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Back A Shadow Intelligence Save as PDF
Chapters (58)
  1. Cover
  2. Also by Oliver Harris
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. NINE
  12. TEN
  13. ELEVEN
  14. TWELVE
  15. THIRTEEN
  16. FOURTEEN
  17. FIFTEEN
  18. SIXTEEN
  19. SEVENTEEN
  20. EIGHTEEN
  21. NINETEEN
  22. TWENTY
  23. TWENTY-ONE
  24. TWENTY-TWO
  25. TWENTY-THREE
  26. TWENTY-FOUR
  27. TWENTY-FIVE
  28. TWENTY-SIX
  29. TWENTY-SEVEN
  30. TWENTY-EIGHT
  31. TWENTY-NINE
  32. THIRTY
  33. THIRTY-ONE
  34. THIRTY-TWO
  35. THIRTY-THREE
  36. THIRTY-FOUR
  37. THIRTY-FIVE
  38. THIRTY-SIX
  39. THIRTY-SEVEN
  40. THIRTY-EIGHT
  41. THIRTY-NINE
  42. FORTY
  43. FORTY-ONE
  44. FORTY-TWO
  45. FORTY-THREE
  46. FORTY-FOUR
  47. FORTY-FIVE
  48. FORTY-SIX
  49. FORTY-SEVEN
  50. FORTY-EIGHT
  51. FORTY-NINE
  52. FIFTY
  53. FIFTY-ONE
  54. FIFTY-TWO
  55. FIFTY-THREE
  56. FIFTY-FOUR
  57. FIFTY-FIVE
  58. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

That left me with twelve hours in Zagreb. I called Olivia Gresham and set up a meeting with her property-developer contact in Astana. Then I found a place to print while-you-wait business cards. When I had the cards in the name of Toby Bell, I printed out graphs and spreadsheets concerning the Kazakh economy. My cover was going to be a consultant for investors in Central Asia: something that put me between business and government, with plenty of room for unaccounted cash and minimal infrastructure. As far as I could tell, that was what the word ‘consultant’ had been invented for. And businessmen were unthreatening compared with other covers: universally explicable, their politics transparent.

I set up Toby Bell’s social media, club membership, dating sites. Used the usual company in Hyderabad to stock my new life with friends and contacts. In a shopping mall on the edge of Zagreb’s old town I bought thermals, boots, a couple of pre-paid phones. I loaded up the phone with apps – privacy vault, military-grade GPS navigation, police scanner and an app that detected radio signals, including those emitted by surveillance devices. I set the phones to upload data to a cloud account and erase all contents if anyone entered the wrong password.

Hotels in Astana were one-star or five-star. I decided to head for the very economical Lion Hotel in central Astana, but didn’t book in advance. December in Kazakhstan wasn’t going to be overcrowded.

Evotec sent through passenger lists for all commercial flights in and out of Kazakhstan over the past week. I searched them for any females aged twenty-five to forty, but there were none of the covers I’d known Joanna use. Same with arrests and hospital records. I was going to have to take a look myself.

I marked up a satellite map of Astana with government buildings, police stations and transport options out of the city. Then I added the address of the landline registered to Nurlan Pokatilov from which I’d been called.

At dawn I got up, switched on some lights, tuned the TV to BBC World News, dropped the keys in the lockbox, caught a train to Zagreb airport and flew to Kiev.

*

I had to stay a night in Ukraine, which felt okay. I thought it would sharpen me up. And I had spent time there with Joanna. Some superstition made me want to touch base. I brushed up my Russian and Kazakh on the flight. It wasn’t so unusual in Six to have minimal time to immerse in a language before deployment, but this felt rushed. Like turning up naked.