Adrian Magson - Deception

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.

‘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 some 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.’