Terminal Black

by Adrian Magson

  ‘And getting Rik killed is a way to do that?’ Harry wondered what on earth Rik could possibly know that made this search so important.

  ‘Colmyer must think so. If it is and it works, he’ll be covered in glory.’ Cramer sounded glum at the prospect.

  ‘Do you have any details on the contractor?’

  ‘Hang on, I’m just reading a summary. His name’s Garth Perry … ex-Military Intelligence … pulled out of Afghan after a series of brutality accusations … and later diagnosed with PTSD, although that’s moot and he might just be fucking nuts. He was under close observation after mixing with a violent far-right group threatening extreme action … and dropped off the radar a couple of weeks ago. He’s thought to have similar contacts with groups throughout Europe.’

  ‘So he might not be operating solo.’

  ‘Probably not. If I find anything else I’ll let you know.’

  Harry swore silently. This wasn’t good. ‘The people holding Rik are jumpy already. Rik says they’re a GRU direct action unit. If they get wind of Perry or anyone else in the area they might just cut their losses and press the button.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But you won’t know what’s behind this then, will you? Won’t that cause you sleepless nights?’

  A pause. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Whatever it is he’s supposed to know must be important to someone. Otherwise why all the fuss? Now might be a good time to tell me what you think it is.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t know!’ The response was too genuinely angry to be anything but the truth. And Harry knew why: it was the field operative’s dislike of being kept out of the loop by those higher on the ladder, when every instinct screamed for more background intel. But he wasn’t going to let Cramer off that easily.

  ‘So I’m out here in the wind on your behalf, with a potentially serious cyber threat on the way, and being treated like an idiot. Rik says he hasn’t been doing anything, and I believe him. He’s an open book, not a cyber spy.’

  A few seconds ticked by, then Cramer said, ‘All I’ve been told is, he’s believed to possess information picked up during his time on loan with Six, but he didn’t disclose it during his debriefing.’

  ‘That’s what his captors are saying.’

  A pause. ‘How the hell would they know that?’

  ‘My question, too. But that’s for the mole hunters to work out.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ Cramer breathed. But he sounded predictably horrified at the idea of an internal leak.

  Harry decided to give him a push. ‘It wouldn’t be about someone or something called Cicada, would it?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Cicada. One of Rik’s interrogators mentioned the name.’

  ‘In what connection?’

  ‘It may have been a name or a reference in one of the files. Rik told them he couldn’t remember. In any case, if it was special forces stuff, which is what he was into, it wouldn’t be of any use to a foreign power, not after all this time.’

  ‘I agree. But that presupposes he saw something he hasn’t admitted to … and maybe the GRU goons think the same. Ask him again.’

  Harry let it go. He was sure Rik was genuinely unable to remember the name. The main thing was to get him out of there; the recriminations could come later. ‘Get me a technical bod,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see. I get the feeling they won’t hold off much longer. They’ve already killed one of their own group, and if they get really desperate Rik will be toast … and then if they’re really serious they’ll go on the offensive.’

  ‘All right, I’m on it.’

  ‘Are you sure? Only there’s no time for committee meetings to get it signed off.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m switching to army rules. Where does this person need to head for?’

  ‘Send me a name first and I’ll text the details. Use WhatsApp. The location’s a major airport in eastern Europe. I suggest you get a plane on standby with special aid-emergency clearance.’

  Two hours later, having briefed Clare about Rik’s situation, he received a text message from Cramer.

  Sally Mitchell, Chief Tech, RAF. Name the RV and time.

  Harry responded. He hesitated over specifying the airport, but he had to trust Cramer would use whatever secure channels were open to him and to keep that information to himself. If it got out right away, he’d have company coming over the hill before he could get Rik out of here.

  Minsk Int. Soonest.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Are we on a fool’s mission?’

  Ben Cramer asked the question as soon as he saw Richard Hough. They were walking around the outskirts of Trafalgar Square, which neither man considered the correct place for a strategy meeting. But they had used worse.

  Hough didn’t respond immediately. Out of habit he was checking the immediate area for signs of listeners. Although it was early the square was busy with tourists, mostly Japanese and Chinese by the looks of them, all eager to take as many selfies as they could before being hustled back into line for the next visitor attraction on the itinerary. The roads around the square were thick with commuter traffic, adding layers of noise to the atmosphere along with a growing smell of exhaust fumes.

  ‘Nobody can hear us,’ Cramer assured his colleague. ‘I checked.’

  Hough looked surprised. ‘You did? How?’

  ‘I had a couple of techs come here yesterday with the latest in laser microphones. There’s too much interference to pick up complete strings of conversation.’ He smiled. ‘Mind you, what they did hear was pretty hair-raising. I’ve got the goods on at least two back-benchers and a very senior civil servant. Also,’ he pulled a device from his pocket, ‘this is a sound disrupter. It kills our voices at anything over two metres.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Hough stared at it. ‘It looks like a mobile phone.’

  Cramer put it away. ‘It is. I’m kidding.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Hough looked puzzled. ‘You’re not having a mental breakdown, are you? Only I can get you some counselling if you need it. Might bugger up this operation, though.’

  Cramer grunted. ‘No need. I’m fine.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. You said you wanted to talk. Urgent, too, you said. You sounded like my wife when I’ve forgotten to do something important. And what do you mean a fool’s mission?’

  ‘Call it a soldier’s instinct. I’ve been in this position before.’ Cramer reached down and tapped his absent leg. It made a dull sound. ‘Only back then I didn’t listen to the warning bells. Now I am.’

  Hough glanced at Cramer’s leg, where the ridge of the prosthetic showed faintly beneath the movement of the cloth of his trousers. ‘Does it hurt? Sorry – that’s insensitive of me.’

  ‘No problem. It used to. I try not to think about it any more.’ He waved a hand to dismiss the subject. ‘Something isn’t right about this operation. Don’t you feel that?’

  Hough opened his mouth, then closed it again, so Cramer continued, ‘You and I have been tasked to find a former MI5 technical officer accused of having accessed restricted files some ten years ago. Files you said had been archived or rendered inactive. I haven’t seen any of them because they’re too sensitive for a simple ex-squaddie like me.’

  ‘Don’t feel too hard done-by,’ Hough said dryly. ‘I’ve only been allowed a peep at a summary report and I’ve been around a lot longer than you.’

  Cramer shrugged. ‘The said techie was debriefed, kicked out of the service and sent to some remote shit-hole in Georgia—’ He lifted his hand. ‘Forgive my language but I’ve been there; it is a shit-hole.’

  ‘I know. A dumping ground for certain people to disappear and to forget. Only some things can’t be forgotten. What’s your point?’

  ‘It sounded pretty basic stuff at first: man goes missing, possibly holding sensitive information. The thing is, Tate says the accusations against Ferris are rubbish.’
<
br />   ‘Well, he would. He’s another Red Station graduate and Ferris’s mate. So?’

  ‘He also said Ferris isn’t working with anyone; he’s being held by a GRU active service team and they aren’t being nice about it. They’ve already used a taser on him and killed one of their own – an FSB helper.’

  ‘Any names for these people?’

  Cramer told him, adding, ‘Kraush is the one calling the shots.’

  Hough nodded. ‘I’ll get someone on that. Anything else?’

  Cramer took a deep breath. ‘Yes. They’re planning a top-level cyber offensive against the UK if they don’t get what they want from Ferris.’

  Hough’s head snapped round. ‘You wait until now to tell me that? I need details, Ben.’

  ‘It’s a threat aimed at Ferris to get his cooperation. We have no proof it goes beyond that. And anyway, what would you do about it? You can’t send in a strike force and knock them out.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we could at least warn Cheltenham to put some extra measures in place.’

  ‘That would alert whoever’s doing this and they’d go to ground.’ Cramer laid a hand on his colleague’s arm. ‘We have to wait for more information.’

  The two men drifted apart to make way for a gaggle of women in chadors and accompanying children, then moved back together. ‘Tate strikes me as a square peg in a round hole,’ said Cramer. ‘But so am I, if you believe the conditioning-by-experience theory.’ He gave Hough a direct look. ‘Like you, if my instincts are correct.’

  Hough said, ‘What’s your point?’ He was watching a tiny Japanese woman covertly drop breadcrumbs from her coat pocket while being photographed by a giggling companion. The dead giveaway was that she was the only person within fifty yards surrounded by the birds.

  ‘I could frighten the shit out of her,’ he commented mildly, ‘by showing her my card. That would ruin the local tourist trade for all of a nano-second.’ He turned back to Cramer. ‘Let me play the supposing game here for a minute, Ben. Back to Ferris: that seems to be the nub of the question here, otherwise why all this charade? What could possibly be so important to merit his kidnapping – if that’s what it is – and a threat to bring the UK to a stand-still?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hough chewed his lip. ‘What if the debrief wasn’t as thorough as the psych team thought? What if he actually saw a file, maybe a summary or even a header, but didn’t disclose it?’

  Cramer shook his head. ‘But why wouldn’t he have mentioned it? He had nothing to lose by coming clean – he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar so his career was a bust anyway.’

  ‘Unless what he saw was so toxic he didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘There is another explanation,’ Hough suggested after several moments. ‘What if he actually didn’t know what he saw because it was … I don’t know, too complex or remote?’

  ‘Is that likely? He’s no idiot.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever question an order because the details weren’t clear?’

  Cramer chewed that over. ‘If you’re talking about my last fracas in Afghan you’d be right on the nail, which makes me an idiot. But I didn’t question it because I trusted the intelligence and the head sheds to have got it right.’ He looked around. ‘I suppose if I had I’d be walking on both original legs God gave me but out of a job.’

  ‘But that aside.’

  ‘No, not every time. Most were battle orders given by people who understood the situation and didn’t use convoluted language. Being sent on some hair-brained op by a bunch of desk jockeys was different.’ He waved a hand. ‘No offence.’

  ‘None taken. In my defence I’ve only been a desk jockey for a couple of years. Before that … well, let’s just say I was following orders in the field, same as you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. Different fields but the game was essentially the same.’

  There was a lull in the conversation while Cramer assessed that for what it was. Hough was somebody he could respect because he’d been out there over many years where there were more shadows than light and enemies were even harder to recognize than in the dusty environs of Afghanistan or Iraq. ‘You don’t like it, either, do you – this op?’

  Hough tilted his head a fraction. It wasn’t a yes but was hardly a denial. ‘I feel … uncomfortable with certain aspects.’

  Cramer grunted. ‘And there speaks a civil servant. A “no” would have done.’

  ‘No, then. I don’t like it.’

  ‘So what can we do about it?’

  Hough squinted at him. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Tate put an interesting question to me earlier. He asked who was driving this operation from our side. And why now?’

  ‘That’s two questions. What did you tell him?’

  ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t.’

  ‘And you want me to tell you.’

  ‘I think it’s time, don’t you? Before we go much further.’

  ‘Cards on the table?’

  ‘Why not? I’m grown-up – I can handle it.’

  ‘God help us. This is the intelligence world. If we start putting cards on tables it’ll cause chaos and kingdoms will fall.’

  ‘Humour me. If not with a name, at least why now after all this time?’

  Hough looked doubtful so Cramer continued, ‘I think Tate’s right: most of the material Ferris got a look at is out of date by now. It’s dead information. The question I keep asking myself, as the lowest rung on this particular ladder – Tate and Ferris notwithstanding – is, what’s behind it?’

  Hough pulled a face. ‘I’m going to play dumber a little longer.’

  ‘All right. What – or should I say who – decided that after all this time, an IT tyke like Ferris needed investigating all over again.’ He waved a hand. ‘So he drops off the radar, does a bunk without asking permission of the watchdogs – who, incidentally, don’t have a right to know. He’s ten years out of touch, so why are they getting their balls in a twist? Or was he already under surveillance?’

  ‘Not as far as I know – at least, not by me. His name might have surfaced for some other reason and it triggered an alarm. It happens.’ He paused. ‘Like you, I’m operating with partial data.’

  ‘But it was put to bed years ago, supposedly with the help of the psych wallahs, who we know rarely fail to dig out every tiny little secret people are harbouring, even if they don’t know what they’re harbouring.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So why all this? Tate says Ferris told him he was looking at field reports on special forces assignments allied to intelligence operations. Probably like the last one I was on. They might be classified but they’re hardly the kind of stuff to get the GRU excited. According to Tate, Ferris was an SAS fan-boy. It doesn’t make him unique or suspect – and unlikely to be a traitor.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Hough pursed his lips. ‘Say I agree with you. What makes you think there’s one person driving it?’

  ‘Because there’s always one. Every proposal ever made since God was in shorts began that way. It would have been a suggestion, a question, whatever; but no proposal gets to be a decisive course of action without being originally pushed by one decider – even if a committee gives the final nod.’

  ‘You don’t believe in collective responsibility, then? That’s odd, coming from a military man.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Cramer grunted. ‘At the top of every plan, every campaign, every mission, there has to be someone pushing it; one person who was the originator. Work your way up the line from ground level and you’ll eventually come to that one person.’

  Hough didn’t argue. His expression was grim.

  ‘You’re unnervingly silent,’ Cramer prompted him.

  Hough shrugged. ‘Maybe because I’ve been on the arse end of bad decisions myself more than once. Soldiers aren’t the only ones sent out to do things on the back of faulty thinking and a lack of preparation.’ He stopped
walking and straightened his coat. ‘Are you actually going to tell me where Tate is right now?’

  ‘In Belarus. Minsk. But that’s not for general release. He’s found Ferris but there’s a specific problem not of Ferris’s doing.’

  ‘Is it solvable?’

  ‘I hope so, otherwise neither of them will be coming home.’ He stamped his foot, flexing his good leg. ‘I’ve used contacts to get a rescue plan in place but it needs Tate to run it on the ground. He can’t do that with everybody and their brother breathing down his neck.’

  ‘I understand,’ Hough said, and made a zipper gesture across his mouth. ‘Scout’s honour.’

  Cramer gave a lopsided smile. ‘I won’t embarrass you with the details but you might have to field a few complaints later about the misuse of military personnel – namely one technical bod – and muscling up a seat on an aid-related flight out of Frankfurt.’

  Hough lifted his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You’re bloody enjoying this, aren’t you? What other little gems can I expect to hear about?’

  ‘None … unless it all goes tits up. Better you don’t know.’

  ‘I appreciate your consideration,’ Hough murmured. ‘Actually, I wish I was in on it … but maybe you’re right. If I don’t know squat they can’t nail my fingers to the table and get anything out of me.’

  ‘Exactly. What about this Garth Perry. Any news?’

  ‘Off and running, I’m afraid.’ Hough looked sombre. ‘A sub-contract job. It was taken out of my hands so I haven’t been able to stop it.’

  ‘And it was Colmyer’s doing?’

  Yes.’

  Cramer looked sour. ‘Well, fuck a duck,’ he breathed. ‘So politicos are running ops now.’ He checked the buttons on his coat. ‘Here’s something to think about – something I can’t check but you might be able to. Does the name Cicada mean anything to you?’