Accidental Agent Read online

  ‘Tonight would be better, if you don’t mind. Headlines only. I need to get my notes into my safe and Suzanne’s not expecting me back until later anyway. Big lunch do tomorrow and she’ll take a gun to me if I spend another Sunday in the office. It won’t be blanks, either.’

  That suited Charles. Sarah had said she wanted to do a couple of hours’ work that evening on an insurance case and they had agreed they would drive down to their Cotswold house late that night to spend Sunday there. Each had promised the other there would be no work.

  Sarah was already working on her case when he got home, papers spread across the kitchen table. ‘Good idea,’ she said when he told her he was going into the office for an hour. ‘I get more done when you’re not here.’

  ‘You got away from the wedding unscathed?’

  ‘Only after prolonged farewells to Deborah. She’s putting a very brave face on it all. Not just the marriage but Daniel’s future. She’s desperate to see him properly settled.’

  ‘I got the impression he thinks he is, since his conversion.’

  ‘Not in his mother’s eyes, he isn’t. She means a partnership in Deloitte or KPMG or something. She never wanted to be the carpenter’s mum.’

  ‘His sister-in-law looked a more likely prospect for that sort of thing.’

  ‘That makes it worse.’

  The new Head Office was in Westminster’s Smith Square, a three-minute walk from their terraced house in Cowley Street. The building had previously served as Conservative Party headquarters, then as the European Union’s London office, a minor but pleasing irony given what Charles was going there to discuss. It was too small to house more than a portion of MI6’s Head Office staff and MI5’s assessment of its physical security vulnerabilities had resulted in an unsightly periphery of heavy steel barriers. But it was not Croydon, where the much-reduced Service had been sent following the events that had led to Charles’s unexpected recall and the downfall of his predecessor. That the rest of Head Office was distributed throughout various central London buildings was undeniably a disadvantage but returning to Westminster was essential. Despite all the advantages of modern communications, nothing compensated for physical proximity to the centres of power and regular access to those who occupied them.

  Gareth’s office, like Charles’s, looked into the leafy upper branches of the plane trees in the square. Gareth was already at his desk, newer and grander than Charles’s own. Charles had kept one of the very few Century House grade-four desks that had survived from the Cold War decades, a symbolism that did not, he knew, escape notice. Nor, in some cases, silent censure; but that didn’t bother him.

  ‘So, Timber Wolf delivered?’ he said, sitting opposite Gareth.

  Gareth turned aside from his screen and keyboard. ‘Big time.’

  ‘Headlines?’

  ‘Plenty of negotiation mood music, bickering behind the seemingly united front, Poland and Hungary threatening to cut up rough, Nordics becoming more cautious. The big thing is the financial bottom line, which is higher than we thought.’

  ‘Sub-sources?’

  ‘The negotiating team, all of them. They all talk to him. Not all at once, nor do all of them tell him everything, but they all gossip or complain and he puts it all together.’

  Timber Wolf was Gareth’s source in the EU Commission, reporting on Brexit negotiations from the other side. A Dutch former diplomat whom Gareth had befriended while running the MI6 Geneva station, Timber Wolf had resigned from the Dutch foreign service to join the Commission as part of the policy development team. Although a permanent EU civil servant, he had remained an Anglophile and he and Gareth had kept up their friendship on a purely personal basis. Over the years there had been a family skiing holiday and occasional visits and dinners. Their friendship had been unaffected by the EU referendum, following which Timber Wolf began to be indiscreet about EU thinking. His indiscretions soon blossomed from office gossip into intelligence and had elevated their personal relationship into a professional one.

  Such, at least, was the case so far as Gareth was concerned. Charles was uneasy. Timber Wolf was not a recruited agent. Although he knew he was talking to an intelligence officer and would – or should – assume that anything he said of intelligence or diplomatic interest would be reported, that did not make him a secret agent, secretly reporting to a brief. He would surely, Charles had argued, have spoken in exactly the same terms to any foreign official with whom he had a long-standing personal relationship. In other contexts conversational indiscretions and gossip might amount to intelligence but in the free-flowing, relatively open culture of Brussels officialdom, they did not. The Joint Intelligence Committee had not mandated the EU as an intelligence target for MI6. Nor should Timber Wolf have been allocated a code name, as if he were an agent whose identity merited protection.

  Gareth had done this off his own bat while Charles was on leave, issuing to Whitehall customers intelligence reports drawn from what Timber Wolf told him. Eagerly received in Whitehall as the Brexit negotiations spluttered on, they had garnered praise for Gareth and MI6, and would doubtless be remembered when the time came to choose a successor for Charles. Charles himself was congratulated on his return from leave as if it were a significant MI6 achievement. Both these factors had made it all the more difficult for him to refute or countermand what Gareth had done. It would have been difficult enough anyway, given their friendship and their history of successful joint casework, but the fact that everything Timber Wolf had so far reported appeared to check out made it all the more so. He had been careful not to fall out with Gareth over it but it was the closest they had ever come to open disagreement. He had concluded that the best way to ensure control of the case was to involve himself more closely. He had also, discreetly, asked Sonia to look at it.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure,’ he had pressed Gareth, ‘that our customers understand that Timber Wolf is a loyal EU official who believes in ever-closer union leading to a United States of Europe and may not regard what he’s telling you as secret or damaging? That he doesn’t see himself as a spy?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. I stressed from the start that these memos I’m issuing are not so much secret intelligence as what used to be called “deep chat”. If you remember the days when diplomats used to be really good at talking to foreigners rather than to London or their screens.’

  ‘And have you made them aware of the political embarrassment if it got out that he’s talking to you like this and you’re reporting it? Even though you’re calling them memos rather than reports, it would still be dastardly MI6 Brits spying on the innocent, kindly and cuddly EU.’

  ‘Absolutely they’re aware. They always are, aren’t they? Terrified of embarrassment rather than simply refusing to be embarrassed. Anyway, it’s kept very tight. Those memos can only be opened by named officials.’

  Now, midway through a Saturday evening, sitting in Gareth’s office with the lighting subdued and the plane tree leaves rustling in the breeze, Charles had once more to suppress his doubts. If what Gareth’s draft memo said about the EU’s bottom line was true, it was truly important. Lower than what the EU hinted at in public, it was still significantly higher than British estimates of what would be an acceptable compromise. There were important public policy implications for what the country could afford, as well as immediate presentational issues. ‘Who’s this going to?’ he asked.

  Gareth read aloud the list of addressees in Number Ten, the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office and the Department for Exiting the EU. ‘Longer than it was when I first started issuing them. More ministerial private offices. Ministers have heard about the case and are gagging to see the reports.’

  ‘That’s what worries me. People talk. And internally here?’

  ‘As before. Just our directors and main board members.’

  ‘Assessments?’

  Gareth’s eyes went back to his screen. ‘Head of Assessments. Yes, she’s here.’

  Charles wasn’t convinced th
at Sonia really had been on the distribution. She would be now. There was a long-standing antipathy between her and Gareth, dating back to an affair he had had, or half-had, or not had – according to him – with a girlfriend of hers, who had since left. More importantly, it was the task of Assessments to assess reports, whether they were true, whether they were timely, whether they met customers’ requirements, whether they were supported by other reporting or whether they merely replicated what was already available through open sources. Assessments also had the right, in a change forced through by Charles in the wake of earlier security failures, to conduct assessments of agents – were they reliable, what were their motives, did they have direct access to what they reported, was their access oral, documentary or other visual, who were their sub-sources? In essence, who had said what, to whom, when, where, who else was there?

  There had been several cases in which Gareth, whose job it was to enhance the production of intelligence, had been frustrated by what he called Sonia’s meddlesome negativity. She, in turn, had complained that he was too gung-ho, too much inclined to uncritical acceptance and over-promotion of the product. ‘The Salesman,’ she called him, when talking to Charles. She shared some of Charles’s earlier doubts about the Timber Wolf reporting.

  ‘Great stuff, eh?’ said Gareth with a smile when Charles handed him back the draft memo. ‘Not bad for half a weekend’s work.’

  Interesting if true, was what Charles wanted to say, recalling the old Foreign Office put-down. Instead, he nodded. ‘Great stuff indeed. Well done.’

  Chapter Three

  Charles was setting out Sarah’s breakfast tray when Sonia rang them at precisely nine o’clock on the Sunday morning. It had rapidly become a convention of their recent marriage that he took Sarah breakfast in bed – boiled egg, toast, fruit, tea – on Sunday mornings, the only day when she was not up first. They were in her house in the hamlet of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, overlooking the valley of the River Windrush. He was still in his dressing gown, gazing at the slow river while waiting for the kettle to boil. The eruption of the phone jerked him out of a pleasing vacancy.

  ‘Hope I haven’t woken you?’

  ‘No, no, we’re up and about.’

  ‘I never ring anyone before nine in the morning or after ten in the evening.’

  ‘Quite right.’ He removed the kettle from the Aga before it began to whistle.

  ‘Have you read the latest Horley blast? It came last thing last night.’

  ‘No, but I saw it in draft and discussed it with him in the office yesterday evening. He was pretty excited about it.’

  ‘Not surprised he was working late.’

  ‘As were you, by the sound of it.’ She must have seen it on her secure laptop at home.

  ‘Funny thing is, the more I think about early retirement the harder it is to let go. I feel the opposite of demob-happy. We should talk about it. Gareth’s email, I mean.’

  ‘Fine. I haven’t looked at my diary for tomorrow but we should be able to fit something in.’

  ‘Today, I mean. I’m worried about it and I’d sooner discuss it outside the office. I feel I could be franker, somehow. I could drive over now if you’re not too busy. Paul’s at home, so he can walk the dogs.’

  ‘It’s quite a journey for you, isn’t it? Unless it’s really that urgent.’ She lived in Hertfordshire but he was thinking of Sarah’s reaction. Although she liked Sonia and knew how indebted Charles was to her, Sunday was the day they promised to each other; no work, no engagements.

  ‘It is important. Which for me inevitably makes it seem urgent. Well, there is some urgency, actually. Genuinely. Anyway, it’s a nice morning for a drive and it’s ages since I’ve driven farther than the station. But if you’ve got something else arranged . . .’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine. Come for lunch.’

  ‘Coffee. I don’t want to mess up the whole day for you both. I’ll come for coffee.’

  By the time she arrived it was warm enough to sit out on the terrace. Sarah had taken the news calmly, with well-concealed resignation, and had driven off to a garden centre the other side of Burford. Charles had Gareth’s memo on his secure laptop and had read it three times. Sonia, despite looking relaxed in jeans and trainers and a T-shirt advertising a canine charity, was businesslike.

  ‘I understand why you promoted Gareth. His operational record is seriously good and he’s done some good things as director of ops and production. I’m not one of those who think you promoted him just through cronyism and the fact that you ran a couple of cases together.’

  ‘Is that what people are saying?’

  ‘One or two, no more. It’s not a big issue. People can see he’s effective and intelligent and a breath of fresh air after his predecessor. Nor do I have any personal issues with him despite how he behaved with my friend Jane, though I know you think I do.’ She smiled. ‘But I do think he might have personal issues with me, oddly enough. He never looks me in the eye and if I say something in a meeting he responds to someone else, as if they’ve said it.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s frightened of you.’

  ‘I can’t believe I frighten anyone.’

  She did, though Charles had given up trying to persuade her of it. She was quiet, calm, self-possessed, rational, always mistress of her subject and nearly always right.

  ‘The point,’ she continued, ‘and the reason I’m spoiling your Sunday, is that I’m worried about Gareth and Timber Wolf. I’m not convinced we’re getting the full story. Or that we’re getting the right story. If there is one.’

  A heron got up from the bank of the Windrush, turned slowly and glided upstream. From the ridge on the far side of the valley came the sound of motorbikes on the A40. Her words provoked in Charles a simultaneous desire to argue and an unwelcome reminder of his own half-formed thoughts. Equally unwelcome was the thought that it should not have taken someone else’s words to get him to acknowledge his doubts.

  ‘I’m mentally taking a deep breath in saying this. Perhaps we both should.’ Sonia paused, her eyes on his. ‘Waiting for the exercise to get going yesterday, I read Timber Wolf’s electronic file, what there is of it. I should have read it before. Have you read it?’

  ‘No. I only know what Gareth has said about Timber Wolf.’

  ‘Me too until yesterday, with less excuse than you. Gareth says on file that he has known him since Geneva, which he left six years ago. After that they kept in touch but vaguely, Christmas cards and all that, though Gareth never recorded him as a registered foreign contact as he should have done. Still less did he log him as any sort of source on any subject, conscious or unconscious. This despite the fact that Gareth now gives the impression that they’d seen quite a bit of each other since Geneva, with frequent contacts, at least one family holiday, dinners and so on.’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘In fact, there’s no record on file of their actually meeting until after the Brexit referendum when Timber Wolf suddenly pops out of the woodwork and they have a couple of lunches in London, where Timber Wolf’s visiting the EU office. Then there’s a long weekend together en famille, with a bit of skiing in France. After the referendum and the lunches, note. Nothing before. During the holiday Timber Wolf begins dropping pearls of high-level EU gossip into Gareth’s lap. After all those years of nothing to report.’

  ‘Maybe there was nothing to talk about before then, no Brexit, no pearls, no gossip, no big issue.’

  ‘Possibly. But also no lunches, no family get-togethers, no skiing à deux, no intimate professional revelations until the run-up to Brexit negotiations. So far as the record shows, Timber Wolf doesn’t exist as any sort of source until he leaps fully formed out of the Alpine mist. Though Gareth does do a later note to say that they’ve been in touch all along.’

  ‘Are you suggesting he doesn’t exist, that Gareth’s invented him?’ Invented sources were not entirely unknown.

  ‘Not at all. He checks out, he’s real enough, his job
is what Gareth says it is. But it’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think, that he’s been in this sensitive EU Commission role ever since he left Geneva without once, we are asked to believe, being in the least indiscreet? Until, following the referendum and in the run-up to negotiations, he’s suddenly Gareth’s big buddy, volunteering secrets.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s also a coincidence that Timber Wolf turns out to be on friendly terms with an FCO friend of mine who runs the UN desk. They too knew each other from Geneva and have kept in touch, I think a little more frequently than Gareth and Timber Wolf. They’ve met for drinks and the odd meal a couple of times since the referendum and not only has Timber Wolf dropped him no pearls but he has specifically said he can’t discuss work now that their masters are on opposite sides of the negotiating table. And nor has he.’