Chapter One
Her Majesty's Secret Agent
On a morning in mid-March 2007, a dark blue car with a Scotland Yard Special Branch driver at the wheel made its way through the west suburbs of London toward the city center. The single passenger in the backseat, Sir John McLeod Scarlett, looked intimidating, the embodiment of the British establishment, a banker, perhaps, or the chairman of a large company. His customized suit, tailored by Gieves & Hawkes, a handsewn shirt with double cuffs and his Travellers Club tie enhanced the impression.
Scarlett was Her Majesty's Secret Agent, a spymaster who had long understood that the chessboard of intelligence gathering has no rules. Now fifty-nine years old, he still had the cultivated drawl from a prep school education (Epsom College) and three years at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied history before joining MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, entering a world where deception and betrayal would remain the cornerstone of his work. For thirty-two years his talents at spying and counterespionage steadily brought him promotion until finally he became its chief, the fourteenth to hold the post, and early in the year he had been knighted by the queen. Married with four adult children, three boys and a girl, he enjoyed collecting history books, visiting medieval churches, and fine dining.
Those pleasant pastimes fitted in with the massive mahogany desk in his office, which once graced the cabin of Admiral Lord Nelson on Victory and behind which Scarlett's predecessors had sat. On the desk was a Victorian inkwell, its pot filled with green ink, and beside it the Parker fountain pen Scarlett used to sign all his correspondence. A desk communications console had direct links to the prime minister, the head of MI5, the director of the CIA, and the chiefs of Europe's intelligence services. There was also a button that activated a phone three thousand miles away on the desk of the director-general of Mossad.
The office furnishings were completed by a grandfather clock constructed down to the last flywheel by the first chief, Sir Mansfield Smith Cumming; almost a century later, it still kept perfect time. Cumming's order that all communications emanating from him were to be known as "intelligence product" and marked with the prefix "CX," an abbreviation for "Cumming Exclusive," remained in force. In his will he had bequeathed the agency a large oil painting of a group of French villagers facing a Prussian firing squad during the war of 1870, and as MI6 had moved from one headquarters to another around London, the picture followed. With it went the custom that Cumming was only addressed as Chief.
When Scarlett had been appointed on May 6, 2004 as director-general of MI6, the queen had addressed him as such. He called her the first time "Your Majesty" and thereafter "ma'am." Protocol with both was inbred.
Attached to Scarlett's console was a tamper-proof computer that contained the current state of MI6 missions across the world: in Moscow, Beijing, Baghdad, and Tehran; in the depths of Amazonia and the jungles of Central Africa; in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan: in all those places where Scarlett and his senior staff detected terrorist threats to the United Kingdom. It was hugely expensive to maintain the field operations, often requiring a score of people to service a single field agent "down the pipe."
MI6 is Britain's external Secret Intelligence Service and has a worldwide mandate. MI5, the Security Service, is responsible for internal security. MI6 is answerable to Britain's foreign secretary; MI5, to the home secretary. Both service heads are appointed by the incumbent prime minister and are represented on the Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC), the link with the government. However, both the chief of MI6 and the director-general of MI5 also have immediate access to the prime minister of the day. The services work closely together in the current threat from global terrorism.
Since the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, September 11, 2001, however, budget considerations were no longer the main concern; MI6 was flush with money to conduct espionage, counterespionage, and electronic surveillance, whose gadgetry in 2007 remained the growth industry of the secret world. Scarlett's computer had a map listing the current state of the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom; on that March morning it was "severe," one level below "critical."
Superimposed over London on the map was the figure 35, representing the number of Islamic networks MI6 believed were in the capital. Eighty were identified as operating within the Muslim communities in the Midlands, in Leicester, Birmingham, Derby, and Nottingham. Further north in the conurbation of Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester, there were another sixty networks. West, in the port city of Liverpool, twenty networks had been uncovered. Across the border into Wales, ten were pinpointed not only in the cities of Cardiff and Swansea but in the Brecon Beacon mountains, where suspected terrorists had been spotted training before the London bombings in July 2005. Twelve other networks were in Scotland, and across the Irish Sea were two more.
Most of the networks consisted of two or three members; a few comprised up to a dozen men and women. After becoming radicalized, they had melted into their community as sleeper agents maintaining contact with each other at Friday mosque prayers and biding their time for instructions to carry out an attack. Their deep cover was protected through their daily jobs as schoolteachers, college professors, doctors and nurses, shopkeepers and salespeople. The popular image of the uneducated terrorist of the IRA had long gone. Al-Qaeda sought to recruit university graduates rather than the street-corner dropouts. While the jihadists waited to be activated, they observed any procedural, legal, or cultural weaknesses in their society that could be exploited.
The networks had produced Richard Reid, a British-born convert to Islamism who, in December 2001, tried to blow up a U.S. airliner bound from Paris to Miami with a bomb in his shoe. The July 2005 London bombers all belonged to a network; two, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had trained as terrorists in Pakistan before returning to England to become sleeper agents. Four others had set up a poison factory in a peaceful suburb of north London, using techniques they had been taught by a chemist at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan before coming to Britain.
Even knowing the jihadists were there, taking action against them before they were about to strike was not easy. Neither MI5 nor MI6 had the power of arrest, and Britain's human rights lawyers made full use of the country's laws to challenge arrests made by the police.
In a briefing to his senior managers on the day he became director general, Scarlett reminded them, "As we are in a global and totalitarian war against terrorism, we must continue to fully engage it on those terms."
In January 2007, a team of MI5 officers had flown to the war-torn African state of Somalia to try to obtain DNA samples from four Britishborn terrorists, who had been among a hundred jihadists killed in a U.S. bombing raid on an al-Qaeda training camp on the remote island of Lamu