The Britons

[Leander]

1

David Morris was almost forty. Approaching middle age, the Englishman living in his country’s capital, down in suburban Putney, was doing very well for himself. He was married with two young children in a nice nuclear family and had his own successful business.

An e-security consultant where he put those who wanted communications security in touch with those who could provide it, David delivered with a tailor-made service being his niche. In an age of government intrusion where they snooped on people’s phones and computers with the full authority of the law, David made his living by exploiting legal loopholes for his clients, sometimes not so legal ones too.

He had been orphaned young and grown up in the North with his aged grandparents. His mother’s mother was now deceased while the man who had raised him was in a comfortable retirement home with memory issues. David had gone to a good school and an even better university. He spoke well and was had an air of confidence. People liked him, people trusted him: especially when he could arrange for their own secrets to be kept from nosy eyes and ears.

His wife was Natalie. A bit younger than he, she was a busy mother to two. They were in school and spent time with an au pair due to her hectic work schedule.

Natalie was in recruitment, working in London and the Home Counties as her husband did. She provided staff to those in important positions of power and influence who needed reliable workers for their offices and also to support their own busy schedules were needs of childcare clashed with earning a living. Always with a smile, Natalie was able to find the right people for those who needed them and worked on reputation rather than advertisement.

She’d been raised by a single mother in London, starting out in less than fortunate circumstances. To put it bluntly, they’d been poor. Her mother had long ago returned home to Eastern Europe in retirement, living the good life too on what her appreciative daughter could provide for her. Natalie had fleeting personal contact with her only parent though did remark to all those who knew her how she valued and missed that mother who’d gone back abroad after raising a child all by herself in the British capital.


Working in London too were Dmitri and Natalia.

Those two who had a sham marriage, one complete with real children though who had no idea about the true identities and loyalties of those parents. Keeping busy schedules and travelling across London, Dmitri and Natalia were foreign intelligence officers from a hostile state. That nation was the Russian Federation and their allegiance was to its primary foreign intelligence arm, the SVR. They lived under legends, carefully crafted entire falsehoods about their existence. Both of them spied for their own country though mostly ran a network of others who did most of that. Their job was mostly management with little hands-on work done themselves.

Dmitri had been born in Russia a few years before its preceding state, the USSR, collapsed in upon itself. His mother was a Russian girl from Leningrad while his father was a British national. The latter had had a not-so stellar career in intelligence work – one littered with bouts of heavy drinking – before being outed as a double agent and escaping from Britain through luck rather than guile as he’d assured his handlers. The KGB had not many years later been disestablished with Dmitri’s father, the unwelcome defector, suddenly finding himself without anyone willing to pay for his upkeep as well as that of his child and that infant’s mother. For most of the Nineties, he’d scrounged a living as a petty criminal in the city which had become St Petersburg while playing an increasingly less important role in his son’s life. Before the Millennium had arrived, he’d drunk himself to death.

Raised half British, half Russian, Dmitri could have become a lot of things. Unbeknown to himself until he was fully committed to such a career, he’d chosen to follow the path his father had taken though. He’d become an intelligence officer working for the successor of the organisation who his father had taken money from to betray those where his loyalties should have been to. A complicated lie, quite the charade in fact, had established Dmitri as someone else entirely when he’d finally gone back to the country of his father. Dmitri served only one country though, not two, and that was Russia.

As to Natalia, she’d been born in a private London hospital yet was a Russian regardless. Her parents were rich émigrés who’d fled attempts at legal persecution back home for crimes which her father denied yet had certainly done. He hadn’t paid off the right people otherwise his smuggling and drug running would have been perfectly acceptable to a system which had worked on bribes. Spoilt, the young Natalia had had a good childhood where money had never been a problem for her parents. She’d gone to school and been an outsider who had a knack for fitting in. Much of that had been her ability at such a young age to lose her accent and pretend she was someone she wasn’t so as to avoid the bullying that came with being someone different.

Before she was eighteen, and against her will, her parents had returned home. Foolishly, her father had believed that things wouldn’t be the same for someone like him when he returned. That wasn’t the case at all. His money had nearly run out while aboard in Britain and there was nothing for him in Moscow that wasn’t already being done by those with better connections and who also didn’t at once arose a wealth of suspicion after spending so many years abroad. Natalia had seen her father arrested and her mother facing destitution. She could have left them to their fate and had almost done so. There were many real anger issues with her parents that she had. Yet, there was a younger brother whom she doted on too. Like her, he was a Russian national despite his birth in Britain. Natalia had been approached in Moscow by her mother country’s security services and recruited to work for them in doing what she had long excelled at: being someone else. Her parents, yet most importantly her brother, would be looked after back home while she went overseas. She had to volunteer for what she did though there was volunteering and then there was saving your younger brother.


David was Dmitri.

Natalie was Natalia.

The two of them were Russian spies in London who ran a network of agents while pretending to be the Britons that they certainly weren’t.

Doing that kept them quite busy and was no easy task at all.

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

Deep Cover...
More, please ??

[Craiglxviii]

Oo’re the Britons?

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[Leander]

Deep Cover...
More, please ??

On the way!

Oo’re the Britons?

IMG_2266.gif

Amusing.

[Leander]

2

“They took my leg: look!”

The hospital patient registered under the name of Vernon Hollingsworth tugged at the bedsheet. It didn’t pull back as he intended it to. Gritting his teeth, tightening his grip, he gave it another go… all to no avail.

“Stop that, will you?” His visitor urged him to halt what he was doing.

“I never told them that they could.” His hands came away from the edge of the sheet. “Who gave them permission to cut if off? I know I didn’t!”

In dramatic fashion, which David looked on upon with near exasperation, Vernon dropped back down from his near seated permission. He threw his arms up in the air briefly before closing his eyes and turning his head away.

The thought came to David that Vernon might actually cry.

“It’s all going to be okay, my friend.”

Of course it wasn’t going to be. No other words came to him though, just that meaningless remark.

Vernon said no more.

David stood beside the younger’s man’s hospital bed with the curtains drawn around them. He’d lied to get in here, telling the nurse who said that only immediate family could enter that he was Vernon’s boyfriend. That he most certainly wasn’t yet the embarrassed woman he believed it.

The motorcycle accident had happened two days ago, just down the road from here at Camberwell Green. From what he’d been able to gather, David had learnt that Vernon had been doing that foolish thing that he always did where he rode his bike in the manner of a daredevil idiot. An approaching lorry had ended that two-wheeled insanity with the result being Vernon being taken up Denmark Hill to King’s College Hospital. An amputation had come to save Vernon’s life.

Having witnessed none of it for himself, David had felt that he had to come here to see it with his own eyes. Natalie had agreed with insistence. What if it was a lie, a deceitful trick, she had offered. She’d said she’d go if David didn’t. They had to be sure and nothing could be faked like this was.

Vernon had lost his leg.

So to had his fellow Russian intelligence officer whose real name was Viktor.


David left the hospital, avoiding that nurse. She’d seen his face just the once, and spoken to him, yet he hoped with just the lone occurrence she’d forget it. He knew that on any given shift, there must be hundreds of people she’d run into. They’d be often in distress and would make more of a mark than him saying what he had to her in the brief moment that they’d been talking.

He got in a taxi and was soon meeting the Underground at Brixton.

David left South London and headed right into the middle of the capital where he spent the next hour this morning changing trains while going in and out of several stations. A tail on him was rather unlikely, that he knew, but he did as his training was in such a situation where he felt exposed.

Natalie was waiting for him when he got home. It was an autumn Saturday approaching midday and the kids were off swimming. She was waiting for him when he came to the back gate after cutting down the alley. Her hand opened it quickly to let him in. His bulky overcoat and his hat went into the shed with Natalie taking the glasses too.

“Your eyes hurt?”

That they did. David rubbed his left one more than he knew he should.

“Don’t do that.” Her admonishment was stern, like she was talking to one of their little ones. “It’ll swell up.”

“If I’m going to wear glasses for adventures like this,” David began repeating what he’d said to her earlier before he’d set off, “I need something else. I draw more attention to myself when squinting in them.”

The two of them stood behind the shed. There was traffic noise from the road and a train in the distance. Being outside with background noise was what David was pleased to be talking in, even if the subject up for discussion wasn’t good at all.

“How was he?”

“Not good at all. He’s in an emotional state.”

Concern was in her face, though not the typical kind for someone who had been hurt as bad as their fellow Russian was. “He won’t do anything silly, will he?”

“No, no.” David shook his head. “Not that kind of state. He’s just lost his leg and… well… imagine how you’d feel, will you? He isn’t about to go crazy and start telling stories, why would he?”

“Did you talk to him about the contact?”

“Yes, I have all the details already and he confirmed it. The meet is still on but, of course, his contact will be seeing me and not Vernon.”

Natalie still looked worried. David wasn’t convincing her.

“If anything goes wrong, you scarper fast. We’re potentially exposed here.”

“I don’t think,” and he really didn’t, “that any British state intelligence play would knock Vernon off his motorbike like that just to see where it might take them. If they had eyes on him, if we were exposed, that wouldn’t be their move.

When you say ‘scarper’, Natalie, do you think I should see if I can get hold of Vernon’s bike for Monday and such an eventuality?”

She gave no answer. Unimpressed by his attempt at humour, she turned on her heels and went back into the house.

David smiled at the sight of her shapely rear as well as his own logic.

If you can’t have a sense of humour about these things, then what’s the point in it all?


Two days later, David was back in the middle of London again. The final leg of his tangled route through the capital’s transport links saw him reach Charing Cross. He left that busy station at rush hour via a side entrance and walked down to the Embankment. He stepped inside the Underground station there yet went out the other side and dashed across the road. David’s eyes spun around to watch for traffic but also to see if his sudden manoeuvre attracted any unwanted attention.

If he was being followed, those doing it would be good, very good in fact, but he’d hoped to flush anyone out with that.

Apart from a white van driver who hooted his horn at him, David couldn’t detect anyone on his tail though. Up onto one of the two footbridges above he went, taking the steps in big strides while dogging in and out between those walking slowly. The northern span was where he went, where Vernon was supposed to be meeting that contact instead.

David spotted him at once.

He stepped over to the bribed politician’s aide and had something quick to say to him.

“Luke, Vernon cannot make it today. Walk with me, as you were to with him.”

The South Bank and the big train station at Waterloo were on the other side. There were plenty of people going over the walkway above the Thames which ran alongside a train track with another footway over on the far side.

“When we meet again, it will be at the same time, only going over the other walkway in the opposite direction. Do you understand?”

“Where’s Vernon?”

“Answer the instruction.”

“I do. Other bridge, opposite way, same meet but over there. I got it. I understand. It’s my routine with Vernon. Now, please, where is he? And who are you: another friend from the East, eh?”

David was walking beside a smartly dressed younger man who had a very important job and thus considered himself something special. Before his accident, in reports made to David, Vernon had gone through everything about the arrogant, privileged, self-interested twirp that Luke was. He’d explained how he’d recruited him and massaged the contact’s ego to pretend to express an awe at that importance.

Nonetheless, Luke was one damn good find for a source of intelligence. Getting him to do something more than just spill secrets for cash though was what David was here to get him to do. It was important enough for this open meet.

“He’s taken ill. It’s a viral infection and he’s not in a good shape at all. Vernon is laid up for some time and I’m taking over.”

David lied about why his fellow intelligence officer wasn’t here. He had no intention of telling Luke the truth less Luke be caught and easily lead those who would do that to Vernon. He had more to that lie ready to give, details that he might be pressed for too. And, he wasn’t about to give his own name, even a fictitious one.

Thankfully, there was no need.

“Poor man.” Luke didn’t sound genuine at all with that. “I can do what he asked me to do, Mister Whatever Your Name Is. Although, it’s going to cost more than he and I agreed.” A pause, a glance back over his shoulder through the crowd of commuters. “Twice as much.”

Raising his eyes at the figure after the simplest of calculations, David had to wonder the reaction back in Moscow at that new number. In the end, they’d accept it though, that he was sure of. What Vernon had arranged to get from Luke was certainly worth it.

“I agree. Now, in three days’ time we meet again. I’ll have what you need to do the job.”

“I’ll be seeing you then.”

With that parting remark, Luke increased his walking speed and fast moved ahead of David. He was quickly going down the stairs to the South Bank, leaving the slower David behind him.

“Greed will be the likely end of you.”

David said that under his breathe to the departing figure.


Back with Natalie in their garden a few hours later, David told her that the intelligence-gathering operation that Moscow had wanted to occur come what may – even an amputated leg – was still on.

“I’m surprised they don’t want a live recording.” She tutted and shuffled her feet. Her hands went to her bare arms too.

David was starting to feel the cold as well. “Jeez,” he touched her freezing arm, “don’t put that in any report, will you? They might just do if we suggest it!”

While it was unlikely that that would be the case, David’s mind momentarily went over the possibility of such a thing. Doing that would be a sure fire way for Luke to get caught and for him and Natalie to suffer the same outcome too. All these years spent in Britain living as ‘illegals’ would come to quite the sudden end. That were be a fallout of near biblical proportions as well from that.

“They’re not that crazy, David.” She was dismissive of such an idea, pulling a face along with that comment.

“Natalie,” (he always called her by her pseudonym as she did him: why break a habit and expose yourself for just a name?), “they are having us bug a private conversation taking place in Downing Street between this country’s prime minister and the American president. They want us to record what is said and send it back to Moscow. That’s pretty crazy in itself considering the risk of exposure.

There’s got to be someone there who had the idea of a live transmission, probably direct into the Kremlin, before someone wiser talked him out of it.

Don’t assume that there aren't those back home who misunderstand the danger we’re putting ourselves in with this.”

[Leander]

3

Jessica, who was David & Natalie’s eldest child, was forever full of questions. Bright and with a keen eye for detail, her father had told her mother before that one day she’d make a good spy. It was in her genes, through his family, so he’d said. Natalie had been aghast at such an idea. She wanted a normal life for her daughter and had told him that what they did, and what they potentially exposed their children to, wasn’t normal at all.

“Why does she get her own airplane?

When she was little, did she know she’d grow up to be a president?

Is her husband the vice president?

Can any American be a president?

Could I be a British president?”

Despite her six years, Jessica liked watching the news and was actually quite aware of world affairs. The last question was a bit off for her because she knew who the British prime minister was and that the country didn’t have a president (though there had been a good few prime ministers recently), yet she still remained rather switched on to such things regardless.

Jessica remained watching the screen and filling her mind with world events. Unlike her younger brother, she didn’t want to watch cartoons. Instead, she sat on the floor with her head in her hands while David was up on the sofa. Jessica didn’t turn around to ask him these questions but continued to watch live media footage of the American leader arrive in the UK.

He answered her questions, one at a time.

She had another one afterwards, changing the subject: “You and Mum have started talking in the garden a lot again. What are you talking about when you’re out there?”

He told her it was grown up stuff, nothing for her to worry about.

“Jimmy saw you talking yesterday near the shed. I saw you two this morning. We’ve decided to keep an eye on it all.”

Yes, spying on people, co-opting others to join her, was in her genes!

He told her not to worry about grown up stuff and keep watching the news.

“Is the Lady President off to see the King?”

That wasn’t the case, came his reply. The American visitor was off to see the prime minister.

“I wonder what they’ll be talking about?”

David didn’t have to ponder over that. He was hopefully soon going to be finding out.


The pedestrian bridges at rush hour were tradecraft from Vernon with his meets with Luke. David had stuck to that when first making contact with the Downing Street aide and also to give him the recording device. For handing it back over though, Luke had been given a new, different location to meet at. It was the type of outdoor rendezvous which David much preferred. Luke worked nearby and wouldn’t have to be a way for long. The briefest of exchanges would be made with a simple brush pass in a park.

David didn’t plan on having a conversation. The small electronic apparatus would go one way, a USB stick with access to a cryptocurrency account would go the other way.

At a quarter to six, David walked into St James’s Park. The cold weather kept the usual evening crowds away from the open space that sat between Whitehall and Buckingham Palace but there were still many people about. Seeking the anonymity he craved, David took a seemingly leisurely stroll.

His walk was purposeful though. His eyes darted around. David tried to miss nothing, to take it all in. Faces were what he looked at, searching for any that were familiar. Having no success in that, he was pleased.

Down beside the lake in the middle of the park David went. He avoided the ducks and the children which were running around near them and instead stuck to the path. His eyes were up, waiting for Luke to appear.

There he was, the young aide to the prime minister’s chief-of-staff.

Not an hour ago, Luke was meant to have slipped that recording device into position within the room where the British and American leaders were to have a private talk. Luke was supposed to it after the room had been swept for listening apparatus by specialist equipment. It had been a plan that Vernon and Luke had drawn up, one that David had approved of long before the former’s accident.

David could think of no reason why it would have gone wrong.

As Luke started to walk towards him, David saw something that was wrong though.

There was a face that came into view, one he recognised. Over to Luke’s left and behind him, trailing the greedy mercenary, was a woman that he recognised from a picture book he’d gone over before he left his house earlier. The face belonged to one of the Russia-focused counterintelligence people from Britain’s internal security organisation: the replacement for the thoroughly discredited MI-5. David had a book of faces that contained many of those either known or strongly suspected to be in that line of work.

There one was, the woman right behind Luke.

David knew that there was no other conceivable reason for her to be here other than chasing spies. She wasn’t out for an early evening stroll!

He snatched off his hat, shook it, and then put it back on. David quickened his pace and kept on going the same way though had his eyes down. The hat routine was a danger signal, one that Luke was supposed to know. In his pocket he jammed the small paper bag that contained what he had been about to hand over. Turning and running wasn’t for him. Instead, David intended to go past Luke as if there was nothing going on.

No exchange was to be made.

Luke saw the danger signal. David was aware of that because, after a moment spent in what looked like quite the panic, he didn’t do as David and try to pretend that nothing was going on.

Turning towards the lake, Luke threw what he had in his hand in there.

It took all that David had in him for calm to replace the horror. He kept on walking, his eyes averted from Luke as he went past him. The woman’s whose face he recognised nearly knocked him down as she started to run towards Luke yet she paid David no attention.

He kept on walking, possibly hearing some commotion behind him yet willing himself to not turn around.


David went over the footbridge across the lake and towards one of the park’s entrances. He crossed over the road at Birdcage Walk, went alongside the government building housing the Ministry of Justice and into St James’s Park Station. Down to the sub-surface level he went and onto the westbound platform.

There was a Tube train arriving in two minutes the electronic sign said. Throughout that, David tensed up as he waited for what he feared was the inevitable confrontation that was coming. Two men had walked into the station from the direction of the park that he’d been. One of the, both of them even, could have been coming to nab him.

No one did so on the platform though.

He took the District Line one stop to Victoria. David got off the Underground there and went up to the railway station concourse. He looked up at the departures board and also down at his phone. Wandering about, David looked at the departures again. He didn’t get on a train though. Instead, he went back to the Underground and was on a Circle Line train going east. No faces were familiar from the last trip. The train went back through St James’s Park and he got off at the Embankment. Up to Charing Cross he went where he stood in front of that station’s departure board. David bought a coffee and drank that on the concourse. His gaze was up but his eyes swung about.

Outside the station, he got into a taxi. That took him to Oxford Circus where he got out on Regent Street after having the driver pull over suddenly. David went down into the busy Underground station and used the subway to get to Oxford Street. Through crowds of people he went, dropping his hat in a bin as he went. The big John Lewis department store was busy enough for his use and he went in there, wandering about a bit, before going out a side exit. A taxi was hailed from across the street and David went down to Marble Arch. He went three stops on a westbound Central Line train to Notting Hill Gate.

David walked out of the station and then went back in again, moving among commuters as he did so. He slipped off his jacket and carried it when he got on a Circle Line train again, this one taking him to Edgware Road. He sprinted for a Hammersmith & City Line train, dropping his jacket as he went. Someone called after him but he was on that connection all the way to King’s Cross St Pancras. That was his favourite station, one he often went when going through this routine of aiming to shake any tail that might be on him, or at least flush it out by forcing someone watching him to make a mistake in revealing their presence.

Half a dozen Tube lines went through the station which served two national rail stations above. So too did the high-sped rail services that went under London both north and south deep into the suburbs as well as cross-country rail links by high-speed trains in every direction… and the international link to France There were four ticket halls belowground and the big train stations on the surface had another pair. David knew all the walkways, passages and exits by heart.

Up and down he went through the huge interchange with its several stations, mixing in with the crowds everywhere. He got on a Victoria Line train before stepping back off at the last minute. His eyes looked to see if anyone reacted in a particular manner to him doing that. Out of the station he went, into St Pancras to use the toilet, and then back out again. Next, he was walking fast back into the neighbouring aboveground station once more, this time via the street, before going down again. David got on the Tube for a two-stop ride to Holborn and the went another stop of a separate line to Tottenham Court Road. There, David got off the Underground for good and, once above ground, he headed on foot towards Piccadilly Circus. The distance wasn’t short and David took a longer route than he could have. He cut down several streets, going back on himself as well. He was looking again for faces he’d seen before this evening.

None came though.

Before he reached Piccadilly Circus, where the crowds of commuters were being replaced by those on a night out, David made the effort to bump into someone. An older man wearing a raincoat and carrying umbrella was his chosen target. He strode right towards him.

David made sure that his hand touched one of the man’s. He wanted it to look to anyone watching like a brush pass and direct attention towards someone completely innocent. Time would be wasted on him if that was the case.

“Excuse me.”

“Watch yourself!”

That reply came with a malice in it. David was gone though, leaving the angry man behind.

He found a taxi two streets away and told the driver to take him to Waterloo.

“Got a train to catch, have you?”

“Yes. Make it fast, will you?”

“The Bakerloo Line,” so the taxi driver offered, “might be faster.”

Despite gaining what David knew would be a good fare – Piccadilly Circus to Waterloo Station would be worth it – the driver tried to talk him out of it even as they got moving.

“Too many Tube rides for me today!”

At Waterloo, David jumped on a train at the last minute. It took him down to Putney. He was almost done with the tail shaking, almost. There’d be some shortcuts taken there in the suburb he lived in before he would go home.

When on that train, full of people going out of the middle of London, David only then allowed himself to start thinking of the implications of just what had happened back in St James’ Park.

And, of course, what Natalie would have to say about it all too.

[Leander]

4

Two counter-espionage officers stood in St James’s Park where the incident had occurred yesterday. It was raining today and underneath their umbrellas, each looked towards the lake and then back around along the path and into the trees. One of them was an eleven year veteran of intelligence work with a focus on foreign agents active in the UK. The other had been working in the same field for less than a year yet before that had been a police officer for almost as long as her counterpart had been chasing spies.

“He was given a danger signal by someone here.”

Harriet Spencer had been here when it had happened. She hadn’t seen what she was sure that the political aide now in custody had but was certain it had occurred.

“There had to be a hundred people nearby, probably more.”

The former police officer was Rebecca Carson, someone who hadn’t been in the park the previous day.

“If it was possible,” Harriet continued, “I’d like to know who every single one of them was, what they were doing here then, where they are now, and if they had any connection to Luke Goddard.”

Rebecca let out a little whistle in reply.

That was a big ask. Something she in fact considered impossible.

“So… about this danger signal?”

“It could have been anything,” so Harriet began to explain, “and would have seemed entirely innocuous to anyone else but who it was aimed at.

Look around now. What do you see? People doing things that people do.

Did you see that woman scratch her nose and that man behind her touch his sunglasses?”

“Yep.” Rebecca had witnessed what her colleague spoke of.

“If you were told to watch for someone to do that, for a specific person to do such a thing, you’d be ready to spot it. There would be something done with the hands and face, both most likely, in a set manner. There would be a signal for ‘all clear’ and another for ‘danger’.”

“How,” asked Rebecca, “are we meant to know what was innocent and what was deliberate? There was a lot of video surveillance but it didn’t catch everything. What’s innocent and what’s the danger signal?”

First thinking that tracking down everyone who was in the park yesterday evening was impossible, Rebecca now took onboard the idea from the veteran spook she was with about trying to make sense of people touching their face in a random manner. That was truly unachievable!

When you left the Met. and came to Niss, what did you expect, Rebecca? Something easy?”


Sometime after leaving St James’s Park, the two of them went back to their office. It was a new facility, over in the Docklands and within a stone’s throw of Canary Wharf. Russia-focused counter-espionage operations being run in the UK were based at that off-site away from the main centres of activities of their employer at both Thames House and Vauxhall Cross.

It was the National Intelligence & Security Service that the two of them – along with thousands of others – worked for. An organisation set up the previous year, NISS had replaced both MI-5 and MI-6. Those two past intelligence services, known formally as the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, had their hundred-plus year histories as independent & autonomous services replaced by a joint organisation firmly under ministerial control via a Cabinet-level position that was the Secretary of State for Security.

What was widely known as the Manningtree Scandal, something that had international implications, and had made Britain a global laughing stock, had brought that situation about. Alicia Manningtree, the UK prime minister, had been exposed as an agent of the Russian state. MI-5 and MI-6 had both been aware of allegations made that she was being blackmailed with kompromat to serving Moscow’s interests and that it was likely that Russian spooks had put her in office through underhand dealings. The two intelligence services had been gripped by refusals to believe such a thing and internal intrigue, much of which Manningtree had manipulated, allowing her to get away with what she had been. People had died and the greatest of all treason had been committed. Exposure had come via a public revelation made from America at a time what Manningtree was in St Petersburg. In Russia she had stayed, denying the allegations made against her, and from there she criticised what she claimed was a coup d’état to defeat British democracy. In broadcasts out of Russia, she revealed state secrets of her country and those of allies too: Washington was just as eager to get their hands on her to shut her up as London was.

Two prime ministers had stepped into her shoes since then as the nation had reeled from further claims of malign Russian influence across the government and the security services. Spy claims were made aplenty and there was suspicion everywhere.

Many of Harriet’s colleagues had been forcibly retired or put out to pasture on non-important tasks. Outsiders such as Rebecca had joined the new NISS and created quite the culture change within the British intelligence community whose practices and methods had been forced to adapt to the current climate of a state watching seemingly everyone less more agents of Moscow be at work. Just because you’re paranoid, so the saying went, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.

Case in point: the uncovering by NISS of a British national working in Downing Street where he’d been spying for Russia.


Their section chief, Tariq, had Harriet and Rebecca attend a briefing being given alongside all those others who were working the investigation into what Goddard had been caught doing. An experienced, long-serving intelligence operative, Tariq had spent most of his career undertaking counter-terrorism work with MI-5 before the transfer to hunting Russian spies upon NISS being formed. Harriet respected his abilities though doubted that he truly had what it took when it came to leading the charge against Russian operations. As to Rebecca, she didn’t share that opinion and believed that her immediate superior knew exactly what he was doing.

“Goddard isn’t talking. He’s watched too many American television shows and has made demands for a lawyer. I’m expecting him soon to declare his constitutional rights under the fifth and sixth amendments.”

Rebecca joined a few others present in having a quick laugh at such a quip.

Harriet didn’t.

“We’re going to hold him,” Tariq continued, “as long as necessary, until he starts talking. He made not be up to speed on the details of the latest Security Bill which has gone through Parliament, but this organisation is.

He’ll talk eventually. Everything has already been laid out before him with visual evidence provided of his treason. He’s thoroughly busted and they’ll be a confession quick enough. I’ve seen his type and witnessed how they break when the realisation comes that game is up.

The moment that happens, we’re all jumping into action. Every name he gives us will be run down and every detail concerning his espionage will be checked. My thinking is that he is part of something very big and there’s going to be a whole lot of work to do once he starts talking.

Harriet, you had something you wanted to say, didn’t you?”

Tariq’s remark caught her off-guard. She’d been listening to his pep talk and forcing her jaw from falling to the floor with incredulity as such arrogant stupidity. Around her in the office stood and sat professional spooks though none of them, certainly not the man in charge, was a real expert on how to deal with caught spies.

Harriet had asked to speak with Tariq alone before the briefing but now he was putting her on the spot before everyone else. She pushed her anger at that aside, telling herself that she wouldn’t be as petty as the self-centred twirp in front of her who wanted to play power games when their business was hunting those out to hurt this country.

“Someone in that park, someone close enough to Goddard at the moment of truth, gave him a warning. He saw it and reacted in the fashion that he did. We need to check through everyone who was in that park yesterday evening to find his contact, one could conceivably be a Russian Illegal too.”

Tariq was shaking his head before Harriet had finished what she was saying.

“No,” came his reply, “that’s not something I agree with as the cause of what happened. As we have already discussed, Goddard got spooked when Sarah and Gemma got too close to him and gave themselves away. There’s no indication that he was meeting anyone there and it’s more likely that he was on his way elsewhere.

He spotted the two officers, ones which I have reassigned after such a mistake, and acted accordingly. There has already been a database search done of faces using footage from all those cameras we have accessed and no one has shown up who is on any watchlist nor have any other warnings attached to them. From the public safety cameras, the body-worn ones we had our people using and the drone footage too from that contraption overhead, no one is worth chasing down in what would seem to me to be a massive resource waste.

We’re not doing that, Harriet.”

There were murmurs of agreement among those gathered. Harriet saw only agreement with the boss from a team consisting mostly of hand-picked people who Tariq had long worked with. She was one of the few outsiders here, the only one willing to speak up to challenge his way of doing things.

“Maybe, Harriet does have a point there. Is it really much of a waste of resources?”

It was from an unexpected source that that comment came from.

Harriet turned towards Katie Parker, the American who’d come to her defence out of the blue like that. An employee of the CIA, she was one of many people from her organisation, plus the NSA and the FBI’s counterintelligence staff, who were on temporary assignment to Britain’s new NISS. They all had varying degrees of influence across the replacement intelligence service and reported back judiciously to Washington. Like so many of her veteran counterparts, Harriet was enraged at their presence. The United States was an ally yet their behaviour was a form of control that was unwelcome. She knew why they were here though. The Manningtree Scandal had hurt the US Intelligence Community just as much as it had that of the UK, and was still doing so as the former prime minister made her public revelations, though the Americans were playing the victim card. They had likewise pushed for unofficial supervision within NISS for the time being with the threat that if they didn’t have their own people embedded everywhere, Britain would be cut out of the global intelligence game. Harriet had heard that one candidate for the role of Security Secretary had refused to take the job on such grounds – claiming colonialism was at the root of it – yet the current officeholder had been more agreeable to such an idea.

Unlikable was how Harriet found Katie, yet here the American was supporting her British counterpart’s push for things to be done as they should be.

“If you think that is wise…” Tariq folded like the wet rag Harriet knew he was.

“I do.” So Katie cut him off.

“…then that is what we’ll do.”

And with that, at the direction of an outsider who Harriet though would be best suited to be down in the entrance lobby rather than up here in the briefing room, she got her way.

All of those in the park yesterday evening were going to be, as described by Rebecca as something impossible, thoroughly looked into to see if one of them had been present to give Goddard that danger signal. There would have been an exchange made right there if that hadn’t been the case. There would have been a deep-cover Russian Illegal in St James’s Park right under all of their noses.

Katie had something else to add: “I’ll give Harriet here a hand with that. I think we’ll work great together, don’t you think so, Harriet?”

Only a nod was all that Harriet could manage with that.

[Leander]

5

At Britain’s international airports and major seaports there were border controls which secured entry to the country and checked passports. Linked to an international system, biometric data was used to deny entry to those using false documents. Robust and effective, it made entry to the UK through one of the primary entrance points for anyone wanting to not be identified as someone travelling under a false name was an unwise move. Long had gone the days when fraudulent passports and disguises had been used to get through such border checks. Russian intelligence operatives entering the country who went through them still did so for one-shot visits but their details were recorded and they couldn’t be able to come back again as someone else.

David and Natalie, when they had been Dmitri and Natalia, had come to Britain via a different route and so too did Yuri when he arrived today.

Landing at Beccles Aerodrome near the coast up in Suffolk was a private aircraft inbound from the Netherlands. Yuri was an undeclared passenger aboard: the air charter company only had to make a declaration of who if anyone was aboard and there were no inspections with that. Quickly the man was off the plane and into a waiting car.

Natalie was driving that car and she left the airfield with him inside the rented vehicle too. Once they were on the A12 main road and going towards London, only then did the senior SVR officer have anything to say to her.


“Viktor made the boat, did he not?”

Several years ago, under an alias, Yuri had spent much time in Britain: one of the reasons why he couldn’t come in through Heathrow Airport or anywhere like that. His English was good and he conversed with Natalie in it rather than the Russian that they had been both raised upon.

“It sailed before dawn and will reach Denmark by tonight. We used a smuggling gang, people that David has had contact with before. They overcharged us but we needed to get him aboard and out of the country despite his condition. A man missing a leg attracts attention and has many needs too.”

“The cost of the boat-ride will raise many eyebrows back in Moscow, Natalia.”

“I know but we had no other choice. Vernon had to be exfiltrated fast and that was what David and I considered the best option.”

Natalie didn’t like Yuri calling her by her birthname, nor doing the same with Viktor either. She remained calling their injured colleague and her husband by their cover names and was hoping that in addition to speaking English, Yuri would do the same too. She wanted to remind him of the necessary security step to avoid accidents yet past experience with him was that he did as he pleased.

He was also a man who liked to complain too.

“Your expenses are extraordinary. The amounts that you both spend upon your operations trouble those back home. Can you not divert some funds from your legitimate business interests?”

She shook her head. “That cannot be done. We make money but not that much. Moreover, the tax officials in this country are not those whose interest we wish to arouse. Being self-employed is not easy when dealing with such officialdom.”

The prepared excuse, one which she had ready because she was anticipating Yuri’s complaints about money, came easy from her. What she didn’t say was to ask him why he cared. It wasn’t money that truly came from Moscow, it wasn’t taken from Russian taxpayers. Cryptocurrency was the latest fad and what those who spied for a fee wanted instead of cash. Natalie was well aware that the SVR got their hands on such funds by stealing it (electronically) and redirecting it.

For Yuri to be outraged, to act as if there was a need to be stingy with such money, was, in her considered opinion, ridiculous!

“The money from home,” he chided her, “is not finite. Without results, Natalia, they’ll start saying no to further requests. Use trickery more, play on the instincts of those who have in their hearts a wish to hurt this country instead of just paying them.

Back home, they see the protests on the streets and read the newspaper articles. Those highlight a great hatred for Britain from its own people and want to see that exploited without the cost that comes with your operations.”

In recent months, Natalie and David both had read instruction briefs delivered from home where the political mood of this country was summed up by people who didn’t live here, let alone had ever visited. Yuri knew Britain well yet even he seemed caught up in that. As she continued to drive them both in the direction of London, she took a deep breath to calm herself, and make sure she didn’t say the wrong thing, before replying once more.

“Those people on the streets are mostly youngsters doing what young people the world over do. They protest because they want free stuff. They’d march against any government in power of any political stripe who doesn’t give them their latest demand. The scathing political columnists have a job to do and their thoughts might resonate with many but they aren’t truly representative of how everyone feels. Read them yourself and see if you can see any line that incites and justifies treason.

You have to understand that these people here, ordinary Britons, have a centuries-long aversion to the Rodina. The matter with Manningtree did us no good at all. In fact, it made things even worse. Then there were those images on the television screens here of what happened in Minsk too.”

With a wave of the hand, Yuri dismissed that: “That was all faked. The video was something created at Langley by the C.I.A.”

Natalie didn’t believe that for a second. She wasn’t sure if Yuri did either and was instead just repeating the Moscow standard line. Opting not to fight that battle on merit, she focused on the implications of it here.

“The tank looked very real to the British people. The woman in crushed underneath it’s treads did too. There are so many here who will not forget the crushing of dissent in Belarus that they were shown such images of, not at least that T-Ninety going over the poor young woman. Fake or not, it is believed. The Russophobia in this country has really taken off.”

Yuri snorted in derision.

“And you mentioned deception? We’ve done that, we still do that. As an example, David has gone down the industrial espionage route with certain targets. These people we try to get information for us are generally no fools though. If they are, they still want paying! I have put on the act of an American caring for the safety of the British nation, playing the false flag approach for all its worth too. Emotions and what they call ‘sexpionage’ have been used as well.” Natalie didn’t say that that was something she personally refused to do. “We aren’t sitting on our behinds here doing nothing! It’s hard work when the British are spying on each other so much, looking for treason. Cash is, at the end of the day, the only currency that has any real impact here.”

Yuri gave her a foul look before he changed the subject: “We are having dinner tonight, are we not? You, myself and Dmitri will talk more about this alternative view concerning American lies with Minsk then. We’ll also discuss all of the agents you and your subordinate officers have running.

Oh,” he added as an apparent afterthought, “and the disaster you two just oversaw with the conversation you were required to bug too.”

Yuri said no more after that. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead as the car taking the two Russians went onwards.

[Leander]

6

Yuri put his glass down on the table with a thud, splashing some of the vodka.

“You cannot be serious!” He thundered. “We have to go outside and talk less there be the risk of recordings in the house?”

Natalie winced when he spelt out exactly what David was trying to tell him when her husband had suggested that the three of them go outside and eat rather than stay in the dining room. If there was a bug in-place, those listening would have gained quite the acknowledgement that there was a reason for them to maintain a listening device with the Putney home of Mr. & Mrs. Morris.

From out of his pocket, Natalie watched as Yuri removed a black-coloured plastic device, something no bigger than a mobile phone. He put it on the table and pushed the big red button – how dramatic – on the top. She assumed that him carrying that was yet another reason why he hadn’t entered the country via Heathrow. Looking at her own phone, she saw that it was dead. It wasn’t a case of it not having a signal, it was just completely blank. The radio over on the kitchen side had also come to a complete silence too with there being no power light. She wandered over to the oven and saw that that was still on, likewise the fridge/freezer. Relief came to her with such a discovery.

“I’ll be leaving this with you both when I go. It’s the latest model. Remember, it will attract more attention than problems it might solve.”

What Yuri had brought with him was an item which she had seen earlier models of though neither she nor David had used while in Britain. There were many names for such a thing, technical ones at that, though the one she had always preferred was a ‘Zapper’. That was what it did: it zapped electronic signal emissions and shut down low-range power sources within a short radius too.

“We’re careful in what we do, where we talk especially.” David was explaining the reason behind the two of them talking outdoors. “The chance that there is a bug in the house in pretty much remote and if there was, I’d expect that we wouldn’t be here this minute and instead either in a prison cell or on a plane back home being deported, Yuri. It’s just a matter of caution. Caution at home breeds caution elsewhere.

Don’t you agree, Natalie?”

Coming back from the kitchen, Natalie nodded as emphatically as she could in acknowledgement.

As to Yuri, he had nothing else to say on that note. He wore another scowl, like the one he had had in the car from the airfield so Natalie took note of.

He then moved onwards from that to what he was here for.

“Start telling me about your agents you run and your current operations. Leave nothing out.”

Natalie went back to check on the dinner while David got to doing that, listening to him and also adding information where necessary.


Apart from Vernon – aka Viktor – who was on a boat taking him out of the UK less the British security services link him to that captured spy they had in their custody, there were four more fellow Russian intelligence officers living under deep cover as Illegals who were under the supervision of David & Natalie.

Andrei was the youngest and newest of their group. He was playing the role of a Briton named Andy. Natalie was supervising his activities as he got close to an American woman working for the CIA Station in London. That was no easy feat and there were difficulties yet on his first proper mission, there had been no major hiccups with him.

Michelle was another fraudulent Briton. Maria was her real name and she was a young woman who was using her feminine charms to target several political figures with the Houses of Parliament. Her bed-hopping was something that had yet to cause a real stir and David assured Yuri that it was all going well. The pillow talk she gained was minimal though what she was really gaining was access: physical as well as being able to swipe the phones of several politicians for a few moments to allow them to be electronically harvested for information.

Pyotr was posing as Peter. He was older than all of them, someone who had been here in the UK longer than David & Natalie had been. He too targeted politicians and was active in gaining information from the senior ranks of the country’s Opposition Shadow Cabinet. There were secrets there that those MPs had access to which he was successfully stealing through guile but also too quite the extreme lax security of those who should have known better.

Finally, there was Yevgeny. As Yitzhak, he was supposedly a British Jew working as a freelance journalist who did investigative reporting in a manner which championed free speech and the exposing of government lies. In addition, he helped with a wider role with missions undertaken by rest of them. There was providing some information from media contacts and also those who were duped into believing he shared their political views but mostly he had a supporting role.

Where Andy, Michelle and Peter were stealing secrets through lies and gaining trust, Yitzhak did as David & Natalie was and instead bought information just as Vernon had been also engaged in. There were people willing to sell secrets to them. They had a couple of personally-run spies in their employ – real Britons – who were risking only themselves in doing that without a thorough understanding of who exactly they were passing that information on to.

Dead drops were mostly being used with few brush-pass exchanges and even fewer face-to-face meetings. Contact was made via what David explained were ‘criminal phones’. For more than a decade, organised crime groups in this country, several of which he and Yitzhak had dealings with, did as what those overseas also did in adapting to modern technology and counter-surveillance to protect their communications. Smartphones were stripped by technicians of most of what gave them their name and left with just an encrypted text message link: those phones had no ability to make calls or sent ordinary messages, no internet access and no location tracking on them. They looked like normal phones but weren’t. Those devices didn’t even have their own number to them!

David also went through some of the work that his own legitimate business was engaged in. The e-security consultancy was a thriving concern with so many Britons worried about their government spying on them… even Russians doing the same thing. David was selling a lot of people encryption systems and had made targeted sells too towards those with secret government information. He was sending that all back home rather than analysing it himself, as per instructions from the SVR on that note. One of his recent sales had been to a trading company working in the very same office building as the counter-espionage portion of the National Intelligence & Security Service. Back in Moscow, they should be working on trying to use that connection to access information what NISS wanted to keep secure.

After going through all of that, David moved to what was being done to replace the activities of Vernon in light of his accident and needing to be removed from the country less his identity having been compromised by the British. Vernon’s sources of information were few and all one that required cash to make use of. Yuri listened to all of that and then had a question.

“Tell me what happened with Goddard. What went wrong?”


In unequivocal terms, David made it clear to Yuri, and the listening Natalie too, that what had happened hadn’t meant to.

“Luke wasn’t to throw that recording device into that lake.

I gave him the danger signal and that wasn’t the reaction which he was supposed to make in response to it. Doing what he did only confirmed his guilt for those watching him. They’ve already been draining that lake with part of the park there closed for the last few days. Its fresh water there, not corrosive seawater, and the device which Vernon had prepared and I gave him was built to take a bit of punishment to it.

The emergency plan that Vernon had long established in his dealings with Goddard didn’t call for anything like that. If he was caught with something he wasn’t supposed to have, such as that item, he was to claim he found it and was looking for a litter bin. Implausible or not, it was the cover story he was meant to stick to.”

“What went wrong?” Yuri repeated the same question as before.

David turned to Natalie as he replied. “We don’t know. Something happened presumably within Downing Street where he was meant to make that recording. Whether he managed to do so or not is another unknown. He’s still being held in detention though there has been no public revelation of that.”

“You,” Yuri had his finger pointed at David, “we’re in the park. What caused you to alert him to call off the exchange? You saw someone, yes?”

David was nodding and he confirmed that: “I run an agent personally, someone who had worked for me for quite a while. He was at M.I.Five and now is employed by their new N.I.S.S. He is in personnel and nowhere near operations of any kind. Information from him is updated monthly on where he able to uncover the assignment of people to their counter-espionage teams, their Russia-watchers especially. He gives me names and faces. I saw one of those faces in the park moments before I was due to do the exchange with Goddard. That was no coincidence.”

“We go through the pictures on a regular basis.” Natalie added to what her husband was saying. “It’s a matter of caution and, as evident by what happened, an absolute necessity.”

Yuri had one final thing to say on that matter.

“You must find out what happened? How did they discover what Goddard was up to? And how close did they come, if at all, to discovering Viktor as well before you removed him from their reach?

Now, Natalia: dinner.”


The three of them ate. Not much was said at all really. Yuri had some comments about the British weather and some news of home. He gave Natalie a video recording of her younger brother sending her a message and apprised David of the intention to send over a replacement for Vernon before the year was out.

After complimenting Natalie on her cooking, he went out into the garden for a smoke. When he returned, she asked Yuri as to where he had left the cigarette butt. Children lived in this house and played in that garden after all.

“I’m putting it here in the bin, do you see?”

She watched him do so.

“Where are your children tonight? Jessica and James are their names, yes?”

On his last visit, made the previous year where they had met him in a countryside rendezvous, Yuri had talked about the future for those children growing up in Britain not knowing that they were Russian. For him to mention them again, worried Natalie. She feared for her kid’s future, something she’d made David well aware of many times. There was no intention in her that they would ever discover the truth and subsequently become a ‘second generation’ set of spies as Yuri had said before was the case with Illegals elsewhere in the world serving Russia in secret.

“Natalie,” David answered for her, “has recently made a new friend. Two streets over lives a single mother with a daughter an identical age as Jessica. They are in the same play group and are tonight together, along with Jimmy, at that woman’s house.

The mother is Charlotte Young.”

Hearing that name, Yuri smiled.

“Well done, Natalia, well done.”

She nodded back to him. She knew full well the achievement made there in gaining the friendship of an intelligence target who served as Britain’s Defence Secretary. There were plentiful opportunities to come the down the line, especially since Young’s daughter had already been in this house where her mother had collected her from too.

[Leander]

7

Katie had her own office, just off the main floor full of work stations – arranged desks and briefing areas – where Harriet certainly had no such creature comforts of privacy. The American who was here as an unofficial overseer within the heart of NISS’ counter-espionage nerve centre was really living up to the image of someone in charge, overseeing activities in the 51st State, which everyone had been calling her activities behind her back. Walking into that office, reporting as instructed to what was a summons if there every was one, Harriet cast envious eyes across its confines.

She wanted her own private work area.

“Coffee or tea?”

Katie was over in the corner where she had what might as well have been a breakfast bar there. Like her fellow Brits, Harriet had to slum it with everyone else at a shared facility.

“Tea.”

Two drinks were made by Katie. She brought them over, motioning for Harriet to sit down on the small sofa that she also had in the office.

“There you go.” Katie handed over the cup. “Don’t worry: I remembered how you take it.”

Harriet thought it best to be appreciative: “Thank you kindly.”

“Now,” back to business Katie was, “your report said you have seventeen names. Couldn’t that be chopped down a bit?”

“No, not at all.” Harriet shook her head emphatically. “That’s the lowest we can go there. There were seventeen people in that park at St James’s who had no rightful business being there at that time and all came within close proximity of Goddard, enough for him to see a danger signal or even make a brush pass that despite everything, we didn’t see.

Seventeen it is. It was twenty-four yesterday, Katie, but we cannot get the number down any more than that.”

“You used the Project Orion system to get to that number, yes?”

“That we did.”

Harriet didn’t like the fact that Katie knew what Project Orion was. It was wholly British, something that even close allies shouldn’t really know much about. However, Tariq had told her that Katie was to be informed of everything and there was nothing, not even that, to be left out.

“Remind me again how that works, will you?”

“Of course.” She might not have wanted to, yet Harriet did as she was instructed. “It’s a computer programme new at G.C.H.Q. Still in the test phase, we’re waiting for our own derivative and when we get one, it’ll no doubt put a good number of people out to work to be honest.

Images of all of those faces that we had, the nearly two hundred, went into the computer. The system then started to scan them through systems here at Niss, over at Cheltenham and then through government computers too such as the D.V.L.A and the Met. Police’s HOLMES system too. Those identified almost all of the people before the final faces were given names through an open internet search, one which backed up the government systems and a bit of prising opening of online banking too.

Once Orion knew who those people were, then it got to working providing explanations for what they were doing in the park. Security camera footage from public safety systems on the transport network was brought into play alongside tax records when Orion prised open the Inland Revenue’s database. Their phone and internet activity was collated and put to use in that effort to confirm their activities as well. Where such people worked, where they lived, their regular routines when coming through Central London were all put together. Timelines for their movements went back a week first, then three months after that.

That allowed us to remove from the list of Suspects To Consider the majority of those who were there when Goddard was nabbed. There was a second run of Orion, separate from the first, looking for any mistakes made the first time around and using different databases to check, including many private civil sources.

A few hiccups aside, nothing really jumped out of note but that was how we knocked the last half dozen or so names off the list.

Such people had a valid reason to be in the park.

Everyone else though, the seventeen remaining people, were just there in a break from their regular routine and habits. They are who I want to run down to try and find the Russian Illegal I believe is among them.”

After taking a moment to consider that, Katie had another question. “Who are these Suspects To Consider? Give me a few brief examples.”

“There’s a retired university lecturer, a C.E.O of a small printing company, an au pair, a manager for a fish supply company, an e-security consultant, an unemployed veterinarian, a housewife, a factory worker, two overseas students… and so on. Ordinary people, all out of place that evening in somewhere that they don’t go regularly or have never been before with no reason that jumps out for them to be there.”

In her head, Harriet had all of the names, occupations and details of those people. Such information was also in the file document which she’d laid on Katie’s desk. She was ready to reel off much more detailed descriptions, especially concerning several people she was keen on.

“Goddard could cut that list down from seventeen to just one if he started talking.”

“But he refuses to, against all logic on that too.” Harriet reminded her that regardless of everything thrown at him, the Downing Street aide still in custody wouldn’t own up to what he had done.

“Then,” Katie lifted her coffee cup, “we start going through those remaining names the old fashioned way. Now, Harriet, have some of your tea, will you?”


Later that day, Harriet and Katie got together with Rebecca and Marcus. That latter pair of NISS investigators had been working through the list of names to have a better look at their identities. An Illegal would have a good cover story but there would be hidden lies that could be broken open to expose them for what they really were once those identities were examined in the right manner.

The top two people – according to Harriet’s own analysis – that the Project Orion system had declared had no good reason to be in St James’s Park when Goddard was stopped were where they had begun with.

“Colin Harris,” so Marcus started with, “is nothing more than who he says that he is.

Forty-seven years-old, he’s been out of work for almost six months now. The vet’s practice he was at put him on gardening leave before they cancelled his employment contract. It seems that he made highly inappropriate remarks of a sexual nature to a young woman on work experience there and, after some legal consultation, they gave him the boot.

Our veterinarian lives over in Wembley, where he was last employed too, and all by himself. He has no close family and no active social life. Since his work termination, he’s been spending a lot of time in Central London playing tourist. He’s been practically everywhere before and since when Goddard was nabbed. We’ve been all over his phone via remote means and tracked his movements.

I can see why the computer flagged Harris because he is pretty secretive and, if you want to look at it that way, his behaviour could come across as suspicious. Yet, if we’re being honest, he’s just an unpleasant chap who wandered into that park on a whim. He really doesn’t meet any criteria of a cover for an Illegal. We’ve run down his family links and both his education & employment history.

Harris is who Harris is.”

Hearing Marcus’ firm assurance there, Harriet was left in no doubt that he had thrown everything into checking Harris out. Her colleague was damn good at his job when it came to tasks such as that and he’d only give such a firm statement of innocence unless there really was nothing there of interest to NISS.

“Harriet, do you agree?”

“I stand by what Marcus reports there.”

“Okay, so… our Kiwi suspect then.” Katie turned towards where Rebecca was seated in her office too along with Harriet and Marcus. “What have you discovered?”

Rebecca took in a deep breath before picking up the file folder she had with her. “There’s a lot in here and, as with the guy that Marcus looked into, there’s a lot of smoke but no fire. It’s clear to me why the computer picked Eleanor O’Neill up. With the basic details we first had, her name jumped off the page at me the moment that I saw it after reading up on the histories of cover identities for Illegals.”

She had some of her coffee – Katie had been pleased over her accepted choice of refreshment – and nodded at Harriet before continuing onwards.

“Eleanor taught Geography at Warwick University up until last summer when she retired aged sixty. Before that, she lectured at Bristol and Leeds too: good universities. She’s been in Britain for the past sixteen years and before that spent many years teaching in Australia as well as her native New Zealand. Coming from those two English-speaking countries and entering the U.K., where no one knew her, is where I don’t have to tell you set off the metaphorical alarm bells. It’s a routing which has been used before by Illegals so they immerse themselves in the language overseas before coming here. Teaching is a good choice too so I’ve read, especially lecturing in subjects that aren’t necessarily always classroom-based.”

Katie agreed with that: “Yes, that’s been an effective manner of placing Illegals before.”

“Nonetheless,” so on went Rebecca, “she is who she says she is. There’s been confirmation from our sister services down there with multiple confirmations that the Eleanor we are looking at is the same Eleanor O’Neill where there are no gaps to be suspicious about concerning her history.

She’s a single woman who lives alone and has no one close to her. Her social circle is limited and there’s no romantic attachments. Eleanor never seems to do much, not in the last year, in terms of travel. She went into the middle of London that day and wandered around the tourist bits. Before going into that park, she was outside of Buckingham Palace and not long afterwards she went through Parliament Square before getting on the train back to Birmingham. She hasn’t left that city since and done nothing of any note. Eleanor isn’t spying, she isn’t running agents and all the evidence that I’ve seen points to her being just who she says she is.”

Not as confident as Marcus was, Rebecca still finished on that firm note. Harriet had seen all of her new colleague’s work done in checking up on O’Neill and agreed with Rebecca’s conclusion. There was nothing there despite the initial promise.

“We’re two down then. Another fifteen to go Harriet?”

“Yes.” Harriet looked over at her colleagues, whose work she was supervising, and they gave her nods. “We keep on going through those people and looking for something out of place with them. It’s going to take time but we’ll keep at it.”

Determined to be proved correct in her initial judgement on what had caused Goddard to do what he did, Harriet wanted to find that Illegal. To be proved right was in fact more important to her than it was to catch a Russian spy: something she kept to herself though.

[Leander]

8

It was the first Tuesday of the month. David was due to service the regular dead-drop from Matthew, the paid informer who worked in the personnel department at NISS. He would today collect the monthly output before, on the last Friday of the month, make use of a separate dead-drop to pay the man. It had been done many times before with no issues having cropped up.

He was getting ready to leave the house. Apart from collecting that passed intelligence, David had things to do in London. There was a morning meeting with a potential client who was worried about his e-security and might want to purchase what David could provide and then there was an early afternoon business lunch with a long-standing customer that he also had pencilled in. Standing just inside the front door, putting on his coat because it was a cold and wet day, David saw Natalie coming up to him. She held her phone in her hand, the screen facing him.

There was an image of a ‘Smiley Face’ there and a report of a blocked number at the top.

Natalie used the thumb on her other hand to tap her chest just as the screen then went blank.

David nodded in reply.

“‘Bye.”

He was out of the house and into the morning drizzle after that.

Walking towards the station, David considered that message that his wife had received. He knew full well who it had come for, just as Natalie did, despite the lack of sender info. It had been Tatyana who’d sent that, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy near Kensington Palace.

One of the slimmed down staff remaining working there – the British had kicked out so many of them, declaring dozens persona non grata –, she was SVR like they were. If caught, her activities would see her safe from harm due to her diplomatic immunity though she’d be on a flight home should that occur. Their only contact with anyone at the embassy, Tatyana was extremely cautious. David had never met her face-to-face and Natalie had only done so once. That image message would have come from a throwaway phone and was a coded signal that David had recognised just as his wife had.

There was a dead-drop (another one) that needed servicing with haste.

The SVR wanted them on something straight away.

Before then though, David had his own separate undertaking for the day to achieve.


He went to the Underground station at Baker Street, on the northern side of Central London. Parts of that station were very old and there were a couple of fixtures and fittings there which weren’t found elsewhere on the Tube network below this country’s capital. A couple of old-fashioned iron & wood benches were on the older platforms at Baker Street.

David sat down on the bench where Matthew was to have left something for him. His shoulder bag, loaded with his computer and a file case, was at his feet. The station was busy and there was someone else on the same bench, yet he had waited until the right-hand side was free, sipping from his water bottle as he did and looking around at faces for any sign of danger too. Reaching down into his bag, David pulled out his charging cable and put one end into his phone. He let the other slide away, dangling below the bench.

With a shake of his head – for the benefit of any audience – he took back a hold of the cable’s end.

He’d also grabbed the small USB stick tucked in between the seat and the end railing too. The manoeuvre had been practised and done for real several times before today.

David kept what Matthew had left for him in the palm of his hand before he took the charging cable back out of his phone and let it fall into his bag. She he started to stand up when the noise of an approaching train focused all attention towards the tunnel on the right, that USB stick was dropped into his bag. Up he stood, joining with the people getting on the train. Rush hour was gone but it was still busy here. David couldn’t get to a seat inside the Metropolitan Line service but found himself a comfortable spot standing in the corner.

Away from Baker Street went that train and David was off to his meeting.

The serviced dead-drop was quickly far behind him and what he’d picked up there in his bag.


David’s text message to Natalie suggesting that they meet at the mini supermarket near home with replied to with a thumbs-up emoji. He found his wife outside there waiting for him. Jessica was off at an after-school thing – she was starting to learn to play the piano – but Jimmy was with her. David bent down to kiss his three year-old on the head before the boy had a question.

“Are you taking me to the park, Dad?”

“That I am!” David looked over towards the small play area across the road. “Hold my hand while we go to the crossing.”

Jimmy did as he was told.

“Did you have a good day? Did everything go well?”

“Perfect.” Now David was speaking to Natalie. He winked at her before finishing what he had to say. “I picked up what I needed too.”

She smiled at him: “Excellent. I had a successful day as well.”

Once over in the park, Jimmy went running off. Natalie called him back, laid out the rules for park play, and then let him head for the slide, the climbing frame and the swings. There were other parents about, all with little children doing what such young ones do when allowed to run free. David recognised several of them from his children’s school, including one of the mother’s whom Natalie had recently arranged an au pair for, though paid more attention to the parents which he didn’t recognise. He studied them in case they were studying him.

Natalie led them over to a bench where she put down her bag and Jimmy’s jacket. Nodding at the isolated spot away from other people, yet still with a fine view of where their son was playing, David sat down first. His wife positioned herself beside him, close indeed.

She had her hand over her mouth as she spoke.

“Matthew delivered, yes?”

“He always does.” The man was certainly reliable, if expensive.

“We’ll look at the updated info from him later. Before then though…”

“… we will see,” David finished what Natalie had to say for her, “just what you received today too.”

She leaned ever closer in, no longer using her hand to shield her mouth from observation. “I looked already. It’s important.”

“What do they want us to do?”

Instructions from home came often and were never easy. There were high expectations back home from what they two of them could manage to achieve by themselves and with the team of fellow Illegals that they controlled. David would have much preferred for him and his wife to run their own operations and just report back success when those tasks paid off (naturally, not informing SVR headquarters of any failures) yet that wasn’t the way things were.

“Find Graham Webb and get a real track on him.”

“Damn.”

That was something that they’d tried to do before and it had been unsuccessful. David certainly didn’t want to make the effort again.

He and Natalie had their orders to do that though.


“Ice Cream! Ice Cream!” Jimmy had run back over to them. “Can I have some Ice Cream?” He was jumping up and down, more excited than David had seen him for some time. “Play Park and Ice Cream go together!”

David reached down, taking a-hold of his son to lift him off his feet.

“Not today.”

“Why not!?”

“It’s too cold for that.”

He put the boy down and off he ran again, back to the slide. David watched Jimmy climb the steps, reach the top and slide down with his hands in the air. The demand for a treat was suddenly forgotten as Jimmy raced back to those steps to repeat the same downwards trip.

“I’ve been thinking…”

Natalie was still right up next to him, talking in hushed tones.

“Yes…?”

“We nearly found that Graham before but a bit of bad luck came into play. We try again and we see if we can locate him.”

David thought that she sounded far to confident in the belief that good fortune would be a factor in locating the man. He told her that: “You have a lot of faith in luck, Natalie.”

“Let’s just see how it works out. Maybe what you got today will help us?”

“I can’t see how,” he couldn’t, “that will.”

“Let’s find out when we get home, shall we?”

[Leander]

9

There was a new name on the list of active NISS employees with a Russia focus. David pointed it out to Natalie.

“Who is this Terry Palmer?”

“Matthew’s notes don’t say much.”

David read their paid informer’s comments.

‘Special projects?’

‘WITSEC?’

“That second one is an American term.” She arched her eyebrows. “It means ‘witness security’, doesn’t it? What their federal marshals use for protected witnesses.”

“You watch too much T.V… but, I think you’re right on that. Is that what Matthew means there, that he handles such duties?”

Only speculating, David still thought that he was correct. Nothing Matthew had ever given them before had been shown to be incorrect. He had added comments when he was unsure of what exactly the current duties were of those whose personnel records he accessed were. Those remarks had added alongside with a name and a profile picture which wouldn’t have been put there, so David thought, without Matthew believing that it was valid information.

Natalie gave a positive view on the matter: “This is the guy we’ve been looking for. Graham Webb is just his cover name. Moscow wants us to find out who the British use for the initial debriefing and resettlement of traitors who defect and want to live here, and this is him.”

“Maybe…”

There was a good chance that what his wife was saying was accurate yet, at this stage, it still remained speculation even if there was that additional information.

“Let’s look into him.” She wanted to go ahead. “It’s a good lead.”

Convinced that trying was worth it, even if it didn’t pan out in the end, David nodded his agreement before raised the subject of how they should go about it.

“Which one of us should try and get close to him?”

She shook her head, cautious as always.

“Yitzhak can do this, that’s why we have him.”


The next day, David observed from a distance as their fellow Russian Yevgeny, also known as Yitzhak, did the deed. On the escalator going down to the Elizabeth Line platforms at Canary Wharf, a tracking device was placed upon Terry Palmer, the suspected Graham Webb. David only saw Yitzhak’s hand movement rather than anything more. For the briefest as moments, as the NISS intelligence officer stood still on the steps, Yitzhak touched him on the arm as he went past him. There was no eye contact made and Yitzhak was soon on a train. Following the Briton instead, David saw no inclination in behaviour nor movement that the man he’d long sought to identify had paid any attention to what had happened.

The tracking device was in-play.

It wasn’t something bulky nor hopefully noticeable. Two centimetres in diameter, it was round shaped and mostly clear plastic. There was a microchip – the smallest one available – attached to what was in many ways a sticking plaster. Yitzhak had placed it under the arm on the Briton’s coat. The plastic was something special indeed. Within twenty-four hours, the biodegradable material would be no more after being exposed to the elements as it had been since leaving Yitzhak’s finger for that coat. The electronic device which it had held into place would fall off and wasn’t something that looked like it needed to be paid attention too for it was coated in plastic itself. In David’s opinion, it would look like a large bit of dirt or some sort of plastic waste.

The device must have cost a fortune and been years in the making. The SVR had quite the range of toys which David had used before though that was a remarkable little piece of technology.


Meeting the next evening with Yitzhak, he and David took a stroll along the riverfront near Greenwich. They weren’t together for long, just two people having a quick walk-and-talk.

“There’s a photo which I’ll send you,” Yitzhak told him, “of Palmer meeting yesterday with a woman at a flat up in Harrow. She’s someone I’m sure you’ll recognise though I don’t know her name. What I am aware of is that she is a controller of British agent operations inside Russia: secrets from traitors to the Motherland go to her. She cannot go back there after nearly being caught a few years ago running a Foreign Ministry official. Palmer and her spoke in the living room as they closed the curtains. I could see the place being tidied up, being aired out too.

It looked like a safe house, David, somewhere to put a defector.”

“You’ve done well.” David gave him a thumbs-up. “Send the picture the usual way.”

“I will do.”

Yitzhak turned and walked away.

Meanwhile, David stood against the wall between him and the Thames. Other people walked or jogged past, none of whom he believed paid him any attention. He got his phone out when it vibrated and looked at what Yitzhak had sent him.

There was the man he now was certain that was using the name Graham Webb, the defector handler that Moscow wanted an identification on. With him was someone whose identity he knew better. Flick Reed was a legend within what had been Britain’s MI-6 as an agent runner and was now doing the same job for NISS. David was well aware of how she’d nearly been caught back in Moscow and the details of her escape. Someone had helped her then, maybe the someone on their way to that flat in Harrow.

There was a defection either already having taken place or about to. What Moscow knew, they weren’t telling him. What he was going to inform them was who was arranging things on this end for what that defector arrived.

Of course, he had questions. He knew Natalie would have them too, worrying herself. However, it had been made clear that he was to do as instructed and no more on this.

That didn’t mean that Terry Palmer / Graham Webb was someone whom he’d forget about after whatever this ultimately was about was done with though.


At the weekend, Natalie took Jessica swimming while David was with Jimmy. The boy didn’t like the water and even bath-times were drama. He and his father instead went to the cinema to see a cartoon film on the Saturday afternoon. It was one aimed at the very young and David found it truly terrible. Jimmy was happy though, lapping up the animated cat & dog characters on an adventure.

He took Jimmy to the loo after the film and then they were waiting in the foyer afterwards for Natalie to come pick them up in the car. The multi-screen cinema complex was out of town and it would have been quite a walk for Jimmy despite David usually liking to make sure his son got plenty of exercise and fresh air by using his legs rather than his mother’s wheels.

Jessica stayed in the car when Natalie parked. David’s put his son in his safety seat and noticed Natalie was waiting to talk to him: there’d been no reason for her to get out. Once David closed the car door, leaving the children inside beyond how far their ears could hear, Natalie showed him her phone screen.

“Have you seen this?” She whispered to him while a grave look adorned her face. “How could they do that without telling us first?”

David said nothing. He read the news page that she had up on the screen.

Three people had been found dead in suburban Harrow. They had fatally succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning after a suspected gas leak. Police were investigating what appeared to be an accident. No names had been realised nor any other details of the victims.

“Oh.”

That was all that David had to say. He was more than a little taken aback by it all.

Natalie’s face had turned to thunder.

“There’re putting us in real danger doing this. What is wrong with them? Don’t they care about how exposed we are? We went through this with Yuri!”

She got back into the car, an action David followed. Her accusational questions echoed in his mind as she drove them and the children home.

He had the same thought: why had Moscow said nothing in advance?

[Leander]

10

Grimsby Chess Club
Novices and Experienced players WANTED
Every Thursday evening to late
Call or Email, or just turn up!

The advert found online was for exactly what it said it was. When looking into the life of Paul Watson, one of the Suspects To Consider, it was found that his only social outlet was a weekly attendance at such a regular event. He had been going to the gatherings in the town he lived for years with no other outlet in his life apart from work.

Rebecca had asked to go undercover and to go play chess with him.

Harriet had agreed that the former policewoman who was growing daily into this business of intelligence gathering would be perfect for that undertaking. She was a chess player – online only though –, a Londoner and reasonably attractive. Watson had a wandering eye, they’d noticed when observing him, and Rebecca had put forth the idea that she could get his attention, get him talking about his latest trip too.

To meet with the fish company manager who’d been in St James’s Park that evening a few weeks ago now Rebecca went. She was on her own going in to the church hall where the chess players were but not alone in Grimsby.


“Did you know either of the two who died the other day out in that North London accident?”

Katie, the American who remained firmly attached in a semi-supervisory role to the investigation, had come to Grimsby with Harriet. She was in the back of the surveillance van parked two streets away from where Rebecca had gone inside to see if Watson was who he said he was, or, instead, was a Russian deep-cover Illegal. She sat next to Harriet on the bench-type seat down one side of the rear of the vehicle. Two technicians were on the other side wearing earpieces and eyes glued to the screens with the video feed.

“No,” she shook her head, “they were former Six people. There has been a lot of intermixing between us former Five officers and those from Vauxhall Cross yet they were colleagues I had yet to meet.”

“What do you think happened? That carbon monoxide leak story doesn’t sound at all likely to me.”

In a Lincolnshire town renowned for its fishing industry, Katie was fishing for information.

Harriet told her the truth.

“They had the Russian deputy defence minister with them, who’d only just gone and defected bringing with him a wealth of knowledge. As the saying goes, if that was an accident, I’ll eat my hat.”

Katie looked up at what Harriet was wearing on her head: “It doesn’t look the most appealing of a meal to me!”

She cracked a smile, Harriet returned one. Yet there was nothing funny in what the woman from the CIA was saying. The head covering was her boyfriend’s beanie. She’d brought it with her because it was a cold winter’s evening and there was a chance, that if things went wrong, she’d have to leave the creature comforts of the warm surveillance van. Grimsby was beside the coast, meaning it was nippy outside, but Harriet had it also to help with keeping her identity hidden in the event of failure here. She could pull it right down if she had to and her bright, distinctive hair was already wrapped up inside of it.

“Rebecca’s going inside now.” The technician on the left made the call and, as Katie did, Harriet now paid attention to what was happening with Rebecca’s first undercover assignment for NISS.


Watching and listening for more than an hour, Harriet was firmly convinced at the end of it all that Watson was entirely innocent. Just as had been the case with Harris and O’Neil before, this man was entirely who he said to be.

Rebecca had got him talking.

From afar, Harriet had observed Rebecca do her thing. She’d turned up at the gathering and introduced herself shyly within close proximity of Watson. There’d been a nervous smile directed at him, one he’d smirked in response to, before she’d asked him if, as someone new, she would play with him that evening because he looked kind. It had been cringeworthy to hear yet it had worked. Watson had been almost gallant, ever so polite to her. They’d chatted for a bit. Rebecca had brought up London when her accent hadn’t been enough to gain the initial desired response to it from Watson. She’d just moved her for work and was looking to make friends. She had a few of them back there in the capital but none yet in Grimsby. Did Paul Watson know London like he surely knew this far smaller place?

It turned out he knew it a little, just the tourist bits mostly to be fair. In fact, in a remarkable coincidence, he’d only been in London recently. Rebecca had let him tell her the reason why rather than ask too many questions. Watson said he was writing a novel with a part of that set in the city. He’d gone down there to have a look at a few places, to get a feel for them. He spoke about his novel at length – Harriet had given a big yawn, one which Katie had given her a playful dig in the arm for making a show of it – and then also told Rebecca while she was seated opposite him something else.

Watson said he was a homosexual and was just as lonely as he knew she was, but, apologising for being so blunt and presumptuous, they two of them could only ever be chess friends and nothing more. Through the camera feed, Harriet had watched Rebecca’s face when Watson told her that. She gave nothing away, keeping in character well, but must have been fuming at how he’d rebuffed her attempts to woo him over a game of chess.

So much for the Honey Pot attempt!

Grimsby and Watson were a wash out, another failure in identifying the Russian hiding in plain sight somewhere that Harriet wanted to find.


It was pretty late when they left the fishing town and headed down the motorway towards home. Rebecca was driving with the two technicians up front with her in the driver’s cab. There was a curtain and a metal door behind that where the observation area was. Harriet was in there with Katie and for a while they rode in silence. Rebecca had said that they’d stop sometime later for a toilet break, and to let one of the guys take over driving, though before then, Harriet was busy writing up her draft report closing things out on Watson. There’d been a better, finished product later for NISS files yet in the meantime Harriet was summarising the night in shorthand.

Katie’s phone beeped and Harriet saw she was reading a message. Her phone soon went back in her pocket and she turned sideways.

“Goddard’s talking. He’s naming names and confessing the whole thing.”

“That’s taken long enough.” Harriet wasn’t as surprised at Katie looked at the news. The Downing Street aide caught red-handed when spying had to talk eventually.

Katie snorted before reply: “The dirty little traitor held out for longer than I thought he would too. But now he’s talking…”

“…that helps us a great deal.” Harriet finished what her colleague had to say there. “We’ll find our Illegal once he tells us who gave him that danger signal that I just know occurred.”

The van kept on heading back south. Tired and uncomfortable, Harriet refused to see her spirits downed. Tonight’s disappointment in Grimsby had been followed by good news indeed.

She couldn’t wait to hear what Goddard had to say.

Just as eager to hear was the American whom she was no longer feeling a hatred for but instead someone she was getting along with almost as a friend, quite the remarkable change from how things had been before.

[Leander]

11

There had been a signal from Peter – aka Pyotr – asking for a meet. It wasn’t a scheduled one yet he hadn’t said that it was urgent. Discussing it with David, Natalie said that she would go and see what was up with him. Like all of their fellow Russians posing as Britons and living here in this country that was hostile to their homeland, the two of them shared access to each one of them. That wasn’t the case with the officers themselves who were in direct contact with British traitors but, as field controllers, David and Natalie were in regular contact with those from home here too. Moreover, the decision over which one of them should see him was easy when it came to Peter. Natalie knew him better. He was a lot like her where there was so much caution in him as well as his penchant for grave suspicion of practically anyone.

It was noon the next afternoon when Natalie took a divert from her business of working and rode the Underground out to Paddington, over on the western side of Central London. She came up to the surface within the train station and criss-crossed several streets where her eyes were swinging about looking for familiar faces. None were observed. Natalie went fast through an alleyway, almost running in her trainers, but stopped around the corner at the end of it. No one came running, or even walking, out of there after her. Finally, she walked past the coffee shop. Peter was sitting at a table by the window bay. She recognised his moustache first: what David had called a ‘70s pornstar ‘tash’. Her eyes met his and he touched his left ear, then his right. Onwards she carried on walking, past him to the newsagents, while remembering what that meant. It was a dead-drop, not a face-to-face talk.

Natalie went into the newsagents to buy a bottle of water and crossed back over to the coffee shop as that went in her bag. Peter was walking down the street ahead as he went away from her.

She went into the coffee shop and sat at the table he’d been at. Natalie’s hand went under the metal table straight away, feeling for the magnet. That and the sheet of loo roll with a message written on it (the material could be flushed, burnt or even, in a worst case scenario, eaten to get rid of it with haste) were grabbed before the waitress came over. Despite the bottle in her bag, Natalie asked for just a glass of water. When the young European girl turned away, and Natalie saw no one else paying her any attention, what was in her hand went into her bag as she pulled that up into her lap. She read the message from Peter, committed it to memory and screwed it up into the smallest of balls. It then went in that opened bottle to begin to dissolve. The waitress was soon back, asking if Natalie wanted anything else but she told her no. In just a few gulps because she was thirsty after her exertions, she drank the whole drink.

Up she soon was to pay and out of the coffee shop she went while thinking of what that message from Peter had said that he had passed during a meeting that was in so many ways not that at all.

They had been supposed to do that though: meet.


“He doesn’t say that she’d been exposed, that she’s turned against him, does he?”

Natalie shook her head in reply to David as they spoke out in the garden of their suburban home.

“But he thinks she might have been, or is about to be, and so he’s gone into hiding?”

“Yes.” This time Natalie gave her husband a verbal answer. “He’s being careful, David. That’s what we taught him and what he is supposed to do.”

That didn’t satisfy David at all: “No, he’s being a worrier, like he always is. Roberta is troublesome, I’ll admit that, but Peter is overreacting here. It’s all down to this Wasif character.”

“I agree on the latter.” That she did, just not the first bit of what David was saying. “Wasif is a real problem whom Peter should have dealt with at the start.”


Roberta was twenty-seven. She was a smart, ambitious young woman whose passion had been for so long only politics. On the left when it came to her international outlook especially, she had a firm belief that her country was always in the wrong and if it was against something, then she was for it. A natural ideological recruit for the SVR, just like Yuri and those back home had always told David and Natalie to exploit, the woman had expensive tastes in clothes and high-end personal electronic goods. She couldn’t just put them on a credit card, not with her views on banks and international finance. Cash was what she wanted, she got stolen cryptocurrency instead. Her job was on the policy staff for the Leader of the Opposition. The head of Britain’s second political party in terms of parliamentary seats was nowhere near Roberta in terms of a shared global outlook yet, over time, at the urging of Peter, she’d reigned that in when it came to expressing it openly. That had allowed her to keep her job and remain close to the levers of power. In Britain, the opposition had access to a lot of government secrets that were freely given to them by the government so that should they win power, they were fully briefed on all aspects of national & international affairs. Secrecy was supposed to be maintained over sensitive subjects but Roberta was there and passing everything that she could to Peter.

That had been going on for the past two years to great success.

Then Wasif had appeared on the scene. Roberta had met him and a political event nor connected to her work, so she had briefed Peter, and become besotted with the man. They had moved in together a bare few months after they had become involved. Wasif was a radical, someone who refused to hold his tongue about his views. Peter would never have gone near him if anyone had been foolish enough to give Wasif access to secrets. Regardless, that they hadn’t. He was at a political think-tank instead along with other economic and social radicals. In reports back to David and Natalie, Peter had told them that he had tried to warn Roberta off from getting to closely involved with an attention-grabber like Wasif. That had been all to no avail.

They were so in love. They were made for one another. They shared everything.

When Peter had asked what ‘everything’ meant, Roberta had denied that she would ever reveal the spying that she did. That was undertaken because it fitted her worldview and she had said that Wasif was anti-Russian. He wouldn’t understand, such was what Peter had been told, and so Roberta had said she wouldn’t tell him.


“We should have given him an accident like our people back home have become so fond of doing recently.”

Hearing that horrified Natalie. She turned to look at David, hoping to see him smiling in jest, but he wasn’t. He was entirely serious with the idea that the best course of action when Wasif had entered Roberta’s life and posed a problem was to have seen him hurt, even killed.

Sometimes she didn’t really know David at all despite him being the man who had fathered her children.

“Absolutely not!” She was adamant on that, less he be thinking of doing that now. “That would bring attention where a mistake could cost us everything. Roberta might assume the worst, and be correct in that, leading to a reaction that we cannot predict.”

“What do you suggest then?” His voice had been raised a bit and his stare hardened. David’s anger was rare but it was always there in the background. Natalie knew that he had had a difficult childhood and buried so much rage, yet it boiled just below the surface there. When he lost his temper with her, she refused to match it though. That wasn’t in her nature.

“We do two things.” She had a plan forming as she spoke. “First of all, you go and see Peter. He’s gone to Oxford, to one of the safehouses” (it was in fact a flat) “there to hide out. Talk to him, get a real read on him. Don’t let him do what he did with me and just leave a message.

As to me, I’m going to see what’s going on with Roberta. No,” she saw David about to protest, “I won’t talk to her and expose us like you did with Luke Goddard. I’ll watch and listen close-in but not step into the light. We need to find out if our agent is against us and if our fellow officer is in danger. And, of course, if the information tap has gone dry too.”

[Leander]

12

Natalie had the busiest of days, one that left her a tired wreck at the end of it.

Successes and frustration had come together for her as she went about the duties of spying for her country while running grave risks to herself in that.


The day started with a trip to the house of Charlotte Young. Britain’s defence secretary had thought she had found herself immensely lucky in having a friend like her sort-of neighbour Natalie was. After volunteering to pick up Charlotte’s daughter that morning to take her to the same school where Natalie’s kids went, Natalie asked to pop into the house briefly so Jimmy could use the loo. Charlotte gave permission and in went Natalie and her son while the two girls waited on the doorstep. Jimmy was directed into the upstairs toilet, making a point of closing the door behind him on his mother. She slipped out of sight and across the landing. Charlotte’s bedroom was there and from Natalie’s palm, she placed a listening device with an attached transmitter under the frame. It was tiny and hidden where no one turning over the bed when cleaning should come across it. She was back on the landing to take Jimmy back downstairs before he was finished. Goodbyes were said, the girls started skipping, Jimmy was talking about airplanes and Natalie left with a smile on her face just as the ministerial car came to collect Charlotte.

The bug had to go in today despite everything else going on.

That involved Natalie taking a long, hard look at Roberta. The mixed race young woman wore nice clothes complete with a fashionable bag and shoes which Natalie admired. She remembered back when she was the same age as the political staffer and would have all the latest must-haves herself. She’d been Natalia then, the Russian emigree who had never thought that her father’s money would run out and he would return home to upend her whole life. No one ever seemed to question Roberta’s wealth, so Natalie had been told. There were never any questions about her flaunting the ‘service fee’ – she’d called it that to Peter apparently – that she took for the information that she delivered. She only observed Roberta closely for an hour, following her at lunchtime from a distance and making sure that she was never close enough for her face to be looked at. Natalie was seeing if Roberta was meeting anyone during her break out of the office. That didn’t happen. What she did see was someone who looked sad and rather down. Peter had been correct on that yet his notion that she had been detected and turned by British counterintelligence was something that Natalie could see no sign of. How could she though? It wasn’t as if Roberta nipped over to a NISS building during her lunch.

The physical surveillance was only a small part of it. Natalie was all over Roberta’s phone and might as well have had it in her own hands.

There was a (supposed) secure communications app named Labyrinth that Roberta’s employers used. It was one of the fashionable ones and political parties as well as many big businesses were using it for the advertised security features. A trendy team of young American designers had created it with an enigmatic woman the face of the app. Studies had shown that it was uncrackable by hackers, even state actors. That was all a lie though. Natalie knew the truth, just like David did where he helped sell it and similar services to those who took communications security seriously yet fell for him. The United States’ National Security Agency had created the app with those creators and voice of the system being long-term agents of theirs. To Natalie, Labyrinth might as well have been called Trojan instead. It had several backdoor access points all built in. The NSA wanted it to be trusted and so used by those they desired to spy upon. Roberta was just as exposed to hacking by those who knew their way in, just as everyone else who had it on their phones with that false sense of security written all over their gullible faces was too.

Messages, content watched & read and activity was all available to Natalie for her to see. She was in one coffee shop in the morning and a lunch bar through the afternoon, both of those locations near to Roberta’s work. She studied everything that she could on Roberta’s phone via that remote access. There was a lot to go through. So much of it was junk, giving Natalie what she feared was brain bleed. Roberta had simple, cringeworthy pleasures. The videos watched and media articles read were awful. The nude selfies taken were icky. The messages with friends made Natalie want to do Roberta a favour and throw her in the Thames… metaphorically, of course. There were other messages though, those with her fiancé. Into those, Natalie directed her entire intention.

He was the problem, the one that she and David had discussed between them just as Peter had said he Wasif would be. Natalie found what the issue was in something that, as she sat reading the exchanges between Roberta and Wasif, she told herself that Peter should have seen for himself rather than panic as he did.

Roberta had secrets that she wouldn’t tell Wasif. He demanded that she did if they were to get married. She made excuses for her behaviour in keeping things from him but refused to budge. Roberta was pretty steadfast in that and, despite despising her, Natalie had to give her some grudgingly respect. Wasif played the emotional card from all different sides. Roberta stuck to her guns. Well done her. This was the problem with Roberta, not her suddenly turning on Peter and getting ready to or already having gone to NISS. Instead, it was all a dispute between two lovers that he had wholly misinterpreted as being about him.


The kids went to bed early with Jessica being a bit difficult about that tonight. She was down eventually though and, when David checked after an hour, she was firmly asleep. He came out to Natalie in the garden when they spoke under the tree and out of sight of their daughter’s bedroom window.

Her looking into the garden to see if they were out there together and talking was becoming a worrying, regular issue.

“The bug went in?”

“Just as we discussed, just where we said it should go.”

“It records by sound activation and does a burst transmission to the receiver across the road every forty-eight hours, yes?”

“That’s correct.”

They’d discussed that before. It was the standard approach done. Placing a listening device that was transmitting in a continuous fashion was a stupid way to have it found and questions asked. What it recorded in the defence secretary’s bedroom would be from phone calls made & taken when she was in there – which reports said she did a lot – with all information sent back to Moscow. Only the most thorough and intrusive search would find it and the device had no fingerprints nor DNA from Natalie on it at all.

That aside, Natalie looked right at David as he said nothing more. She couldn’t understand why he suddenly had so many questions like those.

But… he’d been with Peter today, hadn’t he?

“There’s nothing wrong with Roberta but boyfriend trouble. He remains a problem yet one she is handling, even if it is putting immense pressure on her. I think Peter is overreacting. He’s done that before, David. This time he’s gone too far.”

David signed. “He made me worried. He had me looking around more than usual, thinking that those he is convinced are on to him, are on to me too. I was on the train back waiting for the black hood and the tranquilizer shot.”

Natalie was correct: meeting with Peter had had a negative effect upon her husband.

“There was nothing to it at his end apart from suspicion then?”

“I went through his past two weeks with him, the time he said he started to get concerned. There was nothing in anything he said despite him thinking there was everything in it. His nerves are shot. He’s been doing this too long, worrying all the time.”

“That could happen to any of us.” Before her own eyes she had someone who was close to the state he reported Peter to be in.

David just nodded in reply.

“We need to get a message back home. Peter needs to make a return trip and leave her for good. This is the last time we are going to have to deal with him. If he blows up Roberta, we lose an excellent information source because of it.

We get someone else in to run her.”

“Yes.” This time David had something to say rather than just a head movement. “It’s the only available option. Peter needs retiring and to see home again.”

[Leander]

13

Tariq had briefed Katie and now the American latter spoke with both Harriet and Rebecca.

The regular contact that Luke Goddard from Downing Street had been meeting with had been identified. A man by the name of Vernon Yates had been admitted to hospital previous to attempted bugging of the in-person meeting between the British PM and the visiting US President. Goddard had said that the apparent Briton he only knew as ‘Vernon’ had been ill with a virus of some sort or another. That had turned up no one but a wider search, especially when Goddard’s mention that the suspected Russian Illegal rode a motorcycle, had located him where he had been the victim of a nasty traffic accident while on that vehicle. The patient had lost a leg in a smash. Talking to him had been an urgent priority and his medical records had showed him being moved from where he initially was in South London to a private facility in the Home Counties. That was only true on a computer screen though. No real person had authorised it, no real person had been engaged in the transfer. His moving of location was all a façade. It hadn’t been thought difficult to find a man missing a leg after so recently being hurt, and thus requiring medical care, but it was. Yates was still unlocated.

There was a nurse who remembered a visitor but nothing more than it was just a man who’d said he and the patient were lovers. Someone, not Yates himself, had made the man using that name disappear.

As to what Goddard was saying about the second contact he’d met with, Harriet paid even more attention to the details there. In two quick talks and a glance at each other in a park, what she heard of the description given caused her to believe that despite what was being said, Goddard wasn’t giving them everything. She expressed that to Katie who did agree yet said that Tariq and his bosses were happy. It was a weak depiction indeed.

Male. Early Forties. Tall. Not fat nor thin. Brown hair. Wears glasses. London accent. Confident and easily spoken.

Rebecca said it before Harriet could: that profile fitted two of their suspects though with a few unrounded edges with each. Harriet knew the names before the former policewoman nor the CIA officer who’d been installed here did.

Ken Bedell.

David Morris.

Katie said that Goddard had been shown several photographs of each man who was known to have been in St. James’s Park that evening for an as-yet unexplainable reason. Apparently, he’d said that it was neither of them but had been noted as being unsure of that. It wasn’t thought that he was lying – Harriet didn’t like hearing that assumption – and it was just as matter of him being uncertain.

As far as she was concerned, it was either Bedell or Morris who was who’d they’d long been looking for.


“Which one do you want to start with? Do we go alphabetical?”

“Bedell, I think.” Rebecca seemed keen on him.

Harriet was too: “Yes, we’ll start with him first then look at Morris.”

“These two,” Katie had another question, “have been on your list, Harriet, for some time. Is there a reason that neither was at the top?”

“Mitre.” Rebecca answered for her.

Harriet turned towards her seated colleague where they were both back in Katie’s office again. A nod and then she was looking back at the American. “That’s correct. They’re both using it and we’ve been waiting on something to pop up to help us get around it.”

Katie picked up her phone. “I wouldn’t have it on mine. It’s got ‘Moscow’ imprinted on it as far as I’m concerned.”

“Supernova, Delilah and Labyrinth all come from a little place in Maryland known as Fort Meade, don’t they?” Harriet said that with a smile.

Katie winked back at her.

“I won’t know.”

Harriet reckoned that she in fact did.

“For twenty-four ninety-nine a month, those security cloaking apps can all go do one.” Rebecca was shaking her head as she took out her pink phone. “The manufacturers build enough anti-spyware into these themselves. Charlatans selling wrap-around hole-poked condoms for them, or G.C.H.Q and the N.S.A. and whatever they’re calling Russia’s electronic agency this week pumping out apps as trojan horses while making a nice profit on them, are all just looking for dummies.”

The apps were everywhere. It wasn’t just Britons going crazy for them but people all over the world. New ones were arriving on the market all the time, promising ultimate protection against commercial or government snooping. Their fees varied but the £24.99 price that Rebecca quoted was the UK average. Her remarks made about the fact that they were either rubbish or trojan horses invented by national spy agencies weren’t conspiracy theory nonsense either. Time and time again, as exposes came about government spying on citizens, so did stories about the apps as well. People’s whole lives were on their phones and they worried about having anyone else see all of that. They weren’t paranoid too. Harriet worked for an organisation that hacked phones all of the time.

As to herself, she had an app on hers.

It was Mitre and was – according to the latest in-house National Intelligence & Security Service memo she’d read – pretty damn good at what it did. It’s Emirati creators and owners knew what they were doing and were legit too.

The two people whose lives she wanted to take apart via their phones looking to see if they were secretly Russian Illegals were using it to ensure against that.

“We’re going to have to proceed without the electronic start then, aren’t we?”

“Yes.” Katie was right. They’d have to go the old-fashioned route to uncover the identity that Goddard would only partially give them of whom Harriet had long been seeking. “And we begin with Bedell.”

“Call me later, Harriet?”

As she stood up to leave with Rebecca, Harriet gave Katie a thumbs-up acknowledgment of that.


“You two,” Rebecca said as they went to get coffee in the building’s cafeteria, “are like a pair of fourteen year-old’s from some Nineties high school movie.”

“What!?”

Half-seated, half-standing, Harriet was caught entirely unawares by that remark.

“Katie has made you her new project. Her new bestie. There’ll be some guy next and a bet!”

“That’s absurd.” Harriet sat down and glared at Rebecca. “We’ve just become work colleagues who get on rather well, nothing more.”

Rebecca shook her head with sincere vigour. “No, she’d made you her friend. You didn’t like her but she’s turned that around fast. The colonisers – which you called her and the others – are converting the natives and I’m a witness to that.”

“Oh, c’mon?” Harriet had some of her coffee. “You’re just being silly now.” Rebecca really was. “We just went out for dinner because it was her birthday and she wanted a foursome rather than just her and her date. She doesn’t know anyone else here and I offered to bring Jack with me to help her out.”

“She is our boss. Well, not our official boss, but our boss anyway. More than that, Harriet, I think – and I’m being serious here – that she’s trying to recruit you.”

Harriet was having none of that nonsense.

“Absolutely not. Firstly, she wouldn’t be allowed. There are rules against doing that with Friendlies like us. Secondly, you’re just…,” Harriet searched for the right word, one that wouldn’t make this silly discussion an argument, “…paranoid. Which is okay, that is our job.”

“Harriet, as I said, I’m being serious. I think she is trying to recruit you. You need to think about what that means.”

“Nope, I disagree.” She wouldn’t accept that. “Anyway…,” she deliberately moved on, “where do we start with Bedell?”

[Torten]

Good so far.

David won't be a free man much longer.

[Leander]

Good so far.

David won't be a free man much longer.

Nope. Not when NISS start pulling apart his story!

[Leander]

14

She was born as Maria Mikhailovna Popova but now living in the UK as the supposed Briton Michelle Finch. David’s wife didn’t like him spending any time with the only other female deep-cover Illegal that was here alongside she. That was due to what Michelle had a knack for getting men to do: jumping into bed with her. She’s been doing that when back in Russia as an expensive escort working the fancy hotels in Moscow to entice foreign businessmen before Maria had been recruited by the SVR and transformed into Michelle. Before he’d set off today, Natalie had made a point of confirming with him that it was only a dead-drop he was servicing, not meeting her in person.

David had done something that usually didn’t. He’d lied to his wife.

In a courtyard café over in Islington, they had a quick meet. She could have left something attached to the underside of the table or maybe a chair. There might have been a newspaper left atop the café counter with something inside of it. However, David chose to meet her for a quick chat – entirely in English, of course – and have her whisper to him what she wanted to say. To be seated in her company, if only briefly, did something for him every time.

As to Natalie, she didn’t have to know.


“Greg had something unexpected to say last night.”

Michelle was talking about one of the MPs she was involved with.

“Oh, yes?”

David was all ears because what she’d learnt from that backbencher had previously been of great value.

“Martin Hardy is apparently having another affair.”

Now that was interesting. The private lives of MPs might reduce some people to eye-rolling because such news was seen as gossip, but that wasn’t the case with David nor those who he worked for. There was always long-term strategic value in such knowledge because it could be exploited at once or much further down the line.

And… Hardy was the British government’s Security Secretary too.

“Did he say who it was with?”

Michelle raised her eyebrows and that devilish smile that he’d come her to see adorned her face.

“A journalist you might have heard of. She goes by the name of Imogen Gainsborough.” A smile. “Ah, so you’re well aware of who her brother is then?”

“That I am.”

David absolutely was.


When telling Natalie later about the message he had apparently picked up from Michelle without talking to her, David watched her grow incredulous at the revelation. He imagined that his face would have been the same earlier when having that illicit meeting with the woman that his wife was – correctly too – insanely jealous of.

“This isn’t something we just send onto Moscow and forget about, it is?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “We exploit this ourselves and see what can be gained at once.”

She rubbed her hands together while they stood in the cold garden before stepping up close to him and wrapping her arms around him. There was affection there, David knew, but she was also pretty damn cold too.

“He’s our opponent, the man right at the top who has his minions looking for us. We now know his latest secret, one that he’ll want to keep under wraps less he wants another public revelation about his private life.”

David was speaking into her ear and rubbed his hands down her arms.

“That Imogen,” Natalie said, “must have some sort of issue with her brother to do what she is. That’s his own career in trouble if the story broke in the news and came out the wrong way.”

Unsure on how Natalie saw the political implications of such a scenario occurring, David opted to just give a non-committal answer: “Maybe.”

“The prime minister’s sister! Just what is the Security Secretary thinking?”


For the next couple of days, David sought to see what Michelle had been told be confirmed. Michelle had said that she needed help from Yitzhak, their go-to guy and he was tasked by Natalie when she left him an urgent dead-drop message to work with Michelle. There were technical means that David was involved with in the meantime to try and get something more than compromising photographs that his two officers were seeking.

Hardy sat on the Cabinet and had direct ministerial control over both NISS and GCHQ. David had read several times in media reports that the security secretary wanted to merge the latter into the former, just had been done when MI-5 and MI-6 had been forced to combine. GCHQ was fighting tooth-and-nail to keep its independence. The politics of that aside, Britain’s electronic spying & security organisation, one that had a global reach in an alliance with partners such as the American’s NSA, provided the security secretary with communications safekeeping of his own. His phone, computer and all other devices were shielded against interception by them just as was the case with the majority of the government’s ministers all the way up to the very top. David had several months beforehand explained to Moscow when they instructed him to try and listen-in on Hardy that that was impossible.

The woman he was seeing was a different matter though. She had a commercially available cloaking app on her phone but that one, Deliah, had a backdoor access built into it by its ultimate creators at the NSA. A pair of young, enigmatic University of Iowa post-graduates were the ones who fronted the whole thing where they gave no hint of the truth of their app’s background to the buying public on both sides of the Atlantic. David knew the truth of the matter though, and he also knew how to use that backdoor just as those in Maryland did.

He got into her phone and delved through the sordid details of the affair she was having, all while telling himself that it was just professional interest!


Another evening in the garden, another quiet chat with Natalie.

Tonight it wasn’t so cold and his wife had brought out a big coat with her too.

“He told her how his people are looking for us… well… me actually.”

Natalie looked rather alarmed. “What?”

“Hardy,” David told her, “seems to like to brag about how important his work is. He’s telling Gainsborough all sorts of stuff post-coitus. There’s an active investigation underway into seeking the identity of whom his N.I.S.S people believe gave Luke Goddard a wave-off, a danger signal in St. James’s Park.

There’re trying to find that person now that Goddard is talking to them.”

Now she was quite worried.

“Why did you wait until tonight to tell me this, David? How long have you known? How close are they to discovering you and what are we going to do about it?”

The many questions came all at once.

David wasn’t filled with the same anxiousness that the usually calm Natalie was. That was because what he had heard on intercepted pillow-talk when he had Gainsborough’s phone active as Hot Mike had assured him that there was no need to worry.

He slowly answered her questions one-by-one.

“I found out today and I am telling you now while we are outside and away from any listening ears or even bugs that we know aren’t there.

Hardy told her that everyone they have looked at had come up clean. Detailed checks had been made on all those who were in that park that evening, no matter who they were.

So, I’ve been studied and dismissed as nothing but an ordinary Briton with no more than passing interest in me.”

Confident in what he’d heard, and when he said that to his wife, David was convinced that it was true. He was ready to listen to all of Natalie’s fears and assuage them.

However, it hadn’t occurred to him that Hardy might not be telling Gainsborough the truth for any number of reasons. That hadn’t factored into his thinking. Moreover, nor did he consider that Natalie was disbelieving and already making plans to avert the danger she at once feared.

[Leander]

15

“It’s not a term that I’ve heard before to be honest, Harriet.”

Katie looked entirely disbelieving.

“Boutique brothels do exist,” Harriet assured her of that, “and I happen to know that Rebecca raided a couple of them when she was a vice cop. It’s a police term, one she used, but, regardless, that was where we thought that Bedell had been visiting. Those type of places are few and far between, and provide a tailored service like others can, but with much less fuss and the punters get exactly what they pay for too.”

“Yet with Bedell, it was all about the money?”

Harriet sniggered: “Let’s not put it exactly like that when referencing where he might have been going, shall we?”

“Okay, okay. But the brothel is next door to the solicitor’s office – the latter might come in handy, I guess – and that is where you are certain that he was that particular evening after taking the walk through the park?

“Absolutely.” Bedell had been cleared of any wrongdoing espionage-wise though was guilty of something else that didn’t concern Britian’s security services.

“He sounds like the type of man I don’t want to marry.”

“Me neither.”

“How much is he taking the wife’s father for?”

Harriet had to think for a moment to recall the figure. Facts like that with the investigation into Bedell before he was ruled out as a suspect hadn’t stuck so firm with her.

It took her just a moment…

“Close to three hundred thousand pounds. Bedell’s the listed C.E.O but the father-in-law still owns a significant stake. Bedell is seeking to screw him – let’s forget the neighbouring place to the office for the solicitor, yes? – and walk away with all of that money, leaving the wife too.”

Katie shook her head. “What a git! So, he’s a criminal but he’s not who we’re looking for.”

“Nope, and the last suspect on my list is David Morris,” she pointed towards one of the camera screens, “which is him right there.”


The amusing story of where it had been thought that Bedell had been going instead of where he did, along with the truth of the matter, was funny now but it hadn’t been when uncovered. Several days had been spent finally tracking down that man’s movements on the evening that Luke Goddard, the traitor to the UK working in Downing Street, had been caught red-handed in the act of espionage. Bedell’s furtive behaviour had attracted so much attention from the NISS but all for the wrong reasons. He’d been keeping what he was doing secret for financial reasons; the brothel was just a coincidence, probably one he hadn’t factored into his scheme to defraud his wife’s father.

Harriet had been quite miffed at being led up the garden path by it all.

Now there was Morris and all attention was on him.

She and Katie were back in the surveillance van (the one that they’d gone to Grimsby in before, chasing another dead end) where it was parked near Archway Underground Station in North London. Morris was now in view via the cameras as he entered there and disappeared through the barriers. Harriet kept her eyes on the screen as other people did the same, wondering which one or ones of them were the Watchers.

Like MI-5 before it, NISS had several dedicated teams of close surveillance personnel. They got up close and personal to suspects where they tailed them in close proximity looking for brush passes taking place, dead drops being serviced or brief meetings. Disguises and brass big ones were needed to make sure that those being trailed didn’t realise that. There was no running after them, no making a scene. The job of the Watchers was to blend into the background and be unnoticed. Men and women of all ages, looking like commuters or tourists or general workers, were part of those teams.

Harriet knew that she could look all she wanted but never tell them apart from the general public. Her assumption, her hope in fact, was the Morris couldn’t too, even if he suspected they might be there.


“He’s off home then?” Katie’s question came to break Harriet’s stare at those screens.

“It looks like that, yes. From here to Putney, we believe. There was a meeting he had and Rebecca says,” Harriet’s fellow spook who was overseeing what the Watchers were doing, “that one of his shadows overheard him say that. It’s the right time of day and I think that is where he’s going.

If not though, wherever he’s going, he’ll have those shadowing Watchers staying close.”

Harriet removed her attention from the camera screens and back towards the laptop that she had open in front of her. Morris’ details were in there and she was looking at it all again, trying to familiarise herself with him completely.

Katie popped her head over the top of the screen.

“This thing with the two police set-up and your country’s politicians is a bit much, don’t you think? Why can’t one branch handle it all?”

Harriet realised that Katie was going to keep at this. The American had question after question. That was what she was here for though.

“Hey, it’s not me: innocent!” She held her hands up in mock surrender. “I don’t know when or why exactly it happened, but the Met. Police decided it works best that way for them. They have police officers from one branch doing physical security and another branch handles close protection while the protected person is one the move. They transfer officers about between the two all the time yet keep the branches separate doing the two tasks.

That’s how it is with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet ministers of his such as Charlotte Young.”

Katie raised her eyes to the van roof. “I could spend the rest of my life in this country and I’ll never understand the motives behind the intricacies in your national security set-up. Anyway,” she gave a grave look to Harriet, “I don’t believe in coincidence… or happenstance as your doubtful boss called it, when it comes to Morris’ wife and the defence secretary.”

“Neither do I. There’s something there, I tell you now.”

“What am I always saying, Harriet?” It was a rhetoric question. “You’re damn good at this, too good for the current management at N.I.S.S who don’t have faith enough in their people.”

Harriet smiled in reply rather than say anything. Her mind recalled Rebecca’s words about Katie endlessly buttering her up for ulterior motives. That was something she dismissed as an idea then and now… but it lingered on.


At the time of the first background checks made on all of Harriet’s Suspects To Consider, Natalie Morris hadn’t been a factor. It was noted that Morris was married but that was it. Before they’d moved to take a harder look at him, his wife’s name had been run though the Met.’s shared computer link with NISS for potential security threats to VIPs. Their Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection branch – similar in mission to the Royalty and Specialist Protection with the overlap there causing those questions from Katie – had run her name as a cursory check considering the fact that she was a new acquaintance of Young who had been in her house. The other branch had done the same later that very day. There had been no flags raised for the Met. to worry about.

Once Harriet had recently discovered that, alarm bells had rung within her.

The whole thing caused concern, one which Katie shared. They were looking at Morris to see if he was a Russian Illegal under deep cover here in Britain. No evidence had been found to support that though the effort was only getting started. In the meantime, his wife was palling up with the nation’s defence secretary with a personal connection over their children.

Harriet had been chasing spooks for years – successfully and unsuccessfully – and didn’t believe in coincidences at all.

Not just David Morris, but Natalie Morris too, were regarded by her as being almost certainly the enemy she’d been chasing for some time. Proof was needed first though.


“It’s Rebecca again.”

Harriet took the call and listened to what her colleague had to say. She had a few quick questions and then said goodbye before hanging up.

“Where’s he now?”

“Morris changed tubes at King’s Cross and he’s on his way westbound, possibly for Baker Street. Still going home but he seems to be taking a diversion first.”

“I think we should take that drive to Putney now.” Katie’s suggestion was more like a very polite instruction. “He’s going to beat us back there if we don’t get moving.”

“I agree.” Harriet moved to talk to the driver through the hatch and then returned to Katie. “Tonight, we’re watching and – hopefully – listening to the Morris’. Starting tomorrow, we get serious about pulling their lives apart. If he is who I think he is, and maybe she is too, their legends, those covers they’ve long been building for themselves, will have threads to pull on and the veil will fall.

I’m sure on that too, Katie.”

“Why? I’m not doubting you but what are you seeing that I’m not?”

“Gut feeling.” She touched her belly briefly. “Him, and maybe her as well, are whom I’m looking for.”