Vauxhall Cross, London
0830 IN LONDON and Angela Scott was back at her desk with a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea. No sugar, no milk: that was just the way she liked it. She had been at work since seven that morning, as she often was. Angela was exhausted – they all were on the China team. It had been four days since Hannah Slade, the collector, had been snatched in Hong Kong but the pressure from Cabinet Office for secret intelligence on China’s intentions was mounting by the day. Whitehall wanted results and the Service was struggling to deliver.
The fact that Angela was often to be seen beavering away inside Vauxhall Cross late into the night would perhaps account for her perpetual pallor and the faint grey bags beneath her eyes. Unlike most of her fellow case officers, she had been single for as long as anyone could remember, and she seemed to have no social life that anyone was aware of. None of that mattered at work, of course. She was regarded by everyone there as a first-class case officer with an impeccable record. Which was why what followed was all the more shocking.
Her cup of tea was still too hot to drink when three people, all men, walked rapidly and purposefully up to her desk. They were all wearing white forensic gloves and carrying see-through evidence bags with seals. She recognized two as being from Security Section, an in-house division of MI6, often staffed by ex-policemen and soldiers – people whose job it was to keep officers and their agents safe and alive. The other identified himself to Angela as having been sent by the National Cyber Security Centre. They surrounded her and her workstation. The shortest of the three seemed to be the one in charge.
‘Do not touch anything!’ he barked. ‘Angela Scott … I’m going to ask you to please stand up, move away from your desk and wait over there.’ He pointed to the middle of the room. Angela sat there, open-mouthed.
‘I’m sorry, is this an exercise?’ she protested, her jaw thrust out defiantly. ‘Because if it is, then it’s highly inappropriate. We’re in the middle of a live operation here. Who authorized you to come barging in like this?’
‘I’m aware of that, ma’am, but, no, this is not an exercise. Would you please vacate your workstation.’
Slowly, Angela pushed back her chair, stood up and walked to the middle of the room as instructed. Her colleagues looked on, stunned.
‘Yes, just there where you are now and please don’t move,’ the short man continued. ‘Now, without touching anything, can you indicate to us exactly where your mobile phones, iPads, tablets or any other communication devices are located? And if any of them are sealed away in a locker, then I must ask you to give us the key.’ Angela felt her composure return enough to ask what the hell was going on.
‘Ma’am, all I am authorized to tell you is that your mobile phone has been compromised.’
‘Compromised? By whom?’
‘By hostile intelligence.’
‘What?’ she gasped, her hand instinctively going to her throat as if she could somehow choke off this source of bad news and make it go away. ‘That’s not possible, surely.’
‘Not only possible, Ms Scott, but it’s happened. There’s been a data breach and it’s come from your phone.’
As he spoke, his two colleagues began opening drawers and searching shelves as if she were a criminal suspect. It was then that a terrible thought struck her. ‘Wait – I hope no one is suggesting it’s deliberate on my part? I had no idea …’
The security officer folded his arms and stood looking at her. He might have been slightly shorter than she was but Angela found herself distinctly intimidated by him. She could feel her cheeks reddening with embarrassment.
‘That’s not for me to say, ma’am,’ he replied at last. ‘There’ll be a full investigation, obviously, and we’ll need to go through your complete digital history.’
‘Am I being charged?’ Unthinkable as it was, she had to ask the question.
‘Again, I’m not at liberty to say. The Chief would prefer to keep this in-house for now, but I can’t rule out Scotland Yard’s SO15 being brought in to investigate.’
The Chief? How long had she known about this? Angela’s shoulders slumped. Suddenly, like a sad ending to a film she had already watched, she could see her entire career disintegrating before her eyes. Everything she’d worked for, all those joyless evenings spent late in the office, the pre-dawn starts, the bank holidays and the weekends sacrificed, not to mention the nail-biting stress and angst of sending agents and case officers into hostile territory … and all for what? An ignominious exit from the job she loved, dismissed without honours. There would be no criminal prosecution, she was pretty sure about that. The Service had a visceral aversion to airing its dirty laundry in public.
In her own mind Angela knew she had done nothing with malicious intent and there was not one scintilla of evidence to indicate she had been cooperating with a foreign power. But the bar for digital security was set low right across government and as she stood there, helplessly watching these uninvited men rifle through her workstation, she recalled it wasn’t so long ago that a home secretary had had to resign after sending an official document from her personal email account, breaching ministerial rules.
So Angela Scott, lifelong employee of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, respected case officer and former station chief, knew exactly how this would go down from here. Even if she were exonerated – and she still wasn’t clear what had happened, how or when – the pall of suspicion would never completely lift from her name. Even if she managed somehow to cling on to her job her security clearance would likely be downgraded. She would be lucky to be given some mind-numbing admin role with no access to sensitive intel.
And as she was escorted from the building that day, a slight tremble in her hand as she passed through the ground-floor foyer, flanked by security men, a voice in her head kept repeating the awful truth: ‘It’s finished, Angela. Your days in this organization are over.’