by Tim Heath
“Very funny. Look, with Anya, there is this whole messed-up history.”
“I can see that––she hates you, doesn’t she? I still don’t know what you see in her.”
“She doesn’t hate me, deep down, I’m sure. She’s probably hurt. She has good reason to be; I wasn’t that good to her. I was young and immature.”
“As opposed to the mature, older man you are now,” Zoe said.
“Piss off, will you.” Charlie was smiling. “Look, I’d never met a girl like her before. She blew me off my feet. I mean, to be that gorgeous and that brilliant, it was too good to be true. It really was. I was well out of my league, and she saw through me. I couldn’t keep it up. She just saw through me. It was my fault. I should have been myself, but then she would never have been interested.”
“You don’t really understand women, do you, Charlie?”
“I’ve dated enough.”
“That’s not what I meant, but I guess it proves my point.”
“It was different with Anya. I see that now. There has been no one since. Not since we broke up. Not since she walked away. I hadn’t seen or heard anything from her until she arrived at the airport the other week. It was probably all for the best. You didn’t see eye to eye with her though, did you, Zoe?”
“Not really. She just represents everything I despise.”
“Which is what?”
“Someone who gets by because of her looks and connections, whereas the rest of us have to work our butts off, for what? It’s not a level playing field.”
“There you go again. Man, you really have some issues. Besides, Anya isn’t like that. She’s one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met, regardless of gender.”
“You would say that, of course.”
“No, I’m serious. She can’t hear me, so I have no reason to lie. She’s great. Her father's connections were a huge challenge sometimes, especially when things got political. People would assume she’d be a soft touch, and go easy on the UK because of his connection to the establishment. It caused problems to people when she did her job. Corruption isn’t limited to the Russians, you know. Power corrupts even the West.”
“Hardly in the same way. The fact that she is beautiful doesn’t do her any harm, I might add.”
“Zoe, lay off that record, will you. You’re starting to repeat yourself now. What’s the hang-up with looks?”
“I don’t have a hang-up with looks. I just think it’s what’s in the head that counts, not what the body looks like.”
“There you go again. Enough already.”
“It’s just that’s how it worked for my sister. Modelling is a very shallow world, and she’s had to do a lot of things to get where she has got.”
“Your folks must be so proud,” Charlie said.
“Oh, shut up!” Zoe turned her seat and sat with her back to him. The silly thing, as Charlie now saw, was that she wasn’t a bad-looking girl herself if she’d just put in the effort. She held herself well, had good legs from what he had noticed, and a generous bust. It would take a brave man to win over Zoe.
Their silence was broken by the return of one of the two technicians working on the device, who came into the canteen where they were waiting.
“We’ve got something. The next entry has been opened. You’ll both want to see this.”
They both got up and quickly followed him back towards the room they’d all been using. The device sat open on the table. It read:
Entry 3 - November 2011
I am untouchable in Russia
I have the backing of the Kremlin
I have a product that will break the dominance of Apple in the tablet market
I will bring down William Hackett and expose him for who he really is
“What the...” Zoe said, who was the first to finish reading. “Get your girl back on the phone, Charlie. We need to get these Kremlin connections verified.”
It was the first reference to Bill that they’d found in any of Anthony’s possessions.
“Two things worry me here,” Charlie said, having taken a minute to process things. “Firstly, he called himself untouchable in Russia. Few can say that. He’s also saying he has the backing of the Kremlin. That could only come from Putin himself.”
“Anthony did bankroll the re-election campaign.”
“But Putin was not in power until the following year. The elections happened in 2012.”
“He was very powerful before his return. I don’t think we need to read too much into the timing. Most Russians knew Putin would be the next President, even from the time he was forced to hand over the Presidency to Medvedev. The constitution at the time didn’t allow him to run for a third term,” Zoe said.
“The other thing that gets me is the implication that Hackett will be exposed. From what? He’s as clean as they come.”
“It gives us our motive now. Reason to question the professed innocence.”
“The Russians must be hiding something from us. We need to find out what they have on Hackett. I’ll contact Anya and get her to tell us.”
“And are you sure your lot don’t know more than they’ve told you?” Zoe said.
“Six? They would have told me.” Charlie was a senior agent in MI6. To have been left out of anything they had on Hackett would either be a terrible thing or mean it went so high not even his boss knew. If that was the case, how did the Russians know?
“Are you going to tell Anya what the latest message says?” Zoe said.
“I don’t think we have much choice, do we?”
“Maybe see what they have first, before confirming where we’ve got to. We don’t know what any further entries are going to say yet.”
“Okay, everyone, here’s what we are going to do. Let’s meet back here in sixty minutes. I’ll connect with the Russians, see what they have. Zoe, you push the British side, make sure there isn’t anything we should know. Let’s check November 2011 to see what comes up from that month. I need you both digging as much out of this thing as you can.” Charlie handed the device to the two MI6 technicians again. “And for what it’s worth, run a check against Hackett on the MI6 database. Purely off the record. Have a look where you aren’t meant to look. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Everyone got up and left. There was a lot to do.
Anya was sitting in her office in St Petersburg when the call came through from Charlie. He was put straight through, and greetings exchanged. Things sounded rather amicable.
“Has Bill been coping okay since the transition?”
“Mr Hackett is doing as well as one can be when faced with a murder charge,” she said. “Your Consul General is with him as we speak. Highly unconventional, but understandable given the circumstances. Have you anything more from the device yet?”
“Tests are still being run,” he said. Anya looked up as someone came into her office, dropping a piece of paper in front of her before leaving again.
“Is that so?” she said.
“Anya, I need you to tell me now if the FSB have anything we should know about Bill.”
“Why the change of heart? Do you now think he is a little more guilty?”
“This isn’t a game, Anya.”
“Then why the hell are you playing with me?” This sudden outburst caught him a little off guard before he started connecting thoughts together.
“You have the output from the third entry on the device, don’t you.”
“Yes, of course, we do. And there were you telling me that tests were still ongoing.”
“Do you mind telling me how you got them?”
“From the source, Charlie.”
“The device––impossible.”
“No, not from the device. You have that. But the way it works, remember, is just output on the screen. Like a window. The brains are in the main system, which sends out the info to the individual tablet and posts to a collaboration server. So we’ve been able to read that, at the same time
as you have. As you crack the code, so we too have access to the same information. And we aren’t the only ones.”
“Who else?”
“Media.”
“That’s all we need,” Charlie said. “Can you contain it?”
“What is there to contain?”
“Come on, we both know how it works over there with the press. Nothing goes out if it’s not wanted.”
“Times aren’t what they were, regardless of what you might believe. Look, I’ll see what I can do. But this is big news here. Not so much the murder and trial angle, though that’s still quite hot, it's the technology angle. People want to see what this device is. The murder has only highlighted the fact that this thing was worth killing for.”
“But that isn’t true now, is it. I mean, Fernandes wasn’t killed for the tablet. It was left on his body with everything else he had.”
“True, but these details get lost in the frenzy created around a new gadget. Share prices are starting to rise for RusCom on speculation alone.”
“I thought it was being sold off?”
“It is. It just means the new owners might have to pay a little bit more.”
“So, Anya, business aside, do you have anything on Bill Hackett? Fernandes implied back in 2011 that he was going to expose him. Three years on nothing has happened to suggest that there was anything to expose, besides the killing. Do you know what Fernandes had found out? Is that why you pressed for extradition so quickly?”
“Look, Charlie,” she said, her accent still so beautiful to him. He always loved the way she spoke his name. “That angle was news to me. Are you sure he wasn’t one of yours?”
“I highly doubt that, don’t you?” He had a point, she could see. Still, stranger things had happened.
“Okay, well, keep me informed,” she said.
“Likewise. And Anya, before we go, I’ve not had a chance to say sorry...”
“Just stop right there, Mr Boon. We have to work together, and I expect us to do that professionally as always. But beyond that, we are done. I’m not here to dig up our past.”
“You’re probably right, Anya.”
“Probably? Anyway, you have my number. Anything you come across that I need to know, Charlie, please let me know. It’ll make my job a lot easier.”
“Same here, Anya. Speak soon?”
“Don’t count on it,” she said, ending the call. She stood up and walked over to the window. Taking several deep breaths, she managed to control her feelings somewhat. She held her finger where the diamond engagement ring had once been. That was now at the bottom of the Thames, with bags of emotion to boot.
11
Charlie, Zoe and the two technicians from MI6 were once again around the table. Charlie had brought them up to date on his call with Anya.
“It worries me that the Russians have as much access to this information as we do,” Zoe said.
“It’s the way the thing’s designed,” said one of the technicians. “It’s really clever actually and means the device can constantly be kept up to date. But how secure it is, we cannot tell.”
“Well, I’m worried by the press coverage. It’ll come back to the UK, and you know what that’ll do to the situation. It makes us look stupid, too!”
“It’s far from ideal, Zoe, but we need to stick to what we can do, the things we can affect. What else have we found out?” Charlie said.
“I looked into the timing issue. What’s interesting, is that in November 2011, when the last entry was dated, William Hackett appeared in a national newspaper because of some charity work he’d done. Before that, there was no real coverage. Of course, his charities were working, but there was nothing in the national press about them. That changed in November when he was able to connect a whole village in some African country with their own fresh water supply. That, coupled with some decent research results in the UK for his cancer charity, meant that he was interviewed by one of the broadsheets, a second and third-page feature, no less.”
“So he becomes a more widely known figure at the end of 2011,” Charlie said. “I still don’t see what this has to do with Anthony Fernandes. Anything on the MI6 side?” Both technicians shook their head.
“We ran a complete search, very much off the record. Couldn’t access anything that was level five, of course, but besides that, no obvious reference at all. We even looked into the African connection, but these came back negative. If he was working for Six, they’ve done a good job at hiding it.”
“Could he have been working for anyone else?” Charlie said.
“To what end? He knew nothing in the UK. Politically, as well as security-service-wise, he was clueless, totally unconnected. No obvious links to anyone that would worry us.”
“We must keep digging,” Charlie said, though he didn’t like pushing the team on such little information. “If Hackett surfaced again in November 2011, with the press coverage that it brought him, enough for Fernandes to notice and then vow to expose him that same month, there must be something we’re missing. It’s too much of a coincidence that these two things happened in the same month.”
“Anything on the Russian side regarding his political connections?” Zoe asked, turning back to Charlie.
“Anya is looking into these things, but she’ll have to tread carefully. The Kremlin, especially at the inner core, has always been wary of her, because of her British connections through her father as well as her moral nature.”
“No one is incorruptible, Charlie. Only last week you thought Hackett was whiter than snow, and now you suspect him of being an agent at the highest level.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Zoe. Besides, I just want answers. The press here is going crazy about the extradition. While I never saw him as guilty of what they were saying he did, the evidence was damning. If there was a darker side, however, something that Fernandes knew about and the very thing that got him killed, then I want to know. Maybe it’ll get the press off my back. Maybe I’ll be able to go home and not fight through a crowd of reporters, camera bulbs flashing in my face.”
There was a knock at the door. It was a lady from the PR department.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr Boon, but there is a reporter here from the Guardian, wanting to have an interview with you regarding Mr Hackett.”
Charlie looked up at her. He knew she was just doing her job and that they couldn’t shut the press out forever, but still it didn’t dampen his response.
“Tell them they can go to hell. I’m working on the case. And while you’re at it, tell them to get their fat arses off my front drive and leave me in peace, will you.”
She said nothing, turning a little white, as she closed the door, wishing she’d never bothered to ask him.
Meanwhile, in Russia, a court date was set for Bill for three weeks from then. He was to stand trial for the aggravated murder of a public official, one of the highest charges that could be imposed. News hit soon after, another wave of publicity for events that were threatening to get way out of hand before the month was out.
Several days had passed and, to some extent, the press coverage had moved on. Other things were going on in the world, after all. Charlie had moved into a safe house so that he could at least come and go without a barrage of questions and ‘no comment’ replies. News of the trial date and charge had circulated throughout the UK. The Home Office was working on confirming what the maximum sentence would be. William’s family were in total shock. His children had been seen on most channels crying through interviews, shocked that such a miscarriage of justice could be happening to their father, pleading with the government to intervene.
Several new situations around the world were starting to catch more extensive attention, drawing focus away from this story, which pleased Charlie no end as he walked around the offices of Scotland Yard, a building he’d had no reason to visit before being handed this assignment. Zoe now had a cup of coffee waiting for him on most days. At the beginning she’d just make her own,
never one for him. Now there were always two cups of coffee waiting, sometimes even a biscuit.
“Morning, Zoe,” he said, taking the coffee and drinking half a cup in one go.
“Good morning, Charlie. Sleep well?”
“Yes, thanks. Oh, and thanks for the coffee.”
“It’s nothing.” She was almost flirting with him. It didn’t suit her as she wasn’t very good at it, either. “How did it go yesterday at the Home Office?”
“They’re worried. The Russian press has Hackett as guilty already before the trial has even started. Fernandes has been hailed as this hero of theirs, they’ve adopted him to their nation the more they’ve heard about him. The Kremlin is staying silent about the charges, but it’s clear from the press. They’ve made Fernandes out to be an integral part of the inner workings of the Kremlin. His assassination, in some quarters, has been taken as an act of treason.”
“How do they figure that? He was a British citizen?”
“I know. This is what worries the Home Office. The Russians are now viewing Fernandes as their answer to Steve Jobs. RusCom was to be a flagship Russian computer company. Their own tablet was meant to launch them onto better things. Hype is still driving up the share price. They’ve seen a ten percent rise in value this last week alone.”
“Is the company still being sold?” Zoe said.
“Yes, we believe so. The word is, it’ll probably go to an overseas company. They can’t stand the competition.”
“What does Russia think of that?”
“It’s not a popular outcome, but business is business.”
“It’s not as if there isn’t the money in Russia to buy up the company, though. Why aren't they looking to keep it in the family?” Zoe said.
“Look, I don’t know and really don’t care. It doesn’t help Bill now, does it?”
One of the MI6 technicians, who’d been working on the device always since being handed it, came running towards them at that moment.
