House of Spies Page 3

  “Where do you suppose he is?” asked Amanda after a moment.

  “Saladin?”

  “Who else?”

  “We’ve been unable to definitively—”

  “You’re not speaking to the prime minister, Graham.”

  “If I had to guess, he’s somewhere other than the rapidly shrinking caliphate of ISIS.”

  “Where?”

  “Perhaps Libya or one of the Gulf emirates. Or he could be in Pakistan or across the border in Afghanistan controlled by ISIS. Or,” said Seymour, “he might be closer at hand. He has friends and resources. And remember, he used to be one of us. Saladin worked for the Iraqi Mukhabarat before the invasion. His job was to provide material support to Saddam’s favorite Palestinian terrorists. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “That,” said Amanda Wallace, “is an understatement. Saladin almost makes one nostalgic for the days of KGB spies and IRA bombs.” She sat down opposite Seymour and placed her drink thoughtfully on the coffee table. “There’s something I need to tell you, Graham. Something personal, something awful. Charles has left me for his secretary. She’s half his age. Such a cliché.”

  “I’m sorry, Amanda.”

  “Did you know he was having an affair?”

  “One heard rumors,” said Seymour delicately.

  “I didn’t hear them, and I’m the director general of MI5. I suppose it’s true what they say. The spouse is always the last to know.”

  “Is there no chance of reconciliation?”

  “None.”

  “A divorce will be messy.”

  “And costly,” added Amanda. “Especially for Charles.”

  “There’ll be pressure for you to step aside.”

  “Which is why,” said Amanda, “I’m going to require your support.” She was silent for a moment. “I know I’m largely to blame for our little cold war, Graham, but it’s gone on long enough. If the Berlin Wall can come down, surely you and I can be something like friends.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  This time, Amanda’s smile almost appeared genuine. “And now to the real reason I asked you to come.” She pointed a remote toward the flat-panel television and a face appeared on the screen—a male of Egyptian descent, lightly bearded, approximately thirty years of age. It belonged to Omar Salah, the leader of the so-called Harlow cell who had been killed by a special firearms officer inside St. Martin’s Theatre before he could detonate his explosive vest. Seymour was well acquainted with Salah’s file. He was one of several thousand European Muslims who had traveled to Syria and Iraq after ISIS declared its caliphate in June 2014. For more than a year after Omar Salah’s return to Britain, he had been the target of full-time MI5 surveillance, both physical and electronic. But six months prior to the attack, MI5 concluded that Salah was no longer an imminent threat. A4, the watchers, were stretched to the breaking point, and Salah appeared to have lost his taste for radical Islam and jihadism. The termination order bore Amanda’s signature. What she and the rest of British intelligence didn’t realize was that Salah was communicating with ISIS central command using encrypted methods that even the mighty American National Security Agency couldn’t crack.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Seymour quietly.

  “Perhaps not,” answered Amanda. “But someone will have to take the fall, and it’s probably going to be me. Unless, of course, I can turn the unfortunate case of Omar Salah to my advantage.” She paused, then added, “Or should I say our advantage.”

  “And how might we do that?”

  “Omar Salah did more than lead a team of Islamic murderers into St. Martin’s Theatre. He was the one who smuggled the guns into Britain.”

  “Where did he get them?”

  “From an ISIS operative based in France.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Omar.”

  “Please, Amanda,” said Seymour wearily, “it’s late.”

  She glanced at the face on the screen. “He was good, our Omar, but he made one small mistake. He used his sister’s laptop to conduct ISIS business. We seized it the day after the attack, and we’ve been scrubbing the hard drive ever since. This afternoon we found the digital remains of an encrypted message from ISIS central command, instructing Omar to travel to Calais to meet with a man who called himself the Scorpion.”

  “Catchy,” said Seymour darkly. “Was there any mention of guns in the message?”

  “The language was coded, but obvious. It’s also consistent with a bulletin we received from the DGSI late last year. It seems the French have had the Scorpion on their radar for some time. Unfortunately, they don’t know much about him, including his real name. The working theory is that he’s part of a drug gang, probably Moroccan.”

  It made sense, thought Seymour. The nexus between ISIS and European criminal networks was undeniable.

  “Have you told the French about any of this?” he asked.

  “I won’t leave the security of the British people in the hands of the DGSI. Besides, I’d like to find the Scorpion before the French. But I can’t,” she added quickly. “My mandate stops at the water’s edge.”

  Seymour was silent.

  “Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, Graham. But if I were you, I’d send an officer to France first thing in the morning. Someone who speaks the language. Someone who knows his way around criminal networks. Someone who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.” She smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone like that, would you, Graham?”

  5

  Hampshire, England

  He had come to the port city in the south of England like many others before him, in the back of a government van with blacked-out windows. It had sped past the marinas and the old redbrick Victorian warehouses before finally turning onto a small track that carried it across the first fairway of a golf course, which on the morning of his arrival had been abandoned to the gulls. Just beyond the fairway was an empty moat, and beyond the moat was an ancient fort with walls of gray stone. Originally built by Henry VIII in 1545, it was now MI6’s primary school for spies.

  The van paused briefly at the gatehouse before entering the central courtyard, where the cars of the DS, the Directing Staff, stood in three neat rows. The driver of the van, who was called Reg, switched off the engine and with little more than a dip of his head signaled to the man in the backseat that he could see himself out. The Fort was not a hotel, he might have added, but didn’t. The new recruit was a special case, or so the DS had been informed by Vauxhall Cross. Like all new recruits, he would be told at every opportunity that he was being admitted into an exclusive club. The members of this club lived by a different set of rules than their countrymen. They knew things, did things, that others did not. That said, the man in the backseat didn’t strike Reg as the sort of fellow who would be moved by such flattery. In fact, he looked as though he had been living by a different set of rules for a very long time.

  The Fort consisted of three wings—the east, the west, and the main, where most of the actual training took place. Directly above the gatehouse was a suite of rooms reserved for the chief, and beyond the walls was a tennis court, a squash facility, a croquet pitch, a helipad, and an outdoor shooting range. There was an indoor range as well, though Reg suspected his passenger would not require much in the way of weapons training, firearms or otherwise. He was a soldier of the elite variety. You could see it in the shape of the body, the set of the jaw, and in the way he shouldered the canvas duffel bag before striking out across the courtyard. Without a sound, noted Reg. He was definitely the silent type. He had been places he wished to forget and had carried out missions no one talked about outside safe-speech rooms and secure facilities. He was classified, this one. He was trouble.

  Just inside the entrance to the west wing was the little nook where George Halliday, the porter, waited to receive him. “Marlowe,” said the new recruit with little conviction. And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Peter Marlowe.” An
d Halliday, who was the longest serving of the Directing Staff—a holdover from the days of King Henry, according to Fort legend—ran a pale, spidery forefinger down his list of names. “Ah, yes, Mr. Marlowe. We’ve been expecting you. Sorry about the weather, but I’d get used to it if I were you.”

  Halliday said this while stooping to remove a key from the row of hooks beneath his desk. “Second floor, last room on the left. You’re lucky, it has a lovely view of the sea.” He laid the key on the desktop. “I trust you can manage your bag.”

  “I trust I can,” said the new recruit with something like a smile.

  “Oh,” said Halliday suddenly, “I nearly forgot.” He turned and clawed a small envelope from one of the pigeonhole mailboxes on the wall behind his desk. “This arrived for you last night. It’s from ‘C.’”

  The new recruit scooped up the letter and shoved it into the pocket of his watch coat. Then he shouldered his canvas duffel—like a soldier, agreed Halliday—and carried it up the flight of ancient steps that led to the residential quarters. The door to the room opened with a groan. Entering, he allowed the duffel to slide from his sturdy shoulder to the floor. With the keen eye of a close-observation specialist, he surveyed his surroundings. A single bed, a nightstand and reading lamp, a small desk, a simple armoire for his things, a private toilet and bath. A recent graduate of an elite university might have found the apartment more than adequate, but the new recruit was not impressed. A man of considerable wealth—illegitimate, but considerable nonetheless—he was used to more comfortable lodgings.

  He shed his coat and tossed it on the bed, dislodging the envelope from the pocket. Reluctantly, he tore open the flap and removed the small notecard. There was no letterhead, only three lines of neat script, rendered in distinctive green ink.

  Britain is better off now that you are here to look after her . . .

  An ordinary recruit might have retained possession of such a note as a memento of his first day as an officer in one of the world’s oldest and proudest intelligence services. But the man known as Peter Marlowe was no ordinary recruit. What’s more, he had worked in places where such a note could cost a man his life. And so after reading it—twice, as was his custom—he burned it in the bathroom sink and washed the ashes down the drain. Then he went to the room’s small arrow-slit of a window and gazed across the sea toward the Isle of Wight. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether he had made the worst mistake of his life.

  His real name, needless to say, was not Peter Marlowe. It was Christopher Keller, which was intriguing in its own right, for as far as Her Majesty’s Government was concerned, Keller had been dead for some twenty-five years. Consequently, he was thought to be the first decedent to serve in any department of British intelligence since Glyndwr Michael, the homeless Welshman whose corpse had been used by the great wartime deceivers to feed false documents to Nazi Germany as part of Operation Mincemeat.

  The Directing Staff of the Fort, however, did not know any of this about their new recruit. In fact, they knew almost nothing at all. They did not know, for example, that he was a veteran of the elite Special Air Service, that he still held the record for the regiment’s forty-mile endurance trek across the rugged Brecon Beacons of South Wales, or that he had achieved the highest score ever in the Killing House, the SAS’s infamous training facility where members honed their close-quarters combat skills. A further examination of his records—all of which had been sealed by order of the prime minister himself—would have revealed that in the late 1980s, during a particularly violent period of the war in Northern Ireland, he had been inserted into West Belfast, where he lived among the city’s Roman Catholics and ran agents of penetration into the Irish Republican Army. Those same records would have mentioned, in rather vague terms, an incident at a farmhouse in South Armagh where Keller, his cover blown, had been taken for interrogation and execution. The exact circumstances surrounding his escape were murky, though it involved the death of four hardened IRA men, two of whom had been virtually cut to pieces.

  After his hasty evacuation from Northern Ireland, Keller returned to SAS headquarters at Hereford for what he thought would be a long rest and a stint as an instructor. But after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he was assigned to a Sabre desert warfare squadron and dispatched to western Iraq, where he searched for Saddam Hussein’s lethal arsenal of Scud missiles. On the night of January 28, 1991, Keller and his team located a launcher about one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad and radioed the coordinates to their commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later a formation of coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert. But in a disastrous case of friendly fire, the aircraft attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded the entire unit was lost, including Keller.

  In truth, he had survived the incident without a scratch, which was his knack. His first instinct was to radio his base and request extraction. Instead, enraged by the incompetence of his superiors, he started walking. Concealed beneath the robe and headdress of a desert Arab, and highly trained in the art of clandestine movement, he made his way through the coalition forces and slipped undetected into Syria. From there, he hiked westward across Turkey, Greece, and Italy until finally he washed ashore on the rugged island of Corsica, where he fell into the waiting arms of Don Anton Orsati, a crime figure whose ancient family of Corsican bandits specialized in murder for hire.

  The don gave Keller a villa and a woman to heal his wounds. Then, when Keller was rested, he gave him work. With his northern European looks and SAS training, Keller was able to fulfill contracts that were beyond the capabilities of Orsati’s Corsican-born assassins, the taddunaghiu. Posing as an executive for Orsati’s small olive oil company, Keller roamed Western Europe for the better part of twenty-five years, killing at the don’s behest. They accepted him as one of their own, the Corsicans, and he repaid their generosity by adopting their ways. He dressed as a Corsican, ate and drank as a Corsican, and viewed the rest of the world with a Corsican’s fatalistic disdain. He even wore a Corsican talisman around his neck—a lump of red coral in the shape of a hand—to ward off the evil eye. Now, at long last, he had come home, to an ancient fortress of gray stone overlooking a cold granite sea. They were going to teach him to be a proper British spy. But first he would have to learn how to be an Englishman again.

  The other members of Keller’s intake were more in keeping with MI6’s traditional tastes—white, male, and members of the middle or privileged classes. Moreover, all were recent graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge. All but Thomas Finch, who had attended the London School of Economics and worked as an investment banker in the City before finally submitting to MI6’s repeated advances. Finch spoke Chinese fluently and thought himself especially clever. During their first session he had complained, only partially in jest, that he was taking a substantial cut in pay for the honor of serving his country. Keller could have made the same boast, but had the good sense not to. He told his fellow recruits he had worked in the retail food business and that in his spare time he enjoyed mountaineering, both of which happened to be true. As for his age—he was by far the oldest of the lot, perhaps the oldest recruit ever—he claimed to be something of a late bloomer, which was not at all the case.

  The course was known formally as the IONEC, the Intelligence Officers New Entry Course. Its purpose was to prepare a recruit for an entry-level job at Vauxhall Cross, though additional training would be necessary before he would be ready to operate in the field, lest he do irreparable harm to his country’s interests or his own career. There were two primary instructors—Andy Mayhew, big, ginger, garrulous, and Tony Quill, a whippet-thin former agent-runner who, it was said, could charm the habit off a nun and steal her rosary when she wasn’t looking. Vauxhall Cross had scoured the records of both men to determine whether, in their previous lives, they might have encountered an SAS operative named Christopher Keller. They had not. Mayhew was largely a headquarters man. Quill was Iron C
urtain and Middle East. Neither had ever set foot in Northern Ireland.

  The first portion of the course dealt with MI6 itself—its history, its successes, its stunning failures, its structure. It was far smaller than its American and Russian counterparts but punched above its weight, as Quill was fond of saying, thanks to the native cunning and natural deceptiveness of those who ran it. Whereas the Americans depended on technology, MI6 specialized in human intelligence, and its officers were regarded as the finest recruiters and runners of agents in the business. The hard work of convincing men and women to betray their countries or organizations was carried out by the IB, the intelligence branch. Approximately three hundred and fifty officers were assigned to it; most worked in British embassies around the world, under the safety of diplomatic cover. Another eight hundred or so worked in the general services division. GS officers specialized in technical matters or held administrative positions in MI6’s various geographic controllerates. Each controllerate was headed by a controller who reported to the chief. Though Mayhew and Quill did not know it, “C” had already determined that the recruit known as Peter Marlowe would not be working in any of the existing controllerates. He would be a controllerate unto himself. A controllerate of one.

  Having poured the institutional concrete, Mayhew and Quill turned their attention to the tradecraft of human intelligence—the maintenance of proper cover, detecting and shaking surveillance, secret writing, dead drops, brush contacts, memory drills. For a spy’s memory, said Quill, was his only friend in the world. And then, of course, there were the long and detailed lectures on how to spot and then successfully recruit human sources of intelligence. Keller had an unfair advantage over his classmates; he had recruited and run agents in a place where one small misstep would result in an atrocious death. In fact, he was quite certain he could have taught Mayhew and Quill a thing or two about conducting a clandestine meeting in such a way that both agent and officer survived the encounter. Instead, in the classrooms of the main wing, he adopted the demeanor of a quiet and attentive pupil, eager to learn but not to ingratiate or impress. He left that to Finch and to Baker, a literature student from Oxford who was already making notes for his first spy novel. Keller spoke only when spoken to and never once raised his hand or volunteered an answer. He was as invisible as a man could be in a cramped classroom of twelve students. But then that was his special talent—making himself invisible to those around him.