Matthew Richardson
MY NAME IS NOBODY
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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2017
Copyright © Matthew Richardson, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image: Man © Mark Own/Trevillion Images
London © Roy Bishop/Archangel Images
ISBN: 978-1-405-92480-1
To all my family
‘I know a secret,’ he says. ‘A secret that changes everything.’
Solomon Vine pulls out the rickety plastic chair and sits down on the opposite side of the table. The room is stark and empty. Dust clings to the walls.
‘That wasn’t my question,’ Vine says, holding the man’s gaze. His voice is without colour, bare of any emotion.
‘No. But it is my answer.’
‘I don’t want your secrets, I want names.’
There is an interruption as the door screeches open. Gabriel Wilde fills the space, offering a slight nod of apology. He pads across the concrete flooring and takes the chair on Vine’s left. He slides over a manila folder. Vine doesn’t look at it immediately, as if he has already memorized its contents. Instead, it sits there, free of any official marking or classification, anonymous and deniable.
Vine lets a beat of silence fall. He needs to make the suspect hear the full, noiseless force of it. There is no one else here to save him. This isn’t official embassy territory, softened by rules and edicts. There are no platoons of lawyers ready to ambush the interrogation. He is theirs, to do with what they will.
‘You don’t understand,’ the man says now. There is a spike of volume in his voice. He leans forwards so his upper-body weight pivots on his elbows. Despite the handcuffs, he fights for dexterity with his hands, prodding his index finger at the table top in rhythm with his voice. ‘What I know changes everything. Whatever you think you can do, you are mistaken.’
Vine reaches for the file and brandishes it. He opens the cover and scans the first page.
‘Mobile-phone records show recent contact with five British citizens who have travelled to Syria,’ he says. ‘We have evidence confirming the supply of fake passports and illegal arms. Her Majesty’s government has an isolation cell prepared specially for your return home. With the material we have in this folder alone, you will be sent down for life … Write down the names of your contacts, and we can talk.’
The man looks up, lips creasing into a smile. It is not a reflex, but a carefully calibrated action, the jaw wounded with amusement.
‘There will be no trial, no sentence, no cell,’ he says.
‘No one will save you, Dr Yousef,’ says Vine. ‘No one even knows you’re here. You have disappeared off the face of the earth. You’re lucky you ran into us before the Americans. Though if you would like to be transferred, I’m sure that can be arranged …’
He shakes his head. This time the smile thickens into laughter. ‘One word from me and they will let me go … Trust me, they will call.’
‘Who will call?’ says Gabriel Wilde, breaking his silence. He gets up from the chair and starts roaming the boxy parameters of the room.
‘The people who matter,’ says Ahmed Yousef. ‘They always do. If they want my secret, they will pay the price. It is the terms of business. Nothing more.’
‘A secret that changes everything?’ says Wilde. He stops behind Yousef’s chair and dips his voice to a whisper. ‘It better be a bloody good one. A grass can never be too careful …’
‘It’s the best,’ says Yousef. ‘They will call. You will see.’
‘And if they don’t?’
Yousef doesn’t answer. He looks to the closed door. As if on cue, there is the flash of the alert light, a throb of red that upsets the blankness of the room. Vine feels the first cramp of unease as he gets up from the table and makes his way to the door.
It is cool outside. There is another sound behind, and Vine turns to see Wilde following him down the long line of grey corridor to the control room. An RMP guard – all fidgety eyes and nervous speed – waits with the phone.
‘Who is it?’
‘The switch at HQ,’ he says, handing over the red receiver. As Vine waits to be connected, the guard turns to Wilde.
‘Your wife also called, sir. She needs you back at base. She said it was urgent.’
Wilde doesn’t display any twinge of anxiety. Instead, he says to Vine: ‘You OK to finish this? I’ll be back as soon as I can …’
Vine nods, careful not to react at the mention of Rose. The control room is full of monitors, a glassy panorama of concrete floors and airless turnings. He sees Wilde make his way down the hall and in the direction of the car park. A voice emerges through the crackle on the other line.
‘Please hold for the Chief …’
One burr later, the gravelly tones of Sir Alexander Cecil fill the speaker.
‘Is it true?’ the voice says.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is it true, Vine? You have Ahmed Yousef in custody?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘He’s not talking at the moment. But we’re getting there. The product he was carrying should be enough to put him away this time.’
There is no response on the end of the line. Vine can feel the weight of it, like a silent throat-clearing. ‘I never said this, Vine. Are we clear? This never came from me.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You’re to release Ahmed Yousef immediately. I don’t care where you drop him, but see that you do so within the next half hour.’
I know a secret … A secret that changes everything …
Vine halts, unable to reply immediately. Sweat begins to gather on his forehead, a tightness pressing on his gut. ‘The line’s bad. Repeat please.’
‘You caught it perfectly well, Vine. Just do it.’
Vine waits for another moment, topping up the composure in his voice. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ says Cecil. ‘Drop him and continue with whatever you were doing. Don’t ask questions. Not this time.’
‘Sir, we have direct evidence implicating Ahmed Yousef in the cases of at least five British citizens arriving in Syria. He is a priority-one target on the NSC and CIA Most Wanted lists. We have more than enough material here to prosecute. This makes no sense.’
Cecil’s voice frosts over now, the words newly brittle. ‘This isn’t a discussion, Vine. There are more important things going on here than you can possibly imagine. Carry out this order or I’ll damn well get someone else to.’
With that, the line cuts off. Cecil’s voice is replaced by a scratchy monotone. Vine hands the receiver back to the RMP guard. He glances at the monitors.
He turns to the guard. ‘Is there anyone else in the building?’
‘No, sir,’ he says. ‘Just you, me and the prisoner.’
Vine waits. Once said, the words can’t be unsaid. ‘Good. I want you to go dark until I say so. If anyone asks, blame it on a power cut.’ He notices the scrunch of concern on the man’s face. ‘Refer any questions to me.’
He looks up at the monitors for a final time to see Gabriel Wilde’s car inching out of the driveway – escaping all consequences with immaculate timing. He watches as the guard begins methodically turning the cameras off, each screen blinking fuzzily and then blank.
Then he leaves the building and walks into the blast of heat outside. He unfurls a lighter and a cigarette. The sun bruises his face. He can already feel the pincers moving towards him. Cecil will have engineered things in London to make sure the call was never logged. If it goes wrong, Cecil will be able to plausibly deny he ever gave instructions to let Ahmed Yousef free. But, if Vine doesn’t follow through, he will find the full might of the fifth floor against him. The game demands a scapegoat, and he is now theirs.
He keeps on smoking, letting the minutes drift away, trying to will things clearer. Eventually, he douses the final one and turns. As he walks, the words repeat, tumbling over themselves.
There are more important things going on here than you can possibly imagine …
Curiosity compels him forwards now. The secret looms like a challenge. He treads back through the dour hallways, not yet sure what he will do. But he finds himself suddenly longing to be away from here, tired of patrolling the huts and compounds, starved of oxygen and scenery; tired of the decisions and the choices.
He buzzes back into the secure area and makes his way down the thin final corridor. The interrogation room lies at the end, aglow with a harsher whiteness. Vine wonders again what hold Yousef has on London. What does he know? What grubby deal has he engineered that sees him immune from further questioning? Why would the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service intervene personally to demand his release?
I know a secret … A secret that changes everything …
Vine reaches the door and pauses for a moment. He feels a new anger begin to work its way up from the pit of his stomach until it fills his throat.
He presses his card against the scanner and hears the door click open. He tries to brush aside any final doubt as he steps into the brighter light. He knows what he will do, what he must do.
It is then that he stops. In front of him is an empty chair, a hollow space where Ahmed Yousef should be. But that isn’t it. There is something else wrong. He looks down at the floor and sees the first splashes of colour against the greyness. It seems to ooze and wander according to a logic of its own. Slowly, he traces the source, a lump of shadow behind the table.
Ahmed Yousef is lying on his back, blood haloing around him. It looks like a gunshot wound. Without stopping to calculate the consequences, Vine finds himself pressing the alert button. A keening noise smothers the building.
Soon the steps of the RMP guard sound outside. The door opens with a ponderous click.
He knows they have minutes at best. With the amount of blood loss, they could already be too late. He strains to feel a pulse. But there is just flesh, slippery and raw.
‘Call for an urgent medical team,’ he shouts. ‘We need to evacuate him now.’ As the guard turns, Vine says: ‘Find out who’s been in here and how the hell this could have happened.’
The delay seems to last for ever. He takes out the emergency medical kit and begins doing everything he can to stem the blood loss. But the blood spatters his fingers and up his arms. His clothes become damp and sticky. He tries again to find any signs of consciousness, feels just the fading echo of a pulse.
Minutes later, the guard returns. ‘Evac team on their way from base, sir. ETA five minutes.’ He starts to walk further into the room then stops and hovers.
‘What is it?’
Vine turns. He realizes what he must look like – a butcher, or a surgeon.
‘I’ve found the card that was used to enter the building, sir,’ he says. ‘Ten minutes ago. With the CCTV down, that’s the only identifier we have.’
‘And?’ Vine says impatiently. ‘Who was in here? Who did this?’
The guard doesn’t answer at first. He looks nervous, as if unable to summon the words.
‘It was you, sir.’
Solomon Vine took another sip of coffee and pushed his plate away. He signalled for the bill, flashing his debit card. Perhaps he should just make a run for it now. He could be at an airport within an hour, stay over in Paris or Berlin, even deploy some elementary tradecraft if anyone had bothered to notice he was gone. He had often imagined all the lives he could lead – a teacher, labourer, nomad. Anywhere as far away from this as he could get. From England, the establishment, Westminster, Whitehall and, above all, the Secret Intelligence Service.
As he waited for the bill to arrive, he took the postcard from his jacket pocket again. It had landed on his doormat early this morning. He turned it over and read the single line of text on the back, scrawled in biro. It read:
11 a.m. St James’s Park. CN.
Cosmo Newton, Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Newton still had his number and could have texted. But the card meant he didn’t want GCHQ or, worse still, the NSA picking it up. There had been a drip-feed of scandals in the last few months from former Whitehall veterans claiming they’d been bugged by the intelligence fraternity. Since then, most ministers had ditched the phones and gone back to whispered asides in the Members’ Dining Room.
Vine paid the bill and then grabbed his coat. He walked slowly, trying to focus on his surroundings. The breeze stabbed at his cheeks. The air smelled of fumes, tangy and raw. He wondered what Newton wanted to tell him. Ever since his suspension, he had been exiled from all meaningful contact. His days were filled with waiting, the rare messages heavy with potential consequences. Perhaps they would grant him one final dignity and send Cosmo Newton to deliver the worst news of all. As Vine walked, he felt his body ache with an old frustration. The illogicality of it all strained at him. He had entertained every possible hypothesis over the previous three months, but still the impossibility of it haunted him like a curse. Ahmed Yousef had been silenced by a ghost. He could hear the interview with Cecil on his return, each moment of hesitation dooming him.
You ordered the RMP guard to disable all CCTV coverage?
Correct.
Only you, Yousef and the RMP guard were in, or near, the building at the time of the incident?
Correct.
The RMP guard’s movements were accounted for by digital forensics on the computer system of the premises?
Correct.
Your card was used to enter the secure area during the time of the attack?
Correct.
There are no witnesses to your movements between 1710 and 1730 on the day of the incident?
Correct.
Why did you try to kill Ahmed Yousef?
Vine considered the question again now. He had thought many times about what he would do if left alone with Yousef. The ethics had been juggled, but no answer ever found. Sometimes he wondered if his own memories were deceiving him. In the half-alive moments between sleep and wakefulness, he saw himself tread the hallway to the interrogation room. He could see the splinter of shock on Yousef’s face as he aimed and fired. He could hear the thump of sound as his body collided with the stone floor.
Vine tucked those thoughts away. He soon arrived at St James’s Park. Cosmo Newton was seated on a bench straight ahead, insulated from the weather in an overcoat, hands snug in brown leather driving gloves, both clasping the handle of a furled umbrella.
Vine slipped into the gap beside him. There was no formal greeting, not even a flicker of recognition.
‘How is exile treating you?’ said Newton, after a beat.
‘I can’t complain.’
‘You always were a good liar.’
‘I take it this isn’t just a social call?’
‘Well deduced.’
‘So?’
The shadow of a smile crept to the edge of Newton’s lips. ‘Trust me,’ he said, rising from the bench and prodding his umbrella at the ground. ‘This is something you’ll want to hear.’
‘So why do you want to be a spy?’ he asks.
Vine pauses, looks again at the strange figure in the tweed jacket, tufty hair, red cords. ‘I wasn’t aware I did.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Professor Donaldson told me this was an interview for the Treasury.’
A gale of laughter, five seconds long at least. Cosmo Newton clenches his pipe between his teeth. ‘She did always have a very droll sense of humour. You would prefer the Treasury?’
Vine pushes himself further into his seat. ‘Can’t say I speak from much experience of either.’
‘No, quite.’ Newton looks down at the sheet of paper in front of him. From the back, Vine can just about make out Professor Donaldson’s sloped handwriting, the trademark red ink. ‘Good with numbers, I see.’
‘I can muddle my way through, yes.’
‘Any languages?’
‘I’ve just about mastered English.’
‘But not much foreign experience?’
Vine smiles. ‘I don’t know how familiar you are with state-run care homes, Mr Newton. But not many have budgets for foreign holidays. Blame the government rather than me on that one.’
Newton looks up, an interested crease on his heavy face. ‘You’re political, then, are you?’
Vine takes a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, removing one and scrabbling for a lighter. ‘Hardly. I’m a mathematician, not a politician. I believe in evidence, not words.’
Letting Vine search for a moment longer, Newton slips a lighter out of his jacket pocket and throws it over. Vine catches it, lights his cigarette and relaxes as he puffs.
‘And how do you imagine my world has changed in the last few years?’ asks Newton. ‘If that’s not too hypothetical for you …’
‘Berlin Wall fallen, Soviet Union dismantled, EU promising a century of peace and Northern Ireland over the worst of the troubles. Must be rather boring now, I’d have thought.’ He chucks the lighter back to Newton and admires the deft way he cups it in one of his bearish hands.
‘So you don’t subscribe to the view that every war breeds the next one?’
‘I don’t subscribe to anything.’
‘Excellent …’ Newton crosses his legs. ‘We are currently in limbo, watching the world change around us. The Cold War has gone, some new threat will replace it. Of that we can be sure. New modes of warfare too. Not the old guard like me. We need codebreakers, people with a head for numbers, technology too. Are you any good with computers?’
‘Good enough,’ says Vine.
‘And what about loyalty?’ says Newton, brushing a crumb off his trouser leg. ‘I can see that you’re clever, not afraid to speak your mind. But are you loyal enough to serve your country, to obey every command no matter what?’
Vine is about to answer when he checks himself. It’s a trick, a final question to weed out sloppy thinking. ‘I would be loyal to the values of my country, never to those who seek to override them. Loyalty under the law, never no matter what.’
Newton smiles, nods appreciatively. ‘Well, preliminaries over, I think we’re back to where we started. Why do you want to be a spy?’
‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying Gabriel Wilde has just … disappeared?’
Cosmo Newton sighed. ‘Left the station in Istanbul at approximately 1915 on the evening of Thursday 3 November. According to the CCTV feed, at least. The first sign of trouble was when he didn’t show up for work the next morning. The station alert went out at 0800 and the Ambassador was informed. From witness statements, we think any incident took place roughly between 0100 and around 0200. Forensics found evidence of a struggle. Impossible to judge exactly how many hostiles we could be talking about. From some initial work, we think not more than three. The kitchen was covered in Wilde’s blood. But the snatch team were good. We recovered no other DNA matches. It bears all the signs of a professional take-out.’
‘Any clues about the identities of the hostiles?’
‘No, they were good. Too good.’
Vine coughed lightly and continued to stare ahead. He wrapped his upturned collar tighter around his neck, wincing slightly at the cold. He felt numb at the news, as if the full impact would only hit him hours later. For now, he was content to drift on the guilty thrill of the diversion.
St James’s Park was emptying. When they’d first arrived it was dotted with parents pushing buggies, replaced now with a scattering of joggers immune to the chill.
Vine stared up for a minute at the sky. ‘What was the follow-up?’
‘The Ambassador ordered an immediate search party, unsurprisingly. A team were dispatched to comb the area. Tentative mention was made of trying to use the Cousins and track him by drone, but the relationship has been patchy of late.’
‘And the reaction at Vauxhall Cross?’
‘Well, there’s the rub. That’s where the story stops.’
‘How do you mean?’
Newton transferred his umbrella between hands, his pace slowing a fraction. ‘Cecil won’t let so much as a whisper about it penetrate the walls of Whitehall,’ he said. ‘Wilde was replaced as Head of Station almost instantly, and normal service has been resumed.’
‘And the Americans?’
‘As far as I know, the drone request was never authorized. They’ll have picked up mutterings, of course, but Vauxhall Cross has kept quiet otherwise. Cecil’s best plan is to sit pretty and hope Brexit helps sweep it all away.’
‘And you? The JIC?’
‘We live by rumours alone. Cecil has been consolidating his grip. It isn’t worth the while of any staffer to blab. Everyone’s too frightened of him. The lessons of the past are there for all to see. I don’t need to remind you of that.’
‘No … so why have you summoned me?’
‘I’ve been shut out,’ Newton said. ‘Vauxhall Cross has gone into lockdown. Cecil has always seen the JIC as an irrelevance. The Foreign Office doesn’t want to know. Whitehall instinctively looks the other way when this sort of scandal breaks. But something’s not right. And I need to find out what.’
‘Why the fallout?’
Newton grimaced. ‘The new Public Accountability Bill, extending the thirty-year rule on public files to all branches of Whitehall.’
Vine laughed. ‘Open government.’
‘Indeed. If we can read Cabinet minutes, why not what Five, Six and GCHQ got up to? Even so, none of this makes sense. The Public Accountability Bill has been in the works for years. There’s something else Cecil’s trying to hide. He knows he can’t keep Whitehall in the dark about Wilde’s situation for ever. Perhaps in the old days, but not now. This is him freelancing, I’m sure of it. Whatever game he’s playing, he obviously thinks it is worth the risk.’
‘And he thinks he can win.’
Newton stopped. ‘The truth is, I want you to do something for me. Something that only you can do.’
‘And what might that be?’
Newton sighed, a greyish plume forming. ‘Have a good sniff,’ he said. ‘Inhale the flavours. Swirl it around the glass and see what impression you get. Until the Yousef case is cleared up, you’re not going to be back at Vauxhall Cross any time soon. Might help keep you busy.’
‘Thanks for the thought.’
Newton looked up at Vine. ‘No one else knows Wilde like you did,’ he said. ‘And I can’t trust anyone on the inside. The greatest hope for MI6 in a generation – a man prepared to one day clutch the green pen as Chief – is snatched in the middle of the night, and we’re all meant to pretend it never happened.’
Vine pressed his hands deeper into his furred coat pockets. ‘So what is my brief?’ he said.
‘I want you to go and interview the key people. See what was happening at the embassy, within the station. Go through Wilde’s history and see if you can find me some answers. There were endless rumours about something he might be working on. He was about to be handpicked as the next Director of Global Operations, then seemed to pack it all in. Everyone thought it was personal problems, but see if it was something more. Go back to the start. Talk to Turnbull at Oxford. His Deputy Head of Station is back in London. Get their thoughts. Here’s one name to get you started.’ He handed across a card.
Vine took the card and scanned the name. Olivia Cartier MP, Member of Parliament for Kensington.
‘One of the last people to see Gabriel Wilde before his disappearance,’ said Newton. ‘She was at a dinner at the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a call and she’s expecting you.’
Vine stowed it in his coat pocket. He waited for a second before he asked it. Then he gabbled it out, nervous about the consequences. ‘The report of the scene. Did anyone see or hear him being taken?’
‘The report said two witnesses in the complex heard some movement outside, but there was nothing unusual in that. Wilde was often called in to the embassy at odd hours. He moved out of official accommodation after the separation with Cecil’s blessing, claimed it gave him greater cover. No one saw anything or had reason to raise the alarm.’
‘And CCTV? Emergency protocol from Wilde?’
Newton swallowed, hesitating slightly. ‘What little there was had been down for weeks. You know what it’s like out in the field. The on-site team ran all the tests they could, but there was nothing further on the forensics front. He wouldn’t have had time to activate any emergency protocol. The snatch teams have been getting better. They’ll have shadowed him, found out his routine. It will have been clinical, all mobiles and electronic devices the first thing they destroy. Easier for them, given it wasn’t an official embassy residence. It would have been over in a minute.’
Vine removed his hands from his pockets now and folded his arms. ‘But we’re assuming he was alive when they grabbed him?’
‘Probably unconscious, but that’s the working assumption. Drugged and bundled into the boot is the best guess. In terms of past experience, there’s still some hope that they want to leverage the kidnap for all it’s worth, probably a prisoner exchange. If not, use it as a media opportunity. The public execution of an MI6 Head of Station. One hell of a front page.’
‘And has there been any communication since?’
Newton shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. With every day that passes …’
‘… the worse it gets.’
‘Yes. We both know no one comes back from this. Not really.’ Newton turned to him. ‘I’ve been sidelined officially. That’s why I need you.’
Vine looked around. It was the fear that lurked behind the self-imposed armoury of every MI6 officer, the deadly implications of falling into enemy hands. Despite all that had come between them, he felt sick as he thought of Wilde locked in darkness, the colourful possibilities of the future now fast diminishing, replaced instead by the ghoulish certainty of what lay ahead. They had all undergone hostage training at the Fort, savage interrogation sessions with an SAS team. They had been told how to prepare mentally and physically for torture. But practice was no match for reality.
‘… and wider implications?’ Vine shifted uncomfortably. As he stood here in the park everything that had come between him and Wilde seemed redundant. Instead, he felt the initial kick of friendship return, the irrepressibility of Wilde that he had once so cherished. He realized that he had never had the chance to make it right. Now he probably never would.
Newton’s voice quickly regained an operational briskness. ‘The consequences are unthinkable,’ he said. ‘Our most important assets in the Middle East potentially compromised. Our on-going relationship with every Western intelligence agency doomed.’ He lowered his voice. ‘No matter how long he tries to resist, they all talk eventually. I’m afraid, in some ways, the best we can hope for now is that they killed him quickly.’
Vine felt a shudder at the clinical way he said it, no doubt echoed in the conference rooms of Vauxhall Cross, Cecil and the rest of the fifth floor secretly wishing Wilde away. That was what they were in the end, Vine realized: just so much collateral damage. He was tired of it all. ‘And what if I’ve left this behind? What if I don’t want to play this game any more?’
‘Because you have no other choice,’ said Newton. ‘Until your investigation is concluded, you are in limbo.’ He fixed Vine another knowing stare. ‘And you realize she’s back, don’t you? Returned to Thames House after the separation.’
Vine found his concentration lost in the swirl of noise around them. He hated the smallness of this world, the claustrophobia of old regrets. Yet something else burned too, the better part of him drawn to the case despite himself. As he forced his gaze back towards Newton, he wondered whether redemption came in such an unlikely disguise. ‘Who’s back?’ he said.
Newton smiled. ‘Rose, of course.’
Vine looked at the screen again: he was up by a couple of thousand on the day. As the graphs and numbers flickered back at him, he could feel his anxieties recede. It acted as a form of relief. On the markets there was just the formal purity of numbers. He had been an addict ever since Cambridge, long mornings propped up in bed flicking through the pages of the Financial Times.
His record spoke for itself. He had played it well just before the dotcom crash, then inched his way into behavioural economics, seeing the madness and shifting his money accordingly in the run-up to the financial crisis. He had taken out any loan available and bet it all against the over-leveraged banking sector. With the property market tanking and the rest of the world haemorrhaging money, he had upgraded from his roomy flat in Pimlico to this place in Wellington Square, Chelsea.
Six months later, he had enough to redecorate the library. It was his temple, a vast rectangular space with polished wooden flooring, a high Regency ceiling frosted with decorative twirls and ornamentation. Each part of the room housed a different collection: general reading on the right, intelligence history on the left, and then the collection up ahead, constantly added to, his newly revived work on Enlightenment mathematics. The rest of the room was bare, a nirvana of nothingness.
He clicked off the screen and turned instead to the secure laptop that Cosmo Newton had biked round following their meeting. He lifted the lid and tapped his way through the multiple layers of security with Newton’s own login details. The screen flared into life with a large, searchable JIC database, the Cabinet Office logo filling the top of the screen.
Vine clicked through until he found the folder he needed. He drew up the file containing the brief report from Istanbul Station into Wilde’s disappearance. He started reading through it again. The prose was dry and colourless, but the facts were clear. The embassy CCTV feed showed Wilde leaving the premises at 1915 on the evening of Thursday 3 November. The first alert had sounded from the Deputy Head of Station at 0800 on the morning of Friday the 4th. A station team visited Wilde’s flat at 0900, before full search protocol was initiated at 1000 on the orders of the Ambassador. A forensic team were helicoptered in and conducted an initial sweep of the flat, before Wilde was officially declared missing.
Vine read through the details for a second time. He clicked on the attachment to the file and made his way through the CCTV photos. He began trying to reconstruct the scenario in his mind. He could see Gabriel Wilde leave, careful as always to notice any watcher stepping into rhythm behind him. The embassy regulations preferred staff to stay within their vehicles as much as possible. But Wilde knew as well as anyone that vehicles were too easy a target for tracking devices and electronic surveillance. He always preferred to risk it on foot, dodging his way through the crowds, a change from muggy days cocooned within the station.
He would make his way back to his flat. Despite himself, he would feel the same nostalgic bite as he contemplated his new arrangements: a single-bed flat, Rose permanently back in the UK, wrestling the electrics to life in the hope of a decent supper. And, always, there was the paranoia of constant suspicion. There were ears everywhere, informants surrounding him. Each movement was logged, listened to and sieved for advantage. It was the new normal of life in the field.
Vine closed the lid of the laptop. He paced back to the large rectangular windows that looked down on the tidy square of lawn below, trying to stop himself thinking of the rest. He had seen enough case reports to last a lifetime. The clinical precision disguised the brutal reality. Shock usually numbed you to begin with. Once you had time to assess the scale of the threat, it was too late. By the amount of blood the forensic team had found, Wilde had marshalled impressive resistance. But it came down to numbers in the end. No one stood a chance against a trained snatch team.
He breathed deeply, the thoughts pounding at him. He closed his eyes and tried to shake them off. Instead, he found himself mulling over the past. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever be able to escape that world of rivalries and jealousies. The cast list was still with him somehow: Wilde, Newton, Cecil, Rose. He felt a familiar nausea dig at him, the same feeling he had experienced in the park. He knew deep down that Newton was right. He would agree to his request. He longed to be back in the action, a chance to walk the halls of Vauxhall Cross one last time with his head held high. But more than that: whatever the consequence of his relationship with Wilde, in that past life he had once been more brother than friend. They had been through too much together. The thought of Wilde being tortured to death would leave him no comfort; he would be restless until he knew why.
The silence held for a second longer, then broke. Vine turned, wondering for a moment if he was imagining it. Then the sound echoed again, puncturing the stillness.
The doorbell was ringing.
The rules around the identities of members of the Secret Intelligence Service – more commonly known as MI6 – were clear. To the world at large, they were invisible.
The stringent vetting process took a year before you gained STRAP 3 clearance. Once you had survived training at Fort Monckton, you were then inducted into numerous layers of anonymity. There were two principal ways to hide: official cover and a selection of aliases. The official cover was used within the environs of Whitehall, armed with a card proclaiming allegiance to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. An alias was for outside the manicured streets of SW1. Surnames and backgrounds were slyly altered. The technicians in the basement of Vauxhall Cross produced the props – fake passports, business cards, copycat national insurance numbers. When you bought a property, took out a mortgage or opened a bank account, the trail was obscured behind the scenes, while physical security required constant personal vigilance. Whenever Vine approached Wellington Square, he unconsciously checked his tail. A team from Vauxhall Cross had installed a security camera above his front door and a panic button on the second floor. Paranoia wasn’t an add-on. It infected every second of life.
Vine checked on the security feed relayed directly to his computer. On the steps of the house was a man in a red Royal Mail top with a brown package balanced uneasily in his right hand. He zoomed in a fraction and studied the face: an angular jaw, narrow emerald-green eyes and a fuzz of toffee-brown hair greying at the edges. There should be no way that any foreign intelligence service could know about his recent suspension from duty. He regularly had the house swept for bugs, and all personnel information at Vauxhall Cross was fortressed behind the thorniest possible encryption methods. But if they did, they would know that now was the optimum time to strike. The panic button on the second floor would be met by shrugs in the techier rooms of Vauxhall Cross. There would be no immediate search party sent out if he was abducted, no clamour to let teams loose on the streets of London. The paperwork would be quietly edited and the suspension transformed to severance. He would be cast adrift, doomed to wear out his vocal cords pleading for help that would never arrive.
He took one final look at the video feed and then clicked off. Instinct told him to ignore the call, though it would be impossible to pretend the house was uninhabited. The first floor was illuminated, a gash of yellowish light. The windows were too shiny, the front step swept clean of leaves. He was just about to wait it out when the doorbell rang again, the sound even uglier than the last time. The noise held and echoed before finally tapering back to silence.
Eventually, Vine decided that he would answer. There was something about the package that intrigued him. It was always possible – just possible – that this really was nothing more than it appeared to be. But somehow he couldn’t quite square that possibility. The logic didn’t fit. Very few people outside the Service knew he lived at this address. Spies weren’t encouraged to fatten their Rolodexes. If this was from Cosmo Newton, he would have biked it round with a Cabinet Office freelancer as he had with the laptop, stealing down the street and then dropping a message to the burner phone. The very normality of this worried him.
He reached the ground floor and treaded along the hallway, trying to blank out the flurry of cautionary tales that now suggested themselves, tales of operatives scuppered by one moment off their guard. He could still listen to the voice urging him to think again, though he knew his footfall on the stairs would already be enough to give him away to any agent attuned to such nuances.
Vine reached for the latch and drew back the door, faking a casual smile.
The man nodded silently and drew out a PDA. Vine waited for a name to be produced, the moment he could judge whether such a simple everyday exercise was truth or fiction. Technical wizardry meant the innocuous brown package could contain any number of ills: a bug, bomb, or bio-weapon of some kind that would slowly permeate the house and eat through his insides. Often he wished he could edit out such knowledge and hypotheses, but they stuck in his thoughts. He had eaten from the tree of knowledge too long ago.
‘Mr Joseph Woods?’
Vine felt his pulse beat harder, palms clammy and throat parched. He locked his features into a neutral expression, trained never to give anything away. But the name echoed through him as he clutched the thin stem of the electronic biro and squiggled letters on to the PDA’s surface. Then the package was handed over and, within seconds, Vine saw the man flash him a thin-lipped smile and move back down the steps and away.
He didn’t retreat into the safety of the hall but hovered in the doorway for a moment longer, weighing the package in his right palm first and then quickly assessing the shape of it. He glanced down at the label stuck on the front and saw the name Joseph Woods and his address printed in tidy black type. It looked slightly battered at the edges, as if the journey had been a long one. He checked finally for any other obvious signs of trouble – a professionalism in the sealing which suggested it had been manufactured in lab conditions – though saw none.
He closed the door, walked through into the kitchen and placed the package down on the table. He scrutinized it from all angles for one final time and then searched for a pair of scissors. All the while, those three words beat in a constant rhythm: Mr Joseph Woods. There were only a handful of people alive who had ever known him under that name. It had been one of his earliest operational assignments, joining up with officers from the CIA to hunt and capture key members of the al-Qaeda leadership in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers. The details of the operation, including operational aliases, had been limited to the grander incumbents of the fifth floor.
Vine steadied the object with his left hand and then carefully cut into the packaging with the tip of the scissors held in his right. He continued up in a straight line, watching as it split in two. From the recesses of memory, he could hear the stern warnings of the liaison officials from Porton Down, drilling into them the variety of ways hostile actors could embed biological weapons into everyday objects.
Vine reached the end and parted the packaging. It revealed the blank leather cover of a book, larger than a traditional hardback and covered with a light snowing of dust. He checked to make sure it really was dust, before gently inching the book out of the packaging completely and holding it up to the light. It had no jacket or insignia on the front, and no identification marks on the spine or back cover. But the binding looked pricey, and the texture felt smooth and cushiony to the touch.
He placed it back down on the table surface and then slowly opened the leather cover. The paper was thick and aged to a crinkled creamy-brown. He flicked through some empty pages until he saw the first marking, a circle shape with an arrow-like tail. What looked like the pages of a codex stood on the left and right, two crowns above and one underneath. Vine peered closer at the lettering around the frame of the circle and read: UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. Beneath that symbol stood a further line in italics: Oldsworth Prize 1999.
He turned again and found himself looking at a title page. It read: THE ODYSSEY. Then Vine saw the name and felt a rumble of surprise: The Honourable G. Wilde. Beneath it was another paragraph, this time handwritten in a flash of blue ink.
Vine took a breath and read the words, his mind fizzing with incomprehension:
Dear Solomon,
In case we don’t meet again, I want you to have this. All wisdom lies in this book. Take care of Rose for me.
Yours,
Gabriel