Kompromat

Lillian Peters pondered her options. There was always a temptation to rush to judgement, but she shuddered to think of the consequences if they got it wrong.

She made up her mind. ‘I would propose that we send a holding report up to Dame Jane. We tell her that we are still considering the file.’

Gupta held up his hand.

‘Yes, Mr Gupta.’

‘I hope I have not seemed too negative. There may still be a chance of reaching a firm conclusion, one way or the other. There are images which are obscure and grainy, as in the Skuratov case, and then there are images where the face and other features have been distorted, as a result of a deliberate act of pixelation. Let’s blow up those images again. If they have been deliberately pixelated, we may be able to depixelate them.’

He had their attention. These boffins, Lillian Peters thought, often waited till the last moment before coming up with the goods.

Later that day, Dame Jane Porter went to see the home secretary, with no officials present. Her two close aides, Giles Mortimer and Holly Percy, knew most of what was going on. But they didn’t need to know everything. Not yet anyway.

Mabel Killick ushered her visitor to the sofa in the corner of her large office in the Home Office. She closed the door and pulled up a chair.

‘Well, Jane?’ Mabel Killick was at her most charming. ‘How are you getting on? What’s the verdict?’

‘They’re still working on the Kempinski video,’ Jane Porter said. ‘They hope to depixelate the images.’

‘Ah,’ the home secretary nodded knowledgeably. ‘When do they expect a result?’

‘Hard to say. Apparently this is a long and difficult process with no guarantee of success.’

‘What about the memory-stick the Russians gave Edward Barnard? How are things going there? Are all those documents fake too? The Russians seem to be making a habit of it at the moment, don’t they? Fake news seems to be all the rage. You just don’t know what to believe.’

‘I’m not sure, Home Secretary, that the memory-stick documents are in fact fake,’ Jane Porter said. ‘We’ve been going through them one by one. Virtually all of them are, or appear to be, genuine documents emanating from the PM’s office. The narrative they portray is indeed the narrative that happened: the run-up to the PM’s Bloomberg speech, the PM’s manuscript additions to the manifesto, late in the day, indicating his personal commitment to the Referendum. Those are all genuine verifiable documents, though how they got into the hands of the Russians to form the basis of their Brexit dossier, if I may call it that, is still not clear. That, as you can imagine, is a matter of great concern to us. If Number 10 itself is not secure, who and what is?’

‘Hold on a moment,’ the home secretary said. ‘What about the exchanges the prime minister had with Fred Malkin, Conservative Party chairman, about huge cash transfers into Conservative Party funds in exchange for the Referendum commitment? Surely to heaven those documents aren’t genuine.’

Dame Jane Porter sighed. ‘Things are not looking good. And it wasn’t just the promise Jeremy Hartley gave in the Bloomberg speech. The manifesto commitment was even more explicit. Of course, the PM never expected that he would ever have to deliver on that commitment. The Lib Dems would always have vetoed it. But then the Conservatives won an outright majority and the PM was hoist by his own petard.’

Mabel Killick stood up and walked over to the window. She gazed out at traffic on Horseferry Road. She’d had to take many difficult decisions in her long tenure as home secretary, but this was one of the most difficult.

She turned towards her guest and said in the gravest tones, ‘We’re going to have to pursue this one wherever it leads, even if it leads to the door of the prime minister himself. You’ll have to bring the Met in, and the financial boys. What happened to the money you are talking about?’

Her voice trailed off. For a brief moment she put her head in her hands. If the prime minister had to step down, or was forced out, or – thoughts of the Cayman Islands and illicit personal accounts popped unbidden into her head – yes, conceivably, even went to prison, then who on earth would succeed him?

‘We must keep this one under the tightest of wraps till we’re ready to spring,’ she instructed.

Jane Porter looked down at the home secretary’s trademark leopard-print kitten heels. Mabel Killick was always ready to spring, she thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lyudmila Markova and her fearsome, all-female team flew down to St Petersburg on the afternoon of Thursday May 26th, 2016. A squad car was waiting to take them to their hotel. Next morning, dressed in full riot gear, they headed for FSB St Petersburg headquarters on Cherniavski Street.

At precisely 8:30a.m. they entered the building, flashed their passes at the security desk and belted up the stairs to the second floor.