The Network - Jason Elliot [26]
Since its area of specialisation is the use of human assets, the Firm’s officers engage in four parallel tasks: targeting, cultivating, recruiting and then running their assets. Those in the know are said to be indoctrinated; Seethrough’s philosophy is to keep the number of people indoctrinated into an operation to a minimum, and is emphatic that I discuss the material he’s about to show me with no one but himself unless specifically instructed otherwise. My questions, he said, will go to him. My ideas will go to him, and my contact reports will go to him. I’m to write nothing down.
‘This one’s at the request of the Americans,’ he says, opening the uppermost file. ‘Provisional code name is Elixir.’ He pushes the opened file towards me with a laminated companion list of commonly used acronyms and code words with their explanations – from Actor, meaning the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, to Zulu, meaning Greenwich Mean Time. The contents of the file are divided into several sections, which we examine in turn.
The first is a description of three civilian airline crashes. Each plane has dropped out of the sky shortly after take-off, killing all on board. The three incidents have been briefly reported in the press, but none of the photographs I’m looking at has ever made it into the papers. They’re too gruesome. The debris from the first aircraft is strewn over a mile, along with the bodies of 200 passengers, many of whose charred and mutilated remains are still strapped into their seats. The second and third aircraft have crashed into water, and their wreckage has been gathered and secretly reassembled in long and dangerous recovery operations. Here too the passengers have been photographed as they were found, their bloated and limbless corpses still attached to their seats. In each case the accidents have been publicly blamed on engine failure, which official investigations have later confirmed. The most recent of them occurred only a few months ago.
‘Even the airlines don’t know this,’ says Seethrough, ‘but the culprit in all three is the same.’ He turns to another section in the file, and shows me a US Defense Department image of an FIM-92.
Better known by its common name: the Stinger missile.
‘Not a shred of doubt,’ he went on. ‘The Americans have verified it and we’ve double-checked at Fort Halstead. There’s a machine there that can identify the exact stock of explosive from a tiny fragment of wreckage. Stingers in every case.’
At the mention of Fort Halstead I think involuntarily of my strolls with the Baroness through the gardens of Chevening House, and I picture the incongruous-looking palm trees swaying above the rear porch. Fort Halstead, the secret research establishment labelled only as ‘works’ on ordinary maps, is over a mile away at the top of the hill that overlooks the village, but on a still day we could often hear the faint cry of the warning alarm, at the sound of which the Baroness’s finger would rise like a conductor’s in anticipation of the muffled thump of a subterranean explosion. Somewhere in the complex, more recently, white-coated technicians had identified residues of TNT from Stinger warheads, matching its chemical profile against a database of known explosive stocks.
‘Probably by spectrometric analysis of the isotopic ratios,’ I say because I know a thing or two about explosives.
‘Yes, quite,’ agrees Seethrough, looking up for a moment. ‘PTCP reckons they came through Iran but we don’t know for sure. And if you can’t stop the flow, you go back to the source.’
‘Afghanistan. Where we handed them out in the first place.’
‘To your old friends,’ he adds with a dark look.
‘Only some of them.’
‘Now they’re easy pickings for al-Qaeda, and you know what that means.’
‘Yes, I do. In Arabic it means base or capital or seat of operations. But the way you pronounce it, it sounds like al-qa’da, which means buttocks.’
‘I refer,’ says Seethrough, clearing his throat and choosing to overlook this impudence, ‘to the threat, not the etymology.’
The threat is an obvious