Deception Page 23

  ‘ . . . as if she might make up for being a bit plain by having a string of letters after her name.’

  If there was one thing he wouldn’t have called Vanessa Tan, it was plain. He found Mrs Crane’s telephone number and rang her.

  ‘Mr Tate?’ She sounded surprised to hear from him. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Mrs Crane, do you have a PC?’

  ‘Well, of course. We’re not in the Stone Age up here, you know. I was just using it, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I want you to look at a picture and tell me what you think.’ When she agreed and gave him her email address, he got Rik to send her the jpeg of Vanessa Tan from the memory stick.

  Moments later, she said, ‘Right. Got it. Just let me open the attachment. I don’t suppose you’ve found her, have you? Oh . . . goodness.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Mrs Crane sounded puzzled. ‘Who is this?’

  It was all Harry needed. But he had to have confirmation without feeding her any hints.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’

  ‘No, I don’t . . .’ She hesitated, then said, ‘You think it’s Vanessa, don’t you?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Tate, but I think you’ve been given the wrong information. Whoever this woman is, it’s definitely not Vanessa Tan. Not in a million years.’

  After thanking Mrs Crane and hanging up, Harry sat down to consider the possibilities of what they had stumbled over. Suddenly several bits of the puzzle were falling into place. The unexplained disappearance of a very bright and promising young female army officer; the absence of any solid background details, friends or family; the lack of any clues to her whereabouts.

  ‘How the hell did they do this?’

  Rik shrugged. ‘Easy enough, given time and access.’

  ‘Could you do it?’

  ‘Sure. Whoever set this up would’ve been on the inside, with a lot more facilities, but I could manage, given time and some privacy.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘I could get your name in there if I had to. Put you on the general staff, all braid and creased trousers.’

  ‘How?’ Harry felt sure he was going to regret asking, but he had to know. And Rik was the only one who would tell him.

  ‘I’d have to access certain servers and files which I won’t frighten you with by naming, then I’d go in and enter your name as having served, say, on the HQ staff in Desert Storm. I’d throw in a few photos of you sitting on a gun turret and smiling, or enjoying a brew-up with the lads in the desert, then link it all in with your regimental records. And if I was really clever, which I am, I’d make sure your name was included in movement records from the UK to Iraq and back; maybe even add a bit of gloss by showing you’d been evac’d out and treated in hospital for shrapnel wounds.’ He sat back and grinned. ‘Everyone loves a hero with some metal ballast. It’s not really that hard – just a matter of filling in blanks.’

  ‘But the photo.’

  ‘That’s where they fell short: they wouldn’t have had a recent shot of Tan, so they just took the first one they could get of an Anglo-Chinese woman of roughly the same age. Maybe they managed to get hold of any existing shots of her as a girl and wiped them. What they didn’t reckon on was that you’d show the file photo to someone who’d known her, or that that anyone would bother looking beyond the basic facts they’d put on the records.’

  Harry swore. He’d been on one long wild goose chase. There never had been a Lieutenant Tan. The original had died in a fire after leaving Cambridge. And now he knew why: her place in the big wide world had been taken by a fiction – an invention – used to lay an elaborate bait for the Protectory. It wouldn’t have taken much; false entries in the army records, a glowing CV that painted a picture of a high-flyer with an elephantine memory, and the closest possible connections to the high command in Afghanistan. And just enough detail to make her seem real if anyone should run a cursory check.

  ‘There’s a clincher,’ added Rik. ‘I checked Tan’s original application to university – her real one. She never studied languages, and even if she’d been to Kabul, there’s a reason she wouldn’t have been pictured with locals: in contrast to the old cobblers you were fed, she couldn’t speak Pashto or Dari. She had some Cantonese from her father, and a bit of French, but that was it. And there was no record of a special memory to help her graduate, either. Whatever qualifications she got, she’d had to work hard for.’

  They’d done it in a rush and got careless. Pasted together a past which didn’t exist for a woman who was dead, snatching bits of reality and painting on a fabricated history. A giant Photoshop representation of a make-believe life. It wasn’t going to stand up long to close scrutiny, but that would never have been the intention. It was all smoke and mirrors. Once they’d identified the dead woman in the house fire – which only MI6 would have had the time, clout and purpose to do – the house and phone must have been kept active to show anyone who cared to look that she still existed. Clever.

  He stood up. Ballatyne; before this went any further, he had a lot of talking to do. Before leaving, however, he told Rik about his meeting with Clare off Whitehall.

  Rik was sceptical. ‘She’s poison, you know that. Anyone could cut a man like she did Bellingham isn’t right in the head.’

  ‘I know. But she’s told me more than Ballatyne has, and right now I need all the help I can get. If her friends in Six come up with anything substantial, it could save a lot of time.’

  ‘He’s another one, Ballatyne. He’s strung us along – and for what?’ Rik scrubbed at his hair, making it even wilder than it looked normally. ‘Great game we’re in, isn’t it? Our friends turn out to be our enemies.’

  Harry couldn’t argue with that. It was in the nature of the people who worked in the intelligence business: only tell people as much as they need to know, and even then, make sure very little is the full unvarnished truth.

  ‘I’m going to see him. Find out what’s going on.’

  ‘You want me there?’ Rik looked hopeful. ‘I could hold your jacket.’

  ‘No. I’d like to keep it civilized – but don’t go anywhere.’

  Rik spread his arms, forgetting to wince at his wound. ‘Where will I go? This is my existence. I’m beginning to feel like a laboratory rat. Nothing ever happens.’

  Harry grinned at him. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said, and left.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ‘There are reasons we did it this way, Harry. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you in on the fine detail, but my hands were tied.’

  It was an hour later and Ballatyne had agreed with surprising ease to a meeting. They were back in the Italian restaurant off Wigmore Street, the minder on the door and a car outside. ‘It was decided to have the tightest possible list of people in the know, restricted to me and a maximum of four others, including the IT specialists who fed the Tan background data into the official records. Any wider than that and we would have been no closer to knowing who was leaking the names of deserters out to the Protectory. I don’t include you in that, of course.’

  ‘Big of you. So what’s the story?’

  ‘The government and MOD have been concerned for some time about the desertion figures. They’re rising all the time, especially with the casualty rates in Afghanistan. That by itself is containable, given some attention. But what nobody had reckoned on was deserters turning round and selling what they knew. It’s happened occasionally before, but strictly small-time stuff. Trouble is, we’ve now got a situation where ordinary soldiers are in possession of some amazing technology and equipment, from weapons through to IT and tactical data; stuff that other countries would love to get their hands on. Not just countries, either. Terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda trade on equipment and information, too, selling to the highest bidder. It’s the new form of spying, with a touch of spin.’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘Some months ago, we heard the Protectory had got hold of so
me information from a naval weapons specialist who’d jumped ship. A young bloke who’d got an attack of conscience and didn’t like what buttons he was expected to push in the event of a serious conflict. He told his mates how he wanted a new life and new ID, and had heard how to get them, through this group called the Protectory. They thought he was fantasizing, and so did we; campfire stuff as you called it, a load of romantic tosh. By the time anyone realized it, and before he could be hauled ashore for questioning, he’d disappeared while in dock in Gibraltar.’

  Harry said nothing. It was already sounding familiar.

  ‘Fortunately for us, he turned up two months later in Morocco, stoned out of his brain and homesick. But he was telling an interesting story. The Protectory had sat him down in a room with an expert in weapons technology and drained him of everything he knew. It took ten days, by which time he realized what they were doing, and took off when they relaxed their watch on him. As we now know, he was a lucky bunny; he’d have probably ended up dead under a culvert somewhere once his usefulness was over. As it was, he gave us the first leads into what Deakin and his pals are doing, and from what he told us, it was clear they knew a lot more about him than he’d have ever put on Facebook. The kind of detail that could have only come from his naval records.’

  ‘They had someone on the inside.’

  ‘In the MOD. It was a clever move: they’d get instant news of a deserter, along with a summary of their job, background and rank, and be able to make a decision about whether the runner might be useful to them. After that, they’d make an approach, offer salvation and suggest a trade. Some worked, some didn’t. It was decided at that point to get serious about the Protectory and shut them down. Our problem was finding them; as you know, they’re very good at hiding themselves.’

  ‘So you decided to draw them out using a dead woman as bait.’

  Ballatyne didn’t look ashamed at what they had done. ‘Get a grip, Harry; you know how it goes. Tan had no family, no real friends. Nobody got hurt.’

  ‘That doesn’t excuse it.’

  ‘Maybe not. But we needed something to draw the Protectory out of their hole. A heavily embellished half-truth was the best means of doing that. Tan’s name came up by chance during a police investigation into animal rights groups. She’d died in a fire but her full name was unknown. Given her facial characteristics, it was thought she might have been part of a Chinese work gang who’d got split off from her friends and merged with the animal rights mob as camouflage. We dug around and found out stuff the local police hadn’t, and it led us to a full name and address. By then her mother had died leaving her the house and a small pot to keep it going. We took over the management of the house and phone for background, gave her a glowing legend into the army, then let loose the AWOL story to see if it would draw the Protectory – and the person doing the leaking – out of the woodwork.’ He smiled thinly. ‘You can now see why I didn’t want you speaking to General Foster. He wasn’t in on it.’

  ‘So I gathered.’

  Ballatyne looked annoyed. ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘I tried. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. It was for the same reasons that I didn’t want you chasing after “Tan” as a possible sleeper for the Guoanbu. It was a natural conclusion to come to, given her apparent ancestry, but it would have blown up in our faces if you’d started digging around in that nasty little Chinese puddle. It was all part of the overall picture.’

  ‘And did the Tan story work?’

  ‘Yes. We wanted to see how quickly the Protectory would latch on to it. We started out by feeding the false story through a limited circulation inside the MOD to see who would take the bait. As I said, sorry that had to include you, Harry, but I had no choice.’

  Harry bit down hard on his instinct to tell Ballatyne what he thought of him. It would serve no purpose. They’d played him, but they had played the MOD insider and the Protectory even more. He also understood why; they’d needed to put a stop to the Protectory’s trade in sensitive military data and personnel. To do that effectively, they had to plug the leak of information on deserters at source – inside the MOD. A small skirmish in the fight to protect the nation’s secrets.

  ‘Who took the bait?’

  ‘Gordon Cullum. He was well placed, as it happened; he had access, opportunity and motive. He’d got disenchanted over the years and accumulated a mess of property debts, and was facing retirement on a pension that wasn’t going to take him anywhere. It turns out he was a buddy of Major Colin Nicholls. They’d worked together in Northern Ireland years ago, running an undercover bargain-basement car-hire business renting out disposable vehicles to bad boys from the Real IRA. All part of the army’s plan to keep tags on what cars were going where. Worked brilliantly for a time, too, but they got blown and had to duck out fast. Cullum says Nicholls first contacted him two years ago. Just a call for old time’s sake at first. Then he started leaning on him, citing their service together in the back streets of Ulster and how he needed a favour. That didn’t work, according to Cullum. So Nicholls got him to go to a meeting in Amsterdam, and who should show up but Thomas Deakin. He got all hard-nosed and presented Cullum with a list of his debts and proof that some of the money from the undercover car-rental business had stuck to his hands, and how it would look if a copy landed in the corridors of Five, Six and the MOD. Cullum saw the writing on the prison wall and folded. The rest we know about. He systematically plundered the MOD files for every deserter and disaffected squaddie, trooper or officer he could find. They were all targets for Nicholls and Deakin, but the more specialized they were, the better their chances of making a trade.’

  ‘If the target played along with them.’

  ‘True. Not all of them did. Pike and Barrow were certainly two recent unlucky ones.’

  ‘What did Cullum get out of it?’

  ‘So far? About thirty thousand quid, give or take. Hardly worth losing his job and pension over, but he must have thought he’d be in it for the long haul. Fortunately for us, he was no better at hiding his illicit money than he was at managing his debts. Our internal bloodhounds put two and two together and suddenly he was centre stage.’

  ‘How did they do that?’

  ‘He got careless and left an audit trail. They latched on to it.’

  ‘Cullum knew what I was working on.’ He wondered whether – or when – the information had filtered out to the Protectory.

  ‘Yes. But he didn’t connect the dots. He’d have known Six wouldn’t have been involved in this unless it was something too sensitive for Five to be running. And bringing in an outsider like you only strengthened that possibility. What he didn’t know about was Paulton’s connection with the group. Nicholls must have deliberately kept him out of the loop on that one. All he had was a changeable phone number and various Hotmail addresses for making contact with Nicholls or Deakin.’

  Harry wondered if Cullum had really been that naïve. Given his knowledge of Harry’s history with Paulton and Red Station, an episode that would have been office gossip among long-time Fivers, and the fact that Harry had been brought in to look into some military absconders, it would not have taken long for a man of Cullum’s experience to deduce what was going on. Or maybe his financial straits had blinded him to making those kind of connections.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘We’re playing Cullum. He stays in touch with the Protectory or he goes to jail for a long time. The longer we can keep them unaware of what we know, the better our chances of reeling them in. But we don’t have long; this has got to end sooner or later, but we don’t want any more information finding its way into the hands of the Chinese, Russians or anyone else with an axe to grind. And we still want Paulton.’

  ‘And in the meantime they think Tan is still out there?’

  ‘Yes. The big prize.’

  ‘And your own insider?’

  Ballatyne looked momentarily blank. ‘Sorr
y?’

  ‘There’s been a trickle of information coming the other way – from inside the Protectory. You said so yourself. Was that a bluff as well?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘There’ve been bits of information, but never enough to help us pin anyone down. The language used sounds like it could be Nicholls, but it’s been coming in through an unusual medium.’

  ‘Unusual?’ Harry prompted him. It was an MI6 trait, he knew, to keep everyone, even their friends and assets, in the dark wherever possible. It was standard tradecraft, the need-to-know principle. The downside was that it kept people isolated who very often should have known what was going on further down the line.

  ‘The United Nations Internal Oversight Services office. We have no idea why; it could be that the source once had a contact there or feels it’s the safest way of passing information out. The IOS investigates breaches of conduct and security. Although this business doesn’t involve UN personnel, they’ve been taking this information seriously and passing it on as a matter of concern.’ He pulled a face. ‘Sadly, it didn’t stop with us; the Americans have the information, too, although they’ve shown no great interest so far in doing anything with it. Probably because it involves British forces.’

  ‘And he’s still feeding information out?’

  ‘He’s been a bit quiet of late. We’re wondering how long he’s got.’ If Ballatyne was concerned about the fate of the inside man, he was hiding it remarkably well.

  He stood up and took a slip of paper out of his pocket, then placed it on the table in front of Harry. It held an address in West Sussex. ‘We’ve had one bit of luck: Soran’s got several lock-ups for keeping stock, most of it genuine. He acts as a wholesaler for household goods in and around London. But there’s one place he was rather coy about. In fact, he denied having anything to do with it until we showed him a rental agreement. Then he caved. It’s one of several units on an abandoned World War Two airfield; Nissen huts the old War Office forgot about.’