The Falklands Intercept (16 page)

He thrust the sharpened tip of the eight inch hollow ice pick into the back of her head, passing within inches of the cells where that memory had been stored. The pick penetrated into the cerebellum and then into the brain stem: the part of the brain that connects it to the spinal cord. At the same time he pressed a small button at the bottom of the handle activating a charge of compressed air right up the hollow body of the ice pick and shooting six thick steel needles in an umbrella shape deep into the recesses of Charlotte's dying brain. In effect her body's control centre was destroyed in an instant. There was no gentle falling away or dimming of the lights. The hollow ice pick caused massive destruction inside her brain and instant death. Other than strapping an explosive charge to her head it was the quickest way. The movies always underestimated how long it took for someone to die. A cyanide death was not an easy one. Even for a hard man like himself they were distressing – too much thrashing around. This was better.

He remembered a lecture about killing quickly. Dr Beaurieux a 19th-century French doctor had conducted an experiment at an execution by guillotine. After the head had been severed Breaurieux called out to the victim. Apparently the eyes remained clear and blinked in reply. Maybe. But this way really was quick and death was instantaneous. How
could she complain?

He let the body fall gently to the ground. She was pretty. He shut her glassy eyes. The ice pick would remain inside her skull. Too messy to take out. Its steel and plastic construction would give nothing away. Why not leave the gloves too? The Cambridge police were unlikely to be that stupid, but it would amuse him if the ludicrous Colonel Jacot got a run for his money. He dropped both gloves to the floor but kept the surgical gloves beneath firmly in place, walked slowly up the stairs and into the dark and foggy street. He was sure no one had seen him – not that he cared.

Jacot entered the room to find Chief Inspector Bradshaw of the Cambridge Police. A plump man with a shaved head, he looked very unhappy indeed and barely glanced at Jacot.

‘The Chief Constable got a call from London earlier to say that you were to be informed immediately and shown the crime scene if you wanted Colonel. And that we are to co-operate with you in every way. Straight from Number 10, I understand'. His disgust with this arrangement was apparent.

Charlotte's body was lying parallel to the banks of mahogany draws, neatly laid out face up. Her arms had been folded across her body and her eyes closed, almost as in a ritual killing. There was no outward sign of violence, the only clue to foul play was a small patch of clear liquid lying beneath her head. If Jacot hadn't known that she was dead she could have been a young woman taking a quick lie down just after washing her hair. She was a beautiful girl, almost more so in death and repose than in life. The features were perfect. She could have been a marvellously carved funerary statue set above her own tomb. But the animation, the soul as Jacot certainly believed, was gone.

Once his initial, disorientating aesthetic response to the death scene had waned what Jacot really wanted to do next was to sit down in a corner and cry, and then afterwards rage at the stupidity and waste that had caused this beautiful young English girl to be murdered. Time for that later, if ever. Jacot took himself in hand. He had seen death before, close up. He must master both his sadness and his anger and channel them into a controlled intellectual and emotional aggression – a drive that would produce results, unravel what the hell was going on.

‘Chief Inspector, I would be grateful if one of your team would check the body for a small gold chain and a memory stick that I think she was normally wearing. It should be tucked away somewhere in her bra.'

Bradshaw gave him a distinctly odd look but quickly summoned one of the women on the forensic team. Sure enough the tiny memory stick was still on her body – hung on a small gold chain, tucked sideways for extra security into her bra. It was a small thing, but in it had been wrapped up all the hopes of this young Cambridge don. Hopes for professional advancement and glamour and fame. All come to nothing now.

There was some argument with poor Chief Inspector Bradshaw over Jacot taking possession of the memory stick, only resolved after another telephone call to the Chief Constable. Some might have got a kick out of invoking the Official Secrets Act or aggressively
dropping Lady Nevinson's name. Jacot just found it depressing. Ultimately, he didn't approve of a secret official world and he hated the arrogance of the modern state – at its most arrogant in matters of state security. And he felt sorry for Bradshaw. After a little gentle toing and froing the deal Bradshaw laid down, quite rightly, was that Jacot could take immediate possession of a copy of the data made by the Cambridge Police's computer laboratory but that the original belonged to the police investigation. Jacot readily agreed, adding that under no circumstances should the original be surrendered to anyone else – not even GCHQ. Of course Jacot meant “especially” not GCHQ. This
triggered
something in Bradshaw who appeared to realise that Jacot and the National Security Adviser had no intention of concealing anything or trying to change the course of the investigation. The memory stick was sent away to be copied at the police station a few hundred yards away and Bradshaw handed Jacot a copy before he left the crime scene.

Jacot walked back to St James'. A police forensic team was already in attendance; no doubt forewarned by the newly co-operative Bradshaw, Jacot was waved through the cordon and allowed into Charlotte's rooms accompanied by a policewoman. The rooms were not as grand as the sets allocated to Verney or even Jacot. There was no river view and no gilding. They were pleasant nevertheless and immaculately clean and tidy. Charlotte had decorated the room with six 18th-century prints of her college at Oxford. Her bed was covered in a dark blue duvet. As fellow of a Cambridge college she found it amusing to underline her Oxonian antecedents. The room was exactly as Jacot had expected it – a fairly ordinary junior fellow's set with the personality and habits of its occupant imprinted on a neutral background.

The police forensic team were clearly going through the motions. The rooms were neat and tidy and bore no traces of having been forcibly entered or thoroughly searched. They were much as Charlotte had left them before embarking on her last journey to the Scott-Wilson Institute. He spoke briefly to the policewoman in charge who confessed that, as the rooms were not technically a crime scene, they would seal them off for a few days until Detective Chief Inspector Bradshaw had had a good snoop around and then release them back to the college.

Jacot was suspicious. It takes one to know one – the rooms had been searched
meticulously
and methodically by a team of professionals. He had carried out the same
procedure
himself in Northern Ireland years ago, against the clock. One man would remain on look-out outside. Two men would break into the house or office usually belonging to a senior IRA figure who would have been detained by the police for a few hours on some trumped up offence or other. The RUC's favourite was usually “Thought to be in
possession
of illegally distilled alcohol”; ironic given that the police themselves distilled the best moonshine or poteen north of the border. The version made with pear drops was particularly prized by the British Army.

The first action would be to take Polaroid photographs of the lay out of the room as
an aide memoire. It was easy to forget small details when in a hurry – exactly how were the copies of
An Phoblacht
(The Republic) the IRA's over-the-top but sometimes well written propaganda journal stacked by the filing cabinet, or the precise lay out of a tray of pipes, tobacco and pipe cleaners. They would also check for basic security measures – was there a hair or a small piece of paper laid in a certain way on the handle of a
briefcase
, say? The most popular defensive trick was to insert a small piece of paper inside a book on a certain page. Searchers in a hurry had a tendency to flip through books and it was easy enough for the piece of paper to slip out and be replaced between the wrong pages. Luckily, the British intelligence teams had been well-trained and were able to spot the techniques. They were useful even, as they contributed to a sense of false security among the IRA capos. But the biggest danger for even a highly trained, highly
experienced
team was the temptation to overtidy once the search was complete. When
restoring
a room, supposedly to the status quo ante the spooks breaking in, it was almost impossible to resist the temptation to impose order – squaring off magazines and books on tables for instance or straightening books on a shelf – like an obsessive housewife.

Even the best-trained search teams made mistakes. The team that went through Charlotte's room must have been under immense time pressure. Charlotte's sitting room certainly had that overtidied look.

But to confirm Jacot would look in the bathroom. It was small and the shelves were crammed with an immense array of scents, creams and potions. These were difficult to search properly without leaving a trace. The usual procedure would be to open each pot and insert a knitting needle, or something similar, to probe for anything concealed below. But the knitting needle invariably left a little bobble of disturbance on the surface of the cream or potion. Impossible for an unsuspecting layman to detect but glaringly obvious to the trained eye, particularly in an unused pot of cream or gel. The policewoman gave him some plastic gloves and Jacot unscrewed a pot of some kind of make-up remover. It was half-used but the bobble was there. Same detail in another pot.

Just to be sure, he wanted to check the lavatory cistern. Search teams always checked the lavatory cistern. It was felt to be an excellent hiding place for guns or drugs. But there was one catch to taking the lid off a cistern – because it was so rarely done as part of the everyday cleaning of a bathroom there was usually dust beneath the rim which would then fall onto the water below. A really on the ball team would have known this and flushed it away. But Jacot would need one of the forensic team to help. Bradshaw by this time had arrived. He explained the procedure to the chief inspector who quickly
instructed
one of his Scenes of Crimes Officers. First she checked the cistern for fingerprints of which there were none, itself suspicious. Then she carefully but vigorously applied a small hand hoover to the underside of the cistern rim. Finally she set up a powerful
fluorescent
light in the room and lifted the lid off as carefully as she could. There was a thin barely discernible coating of dust on the surface of the water. With the fluorescent light you couldn't miss it.

Jacot was in a quandary. What he needed was not a Provincial Police Scenes of Crime team, however skilled, but a specialist search team from the intelligence services or The Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Lady Nevinson could have one despatched in minutes but could they be trusted? The army people almost certainly, but it would mean going through a couple of layers at least of leaky military bureaucracy. As for the intelligence people, they would ultimately be loyal to their own bosses and to them alone. If it was not in their interest to uncover evidence of the presence of another intelligence agency then they would find nothing, officially at least.

The innocent and unworldly Charlotte Pirbright, her head full of romantic visions of her hero “Captain S”, had really belonged to another age. There was something trusting, enthusiastic and optimistic about her that would have suited Edwardian England. With those looks she would have married well and been free to pursue a private academic career. No doubt about that, thought Jacot. Poor child, she simply had no idea what she had got involved with once Verney began to share with her snippets of highly classified intelligence. Men and women could be murdered, tortured or worse “disappeared” for certain kinds of information. She would have known that. How could anyone not know in the years of the “911 Wars”, as one historian was already calling them.

She had one fundamental naiveté, had made one crucial mistake. She didn't realise that the compromises even the good guys have to make in the intelligence world – the world the other side of the green baize door as Lady Nevinson liked to call it – could build up over time into something much more than a ruthless but proportionate
operational
pragmatism. Ruthlessness builds on and feeds off ruthlessness. Each time the
intelligence
cycle turned full circle it was spun with more energy and cruelty – to keep ahead of the other side. The process was the same in all countries. Those who considered
themselves
the guardians of freedom and democracy, and those who revelled in their
reputations
as brutal and feared secret policemen used the same time-honoured process: Direction – Collection – Processing – Analysis – Dissemination. And for both types the ultimate destination usually ended up the same: everyone an enemy, everyone a target – even Charlotte. Jacot pretty much had the picture now. He knew at last who he was up against.

It was a small comfort that even in her innocence she had outwitted their opponents by carrying the memory stick on her person. The orders appeared to have been kill the girl and search her rooms for what they wanted, or wanted back. No one seems to have planned for the fact that what they wanted, or at least a copy of it, was actually on her person. She had pulled off the oldest intelligence trick in the book, hiding a high value item in plain sight. Jacot was re-assured that his opponents might not be quite as good as they thought they were. They made mistakes under pressure or out of over-confidence.

Both these were factors in the basic error Jacot himself was about to make. He walked down the staircase into the court and took out his scarlet Cabinet Office iPhone. He punched an 11 figure code into the handset and waited a few seconds. The Magenta
facility
was enabled. It was the first time Jacot had used it. But he had to be absolutely sure that no one could hear what he was saying.

He rang Lady Nevinson's special number. When she replied he asked her a short question – just eight words in all. She replied with the single word ‘Yes' and broke the connexion.

Jacot was right to trust the Magenta facility. It was unbreakable. No outside agency could decipher written or voice messages in Magenta. He did not fully understand the technology behind it except that it had been a joint Franco-British venture. But not being able to understand a conversation is a very different matter from not knowing that the conversation is taking place at all. In a darkened room at an airbase not far from Cambridge a young signals operator alerted the officer supervising his shift – an
individual
in Cambridge and an individual in London were having a short conversation using a heavily encoded signal that their best analysts and most powerful computers could not decipher. The officer made a special entry under the ‘Unusual Occurrences' paragraph of his daily report and despatched it up the chain of command, taking care to give it a higher classification than was normal.

Back in her office overlooking Downing Street Lady Nevinson initially felt a wave of satisfaction that Jacot appeared at last to be coming to some solid conclusions about the murder of General Verney. And it was murder. She was also pleased at the existence of the Magenta facility. She had long felt uncomfortable about the so-called secure
communications
in Downing Street. Given that often we seemed capable of listening in to the most sensitive communications of other countries she could never quite believe that some of them weren't able to do the same to us. But she knew that no one could break Magenta.