As she waited, Kate leafed through more of the papers on Russell’s desk. There were titles like “Democracy in Estonia,” “Open-Source Coding for the Military,” and a whole pile dedicated to the Arsenal Football Club, which played out of North London. He’s a spy, she thought rather crazily. A spy with a football fix. But what kind of spy communicated with mousy housewives with newborn babies?
Ten minutes later Reg Cleak came back into the room. “Russell left his parents’ home in Windsor at eleven-thirty. Just after football highlights on BBC2.”
“Eleven-thirty?” Kate ran a hand over the back of her neck. “That leaves nearly three hours unaccounted for. Maybe he hit the clubs, such as they are on a Sunday night, or maybe he visited a friend. Either way, I want to know. His car’s downstairs. Send the plates to AVS. Ask them to run the number through their system and see if they get any hits.”
AVS stood for Automobile Visual Surveillance, a division of the Metropolitan Police that monitored the thousands of closed-circuit television cameras positioned in and around London. Advanced software scanned the stream of images every three seconds, identifying each passing automobile’s number plates and storing them in a temporary databank for five days. By searching for a given number plate in a given time period, it was possible to track a vehicle’s movements from camera to camera as it drove across the city.
“I’ll put some of the boys on it back at the nick,” said Cleak.
“Anything about the woman?”
“Nothing. Russell’s a bachelor. Parents don’t know anything about his having a girlfriend.”
“We’ve got to find her, Reg. She’s our first priority.”
Cleak nodded, all the while writing in his log.
“And what did the duke of Suffolk say about his son’s job?” asked Kate.
“He teaches,” said Cleak. “He’s a don at Christ Church College, Oxford.”
“A don with a Browning semiautomatic in his desk? What does he teach-marksmanship?”
“History. The duke wanted me to know that his son took a first when he was there.”
“I’m sure we’re all suitably impressed. Did the duke say what he studied?”
“Oh yes.” Cleak picked up the pistol and admired it. “ Russia.”
6
“How the hell did he get to London without us knowing it?” asked Frank Connor, Division’s newly appointed acting director, as he studied the photograph of Jonathan Ransom taken at the Terminal 4 arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport exactly three hours earlier. “The last you told me he was still at that godforsaken camp in Kenya.”
“Turkana Refugee Camp. That’s correct.”
“Not looking very spry is he? I don’t know how anyone can survive in that hellhole. How long’s he been there? Five months?”
“He arrived in Kenya at the end of February,” said Peter Erskine, Connor’s number two. “He hasn’t left since. He suffered a bout of malaria two months back. Dropped twenty pounds.”
“When was our last sighting?”
“A week ago. One of our contacts with Save the Children reported seeing him at the camp.”
“Save the Children?” Connor flushed with anger. “Who will we be using next? The Make-a-Wish Foundation?”
He tossed the photo on top of Ransom’s file, a binder stuffed four inches thick. The material inside dated back eight years, to Ransom’s first assignment in Liberia. But Jonathan Ransom was not in any way affiliated with Division. He’d never received a U.S. government paycheck. In fact, until five months ago, he’d had no idea that he was working on its behalf. Ransom was what professionals in the trade call a pawn, a private individual manipulated to do the government’s work without being made aware of its intent. Frank Connor had another name for them: schmucks.
Sighing, Connor removed his bifocals and rose from his desk. He would turn fifty-eight in a month, and at 4:38 Eastern Standard Time this fine summer morning, he was feeling every bit his age. Four months had passed since he was appointed acting director of Division, and those months counted as the hardest, most frustrating of his life.
Division had been created prior to 9/11 in the wake of the Central Intelligence Agency’s failure to find and punish those responsible for the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and numerous other attacks against American interests abroad. The fire-eaters in the Pentagon were upset and eager for revenge. They argued that the CIA had grown soft, that it had become an organization of paper-pushers content to hide behind their desks. Instead of developing flesh-and-blood sources inside hostile territory, they were satisfied to wait for the next download of satellite imagery to study beneath their microscopes. The CIA didn’t have a spy worth two cents on the ground in any of the world’s hot spots and hadn’t mounted a successful black op in ten years.
In short, the job of gathering intelligence could no longer be entrusted solely to the spooks in Langley.
It was the Pentagon’s turn.
The United States military had the resources and the culture to put men into the field capable of taking the offensive in the global war on terror, referred to in directives and white papers as “GWOT,” a name as ugly as the scourge it set out to defeat. “Proactive” was the watchword, and the former president liked the sound of it. One National Security Presidential Directive later, Division was created. A beast as secret as it was stealthy, to serve at his behest, and his behest only.
Division’s first successes came quickly. The assassination of a Bosnian general wanted for genocide. The targeted killing of a Colombian drug lord and the pillaging of his networks. The kidnapping, interrogation, and, later, execution of several Al-Qaeda supremos in Iraq and Pakistan. All were important victories, and Division’s reputation benefited accordingly. The operations it mounted grew in scope. More money. More operatives. More latitude to navigate the quicksilver currents of the gray world. Goals were no longer tactical but political. Removing a bad actor from the scene was not enough. Ideological factors were to be considered. Fostering democracy in Lebanon and kick-starting the Orange Revolution in Ukraine were but two examples.
But success bred hubris. Not content to implement policy, Division began to make it. “Proactive” took on a new meaning. It was Acton ’s theorem all over again: power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Inevitably Division went a step too far.
In Switzerland six months earlier, a plan to foment war between Iran and Israel was foiled at the last moment by a Division agent gone rogue, and an international incident was narrowly averted. Behind closed doors, the president was forced to admit American involvement. Part of his penance involved the sharp curtailing of Division’s mandate. Its operatives were recalled, its offices moved out of the Pentagon. Division’s budget was halved and its staff sent packing. The coup de grâce came when it was decided that congressional permission was henceforth required to mount an operation.