Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2023 5:48 pm
Gravity is natural.Nik_SpeakerToCats wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 5:42 pm Would the Russian for 'Defenstration' translate as 'Natural Causes' ?
And did Pishvanov set up a 'DeadMan' system ??
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Kompromat
Page 3 of 5
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2023 5:57 pm
Prague is famous for it and with a Russian there, I couldn't help but have it occur.Nik_SpeakerToCats wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 5:42 pm Would the Russian for 'Defenstration' translate as 'Natural Causes' ?
And did Pishvanov set up a 'DeadMan' system ??
Pish/Kolya has given them nothing to use at all. Again, another dead end despite all the promise of more.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2023 5:59 pm
Thirteen – Toilet brush holder
Svetlana was awake and up & about on this early morning though it wasn’t the case that she’d gotten up early. Instead, she hadn’t yet gone to bed. Over the past few weeks, she was convinced that she’d missed a day somewhere… or maybe gained a day: that depended upon how she looked at it. She was awake all night and slept through different parts of the day. There was no routine for her to follow. She was bored too. The days and nights had all merged into one, especially since the move from that cottage in Oxfordshire to this farmhouse somewhere in the middle of Wales.
Where exactly she was, Svetlana didn’t know. It was Wales and near the sea but she had been told no more. For her own protection, so Terri–Anne had said, it was best that she didn’t know. She’d been moved from the first safe house too for her safety as well. There was nothing to do but watch films and eat junk food. Fresh air was being allowed out on the sheltered patio for irregular periods. Staying inside would keep her safe whereas there was apparently danger outside.
Both Terri–Anne and Jacqueline had come with her to Wales and they’d been joined by Eleanor too. The third woman was another spook though Svetlana didn’t know if she was with MI-5 or MI-6. She shared baby-sitting duties with the two other female spooks and didn’t like Svetlana. That was clear in how she behaved towards and spoke to her. Svetlana could have taken the time to figure out why that was the case and perhaps then worked to win her over, yet her life now consisted of sleeping, eating excessively and watching rom-coms. She’d seen dozens of them, many several times now.
Having just finished another Hollywood movie, Svetlana got up off the chair in the bedroom that she had been given to use and looked out of the window. The curtains were closed – an enforced security measure – so she pulled them to the side just a little to have a glance at the garden in which she wasn’t allowed to walk in. Catching her eye at once was one of the security team here. He walked through the garden, coming from the treeline at the edge of the property.
He wasn’t one whom she’d seen here before.
Svetlana’s count on them was nine. They worked in shifts with four always on at night and two during the daytime. She’s seen them patrolling the house and grounds, carrying what had to be weapons under their bulky jackets. Ex-soldiers they looked like to her, men who were now mercenaries for their government’s intelligence services.
This new one was handsome. She certainly hadn’t seen him here before though Svetlana couldn’t shake the odd feeling that she had seen that face before regardless.
It was very strange.
Yawning, she went out onto the landing and called over it to whichever baby-sitter was here this morning to keep an eye on her.
“I’m going to have a bath and then a sleep.”
She was in her pyjamas when leaning on the banister. Like everything else she had, they weren’t really hers. Clothes, food, drink and this roof over her head had all been given to her. It was a strange situation to be in but at least she was comfortable.
“No problem.” The call came back from what sounded like the kitchen. “Enjoy yourself, Svetlana.”
There was a crash after that. Svetlana heard what she was sure was a teacup hitting the floor.
“It everything alright?”
As she asked that, Svetlana stepped away and towards where the top of the stairs were.
“Everything is fine, Svetlana.”
It had been Terri–Anne who spoke to her. She sounded like she had a sore throat, not something that she’s had a few hours ago when Svetlana had spoken to her.
Back across the landing she went and into the bathroom. Closing the door behind her, Svetlana realised that that was the first time that Terri–Anne had called her by her full name.
It was always ‘Lana’.
Her hand on the doorknob still, several other peculiarities in recent moments came into focus for Svetlana too.
The internet had gone out right when she had finished watching that film on the tablet she’d been given.
There was a man she’d never seen here before but recognised in the garden.
Terri–Anne’s voice was odd.
There was that crash in the kitchen which might not have actually been the innocent thing what she had thought it was.
“I’m in trouble.”
Without meaning to, Svetlana spoke aloud.
She was frozen still when she recalled where she’d seen that man from before too. It wasn’t here nor at the other safe house either.
No, instead it was at Yasenevo.
He was SVR and thus Svetlana knew she really was in trouble.
There was no weapon to hand. She’d killed Mikhail with a kitchen knife, in the dagger fashion. But there were no knives in the bathroom. There were no guns either. The security people and those that were coming to kill her – there’d be more than one – would have those.
Svetlana opened the cabinet over the sink in what she knew was a vain hope for an improvised weapon. Nothing was to be found there. She turned towards the door, considering fleeing to the bedroom. Her mind decided against that though. No, she’d stand and fight here.
Catching her eye was the toilet brush and especially its holder. She’d looked at that the other day while sitting on the loo. Now, preparing to fight for her life, she picked up the holder.
It was porcelain and had quite the strong base.
Svetlana tapped her palm with the bottom and chose this as her weapon.
It would be far more effective than the plastic brush!
Looking down at her feet next, Svetlana wished she had some shoes. Fighting to live in just her socks wasn’t the best option, not if it was to be more than just here in the bathroom as she thought it would be. There might be a need to even go outside. She grabbed two more of them, dirty ones, from the laundry basket and put them on as fast as she could. The cord around her waist from the pyjama bottoms was tightened next.
Svetlana stood behind the door, waiting now for those seeking to kill her to come and try.
There was a step near the top of the stairs which creaked. It was something which for the time she’d spent here she had found annoying when she and anyone else put their weight on it.
This morning, she was ever so thankful for that.
It creaked.
Someone was creeping up the stairs yet had given themselves away.
The bathroom door opened quicker than she thought it would and in came an assassin.
It was a pistol which she saw first. A black automatic weapon with a long silencer on the end. As she’d planned to, Svetlana grabbed the end of that with her left hand while, with her right, she swung the toilet brush holder forward at head height.
She attacked someone she didn’t see until impact was made with his face.
What a swing it was, what a bash was gained. Svetlana was impressed with herself, with the force which she’d employed.
“Eeeerrrr!”
A man collapsed in the doorway with that groan.
Svetlana looked at his face. He wasn’t the man she’d seen in the garden. That meant, as she’d expected, that there were at least two of them.
Well… there had been.
Saying nothing, barely looking at the wounded man she’d knocked down in a messy heap that he formed, Svetlana took his gun from him. She had a towel in the other hand – the toilet brush holder was on the floor, covered in blood – and put that on his face, folding it once as she did.
“Say hello to the Rodina for me.” She whispered that to him before adding a final comment, the nastiest of all Russian insults: “Also, yob tvoyu mat.”
With that said, she shot him in the face.
The sound was louder than she’d thought, even with that silencer and the towel to muffle the sound.
One assassin was dead and Svetlana was out on the landing fast, leading like he had with the gun head of her. She had both hands on it and was ready to open fire on anyone up here.
There was no one else in sight though.
“Ilya?”
There was a hurried, hushed call made up the stairs. It came from a male, someone who sounded concerned.
Svetlana smiled when hearing it. The second killer, the one downstairs was calling upon his buddy but had no idea that Ilya was dead. He, hopefully the one she’d seen in the garden, would soon be next.
Laying down on the carpeted floor, Svetlana kept the pistol pointed towards the top of the stairs. She was in the corner and could be seen, though not so easily so she hoped.
That proved correct.
It was amateur hour here, so Svetlana silently told herself as the second man came up the stairs. “Ilya, where are you?” In Russian he spoke and those were his last words.
The very moment that his head appeared in view, as he came up the steps, Svetlana fired a second shot. She watched half of head seem to explode. He fell down and she was up on her feet and at the top of the stairs. The second killer was all the way down at the bottom. She went down towards him, moving quickly though with her eyes scanning around, especially to the left where the banister opened up to the hallway.
There was no one else there, just someone who looked pretty dead and in a crumped mess at the bottom of the stairs.
Svetlana made sure of that. She’d shot him through the right eye. When having a close look at him, it was clear that the bullet had ripped open the whole side of his face with his ear gone. There was no need to shoot him again, but that she did. Svetlana put a bullet in his chest before crouching down and keeping her gun pointed towards the kitchen door.
She recalled his name now, the second man that was, the one she’d met just the once a long time ago at SVR headquarters back in Russia: it had been Petr… before she’d blown half his face off.
Waiting, Svetlana asked herself whether there was there anyone else here to kill her?
It took an awfully long time for anyone else to arrive. Svetlana had no one to call, nor anyway to make contact with them if she could. It wasn’t just the internet that was out but phone signals too. She had tried to use Terri–Ann’s phone but found that there was no reception.
Somehow, probably with a fancy gadget, electronic silence had descended upon the house.
When no one had come out of the kitchen, she’d gone in there. Terri–Ann was dead on the floor with deep red cuts forming a ring around her throat. Svetlana suspected a garrot had been used. She looked too at the ‘world’s best mum’ socks that the young mother she’d spent so much time with wore. There was a teacup handle still in one hand but the remains of the cup, and contents, split across the floor.
One of the security guards was also dead in the kitchen – that one shot – and, taking the briefest of looks through the window, she saw another one down dead in the garden. To make sure that the one called Ilya wouldn’t do the impossible and come back like some monster from a Hollywood film, she’d gone back upstairs to the bathroom and shot him again.
Like with Petr, it was a shot to the chest. People can live after being shot in the head or in the chest, but not in both places. Svetlana didn’t have much experience with gunplay but with the SVR, she’d done a little training with pistols. The two that she had taken from those assassins sent to kill her were kept in her hand & in a pyjama bottom pocket.
She’d found her shoes and a warn coat in case she needed to go outside but had waited inside until ‘the cavalry’ showed up.
“I want to talk to Grace Miller.”
It had been an hour at least. There were men claiming to be with MI-6 outside, one of them who, at her insistence, had pushed a phone through the door and said that there was signal reception now. Someone called Neil MacDonald had apparently been on the line wanting to speak to her.
Back through the letterbox went that phone as she told them who she’d speak to.
“He says that she’d unavailable.” The shout came back through the letterbox.
“Then he can talk to himself! I’m not coming out of here and if you come in, it’ll be a mistake you’ll regret.”
Svetlana wasn’t in the mood to trust the words of anyone she didn’t know.
“She’s someone she can’t be reached.” The reply came after a few moments from the man unwittingly playing messenger. “He says that he’s her boss, in charge of the investigation she’s running.”
“That’s nice for him.” Acid sarcasm came from her due to the circumstances of all of this. “And where’s this place that Grace can’t be reached, eh? Is it maybe Antarctica?”
There was a low laugh that she heard outside though it didn’t sound like it came from the man she was talking to.
“Luv’,” there was no kindness in his voice despite what he called her in that galling Cockney accent, “we’re going to come through this door. We’re going to come through the windows. If you’ve got a gun, put it down quick. That’s a fair warning and I say that because we aren’t messing around. We’ve come here to save you and you’re testing my patience.”
For a moment, Svetlana thought about telling him to dare to try it. Sense overcame her though. That would be foolish. Two guys had come to kill her, and she’d killed them instead, so it wouldn’t be the best of ideas to maybe get killed by her gung-ho, late-to-the-party rescuers, would it?
“Send the phone back through then, and let me talk to this MacDonald character.”
She let them in soon enough, making sure that the two pistols were on the ground and she was standing up against the wall with her arms outstretched. Three men came in through the front door after she’d unlocked it and another two appeared in the kitchen after coming in the back door.
One of them, his machine pistol pointed at her belly, covered her.
The others swept through the house.
“Clear!”
“Body!”
“Bedroom clear!”
“Study clear!”
She listened to them as they called out to each other while they went through the house.
The one she’d been talking through the door to, who she believed was their team leader, came back downstairs and asked her a question.
“Did you hit him with that holder for the bog brush, Luv’?”
He was wearing body armour and tactical gear. The muscles in his neck, chest and biceps bulged. Svetlana hadn’t been with a man in a while. She was attracted to him and his green eyes, with all of that bulk too, despite his accent.
“Yeah.” Still standing still and making no sudden movements, Svetlana confirmed that with a nod and a smile too.
He shook his head. “You are one mean lady. What a way for anyone to go out!”
Another one of the armed men in the farmhouse let out a laugh before a third came down the stairs and whispered in the leader’s ear. That smile vanished.
“Talk to MacDonald on the phone again.” He pointed at where she’d left it on the floor. “And tell him that there’s no sign of the Eleanor woman despite her supposedly meant to be here.”
Svetlana was awake and up & about on this early morning though it wasn’t the case that she’d gotten up early. Instead, she hadn’t yet gone to bed. Over the past few weeks, she was convinced that she’d missed a day somewhere… or maybe gained a day: that depended upon how she looked at it. She was awake all night and slept through different parts of the day. There was no routine for her to follow. She was bored too. The days and nights had all merged into one, especially since the move from that cottage in Oxfordshire to this farmhouse somewhere in the middle of Wales.
Where exactly she was, Svetlana didn’t know. It was Wales and near the sea but she had been told no more. For her own protection, so Terri–Anne had said, it was best that she didn’t know. She’d been moved from the first safe house too for her safety as well. There was nothing to do but watch films and eat junk food. Fresh air was being allowed out on the sheltered patio for irregular periods. Staying inside would keep her safe whereas there was apparently danger outside.
Both Terri–Anne and Jacqueline had come with her to Wales and they’d been joined by Eleanor too. The third woman was another spook though Svetlana didn’t know if she was with MI-5 or MI-6. She shared baby-sitting duties with the two other female spooks and didn’t like Svetlana. That was clear in how she behaved towards and spoke to her. Svetlana could have taken the time to figure out why that was the case and perhaps then worked to win her over, yet her life now consisted of sleeping, eating excessively and watching rom-coms. She’d seen dozens of them, many several times now.
Having just finished another Hollywood movie, Svetlana got up off the chair in the bedroom that she had been given to use and looked out of the window. The curtains were closed – an enforced security measure – so she pulled them to the side just a little to have a glance at the garden in which she wasn’t allowed to walk in. Catching her eye at once was one of the security team here. He walked through the garden, coming from the treeline at the edge of the property.
He wasn’t one whom she’d seen here before.
Svetlana’s count on them was nine. They worked in shifts with four always on at night and two during the daytime. She’s seen them patrolling the house and grounds, carrying what had to be weapons under their bulky jackets. Ex-soldiers they looked like to her, men who were now mercenaries for their government’s intelligence services.
This new one was handsome. She certainly hadn’t seen him here before though Svetlana couldn’t shake the odd feeling that she had seen that face before regardless.
It was very strange.
Yawning, she went out onto the landing and called over it to whichever baby-sitter was here this morning to keep an eye on her.
“I’m going to have a bath and then a sleep.”
She was in her pyjamas when leaning on the banister. Like everything else she had, they weren’t really hers. Clothes, food, drink and this roof over her head had all been given to her. It was a strange situation to be in but at least she was comfortable.
“No problem.” The call came back from what sounded like the kitchen. “Enjoy yourself, Svetlana.”
There was a crash after that. Svetlana heard what she was sure was a teacup hitting the floor.
“It everything alright?”
As she asked that, Svetlana stepped away and towards where the top of the stairs were.
“Everything is fine, Svetlana.”
It had been Terri–Anne who spoke to her. She sounded like she had a sore throat, not something that she’s had a few hours ago when Svetlana had spoken to her.
Back across the landing she went and into the bathroom. Closing the door behind her, Svetlana realised that that was the first time that Terri–Anne had called her by her full name.
It was always ‘Lana’.
Her hand on the doorknob still, several other peculiarities in recent moments came into focus for Svetlana too.
The internet had gone out right when she had finished watching that film on the tablet she’d been given.
There was a man she’d never seen here before but recognised in the garden.
Terri–Anne’s voice was odd.
There was that crash in the kitchen which might not have actually been the innocent thing what she had thought it was.
“I’m in trouble.”
Without meaning to, Svetlana spoke aloud.
She was frozen still when she recalled where she’d seen that man from before too. It wasn’t here nor at the other safe house either.
No, instead it was at Yasenevo.
He was SVR and thus Svetlana knew she really was in trouble.
There was no weapon to hand. She’d killed Mikhail with a kitchen knife, in the dagger fashion. But there were no knives in the bathroom. There were no guns either. The security people and those that were coming to kill her – there’d be more than one – would have those.
Svetlana opened the cabinet over the sink in what she knew was a vain hope for an improvised weapon. Nothing was to be found there. She turned towards the door, considering fleeing to the bedroom. Her mind decided against that though. No, she’d stand and fight here.
Catching her eye was the toilet brush and especially its holder. She’d looked at that the other day while sitting on the loo. Now, preparing to fight for her life, she picked up the holder.
It was porcelain and had quite the strong base.
Svetlana tapped her palm with the bottom and chose this as her weapon.
It would be far more effective than the plastic brush!
Looking down at her feet next, Svetlana wished she had some shoes. Fighting to live in just her socks wasn’t the best option, not if it was to be more than just here in the bathroom as she thought it would be. There might be a need to even go outside. She grabbed two more of them, dirty ones, from the laundry basket and put them on as fast as she could. The cord around her waist from the pyjama bottoms was tightened next.
Svetlana stood behind the door, waiting now for those seeking to kill her to come and try.
There was a step near the top of the stairs which creaked. It was something which for the time she’d spent here she had found annoying when she and anyone else put their weight on it.
This morning, she was ever so thankful for that.
It creaked.
Someone was creeping up the stairs yet had given themselves away.
The bathroom door opened quicker than she thought it would and in came an assassin.
It was a pistol which she saw first. A black automatic weapon with a long silencer on the end. As she’d planned to, Svetlana grabbed the end of that with her left hand while, with her right, she swung the toilet brush holder forward at head height.
She attacked someone she didn’t see until impact was made with his face.
What a swing it was, what a bash was gained. Svetlana was impressed with herself, with the force which she’d employed.
“Eeeerrrr!”
A man collapsed in the doorway with that groan.
Svetlana looked at his face. He wasn’t the man she’d seen in the garden. That meant, as she’d expected, that there were at least two of them.
Well… there had been.
Saying nothing, barely looking at the wounded man she’d knocked down in a messy heap that he formed, Svetlana took his gun from him. She had a towel in the other hand – the toilet brush holder was on the floor, covered in blood – and put that on his face, folding it once as she did.
“Say hello to the Rodina for me.” She whispered that to him before adding a final comment, the nastiest of all Russian insults: “Also, yob tvoyu mat.”
With that said, she shot him in the face.
The sound was louder than she’d thought, even with that silencer and the towel to muffle the sound.
One assassin was dead and Svetlana was out on the landing fast, leading like he had with the gun head of her. She had both hands on it and was ready to open fire on anyone up here.
There was no one else in sight though.
“Ilya?”
There was a hurried, hushed call made up the stairs. It came from a male, someone who sounded concerned.
Svetlana smiled when hearing it. The second killer, the one downstairs was calling upon his buddy but had no idea that Ilya was dead. He, hopefully the one she’d seen in the garden, would soon be next.
Laying down on the carpeted floor, Svetlana kept the pistol pointed towards the top of the stairs. She was in the corner and could be seen, though not so easily so she hoped.
That proved correct.
It was amateur hour here, so Svetlana silently told herself as the second man came up the stairs. “Ilya, where are you?” In Russian he spoke and those were his last words.
The very moment that his head appeared in view, as he came up the steps, Svetlana fired a second shot. She watched half of head seem to explode. He fell down and she was up on her feet and at the top of the stairs. The second killer was all the way down at the bottom. She went down towards him, moving quickly though with her eyes scanning around, especially to the left where the banister opened up to the hallway.
There was no one else there, just someone who looked pretty dead and in a crumped mess at the bottom of the stairs.
Svetlana made sure of that. She’d shot him through the right eye. When having a close look at him, it was clear that the bullet had ripped open the whole side of his face with his ear gone. There was no need to shoot him again, but that she did. Svetlana put a bullet in his chest before crouching down and keeping her gun pointed towards the kitchen door.
She recalled his name now, the second man that was, the one she’d met just the once a long time ago at SVR headquarters back in Russia: it had been Petr… before she’d blown half his face off.
Waiting, Svetlana asked herself whether there was there anyone else here to kill her?
It took an awfully long time for anyone else to arrive. Svetlana had no one to call, nor anyway to make contact with them if she could. It wasn’t just the internet that was out but phone signals too. She had tried to use Terri–Ann’s phone but found that there was no reception.
Somehow, probably with a fancy gadget, electronic silence had descended upon the house.
When no one had come out of the kitchen, she’d gone in there. Terri–Ann was dead on the floor with deep red cuts forming a ring around her throat. Svetlana suspected a garrot had been used. She looked too at the ‘world’s best mum’ socks that the young mother she’d spent so much time with wore. There was a teacup handle still in one hand but the remains of the cup, and contents, split across the floor.
One of the security guards was also dead in the kitchen – that one shot – and, taking the briefest of looks through the window, she saw another one down dead in the garden. To make sure that the one called Ilya wouldn’t do the impossible and come back like some monster from a Hollywood film, she’d gone back upstairs to the bathroom and shot him again.
Like with Petr, it was a shot to the chest. People can live after being shot in the head or in the chest, but not in both places. Svetlana didn’t have much experience with gunplay but with the SVR, she’d done a little training with pistols. The two that she had taken from those assassins sent to kill her were kept in her hand & in a pyjama bottom pocket.
She’d found her shoes and a warn coat in case she needed to go outside but had waited inside until ‘the cavalry’ showed up.
“I want to talk to Grace Miller.”
It had been an hour at least. There were men claiming to be with MI-6 outside, one of them who, at her insistence, had pushed a phone through the door and said that there was signal reception now. Someone called Neil MacDonald had apparently been on the line wanting to speak to her.
Back through the letterbox went that phone as she told them who she’d speak to.
“He says that she’d unavailable.” The shout came back through the letterbox.
“Then he can talk to himself! I’m not coming out of here and if you come in, it’ll be a mistake you’ll regret.”
Svetlana wasn’t in the mood to trust the words of anyone she didn’t know.
“She’s someone she can’t be reached.” The reply came after a few moments from the man unwittingly playing messenger. “He says that he’s her boss, in charge of the investigation she’s running.”
“That’s nice for him.” Acid sarcasm came from her due to the circumstances of all of this. “And where’s this place that Grace can’t be reached, eh? Is it maybe Antarctica?”
There was a low laugh that she heard outside though it didn’t sound like it came from the man she was talking to.
“Luv’,” there was no kindness in his voice despite what he called her in that galling Cockney accent, “we’re going to come through this door. We’re going to come through the windows. If you’ve got a gun, put it down quick. That’s a fair warning and I say that because we aren’t messing around. We’ve come here to save you and you’re testing my patience.”
For a moment, Svetlana thought about telling him to dare to try it. Sense overcame her though. That would be foolish. Two guys had come to kill her, and she’d killed them instead, so it wouldn’t be the best of ideas to maybe get killed by her gung-ho, late-to-the-party rescuers, would it?
“Send the phone back through then, and let me talk to this MacDonald character.”
She let them in soon enough, making sure that the two pistols were on the ground and she was standing up against the wall with her arms outstretched. Three men came in through the front door after she’d unlocked it and another two appeared in the kitchen after coming in the back door.
One of them, his machine pistol pointed at her belly, covered her.
The others swept through the house.
“Clear!”
“Body!”
“Bedroom clear!”
“Study clear!”
She listened to them as they called out to each other while they went through the house.
The one she’d been talking through the door to, who she believed was their team leader, came back downstairs and asked her a question.
“Did you hit him with that holder for the bog brush, Luv’?”
He was wearing body armour and tactical gear. The muscles in his neck, chest and biceps bulged. Svetlana hadn’t been with a man in a while. She was attracted to him and his green eyes, with all of that bulk too, despite his accent.
“Yeah.” Still standing still and making no sudden movements, Svetlana confirmed that with a nod and a smile too.
He shook his head. “You are one mean lady. What a way for anyone to go out!”
Another one of the armed men in the farmhouse let out a laugh before a third came down the stairs and whispered in the leader’s ear. That smile vanished.
“Talk to MacDonald on the phone again.” He pointed at where she’d left it on the floor. “And tell him that there’s no sign of the Eleanor woman despite her supposedly meant to be here.”
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2023 7:39 pm
If she was lying, the Russian would try to kill her to help sell the story. If she was telling the truth, the Russians should have left her alone to sow distrust about her.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2023 11:28 am
by Nik_SpeakerToCats » Sun Jan 29, 2023 12:42 pm
Would the Russian for 'Defenstration' translate as 'Natural Causes' ?
It probably translates to "the usual".
Leander -
Keep it up, this bit was worthy of LeCarre or Fleming.
Mike
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:05 pm
"In the Bathroom with the Bog-Brush Holder !!"
Her take-down will become the stuff of legend...
But, now, the missing woman ??
Tracked /grabbed or turned / sleeper ??
Their leak seems to have turned into a mire of wet-work...
Her take-down will become the stuff of legend...
But, now, the missing woman ??
Tracked /grabbed or turned / sleeper ??
Their leak seems to have turned into a mire of wet-work...
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2023 2:26 pm
I'm hoping some UK heads start rolling. Any chance of bring in actual head hunters?
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2023 9:40 am
First going to say this is awesome and I love it. Second this is the nightmare for any government intelligence service. Your Boss is literally an enemy.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2023 8:28 pm
Rationally, you're right. We're dealing here with people not acting rationally though.jemhouston wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 7:39 pm If she was lying, the Russian would try to kill her to help sell the story. If she was telling the truth, the Russians should have left her alone to sow distrust about her.
Thank you for the kind words. I spent much time on that chapter.MikeKozlowski wrote: ↑Thu Feb 02, 2023 11:28 amby Nik_SpeakerToCats » Sun Jan 29, 2023 12:42 pm
Would the Russian for 'Defenstration' translate as 'Natural Causes' ?
It probably translates to "the usual".
Leander -
Keep it up, this bit was worthy of LeCarre or Fleming.
Mike
It was the deadliest weapon in my bathroom and I thought it would do. Poor guy, I should have let him leave to deal with humiliation of being called 'the bog brush guy'.Nik_SpeakerToCats wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 1:05 pm "In the Bathroom with the Bog-Brush Holder !!"
Her take-down will become the stuff of legend...
But, now, the missing woman ??
Tracked /grabbed or turned / sleeper ??
Their leak seems to have turned into a mire of wet-work...
Heads will roll, but the wrong ones.jemhouston wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 2:26 pm I'm hoping some UK heads start rolling. Any chance of bring in actual head hunters?
Thank you.
It's a story idea I've had for a while. They first got Manningtree by accident: later in the story we'll see more of how they've worked her.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2023 8:30 pm
Fourteen – Revelations
Lauren was asked to leave the room. It was something that happened a lot when people came to see Alicia urgently. She didn’t like it now like she hadn’t liked it before yet none of that mattered. Out of the living room and into the kitchen she went, closing the door behind her yet standing pressed up against it ready to hear what was said in her absence.
She and her employer were in the latter’s flat above 10 Downing Street. It was a small and cosy apartment up on high above the offices downstairs. Alicia’s kids had bedrooms here though were away for the evening with their father. Back in the living room, there had been a late dinner being had before the interruption and with her banishment, Lauren was now in the kitchen that Alicia rarely used. The door which she leaned against, like all of those in the flat, was thin and conductive to listening ears.
Lauren had stood right here before, listening to things which she wasn’t meant to. Tonight, it was just the same.
“I am afraid that I have to bring your attention towards an unfortunate and serious situation which occurred earlier today in up Wrexham.”
That was the head of MI-5 speaking, a woman whom Lauren had seen come into the flat looking rather emotionally drained.
“What,” came Alicia’s irritated question in return, “could have happened up there in Wales that you need to bring to me?”
“Something quite awful, Alicia.”
That was the home secretary. Another woman who’d come up to the flat, she was among the entirety of the UK’s national security leadership that was female. Lauren, just like Alicia, was proud that her country had all of those women at the top, knowing that it was one in the eye of the political opposition’s male-dominated leadership.
Quinn–Browne was next up, the Chief of SIS. What she had to say made Lauren’s belly tighten just as it had done when she was in Worcester a good few days ago now.
“Prime Minister, several weeks ago now, we had a Russian intelligence operative defect to us out of the blue when down in Gibraltar. We brought that person here to the U.K and kept them in a safe house. The defector provided us with plentiful intelligence and there has been an ongoing debriefing of them.
Early this morning, there was an armed attack on that safe house where Beth’s people and mine have been jointly sharing the security and debriefing tasks. A total of five lives have been lost. Two of them are suspected Russian nationals – assassins it looks like – and three are ours, including one of my own top people. In addition, we have a missing officer, again from my organisation, of whom there is no signs of what happened to her at all.
The defector is alive and has been moved elsewhere.”
HOLY SH*T!
Lauren involuntary put a hand over her mouth as that thought nearly verbally erupted from her.
“You’re only telling me this now?” The incredulity in Alicia was as clear as day to hear. “Suzannah, what was this defector telling you?
Was this the matter that before Manchester took up the time and attention of so many of your people who should have been on counter-terrorism work, Beth?”
The home secretary answered in the place of both of those two professional spooks.
“Alicia, its long been the customary procedure for the Security Service, and Suzannah’s S.I.S too, to not directly relate to ministers, prime ministers included, the exact details of ongoing intelligence operations unless there is an absolute need.
They didn’t tell those to me and, I believe, we don’t need to go into that now. It keeps the two services politically independent and free from allegations of bias.”
Lauren didn’t like what she heard there at all. The spooks shouldn’t be keeping things from ministers. If they hadn’t, there would have been a clue to the risk to her personally before the sudden danger signal had been given that day in Worcester.
Alicia wasn’t best pleased either.
“There’s details and then there are details, Catherine. I should have known that we had a defector in-country, one here spilling secrets whose life was in danger. Now we have dead people and a missing spook of ours.
Suzannah, do you think that this missing spy was working with those who came to kill your defector?”
“It’s a possibility being explored. It would explain the ability of those killers to locate her when we, Beth and I, worked to keep the defector hidden.”
“So now you have a treason case to follow. Go follow that.
Catherine, I want to talk to you alone.”
Lauren kept on listening as the spy chiefs left. There was silence and she leaned even closer against the door, worried she wasn’t hearing something being possibly whispered.
That wasn’t the case though. Alicia had just bidden her time.
“Catherine, Beth has to go. I’ve had enough of her, Suzannah has displeased me too, but Beth is a whole different matter. I think that it is time she moved on.”
“It’s not the done thing for prime ministers to remove director generals from Five.”
Catherine was a guarded, unfriendly woman. Lauren had never warmed to her just like she knew Alicia hadn’t too.
“After Manchester, after this mess in Wrexham… she’s lost my faith in her. Let’s find a way and do it soon.”
“I’ll see to it.”
Despite all of her failings, the home secretary was weak. Lauren couldn’t help but smile at how easily Alicia forced her subordinate into backing down and agreeing to see to it that the head of the Security Service would be soon replaced.
Hearing what she had been, it was clear that that woman posed an extraordinary threat to she and Alicia both. Lauren would be safer with her gone yet the Chief of SIS too sounded concerning.
After the home secretary left, Alicia opened the door to the kitchen. If she’d still been leaning against it, Lauren would have fallen into the living room. She was against the kitchen counter though.
“How much of that did you hear?”
Lauren could have lied but chose not to. She never lied to Alicia.
“All of it.”
“I know it’s late,” Alicia yawned seemingly to emphasis that, “but do you want to go for a run?”
An hour later, they were back. The two of them, with police officers in tow, had taken a couple of laps around Whitehall. It had been dark outside and the prime minister running alongside her aide plus two police officers hadn’t attracted any real attention. It was a regular thing, though mostly done in the morning rather than after eight at night.
Lauren wanted to get home though Alicia convinced her to stay for a bit.
“Jump in the shower with me, will you?”
She whispered that less the microphones which she said were there in the flat picked that up. It was something which Lauren had always thought to be over the top paranoia. However, the events of recent days had convinced her otherwise. The noise of that shower was excessive and would allow her to talk about something she’d been thinking of when they’d run up Horse Guards Parade and back down Whitehall.
If Alicia wanted her to stay, then she’d have to hear that.
“What’s in those packages that go to the Russians?”
“Why do you ask?”
Alicia had been about to kiss her but backed off now.
“I want to know.”
“It’s just government stuff. Its all harmless really. I give them nothing of any significance and only because I have to.”
Lauren didn’t believe that.
“It cannot be nothing, it cannot be harmless: not with all of the effort involved. For you to say that it’s all nothing means you’re lying to me, that you think I’m stupid too.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.” There was exasperation in Alicia. “You never wanted to know before. In fact, I specially remember you telling me that you didn’t want to know. You said that you loved me and trusted me.”
“That was before five people were dead in Wales!”
She hadn’t meant to say that so openly, to blurt it out that way. This conversation wasn’t going like it had been in her head when they were running though. Nonetheless, it was an expression of how she really did feel.
“The two things don’t have to be directly related.”
It sounded weak and was clear that Alicia didn’t believe it either.
Lauren got out of the shower and was straight into a dressing gown.
“I should be getting going.”
The shower, with all of its noise, was left on as Alicia too got out.
“Why are we arguing?”
“We are arguing,” Lauren told her, “because all of this has gotten out of hand! Look at all that we’ve heard tonight. I’m linking it all together and seeing myself in prison… or running to safety in Russia, of all places!”
Alicia took hold of her: “Calm down.”
Lauren refused to do so though. She stepped out of the embrace and turned around while starting to dry herself off.
“I’m not going to do it anymore. I won’t be making exchanges for you.”
“There is no danger, don’t you see that? I’ve stopped it all. I removed the risk and we can carry on as usual.”
When she’d been running and thinking it all over, much dot-connecting had been done by Lauren.
“In Worcester, you didn’t know that I was being watched. You did afterwards though, long before tonight happened. When we were on the way to Manchester, you told me that no one was watching because you’d stopped that but I didn’t make the connection. Now I do.
When, Alicia, did you know?”
Smiling at her, Alicia stepped forward once again to embrace her. This time, her patience exhausted, Lauren didn’t push her away.
“The Canadian ambassador,” Alicia whispered to her, “told me later that evening, after Worcester that is. It came from his prime minister direct because our spooks asked his spooks to spy on me by turning my phone into a bug. I assumed that they did the same to yours too.
The P.M there thought I deserved to know.
Andy Thorn has been helping me since. He has a contact with someone who works for Barton over the F.C.O. A lot of this is coming from Robert because he has those top spooks at Five and Six under his influence.
I’ve shut Beth down and Quinn–Browne will be next. Then it will be just Barton to deal with.”
With all of that revealed to her, Lauren stepped back and away from Alicia. She started putting on her clothes. Her employer watched her and seemed on the edge of saying something more yet didn’t.
“You know how much I hate Andrew, don’t you?”
“He’s nothing. He’s just a means to an end. I need him for now but, if it makes you happy, the moment that his usefulness if up, he’s gone.”
That wasn’t enough for Lauren though.
“Do what you must there.” She was finished getting dressed. “Yet, as I said, I’ll no more of those exchanges with the Russians.
You aren’t telling me the truth on what gets passed to them. You didn’t tell me soon enough, when you should have, about those watching me with the aim of catching me engaging in treason against this country. You’re covered and you’ve been thinking of yourself in all of this.
As to me, I’m just as expendable as Andrew. No more.”
In a fashion a bit more dramatic than she had intended, yet satisfying enough, Lauren stormed out of the bathroom and through the flat to the exit.
“Lauren, don’t be rash: come back!”
She didn’t though. She was out of there.
It was the end of the two of them as far as she was concerned.
Lauren was asked to leave the room. It was something that happened a lot when people came to see Alicia urgently. She didn’t like it now like she hadn’t liked it before yet none of that mattered. Out of the living room and into the kitchen she went, closing the door behind her yet standing pressed up against it ready to hear what was said in her absence.
She and her employer were in the latter’s flat above 10 Downing Street. It was a small and cosy apartment up on high above the offices downstairs. Alicia’s kids had bedrooms here though were away for the evening with their father. Back in the living room, there had been a late dinner being had before the interruption and with her banishment, Lauren was now in the kitchen that Alicia rarely used. The door which she leaned against, like all of those in the flat, was thin and conductive to listening ears.
Lauren had stood right here before, listening to things which she wasn’t meant to. Tonight, it was just the same.
“I am afraid that I have to bring your attention towards an unfortunate and serious situation which occurred earlier today in up Wrexham.”
That was the head of MI-5 speaking, a woman whom Lauren had seen come into the flat looking rather emotionally drained.
“What,” came Alicia’s irritated question in return, “could have happened up there in Wales that you need to bring to me?”
“Something quite awful, Alicia.”
That was the home secretary. Another woman who’d come up to the flat, she was among the entirety of the UK’s national security leadership that was female. Lauren, just like Alicia, was proud that her country had all of those women at the top, knowing that it was one in the eye of the political opposition’s male-dominated leadership.
Quinn–Browne was next up, the Chief of SIS. What she had to say made Lauren’s belly tighten just as it had done when she was in Worcester a good few days ago now.
“Prime Minister, several weeks ago now, we had a Russian intelligence operative defect to us out of the blue when down in Gibraltar. We brought that person here to the U.K and kept them in a safe house. The defector provided us with plentiful intelligence and there has been an ongoing debriefing of them.
Early this morning, there was an armed attack on that safe house where Beth’s people and mine have been jointly sharing the security and debriefing tasks. A total of five lives have been lost. Two of them are suspected Russian nationals – assassins it looks like – and three are ours, including one of my own top people. In addition, we have a missing officer, again from my organisation, of whom there is no signs of what happened to her at all.
The defector is alive and has been moved elsewhere.”
HOLY SH*T!
Lauren involuntary put a hand over her mouth as that thought nearly verbally erupted from her.
“You’re only telling me this now?” The incredulity in Alicia was as clear as day to hear. “Suzannah, what was this defector telling you?
Was this the matter that before Manchester took up the time and attention of so many of your people who should have been on counter-terrorism work, Beth?”
The home secretary answered in the place of both of those two professional spooks.
“Alicia, its long been the customary procedure for the Security Service, and Suzannah’s S.I.S too, to not directly relate to ministers, prime ministers included, the exact details of ongoing intelligence operations unless there is an absolute need.
They didn’t tell those to me and, I believe, we don’t need to go into that now. It keeps the two services politically independent and free from allegations of bias.”
Lauren didn’t like what she heard there at all. The spooks shouldn’t be keeping things from ministers. If they hadn’t, there would have been a clue to the risk to her personally before the sudden danger signal had been given that day in Worcester.
Alicia wasn’t best pleased either.
“There’s details and then there are details, Catherine. I should have known that we had a defector in-country, one here spilling secrets whose life was in danger. Now we have dead people and a missing spook of ours.
Suzannah, do you think that this missing spy was working with those who came to kill your defector?”
“It’s a possibility being explored. It would explain the ability of those killers to locate her when we, Beth and I, worked to keep the defector hidden.”
“So now you have a treason case to follow. Go follow that.
Catherine, I want to talk to you alone.”
Lauren kept on listening as the spy chiefs left. There was silence and she leaned even closer against the door, worried she wasn’t hearing something being possibly whispered.
That wasn’t the case though. Alicia had just bidden her time.
“Catherine, Beth has to go. I’ve had enough of her, Suzannah has displeased me too, but Beth is a whole different matter. I think that it is time she moved on.”
“It’s not the done thing for prime ministers to remove director generals from Five.”
Catherine was a guarded, unfriendly woman. Lauren had never warmed to her just like she knew Alicia hadn’t too.
“After Manchester, after this mess in Wrexham… she’s lost my faith in her. Let’s find a way and do it soon.”
“I’ll see to it.”
Despite all of her failings, the home secretary was weak. Lauren couldn’t help but smile at how easily Alicia forced her subordinate into backing down and agreeing to see to it that the head of the Security Service would be soon replaced.
Hearing what she had been, it was clear that that woman posed an extraordinary threat to she and Alicia both. Lauren would be safer with her gone yet the Chief of SIS too sounded concerning.
After the home secretary left, Alicia opened the door to the kitchen. If she’d still been leaning against it, Lauren would have fallen into the living room. She was against the kitchen counter though.
“How much of that did you hear?”
Lauren could have lied but chose not to. She never lied to Alicia.
“All of it.”
“I know it’s late,” Alicia yawned seemingly to emphasis that, “but do you want to go for a run?”
An hour later, they were back. The two of them, with police officers in tow, had taken a couple of laps around Whitehall. It had been dark outside and the prime minister running alongside her aide plus two police officers hadn’t attracted any real attention. It was a regular thing, though mostly done in the morning rather than after eight at night.
Lauren wanted to get home though Alicia convinced her to stay for a bit.
“Jump in the shower with me, will you?”
She whispered that less the microphones which she said were there in the flat picked that up. It was something which Lauren had always thought to be over the top paranoia. However, the events of recent days had convinced her otherwise. The noise of that shower was excessive and would allow her to talk about something she’d been thinking of when they’d run up Horse Guards Parade and back down Whitehall.
If Alicia wanted her to stay, then she’d have to hear that.
“What’s in those packages that go to the Russians?”
“Why do you ask?”
Alicia had been about to kiss her but backed off now.
“I want to know.”
“It’s just government stuff. Its all harmless really. I give them nothing of any significance and only because I have to.”
Lauren didn’t believe that.
“It cannot be nothing, it cannot be harmless: not with all of the effort involved. For you to say that it’s all nothing means you’re lying to me, that you think I’m stupid too.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.” There was exasperation in Alicia. “You never wanted to know before. In fact, I specially remember you telling me that you didn’t want to know. You said that you loved me and trusted me.”
“That was before five people were dead in Wales!”
She hadn’t meant to say that so openly, to blurt it out that way. This conversation wasn’t going like it had been in her head when they were running though. Nonetheless, it was an expression of how she really did feel.
“The two things don’t have to be directly related.”
It sounded weak and was clear that Alicia didn’t believe it either.
Lauren got out of the shower and was straight into a dressing gown.
“I should be getting going.”
The shower, with all of its noise, was left on as Alicia too got out.
“Why are we arguing?”
“We are arguing,” Lauren told her, “because all of this has gotten out of hand! Look at all that we’ve heard tonight. I’m linking it all together and seeing myself in prison… or running to safety in Russia, of all places!”
Alicia took hold of her: “Calm down.”
Lauren refused to do so though. She stepped out of the embrace and turned around while starting to dry herself off.
“I’m not going to do it anymore. I won’t be making exchanges for you.”
“There is no danger, don’t you see that? I’ve stopped it all. I removed the risk and we can carry on as usual.”
When she’d been running and thinking it all over, much dot-connecting had been done by Lauren.
“In Worcester, you didn’t know that I was being watched. You did afterwards though, long before tonight happened. When we were on the way to Manchester, you told me that no one was watching because you’d stopped that but I didn’t make the connection. Now I do.
When, Alicia, did you know?”
Smiling at her, Alicia stepped forward once again to embrace her. This time, her patience exhausted, Lauren didn’t push her away.
“The Canadian ambassador,” Alicia whispered to her, “told me later that evening, after Worcester that is. It came from his prime minister direct because our spooks asked his spooks to spy on me by turning my phone into a bug. I assumed that they did the same to yours too.
The P.M there thought I deserved to know.
Andy Thorn has been helping me since. He has a contact with someone who works for Barton over the F.C.O. A lot of this is coming from Robert because he has those top spooks at Five and Six under his influence.
I’ve shut Beth down and Quinn–Browne will be next. Then it will be just Barton to deal with.”
With all of that revealed to her, Lauren stepped back and away from Alicia. She started putting on her clothes. Her employer watched her and seemed on the edge of saying something more yet didn’t.
“You know how much I hate Andrew, don’t you?”
“He’s nothing. He’s just a means to an end. I need him for now but, if it makes you happy, the moment that his usefulness if up, he’s gone.”
That wasn’t enough for Lauren though.
“Do what you must there.” She was finished getting dressed. “Yet, as I said, I’ll no more of those exchanges with the Russians.
You aren’t telling me the truth on what gets passed to them. You didn’t tell me soon enough, when you should have, about those watching me with the aim of catching me engaging in treason against this country. You’re covered and you’ve been thinking of yourself in all of this.
As to me, I’m just as expendable as Andrew. No more.”
In a fashion a bit more dramatic than she had intended, yet satisfying enough, Lauren stormed out of the bathroom and through the flat to the exit.
“Lauren, don’t be rash: come back!”
She didn’t though. She was out of there.
It was the end of the two of them as far as she was concerned.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:44 am
"Paging Samson, please report to the temple."
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:09 pm
Never mind sh**t hitting the fan, this is bloody guts & brains spraying from the wood-chipper...
added: This is the point when, trapped between she-devil, deep blue sea and circling sharks of sundry hue, you 'turn your coat', go 'State Evidence'...
added: This is the point when, trapped between she-devil, deep blue sea and circling sharks of sundry hue, you 'turn your coat', go 'State Evidence'...
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2023 6:37 pm
Things are getting dicely!
What if the authorities have returned to the head-in-the-sand, fingers-in-the-ears, we-don't-want-to-know approach though?Nik_SpeakerToCats wrote: ↑Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:09 pm Never mind sh**t hitting the fan, this is bloody guts & brains spraying from the wood-chipper...
added: This is the point when, trapped between she-devil, deep blue sea and circling sharks of sundry hue, you 'turn your coat', go 'State Evidence'...
Plus, what if those who could help you end up getting bumped off?
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2023 6:40 pm
Fifteen – Slip of the tongue
Grace was on a videocall to Svetlana. The Russian defector was somewhere undisclosed though, Grace had the notion during the chat that she was talking to someone who was on a ship rather than in yet another safe house… but that could have been just her imagination.
While not looking physically affected by her near brush with death when a pair of assassins had tried to kill her, Svetlana was boiling with rage.
“It was your prime minister! She sent those two men to kill me. Manningtree found out where I was, contacted Yasenevo, and so Petr and Ilya were sent. It’s all on her, Grace.
If I was you, I’d be worried about my own safety as well. There’s a good chance that you’ll have a deadly accident. Mark my works: watch your back. That woman has killed before, has had those who threatened her position killed and sent those gunmen after me too.”
Grace had been told that Svetlana had been saying such things such she had been rescued from that Wales safe house where everyone else inside had been killed: two of them at her own hands. The allegations that it was the country’s prime minister directing foreign assassins on UK soil, killing UK intelligence officers & contracted former soldiers in SIS employ, had been made to anyone within earshot. She’d said it to her rescuers, debriefers and those who were with her now wherever that new ‘safe’ place might be.
“That Petr was someone I’d seen at S.V.R headquarters myself, Grace. The guy was a killer, someone who’d knocked off people before. You know that they asked me when I got her, those debriefing people that is, if I felt any regret for killing him. It was posed like a psychologist would ask.
That’s a load of rubbish though. Do you know what they really want to get at? They want to know if I had something to do with it all, if I was the one behind all those people getting killed? Yeah, I know: it’s just crazy! Try and make sense of all of that if you will, try to figure out what could be my endgame with that. They were suggesting that I shot those two assassins so that they couldn’t be interrogated.
I was fighting for my life!
You know what it means, right?
They’re looking for an excuse, one to excuse Manningtree. She’s pulling the strings here, Grace, and, to be honest with you, things don’t look at good for me long-term. I’ll fight for my life again should they come for me. I just wanted you to know that if it is said I suddenly went crazy and attacked people, leading to my unfortunate demise, that that is a load of baloney.
I tell you now: I’ll fight for my life again. Whomever Manningtree sends next time, they better be ready for what I will have to give to them in reply!”
Watching and listening to Svetlana, Grace saw the utter determination in her do just that. Should anyone come after her again, they would have that fight on their hands that Svetlana was promising.
That mattered little though in comparison to what else she was saying. The assertions that the prime minister had been behind what had happened was what was of great importance. Naturally, Svetlana had no evidence and even to Grace, submerged as she was in the belief that Manningtree was as guilty as Svetlana had always said she was, to hear that was rather unsettling.
Others who had heard it were having stronger emotions than she was.
Poor Svetlana had a knack for making herself unpopular with those who heard what she had to say.
“We’ll talk again soon.” Svetlana said before the connection ended. “In the meantime, watch out for yourself too.”
Grace went to see MacDonald afterwards. Just like countless times beforehand when she went to see her superior, the man leading MI-6’s side of the investigation into the prime minister, he looked overwhelmed with it all. Sure that he was under immense external pressure, though without knowing any of the details of that, Grace felt much sympathy for him.
She surely wouldn’t have liked to have been in his shoes.
“Neil, I’ve got two things to ask. Can we go and pick up Worthing? We have that recording of her arguing with Manningtree and subsequently storming off. I think she’d be ripe for a talk now, especially after there’s been two days now of her not accepting Manningtree’s attempts to contact her. She’ll be eager to talk.
Also, where’s Debbie? I cannot get hold of her.”
Looking upwards from all of the scattered paperwork across his desk, MacDonald wore a look that Grace at once recognised as meaning that there was trouble.
“Things have gone to hell.”
“Tell me the worst of it.”
Grace was ready for it… at least she thought she was. Nothing could have been as bad as what had only recently happened in Prague.
Surely not.
“Debbie has been pulled back to Thames House. She won’t be returning. Five is finally shutting down all enquiries on their end. It’s not public knowledge, and isn’t going to be for some time, but the D.G is on a leave of absence. That was something enforced by the Home Secretary herself. She took it two days ago and since then the D.D.G – that awful deputy of hers – has conducted a brief look at the investigation into Manningtree.
‘Not Proven’ is what that Scotsman is saying. He’s using that silly Scottish legal term like it really means something.
That’s a shutdown on their end and there doesn’t look like there is going to be a willingness to do anything else at all. He’s saying that everything on Manningtree and Worthing that we got is nowhere near enough to justify continued involvement.
More than that, he went to our Chief to ‘recommend’ that we are shut down too.”
“What?” Grace hadn’t been prepared to hear what she did after all. “They just cannot do that!” She was leaning forward and onto his desk, her palms face down. There was a rush of blood to her face which she felt as Grace realised that she was turning into Svetlana. “No, no, no.”
MacDonald went backwards in his chair, increasing the distance between them. The loom of alarm on his face made Grace think that her reaction might have been too much.
“Jeez. Calm down, will you?” It was a plea, not a polite request.
“It’s completely unacceptable. They shouldn’t be allowed to shut us down like this!”
“Well, ‘they’ technically aren’t. Five have pulled out but their actions are going to do us in. What will is what is happening with G.C.H.Q. They too are pulling out and with that goes all of our electronic surveillance. Our Chief will not be able to keep us going without the support of Thames House and Cheltenham both pulled.”
“Do we just give up then?”
Grace had now sat down. Despondency hit her when she suggested that course of action. There was anger in, though one which she was no longer physically manifesting.
“Eleanor is an issue that we are going to have to deal with. That keeps us on life support. Grace, I don’t want you to think that I’m willing to let this all go. Our P.M is in bed with a hostile foreign power and working against this country. I want to stop her and, when I spoke to Paul this morning, he urged that we redirect by trying to locate Eleanor.
She’s one of ours and she’s vanished. Suspicions about the ultimate reasoning behind that are one thing but we can focus on trying to find her first and justify staying active by hunting for her.”
Grace recalled what Debbie had said before they had taken that trip to the Czech Republic where she was certain that they had a leak. It had been Eleanor all along.
“So… I cannot go and pick up Worthing then?”
Maybe, just maybe, MacDonald might be willing to let her…
“No.” He was clear with that. “The missing Eleanor is our focus. We’re hunting our own now, someone who it looks like to have gotten people of ours murdered. We’re going to find her and take things from there.”
*
“This is the boyfriend’s flat then.”
“This is the cause of the Christmas row, yes.”
After calling first, Grace had taken the Tube up to Finchley and to where Debbie had recently moved into an apartment with her new boyfriend, the one whom her mum didn’t like. She was almost thirty though and thus grown up enough to make her own decisions.
“Oh, it’s warm in here!” It was a freezing evening outside yet inside the flat, Debbie had the heating on. Grace handed over her coat then turned towards the open door to what she could see was the living room. “In?”
“Yeah. Steve’s out for a good while so we can talk in privacy and relax.”
That they did. Debbie confirmed that she had been pulled back from her assignment to assist MI-6 and was back at Thames House. MI-5 had her doing paperwork though she didn’t say what that entailed. Grace didn’t ask either: it would be impolite to force Debbie to tell her that she couldn’t talk about it.
“You spent some time with Eleanor, didn’t you? Tell me everything about her. Don’t worry if you think I might already know something or that it’s unimportant. Just give me everything.”
“You still cannot find her?”
“That’s why I came round, Debbie: didn’t I say that. I want your help. You spent more time with her than me.”
Debbie pulled a face. “Grace, Eleanor Jenkins is one of your Secret Intelligence Service people. I don’t really know how much I can tell you about her that you really shouldn’t know yourself.”
Grace was seated in an armchair within the warm yet messy living room. Debbie was over on the sofa, spread out and looking extremely relaxed. What she said though when Grace asked her about Eleanor was anything but relaxed though. She looked tired and her remarks displayed indifference.
Grace had never known Debbie – admittedly their acquaintance hadn’t been for that long – be like that before.
“I need some help, and I was hoping that you could aid me in this.”
“I’m sorry,” she didn’t look like she was, “but I don’t know what I can tell you. Yes, I spoke to her a few times, and we had lunch one day, right before she went to Wrexham, but, otherwise, I just didn’t know her.”
Grace watched Debbie as the younger woman got up and went out of the room.
She was flummoxed at such behaviour. Grace just couldn’t understand why Debbie was being so uncooperative. It didn’t make any sense, none at all.
“I’m just making a cuppa, Grace!”
Debbie called out from the hallway. Grace heard that and took it in yet something else was on her mind.
That was the name of a place which Debbie had mentioned before she had left the room.
That place was Wrexham.
In Wrexham, two SVR hitmen had sought to murder Svetlana while killing others at the safe house there, including Grace’s friend Terri–Anne.
Debbie couldn’t know, shouldn’t have known in fact, that that event had happened there in Wrexham. The location was compartmentalised and she knew that Debbie wasn't in the loop there.
How could she have known that?
Grace was standing up as Debbie came back into the living room. The spook from MI-5 wasn’t carrying a couple of cups of tea. Instead, she had a pistol in her hand.
It was pointed direct at Grace, held firm in two hands by someone she had thought of as a friend.
“You picked up on it, didn’t you. My slip of the tongue revealed something that I wasn’t supposed to know and, Grace, you didn’t need long, did you?”
With a gun pointed at her, and Debbie wearing a look of what Grace could only describe as blankness, she decided to shut up and say nothing in reply.
“I didn’t want things to go this way. Eleanor was supposed to be the perfect patsy. She was supposed to have been found by now, another dead end to go with Kolya and Svetlana too.”
Understanding the implications fully of what Debbie was saying, Grace found dry amusement in the situation she was in though. In the movies, this was the part where the ‘bad guy’ revealed their entire plan… right before the ‘good guys’ burst in to save the day.
There was no sign of them though, and, maybe because she was thinking the same, Debbie said nothing else after that.
Silence descended upon the room.
Grace stood staring at Debbie and that was returned. A Mexican Stand-Off it might have been had Grace been armed, trained in gun-play and prepared. She was neither though.
There were questions that she had, oh so many of them. She wanted to ask how deeply Debbie was involved in this and for how long too. She wanted to know what drove her fellow spook, someone whom she’d only shown kindness towards, to do what she had in betraying not just her country and service, but her – Grace – too.
It seemed the best idea to say nothing though.
A car drove past noisily on the street outside.
Grace watched Debbie turn her eyes towards the window but those were soon returned. Only afterwards did it occur to her that if there had been a time to do something, anything at all to save herself that would have been it.
The moment had passed.
And Grace was no Svetlana.
Instead, there just came the anger again. The same anger that there had been earlier when talking with MacDonald. It was too the same rage that she’d been supressing since all of this had started and time and time again, every progress made with it all was quickly met with a reversal. Now, there was this betrayal.
“Is anything that you’ve told me ever been true?” Grace’s hands gripped the armrests as she stopped herself from unintentionally standing. “Have you just lied to me again and again, Debbie? Why? What’s in it for you?
Are you another one of Manningtree’s creatures?”
There remained zero expression on Debbie’s face. She was unrecognisable to Grace. Her fellow spook, someone who must have been duping her for a long time while feigning friendship with that, was someone else entirely now.
“I’m sorry.” This time she did sound like she meant it. “I really tried to keep you clear and out of danger.
I cannot make what happened go away either. Again, I’m sorry.”
Grace opened her mouth to say something, anything, yet before she could, there was a flash and then there was darkness.
Grace was on a videocall to Svetlana. The Russian defector was somewhere undisclosed though, Grace had the notion during the chat that she was talking to someone who was on a ship rather than in yet another safe house… but that could have been just her imagination.
While not looking physically affected by her near brush with death when a pair of assassins had tried to kill her, Svetlana was boiling with rage.
“It was your prime minister! She sent those two men to kill me. Manningtree found out where I was, contacted Yasenevo, and so Petr and Ilya were sent. It’s all on her, Grace.
If I was you, I’d be worried about my own safety as well. There’s a good chance that you’ll have a deadly accident. Mark my works: watch your back. That woman has killed before, has had those who threatened her position killed and sent those gunmen after me too.”
Grace had been told that Svetlana had been saying such things such she had been rescued from that Wales safe house where everyone else inside had been killed: two of them at her own hands. The allegations that it was the country’s prime minister directing foreign assassins on UK soil, killing UK intelligence officers & contracted former soldiers in SIS employ, had been made to anyone within earshot. She’d said it to her rescuers, debriefers and those who were with her now wherever that new ‘safe’ place might be.
“That Petr was someone I’d seen at S.V.R headquarters myself, Grace. The guy was a killer, someone who’d knocked off people before. You know that they asked me when I got her, those debriefing people that is, if I felt any regret for killing him. It was posed like a psychologist would ask.
That’s a load of rubbish though. Do you know what they really want to get at? They want to know if I had something to do with it all, if I was the one behind all those people getting killed? Yeah, I know: it’s just crazy! Try and make sense of all of that if you will, try to figure out what could be my endgame with that. They were suggesting that I shot those two assassins so that they couldn’t be interrogated.
I was fighting for my life!
You know what it means, right?
They’re looking for an excuse, one to excuse Manningtree. She’s pulling the strings here, Grace, and, to be honest with you, things don’t look at good for me long-term. I’ll fight for my life again should they come for me. I just wanted you to know that if it is said I suddenly went crazy and attacked people, leading to my unfortunate demise, that that is a load of baloney.
I tell you now: I’ll fight for my life again. Whomever Manningtree sends next time, they better be ready for what I will have to give to them in reply!”
Watching and listening to Svetlana, Grace saw the utter determination in her do just that. Should anyone come after her again, they would have that fight on their hands that Svetlana was promising.
That mattered little though in comparison to what else she was saying. The assertions that the prime minister had been behind what had happened was what was of great importance. Naturally, Svetlana had no evidence and even to Grace, submerged as she was in the belief that Manningtree was as guilty as Svetlana had always said she was, to hear that was rather unsettling.
Others who had heard it were having stronger emotions than she was.
Poor Svetlana had a knack for making herself unpopular with those who heard what she had to say.
“We’ll talk again soon.” Svetlana said before the connection ended. “In the meantime, watch out for yourself too.”
Grace went to see MacDonald afterwards. Just like countless times beforehand when she went to see her superior, the man leading MI-6’s side of the investigation into the prime minister, he looked overwhelmed with it all. Sure that he was under immense external pressure, though without knowing any of the details of that, Grace felt much sympathy for him.
She surely wouldn’t have liked to have been in his shoes.
“Neil, I’ve got two things to ask. Can we go and pick up Worthing? We have that recording of her arguing with Manningtree and subsequently storming off. I think she’d be ripe for a talk now, especially after there’s been two days now of her not accepting Manningtree’s attempts to contact her. She’ll be eager to talk.
Also, where’s Debbie? I cannot get hold of her.”
Looking upwards from all of the scattered paperwork across his desk, MacDonald wore a look that Grace at once recognised as meaning that there was trouble.
“Things have gone to hell.”
“Tell me the worst of it.”
Grace was ready for it… at least she thought she was. Nothing could have been as bad as what had only recently happened in Prague.
Surely not.
“Debbie has been pulled back to Thames House. She won’t be returning. Five is finally shutting down all enquiries on their end. It’s not public knowledge, and isn’t going to be for some time, but the D.G is on a leave of absence. That was something enforced by the Home Secretary herself. She took it two days ago and since then the D.D.G – that awful deputy of hers – has conducted a brief look at the investigation into Manningtree.
‘Not Proven’ is what that Scotsman is saying. He’s using that silly Scottish legal term like it really means something.
That’s a shutdown on their end and there doesn’t look like there is going to be a willingness to do anything else at all. He’s saying that everything on Manningtree and Worthing that we got is nowhere near enough to justify continued involvement.
More than that, he went to our Chief to ‘recommend’ that we are shut down too.”
“What?” Grace hadn’t been prepared to hear what she did after all. “They just cannot do that!” She was leaning forward and onto his desk, her palms face down. There was a rush of blood to her face which she felt as Grace realised that she was turning into Svetlana. “No, no, no.”
MacDonald went backwards in his chair, increasing the distance between them. The loom of alarm on his face made Grace think that her reaction might have been too much.
“Jeez. Calm down, will you?” It was a plea, not a polite request.
“It’s completely unacceptable. They shouldn’t be allowed to shut us down like this!”
“Well, ‘they’ technically aren’t. Five have pulled out but their actions are going to do us in. What will is what is happening with G.C.H.Q. They too are pulling out and with that goes all of our electronic surveillance. Our Chief will not be able to keep us going without the support of Thames House and Cheltenham both pulled.”
“Do we just give up then?”
Grace had now sat down. Despondency hit her when she suggested that course of action. There was anger in, though one which she was no longer physically manifesting.
“Eleanor is an issue that we are going to have to deal with. That keeps us on life support. Grace, I don’t want you to think that I’m willing to let this all go. Our P.M is in bed with a hostile foreign power and working against this country. I want to stop her and, when I spoke to Paul this morning, he urged that we redirect by trying to locate Eleanor.
She’s one of ours and she’s vanished. Suspicions about the ultimate reasoning behind that are one thing but we can focus on trying to find her first and justify staying active by hunting for her.”
Grace recalled what Debbie had said before they had taken that trip to the Czech Republic where she was certain that they had a leak. It had been Eleanor all along.
“So… I cannot go and pick up Worthing then?”
Maybe, just maybe, MacDonald might be willing to let her…
“No.” He was clear with that. “The missing Eleanor is our focus. We’re hunting our own now, someone who it looks like to have gotten people of ours murdered. We’re going to find her and take things from there.”
*
“This is the boyfriend’s flat then.”
“This is the cause of the Christmas row, yes.”
After calling first, Grace had taken the Tube up to Finchley and to where Debbie had recently moved into an apartment with her new boyfriend, the one whom her mum didn’t like. She was almost thirty though and thus grown up enough to make her own decisions.
“Oh, it’s warm in here!” It was a freezing evening outside yet inside the flat, Debbie had the heating on. Grace handed over her coat then turned towards the open door to what she could see was the living room. “In?”
“Yeah. Steve’s out for a good while so we can talk in privacy and relax.”
That they did. Debbie confirmed that she had been pulled back from her assignment to assist MI-6 and was back at Thames House. MI-5 had her doing paperwork though she didn’t say what that entailed. Grace didn’t ask either: it would be impolite to force Debbie to tell her that she couldn’t talk about it.
“You spent some time with Eleanor, didn’t you? Tell me everything about her. Don’t worry if you think I might already know something or that it’s unimportant. Just give me everything.”
“You still cannot find her?”
“That’s why I came round, Debbie: didn’t I say that. I want your help. You spent more time with her than me.”
Debbie pulled a face. “Grace, Eleanor Jenkins is one of your Secret Intelligence Service people. I don’t really know how much I can tell you about her that you really shouldn’t know yourself.”
Grace was seated in an armchair within the warm yet messy living room. Debbie was over on the sofa, spread out and looking extremely relaxed. What she said though when Grace asked her about Eleanor was anything but relaxed though. She looked tired and her remarks displayed indifference.
Grace had never known Debbie – admittedly their acquaintance hadn’t been for that long – be like that before.
“I need some help, and I was hoping that you could aid me in this.”
“I’m sorry,” she didn’t look like she was, “but I don’t know what I can tell you. Yes, I spoke to her a few times, and we had lunch one day, right before she went to Wrexham, but, otherwise, I just didn’t know her.”
Grace watched Debbie as the younger woman got up and went out of the room.
She was flummoxed at such behaviour. Grace just couldn’t understand why Debbie was being so uncooperative. It didn’t make any sense, none at all.
“I’m just making a cuppa, Grace!”
Debbie called out from the hallway. Grace heard that and took it in yet something else was on her mind.
That was the name of a place which Debbie had mentioned before she had left the room.
That place was Wrexham.
In Wrexham, two SVR hitmen had sought to murder Svetlana while killing others at the safe house there, including Grace’s friend Terri–Anne.
Debbie couldn’t know, shouldn’t have known in fact, that that event had happened there in Wrexham. The location was compartmentalised and she knew that Debbie wasn't in the loop there.
How could she have known that?
Grace was standing up as Debbie came back into the living room. The spook from MI-5 wasn’t carrying a couple of cups of tea. Instead, she had a pistol in her hand.
It was pointed direct at Grace, held firm in two hands by someone she had thought of as a friend.
“You picked up on it, didn’t you. My slip of the tongue revealed something that I wasn’t supposed to know and, Grace, you didn’t need long, did you?”
With a gun pointed at her, and Debbie wearing a look of what Grace could only describe as blankness, she decided to shut up and say nothing in reply.
“I didn’t want things to go this way. Eleanor was supposed to be the perfect patsy. She was supposed to have been found by now, another dead end to go with Kolya and Svetlana too.”
Understanding the implications fully of what Debbie was saying, Grace found dry amusement in the situation she was in though. In the movies, this was the part where the ‘bad guy’ revealed their entire plan… right before the ‘good guys’ burst in to save the day.
There was no sign of them though, and, maybe because she was thinking the same, Debbie said nothing else after that.
Silence descended upon the room.
Grace stood staring at Debbie and that was returned. A Mexican Stand-Off it might have been had Grace been armed, trained in gun-play and prepared. She was neither though.
There were questions that she had, oh so many of them. She wanted to ask how deeply Debbie was involved in this and for how long too. She wanted to know what drove her fellow spook, someone whom she’d only shown kindness towards, to do what she had in betraying not just her country and service, but her – Grace – too.
It seemed the best idea to say nothing though.
A car drove past noisily on the street outside.
Grace watched Debbie turn her eyes towards the window but those were soon returned. Only afterwards did it occur to her that if there had been a time to do something, anything at all to save herself that would have been it.
The moment had passed.
And Grace was no Svetlana.
Instead, there just came the anger again. The same anger that there had been earlier when talking with MacDonald. It was too the same rage that she’d been supressing since all of this had started and time and time again, every progress made with it all was quickly met with a reversal. Now, there was this betrayal.
“Is anything that you’ve told me ever been true?” Grace’s hands gripped the armrests as she stopped herself from unintentionally standing. “Have you just lied to me again and again, Debbie? Why? What’s in it for you?
Are you another one of Manningtree’s creatures?”
There remained zero expression on Debbie’s face. She was unrecognisable to Grace. Her fellow spook, someone who must have been duping her for a long time while feigning friendship with that, was someone else entirely now.
“I’m sorry.” This time she did sound like she meant it. “I really tried to keep you clear and out of danger.
I cannot make what happened go away either. Again, I’m sorry.”
Grace opened her mouth to say something, anything, yet before she could, there was a flash and then there was darkness.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2023 7:17 pm
...Outstanding.
Mike
Mike
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2023 7:45 pm
Hope the chickens come home to roost on everyone
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:02 pm
Thank you kindly.
Bad people usually get their just deserts.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:04 pm
Sixteen – Ludicrous notion
Barton was working late in the FCO when a call came in from over in Downing Street. His aide told him that it was Manningtree’s chief-of-staff asking if he’d pop over and see the prime minister. When he was ready, finishing up what he was doing with regard to reading the latest reports coming out of Islamabad, dreading every line of information about the internal collapse there, only then did respond to the summons.
The Foreign Office was on Whitehall though its northern face was actually against Downing Street. It was a quick walk over to and through the famous No.10 door. Katie Fieldhouse met him inside and directed him to follow her.
“The prime minister’s in the Cabinet Room.”
A loyal member of Manningtree’s inner team, Fieldhouse was no friend to Barton. He couldn’t wait to see her and her boss out of this building, once he was resident here that was.
At the rear of the building lay the Cabinet Room. Fieldhouse let him in and he saw Manningtree over by the French doors in the far corner: the chief-of-staff meanwhile closed the door behind her leaving him with just this country’s greatest ever traitor.
“Robert, good evening.”
She wore a wide grin. It was her cunning, conniving look: one he knew all too well.
“Just us?” He spread his hands, indicting the emptiness of the whole room. One-on-one meetings were never held in here.
“Can we go outside? I like to talk out there. It’s not raining anymore.”
“Sure.”
Barton agreed easily. He’d been told about Manningtree’s recent pendant for talking outside rather than in any rooms and suspected that was about her fear of being recorded in an enclosed space. In his pocket though he had his phone and, when coming into 10 Downing Street, he’d activated the voice recorder.
He’d bug her even if no one else would be.
She opened the doors and led them out. As Barton followed her, he took note of the security people stepping out of the way yet never straying too far from her. Manningtree then stopped in the middle of the open space, out there in the always impressively expansive Downing Street Gardens.
Barton was close to her, almost in her personal space.
“Have you seen the latest polling numbers?”
“Which polls, Alicia?”
He knew to which ones she referred yet decided to not cooperate fully with whatever she was up to in her conversation leading here.
“The most recent one for prime minister approval. It put my favourability at sixty-two per cent.”
“That’s a big, impressive number.” It was too, there was no denying that. “But, polls can change. People can go off their leaders fast.”
She smiled at him. It was cold and one without any friendliness.
“It would take something special to take a big bite out of that, Robert. Something extraordinary would have to happen.
Anyway, just as I was standing her considering that number, I remembered Michael Evans and the favourability numbers he had back when he was a minister. Do you remember Mike?”
“Of course I do.”
Barton had no idea why she had suddenly brought him up.
Evans was a former health secretary who had served in the government before Manningtree won power. He’d been a rival of hers for the top job though didn’t contest the party leadership election due to his resignation as health secretary on the eve of that opening. In fact, Evans was no longer in parliament. After leaving government, he’d quit his seat within a few months leading to a by-election which had been won (against all the odds) by the government. Manningtree had claimed vindication for her government after that shock result.
Still, the connection she was making didn’t connect in his mind.
“When Mike quit the Cabinet, it was put out there – unofficially, you’ll recall – that his decision to resign was due to the scandal concerning that tragic fire at Homerton Hospital the month beforehand. That was an excuse though. He didn’t quit his job and not run for the leadership because of that fire.”
“Why did he quit then?”
She wanted him to ask that. He knew he was playing her game but couldn’t help himself.
“He was in Germany, on ministerial visit right before my predecessor himself announced he was stepping down. Mike was at the airport in Dresden, so the way I hear it, when his wife phoned him in an emergency. There’d been police officers at their family home and they had taken away the laptop of their twenty-something son.
That boy lived at home and the police had received a report that there were images of children on it: do I have to spell out what kind of images? There was no arrest, just a seizure in a surprise visit. That came as a shock to Mike. He foresaw his son’s future in a negative light, with his own name dragged through the gutter for the rest of his career.
Mike and I never really got on but we had neighbouring constituencies and were both in government. I was new at the Home Office and he came to me when he arrived back from Germany. I advised him to step out of the limelight. He took my advice. Thankfully, whether they found nothing or not, the Met. Police closed their enquiry into his son.”
“Was,” Barton asked a couple of rushed questions which he didn’t expect an answer to, let alone the truth about it, “there anything actually on that computer? If there had been, was it planted? That’s a Russian trick to discredit political opponents, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea about any of that.”
She lied. He knew that she knew the truth of it all because that was her work she was boasting of there.
“Why bring him up?”
“His popularity never collapsed and instead he just faded away. Yet, if that had come out into the public arena, in an instant he would have been reviled nationwide… even if it was his son’s and not his computer.
I was making a point, Robert, about how public opinion could, can dramatically shift in the right circumstances after you suggested that mine could disappear. It would take something quite spectacular for me to fall though.”
He gave no reply to that. His eyes swept across the darkened garden this evening and towards the rear of the buildings along Downing Street. The high wall that separated the green space from Horse Guards also caught his attention.
“Is there a fall me for me that you foresee, Robert? One quite dramatic?”
There it was. She’d come to the real point of why she’d brought him here.
“Your poll ratings are only so high after that charade which you put on in Manchester. What you said there should never have been said and, in time, that will come back on you hard.”
“We’ll have to see about that.”
Manningtree looked as if she truly thought that it wouldn’t.
“I was just thinking too about another Cabinet colleague of ours, one who was also a potential leadership candidate at the time. Pramila Singh dropped out in the quite peculiar circumstances too, didn’t she? At the time, it benefited me for a short-term tactical advantage… yet now I see that differently.
How very House of Cards of you, Alicia.”
An innocent look overcame her. “Who, me?”
“You didn’t try any tricks on me though, did you?”
Barton wasn’t falling for her innocence act. She all but told him how she’d seen her rival Evans fall and he was suspecting now that she’d been behind the nobbling of the campaign of Singh, yet he couldn’t think of anything overt that had happened to his failed attempt to become prime minister. He’d always known that she’d had a hand somewhere though had put that down to general backstabbing among colleagues rather than anything serious.
“There was no need to, Robert. You ran a poor campaign and I beat you fair and square.” Her arrogant, spiteful tone told him what he’d always known: it had always been personal rather than political with her.
Again, silence befell them both for a moment. Barton’s eyes were wandering about again. He looked over where the entrance back to the Cabinet Room was.
“Shall we go back inside?”
“In a minute.” Unexpectedly, she reached out and touched his shoulder for a brief moment. “You know, there was the opportunity presented to me for one of those tricks which you speak of.
Your daughter Siobhan came to me – personally – and offered to spill the goods on you. She offered, what do they call it: oh, yes, kompromat.
Siobhan clearly hates you. Why is that, Robert? I turned her down, knowing that you were going to be beaten with ease. However, I did make the introduction between her and My Lauren. You know that they are friends, right?”
“What has my daughter got to do with anything?”
He was angry now.
How dare Manningtree bring up Siobhan!
As to what the prime minister was saying, that was certainly a lie.
It had to be.
“The thing is, Robert, is that you have this ludicrous notion that I am some sort of Russian spy. When I first heard of it, I laughed. It’s still funny now, though, to be fair, not as much as it was at the beginning. That’s because I’ve been informed of what you’ve been up to.
You secretly brought the country’s spy chiefs into the silly idea.
Your actions saw a friendly, allied country’s spooks also involved.
You’ve been telling people this crazy thing too.
You had me spied upon direct and also had my body-woman targeted as well with the accusation that she was involved in espionage. My Lauren is very upset.”
Barton stared her down once she finished what she had to say. He took note of the ‘My Lauren’ thing but bit his tongue rather than say something about just how close he knew Manningtree and her aide really were. There might have been a time for that but it wasn’t now.
Manningtree continued: “The whole thing is ridiculous. I’ve done nothing like that and, the way I hear it, there isn’t any evidence to suggest that anything I nor My Lauren has been observed doing give any credit to your paranoid fantasies about Russian influence here in Downing Street.
With all that is going on at the moment with the situation in Pakistan, something that threatens this country’s security both foreign and domestic, you’re messing around with this silliness!
I want you to consider something, Robert.
If you decide that you don’t wish to admit defeat with grace and back away, and instead try something along the lines of talking to a friendly journalist, the fallout won’t go as you think.
There’ll be a lot of attention paid to your daughter in that situation. Bridges will be burnt and she’d be one of them. Siobhan will end up as a patsy. Her job and her hatred of you will combine to doom any belief that you might entertain of ending up in my job.”
Barton wanted to explode at her. On the tip of his tongue was a series of expletives. He balled his fists too.
The threat to use his daughter against him, to ruin her like Manningtree was saying without saying that she was willing to do, brought about a strong paternal urge to protect her here and now.
Self-control swept over him though. A strong reaction was what she wanted, so he told himself, and he wouldn’t give her that.
“I’m going back inside. It’s been enlightening talking with you this evening, Alicia, but, for now, we’ll have to leave it there.”
What he actually said was less impressive than what he’d briefly formed in his mind as a dismissive comment to her, yet it would have to do.
Barton left the garden and went back into Downing Street. He was soon back over at the FCO and into his own office. Once he saw down, all of the anger was long gone. He smiled instead. That came when he took out his phone, the one which had been set to record his conversation with Manningtree. What she said to him would be enough for what he wanted, even if it wasn’t a full, explicit confession of her absolute guilt.
Alas, the smile then vanished.
His phone was inexplicitly dead.
“How did she do that!?”
Not for the first time, he’d underestimated his opponent.
However…
…Barton wasn’t beaten. He started to think about what to do next. Quitting wasn’t in him: only winning.
Barton was working late in the FCO when a call came in from over in Downing Street. His aide told him that it was Manningtree’s chief-of-staff asking if he’d pop over and see the prime minister. When he was ready, finishing up what he was doing with regard to reading the latest reports coming out of Islamabad, dreading every line of information about the internal collapse there, only then did respond to the summons.
The Foreign Office was on Whitehall though its northern face was actually against Downing Street. It was a quick walk over to and through the famous No.10 door. Katie Fieldhouse met him inside and directed him to follow her.
“The prime minister’s in the Cabinet Room.”
A loyal member of Manningtree’s inner team, Fieldhouse was no friend to Barton. He couldn’t wait to see her and her boss out of this building, once he was resident here that was.
At the rear of the building lay the Cabinet Room. Fieldhouse let him in and he saw Manningtree over by the French doors in the far corner: the chief-of-staff meanwhile closed the door behind her leaving him with just this country’s greatest ever traitor.
“Robert, good evening.”
She wore a wide grin. It was her cunning, conniving look: one he knew all too well.
“Just us?” He spread his hands, indicting the emptiness of the whole room. One-on-one meetings were never held in here.
“Can we go outside? I like to talk out there. It’s not raining anymore.”
“Sure.”
Barton agreed easily. He’d been told about Manningtree’s recent pendant for talking outside rather than in any rooms and suspected that was about her fear of being recorded in an enclosed space. In his pocket though he had his phone and, when coming into 10 Downing Street, he’d activated the voice recorder.
He’d bug her even if no one else would be.
She opened the doors and led them out. As Barton followed her, he took note of the security people stepping out of the way yet never straying too far from her. Manningtree then stopped in the middle of the open space, out there in the always impressively expansive Downing Street Gardens.
Barton was close to her, almost in her personal space.
“Have you seen the latest polling numbers?”
“Which polls, Alicia?”
He knew to which ones she referred yet decided to not cooperate fully with whatever she was up to in her conversation leading here.
“The most recent one for prime minister approval. It put my favourability at sixty-two per cent.”
“That’s a big, impressive number.” It was too, there was no denying that. “But, polls can change. People can go off their leaders fast.”
She smiled at him. It was cold and one without any friendliness.
“It would take something special to take a big bite out of that, Robert. Something extraordinary would have to happen.
Anyway, just as I was standing her considering that number, I remembered Michael Evans and the favourability numbers he had back when he was a minister. Do you remember Mike?”
“Of course I do.”
Barton had no idea why she had suddenly brought him up.
Evans was a former health secretary who had served in the government before Manningtree won power. He’d been a rival of hers for the top job though didn’t contest the party leadership election due to his resignation as health secretary on the eve of that opening. In fact, Evans was no longer in parliament. After leaving government, he’d quit his seat within a few months leading to a by-election which had been won (against all the odds) by the government. Manningtree had claimed vindication for her government after that shock result.
Still, the connection she was making didn’t connect in his mind.
“When Mike quit the Cabinet, it was put out there – unofficially, you’ll recall – that his decision to resign was due to the scandal concerning that tragic fire at Homerton Hospital the month beforehand. That was an excuse though. He didn’t quit his job and not run for the leadership because of that fire.”
“Why did he quit then?”
She wanted him to ask that. He knew he was playing her game but couldn’t help himself.
“He was in Germany, on ministerial visit right before my predecessor himself announced he was stepping down. Mike was at the airport in Dresden, so the way I hear it, when his wife phoned him in an emergency. There’d been police officers at their family home and they had taken away the laptop of their twenty-something son.
That boy lived at home and the police had received a report that there were images of children on it: do I have to spell out what kind of images? There was no arrest, just a seizure in a surprise visit. That came as a shock to Mike. He foresaw his son’s future in a negative light, with his own name dragged through the gutter for the rest of his career.
Mike and I never really got on but we had neighbouring constituencies and were both in government. I was new at the Home Office and he came to me when he arrived back from Germany. I advised him to step out of the limelight. He took my advice. Thankfully, whether they found nothing or not, the Met. Police closed their enquiry into his son.”
“Was,” Barton asked a couple of rushed questions which he didn’t expect an answer to, let alone the truth about it, “there anything actually on that computer? If there had been, was it planted? That’s a Russian trick to discredit political opponents, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea about any of that.”
She lied. He knew that she knew the truth of it all because that was her work she was boasting of there.
“Why bring him up?”
“His popularity never collapsed and instead he just faded away. Yet, if that had come out into the public arena, in an instant he would have been reviled nationwide… even if it was his son’s and not his computer.
I was making a point, Robert, about how public opinion could, can dramatically shift in the right circumstances after you suggested that mine could disappear. It would take something quite spectacular for me to fall though.”
He gave no reply to that. His eyes swept across the darkened garden this evening and towards the rear of the buildings along Downing Street. The high wall that separated the green space from Horse Guards also caught his attention.
“Is there a fall me for me that you foresee, Robert? One quite dramatic?”
There it was. She’d come to the real point of why she’d brought him here.
“Your poll ratings are only so high after that charade which you put on in Manchester. What you said there should never have been said and, in time, that will come back on you hard.”
“We’ll have to see about that.”
Manningtree looked as if she truly thought that it wouldn’t.
“I was just thinking too about another Cabinet colleague of ours, one who was also a potential leadership candidate at the time. Pramila Singh dropped out in the quite peculiar circumstances too, didn’t she? At the time, it benefited me for a short-term tactical advantage… yet now I see that differently.
How very House of Cards of you, Alicia.”
An innocent look overcame her. “Who, me?”
“You didn’t try any tricks on me though, did you?”
Barton wasn’t falling for her innocence act. She all but told him how she’d seen her rival Evans fall and he was suspecting now that she’d been behind the nobbling of the campaign of Singh, yet he couldn’t think of anything overt that had happened to his failed attempt to become prime minister. He’d always known that she’d had a hand somewhere though had put that down to general backstabbing among colleagues rather than anything serious.
“There was no need to, Robert. You ran a poor campaign and I beat you fair and square.” Her arrogant, spiteful tone told him what he’d always known: it had always been personal rather than political with her.
Again, silence befell them both for a moment. Barton’s eyes were wandering about again. He looked over where the entrance back to the Cabinet Room was.
“Shall we go back inside?”
“In a minute.” Unexpectedly, she reached out and touched his shoulder for a brief moment. “You know, there was the opportunity presented to me for one of those tricks which you speak of.
Your daughter Siobhan came to me – personally – and offered to spill the goods on you. She offered, what do they call it: oh, yes, kompromat.
Siobhan clearly hates you. Why is that, Robert? I turned her down, knowing that you were going to be beaten with ease. However, I did make the introduction between her and My Lauren. You know that they are friends, right?”
“What has my daughter got to do with anything?”
He was angry now.
How dare Manningtree bring up Siobhan!
As to what the prime minister was saying, that was certainly a lie.
It had to be.
“The thing is, Robert, is that you have this ludicrous notion that I am some sort of Russian spy. When I first heard of it, I laughed. It’s still funny now, though, to be fair, not as much as it was at the beginning. That’s because I’ve been informed of what you’ve been up to.
You secretly brought the country’s spy chiefs into the silly idea.
Your actions saw a friendly, allied country’s spooks also involved.
You’ve been telling people this crazy thing too.
You had me spied upon direct and also had my body-woman targeted as well with the accusation that she was involved in espionage. My Lauren is very upset.”
Barton stared her down once she finished what she had to say. He took note of the ‘My Lauren’ thing but bit his tongue rather than say something about just how close he knew Manningtree and her aide really were. There might have been a time for that but it wasn’t now.
Manningtree continued: “The whole thing is ridiculous. I’ve done nothing like that and, the way I hear it, there isn’t any evidence to suggest that anything I nor My Lauren has been observed doing give any credit to your paranoid fantasies about Russian influence here in Downing Street.
With all that is going on at the moment with the situation in Pakistan, something that threatens this country’s security both foreign and domestic, you’re messing around with this silliness!
I want you to consider something, Robert.
If you decide that you don’t wish to admit defeat with grace and back away, and instead try something along the lines of talking to a friendly journalist, the fallout won’t go as you think.
There’ll be a lot of attention paid to your daughter in that situation. Bridges will be burnt and she’d be one of them. Siobhan will end up as a patsy. Her job and her hatred of you will combine to doom any belief that you might entertain of ending up in my job.”
Barton wanted to explode at her. On the tip of his tongue was a series of expletives. He balled his fists too.
The threat to use his daughter against him, to ruin her like Manningtree was saying without saying that she was willing to do, brought about a strong paternal urge to protect her here and now.
Self-control swept over him though. A strong reaction was what she wanted, so he told himself, and he wouldn’t give her that.
“I’m going back inside. It’s been enlightening talking with you this evening, Alicia, but, for now, we’ll have to leave it there.”
What he actually said was less impressive than what he’d briefly formed in his mind as a dismissive comment to her, yet it would have to do.
Barton left the garden and went back into Downing Street. He was soon back over at the FCO and into his own office. Once he saw down, all of the anger was long gone. He smiled instead. That came when he took out his phone, the one which had been set to record his conversation with Manningtree. What she said to him would be enough for what he wanted, even if it wasn’t a full, explicit confession of her absolute guilt.
Alas, the smile then vanished.
His phone was inexplicitly dead.
“How did she do that!?”
Not for the first time, he’d underestimated his opponent.
However…
…Barton wasn’t beaten. He started to think about what to do next. Quitting wasn’t in him: only winning.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2023 12:34 am
Time to play with real knives.
Re: Kompromat
Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2023 8:22 pm
"The phone was inexplicably dead..." 
Time for Q-Division to take a very close look, as the pattern of damage will be educational...
Time for Q-Division to take a very close look, as the pattern of damage will be educational...