Darke Mission (14 page)

Tom Watts couldn't tell whether this was a load of old tosh, or one of those occasions when a major hedge fund got itself a lucky break. He had checked all the FSA and FCA files on MAM's three employees before today's meeting. The French dude was a bit too new to have much of a file and both Darke and Naismith's records were clean, spotless, whiter than white. Watts' FSA and FCA record at nailing financial miscreants was second to none. He was partly responsible for digging out some Madoff connections in London when he was in his twenties and he helped bring two of the LIBOR fixers to light. Jail terms and substantial fines ensued. He knew that if this MAM incident was an insider trading case and he proved it then his regulatory star would burn even brighter in the night sky.

After a minute's pondering, Tom Watts said, “I've one final question, Mr Darke.” Watts had racked his brain and forensically studied every communication that MAM's Compliance department had given him. Their file was comprehensive, detailed with no time gaps or omissions. Any content, Bloomberg, BlackBerry, landline or email communication that December day was in his sticky mitts and those mitts were not yielding any wrongdoing. He could ask for their personal mobile phone records and he might still do that. At this juncture, however, he did not have the size of a gnat's eyelids piece of dirt on these guys. He had one more shot.

“Do you Mr Darke or your colleagues have any Greek family or friends?” asked Watts.

JJ looked at Toby then Yves-Jacques straight in the eye. “Well, I don't,” said JJ. “How about you guys?” Toby said he hadn't and Yves-Jacques shook his head. Good job he wasn't Bulgarian.

Tom Watts looked a little deflated, eye candy was already off her seat, ready to leave and the note taker had closed his pad and tucked his pen away in his man bag. JJ and Tom Watts both knew that Round One had gone to MAM. One of them hoped it was a one round contest and while the other did not, Watts' sad little chopper expression suggested that he wasn't thinking there was going to be a Round Two. JJ was also moderately amused that their answer to Tom Watts' hopeful silver bullet question was totally truthful. Neither he, nor Toby, nor Yves-Jacques did have any Greek family or friends. Marcus Whyte did, but Marcus hadn't been asked to the meeting, Marcus Whyte didn't do any of the trades and, from an FCA perspective, Marcus Whyte was a ghost.

After the FCA contingent left, Toby and Yves-Jacques were all full of the joys of life. JJ was a little more reserved. He knew that the FCA could return with more questions if they felt the need. The only real part of their story that seemed less than titanium robust was the apparent spontaneity of Toby and him just deciding to go to the office at two in the morning, all Macallaned up. If the FCA came back for mobile phone records then the gig was up. JJ could still argue that there were no net losers from their actions that night. The gainers were MAM and its employees, outside investors who were already short Greek bonds and equities and short USD/JPY. The losers were holders of Greek bonds, equities and those long USD/JPY. He had almost convinced himself it was a zero sum game, no overall winners or losers, just a redistribution of capital.

JJ left for the Marsden and then home that night reasonably content with his day's work. The only thing that bugged him was the phrase, in the public domain. Zero sum game or not, if the phone calls from Marcus Whyte or Toby ever saw the light of day then it was that requirement that would send them all to buggery in a handbasket.

* * *

Bai Ling was lying nearly flat out in her gadget full seat in the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane, first class, aisle seat, starboard side, heading from Boston's Logan airport to Heathrow. As a child she had preferred the window seat on a plane, in fact she still preferred the window seat if truth be told. Her left knee, however, hurt like hell even though it had been a few weeks since Boston. She needed the aisle seat for ease of access, but it was still awkward and incredibly annoying. The bullet hadn't smashed her kneecap to smithereens, but the knee is a very complex mechanism, made up of muscle, ligaments, cartilages and bone. The 9mm projectile had more or less destroyed her medial collateral ligament, one of the four major ligaments of the knee. Normally, certain skiing injuries and contact sports like American football – helmet to knee action – can severely damage this ligament but, hey, a stray bullet can do the trick too. The medical profession grades this type of ligament injury from one to three, with three being the most severe. Bai Ling's was about one and a half. She still had a small limp but the doctors had said that with regular physio and then light exercise that may go away. It hadn't yet. She wouldn't be running the 100 metres in Olympic qualifying time though and, more distressing for Bai Ling was that she would not be capable of any roundhouse kicks to the head on anybody taller than an oompa loompa.

Psychologically Bai Ling was still coming to terms with her career ending injury. She had gone to the NSA's offices in Boston as ordered by Kevin Morgan, got in touch with Jane Hayden and joined the listening post team, dialling into chatter, email surveillance and all the recent communications from millions of people in and around the Boston area. By that time, the death toll had amounted to three people, including a kid, with 176 injured, some severely. The suspects emerged as two brothers of Chechen descent but who had been in the United States for several years. The call came in that one of the suspects had been shot dead by the Boston Police in the Watertown area, where the MIT campus was situated. An MIT police officer had been shot and later died in hospital. A manhunt was underway for the second brother, nineteen years old and the younger of the two Tsarnaevs as it turned out. Normally, a primarily office based surveillance team would not be sent out to a conflict zone. However, the security agencies were still smarting because they had had no warnings about the Boston bombs and, frankly, very little information about the whos, whys and wherefores of this attack. The whos were becoming clearer but the other critical information was still lacking.

‘Zhang, you need to go with the team.' Bai Ling could still recall Jane Hayden telling her that although she had just arrived, she was to join her new found colleagues, Tim Peterson and Jerzy Kowalski in their technology bursting silver GMC SUV and get as near to the MIT campus as possible. Their job was to listen to all communications that were near at hand, and any inter-agency talk. Neither Jane Hayden nor Kevin Morgan wanted to be seen as doing little in the midst of what might have been the most devastating attack on American soil since 9/11.

“Are you packing?” Tim asked Bai Ling as they parked up their truck.

“No, I didn't have time to go to my apartment and pick anything up. I came straight here after I got Morgan's call,” said Bai Ling.

“I thought as much,” said Tim. “Here,” and with that he handed Bai Ling a 357 SIG Sauer handgun, holstered. The CIA and FBI tended to equip their agents with Glocks but for some reason the listening agency often preferred semi-automatic SIG Sauers. The variant handed to Bai Ling was non-reflective black, weighed just over 30 ounces, 7 ½ inches long with a 4 ½ inch barrel. This one had 12 rounds in it though the 357 could take up to a 15 round magazine. She was comfortable enough with her borrowed firearm as she strapped it on but did not feel that there was much chance that she'd use it.

The Boston Police, FBI and Homeland Security had locked down the Watertown area near Boston. Agents and officers were conducting house to house searches, there were roadblocks everywhere and surveillance helicopters black dotted the skies. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got out of this one, then Houdini was surely a Chechen. Bai Ling and her two colleagues parked up on Franklin Street. There was a lot of activity in the night, most of it official but the occasional local pea brain who felt the need to accost the authorities for one protest reason or the other did make the odd appearance.

After about forty-five minutes of listening and surveying nothing very illuminating, Bai Ling said she was going to step outside for some air. Tim and Jerzy were fully in the zone of their work and Bai Ling was feeling a bit claustrophobic. She was leaning against the back of the silver SUV checking her own emails on her smartphone when suddenly there was chaos. An African American man, dressed like a rapper with no style was running amok, firing a gun at a couple of uniformed police officers and bellowing about his human rights. Bai Ling felt an agonising sharp jolt in her left leg and crumpled to the ground. Jerzy heard the commotion and Bai Ling's screams and came hurtling out of the back of the van. Bai Ling was clutching her leg, which was now in excruciating pain, there was blood all over her trousers and spilt on the road. Jerzy comforted her, called the paramedics immediately and got Tim to call the office.

The styleless rapper dude was shot by an FBI agent but not fatally. He was a known drug dealer who lived and dealt in the area, who was out that night doing his evil work, pissed as a newt and high as a kite. As he was publically relieving himself he came across a pistol that had been chucked in some bushes. Whatever lunacy triggered that part of his brain that he should go on a shooting spree, most likely consumption of his own product, triggered it was and bang, bang he went. To add insult to severely painful injury, Bai Ling discovered that the pistol was a Ruger 9mm semi-automatic that Tsarnaev the younger had lobbed before he was captured that very same night, hiding in a boat in a backyard. Bai Ling wasn't prone to swearing but ‘for fuck's sake' did emit from her small oriental mouth more than once that night and in the following few days.

Under normal circumstances, once Bai Ling had recovered sufficiently from her wounds and her mental and physical rehabilitation was on track, she would have gone back to her NSA job. More than unfortunately, however, the hunt for the Tsarnaevs was one high profile, real time media fest. No sloping about in some Pakistani shit hole looking for the American people's most wanted. Oh no, grumbled Bai Ling, every media channel on the continent was in Boston, hoping to catch a televised glimpse of the tousle topped teenager, who looked way too much like a young Bob Dylan to be a murderous bastard. Well, they got their glimpse or six, but bad news bears for Bai Ling, they also got more than a glimpse of the injured NSA agent. Her strained visage was all over
Sky News
,
Channel 5
, any media outlet you could think of. The reporters and journos dug and dug over coming days. They worked out that she was not a long-standing LINEAR employee. Anyway, what would a LINEAR employee be doing with a holstered firearm – that annoyed the crap out of Bai Ling too, she never even got a shot off at the idiot druggy dude – lying on the ground, bleeding, crying in a Boston suburb in the middle of a manhunt. It didn't take too long for the truth to out that she was an NSA agent.

Well, that was the end of that. Spooks can be many things and they can come from all sorts of backgrounds, with all sorts of personal baggage. One thing they had to be, really really had to be was – anonymous. Bai Ling was so anonymous now that she even had to turn down an interview with Oprah. As she lay in Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, she got a phone call from Kevin Morgan and flowers and a visit from Jane Hayden.

Bai Ling's parents and younger brother lived and worked in the Hong Kong retail business. She used to send part of her NSA monthly salary back there regularly, and they promised to visit her soon. They were extremely relieved that their beloved daughter and sister was alive and recovering. It was during Jane Hayden's visit that Bai Ling fully realised that she could not return to the NSA. Ms Hayden was a forty-five year old NSA veteran, who looked a lot like the American actress Elizabeth Mitchell.

“How are you holding up, Bai Ling?” asked Jane.

“The doctors think I'll get much of the use of my knee back in about ten weeks,” Bai Ling replied but with no positive emotion involved in her response. “It hurts a lot, I'm bored rigid lying here and I'm gutted about the whole incident. If I'd just stayed in the SUV…”

“You can't beat yourself up about that,” interrupted Ms Hayden. “It was a natural thing to do, step outside the hot tin can and get air. You were just extremely unlucky. As Lauren Oliver said in
Before I Fall
: ‘Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions'. Your knee collided with the last of the eight rounds in that Ruger. It's changed your life and it was a shit dose of bad luck.”

“Whatever,” retorted Bai Ling. She was in no mood for fancy quotes or a dollop of official sympathy that would be forgotten by the weekend. “What happens next?”

Jane Hayden wasn't too far into her explanation of what happened next before Bai Ling started to feel progressively worse. As expected, while her injury would not have prevented her returning to the NSA, even to her undercover role at LINEAR, the media attention had transformed her into a B-list celebrity. There was more or less no option but to retire her. The financial package wasn't bad. Under the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) Bai Ling, as a permanent employee, would qualify for their three tier compensation package which covered basic benefits depending on age, length of service and average high salary over her most recent three year employment. On top of the basic benefits and disability benefits, agent Zhang also qualified for some monetary release from the Social Security Fund and a Thrift Savings Plan. In total, Bai Ling was in line for a decent stipend for life. Good enough for a twenty-nine year old, but not exactly what she had planned. Jane Hayden unloaded the rest of her information, including reminding Bai Ling of her continued commitment to The Espionage Act of 1917, a US law with similar components to the UK's Official Secrets Act.

Bai Ling couldn't really get to sleep properly on the plane. Her seat was great, turned into a nearly bed easily. It wasn't too constraining for a slim woman and the new mood lighting in the cabin was genuinely soporific. Her knee hurt though. The flight was about half way across the pond now and though it wasn't quite the classic ‘red-eye' she knew she was going to be drained when she arrived at Terminal 4. Bai Ling readjusted her gammy leg and positioning in the seat. She thought she'd try to get some brief shut-eye before all the cabin's lights went on blazing and the stewardess shoogled awake anyone daring to sleep close to landing time.