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

consultancy in the K Street area in DC, helping Conservative allies in Congress with data and election strategy. He was the most powerful of the trio, though you’d never guess it looking at him. In the several pictures of him, he was short and plump, with no neck to speak of, and an execrable taste in ties and pocket squares. On his books, so to speak, were Mike H. Proctor, Deputy National Security Advisor, and Kirsten Donnelly, a staff member at the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which gave Daus access to what was going on in the White House Situation Room and the most secret concerns of America’s Intelligence Community. His network included hundreds of people, who were attracted by his Conservatism, open wallet and cut-price consultancy fees. There was a dark side to Jeffreys, said Leah, and they had only got on to it through the suicide, a year ago, of a young Congressman named Sam Kuvin who they believed was filmed at Clouds Ranch with an under-age boy, then presented with evidence that not only had he had sex with him but had conspired in trafficking a minor from a neighbouring state. It was rare to acquire such detail, but Jeffreys had sent emails whose meaning could not be doubted, a rare lapse for him, and the boy, who was then sixteen, was active on social media. Leah said that the FBI were investigating and beginning to sniff around cases of entrapment by Jeffreys, their interest piqued by abrupt swerves in position, resignations, divorces and unaccountable wealth. Pointing to Jeffreys’s photograph, she went on, ‘This man right here is responsible for a lot of pain and corruption in America, but we believe that all the psychological pressure on individuals is orchestrated by Mila Daus. She picks the targets and works them over.’

California was Chester Abelman’s realm. He ran GreenState West from a spacious building in Palo Alto, as Anastasia noted, not far from the offices of Hisami’s own lawyers. Of mixed Jewish and Irish parentage, Abelman moved easily among the scientific community of the West Coast under the cover of GreenState’s funding activities and the organisation’s interest in the environment. Originally an academic at Stanford, he had set up GreenState West five years before and he and his socially active wife had made connections with the partners of a coterie of right-leaning entrepreneurs.

They ended with the Pitch Black network, which was smaller than the other three and also relied on a powerful wife, in this case Betsy Kukorin, a publicist from a conservative family in Ohio. Erik Kukorin, originally a cable-TV news producer, moved in the background, making connections at parties Betsy threw for her celebrity clients, a good cover for gathering intelligence on banks and hedge funds. There were some forty names associated with Kukorin’s network, three of which were prominent Wall Street figures, including the head of a bank. Most of his activity, however, was in the large-scale financing of dark operations on the Web – false-flag Antifa sites and accounts, partisan provocateurs, YouTube channels that openly praised the Nazi ‘experiment’ and a myriad of Facebook groups pushing for one form of violent disruption or another. Kukorin had a television producer’s eye for plausible, fresh-faced advocates among young fascists and backed half a dozen with enormous sums.

The last slide showed hundreds of names in the three networks. Macy raised his hand again. ‘That’s impressive. Fine work. But there’s a great deal of difference between intelligence and proof. You can’t publish a list like this and say all these people work for Mila Daus and are effectively betraying their country. How many of them are there by chance?’ The Bird nodded and muttered something.

Samson stepped in to smooth the differences between the Cold War warriors and young hackers. ‘I think we accept that this is a first draft, Macy, and that the complete work that answers these questions is with Denis Hisami. What do we have on Mila Daus herself? Where does she live? Where does she work? What’s her routine? Does she travel much? We’ve heard that she’s in London and Berlin – does she go to Moscow? And what about the foot-doctor husband? How does he fit in? Does he know about her past? Does he know that she’s sleeping with her stepson?’

‘That’s Rudi’s area,’ said Zoe.

Rudi got up and stood in the pool of light beside her. He glanced at Macy and began speaking. ‘Mr Harp, this is the woman who murdered your friend and my stepfather. Before that, she killed my father, Rudi, and she had a lot to do with the psychological torture and medical neglect that killed my uncle just a few weeks before the Wall came down.’ He walked over to Naji and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘My friend Naji’s dad was tortured and broken by a different group of thugs. We have an interest in this investigation. Yes, we seem young to you, but we have been through very bad times. We aren’t frivolous and we haven’t made errors. Now we will show you some photographs.’ Ulrike smiled at him. Her eyes were filled with tears. Zoe laid her hand briefly on his arm.

A picture of a group of houses appeared. They were arranged around a rocky outcrop that overlooked mountains and forests as far as the eye could see. Each house had a separate driveway and parking area but no garden. The bluff and the house looked like the prow of a ship heading into an ocean of trees. In some places the houses incorporated parts of the sedimentary strata, giving the impression they’d grown out of the native rock.

‘This is Seneca Ridge,’ said Rudi. ‘It’s one and a half hour’s drive from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There are seven houses and they are all owned by Mila Daus, through her husband, Dr John Gaspar. We have satellite imagery from six years ago showing the construction of passageways between some of the houses. The area has been