A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  ‘Don’t tell me: you’re putting the band back together.’

  ‘I’m curious to know what you’ve heard recently.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to contact you,’ he said. ‘Are you back in Turkey?’

  ‘Not right now. What do you know about St Petersburg?’

  ‘There’s a possibility he connects to our network. Maybe distantly, maybe not so distantly. Can you shed some light?’

  I felt vertigo, standing over a pit of my own making, with difficulty discerning the knot of connections at the bottom. Nikfar, or Reza to friends, was Iranian-born, CIA-trained, Peshawar-made. He’d been in the dark corners of the CIA long enough to have helped build the Taliban and take it down again. He was the hinge between Langley and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the largest intelligence agency in the world. It was called Inter-Services because it drew on all branches of Pakistan’s armed forces, but I always felt the name described a bigger crossroads, the intelligence equivalent of the arms bazaar in Pakistan’s north-western mountains, where every gang came, no laws applied and you could get pretty much anything for a price. Aside from being a reckless visionary, Reza was one of the few intelligence officers who operated at the heart of things.

  ‘Do you have the name on the Saudi passport?’ I asked.

  ‘Yousef Shaheen.’

  I had arranged a few Saudi passports in my time: they were gold dust, welcome almost everywhere. I didn’t remember a Yousef Shaheen.

  ‘Know when it was issued?’

  ‘No. But something’s going on. All the grapevines are whispering: Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the game’s moving. I heard Bakhtiyar Ibraimov, the shooter, was involved in drafting up Central Asians to fight in Libya. He has phone connections with UK recruitment networks.’

  I fought against mounting disquiet. ‘Heard’ wasn’t a strong verb in intelligence circles; phone connections extended as far as you wanted them to. I stored Reza’s conjecture for later reflection.

  ‘IMK a thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Possibly. Remnants of Al-Nusra and Abu Uzair’s men. It’s very hazy at the moment. If it exists it’s a splinter cell. I’d take the black flag with a pinch of salt, but they did come up in a JIX report yesterday. Where are you?’

  ‘Kazakhstan.’

  ‘You had a heads-up on this?’

  ‘Not as such.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Some leads,’ I lied. ‘But I need your help.’

  ‘Are you on usual channels?’

  ‘Personal ones. They’ll do for now.’

  He sent the information through: a report from Joint Intelligence X, the secretariat at the heart of Pakistan’s security services. The time and date put its distribution twelve hours ago. It was one page, light on detail, collating information from sources in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

  Intelligence had suggested that a group identifying as the Islamic Movement of Kazakhstan was in possession of detonators and 4,000 kilograms of C-4 explosives. The load originated in Afghanistan: it had been packed in crates on an articulated lorry travelling from Hairatan in Afghanistan to Termez in Uzbekistan. Uzbek intelligence had tracked it by satellite, with the intention of identifying the insurgent cell. Somewhere along the line things went wrong. The artic was stopped but it was empty. The load had already been transferred.

  In the twenty-four hours after the failed seizure, sixteen homes and businesses were raided across Afghanistan. The lorry driver’s brother was cooperating. Police had seized a laptop containing research on fuel-air bombs along with a detailed satellite image of Astana and surveillance photographs of public squares.

  I called Reza back.

  ‘Have any more details surfaced since this report?’

  ‘Nothing. They came out of nowhere and vanished into nowhere.’

  ‘I’m going to need you to update me if you hear anything more about Astana or the IMK.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What put you on to them?’

  ‘A woman from your end, the one you introduced me to.’

  ‘Joanna Lake?’

  ‘That’s what I was trying to contact you about. Is she kosher?’

  I felt a stab of adrenalin.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About six days ago.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She’d seen plans of some kind, relating to those explosives. Wouldn’t give me a source.’

  ‘I need to know the exact contact time.’

  He checked, came back. It was 11.02 p.m.

  ‘11.02 in Islamabad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then it was a few minutes before she contacted me. In the very narrow window between fleeing the safe house and vanishing.

  ‘She’s missing,’ I said. ‘Went missing in Astana last week.’

  ‘Shit. No one’s chased me about that.’

  ‘What device did Joanna call on?’

  ‘Cellphone. We’ve run a check: it was clean, it’s now dead. Been dead for days.’

  ‘I’m going to need your help.’

  I sent through a still from the Mega Astana, in case Reza could ID the man in the cap, the probable source for her intelligence. He couldn’t. I promised I’d pass any further information his way, took a final look at the anger raging online, then closed my browser.

  Where are you, Joanna? What have you led me into?

  She’d called Reza. She knew him as one of the only individuals plugged into terrorist networks in all directions. She put him on to an attack, shared intel. Did that give me some frayed thread of a narrative to set against the one in which she sold us out to Gazprom?

  I had my eyes closed, the sunlight red through my eyelids. ‘When was the last time you kissed someone you weren’t trying to recruit?’ she asked.

  ‘A long time,’ I said, although it wasn’t strictly true. ‘Did you know some people do it because they enjoy it?’

  ‘Perverts,’ I said. If she was making an accusation of coldness on my part it was neutralised by the summer afternoon. I heard the splash of wine in her cup. Then she said, as if it followed from her previous thoughts, ‘Do you ever think about all of that probing they did when they recruited us? All that cross-examination, interviewing friends and family behind our backs, setting us tests: we thought they were weeding out the corrupt, but what if that was what they wanted? We were chosen because of our flaws.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re that imaginative,’ I said.

  ‘They chose us because we were already halfway corrupt.’

  *

  I turned Cherenkov’s business card in my hand again and wondered what light he could throw on Perfect Vision, and what I’d have to do to get it. Be careful, I thought. Exhaustion had begun to fog my judgement. I wasn’t going to sleep, so I went for a walk.

  The roads had iced. I took my gloves off and touched the hard snow. It was what Mongolians called a harin zud, a black freeze, when snowfall was followed by another sudden drop in temperature. The earth became inaccessible. Out on the steppe it spelled the death of livestock in their thousands. I’d been told of horses eating their own hair. People died but it was impossible to dig graves, so they were mummified until summer, organs replaced with pine needles and larch cones. In Astana it meant drivers kept to 10 miles per hour, like a city-wide funeral procession. Near Bayterek I saw three crashed cars, one on its side, strands of emergency tape fluttering.

  The colours of the office blocks changed from green to blue. There was an unearthly metallic ticking sound that I eventually identified as streetlights agitated in the wind. I got the war-zone feeling, where everything seems provisional, and when you look at buildings you see their destruction too.

  Who else was chasing this imminent attack? I didn’t feel in a position to take responsibility for stopping it. Reza was good, but he had more allies in Peshawar than Washington. When Joanna needed access to northern Syria I introduced them. We met in the closest he had to an office – which was someone
else’s office behind five walls of concrete and barbed wire. There was a poster of an imaginary Kurdistan on the wall, a photograph of a young-looking Reza with Bill Clinton. Joanna was all charm and only gave me her opinion of him on the flight back: she said he was well connected and borderline insane. The CIA, she felt sure, kept him active in the hope that he’d get himself killed.

  I’d first bumped into him in Tajikistan, the most lawless corner of Asia at that time, controlled by a circus of Russian soldiers, Islamist guerrillas, warlords, bandits and deserters from all sides. It was 90 per cent mountain rock. The only way to make a living was by trading weapons or narcotics. Russia had established outposts along the border, then manned them with drunks and criminals, whiling away long hours as they waited to be decapitated by insurgent Afghans.

  I was in the country ostensibly to learn who controlled its mountain passes. Someone in Vauxhall had identified this as important – China was using Tajikistan as a bridge to the Middle East – and I was happy to spend a couple of weeks based in the capital, Dushanbe, heading to the mountains when I could. On the way back to Dushanbe one time, I decided to return through the Yagnob valley to see if I could find the isolated village of Yagnob itself. People there were said to be descendants of people from the ancient kingdom of Samarkand. They spoke a language that hadn’t changed significantly in five thousand years. When they prayed, it wasn’t towards Mecca but in the direction of the highest mountain peak, the stepping stone to heaven.

  I didn’t find any Yagnobi. I ended up deeper into the valley than I probably should have done, especially on a raw February night. When I bumped into a crew of Russian soldiers, I was low on food and water, and almost relieved to see them. I still had vodka and cigarettes, and this, combined with the fact that they were strung out on heroin, saved me from summary execution. They invited me to their camp.

  The camp was a dirt-walled hole in the ground. I was led between sandbags into something resembling a First World War trench, where everyone was wasted and they were using fuel barrels to make moonshine. Reza sat among it all, serene, pupils constricted to pinpoints. I thought he was one of the locals, in his filthy kaftan and turban and beard. Then I heard his accent. He reminded me of pictures I’d seen of British special forces in Yemen in the 1940s, looking as if the desert wind had whittled them down to a foreign core.

  He spent a long time assessing me, trying to establish which intelligence service was operating on his territory. We ate around a table with a carpet on top and embers burning beneath it. They melted snow for water. Every few mouthfuls someone would raise a toast and we’d knock back another fifty millilitres of vodka. When the Russians sank into oblivion, Reza proposed we borrow their motorbikes and go up the mountain. That was fine by me.

  I remembered him howling into rain at the peak.

  ‘This is it, right? This is what I call getting off base.’

  Next day we drove along the border with Afghanistan. I’d earned his trust. We skirted the most beautiful and dangerous scenery I’d seen, mountains folded around poppy fields. We followed a two-lane road towards China. When we were a hundred miles or so from anything, Reza sat me down and we talked networks, funding programmes, his plans for the region. He wanted to know what I thought, and what support I could get. It seemed a bit crazy, knocking around foreign policy on a mountainside littered with smashed cars, although it doesn’t seem so crazy now. On the way back he stopped in at a mud-walled village, ‘dropping off provisions’. While he chatted up locals, I looked inside the remaining parcels on the back seat of his car. They contained encrypted radios and body armour.

  By the following week we were solid friends. In 2013 he began making noises about support for rebel militias: Libya initially, then Syria. Asked for you by name, Kane. Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Forces, he said: they’re our men. They’ve got the fighters, Saudis have the money. Boom.

  He linked Joanna up with some Kurdish cigarette smugglers based in Qamishli, a Syrian city near the Turkish border. She had been suspicious before meeting him, then disarmed by his charisma – and more suspicious. I had mentioned him the last time we met, a conversation the three of us had had about emotional manipulation. I’d used him as an example of what you can’t do with computers. ‘He’s mad, but he understands grievances.’

  ‘There’s software for that,’ she’d said.

  Joanna and I argued, in a fairly civil way at first, about psychology: a nation’s psychology and the limits of computing; historical and cultural sensitivity – trauma, resentment – how would a machine learn that? Feed in artworks, school lessons, poetry, I suggested, jokingly; dreams, nightmares.

  ‘Why not,’ she said.

  GCHQ had a program called XKeyscore which had already hoovered up data for entire populations, including medical records. It consisted of over 700 servers at approximately 150 sites. The data came from satellite intercepts, telecoms access, and what they called overhead: pickup from planes and drones. There was third-party product from twenty-seven countries, content and metadata. Like a lot of industries, the challenge facing the intelligence services wasn’t getting all this information, it was figuring out what to do with it. You’ve got every word used in phone calls, emails and messaging services in Georgia over a twelve-month period. How do you turn that into knowledge? How can you accept that it doesn’t tell you the future?

  ‘So what’s next?’ I asked. Part of me was getting sucked in, wondering if maybe Joanna and her secretive Shefford unit really had glimpsed something ahead.

  She said there would be another incident like the Crimea. Russia wouldn’t sit still. We argued about that. I said the risks were too high.

  ‘You don’t think they would?’

  ‘I’m not saying they wouldn’t want to. They want secure borders. Russia’s idea of a secure border is one with Russians on both sides. But there are limits. Think of the potential consequences.’

  ‘Nations aren’t rational actors,’ she said. ‘They’re bitter old men.’

  ‘But you think you can predict what they’re going to do.’

  ‘You don’t need to be rational to be predictable.’

  Sometimes it seemed as if the entire intelligence service had become obsessed, chasing an infinite meteorology. It had started out simply enough, with a search for algorithms that could warn us of attacks, identifying digital landscapes that had previously led up to terrorist incidents: communications activity, social media, financial transactions, geographical movement. Then it turned to visual patterns: how someone moves around a city, their posture, their silhouette, whether they have a bag, how the bag is carried. All the messages you write without intending to.

  This is mankind’s eternal quest, I’d argued. To protect ourselves from randomness. To know everything. The machines allowed fixation. In the old paper archives you could see the sickness of an obsession, the visible mess of paper, stacks and annotations. One click of a mouse could deliver three hundred lifetimes of obsession.

  At five past midnight my phone buzzed. Reza had sent through a message.

  This her?

  I opened the attached file. It was a photo of a group: four men, three women, wrapped up for a hike. They were outside, in the snow, a boxy concrete building behind them. One of the women’s faces had been circled. She was standing at the back of the group. Almost as if she hadn’t wanted to be picked up.

  It was her.

  She wore a woollen hat and hiking boots. Some of the other members of the party had walking poles. Was this Joanna as Vanessa? I didn’t recognise any of the other individuals. There was no geographic tag to the image. I was left with the blurred face, some trees that looked like pines breaking the deep snow, the building behind her. A faded sign said Kinoteatr. It was a derelict cinema: ‘Miners’ Cinema’, according to signage grown encrusted in icicles.

  Reza’s analysts had retrieved it from a computer in Berlin they were monitoring, which had received it on Facebook in a posting originating in Kazakhstan. Eco-ac
tivists. It had been posted a couple of months ago. The activists connected to various campaigns against pollution, but had been careful to remove geotags and any reference to a location. It wasn’t Astana. Behind the cinema, a wall of coniferous trees clung to a steep white hillside.

  What was Joanna doing here two months ago? According to Walker, she’d been in the country six weeks. I asked Reza to get any more details he could, studied the image again. Well away from Astana, by the looks of it. I thought of what Shomko had told me: There’s a possibility she headed east. She had connections there.

  I tried to call Stevenson but he didn’t pick up. In the hotel’s business suite, I printed off a story by the writer Aliya Savinova had recommended. I pulled the chair away from the centre of my hotel room so I’d see anyone entering a second before they saw me. Then I removed the handgun from the safe, cleaned it, oiled it, rested it on the arm of the chair.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I woke up in the chair, listening for the layered sirens of an attack. The city was silent. It was 6 a.m. No smoke on the horizon, just the steam rising out of the top of Khan Shatyr.

  I checked jihadi sites, then social media, then global news. Cellophane-wrapped flowers piled high outside the Sunshine mall. The first victims had been named, photographs of them placed alongside candles and rosary beads.

  No news of any man found shot in Astana. No news of an English woman missing.

  I studied the eco-activists’ photo of Joanna again, partly kidding myself I could derive more clues from it, partly because she looked happy in the photo, and I hadn’t seen her like that for a while.

  Lucy Piper messaged: she’d pick me up for a breakfast meeting at eight, heading to a restaurant on Nurzhol Boulevard.

  ‘Is Callum going to be there?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s on his way. Why?’

  ‘Just checking.’

  I messaged Stefan and suggested that it was a good time to recce the Vectis office. He confirmed intent.

  Aliya Savinova’s story had fallen to the floor. I picked it up and thought about what I’d read the previous night. It was well written. A lonely woman fears she is going mad; she contemplates the way in which we believe in unreal things when real things cease to help us, ‘when a limit is reached and only darkness lies ahead’. Lost in fantasy, she succumbs to an ill-judged relationship. The writer’s name was given as Salima Qupiya. In Kazakh, qupiya meant secret or mystery. There were few traces of her online; a poem in an Almaty magazine, a reference on a literary website from two years ago. No photos. According to a biog, she was the same age as Aliya Savinova. She wrote with Aliya’s laconic scepticism. Began studying at Nazarbayev University, it seemed, when Aliya did.