This was weird. Peggy sighed and looked again at the CV in front of her. It was the third day she’d spent checking the credentials of the UCSO staff in London and Athens. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for – just anything that might mean someone was not who they appeared to be, and had joined the charity with an ulterior motive. It was as vague as that, but she hoped she’d recognise it when she saw it. So far all she had found were the sort of discrepancies that you might find in any organisation of fifty-five employees that wasn’t too careful about its recruitment processes.
And it looked as though UCSO was just such a one. Maybe charities didn’t bother too much, she thought. Maybe they were glad to get anyone to work for the modest salaries they paid.
A young woman called Wainwright had claimed an Honours degree in Anthropology from Cambridge, though a few simple enquiries produced the information that she had never completed a university course and had no formal qualifications at all. Cathy Etherington, a fund-raising assistant, claimed to have spent two years working for the Red Cross, but a phone call found no record of her employment there, and a check with a previous employer uncovered the fact that she had been fired for chronic absenteeism. Finally, the business analyst Sandy Warlock’s proud claim to have been a finalist in the Olympic trials in judo turned out to be complete phooey.
Though all this had revealed that UCSO was pretty careless, it had not set Peggy’s antennae vibrating. But what she was looking at now certainly did. It was the CV of Mitchell Berger, Head of the Athens office, that had made her sit up. It wasn’t that she had any reason to doubt the accuracy of the impressive list of previous posts he’d held – and it was impressive: as he’d said in his covering letter when he applied for the job in Athens, ‘ My background is a mix of military, diplomatic, journalism and NGO, and it has taken me to many parts of the world…’ It was something about the location of those posts and the dates that had sparked her interest.
As Peggy sat thinking about all this, her chin resting in her hands, her eyes drifted over her colleagues in the open-plan office where she worked. She thought how surprising it was that so many people seemed to lie about their past, about their qualifications. It would never have occurred to her to do that. In the Service, of course, you wouldn’t get away with it for five minutes: the vetting process would soon find you out.
She looked at Denise from the library who was standing talking to an agent runner who’d just walked into the room. There was no chance at all that Denise didn’t have the degree in library science or whatever professional qualification she claimed to have, or that the agent runner, who was now rather obviously flirting with her, had an undeclared wife somewhere.
On the other hand, there were spies working within the intelligence services. People who led a double life for years without being discovered. The most famous British ones, the Cambridge spies, were recruited before there was any kind of vetting. They just recruited each other. But there had been others much more recently, in Britain as well as in America.
She looked down again at the CV on her desk. She’d better talk to Liz about Mr Berger.
Liz was on the phone but she waved Peggy into her office and, while she waited, she stood by the window, looking down. The sun was out, and the Thames looked blue and sparkling and much cleaner than it really was – though she’d read that fish were now coming up the river as far as Westminster. Perhaps MPs, she thought, smiling to herself, would soon be fishing from the terrace of the House of Commons.
Liz put the phone down. ‘What’s amusing you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t say there’s some good news for a change.’
‘I wondered what you’d make of this.’ Peggy put the sheet of paper on the desk and sat down opposite her.
‘Mitchell Berger,’ Liz said aloud in surprise. ‘Don’t tell me he didn’t go to college either?’
‘No, everything checks out so far. He was in the military, he did some contract work for the State Department, and he’s worked for a bunch of NGOs. He was even a journalist – I found a couple of articles by him in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘It’s where he was – and when. I’ve highlighted the dates and places on his CV.’
Liz looked carefully at the document. ‘El Salvador and Nicaragua in the seventies; Lebanon… that was when the Marines got blown up there, wasn’t it? Haiti. What was going on there then?
‘A coup.’
Liz nodded. ‘Then the Dominican Republic. That must have been a few months before Reagan sent troops in. Then Kosovo in the nineties, and Afghanistan after nine-eleven. And now Athens?’ She looked up at Peggy with a hint of a smile. ‘Bit of a soft option after all that. He must have got tired of hot spots. But I see what you mean.’
‘It’s as if he’s always wanted to be where the action is. A cynic might say he had a death wish.’
‘Or else that he was paid to go there.’ Liz raised her eyes from the CV and looked at Peggy. ‘I know what you’re thinking. This is either the résumé of a retired CIA officer or someone who’s gone to almost inconceivable lengths to pretend he’s one. I know which option my money’s on.’
‘Do you think Blakey knows?’
‘He didn’t say anything to me, but you’d think he’d have spotted it when he appointed the chap. Blakey is ex-Six, after all.’
‘What I was wondering is whether he appointed him because of it. Does that mean there’s something going on in UCSO that we don’t know about? And do you think Geoffrey Fane knows?’
Liz sighed deeply. ‘He didn’t mention it. Which, with Fane, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.’
‘Do you want me to do anything?’
Liz put her head in her hands. ‘No. I’ll have to go and talk to Geoffrey. And I was hoping not to have to see him for a while… fat chance of that now!’