The Angel Read Online Free PDF

work of the MI5/MI6 intelligence operation known within its own walls as ‘the Firm’. The organisation was as labyrinthine as the building that accommodated it.
    It was divided into fifteen separate Groups. Each was supposed to mesh seamlessly with the others, but in practice, there was as much interdepartmental conflict as one might expect to find in any office of the same size and complexity. Group Three, for example, was responsible for providing intelligence through watching and listening – what the Americans would crassly refer to as IMINT and SIG INT – together with liaising with the electronic dragnet that was GCHQ. Group Five maintained dead-drop ‘post boxes’ and safe houses for agents in the field, and was also the home Group for the postmen who were tasked with couriering intelligence and equipment around the world. Other Groups were dedicated to research and development, cryptography and cryptanalysis, interpreting and transcription, forgery, vetting, interrogation and research. Service Departments ensured the smooth running of the Old War Office. They occupied themselves with the daily functioning of the building, pay and pensions, the personal problems of agents, the storage of documents and the maintenance of security.
    Each Group was led by a man or woman referred to as ‘ Control ’. Pope was responsible for Group Fifteen. His agents were regarded with a measure of fear by the other staff. In the fashion that the operatives of Group Five were known as ‘postmen’, and those who worked in cryptanalysis were ‘crackers’, the agents of Group Fifteen were referred to as ‘headhunters’. Assassinations and other wet work comprised a large part of their responsibilities, but not all of them. They carried out the Firm’s extrajudicial dirty work: burglaries, kidnapping, blackmail. They were responsible for bodyguarding other members of the intelligence community, emissaries of the government or businessmen and women who were important to British interests overseas. They were all well-regarded soldiers before they were selected, but after their year of training at the Manor House, the Group’s establishment in Antsy, Wiltshire, they emerged as something else entirely: ethically flexible operators who were adept at submerging themselves within foreign cultures. When so ordered, they became murderers who emerged from cover to eliminate their targets without regret or compunction before disappearing again like shrimps into sand.
    The Committee had been imposed on the Firm following the scandals involving John Milton and Beatrix Rose, two Group Fifteen operatives who had gone rogue. The government had installed it as an extra layer of control that would also act as a suppressant to a potentially flammable political situation, should the full details of the organisation’s activities ever come to light. The Committee was a mixed inter-ministerial body composed of representatives from Westminster and Whitehall. It brought together senior members of the Cabinet and Whitehall mandarins, and was placed between the intelligence fraternity and the government as a guiding light or, as required, a brake. The staff of the Firm, sceptical to the last, had dubbed it the ‘Star Chamber’.
    Sir Benjamin Stone, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, was on Pope’s right. He was in his late fifties, a moderately large man, a shade under six foot tall, with an accumulating gut. His hair was lank and grey, and his smile was as warm as a corpse.
    The woman opposite him was Home Secretary Elizabeth Morley , a high-serving member of the cabinet ever since the election . Appointed home secretary three years ago, she was hawkish , aggressively right wing and possessed of an infamously short temper.
    The woman to her left was Eliza Cheetham, the director general of the Secret Service. She was in her early sixties and more handsome now than the beauty that he knew she had been when she was younger. She was dressed