Vauxhall Cross, London
LUKE SAT AT the far end of the table as the last two people joined the meeting in that narrow, aseptic room on the ground floor. He recognized them as the Chief and the Director of Strategic Advantage, the branch of SIS that devoted itself to state-based threats from Russia and China.
‘Close the door, will you?’
The Chief spoke first, her crisp syllables slicing through the silence in the room. Alex Matheson was a career intelligence officer, joining the Service straight from university, and now the first woman to head MI6 in its 116-year history. As a Sinologist and fluent Mandarin speaker, she had spent her early years working out of Beijing station, running agents into Shanghai, the Shenzhen Economic Zone and as far away as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and the porous border with North Korea. All in the halcyon days before biometric identification and facial-recognition cameras. Her style was very different from her predecessor’s. Sir Adam Keeling’s departure had been somewhat hastened by the business of the Leak. Somehow, and the investigation had yet to run its full course, a far-right extremist group had managed to smuggle a bug into the Chief’s private office, concealed inside a smoke detector. Deputy heads had rolled after that one.
Today, at this hastily called crisis meeting, Luke noticed the Chief was dressed in a sombre grey woollen jacket and matching skirt with a brooch of a silver fern pinned to her lapel, a gift, he presumed, from the NZ Security Intelligence Service.
‘In the last twenty-four hours,’ she began, ‘two things have happened in the Chinese area of operations. The public knows about one of them: that’s the naval incident in the Taiwan Strait. The other involves this Service, which is why I’ve called you all in here today. Let me first put this into context. Out of the Big Four, as I like to call them – Russia, China, Iran and Counter-Terrorism – China has been, as you all know, our top priority for some years now. We’ve had our successes and …’ She closed her eyes for a moment and nodded to herself. ‘… and we’ve had our setbacks. I’m sorry, I don’t like the word “failures”. But I regret to say that the most important operation SIS has undertaken in the People’s Republic for a generation is … well, it’s in serious jeopardy. Operation Boxer has been compromised.’
She let her words sink in as Luke registered the sharp intakes of breath from some around the table. He studied each face for a reaction, telling him who was already in the know about this operation and who wasn’t. And he wasn’t. All Luke knew was that Op Boxer was China-related, but for him to be pulled off the Middle East desk like this at short notice something big must have happened.
‘For those of you in this room who didn’t know until now,’ the Chief continued, ‘Operation Boxer is Category One and it’s been live for more than eighteen months. Some of you,’ and here she cast a glance towards the Director of Strategic Advantage, ‘will already be aware of “Blue Sky”.’ Some knowing nods, some blank faces, including Luke’s.
‘Blue Sky, for the uninitiated, is a high-level agent this Service has been running upstream, inside the Scientific Division of the People’s Liberation Army. More importantly, he works as an adviser to the Central Military Commission. That is the beating military heart, as it were, of the CCP. You don’t need to know how he was recruited, just that he came over to us some time ago.’
At this point Luke felt his eyes drawn inexorably to the plate of untouched digestive biscuits that sat waiting on the table. They were wrapped in clear cellophane, stretched tight over the neatly stacked pile beneath. He reckoned they were just at the outer limit of his reach. Feeling a pang of hunger after his fast ride in, he was oh-so-tempted to reach over, break the seal and pop one into his mouth. But he thought better of it. Probably not a good look in the current situation.
‘Blue Sky,’ continued the Chief, ‘was all set to deliver us the absolute mother lode on China’s plans for a coming invasion of Taiwan. And I mean everything. Missile launch codes, false flag operations, satellite trajectories, amphibious landing sites, their complete list of targets. Even data on the sleeper cells they’ve got lined up inside Taiwan’s military. Yep. It’s the whole nine yards. I don’t think …’ Alex Matheson glanced up at the ceiling as she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. ‘… I don’t think we’ve tapped into a seam quite this rich during my entire time in the Service and I cannot tell you how critical this is to us. Or, more importantly, what it means to our chances of preventing the South China Sea from blowing up into a full-scale twenty-first-century war. One that pulls in the US, Australia, Japan, South Korea and very probably ourselves. A war this Service might have been able to prevent.’ Her eyes blazed as she said this. It was one of the rare occasions when anyone had heard C raise her voice.
‘Think about that for a second,’ she said. ‘If we can get our hands on this gold mine we’ve got every chance of spiking Beijing’s invasion plans and possibly setting them back by several years. Perhaps even indefinitely. But that was as of yesterday.’ The Chief glanced at the clock on the far wall of the meeting room. ‘And today we are in a whole different world, unfortunately.’
Luke noticed that the one person who was showing no reaction to all this was Felix Schauer, the Director Critical. He was sitting at the other end of the table, staring impassively at the Chief, waiting for his moment. He was wearing his trademark tweed jacket with the brown leather elbow patches, a chequered shirt and a maroon silk bow-tie, a last stand against the more relaxed dress code of the modern era. To Luke, still gently perspiring in his Lycra cycle gear, Felix Schauer looked like a parody of a latter-day Latin master. Yet this was his moment.
‘I’m going to let Felix take over now,’ Alex said, nodding to the Director Critical. ‘Felix, will you take it from here, please.’
Schauer removed his horn-rimmed glasses, gave them a quick polish with a silk handkerchief that he seemed to produce from nowhere, replaced them on his nose and addressed the room. ‘You will understand, I hope,’ Schauer began, with his faint trace of a German accent, ‘when I tell you that the data Blue Sky was about to give us is so sensitive, and so time-critical, that we opted to stay offline, not even to use Hong Kong station or one of our own case officers for the handover. No.’ He exchanged a knowing glance with the Chief, as if they were a long-married couple secretly signalling to each other that it was time to leave a dinner party. ‘Instead we took the difficult decision to use a collector, a civilian, to take delivery of it in person. She is an academic from a university here in London with a rock-solid cover for visiting Hong Kong.’
Felix Schauer paused and looked down at his watch, frowning.
‘In fact by now the exchange should have been made and our collector should have been on her way to the airport with the data concealed in a way we think even our most inquisitive Chinese friends would have been hard pushed to detect. But …’ Luke caught a glimpse of the expression on the Chief’s face. She suddenly looked years older. ‘… I regret to inform you that she has disappeared. Vanished. So far, our enquiries in Hong Kong have produced no explanation whatsoever. We must therefore assume the worst-case scenario.’ The Director Critical looked around the table at each of the faces in turn. ‘Which is that her identity has been compromised, she has been lifted, and that she is now in the hands of China’s Ministry of State Security.’