Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Also by Oliver Harris
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‘Sure. In return for granting me access to her work while over here, the details of the set-up and information on the search for her so far.’
He nodded slowly, mentally checking through the requests one by one.
‘I need to be clear,’ he said. ‘We’re not in a position to go behind the backs of the British intelligence services.’
‘You’ve been managing so far.’
He sighed. ‘We’re not entirely renegade.’
‘Who do you liaise with at Six?’ I asked.
‘We have a few points of contact. I can’t give you names.’
‘But you haven’t told them about this?’
‘No. Why?’
‘She came to me, not them. There was a reason for that.’
EIGHTEEN
I gave him my footage to send through to analysts. In return I got a glimpse of the hunt for Joanna so far. Staff in three Vectis offices, London, Berlin and Moscow, were trawling intercepts for any whisper. Walker gave the impression of big data coming in, which could leave you with a lot of haystack and no needle. He had contacts in intelligence companies that had more experience in the region but he was reluctant to go begging for help, as they were all competitors for the Saracen contract.
There were a few more complications. MI6, and the UK government generally, were unhappy about Vectis operating in Kazakhstan: a planned £2 billion sale of BAE helicopters to the Kazakh defence forces meant UK plc were putting a lot of effort into presenting Kazakhstan as a clean place to do business. Neither Saracen nor Vectis were helping.
I got an hour to look through the reports Joanna had delivered. I had to do it in the Vectis office, at an isolated desk, no phone, watched over by Walker himself, passing over paperwork deemed not too sensitive, clicking files for me.
It wasn’t worth the effort.
She had spent most of her time monitoring what Vectis called IMGs – Issue Motivated Groups. As well as Testimony, these included the usual suspects: Greenpeace, Amnesty, opposition groups within Kazakhstan in so far as they were allowed to exist. Additionally, Joanna had mapped power structures: clans, families, regions, departments, all webbed around the presidential family itself; what, in Six, we referred to jokingly as bribe maps. The EU and the UN were concerned about Saracen. Laws were being thrown around by rivals and their lobbyists. Shareholders got jumpy. Alongside the IMGs was what Vectis presented as ‘Civil Unrest Analysis’: the big picture.