“Please tell me you ate for the petsitter.” Evan set down his bags and picked up Trent, who purred like a chainsaw as she bashed her head against his chin. He carried her into his kitchen, where he found a half-empty bowl of dry food. “Not bad.” As usual, the towel beneath the cat’s water dish was damp, because she liked to splash when she was bored or happy or awake.

With Trent trotting at his heels like a puppy, Evan went through his flat to confirm that all the items he’d arranged had remained as he’d left them. He’d vetted the petsitter, but one couldn’t be too careful.

The stack of mail on the table still showed the corner of a specific envelope poking out at the correct angle. The talcum powder he’d spilled in front of his wardrobe was untouched apart from a single trail of paw prints.

Satisfied at the state of his security, Evan flopped onto his bed for a much-needed nap. He and Ben had taken an extra day off so they could spend most of yesterday in Orkney before boarding the five o’clock ferry. Then they’d stayed the night in Thurso—partly to avoid driving on the peedie Highland roads in the dark, but also to ease the culture shock of returning to real life.

His phone buzzed with a message:

Dad: You still use encrypted texting app?

Evan: Of course.

His father replied with an email address and a long, complex password, followed by the unnecessary instruction to delete this text message.

Evan acknowledged receipt, then fetched his laptop from the safe in his wardrobe. Sitting on the bed, he activated a virtual private network, opened a Tor browser, and logged in to the email address. There he found a drafts folder containing one message.

An email “dead drop” like this was breathtakingly simple and effective. As long as two people both knew the username and password, they could share information without ever technically sending it over the internet. No transmission meant no tracking.

Of course, the drafts could easily be found by MI5’s signals-intelligence sister agency, the blandly named Government Communications Headquarters. But first GCHQ would need to know where to look. For a simple file share, this method was a lot safer than handing over a memory stick that could have been lost or stolen on the journey back from Orkney.

Evan clicked on the blank message, then downloaded and opened its PDF attachment:

Russian false-flag operations in Eastern Europe

Evan began to read the summary, his heart beating faster with every line.

The classified Joint Intelligence Committee report described how Russian spies had masqueraded online as Islamic extremists, appearing to associate with well-known non-radical Muslims in two small Eastern European countries. They’d left an electronic trail just clear enough for those countries’ domestic intelligence officers to follow—enough to get them chasing their own tails trying to find their targets, to leave them anticipating attacks that never came.

Then the stories would conveniently “leak,” framing the Muslims for planned attacks on a beloved landmark. The Russian leaks would be timed with a wave of online trolls boosting phony news reports on social media to whip public anxiety into a froth. By the time the police and security services dispelled the rumors, the damage had been done: rising Islamophobia, social division, and mistrust in authorities to even tell the public about a terrorist threat, much less protect them from it. This fear and uncertainty stoked support for extreme-right-wing populist xenophobes, who had already made massive inroads into local and national politics across Europe.

Evan’s phone buzzed with another text from his father:

In Glasgow. Fancy a quick lunch?

“Did you read it all?”

“You didn’t give me time.” Evan tore off a shred of his falafel wrap and tossed it to a sparrow, provoking a disapproving tongue-click from his father. The peedie bird hopped across the sunlit tile floor of Glasgow Central Station and snatched up the bread. “I read enough to get the general idea.”

“Were you surprised?” his dad asked.

“More than I should have been.” Evan scanned the train station’s wide-open waiting area to see if anyone was close enough to hear. “I get why a fake terrorist plot on same-sex weddings would serve Russia’s objectives, but why stage it in Glasgow? Why not in London or Manchester or Birmingham?”

“Russian intelligence likes to test its methods on smaller targets, then optimize those methods before deploying them against their main quarry. It’s called capability development. The report I gave you explains this,” his dad added with a note of annoyance.

“I told you, I didn’t finish it because I had to meet you before your train left.”

“Hmph.” His father checked the departures board, which showed the train to London’s Euston Station running ten minutes late. “Anyway, the report predicts the Russians will eventually execute similar operations in countries like France, Germany, the Netherlands, and of course…”

“The UK. Which Scotland is a part of, so how can it be a small target?”

“It’s a less complicated target. There are fewer Muslims here, so it’s more likely your office will track the ones the Russians want you to track, even if they’re fake Muslims. In London this scheme might never have been noticed.”

“But there are same-sex weddings all over Great Britain now, so if this alleged plot gets leaked, it’ll scare the entire country.” Including Ben, who could never know the top-secret truth.

“Exactly.” His dad shoved the last two chips from his fish supper into his mouth. “It has all the potential rewards of a London-based operation yet few of the risks. Putin still gets to sow chaos and fear. He gets to remind people of Islam’s alleged threat to human rights.”

Evan thought about how such a propaganda effort could undermine the open society that most Brits took justifiable pride in, a society that embraced both immigrants and LGBTI folk. “Can’t the government make an announcement before any leaks happen? Like, inoculate the public with a dose of the truth?”

His father gave him a withering look. “Accuse a foreign state of messing with our domestic counterterrorism efforts? They’ve got nukes, you know.”

“So do China, and we wouldn’t let them get away with something so brazen.”

“The Chinese aren’t propping up the British economy.” His dad tugged another paper napkin from his takeaway bag and flapped it as he ranted. “Putin’s oligarch mates have spent the last decade moving to the UK and buying everything they could get their hands on: Knightsbridge mansions, Premier League football clubs, even fucking castles. No one here batted an eye. After all, the Russians were white, Christian—and most of all, rich. They’re part of us now, which means they’ve got us by the bollocks.” He wiped his hands with the napkin, then pitched it into the rubbish bin several feet away.

This was a familiar lament, one Evan had usually dismissed as his dad’s Cold-War paranoia. Literally born the day the Berlin Wall fell, Evan had regarded the Soviet Union and its components as matters for the history books.

Evan rubbed the bridge of his nose. After the serenity of Orkney, this bustling train station was giving him a raging headache. “This could be devastating. A manufactured threat against same-sex weddings would poison the way people in this country look at each other.”

“And nothing would make Russia happier. They’ve worked out exactly how to turn us against one another.” His father crumpled up his takeaway bag. “It won’t happen overnight, but after years of carefully cultivated chaos, the West will eat itself.”

Evan wrapped the remains of his falafel, having lost the appetite to finish it. All along Operation Caps Lock may have been just a peedie piece of someone else’s planet-size puzzle. It was too big for MI5—much less a single junior officer—to handle.

“Hang on,” Evan said. “Russian intelligence must be doing all this within our country, right? If it were outside our borders, you wouldn’t know so much about it, because it wouldn’t be MI5’s purview. It would be under MI6.”

A sneer curled his father’s lips, as it always did when their international-facing counterparts were mentioned. “You’re right. My branch would be privy to some information, but those stuck-up snakes at Six would probably withhold many of these details out of sheer spite.”

Evan doubted that. Then again, he’d entered the Service long after the interagency feuds were at their fiercest. These days the rivalry was friendlier out of necessity, but he’d grown up hearing his father refer to MI6 as “Enemy #2”—after Russia, of course.

“What’s your point?” Dad asked.

“Well, if it’s happening here, surely someone in the UK is helping them. Maybe several people. Maybe even in Scotland.”

“True. They may have agents here, witting or unwitting.”

Evan remembered the pure daft articles Jordan had been forwarding to him. Their source could easily be some Russian-operated troll farm like the ones in the Joint Intelligence Committee report.

Then he thought of how David Wallace had called Scotland a “white firewall” at the BVP meeting. And at the rally he’d said, “Mark my words, mate: This is where it starts.” At the time, Evan had thought he meant that the rally itself was the beginning of a movement, but perhaps he’d literally meant where. As in Scotland.

“Big people are watching us, Gunnar. And they like what they see.”

Evan got to his feet. “I think I know where to look.”