The Spy – a short story by Des Molloy

Ryan was an unusual child.  Physically he was the stereotypical average kid. In class photos he merged into the line-up, just another kid with sticky-out ears and a pretty bad haircut.  Good enough at sport, but not outstanding.  But when it came to his capacity to absorb knowledge and retain it, he was exceptional.  Not weird enough to be an outsider, he fitted in with his peers without attracting attention, other than by being the smartest kid in the school.  Ryan just knew stuff, and his resolute nature fostered a never-give-up stubbornness.  He was the only child of Marie, a nurse whose feckless husband had abandoned in the mid-term of her pregnancy.  The Bastard, as Marie’s coven of friends called him, had left town with a blowsy Aussie barmaid and was thought to be somewhere in that big red land, one step ahead of a number of baying creditors and debt collectors.

It is often debated by academics whether it is nature or nurture that defines the outcome of life.  In Ryan’s case it was pretty clear that it was nurture.  Plugging the gaps of childcare from his birth had been provided by a retired Ukrainian couple Pavlo and Yana who lived next door. Their daughter Natalia was a language teacher in the local High School and with no other family back home, New Zealand had become home.  Ryan grew up with Pavlo and Yana as whanau, simultaneously learning the Ukrainian language as well as his native tongue.  By the time he was enrolled in school at five, he could converse in English, Ukrainian and Russian, as well as having a pretty good level of competence in the written Cyrillic and Latin scripts.  However it was Pavlo’s particular bent for learning English through comics, that really put the stamp on Ryan’s persona.  A tidy and ordered man, Pavlo had a vast collection of the satirical American comic, MAD Magazine, and to balance the Americana influence, he also had large number of the English comics, Battler Britton, and Spy 13.  Yana eschewed the use of TV as a babysitting tool, but was happy that Ryan devoured the imagery contained in these publications.  Ryan loved the excitement and wartime adventures of Battler Britton and the laughable responses from his German adversaries, with so many of the comics ending with “Donner und Blitzen, Battler Britton has done it again!”  But a step up was Spy 13 because it also had a level of intrigue factored in.  This, Ryan came to appreciate and understand, as his years passed.  Absolutely top of the pops for simple naïve enjoyment though, was the wordless Spy v Spy comic strip in each Mad Magazine.  With one black and one white cartoon spy locked in a continuous series of stereotypical and comical espionage activities, Ryan would chortle at their attempts to do harm to each other, alternately bestowing his affection from one to the other.  He loved the beaked caricatures which gave them an almost crow-like appearance, yet clearly they were humanoid.  He also felt part of a secret minority when Pavlo explained that the insignificant line of dots and dashes under the feature image was a Morse Code accreditation to Antonio Prohías the Cuban creator.  “Not many people know that!”

Ryan was seven when he asked Marie “What exactly is a spy?”

“Well, they are people who sneak around finding out secrets about other people, usually enemies of their countries.”

“Do we have spies?”

“I think so.”

“I want to be a spy when I grow up!”

Inwardly Marie groaned as she knew Ryan was not one to take up a five minute obsession then drop it.

And so it was that over the succeeding years, unwaveringly, Ryan fed his fixation with spies and spying by seeking out all the best books of the genre.  Each succeeding school’s librarians were kept busy sourcing books by Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Graham Greene, Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton and Tom Clancy.  By the time he was 14 even the Careers’ Master was on board and actively attempting to find out whether there was a career pathway via a government cadetship.  The ‘Secret Service’ seemed to be made up of many murky divisions, wings and off-shoots.  It seemed quite a complex world of acronyms and initials.  The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS), the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), and the National Assessments Bureau (NAB), all within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), form the core national intelligence, assessment and protective security functions of the New Zealand Intelligence Community (NZIC) … which is the lead organisation for human intelligence (HUMINT).

“But which ones have spies Sir?

“Not sure young Ryan, give me another week … and meanwhile enjoy the Liar's Game.  It is the first of The Frenchman Trilogy by Jack Beaumont.  They’re good.”

Ryan was keen to know what academic qualifications would ensure entry into ‘the service’.  In a lot of the books he was devouring as a foundation to his intended career, the agents came from a military background, not a conduit that he was keen on.  Fortunately, quite a few also seemed to be attached to trade legations associated with the embassy or consulate.  Most could speak several languages.  Ryan felt that he was on the right path there, because in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, at school he was studying and excelling in Spanish. In the evenings he was expanding his grasp of this core romance language to cover the associated ones.  The obvious links and similarities enabled him to privately progress apace in Portuguese, Galician and Italian.  These languages gave him also a working ability in Romanian and French.  By 16 he was a true polyglot, and still fixated on becoming a spy.  Already he knew it would be by brains not brawn that he would succeed in the world of espionage.  He was no James Bond or Willie Garvin.  Fortunately, he was part of a small number at his school who stretched the ability of their computer sciences’ teacher.  Although computer programming is just a matter of arranging binary nought/ones into an arrangement that gives instructions to the various transistors, diodes and capacitors that electronic devices need to operate, that is just Janet and John stuff.  Soon bored with constructing motherboards and integrated circuits, this small coterie of would-be boffins moved on to the dodgy world of ‘hacking’, then into the emerging world of Artificial Intelligence .  Of course the frisson of excitement that this brought was addictive.  Very quickly this group’s knowledge of AI was way beyond that of their tutor.  The aether was their playground and they were voracious in their exploration of it.

The Careers’ Master had no success with finding a way into any of the government departments which handle the spy world.

“It seems to be a secret pathway.  I think you need to be a spy to inveigle your way in.  I did find some interesting courses down at Vic Uni though. Look at this for a tempter! ‘Think like a hacker or security professional?  Study Cybersecurity if you have a curious mind and like to know how things work.’  That would be right up your alley, and your mates Niven and George.  The Cybersecurity Engineering course is one of four majors available in the four-year professional Bachelor of Engineering with an Honours degree at the end.  What do you think?”

And so it was that three 17-year-old lads from provincial New Zealand found themselves at Wellington’s Victoria University’s Faculty of Engineering, embracing the life as students.  Ryan was already focussed on face-recognition software, as he felt that this would be useful in his future employment as an agent of the state. George was more interested in creating apps from the world of GPS and Niven was a superb fabricating technician adept at bringing their flights of fancy into reality through the medium of 3D printing.  They were all doing engineering papers although Niven’s were part of a science degree.  It was part way through their second year that Ryan got the idea of merging recognition and tracking.

“If we could come up with something that could combine photography and GPS tracking, we’d have a great spy tool.  Something surreptitious of course.  Already you can use photography and location software to pin point where things are.  Currently, the point-of-focus for the image-capture from a camera is simultaneously fed into software that produces coordinates to give an accurate position on the planet.  What if we go a step further?  I think we could freeze the image and using recognition software, have GPS real-time tracking, follow the captured image remotely!”

Of course this threw up lots of challenges, but also a lot of excitement. This was their own little secret project, something that filled almost all of their spare time.  Early in the piece they decided that they didn’t want the infra-red dot locator commonly used in electronic measuring tools and in popular movie scenes on a target’s chest when an assassin is about to pull the trigger.  Their tool had to be invisible and silent.

“We’re just managing data and moving it around.” Ryan would often postulate. “Think small, think smart!”

“Let’s get the system to work first, then worry about making it small, pretty and discreet.”

“Remember KISS … Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

Initially they used more-or-less readily available equipment to prove the concept, then through several prototypes moved to using a 2 mm micro-lens at the end of suitable length of fibre-optic cable.  This cable was able to be almost invisibly run from a shirt cuff inside clothing to connect to a hard-shell wallet in a trouser pocket.  This faux wallet did carry a few cards and a bit of money, but contained an embedded chip which was able to transfer data via Bluetooth across to a conventional smart phone in another pocket or even with another person up to 10 m away. This phone had a cloned version of the popular navigation app Waze on its desktop.  Casual scrutiny would not determine that this had been fine-tuned to receive the GPS data from the image captured by the lens at the end of the fibre-optic cable.

Ultimately the operation was as simple as ensuring the target was within about 15 m.  The ‘photographer’ would appear to scratch his head with one hand and as he brought his hand down past the level when it was pointing at the target, the wallet was squeezed by his other hand in his pocket.  Simultaneously an image would be captured on the chip in the wallet and a flashing target would appear on the applicable Waze map on the screen of the smart phone.  The Waze app need not be opened until it was required which might be several hours later.  A second iteration was developed to enable more than one target to be followed … it just took additional squeezes.

Time and time again Ryan tested what the boys were calling Tracka Dacka. Now he truly felt he was ready to become a spy.  He spoke six languages fluently and had a working knowledge of two others, he was a bit of an IT guru, could hack into most computer systems, and now could secretly track people.  It was time to break in to the service.  Getting an audience with the Director-General of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service took a few months.  Fortunately their local MP was now in opposition and consequently had more time for personal consultations with constituents.  When in power he had been both the minister responsible for NZSIS and the minister responsible for GCSB, meaning that he was a personal acquaintance of Andrew Hinkton, the Director-General of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.  It took a little persuasion but ultimately a two minute meeting was agreed upon.  Due to all the security measures and protocols needing to be complied with, a meeting in the minister’s office was out of the question, and a time for the brief audience was agreed, with the location being under the entry porte cochère with a plain clothes minder present.

“Hello, Pryvit, Privet, Hola, Olá, Alo, my name is Ryan.  I speak several languages and have many skills that would make me a good Intelligence Agent.  Remember my face, you will see it often.”

As he’d approached, Ryan had squeezed the Tracka Dacka twice, cleanly capturing both targets before reaching forward for a handshake.  Mr Hinkton had gripped it firmly and met his gaze resolutely.

“We’ve got no vacancies at present son.  Is that all?”

“Absolutely.  I think you’ll understand soon.”

And so began a regime of tracking both the minder and the DG.  For getting around town and for ease of parking Ryan had invested in a FTN electric motorcycle.  On the first night of tracking, it was clear that AH, as they had labelled Hinkton, was headed off to a social meeting in the suburbs.  Ryan stayed way out of sight and had the good fortune of a lucky guess as to his destination because of where AH parked.  Ryan was able to park the FTN in the access alley beside Flamingo Seafood Restaurant and be already inside when AH came in through the front door.  Ryan nodded to him and left.  The minder was next and the tracker showed him to be at the stadium watching the Hurricanes.  Ryan bought a beer inside the concourse and waited until it was half time, then made his way to Aisle 25, Row 17, Seat 246 and wordlessly handed the surprised target an unexpected libation.

Saturday was a day off, but Sunday saw AH and his wife taking a walk in the Town Belt on Mt Victoria.  This was an easy one for Ryan.  He just sidled past with the familiar nod.  He sensed the surprise on AH’s visage.  Later that day he ‘happened’ upon the minder, who by now they had labelled as Big Jim … BJ, at an ice cream van on the Petone Foreshore.  Again he just acknowledged their encounter with a nod.  Ryan imagined the Monday morning discussion relating to their respective chance encounters and the realisation that they couldn’t be.

For two more weeks this pattern of miraculously appearing, and casually waving or nodding, was kept up. Ryan even tracked both targets to their homes and nonchalantly walked by as each of them was leaving for work.  He once appeared alongside their governmental limousine at some traffic lights when they were stopped on the red.  He made sure that BJ saw him in the supermarket while shopping.  He clocked AH coming out of the Kilbirnie Pool, and ‘happened’ upon them both leaving the Police College in Porirua.  By now the secret service knew Ryan’s FTN and fully expecting some sort of reaction, all three boys had moved their computers and their electronic hardware out to Niven’s aunt’s place in Island Bay.  They had however upped their security monitoring equipment.  They had a couple of outside cameras in both the front yard and the back yard, discretely well-hidden with 24-hr feed to a Dropbox folder that all three of them had access to.  Each of the bedrooms had wide-angle tiny lens installed in places that only an extemely detailed search would reveal.

It was about six weeks after Ryan had the fleeting interface under the porte cochère, that their flat was searched by a two-man team.  Very professional, they left no signs of entry or of the search.  However the footage the boys captured was damning.  There had been no search warrant sought or given.  The facial and movement recognition software that Ryan had developed, showed that it was almost certainly BJ who led the incursion.  Ryan made sure that word got back to AH that he would be releasing everything he had to the police and media in 10 days’ time.  No acknowledgement came back, but on Day Nine a short note was received, advising Ryan that an unexpected vacancy had become available within the agency and would he like to make contact.

And so it was that the persona who would become known as Spy 14 joined the intelligence world.

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