The final member of the group, apart from Peggy, was Charlie Simmons from GCHQ. Even he was looking somewhat more grown-up than usual. His hair was still standing on end as though he had just got out of bed but he had swapped his pullover for a jacket and his usual tee-shirt for a white shirt with an open neck. And, unusually for him, he wasn’t late. He had come down by car with a colleague for an earlier meeting so had not been reliant on the notoriously unreliable trains from Cheltenham.
Liz began, ‘I think it will be helpful if I just summarise where we have got to in this case. All of you know some of it but I want to be sure we are all au fait with the latest developments because we need to decide whether we should take action now or wait to see what happens next.’
There was a general shuffling in the room as people sat up in their chairs ready to join in. ‘You will all remember,’ she went on, ‘that the first lead in this investigation came from Miles. His colleagues had a Russian military source in Ukraine who asked to meet a British expert as he had important information to pass on. Miles, you went to Ukraine to meet him and he said, correct me if I get this wrong, that the Russians were planting Illegals in Europe and the US with the aim of weakening or destabilising those countries. That in the UK the operation was proving very promising and the Illegal was getting close to a target.’ She paused and looked at Miles.
‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘The source, Mischa, claimed to be disaffected after the Malaysian aircraft was shot down over Ukraine. The other important point is that Mischa’s source for this is his brother, an FSB officer, who talks more than he should, when he’s drunk. So in other words, our source has direct access to the information. I should just add that he is being paid quite generously by my colleagues in Ukraine.’
‘Thanks, Miles. So it was all very vague and there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it, except keep our ears to the ground. Then Mischa resurfaced saying he had more specific information. By that time he had been posted to Tallinn and I met him there.
‘What he told me was that the Russians are operating two Illegals in this country, and suggested they were a couple. Their original brief was to infiltrate protest movements in the UK and subtly influence them to cause as much trouble and disturbance as possible, with the aim of weakening both government and society. But then the nature of that operation changed. The man managed to get close to a woman who was in some way connected with one of the intelligence services and his partner was targeting a man who might be able to provide information about another of our services. They were now calling the operation “Pincer”. I suppose they were imagining a pair of jaws snapping up two of our services.
‘That was the background. Now we get on to the current situation, which as you will all appreciate is highly sensitive as it involves a member of one of our services and a close contact of another. It appears that our two Illegals got lucky. We assume that they were targeting the anti-surveillance lobby, probably trawling through internet chat rooms, looking for people to approach, when they must have come across a notice for a lecture that Jasminder Kapoor was giving at King’s College, London, where she worked at the time.
‘It seems certain that the female attended the lecture. Who knows how many people present were potential targets, but we are aware of one in particular – a lecturer at the college called Tim Simpson – who asked a fairly aggressive question and made it clear that he didn’t think Jasminder’s lecture was radical enough. Tim was active on the internet, on various anti-snooping blogs. He was approached at the talk by a woman calling herself Marina, and they chatted for a while, then continued their conversation by email.’
There seemed no good reason not to mention that Tim was also Peggy’s partner so Liz continued, ‘Unsurprisingly, Marina’s interest in Tim increased dramatically when she learned he lived with a member of MI5. It was then that she gave him a special phone to use when communicating with her, telling him that it would be more secure from surveillance. Charlie has had a close look at this phone and is ready to tell us what he’s found out.’ And before anyone could interrupt to ask the identity of the MI5 officer concerned, she turned to Charlie Simmons.
‘Yes. Thanks, Liz,’ said Charlie, sitting to attention. ‘The phone, which is now in bits at Cheltenham, looks like an ordinary iPhone 5c, and it is – but that’s not all it is.’ Everyone was looking at him now as though he were about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
‘I’m reasonably good at spotting things, but it took me three days to work out what’s inside this. They’ve been very clever. First of all, they fronted it with an app that automatically erases messages and texts that might be lying about. I couldn’t find any history of messaging, much less the messages themselves, simply because they’d all been wiped as soon as they were received and read or transmitted.’
Liz said, ‘Tim mentioned that to me. He thought it must be for security purposes.’
‘He’s right, but it also hides a multitude of other sins. Capabilities the person who gave it to Tim didn’t want him to know about.’
‘What else does it do?’ asked Miles Brookhaven.
‘The hardware has been rigged. It can be turned on remotely and all the functions can be operated by a third party. The camera’s ready to video whatever Tim’s looking at; the audio component’s set to transmit any conversation on the phone – and off the phone too. It’s like carrying a microphone around. And the phone can be made to transmit its location. So if Tim had the phone with him, his “friend” would know exactly where he was.’
‘The complete works,’ said Miles. ‘That’s got to be state-sponsored. No private individual could do all that.’
‘That’s the bad news,’ said Charlie.
‘You mean there’s good news?’ asked Bruno.
He nodded. ‘Yes, and that is… these utilities haven’t been used. It’s as if someone had decided they’d made a mistake setting Tim up with all this. The links are all fallow; it’s like they couldn’t be bothered. Very odd.’
‘Indeed,’ said Fane. He sounded unimpressed.
‘Why’d you think that is?’ Peggy asked.
‘They must have decided Tim was never going to be one of them,’ said Charlie.
Fane said, ‘So it’s a bit of a damp squib, isn’t it? This Marina woman doesn’t want to play.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she does – just not with Tim, when he’s so unforthcoming. But she’ll keep sniffing around until she finds someone who can be more helpful. In fact for all we know, she may have other people in play right now. So it’s important that we find her.’
‘How are you going to do that?’ Fane still sounded sceptical.
Liz sat further forward in her chair. ‘We hope that she will resurface. With Tim or someone else. But that’s just one side of their pincer movement. As Geoffrey and Bruno already know, we seem to have uncovered another, even more dangerous, plot that looks set to compromise their service.’
And she explained what they had discovered about Laurenz, detailing how he had met Jasminder, his cover as a Norwegian banker, and how the fact that he had given her the same model of iPhone had spurred them into taking a closer look at the man. She described the recent surveillance operation, and the shock discovery that Laurenz Hansen was actually Karpis, aide-de-camp to a Russian oligarch living near Manchester.
‘And this is the same chap who was romancing Jasminder Kapoor, new Communications Director of Six?’ said Fane in an incredulous tone. ‘How did this interesting personal connection escape the vetters?’
‘I’m afraid she failed to declare that she had a boyfriend,’ said Liz. ‘As soon as we began to suspect there was something wrong about Laurenz Hansen, we checked.’