Rogue Elements (12 page)

‘Anthony Watchman served in the Royal Marines before joining SIS, and his first experience of leadership was taking command of a troop after a gruelling fifteen-month training course.’ The speaker was a young woman, fresh from Edinburgh University’s History department. Very much a civilian, she seemed highly impressed by the idea of the Marines and even more impressed by the idea of Tony Watchman. The tufted blond hair and knowing smile of the longstanding Head of Counter-Terrorism were projected on the wall behind her. ‘Mr Watchman was first posted to Ankara, where he took over a complex surveillance operation when the station chief was hospitalized with food poisoning . . .’

It had been a stroke of genius, no need for modesty. Watching his young charges make their presentations, Edward Joyce quietly congratulated himself. It was the perfect solution. Even Madeleine would have to admit it.

‘It must have been very hard for Ms Saddle to leave the field after her achievements in Vienna. Leaders have to face up to difficult decisions, and she decided that her children needed their mother to be home every night. So she learned new skills, demonstrating continuous improvement, and applied her analytical talents to Treasury and Vetting, before taking on the critical role of personal secretary to the Chief.’

The challenge had been the record. The personal files on each SIS officer are jealously guarded by Personnel Department; not even the Chief can see his own file. But a smart researcher can reconstruct much of a colleague’s service history from less restricted sources, including operational files, station logs and gossip. As an Intelligence Branch officer, Joyce was perfectly entitled to access a wide range of files pertaining to a particular superior. But as a humble Treasury manager, on secondment to Personnel as IONEC directing staff, he had no legitimate reason to do so. And since many of the files had been digitized, it was now impossible to so much as glance at them without that glance being entered automatically into the record.

Curiosity about one senior director might be explained away, but investigating five top-ranking individuals would bring an unpleasant degree of upstairs attention. The files were all accessible; Joyce just couldn’t be seen to be interested in them. And he certainly couldn’t go around asking suspicious questions.

‘Since then, Mr Vine has been commended by three different US presidents on the extent of his Arab network and the quality of the CX it generates. CIA say without him AMB would have lost three times as many contractors in Iraq . . .’

So to the stroke of genius. Among the many skills Joyce was supposed to teach the Firm’s new intake was ‘leadership’. Conveying such a nebulous concept was a challenge at the best of times, especially for someone – and Joyce was honest about this much at least – not overly endowed with leadership attributes himself. The solution was elegantly simple: combine the challenges. The eight IONEC students would research ‘what makes a great leader’, each with a case study to guide them. And what better case studies than their very own Elphinstone, Watchman, Vine, de Vries and Saddle? Five officers of the highest repute, with three dummies thrown in to make up the numbers.

Simple, clean
and
efficient. He didn’t even need to do the legwork.

‘I’ll be straight with you, I didn’t much like the look of this Elphinstone bloke at first.’ An Essex lad, ex-City, ex-offender, this student had given Joyce some trouble over the weeks since induction, asking the difficult questions, taking the piss. ‘Posh bugger. But give him credit. The man has turned this ship around. Requirements and Production is the heart of everything, right? You need a real leader there. Someone who’s proved himself. His greatest hits: Somalia, Geneva, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. The only reason Somalia’s a harmless basket case and not a fully functioning AQ client state is Jeremy Elphinstone.’

Armed with a list of textbook leadership traits, the IONEC students had been dispatched that morning to gather their intelligence and present a report at end of day – with all source data appended. Young, unaware of the politics that would come to dog their careers, they could ask the unguarded questions, digging where older staff might fear to venture. They could ransack central registry and scour the central computer index. They could pester and charm and tease out information, exactly as intelligence officers were supposed to do, all the time protected by a legend made watertight by their unthinking belief in it.

Ironically, it actually was quite a useful training exercise.

‘People say Martin de Vries can play chess blindfolded. He was obsessed with the Soviet Union, even more than everyone else back then.’ This said by a sparky type with extraordinary hair and a natty taste in thin ties who viewed anything that had happened in SIS prior to the Vauxhall Cross relocation as akin to founding mythology. ‘He personally bugged sixteen SovBloc embassies before he was twenty-eight, and rearranged the wiring of over two hundred telephone exchanges across Europe and the Middle East. As director of Technical and Operations Support, he created the Porthos messaging system –’

‘That is not accurate.’

The voice, dry and dusty, came from the doorway.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a real honour,’ said Joyce quickly. ‘Mr Martin de Vries in the flesh.’

‘Porthos was the work of over one hundred people, both h-here and in GCHQ and partner c-commercial organizations. It was a
team
effort.’ Martin de Vries focused intently on Joyce. ‘Would this individual be David Tucker?’

The student straightened unconsciously. ‘That’s me, sir.’

The searing glare transferred itself to him. ‘And why, please, Mr Tucker, were you r-rootling around in my CoDeka file this morning? Furthermore, why did you then choose to investigate my 1988 visit to Moscow and interrogate multiple members of my staff as to my emotional t-temperament?’

Joyce intervened hurriedly as the unfortunate Tucker wilted beneath the director’s gaze. ‘A training exercise, Martin. Nothing sinister. We’ve just heard a fascinating account of your service career from David, along with similar accounts of seven other directors.’

‘And were all these “accounts” of a c-c-comparable quality to the nonsense I just listened to?’

Joyce flushed, temporarily lost for words.

‘Mr Joyce, what is the purpose of this exercise, to which you appear to have devoted a substantial proportion of this intake’s valuable training schedule?’

‘Leadership,’ he coughed. He longed to be back in Italy, holding a gun, commanding a team of Wraye’s mercenaries, crushing the cocky TALON. That had felt so good. ‘Understanding what makes a good leader.’

‘A word, Mr Joyce.’

Crimson now, Joyce followed de Vries out into the corridor. He closed the door on the rapt students.

‘Far be it from me to question why cubs who’ve yet to r-recruit their first agent need to know how to lead,’ began de Vries. ‘But may I respectfully request that you prioritize instruction in the capabilities we might actually require? If it’s not too much trouble, you might consider teaching them how to build a legend, how to protect themselves against electronic surveillance, even how to read a map. Unless you think I’m being old-fashioned?’

‘Of course,’ muttered Joyce.

‘And for goodness’ sake make sure the little buggers who have been into the files are fully cognizant of their data security obligations.’

‘First thing we teach them,’ Joyce promised.

De Vries tilted his head and gave him his dustiest stare. ‘I am relieved.’

Joyce paused on the threshold of the training room to recover after de Vries’s departure. The man was inhuman, he decided. Half machine, half . . . malevolence. Distracted and on edge, he nearly missed the tail end of the conversation inside. David Tucker had deliberately excluded the gossip from his presentation on de Vries, aware it was ethically troublesome, too new into the Firm to have become inured to such concerns. But after Joyce’s dressing down, the students had been unable to resist a colourful debate on H/TOS’s character. It was only a matter of time before Tucker revealed his reserved card: ‘We shouldn’t judge him. His sister was murdered in Zimbabwe. Gang raped and then beaten to death during the farm invasions. That’s going to make anyone bitter.’

Tucker swallowed the last sentence as he became aware of TD8’s return. For his part, Edward Joyce pretended he hadn’t heard.

Madeleine Wraye knew all about bitterness. She had first felt its deathly grip on her humanity in the hours following GRIEVANCE, as it became clear that one of her closest friends from her Washington days had been killed. Paul Connor, a Naval Intelligence officer with a rare expertise in atomic weapon delivery systems, had been scheduled to fly home from a Chicago conference that day. He’d left behind a young family whom Wraye still had not found the strength to visit.

She had got control of the bitterness, had shaken it off and gone on to pursue the proliferators all the more diligently. But now the bitterness was back, doubly intense, as she contemplated the former colleagues who might have been responsible for Paul’s death. She tried to imagine each ASH suspect putting a gun to his head. Elphinstone and Watchman, yes, they would pull the trigger in a heartbeat, and go on to dinner afterwards without the slightest qualm. De Vries was more of a stretch, but she dressed him in Rhodesian khaki and gave him a dusty scout’s rifle and then she could see it. Jane Saddle? The idea seemed outlandish, but not impossible. Only Vine defied her thought experiment. Could a man as lovable and generous as George Vine kill?

A memory. Faded but intact. Egypt.

‘I can see you don’t like boats,’ Vine had said as he helped her board the felucca. ‘The thing is, hotel rooms are just too easily bugged. Vasily feels safer on the water.’

‘Where is he?’ Trying to cover her nervousness, Wraye was brusque and direct. It didn’t help that she had contracted diarrhoea within a few hours of arriving in Cairo.

‘No idea. We’ll potter downstream for a while; somewhere along the way, he’ll wave to us from the bank. Rather bothersome protocol, I know, but one must do everything one can to protect one’s agent, mustn’t one?’

She understood this was not an idle observation. Pushing aside concerns about toilet access and the dreadful first impression she was likely to make in her debilitated state, she said, ‘I’ll look after him, George.’

Vine patted her hand in gratitude. ‘I know you’ll do your utmost.’

He hadn’t always been Vine. Madeleine Wraye had established as much during a seemingly casual drinks party at her political theory tutor’s Summertown flat, an event which in retrospect might just possibly have been engineered around her.

‘Do you know? I am so pleased. I was afraid it would only be dons.’ He was a little slimmer then, the heavy Arabian tan and pinstripe suit giving him the look of a successful barrister just back from the slopes. ‘There weren’t any girls in my day. It still feels the most delicious treat.’

‘There weren’t any Vines, either,’ she had said coolly over her glass of warmish Blue Nun. At twenty, pert and precocious, she prided herself on being no one’s dupe. She had read him well enough at the college’s fund-raising garden party to recognize that girls were the least of his interests.

‘Goodness,’ Vine blinked. ‘You’ve been investigating me. So you conclude that I’m a fraud?’

‘Not necessarily. You might be a genuine alumnus with a desire for anonymity.’

‘And why might that be?’

‘Perhaps you have something to hide. Perhaps your proposition is not entirely proper.’ She was going through a phase of being pleased with herself for clever wordplay.

‘Proposition?’

‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’ A little too pert perhaps, in those days, to compensate for her insecurities. ‘I can’t believe it’s for the wine or the reheated Marxism.’

He smiled delightedly. ‘All right, Miss Wraye, I
will
make you a proposition. The firm I work for is embarrassingly short on women, and I did so enjoy our conversation on the sundial lawn. This is your final year? I would like to invite you to apply for a job – on condition that you manage to unearth my real name.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘Work that out too and I’ll recommend you for the fast stream.’

He had been the Honourable George Aubrey Villiers-Neville. The title had been discarded and the name savagely abbreviated the day he left Oxford. Wraye, who had come up from a provincial grammar school – what she liked to think of as the Mrs T route – found herself both awed and irritated by this privileged sloughing off of an unwanted aristocratic skin. Occasionally Vine dusted down the old identity and flaunted his baronial legacy in certain quarters of the Middle East. ‘They do like these little English embellishments in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi,’ he admitted. ‘What they do not like, I am sorry to say – at least not to entrust with their secrets – are women. No, much as it grieves me to admit it, you’d be far better off in SovBloc.’

As a consequence of that sage career advice, Madeleine Wraye saw little of George Vine over the years, until she joined him at the Chief’s top table. The agent handover on the Nile was a rare crossing of their divergent paths, and it had made an impression. He briefed her while they sailed. The asset was a Soviet embassy signals clerk, identified as a potential turncoat by a contact in the Egyptian Mabahith. Vine had approached him in the souk with an innocent question about cumin, and then cultivated him over eight long months. ‘I find it best,’ he observed, ‘just to talk to them until they tell you a secret. So much easier if you don’t have to ask for anything.’ Now Vasily was being rotated back to the USSR and out of Vine’s sphere. ‘You’ll have to judge for yourself if he’s worth keeping on the books. The truth is we’ve already had the best of him. I’ve drained him dry; now it’s a question of what he can do for you in post – and it is quite a lowly post. But you never know: all kinds of communications pass through these people’s hands. He may just be able to tip you off when the tanks start rolling westward.’

‘Why’s he doing it? Money?’

Vine used his Panama hat to fan away a fly. He was sweating lightly, having given her the only shaded seat. ‘If that’s what he wanted, we’d have lost him to the Americans. No, he’s frustrated, fed up with seeing lesser men promoted ahead of him, angry that no one’s fully recognized his talents. It’s worth reminding him of that occasionally, very gently provoking that sense of grievance.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Madeleine, my dear, traitors aren’t nice, normal, well-adjusted people, by and large. We have to work with what we get.’

‘What role should I play today?’

‘Be his friend, simply that. He hasn’t been able to talk openly to anyone but me for almost two years. Be sympathetic, indulge his resentments and anxieties. He won’t trust you at first, but he’ll desperately want to. Simply to have someone else in his life he can talk to. He may fall in love with you at some point, of course . . .’

‘Is that why you picked me?’

‘He certainly likes pretty faces, and there aren’t many of those in the Firm. I’ve found it helpful to procure the odd mistress for him. Up to you whether you want to make similar arrangements in Minsk. It might take the pressure off you. It will also help you lead him very gradually to a point where he really feels he has no choice but to keep on working for you.’

Wraye glanced uneasily at the boatman. Vine had assured her he spoke no English. ‘You mean blackmail?’

‘Certainly not. But the fellow is married, and the more secrets he betrays to you and illicit pleasures he accepts from you, the harder it will be . . . let’s just say, the easier it will be to keep doing as you ask.’

George Vine was, by common agreement, the most gentlemanly of intelligence officers. And yet if Wraye could pinpoint a moment when the scales had finally fallen from her youthful eyes, when she had truly understood how deep she would need to bury her arms in shit to serve her country, it was that day in George’s sun-bleached and leaking felucca.

Maybe, after all, he could find it in him to pull a trigger.