3

KATE WAS MET back at the church by the implacable set of her fifteen-year-old daughter’s jaw. ‘Where the hell were you?’

‘I—’

‘You promised you weren’t going to work while you were here.’

‘How did you—’

‘Dad said you had to take a work call.’

‘Yes . . . yes. I’m really sorry.’ Kate knew better than to choose this moment to get into an argument with her daughter. She could see the hurt in her eyes. There were also scratch marks on her arm, a recent worrying indication of her tendency to self-harm. Gus, meanwhile, stared resolutely at the floor. Whatever had happened in the meeting with their father had evidently shaken them both. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can find an ice cream.’

As the children turned away, Julie whispered, ‘What the hell happened?’

‘Pas devant les enfants.’

‘I do speak French, you know,’ Fiona threw over her shoulder, ‘and in six days’ time, I’ll basically be an adult anyway.’

That sounded like a threat rather than an abstract statement of fact, but Kate let it ride. They did get ice creams on the way back, and sat on a wall by the canal in front of their hotel, eating them in silence.

Once inside, Kate left her children in their room to simmer down, and tackled Julie first. ‘Mikhail and Igor’s thugs,’ she explained. ‘They took me at gunpoint to Mikhail’s fancy palazzo.’

‘What did they want?’

‘To defect.’

Julie looked at her as if she had just gone mad, her vivid green eyes clouded by confusion.

‘They are offering us the video they claim to have been using as kompromat against the prime minister. It shows him having sex with underage girls.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘No. Only if we accept their offer in principle.’

‘What if it’s a fake?’

‘He claims we’ll know it isn’t.’

‘I thought they could fake anything, these days . . . But why would they want to defect?’ Julie couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. She sat down on her bed.

‘Mikhail says his father and Vasily Durov have fallen out with the Kremlin and been ousted in a coup orchestrated by the GRU. He says Durov is under arrest, which likely means bound for Siberia at best, execution at worst. He and his father are desperate to flee to the West before the net closes on them.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe him or not. If the video exists, if it’s real – and he promised evidence of the payments they’ve made to the prime minister, too – then we have no choice. There was more. As a gesture of goodwill, he said we should know the Kremlin is planning some kind of coup in Estonia.’

‘What?’

‘There will be a “threat” to the local Russian population in Narva – protests or riots or civil disorder. The Night Wolves have bought a farm just outside, stacked it with enough weaponry to start a war. They will come to the aid of their “countrymen”.’

‘Why the Night Wolves?’

‘Plausible deniability. A bunch of old army vet bikers. How would we prove they took their orders from the Kremlin?’

Julie contemplated that in silence. Neither of them needed to articulate the fact that this was the kind of confrontation that could spark a third world war. ‘Are you going to call London?’ she asked.

‘No. I was thinking about driving to Rome to file from the embassy, but we don’t have time. Let’s go straight to the flight. I’ll have to drop the kids off at home, but I’ll text Danny now and see what he can find out. The CIA is bound to have good coverage on the border.’

‘I’ve never actually seen the Night Wolves in action, so what—’

‘Just volume at this stage. Any farm with a lot of outbuildings or barns, any sign of lorries moving or parked on a significant scale. Motorbikes, obviously. Any recent transactions recorded in the Estonian Land Registry, otherwise a list of all properties owned by ethnic Russians.’

‘Should I talk to Karen in Tallinn?’ Karen White was their station chief in the Estonian capital.

‘No. And don’t do anything to alert the Estonians either. As soon as I’ve dropped the kids I’ll tackle Ian and the chief and we’ll go from there.’

Kate went next door to speak to her children. Fiona was in the loo. Gus was on his bed, playing Angry Birds on his iPad. Kate came to sit next to him. ‘Was it all right?’ she asked, caressing the back of his head. He pulled away. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Nothing happened.’

‘You both seem . . . upset.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Was it nice to see Dad?’

The bathroom door opened and Fiona stepped out. ‘Dad burst into tears. He said he was miserable in Moscow. He has no friends, no money and no life. He told us he had made one terrible mistake and he would pay for it for the rest of his life.’

Kate shook her head slowly. ‘He shouldn’t have said that.’

‘Why not? It’s true.’

‘Because it loads the burden of his mistakes on to you.’

‘He only made one.’

‘Well, that’s not quite true, is it?’

‘It’s absolutely true.’

Kate could see her daughter was spoiling for a fight. Fiona took off her hairband and shook her hair free. It was never a good sign. Kate knew she should walk away. ‘He betrayed us and chose to betray his country,’ she said quietly.

‘He didn’t betray Gus and me.’

Kate stood up. ‘I’ll meet you in Reception in twenty minutes. We’re a long way past the check-out time I agreed, so don’t be late.’

‘Why won’t you accept his apology?’ Fiona asked. She looked as if she was about to smash something or burst into tears, or both.

‘Let’s talk about this calmly when we get home.’

‘That’s just an excuse not to talk about it at all.’

‘I’ll see you in Reception in twenty minutes.’

Kate went to her own room and sat on her bed. She noticed that her hands were shaking, got to her feet and went into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her face was white, her eyes bloodshot. She looked exhausted, which was no surprise. The acute stomach and back pain that had been plaguing her had returned with a vengeance. It was as if someone had wrapped a belt around her chest and was slowly tightening it.

She felt physically terrible. She walked to her bed, lay down and tried to concentrate on the breathing exercises the psychologist she had been seeing had recommended. They seemed to make no bloody difference at all.

She forced herself upright, packed the last of her belongings and walked down the grand staircase to Reception.

They caught the four o’clock flight home, the entire journey conducted in more or less total silence. Julie had made a concerted effort to jolly the children along before they boarded the plane until she received a text at Passport Control. After that she’d retreated rapidly into herself. Kate made no headway in winkling out of her what the trouble was.

She left Fiona in theoretical charge of her brother at home in Battersea and reached MI6’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters just after eight. She stopped off at the ops room on the second floor, where she found Julie sitting next to Danny in front of a bank of computer screens. ‘I think we’ve found it,’ Julie said.

‘Grab a seat,’ Danny instructed. He had long dark hair, piercing blue eyes and pretty much always wore a black T-shirt, blue jeans and threadbare sneakers. He had a Chinese dragon tattooed around the side and back of his neck and the kind of easy smile that could stop grown women in their tracks. Or perhaps it was just Kate. She suspected he and Julie had once been an item but, if so, it was a rare outbreak of common sense on her friend’s behalf: her taste in men was usually abysmal.

Kate did as she had been told. The floor was covered with styrofoam coffee cups and takeaway food cartons that had yet to make it to the bin in the corner. In his eating habits, and the curious absence of any visible impact on his waistline, Danny provided another painful reminder of her former deputy, Rav, who’d had a similar penchant for chaining himself to his desk in a tunnel of intense concentration. It was what made Danny – and had made Rav – so good at his job.

The images streamed from the CIA satellite covering this section of Estonia were so clear you could have seen a pebble in the grass. They were looking at a collection of outbuildings, but the screen next to them had a wider view of a village. ‘Puhlova,’ Kate said.

‘You know it?’ Julie asked.

Kate had met a Russian Army colonel there about a decade previously. He’d promised information on the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal in return for very large cash payments, but she’d not believed a word he’d said and had turned down his offer flat.

‘It changed hands two months ago,’ Julie said. ‘The new owner is a business registered in Helsinki.’

Danny closed in on the tyre tracks in the mud. Kate could see exactly what he was thinking: a lot of tracks, too narrow for a tractor, much too wide for a car. ‘Hard to be sure until we see some movement,’ he said. He zoomed in on a patch of grass just outside one of the buildings. Cigarette butts lay everywhere. ‘A lot of workers for a small farm.’

‘You find anything on the firm?’

Julie shook her head. ‘A holding company in Geneva, another in Bern, then to Belize and finally Panama. If it’s not the Russians, it’s someone else with a lot of cash to spend covering their tracks.’

‘How far back can you go?’

Kate’s question was to Danny and he pulled up another screen and started to rewind the footage on it rapidly. ‘Only a week, but that’s what’s weird. I checked the Met Office records. It rained really heavily nine days ago, so these tracks would have been obliterated if they’d been there before then. They must have been made after the deluge. But there’s been no movement in or out of these barns in the past week.’ He stopped rewinding and minimized the screen, pulling up another. ‘We started casting around. We looked closer to the border . . . but neither of us could find anything. So then we went further away.’ He froze the footage and closed in on a building by the Baltic. ‘This is a hotel in Silamae on the beach. A congenial place to plan a coup.’

Beneath a lean-to beside the hotel, the rear wheels of several motorbikes were clearly visible. ‘Not an army, exactly,’ Danny concluded, ‘but maybe the vanguard.’

‘That’s great,’ Kate said. ‘What’s that on?’

‘PCR2.’

‘See what else you can find on both sides of the border.’

Kate left them to their work, then thought better of it and doubled back. She sat again, so that she was close to Danny: the people at the other end of the ops room would be out of earshot. ‘Talk me through faking a video.’

‘What kind?’

‘If someone wanted to create a fake kompromat video, is it possible to do it convincingly enough to fool us?’

‘I guess that really depends. What kind of video are we talking about exactly?’

‘A sex tape.’

‘It’s hard to know without seeing it. I guess it would depend on the quality of the lighting, the camera angles . . .’

‘But, in theory, is it possible that we could be completely convinced by a fake?’

Danny glanced over his shoulder to check no one was listening. ‘In theory, yes. Who you are talking about?’

‘The prime minister, say, or the US president.’

Danny nodded. ‘You could fake footage of either of them giving a speech they never gave saying things they never said – and people have.’

‘How?’

‘Well, they’ve given thousands of speeches, so you feed all those into a powerful piece of software called a neural network. You direct the software to learn the visual associations between particular words and their mouths as they say them. And if you want the final version to be particularly convincing, you’d get the software to compete with a copy of itself, one generating the imagery, the other trying to spot the fakes. They call them generative adversarial networks and it’s very effective. The computer goes on improving its work until it finds a way to beat the competing network that is trying to weed out the fakes, so you get pure computational hallucinations.’

‘What about a sex video?’

‘Same principle, though probably easier in reality. You just need to make the statistical connections between the individual you want to focus on and the aspect of his behaviour you wish to fake – in this case movement.’

‘Could you spot a fake?’

‘Probably. The GAN images have a creepy edge, though the software is improving all the time. The Russians might be ahead of us on this.’

‘Could I spot a fake?’

‘It all depends on the clarity of the image. If there is plenty of light and the visual and audio quality are good, you’d probably have a good sense of whether it’s real or not. But the lower the quality, the easier it might be to pass off as a fake.’

Kate touched Danny’s arm. ‘Thanks.’ She made a brief phone call to their liaison officer at GCHQ in Cheltenham to check whether they had any information on the claims Mikhail had made of a coup inside Moscow Centre against his father and Vasily Durov. She said they had heard nothing of the kind.

Kate walked up to the chief’s office on the fifth floor. C, otherwise known as Sir Alan Brabazon, was waiting for her, looking out at the lights of the House of Commons twinkling on the far side of the river. As he turned to face her, she thought how much he had aged these past six months, his thick curly hair now flecked with grey and his hooded eyelids locked under a permanent frown. His wife, Alice, had seen her cancer return – this time to the liver – and her life was now almost certainly measured in weeks rather than months. He walked to his desk and picked up the phone. ‘I’ll get Ian up here.’ He dialled and waited. ‘She’s here,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.

He went to the sofa and chairs in the corner and motioned Kate to sit. He tapped his tortoiseshell reading glasses against his knee, his hands weathered from the hours he spent in the garden at his country home just north of Winchester. ‘How was Stuart?’ he asked.

‘He burst into tears when he was alone with the kids.’

‘I’m not surprised. A lifetime in Moscow probably wasn’t what he had in mind.’

‘He says they’re treating him like a pariah.’

‘Perhaps, but I doubt it.’

Kate had only a moment to consider this before Ian Granger burst in, as was his habit these days. He’d always liked to stage an entrance. ‘Aghamo mshvidobisa,’ he said. Even by the standards of the service, he had a gift for languages and liked to remind everyone of this by peppering routine conversations with different greetings – in this case, Georgian.

‘I fear this is not going to be good news.’ He crossed his legs to reveal a brand new pair of suede Chelsea boots that matched the designer black jeans he had recently taken to wearing to the office. He now eschewed Savile Row tailoring, the qualities of which had once been one of his standard dinner-party riffs, and rarely seemed to bother with a haircut either, his long blond curls tumbling over the collars of his Ted Baker shirts. Sir Alan was much too aloof to notice Ian’s cry for mid-life attention.

‘Coffee, tea?’ Sir Alan asked.

‘Not at this hour,’ Ian said. He’d discovered ‘wellness’ lately and told anyone who would listen it was ‘dangerous’ to drink caffeine past noon.

‘Something stronger?’

Ian was about to decline, but then had second thoughts. ‘Well, if you’re offering.’

Sir Alan went to a cupboard in the corner, took out a bottle of Glenfiddich and poured three glasses. He didn’t ask Kate whether she wanted ice or water.

Ian didn’t wait for Sir Alan to take his seat before turning to Kate. ‘Give us your worst,’ he said, with what he considered his megawatt smile.

Kate tried not to let her irritation show. ‘Mikhail Borodin and his father, Igor, want to defect. Mikhail says that Igor and Vasily Durov have been the victims of a coup in Moscow Centre, orchestrated by the GRU. He says that both men are under house arrest already. He’s offering the video he says was used as kompromat to force the prime minister to work for them, along with evidence of the cash payments made to him over the years.’

‘Do I dare ask what the video shows?’ Ian said.

‘He claims it’s of James Ryan having sex with underage girls while he was an army officer in Kosovo. I asked to see it, but he said he would only show it to us once we accept his offer in principle.’

‘What do they want?’ Sir Alan asked.

‘Residence here, passports – and a guarantee they’ll be able to use the assets they have stored in the West. They also want to ensure freedom of movement throughout Europe and America. I said that wasn’t in our gift.’

‘And, no doubt, they’re in a hurry.’

‘Yes. There was one other thing. He offered what he called a parting gift. He says the GRU has been planning a coup in Estonia, which is now imminent. The Night Wolves have bought a farm just outside Narva and stored enough weapons there to start a small war. The Kremlin will create some kind of crisis involving the Russian minority and the Night Wolves will come to their aid.’

‘And the Center Party will call for Moscow to intervene,’ Sir Alan said, tapping his glasses against his leg again. Kate noticed some dark stubble beneath both sides of his chin, missed with careless shaving. It was most unlike him.

‘We think we’ve probably found the farm. It’s on PCR2.’

Sir Alan got up and went to his desk. Ian and Kate stood behind him as he put on his glasses and looked at the satellite feeds. ‘The place by the beach on the right is where we think some of them are staying. If you close in, you can see the rear wheels of a line of motorbikes.’

‘How long have the CIA got?’ Sir Alan asked.

‘Only a week. No movement in or out in that time. But it rained heavily nine days ago, so those tyre tracks outside the barn have been made since then.’

Sir Alan closed the feed and led them back to sit in the corner. He took a sip of his whisky and swirled the ice around in his glass.

Ian jumped into the silence, as was also his style. ‘I’m suspicious,’ he said. ‘That’s my first reaction, I’m afraid.’

Kate resisted the temptation to point out that he was always suspicious of anything he hadn’t originated. Sir Alan continued to stare into his glass.

‘I don’t think this needs to take all night,’ Ian went on, which invariably meant he had a dinner to attend, or an assignation, or both. ‘We can monitor the situation in Estonia to see how it develops, but we shouldn’t – couldn’t – accept their offer to defect.’ He looked at his superior. ‘I’m sure you agree, Alan.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘And why would you think that?’

Ian made a show of appearing incredulous. ‘Because it smacks of a well-organized disinformation plot designed to take us for fools. They know Kate is in a vulnerable state—’

‘Come on, Ian,’ Kate said. She had not expected his assault on her to be quite so obvious.

‘Withdraw that,’ Sir Alan instructed him. ‘And apologize, please.’

‘All right, I’m sorry,’ Ian said easily, without bothering to look at her or sound as if he meant it. He ran his hand languorously through his hair. ‘But the stakes are damned high here. Just imagine if the PM gets wind of the fact that we’re taking this seriously. He is the prime minister, after all, and likely to remain so, unless I’m missing something. The damage that could be done – the havoc he could wreak – on our organization might be terminal.’

‘So you’d rather have a Russian spy running our country?’ Kate asked.

Ian faced her. ‘Well, first, we should be careful in our language. If we accept your theory, he isn’t a Russian spy but an agent of influence. Compromised, yes, if it were true, but unlikely to be doing much more than simply giving their arguments a fair hearing. And, much more importantly, there is absolutely not a shred of hard evidence that he is working for the Russians.’

‘That’s what they’re offering us,’ Kate said.

Sir Alan was sitting back in his chair, watching the pair of them fight this out.

‘It’s a trap, Kate. Surely you can see that. They’ve offered us some tasty bait again. We’ll be drawn in again. And then they’ll seek to embarrass and confuse us. Again. They hardly need to bother with any serious operations, these days, because we do all their work for them.’ Ian looked at them, waiting for a response, and, when he didn’t get one, simply ploughed on. ‘It’s too damned neat. Last time, they drop in the intelligence that our prime minister has prostate cancer. We don’t know this, so we discount it. Then, hey presto, he suddenly walks out into Downing Street to announce both his illness and resignation within twenty-four hours. We take this as clear evidence that the original operation was a stroke of genius and the intelligence it gleaned thus one hundred per cent genuine and correct. And the rest is history. Weeks of total chaos and confusion not just inside these four walls but in our country at large.’ Ian paused to draw breath. If his frustration was confected, it was very convincing. ‘And now here we go again. They offer us another juicy morsel. Proof, this time, in the form of some disgusting video of our new prime minister – and who can argue with that? It couldn’t possibly be faked – that the original intelligence was correct. They know Kate will be inclined to believe—’

‘Do not personalize this, Ian,’ Sir Alan said. ‘And that’s an order, not a request.’

‘But we’re going around the same mountain.’

‘Perhaps we are,’ Sir Alan said, ‘but if there is a video and a chance it proves that our prime minister is a liar, a traitor and a cheat, then we would be neglecting our duty if we failed to mount even a cursory investigation into its credibility. I have enough faith in our organization to believe us capable of determining whether a piece of video is faked or not.’

‘But that’s exactly the point. No one can ever determine that with one hundred per cent accuracy. So they’ve just put this fly out on the water, waiting for us to come up and swallow it whole, like a lazy trout.’ Fly-fishing was another of the new hobbies Ian liked to show off about, along with skiing, shooting and an apparently endless succession of Ironman competitions. He glanced at his watch. ‘Time is money’ was another of his favourite phrases. ‘I have to go or I’ll be late.’

‘For what?’ Sir Alan turned his gaze towards him.

Ian was briefly flustered. ‘I just promised not to be late for dinner.’

‘I understand that your reputation for good timekeeping can’t be held hostage by important matters of state, but all the same . . .’

Ian bridled. Only a short time ago, his brazen insubordination, even rudeness, would have been unthinkable, but his insolence was a testament to Sir Alan’s fading power. He had been in the job for seven years now, his standard five-year term extended twice, but it was unlikely to be amended for a third time, and Ian’s attempt to woo the prime minister to appoint him Sir Alan’s successor was Whitehall’s worst-kept secret.

‘We really can’t take this any further now, Alan.’ Ian was addressing him as if Kate wasn’t present. ‘I’m happy to stay all night, if need be, as always.’ He shook his head. ‘But nothing is going to be said, I fear, that will persuade me to change my mind. I propose a keen watching brief on Estonia, but as for the rest . . .’ he shrugged ‘. . . we should let it go.’

As Kate watched the two men squaring up to each other, like stags long past their prime, she was reminded of Stuart’s succinct summary of Ian Granger. ‘He’s just a bit of a cunt,’ he would say. ‘Everyone has a boss like that once in a while.’

If thinking of Stuart wasn’t in itself so painful, it might have made her smile.

Ian departed. Sir Alan peered at the whisky in his glass, then drank it straight. ‘If he ends up as your replacement, I’m going to kill myself,’ Kate said.

Sir Alan went to refill his glass. ‘You’ll have to excuse his manners. Ella has just filed for a divorce.’

‘Christ. Why?’ Ella was Ian’s long-suffering wife. The pair had met at Oxford and he liked to boast of her incredible success in building an online retail empire selling sleepwear. ‘I mean, I always assumed she must know about his affairs.’

‘Suspecting is one thing, but it turns out knowing is another. She found the phone he’d been using to arrange his assignations.’

‘With Julie?’

‘He wasn’t in a mood to be specific. It only happened this afternoon.’

‘Oh, shit. That would explain it. She got a text while we were travelling back from Venice.’

‘He tells me he’s in love and fully intends to marry her.’

‘Julie? He thinks he’s going to marry Julie?’ Kate was aghast. If the two of them having an affair was puzzling enough, marriage would be incomprehensible. ‘She thinks it’s just sex. Expedient, because she can’t be bothered to date properly. I feel sorry for him.’

‘I doubt that. I don’t. Somewhere in there, beneath the vaulting ambition and the deep-seated insecurities, is a man whose heart is basically in the right place, but I’m afraid I lost sight of that individual a long time ago.’

‘Subtlety has never been his strong point.’

‘Or loyalty.’ Sir Alan turned to her. ‘How are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ She thought about it. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘Try not to take this the wrong way, but you don’t look on top of the world.’

‘Thanks. How are you?’

‘As you would imagine. Alice decided in the end that she would go through another round of chemo, but the oncologist was fairly clear that he thought it unlikely to have much effect. If it doesn’t, we’re to be transferred to palliative care.’

‘I’m sorry, Alan.’ She watched him in silence.

He was as still as a statue. Then he shook his head, as if to dismiss a morbid train of thought. ‘Tell Karen to go down to Narva tonight. I’ll send out someone to help her and speak to the Estonians. We’ll need a Cobra in the morning. I’d like them to know we were ahead of the curve if Mikhail is right and it does kick off.’

‘What do you want to do about their offer?’

‘Ian’s objections are understandable enough. In the end, the only thing all that grief brought us six months ago was the knowledge that your husband was Agent Viper. So . . . I need to buy some cover. I’d like us both to brief the foreign secretary after Cobra. I think, for once, I’ll conspire to leave Ian behind.’

‘Is that wise? Briefing the foreign secretary, I mean.’ The prime minister had sent one of his early leadership rivals, Meg Simpson, to the grandiose office overlooking Whitehall that had once ruled an empire. The press generally considered it a dull, uninspiring choice, designed to make sure he had no rival anywhere near him. Imogen Conrad, the dynamic younger woman who had given him a run for his money in the final round of the leadership contest, had remained where she was at Education.

‘I think so,’ Sir Alan said. ‘Meg may not be as dazzling as either the prime minister or Imogen Conrad, but she’s a hell of a lot more reliable than either. Did you check with Cheltenham for any traffic to support the idea of a coup in Moscow Centre?’

‘Yes, and they’ve heard nothing of the kind either.’ Kate stood. ‘I’d better go. The children are looking after themselves, which is not ideal.’

She went downstairs and put her head around the door of her department. Only Suzy was there, which was far from untypical as Kate had quickly learnt. Suzy shared her predecessor Rav’s work ethic but, sadly, not his charm. ‘Julie briefed me,’ Suzy said, with clipped Mancunian vowels, in such a way as to indicate Kate should really have done so.

‘I’m sorry. Do you mind if I fill you in properly tomorrow? I have to run for the kids.’

‘I understood the situation in Estonia was potentially critical.’

‘We’re watching it closely. Karen is going to Narva tonight. She’ll report back in the morning.’

‘Do you want me to do some work on anything?’

‘No, don’t worry. And don’t stay late . . .’ Kate got a few paces down the corridor before she had second thoughts and went back. If Suzy was determined to staple herself to her desk, they might as well make it count. ‘Actually, it would be useful if you could do a briefing note on the Night Wolves for the foreign secretary and the PM, their links with the Kremlin and the GRU, their role in Ukraine, that sort of thing.’

Suzy looked pleased. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate that.’

‘There’s a Cobra meeting first thing. I’ll give it to the PM and the foreign secretary there.’

Suzy’s smile broadened. Kate had already worked out that nothing pleased her new deputy quite as much as the prospect of catching the eye of their superiors.