The bungalow looked as normal as any other house in Elgar Avenue. Its pebble-dashed walls dated back to the seventies when the house was built and such exteriors were ever-so briefly fashionable, which now gave it a quaint appearance. Its front garden had been long paved over for extra parking like every other house in the street, despite the perfectly adequate garage attached to the side of the house, but flowerbeds full of blooming tulips, daffodils and bluebells provided a wash of colour to offset the concrete. Its pristine white front door and matching windowsills were all perfectly maintained and looked as if they’d been spruced up recently.
All the neighbours agreed the house was a credit to the owner, in fact, and some wondered how she managed to keep everything looking so nice, given her circumstances.
She was in a wheelchair, after all, and found it difficult getting out and about. That was why she hardly left the house and barely used the Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in her garage, despite it being adjusted so she could drive it even with her physical challenges.
However, they knew she was a proud woman too. She never accepted any offers of help and always said no if someone suggested carrying her shopping inside for her.
In fact, no one in Elgar Avenue had ever been invited inside her unassuming bungalow. If anyone knocked on her door, nine times out of ten she wouldn’t answer — even when she was clearly home. Tinted windows ensured no one could look inside her home to check, either.
The woman, a retired schoolteacher apparently, was a very private person and her neighbours respected that. After all, no one wanted to live next door to a busybody who was into everyone else’s affairs.
That’s why Cassandra Mathews from Anglesey fitted into the local community just fine. So much so, in fact, it was easy to forget she was even a part of it.
Which was exactly how the owner of the house wanted it.
Because she didn’t want visitors. She didn’t want to make idle chit-chat with the neighbours or have people pop around for a cup of tea and a natter.
Quite the opposite in fact.
She needed to be anonymous and unseen.
Her life depended on it. Especially now.
The woman pretending to be Cassandra Mathews was wanted by some of the very worst people in the world. Her face and real name were on watch lists. Right then, algorithms were scanning social media networks, CCTV footage and other databases looking for anything that would reveal her location.
And if they found even so much as a hint as to where she was? They would come with guns and body bags and do everything they could to ensure the woman ended up in an unmarked grave somewhere — if she was lucky.
The woman knew discovery was inevitable, though. No matter the great lengths she’d undertaken to remain hidden, they would find her eventually.
Thinking of her enemies sent a shiver of fear through her, as it always did. Her hand drifted to the pistol wedged between her side and the armrest of her wheelchair. It was an FN P35, known as the Browning Hi-Power, the favourite sidearm of the SAS. Hers was the newer 2022 version, that came with a seventeen-round magazine. Apart from the increase in firepower, she liked the new safety catch design. It was easier to disengage than the older models. All it took was a wiggle of her thumb and the pistol was ready to fire.
It was a big gun, and heavy too, but that was good. She wasn’t pissing about. That was why she’d loaded the Browning with hollow point bullets that expanded on impact with any soft target, causing catastrophic damage on their way.
After all, she’d been shot herself once and she didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to try again.
Hence the fake identity, the security at the house, and the gun. All topped off with a healthy dose of paranoia.
Reassured by her gun’s cold touch, she still checked the security monitors that covered all the approaches to her house. Just to be sure. Just to be safe.
No one was in sight.
Elgar Avenue was as quiet as it always was during the week.
Just the way she liked it. Good.
She glanced at the clock on one of her many monitors. It was time.
Pulling her keyboard and mouse closer, the woman checked the package once more, then opened the connection to her target. For a moment, it seemed to resist, and she thought that something had gone wrong. Perhaps her backdoor had been discovered after all this time, and they’d shut her out. If so, all her work would be for nothing. There was no Plan B after all.
Then, the door opened, and she was in. She moved quickly from system to system, diving deep, until she was back where it all began.
This was the point of no return. Every part of her carefully controlled life would change if she proceeded. The woman would no longer be able to hide in the shadows. The danger she faced would multiply a thousandfold.
She wished there was another way, a safer way, but there wasn’t.
It was do or die.
The woman hit send. The package was gone less than an instant later.
It was with them now. Already at work.
She could only imagine the chaos it would cause.
The war it would start.
‘God help us all,’ she whispered as she closed the connection.
All the neighbours agreed the house was a credit to the owner, in fact, and some wondered how she managed to keep everything looking so nice, given her circumstances.
She was in a wheelchair, after all, and found it difficult getting out and about. That was why she hardly left the house and barely used the Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in her garage, despite it being adjusted so she could drive it even with her physical challenges.
However, they knew she was a proud woman too. She never accepted any offers of help and always said no if someone suggested carrying her shopping inside for her.
In fact, no one in Elgar Avenue had ever been invited inside her unassuming bungalow. If anyone knocked on her door, nine times out of ten she wouldn’t answer — even when she was clearly home. Tinted windows ensured no one could look inside her home to check, either.
The woman, a retired schoolteacher apparently, was a very private person and her neighbours respected that. After all, no one wanted to live next door to a busybody who was into everyone else’s affairs.
That’s why Cassandra Mathews from Anglesey fitted into the local community just fine. So much so, in fact, it was easy to forget she was even a part of it.
Which was exactly how the owner of the house wanted it.
Because she didn’t want visitors. She didn’t want to make idle chit-chat with the neighbours or have people pop around for a cup of tea and a natter.
Quite the opposite in fact.
She needed to be anonymous and unseen.
Her life depended on it. Especially now.
The woman pretending to be Cassandra Mathews was wanted by some of the very worst people in the world. Her face and real name were on watch lists. Right then, algorithms were scanning social media networks, CCTV footage and other databases looking for anything that would reveal her location.
And if they found even so much as a hint as to where she was? They would come with guns and body bags and do everything they could to ensure the woman ended up in an unmarked grave somewhere — if she was lucky.
The woman knew discovery was inevitable, though. No matter the great lengths she’d undertaken to remain hidden, they would find her eventually.
Thinking of her enemies sent a shiver of fear through her, as it always did. Her hand drifted to the pistol wedged between her side and the armrest of her wheelchair. It was an FN P35, known as the Browning Hi-Power, the favourite sidearm of the SAS. Hers was the newer 2022 version, that came with a seventeen-round magazine. Apart from the increase in firepower, she liked the new safety catch design. It was easier to disengage than the older models. All it took was a wiggle of her thumb and the pistol was ready to fire.
It was a big gun, and heavy too, but that was good. She wasn’t pissing about. That was why she’d loaded the Browning with hollow point bullets that expanded on impact with any soft target, causing catastrophic damage on their way.
After all, she’d been shot herself once and she didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to try again.
Hence the fake identity, the security at the house, and the gun. All topped off with a healthy dose of paranoia.
Reassured by her gun’s cold touch, she still checked the security monitors that covered all the approaches to her house. Just to be sure. Just to be safe.
No one was in sight.
Elgar Avenue was as quiet as it always was during the week.
Just the way she liked it. Good.
She glanced at the clock on one of her many monitors. It was time.
Pulling her keyboard and mouse closer, the woman checked the package once more, then opened the connection to her target. For a moment, it seemed to resist, and she thought that something had gone wrong. Perhaps her backdoor had been discovered after all this time, and they’d shut her out. If so, all her work would be for nothing. There was no Plan B after all.
Then, the door opened, and she was in. She moved quickly from system to system, diving deep, until she was back where it all began.
This was the point of no return. Every part of her carefully controlled life would change if she proceeded. The woman would no longer be able to hide in the shadows. The danger she faced would multiply a thousandfold.
She wished there was another way, a safer way, but there wasn’t.
It was do or die.
The woman hit send. The package was gone less than an instant later.
It was with them now. Already at work.
She could only imagine the chaos it would cause.
The war it would start.
‘God help us all,’ she whispered as she closed the connection.
Jo Batten was still amazed she worked in Thames House. It felt surreal every time she walked through its doors. She half-expected someone to stop her from entering, take her security pass off her and send her packing with a shout of ‘you don’t belong her.’ Whenever she looked around at the others who worked there, she couldn’t help but think that they were all grown-ups doing grown-up work and, deep down, she still felt like a kid play-acting at something she wasn’t.
It was stupid really. After all she’d gone through to get hired, after two years of hard training, after eighty-seven percent of her fellow recruits had been binned, Jo knew she’d done more than enough to earn her place there but still … the thought lingered.
Maybe, she’d feel better when she finished her probation at the end of the week. God, she hoped so.
The building itself was perched right on the water in Westminster, an imposing neoclassical building that harked back to Britain’s empirical past, a mere stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. Once it had been home to merchants and bankers, traders and industrialists, but since 1994 it was the official residence of Jo’s employer, His Majesty’s Security Service, also known as MI5.
Five thousand people worked inside its walls along with Jo, operating in shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to protect the UK from threats both foreign and domestic.
Most of MI5’s employees worked across the two interconnected buildings visible from the street. They crunched data and assessed information, often dealing in theories and probabilities, so that any threat could be anticipated and prevented from ever becoming a real issue. They worked closely with the country’s various police services, the armed forces, and the eavesdroppers at GCHQ and liaised with the government on all matters of national security.
Thames House’s hi-tech operations, readily acknowledged by both friend and foe as the best in the Western world, summed up twenty-first century intelligence work in a nutshell: peace and stability maintained by desk jockeys and nerds.
But Jo didn’t work upstairs. She was part of a select group who dealt with the situations that were too much for the people upstairs to handle.
MI5’s Operations Centre was not marked on any maps of the building, however. Nor were there any signs with helpful directions to its location for anyone curious enough to try to find it.
Three floors below ground, the Ops Centre wasn’t even known as the Ops Centre by anyone who worked there. It was called the Pit. After all, it was an ugly place for ugly work.
No interior designer had come in to furnish it with sleek metal tables and install frosted glass windows everywhere. There were no plush, ergonomic chairs or angle-poise lamps, no hi-tech 3D projections or touchscreen monitors. The Americans might have the money for all that crap, but not the British. MI5 had learned long ago to run on a budget that consisted of little more than a bloody shoestring and a couple of ill-matched buttons.
The floor, like the walls, were of polished concrete, grey in colour and hard-working, designed to last a lifetime. The furniture was mismatched but functional. Desks, chairs, lights, computers and monitors were just replaced when needed with whatever was available at the time, giving the whole room a junk yard aesthetic. Not that anyone gave a damn what the place looked like as long as it worked.
Machines were hooked together with cables that no one had attempted to hide away. Wires ran into boxes fixed to the walls then disappeared into the concrete to go where only God and the tech heads knew where. Paperwork lay scattered over desks, mixed up with maps and photographs and the odd set of fake bank cards and identification documents. There were ancient tea mugs, their insides stained a wide variety of caramel, sitting next to paper cups from the canteen that had yet to make it into the overflowing wastepaper bins.
The most up-to-date technology, and the beneficiary of most of Five’s budget, belonged to the high-definition screens that covered one wall. If a mission was in progress, everything from satellite imagery to body-cam footage would play across them. There would be live maps tracking the agents’ positions and progress as well as video feeds hacked from any camera in the location, whether that came from government-controlled CCTV or a phone belonging to Joe Public.
It was powered by a system that used machine learning and data fusion to process all available intel from photographs, satellite imagery, geolocation data from communications intercepts, infrared sensors, synthetic-aperture radar, and a million other sources, to then serve it all up on the monitors’ interface in real time in a way the mere mortals in the Pit could understand and react to.
Out in the real world, civilians were getting all excited about AI writing their resumes, but MI5 were using it to protect the country.
In contrast, an ancient and overworked air-conditioning system hummed and groaned away overhead, promising to give up its ghost at any moment. Its painful drone synched with the buzz of hard drives and the tapping of keyboards and did little to improve the stink of sweat and stale coffee that permeated the air. Elsewhere, phones beeped and buzzed as words were said and sometimes shouted. Orders were given and always obeyed. Swearing was obligatory in this workplace and considered damn-well necessary for everyone’s mental health.
However, no one who worked there wandered by in three-piece suits, throwing their hats onto hatstands before flirting with a secretary employed for their looks rather than their ability to keep the country safe. Nor did they work there because they’d gone to the right public school, unlike some of the chinless wonders on the floors above.
The crew in the Ops Centre had all earned their places in that room with blood, sweat and more than a fair share of tears. They were there because they were grafters, and they got things done no matter what. They were happy to get their hands dirty when the occasion demanded some necessary violence to sort out whatever needed sorting.
And God help anyone who couldn’t hack it.
They’d not get a gentle hand around the shoulder with whispered words of encouragement. They’d be pushed out the way and told to fuck off. The place didn’t tolerate passengers or weakness of any kind. It couldn’t afford to.
And, because of these very exacting standards, it had the reputation for only employing the very best that MI5 had to offer.
That’s why it came as a surprise when someone approached Jo during her training and said that she had the right characteristics to work in Ops. Not only that, they suggested that she could be an actual Operator. They were the elite of the elite. The ones who charged out into the world to stop the bad guys by hook, crook, bullet or blade.
Naturally, while Jo thought they were mad to even think that, but she wasn’t dumb enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. She jumped at the chance.
Who wouldn’t?
She’d joined MI5 so she could be in the thick of the action with cloak and dagger, making a difference, saving lives, fighting the good fight for King and Country. She wanted to kick in doors and take names. To be the unsung hero saving the day.
Being an operator gave her that opportunity.
So, Jo Batten signed up, all eager for action.
Unfortunately, six months on, the reality had proven quite different.
Disappointedly so.
After all, while the agents inside the Pit might be ready to deal with an emergency twenty-four-seven, emergencies were a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. In fact, when the desk jockeys upstairs did their jobs properly, Jo had discovered that things got pretty quiet down in the Pit.
Really bloody quiet.
So much so, Jo would almost go as far to say working in the Pit had proven to be just a little bit boring.
She leaned back in her ancient office chair and glanced around the room, taking in her colleagues. They were all busy doing stuff, but it was hard to imagine that the work being done down there was any different to what the number crunchers were doing upstairs.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t busy, either. Jo was just busy doing dull work.
There was no excitement on offer. No danger.
Now, with one week left of her probation, Jo was starting to wonder if she’d made the right career choice after all. She’d been seduced by the hype but couldn’t stand the reality.
Jo had spent most of the last six months infiltrating various pro-Palestinian protests groups that had popped up across the country following Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Despite certain members of the government labelling them as terrorists, infiltrating said organisations involved no more skill than checking Facebook for notifications for when the next meetup was. There were no secret codes or hidden agendas to uncover. No teams of watchers to fool.
All Jo had to do was turn up, flash her fake student ID and she was always welcomed in with open arms.
It was hardly dangerous work.
On top of that, Jo hadn’t met anyone who was in any shape or form a threat to UK security. Most were students and housewives with nothing better to do with their time than get outraged over events in the Middle East. So far, the only illegal activity Jo had witnessed was some Class C drug use outside a student bar in Sheffield.
The previous Saturday’s protests in London summed it up perfectly.
Two hundred thousand people had turned up to march through the capital and Jo, with several other agents, had mingled amongst the crowds, posing as protestors, looking for agitators.
They found none.
Now, Jo was stuck cataloguing all the photos she’d taken, putting names against faces where possible. It was mind-numbing work.
At the moment, there was a picture Jo had taken of a woman called Maria on her screen. She was a mother of three who’d driven down from Leicester to take part in the protests. Maria’s enthusiasm had caught Jo’s attention, particularly when she’d led some of the anti-government chants. But it became clear very quickly that Maria wasn’t a domestic terrorist in waiting. Sure, she was upset about what was happening in Gaza, but Jo reckoned she was, in fact, more interested in creating some juicy content for her Instagram feed than forcing political change.
Of course, not everyone felt the same way about the protestors.
That very moment, the Home Secretary’s face filled one of the Pit’s large monitors, curtesy of the BBC. Glaring at the journalists before her, she looked ready for a fight. Considering she’d just come out of a government COBRA meeting, that wasn’t a good sign.
‘We’ve seen now hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in celebration of the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,’ she said. ‘These are not peaceful protests: they are hate marches and this government will not tolerate them.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Jo muttered. ‘Is she talking about the same march I was on?’
Mark, her partner and training mentor, glanced up from his own monitor. ‘Politicians have never worried about the truth getting in the way of a story.’
‘I have told the police to take a zero-tolerance approach to such antisemitism from now on,’ the Home Secretary continued. ‘People will be arrested if there are more of these hate marches.’
‘I think someone should tell her that there aren’t enough prison cells to do that,’ Mark scoffed.
Jo smiled. She liked Mark — trusted him — even though he was one of the people who had the final say on whether she passed her probation or not.
The man was at least a good fifteen years older than her and had done all the hard stuff — SAS, Military Intelligence and so on — before he’d joined MI5. As a result, Mark had seen a lot of action and fired a lot of bullets at home and abroad, according to the office gossips. Still, Jo struggled to see the killer in the man. His demeanour was more that of a giant teddy bear, with blue eyes that always twinkled and a kind word of encouragement for her just whenever it was needed.
He was another reason she’d found the last six months so easy. Mark had made long days and nights of nothing happening bearable. He’d kept her alert when every instinct told her that she was wasting her time. Mark had also made sure she’d not cut any corners or let her guard slip even when all she was doing was listening to some Oxford student waffle on about ‘the struggle’ while trying to roll a joint.
Still, thinking about her probation got Jo checking her calendar again to see how much time she had left.
Five days.
That was it. Five days till she was done.
Easy bloody peasy. Especially if all she had to do was spy on people like Maria. Her biggest problem would be drinking enough coffee to stay awake each day.
But was that a good thing?
Jo just didn’t know. The work she was doing wasn’t why she’d signed up. Far from it.
‘Why have you got such a weird look on your face?’ Mark asked.
Jo jerked up from her thoughts and blushed with guilt. ‘Nothing.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re not going to make much of a spy if that’s the best you can lie,’ Mark replied.
‘You’re going to think I’m stupid.’
‘Jo, we’ve been working together for six months. I already know that you’re stupid. Nothing you can tell me now will surprise me.’
‘You’re such a wanker.’
Mark winked. ‘Something else I already know. So, tell me.’
Jo took a breath. ‘I’ve been here nearly six months, and I was expecting a bit more action, you know? I didn’t think it would be this … this quiet.’
An exaggerated look of horror passed across Mark’s face. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Say what?’
‘The Q word. It’s forbidden.’
‘What? Quiet?’
‘Shit. Jo, I mean it. It’s a fucking jinx. Didn’t anyone tell you that during your training?’
Jo laughed. She held up both hands, playing along. ‘Okay. Forgive me.’
Mark shook his head. ‘If the shit hits the fan because of you, you’re buying the next time we go out.’
Jo glanced at the picture of Maria on her screen. ‘Deal.’ She reckoned her money was as safe as it could get.
‘Anyway, you’ve not been here six months already.’
‘Yeah, I have. Friday’s the last day.’
‘Friday,’ Mark repeated as if he’d never heard the word spoken before. Then he arched that eyebrow of his again. ‘Five days left?’
‘Yeah,’ Jo said. ‘Five days.’
‘In that case, if you make it without fucking it up, the drinks are on me.’
‘Deal.’ As Jo turned back to her work, all the main room monitors went blank. The loss of light in the room was so sudden, so obviously unexpected, that the whole room fell silent. Every face turned to look at the black screens.
‘What the fuck?’ Mark said, half-rising from his seat.
‘What’s going on?’ Jo asked, but he ignored her, eyes fixed on the dead monitors.
Then the central screen flickered. Little flashes of light danced across it, a glimpse of life before going dark again.
Jo had barely taken a breath when a clock appeared. It said ‘45:00.00’ for a heartbeat before the milliseconds whirred into life and the seconds began to count down.
Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound filled the Pit.
‘What the fuck is that?’ a man shouted. It was Ed Seldon, but no one called him by his name. He was simply Control, the Director of Operations. He marched towards the screens. ‘Why aren’t there bloody alarms going off? Someone’s in our systems. Shut this down now!’
All around the Pit, people began to scramble. This was bad. Really, really bad.
As the techs worked, a passport photo appeared on the screen next to the countdown clock. It was a man. Arabic. Short, dark hair. Trimmed beard. Maybe late thirties.
A name came up next to the picture. Nadim Aldawsari. Born: Gaza, 7 April, 1986. More images appeared of the man popped up, overlapping each other. These looked like they were grabbed from CCTV footage. Of Aldawsari in London.
All the while, the clock continued to count down second by second. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Another image appeared on a screen. A two-story warehouse. The location said: Willow Walk, London. A map of the city was next to it, the address highlighted by a blinking red light.
‘Why haven’t we locked this down?’ Control shouted. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s being broadcast from inside our systems,’ a tech called back. ‘We’re tracking it …’
More pictures appeared on the screens as Control stormed over to the tech’s side. Surveillance shots. Aldawsari at the location. Parking a white van at the warehouse. Aldawsari outside Leicester Square Tube Station. It was a full ops package.
‘We’re going to switch to the back-up system,’ the tech said, head down, hands hammering his keyboard. ‘We’re—’
A man’s voice echoed out of the Pit’s speakers. The words were in Arabic. Jo didn’t understand what was being said.
Nor did Control. ‘Translate, someone!’
Raza, an intel guy, stood up. ‘You will leave at 1130 hours. You will drive to Leicester Square tube station … here and you will drive the van into the main entrance … here.’
Control grabbed the tech, pulling him back from his keyboard. ‘Don’t switch anything yet.’
Another man’s voice came out of the speakers. It sounded nervous.
‘The explosive …’ Raza translated.
The second man replied.
‘You do not have to worry,’ Raza told the room. ‘It will explode on impact.’
‘How many people will I kill?’
‘These are not people. Remember that. They are infidels. Minions of the Great Satan. This is their punishment for their support of the genocide of our people. For cheering at the murder of our families. You are doing God’s holy work.’
The recording ended and all was silent in the Pit except for the sound of the clock.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time was running out.
‘Right. Shut it down now,’ Control told the tech, releasing his grip on the man’s arm. ‘I want whoever is doing this off my screens.’
The tech went back to his keyboard. ‘Switching the KVM now.’
The screens went blank again, then popped back to life, just as they were mere moments before the hack.
‘Sam!’ Control called out. ‘Ops Teams in the briefing room now.’
Sam Okebe, the Duty Operations Officer and Control’s number two, waved a hand in the air, acknowledging the order. ‘On it.’
Control was already moving though. Heading to the briefing room. Sam ran over to where the Operators were based in the Pit. Over to Mark and Jo.
‘You two. Briefing room,’ Sam said.
Mark didn’t need telling twice. He was up and out of his seat, running to the back of the Pit.
For a second Jo watched him disappear, her mind still struggling to take in what had happened, but then she was up too, and running.
The memory of the countdown clock chased her to the briefing room. That sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
What would happen when it stopped?
It was stupid really. After all she’d gone through to get hired, after two years of hard training, after eighty-seven percent of her fellow recruits had been binned, Jo knew she’d done more than enough to earn her place there but still … the thought lingered.
Maybe, she’d feel better when she finished her probation at the end of the week. God, she hoped so.
The building itself was perched right on the water in Westminster, an imposing neoclassical building that harked back to Britain’s empirical past, a mere stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. Once it had been home to merchants and bankers, traders and industrialists, but since 1994 it was the official residence of Jo’s employer, His Majesty’s Security Service, also known as MI5.
Five thousand people worked inside its walls along with Jo, operating in shifts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to protect the UK from threats both foreign and domestic.
Most of MI5’s employees worked across the two interconnected buildings visible from the street. They crunched data and assessed information, often dealing in theories and probabilities, so that any threat could be anticipated and prevented from ever becoming a real issue. They worked closely with the country’s various police services, the armed forces, and the eavesdroppers at GCHQ and liaised with the government on all matters of national security.
Thames House’s hi-tech operations, readily acknowledged by both friend and foe as the best in the Western world, summed up twenty-first century intelligence work in a nutshell: peace and stability maintained by desk jockeys and nerds.
But Jo didn’t work upstairs. She was part of a select group who dealt with the situations that were too much for the people upstairs to handle.
MI5’s Operations Centre was not marked on any maps of the building, however. Nor were there any signs with helpful directions to its location for anyone curious enough to try to find it.
Three floors below ground, the Ops Centre wasn’t even known as the Ops Centre by anyone who worked there. It was called the Pit. After all, it was an ugly place for ugly work.
No interior designer had come in to furnish it with sleek metal tables and install frosted glass windows everywhere. There were no plush, ergonomic chairs or angle-poise lamps, no hi-tech 3D projections or touchscreen monitors. The Americans might have the money for all that crap, but not the British. MI5 had learned long ago to run on a budget that consisted of little more than a bloody shoestring and a couple of ill-matched buttons.
The floor, like the walls, were of polished concrete, grey in colour and hard-working, designed to last a lifetime. The furniture was mismatched but functional. Desks, chairs, lights, computers and monitors were just replaced when needed with whatever was available at the time, giving the whole room a junk yard aesthetic. Not that anyone gave a damn what the place looked like as long as it worked.
Machines were hooked together with cables that no one had attempted to hide away. Wires ran into boxes fixed to the walls then disappeared into the concrete to go where only God and the tech heads knew where. Paperwork lay scattered over desks, mixed up with maps and photographs and the odd set of fake bank cards and identification documents. There were ancient tea mugs, their insides stained a wide variety of caramel, sitting next to paper cups from the canteen that had yet to make it into the overflowing wastepaper bins.
The most up-to-date technology, and the beneficiary of most of Five’s budget, belonged to the high-definition screens that covered one wall. If a mission was in progress, everything from satellite imagery to body-cam footage would play across them. There would be live maps tracking the agents’ positions and progress as well as video feeds hacked from any camera in the location, whether that came from government-controlled CCTV or a phone belonging to Joe Public.
It was powered by a system that used machine learning and data fusion to process all available intel from photographs, satellite imagery, geolocation data from communications intercepts, infrared sensors, synthetic-aperture radar, and a million other sources, to then serve it all up on the monitors’ interface in real time in a way the mere mortals in the Pit could understand and react to.
Out in the real world, civilians were getting all excited about AI writing their resumes, but MI5 were using it to protect the country.
In contrast, an ancient and overworked air-conditioning system hummed and groaned away overhead, promising to give up its ghost at any moment. Its painful drone synched with the buzz of hard drives and the tapping of keyboards and did little to improve the stink of sweat and stale coffee that permeated the air. Elsewhere, phones beeped and buzzed as words were said and sometimes shouted. Orders were given and always obeyed. Swearing was obligatory in this workplace and considered damn-well necessary for everyone’s mental health.
However, no one who worked there wandered by in three-piece suits, throwing their hats onto hatstands before flirting with a secretary employed for their looks rather than their ability to keep the country safe. Nor did they work there because they’d gone to the right public school, unlike some of the chinless wonders on the floors above.
The crew in the Ops Centre had all earned their places in that room with blood, sweat and more than a fair share of tears. They were there because they were grafters, and they got things done no matter what. They were happy to get their hands dirty when the occasion demanded some necessary violence to sort out whatever needed sorting.
And God help anyone who couldn’t hack it.
They’d not get a gentle hand around the shoulder with whispered words of encouragement. They’d be pushed out the way and told to fuck off. The place didn’t tolerate passengers or weakness of any kind. It couldn’t afford to.
And, because of these very exacting standards, it had the reputation for only employing the very best that MI5 had to offer.
That’s why it came as a surprise when someone approached Jo during her training and said that she had the right characteristics to work in Ops. Not only that, they suggested that she could be an actual Operator. They were the elite of the elite. The ones who charged out into the world to stop the bad guys by hook, crook, bullet or blade.
Naturally, while Jo thought they were mad to even think that, but she wasn’t dumb enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. She jumped at the chance.
Who wouldn’t?
She’d joined MI5 so she could be in the thick of the action with cloak and dagger, making a difference, saving lives, fighting the good fight for King and Country. She wanted to kick in doors and take names. To be the unsung hero saving the day.
Being an operator gave her that opportunity.
So, Jo Batten signed up, all eager for action.
Unfortunately, six months on, the reality had proven quite different.
Disappointedly so.
After all, while the agents inside the Pit might be ready to deal with an emergency twenty-four-seven, emergencies were a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. In fact, when the desk jockeys upstairs did their jobs properly, Jo had discovered that things got pretty quiet down in the Pit.
Really bloody quiet.
So much so, Jo would almost go as far to say working in the Pit had proven to be just a little bit boring.
She leaned back in her ancient office chair and glanced around the room, taking in her colleagues. They were all busy doing stuff, but it was hard to imagine that the work being done down there was any different to what the number crunchers were doing upstairs.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t busy, either. Jo was just busy doing dull work.
There was no excitement on offer. No danger.
Now, with one week left of her probation, Jo was starting to wonder if she’d made the right career choice after all. She’d been seduced by the hype but couldn’t stand the reality.
Jo had spent most of the last six months infiltrating various pro-Palestinian protests groups that had popped up across the country following Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Despite certain members of the government labelling them as terrorists, infiltrating said organisations involved no more skill than checking Facebook for notifications for when the next meetup was. There were no secret codes or hidden agendas to uncover. No teams of watchers to fool.
All Jo had to do was turn up, flash her fake student ID and she was always welcomed in with open arms.
It was hardly dangerous work.
On top of that, Jo hadn’t met anyone who was in any shape or form a threat to UK security. Most were students and housewives with nothing better to do with their time than get outraged over events in the Middle East. So far, the only illegal activity Jo had witnessed was some Class C drug use outside a student bar in Sheffield.
The previous Saturday’s protests in London summed it up perfectly.
Two hundred thousand people had turned up to march through the capital and Jo, with several other agents, had mingled amongst the crowds, posing as protestors, looking for agitators.
They found none.
Now, Jo was stuck cataloguing all the photos she’d taken, putting names against faces where possible. It was mind-numbing work.
At the moment, there was a picture Jo had taken of a woman called Maria on her screen. She was a mother of three who’d driven down from Leicester to take part in the protests. Maria’s enthusiasm had caught Jo’s attention, particularly when she’d led some of the anti-government chants. But it became clear very quickly that Maria wasn’t a domestic terrorist in waiting. Sure, she was upset about what was happening in Gaza, but Jo reckoned she was, in fact, more interested in creating some juicy content for her Instagram feed than forcing political change.
Of course, not everyone felt the same way about the protestors.
That very moment, the Home Secretary’s face filled one of the Pit’s large monitors, curtesy of the BBC. Glaring at the journalists before her, she looked ready for a fight. Considering she’d just come out of a government COBRA meeting, that wasn’t a good sign.
‘We’ve seen now hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in celebration of the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,’ she said. ‘These are not peaceful protests: they are hate marches and this government will not tolerate them.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Jo muttered. ‘Is she talking about the same march I was on?’
Mark, her partner and training mentor, glanced up from his own monitor. ‘Politicians have never worried about the truth getting in the way of a story.’
‘I have told the police to take a zero-tolerance approach to such antisemitism from now on,’ the Home Secretary continued. ‘People will be arrested if there are more of these hate marches.’
‘I think someone should tell her that there aren’t enough prison cells to do that,’ Mark scoffed.
Jo smiled. She liked Mark — trusted him — even though he was one of the people who had the final say on whether she passed her probation or not.
The man was at least a good fifteen years older than her and had done all the hard stuff — SAS, Military Intelligence and so on — before he’d joined MI5. As a result, Mark had seen a lot of action and fired a lot of bullets at home and abroad, according to the office gossips. Still, Jo struggled to see the killer in the man. His demeanour was more that of a giant teddy bear, with blue eyes that always twinkled and a kind word of encouragement for her just whenever it was needed.
He was another reason she’d found the last six months so easy. Mark had made long days and nights of nothing happening bearable. He’d kept her alert when every instinct told her that she was wasting her time. Mark had also made sure she’d not cut any corners or let her guard slip even when all she was doing was listening to some Oxford student waffle on about ‘the struggle’ while trying to roll a joint.
Still, thinking about her probation got Jo checking her calendar again to see how much time she had left.
Five days.
That was it. Five days till she was done.
Easy bloody peasy. Especially if all she had to do was spy on people like Maria. Her biggest problem would be drinking enough coffee to stay awake each day.
But was that a good thing?
Jo just didn’t know. The work she was doing wasn’t why she’d signed up. Far from it.
‘Why have you got such a weird look on your face?’ Mark asked.
Jo jerked up from her thoughts and blushed with guilt. ‘Nothing.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re not going to make much of a spy if that’s the best you can lie,’ Mark replied.
‘You’re going to think I’m stupid.’
‘Jo, we’ve been working together for six months. I already know that you’re stupid. Nothing you can tell me now will surprise me.’
‘You’re such a wanker.’
Mark winked. ‘Something else I already know. So, tell me.’
Jo took a breath. ‘I’ve been here nearly six months, and I was expecting a bit more action, you know? I didn’t think it would be this … this quiet.’
An exaggerated look of horror passed across Mark’s face. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Say what?’
‘The Q word. It’s forbidden.’
‘What? Quiet?’
‘Shit. Jo, I mean it. It’s a fucking jinx. Didn’t anyone tell you that during your training?’
Jo laughed. She held up both hands, playing along. ‘Okay. Forgive me.’
Mark shook his head. ‘If the shit hits the fan because of you, you’re buying the next time we go out.’
Jo glanced at the picture of Maria on her screen. ‘Deal.’ She reckoned her money was as safe as it could get.
‘Anyway, you’ve not been here six months already.’
‘Yeah, I have. Friday’s the last day.’
‘Friday,’ Mark repeated as if he’d never heard the word spoken before. Then he arched that eyebrow of his again. ‘Five days left?’
‘Yeah,’ Jo said. ‘Five days.’
‘In that case, if you make it without fucking it up, the drinks are on me.’
‘Deal.’ As Jo turned back to her work, all the main room monitors went blank. The loss of light in the room was so sudden, so obviously unexpected, that the whole room fell silent. Every face turned to look at the black screens.
‘What the fuck?’ Mark said, half-rising from his seat.
‘What’s going on?’ Jo asked, but he ignored her, eyes fixed on the dead monitors.
Then the central screen flickered. Little flashes of light danced across it, a glimpse of life before going dark again.
Jo had barely taken a breath when a clock appeared. It said ‘45:00.00’ for a heartbeat before the milliseconds whirred into life and the seconds began to count down.
Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound filled the Pit.
‘What the fuck is that?’ a man shouted. It was Ed Seldon, but no one called him by his name. He was simply Control, the Director of Operations. He marched towards the screens. ‘Why aren’t there bloody alarms going off? Someone’s in our systems. Shut this down now!’
All around the Pit, people began to scramble. This was bad. Really, really bad.
As the techs worked, a passport photo appeared on the screen next to the countdown clock. It was a man. Arabic. Short, dark hair. Trimmed beard. Maybe late thirties.
A name came up next to the picture. Nadim Aldawsari. Born: Gaza, 7 April, 1986. More images appeared of the man popped up, overlapping each other. These looked like they were grabbed from CCTV footage. Of Aldawsari in London.
All the while, the clock continued to count down second by second. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Another image appeared on a screen. A two-story warehouse. The location said: Willow Walk, London. A map of the city was next to it, the address highlighted by a blinking red light.
‘Why haven’t we locked this down?’ Control shouted. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s being broadcast from inside our systems,’ a tech called back. ‘We’re tracking it …’
More pictures appeared on the screens as Control stormed over to the tech’s side. Surveillance shots. Aldawsari at the location. Parking a white van at the warehouse. Aldawsari outside Leicester Square Tube Station. It was a full ops package.
‘We’re going to switch to the back-up system,’ the tech said, head down, hands hammering his keyboard. ‘We’re—’
A man’s voice echoed out of the Pit’s speakers. The words were in Arabic. Jo didn’t understand what was being said.
Nor did Control. ‘Translate, someone!’
Raza, an intel guy, stood up. ‘You will leave at 1130 hours. You will drive to Leicester Square tube station … here and you will drive the van into the main entrance … here.’
Control grabbed the tech, pulling him back from his keyboard. ‘Don’t switch anything yet.’
Another man’s voice came out of the speakers. It sounded nervous.
‘The explosive …’ Raza translated.
The second man replied.
‘You do not have to worry,’ Raza told the room. ‘It will explode on impact.’
‘How many people will I kill?’
‘These are not people. Remember that. They are infidels. Minions of the Great Satan. This is their punishment for their support of the genocide of our people. For cheering at the murder of our families. You are doing God’s holy work.’
The recording ended and all was silent in the Pit except for the sound of the clock.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time was running out.
‘Right. Shut it down now,’ Control told the tech, releasing his grip on the man’s arm. ‘I want whoever is doing this off my screens.’
The tech went back to his keyboard. ‘Switching the KVM now.’
The screens went blank again, then popped back to life, just as they were mere moments before the hack.
‘Sam!’ Control called out. ‘Ops Teams in the briefing room now.’
Sam Okebe, the Duty Operations Officer and Control’s number two, waved a hand in the air, acknowledging the order. ‘On it.’
Control was already moving though. Heading to the briefing room. Sam ran over to where the Operators were based in the Pit. Over to Mark and Jo.
‘You two. Briefing room,’ Sam said.
Mark didn’t need telling twice. He was up and out of his seat, running to the back of the Pit.
For a second Jo watched him disappear, her mind still struggling to take in what had happened, but then she was up too, and running.
The memory of the countdown clock chased her to the briefing room. That sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
What would happen when it stopped?