‘What’s going on?’ Stefan asked.
‘Why?’
‘I placed a wall-contact mic near the room you’re interested in. The occupant makes and takes calls on a dedicated satphone; deep encryption. Plays white noise from an audio jammer.’
Stefan showed me images he’d taken with an under-door camera. Walker’s room was neat. You saw the audio jammer on the bureau, a black box barely bigger than a cigarette packet. A suitcase had been lifted to the bed, which was made. There was a suit over the back of a chair and a bottle of whisky beside the bed.
‘Is he in there now?’
‘He left ten minutes ago. So who am I spying on? What are we doing here?’
‘A woman’s missing. She was working in Astana for Vectis, the private intelligence company. She’s vanished. We need to know what she got.’
‘Who is she?’
‘A former colleague of mine. Her name’s Joanna Lake. If you see or hear anything mentioning that name, let me know.’
‘How long’s she been missing?’
‘Seven days now.’ I talked him through the mall swap, the email she’d sent from the IT café. Stefan checked the locations on a map, then sat back and sipped his Red Bull. It was a relief to have someone I trusted around. Stefan had been a teenager when I first met him, ten years ago. He came to my attention in a dusty office belonging to New Scotland Yard’s cyber crimes division. Seventeen years old, born in north London to Polish parents, he’d been arrested for hacking his school’s system, promptly hacked into the police unit investigating him, then crashed the Home Office website. He already had a criminal record for breaking into electronics stores. He’d tried to escape the country but was picked up at Dover with his brother’s passport. I got him released the next day. A year later he was helping GCHQ develop battlefield capability, and a year after that directing cyber ops in Afghanistan. If he ever wished I’d left him on the run, he was polite enough not to say so.
A couple of years later I was in Dubai when I heard that someone at the Burj Al Arab was wiping minibar accounts from the hotel system. I found him locked in his room, war-fatigued, drinking a cocktail of Mountain Dew, tequila and Zopiclone, and gambling heavily. I paid off his debts and put him in touch with Marius in Romania, who regularly asked for contacts on the ground: people who could infiltrate delivery chains or break into places covertly. Stefan was trained in all that. He had the rare combination of skill and greed that made men return to conflict zones voluntarily. I got him a six-figure salary, knowing he was worth twice as much.
‘You think she’s still in the area?’ he asked.
‘I think it’s a possibility. I think she discovered something that was dangerous for her. Look out for the words “Perfect Vision”,’ I said. ‘And “Catalyst”.’
Stefan nodded. He’d heard enough cryptonyms in his time, and knew not to ask for more knowledge than he needed. The more you knew, the more people wanted to torture you.
I showed him the map I’d marked up with cafés and restaurants near the buildings I was interested in, anywhere targets might gather. Often the secret was not to try and directly hack the offices themselves, but find where staff congregate with unprotected smartphones and laptops. Stefan had a Polar Breeze – a remote data-sucking device for tapping wirelessly into nearby computers – and a Stingray, which was able to mimic a cell tower and force all phones in a 200-metre radius to connect to it. From there, it could extract contact information, dialled numbers, text messages, calendar entries. It could give you a stepping stone into an entire network.
‘There’s a range of places I’d like to know more about: Kazakh security services to start with, then Gazprom offices and the Russian embassy.’ I pointed out the internet café Joanna had used and asked him to see if there were any traces of her activity there. ‘Callum Walker in the room below us heads the company Joanna works for: Vectis Global Insight. I’d like to know why she’s working for them, and anything they might be keeping from me.’
Then I showed him the plan of the Vectis office.
‘All their computing’s on a closed network but I reckon we can establish a physical breach.’ I handed him the swipe pass from Piper’s bag. He turned it in his fingers. ‘TensorCo electronic gates at the front,’ I said. ‘Dozy security, two dozen different companies across the building. The swipe will work the lifts as well. Office entrance is pincode; possibly 3579 or 3570. Facilities maintenance for the building is done by a German company called Apleona, and that includes tech. Server room’s in the basement.’
‘And this is a job for Six?’
‘It’s a job for me.’
‘How are your diplomatic relations with the Kazakh government when I end up in a cell?’
‘We use the usual contingency plans. There’s a big security team here; you don’t have to worry about that.’
He looked uneasy. I was leaving when he said, ‘What do you want me to do about the bots?’
I stopped. I’d almost forgotten my request to Evotec regarding the psychological war being waged online.
‘Have you got a lead on it?’
He typed in a password. The face of a young woman appeared on the screen of the MacBook. She was pale, in her early twenties, Caucasian with a touch of Kazakh; streaks in the hair and a certain force in the dark eyes.
‘Who’s that?’
‘The enemy. You wanted to know about online activity. This has just come through from the team. She connects to pro-Russian blogs. You’ll be pleased to know you’re right: there’s a massive online information warfare operation going on.’
They’d identified over two hundred accounts, a lot simply amplifying a core of ten or twenty with original content, ‘handwritten’, so to speak. The handwriting meant you could compare phrases and grammar to open-source social media.
‘She runs this site,’ Stefan said. ‘Aliya in Astana. Favourable to Russia. Favourable to the fight against Islamist terrorism. Anti-Western oil companies. She posts heavily on Vkontakte.’
I studied the face again. There was something haunting about it; someone you’d find yourself watching without meaning to. I wondered if it was computer-generated.
Stefan showed me a cartoon on the Aliya in Astana site: a drawing of Zhaparov stamping a polished shoe on a bearded mullah. I recognised the style. It looked like those produced by an outfit called Infosurfing, which posted pro-Kremlin graphics on Instagram. Quotes from Zhaparov’s speeches had been put into calligraphic fonts, sometimes alongside pictures of eagles or faded-out photographs of balaclava’d special forces.
Aliya also reposted Testimony reports on Saracen malpractice. Only she beefed them up with images: a photograph of Robert Carter and CEOs in what Aliya claimed was a lapdancing club. It was set alongside a photo supposedly showing workers at one of the drill sites, malnourished Chinese and Indians squatting around a pan of rice in something resembling a shower block.
She was good: skilled at counter-argument, quick at sourcing memes, often using Western or Asian celebrities. She addressed other commentators by name, engaging in four or five debates simultaneously across various platforms: about the barbarism of traditional Kazakh customs like ‘bride kidnapping’ – in which a groom abducted his wife-to-be – about increasing use of the veil in rural communities to the south and east of the country. She debated the economic benefits of oil exploration. She originated hashtags: #KZFreedom. #StopSaracen.
I clicked #StopSaracen, got a photograph of a woman burning.
A forty-year-old woman had set herself on fire outside a Saracen compound in Shymkent. It was the second self-immolation in a week. The only footage that had surfaced showed a Kazakh police officer rushing towards her with a coat in his hands to smother the flames. The woman herself was barely visible, lying on her side next to an electronic gate, hands to her head, flames consuming her torso, which wasn’t easy to achieve and took a lot of accelerant. Apparently the woman had longstanding issues with the company over compensation for the deat
h of her husband, a rig worker. People were debating whether it counted as terrorism, whether it was even political or just tragic, some belated sati. Others pointed out that there were no corroborating sources.
But there was an interview with her brother, weeping tearlessly on a sofa in a low-ceilinged front room. I tried to figure out what felt strange about it. Finally, I enlarged the prints on the wall behind him, then I brought up the clip of myself in the Triumph.
‘Look,’ I said to Stefan. ‘The prints on the wall behind him.’
‘What about them?’
I showed him the Triumph clip. Both rooms had the same print of a horse and rider travelling through mountains. The rider was bending down asking directions from a peasant with a staff. The path behind him meandered from the woods into a rocky landscape.
‘Even the light reflecting on the frames is identical,’ he said. ‘What’s this clip of you about?’
‘I don’t know. But someone somewhere is crafting fake videos. Maybe several people, maybe a factory of them.’
‘Maybe an algorithm.’ Stefan was still staring at the screen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘These days they can create their own imagery. Places, faces, whatever.’
‘Whole scenarios?’
‘Sure. If an algorithm can predict a scenario it can create an image of it easily enough. Deep learning’s a step away from deep dreaming, where computers become imaginative, start generating their own content.’
‘They could produce scenarios then produce imagery to fit them?’
‘Why not? There could be a thousand videos of you being produced every hour, a thousand parallel universes.’ After another moment, he said: ‘The fire’s good.’ He tapped a knuckle against the image of self-immolation.
‘You don’t think it’s real?’
‘No. But I think someone’s got their effects working nicely.’
We watched the burning woman again, then the grieving brother.
‘Has Aliya posted fake videos before?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t checked. And it’s not as if it’s easy to tell. The US defence department has tried to develop tools for detecting computer-generated material, but no silver bullet yet.’
‘Any more information about her?’
‘We located her personal social media,’ Stefan said. ‘The name behind the more glamorous persona is Aliya Savinova, a postgrad student at Nazarbayev University. Syntax gets a ninety-seven per cent match; so does vocabulary, even typos.’
‘Address?’
‘There’s no address online but we got her IP and wi-fi connection history. Every morning her laptop connects to home broadband. Records suggest there are four people living at that address: one is Ms Savinova.’
I took a look at Savinova’s personal social media. Pre-2017 she’d been a lifestyle blogger: recipes, fashion, music, also cultural happenings. She posted poetry, talked about her short stories as well. The poetry was good, covering urban ennui, romantic longing, thinly disguised erotic musings.
She liked modernism, eye shadow, drinking alone. I wondered if she liked starting wars.
‘Think her account’s been hijacked?’ Stefan asked.
‘I don’t know. Think she’s definitely real?’
‘According to her Facebook page, she just checked in to a gallery opening two miles away. So I guess you’ve got one way of finding out.’
THIRTY-TWO
I drove to the gallery, a new glass box beside the river, sponsored by Credit Bank of Moscow and Emporio Armani. It was already crowded when I got there, with high security for a wealthy turnout. I tried to see the guest list, began to blag my way in, then the voice of Craig Bryant reached me from the throng.
‘He’s with me.’
Bryant drifted into view with a woman in heavy make-up and heels that raised her a couple of inches above him. He ushered me in.
‘I told you it was a small town at heart.’
‘Small town with big money.’
The smell of paint mingled with expensive perfume and canapés. The crowd was mostly business, the power circuit, a few sharper, younger Kazakhs. The art was modern, one room darkened for video installations, one involving bean bags and headphones. The stated theme of ‘Nostalgic Futures’ was offset by models in tight black T-shirts distributing Armani goodie bags. The Russian bank co-sponsoring the show kept a lower profile.
If Bryant felt any sheepishness about our last encounter he didn’t show it. He introduced me to Dr Zyabkina. Zyabkina, Bryant explained, was a psychologist working with the Health Minister to tackle the problem of radicalisation.
‘How interesting,’ I said. ‘The Health Ministry.’
‘It is a public health issue like any other,’ she said. ‘That is how it must be treated, like an epidemic.’
I glanced around for Aliya Savinova as I fell into conversation, found myself studying the crowd. The white-painted space was still novel enough to inspire deference. Older attendees circulated obediently; the middle-aged recognised it as a new kind of fun like fast food and rock music. A lot of the young were checking their phones.
‘See the St Petersburg mall?’ Bryant said.
‘Awful.’
‘Maybe I was wrong in my judgement of this place.’
‘Places change.’
‘There’s going to be a lot of attention on Kazakhstan now.’
‘You think?’
‘It’s going to be tense times. As if this place didn’t have enough going on.’
‘Right. You would have thought Islamism could bring Russia and the West together,’ I said.
‘That’s the real enemy, right? That’s the happy ending they can agree on: kill some terrorists.’
Then I saw her. A young woman with black hair, magenta lipstick, glasses. It felt like seeing a celebrity, with an extra frisson of shared secrets. There was a poise to Aliya that made her seem, on first impression, older than her twenty-three years: cool, sceptical eyes, black jeans, white blouse. She took photos of the exhibits. Twice, she checked her phone and typed something.
She was accompanied by two female friends. I waited for her to move away from them, saw which way she was circulating, then told Bryant I’d be back. I took a fresh glass of wine and placed myself two works ahead. A semi-abstract painting incorporating symbols from Kazakh rock art. A sign on the wall said that the artist grew up in Mongolia, completed her education in Utah, where she became interested in a new idea of nomadism involving fluidity.
Aliya Savinova browsed a few metres away: a wall-hanging woven from fragments of sportswear; a vitrine of old ID cards. I watched her reapply her lipstick, checking her face in her phone. She was someone with layers, I thought; hidden aspects and desires, which was what you looked for in a potential agent. Espionage, like any vice, is a weapon against mundanity, against being unnoticed or unworthy of notice. Contrary to expectations, you sought the attention seekers.
Finally we were side by side. ‘Can I ask – do you think this is patronising?’ I said. I spoke Russian. She looked at me, then at the work we’d arrived at: a pastiche of Soviet realism: heroic workers holding games consoles.
‘Slightly.’
‘I don’t imagine this means much to anyone now,’ I said, as we walked past. ‘It’s a concept, well executed. Not much more.’
‘Yes.’
I introduced myself as Toby. She told me she was Aliya. We walked on, in step, casually. I saw her friends turn, look. She glanced at them and gave a wry smile. I struggled to discern the personality she projected online. But then that was the point of an online personality: you could be different. I wanted to know how the operation was being coordinated. Did she work in a centre of some kind? Did she receive instructions remotely? Was Joanna on to this? She reminded me a little of Joanna.
We walked past glossy portraits of militiamen – Kiev, Zagreb, Georgia – into a final room devoted to a triptych of large black and white photographs. The central one showed the Cathedra
l of Christ the Saviour in Moscow collapsing in clouds of dust as the Soviets dynamited it. To its right, less dramatically but more hauntingly, was a mosque in Uzbekistan being used as a warehouse for cotton. To the left was a Ukrainian synagogue converted to a centre for communist youth. A banner hung across it with the old communist slogan: Peace to the World. This was the title of the artwork.
Aliya studied each image in turn. An older woman with an Armani badge arrived at our side, beaming.
‘It is good they are showing this, no? A lot of people still think it was better in those times. Young people too. They don’t know about this.’
‘Do you think that’s what it’s saying?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, less certainly. Someone caught her attention and she wandered off. Aliya looked sceptical. I leaned closer.
‘I was in this country a few years ago,’ I said. ‘Further east. I met a man who was ninety-four years old. He used to be a travelling merchant, carrying gold into China, then returning with his camels loaded up with silk. Anyway, he became a butcher in Almaty, settled there, and a friend of mine introduced me to him. I asked what he thought of Kazakhstan now and he said, “Everything was better in the time of Czar Nikolai II.”’
Aliya smiled.
‘He said that?’
‘Czar Nikolai. Yes, in the 1900s. Downhill from there.’
‘Maybe he was right.’
‘Are you an artist?’
‘A writer. And a student.’
‘What do you write?’
‘Various things.’
‘I’ve always wanted to write,’ I said, ignoring her opacity. ‘It must take dedication.’
‘Not so much what I do.’
‘Do you write fiction?’
‘A little. Less so now.’
We arrived back at the militias. One thing they had in common, it occurred to me: all had been fighting Russia or Russian proxies in the last few years. I wondered about the Credit Bank of Moscow’s involvement. Last year, a show of photo-journalism in Berlin got taken down when it turned out to be put together by the Kremlin.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 21
