The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

chart appeared headed by a photograph of Jonathan Mobius. He had changed little since the wedding of his doomed father to Mila Daus – slim, humourless and with a curl to his upper lip. Like his stepmother – with whom he still had some sort of physical relationship that Zoe described as ‘Oedipal habit’– he was interested in three things: influence, political intelligence and data. The key people in his network were old friends. He had met Anthony Jerome Drax, one of two special advisers to the Prime Minister, in St Petersburg in the early 1990s, when he was seeking to recruit mathematicians for his father’s business. Ben Bera of the Foreign Office and Joint Intelligence Committee – Samson had never heard of him, but Macy thought that maybe he had – was befriended at a party in New York a little later when Bera was working for the UN. Christine Carter, head of an Anglo-American trade organisation, Tanner Matlock and Jeff Koblenz – both from finance – all came later but were part of Mobius’s circle for at least a decade. Of these three, Matlock was the most influential. He was on the governing body of the BBC and also on the board of Luminescence Analytics. The common characteristic was that they were all off-the-scale right wing. Zoe corrected herself: ‘I’m not sure if it’s accurate to call them fascist, neofascist or whatever, but they do all have contempt for democracy and people. It’s all about power and winning.’

This power was exercised and extended socially with receptions at the Tate and the National Gallery, summer drinks parties in the Chelsea Physic Garden and seats at Wimbledon and Covent Garden. There were environmental awards, retreats and conferences; donations to think tanks located in the Smith Square area of Westminster, and favours done for members of the British political establishment. Near Arezzo, in Umbria, a restored Palazzo offered special respite to politicians, where it was likely they were compromised with young male and female members of staff, a mirror image of the operation at GreenState’s Clouds Ranch in Idaho.

Naji projected a photograph of the man in Number Ten. Drax was in his mid-forties, with cropped dark hair, a bulbous nose and watery blue eyes whose lower lids sagged and gave for an unsettling stare. They heard that he checked in with Mobius at the end of every week, and then Mobius reported back to Daus.

Zoe went on: ‘We’ve got emails and messages to receiving-only accounts that we believe belong to Mila, which usually followed these conversations. Of course, there is never any traffic from her. But the access she has to the inner workings of the British government is clear.’

Macy coughed and raised a hand. ‘So, all this information goes to her,’ he said, ‘but do you know what she does with it? Have you got any sense of the ultimate destination?’ He opened his hands and looked affably at the young people for an answer, and, there being none, continued. ‘Put it this way, you have described the sort of business network that I come across all the time. Companies, industrial sectors and syndicates often gather intelligence and seek to bend the will of governments. If you have evidence that this information was going straight to Russia, well, that would be a different matter.’

Zoe looked down to hide her irritation. ‘What we’re showing you here isn’t the final product, and, no, we don’t bloody well know the end user of the information. But how many companies can you name that have people killed and kidnapped, smear opponents, use intimidation and blackmail, bend elections, bribe officials, soak up people’s data without regard to law and regulation and use it against them? Even if this had absolutely nothing to do with espionage, you would have to classify what Mila Daus has created as a Mafia-level criminal enterprise. And no one has a clue about her, or who controls companies like Luminescence MB, Luminescence Analytica, MBX3, or even Luminescence MXB3, same as they don’t know who actually owns GreenState, although we have established it is wholly owned by Daus and Mobius.’

She grabbed a bottle of water from her seat, swigged from it and resumed. ‘Now we are going to move on to the States.’

Under the headings, ‘Aurora Red’, ‘Pitch Black’ and ‘Saffron Yellow’ appeared photographs of three men: Chester Abelman, Erik Kukorin and Elliot Jeffreys. They had the country neatly divided up between them. Abelman was based on the West Coast, Elliot Jeffreys in Washington, DC, and Erik Kukorin in New York. They ran three distinct operations, and there was little or no contact between them. If connections needed to be made, they went through Mila Daus. Apparently, the three had no interest in business whatsoever – Mila and Mobius handled all that. But Abelman, Jeffreys and Kukorin had millions at their disposal and lived the life of the top one per cent of Americans.

Unlike the deep-cover illegals that Russia seeded in the US in the 1990s and in the early part of the century, all three were born in America. No infiltration from Canada was necessary, no marriages of convenience between spies, and no making do with scraps of intelligence from the bottom of the food chain. They formed Daus’s frontline from political conviction, which was about love of power and a straightforward loathing of liberal America.

‘But do they know they are really working for the enemies of America?’ asked Anastasia.

Zoe looked at the four Americans in front of her for an answer. The answer was – no, but Leah suggested that if they did know, it probably wouldn’t affect them because they basically shared the worldview of the Russian leadership.

The Bird and Macy Harp exchanged looks and shook their heads. This wasn’t a world they recognised.

Leah, Chinese-American, with a bob and eyes that shone from behind small, oval glasses, took over from Zoe to speak about Elliot Jeffreys. He was a lawyer from Chicago who had failed in the city’s politics and moved to set up a small political