’

  ‘How many in the building?’

  ‘Hard to say. It had a separate entrance.’

  So within the most classified of government sites they had created an enclave of enhanced secrecy. That usually meant the technology involved was sensitive, or the ethics. Often both.

  ‘You must have some idea of what was going on in there,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. She joked it was seeing into the future.’

  ‘Forecasting? Pattern analysis?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I struggled to imagine Joanna cooped up with software all day, no matter how advanced it was. Tom’s questioning by unspecified security officers worried me. The security concerns could be real or they could be part of a discrediting campaign. Six and GCHQ collaborated on an ‘effects’ unit. Its job was using dirty tricks to make life impossible for those it chose to destroy, and that ranged from the manipulation of bank accounts to dropping child abuse images onto someone’s hard drive. You didn’t want them turning against you.

  ‘What’s your hunch?’ I said to Marsh.

  ‘Maybe the program they were working on predicted something which they didn’t want getting out. Maybe she saw too much.’

  He said it deadpan. I tried to disguise my scepticism. Still, if I could keep Marsh out of the hands of security, he was a potentially useful ally. I recommended he set up a new email account for contacting me, one that disguised IP addresses.

  ‘Joanna told me you’d help,’ I said. ‘If anything happened.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You were one of the few people she trusted. See what you
can find.’

  I walked back to my car and checked a satellite view of Shefford, locating Building D according to Marsh’s description. They had partitioned the building off from the rest of the grounds. New trees had been planted, alongside more robust fences. Upper windows and skylights had been blocked.

  Shefford village looked cold and empty as I took a final drive through. The first time I visited Joanna here it had been spring. We walked from the farms into woodland with thick carpets of bluebells, everything so simple and bright it seemed to mock us and the barren rooms in which we strategised the world. We picnicked in a clearing, lay back on the grass, an unthreatening English sun above us.

  I saw her face with the sun on it, and then her face in moonlight, on our last night in Turkey together, driving along the Iskenderun–Aleppo road. The road was permanently slick with contraband oil dripping from supposed vegetable trucks. The route saw a lot of oil smuggled out and a lot of people trying to reach the refugee camp in Reyhanli. A complex of Byzantine architecture remained close to the border, ruins which had been largely destroyed and reused to reinforce the border itself, but leaving the better portion of a triumphal arch as testament to Rome’s north-eastern frontier. Joanna had been amused by my interest in it. In moonlight the arch was ghostly. One wall of a tower remained, so it looked like a tool with a blade and a handle.

  We stopped and got out of the car and she took my arm.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  Stars blanketed the sky. We lay down to watch them, spotting asteroid showers.

  We had kissed before, but not with necessity. Perhaps we had been waiting to become desperate. To prove something. Everything stopped for a moment as I tasted her.

  It occurred to me that maybe she thought I was going to die, that this was her last chance. Or perhaps she had decided that she was going to die.

  What did she go back to the UK to do?

  You’re taught to cultivate trusted insiders. What they don’t say, but becomes obvious, is you need someone inside Six as much as anywhere. The party where I’d seen Marsh flirting with Joanna was Hugh Stevenson’s fortieth. Stevenson was someone I considered a friend. I obscured my caller ID for his sake.

  ‘Hugh, it’s Elliot. I wondered if you’d heard from Joanna recently?’

  ‘You’re in town?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you meet? Now?’

  Stevenson shared his inherited townhouse with three dogs, his father’s collection of South East Asian memorabilia, and a Nepalese man I had never met. It was a beautiful house on a wealthy Hampstead street. I watched him passing through the golden spotlights of the streetlamps towards me, his silhouette baggy in an oversized belted jacket, his German Shepherd bobbing by his side.

  At the end of the street we fell in step.

  ‘Good to see you, Elliot.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  Stevenson was climbing the ranks of Counter Terrorism in Vauxhall. He had cultivated an ageless donnishness although he was only a couple of years older than me. There was a sense of succumbing to class, becoming the person fate had always had in store for him. But he was brilliant in his own self-deprecating way. I had met him in the library at Vauxhall Cross. I used to get in early – in through the double-airlock doors while it was still quiet. I enjoyed the place at that time of the morning: the courtyard with its fountain, the central atrium bathed in cool, green light from the triple-glazed windows – light that always reminded me of the interior of a mosque. I could imagine people removing their shoes upon entering, prostrating themselves towards the Union Jack.

  The library was a gem, and underused. In those less digital days, it kept papers from around the world, along with academic publications and the less sensitive reports from rival agencies. It had lamps and leather seats that nodded towards private clubs or the archives of prestigious legal chambers. Stevenson was always there. We developed a friendship based on this convergence. He was curious about my work in the field. I could already see that he was going to rise through the ranks, and knew this would be useful. Also, we liked each other.

  ‘Heard you did pretty well out there,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure about that.’

  ‘Not your fault it got pulled.’

  ‘Pulled suddenly. Left people exposed.’

  ‘Ours is not to reason why.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  We lapsed into silence.

  ‘How’s Sunil?’ I asked, remembering his partner’s name.

  ‘Fine. Tired. Overworked.’

  ‘And Legoland?’ I asked, before he felt obliged to inquire into my own private life. ‘What’s news in Vauxhall?’

  ‘The current regime’s isolated pretty much everyone. Doyle’s in the Secretariat now, still obsessed with the Arctic Circle. Ann Swan went to Citibank. Did you hear Etienne had a flap of sorts in China?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Triad-run billiard halls. The word is: don’t mess with them.’

  ‘I’m glad we’ve established that.’

  I momentarily missed HQ: the gossip, the etiquette of careful eyes, locked doors and hushed corridors where you could nod at men and women who you saw every day, and if they didn’t know exactly what you did, at least they had an idea, and that was permitted.

  ‘I saw a review I thought would interest you.’ He extracted a folded clipping from his pocket: An Islamic Utopian: the life of Ali Shari’ati. ‘Islam, Marxism, revolution. I thought it sounded like you. Know it?’

  ‘I skimmed a copy when it was in hardback.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Not bad. The usual line: CIA ruined the Middle East, etcetera. Everything’s our fault. The publishing house is Kremlin-sponsored.’

  His silence made me conscious of my irritability.

  ‘It’s worth a read,’ I said. ‘I have nothing for you, I’m afraid. Ramil Terzi says hello. He’s on good form.’

  Stevenson laughed.

  ‘House arrest must agree with him.’

  We skirted the pond, turned onto a footpath that led into the Heath. Into the trees. Stevenson stopped and crouched, as if to bag dog shit, and we both checked the path behind. No one. When the darkness had closed around us we sat down on a bench. He wrapped the leash around the arm.

  ‘Joanna’s a bit AWOL.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Definitely not working for us any more, it seems. Stopped six months ago. Not clear why or where she’s gone.’

  ‘How can no one know?’

  ‘This is just off a quick check, a personal check. Not many people are being cooperative. Seems she left under a bit of a cloud. Type of cloud unknown. Out of contact since May.’

  ‘She was at Shefford.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I popped in on Tom Marsh.’

  ‘What did Tom have to say?’

  ‘He was questioned about her. And about me. There’s been surveillance on me since I returned to London.’

  This raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You think it’s us?’

  ‘Hard to tell. What do you know about Building D at Shefford?’

  ‘Nothing. Shefford is as much of a mystery to me as to anyone else.’

  ‘Anything codenamed Catalyst that you’ve come across?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘New tech in development? New software?’

  ‘You name it. But I’m not the man to ask about that. I’m still waiting for my pen gun. I can have a sniff, Elliot. But you know what Shefford’s like.’

  I got my phone out.

  ‘I received an encrypted file three days ago. I believe it came from Joanna. It contained this; the footage is computer-generated.’

  Stevenson watched the footage twice in silence.

  ‘It’s not real?’

  ‘No. There’s something odd about the way we physically interact. That’s not my body. And the box at the back, there’s n
o shadow. See how the vase casts a shadow but not the box?’

  He looked again, nodded.

  ‘You think she sent it to you?’

  ‘It was sent using a system only she knows about. No one else could have done it.’

  ‘Is there any more?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been in that room. I’ve been in Kazakhstan twice, but not for many years.’

  ‘Has Joanna?’

  ‘Not when I last saw her. That was a few months ago. I had three missed calls around the same time I received the video – from a landline in Kazakhstan.’

  Stevenson stared at the screen. I could see professional appraisal. He was looking for signs of provenance.

  ‘The reflection’s good.’

  ‘The whole thing’s impressive.’

  ‘Do you know the other man?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The location?’

  ‘The plug sockets are type F, which doesn’t narrow it down much. But it looks like there’s a newspaper in Kazakh. It’s dated two weeks ahead, 13 December.’

  Stevenson wrinkled his brow.

  ‘Strange that the date’s visible?’

  ‘Seems overdetermined. The message it came with is a duress code. It means the sender needs to get out of the country, that I’m in danger too.’

  He sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Why so cryptic?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering. Maybe the sender was interrupted or in a hurry. It takes time to encrypt files. Perhaps if I’d got the accompanying phone call more would have been explained. Or perhaps the whole thing’s deliberately mysterious because it’s a trap, a lure. An attempt to play with our minds.’

  ‘By her?’

  ‘More likely someone who’s got information out of her.’ I regretted saying it immediately. This touched on the world he didn’t operate in, and deepened the darkness around us.

  ‘What’s going on in Kazakhstan at the moment?’ I asked.

  ‘Desert, I imagine. Some oil. Benign dictatorship and shaky post-Soviet nationalism. Why?’

  ‘Who’s on it for Six?’

  ‘There’s no permanent station. I think the ambassador’s Suzanna Ford, but we haven’t had cause to use her much.’

  The dog barked and we both fell silent. A figure passed up by the pond, male, hunched, hands in the pockets of a short jacket. He continued towards Hampstead Lane.