Red Corona Read online

  PRAISE FOR RED CORONA

  ‘Relentless and sleek. This pitch-perfect debut – a gripping espionage thriller in the vein of Charles Cumming, Tom Rob Smith, and Mick Herron – signals the arrival of a remarkable talent.’

  A. J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window

  ‘A thoroughly engaging spy thriller that had me gripped from start to finish and left me desperate for more!’

  S. J. Watson, author of Before I Go to Sleep

  ‘A clever and complex thriller with truly memorable characters. The 60s setting is brilliantly done.’

  Elly Griffiths, author of the Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries

  ‘A thriller of true ambition and scope – with Red Corona, his debut novel, Tim Glister announces himself as a writer to watch.’

  Lucie Whitehouse, author of Critical Incidents

  ‘A gripping historical thriller, impeccably researched and skilfully told.’

  Charles Cumming, author of The Man Between

  ‘An engrossing and original spy thriller. Glister writes with confidence and excitement. A star of the espionage genre is born.’

  Michael Wood, author of the DCI Matilda Darke series

  ‘A fascinating chase through an extraordinary time in history. Tim Glister blends technical insight with a clever story that races along. I enjoyed the intriguing characters who are rushing to solve a mystery as superpowers teeter on the brink.’

  Holly Watt, author of To The Lions

  ‘A fascinating and gripping Cold War thriller that shines a light on the surveillance race that hid in the shadow of the space race.’

  Gareth Rubin, author of Liberation Square

  RED CORONA

  Tim Glister

  PROLOGUE

  Everyone on the Shining Emerald was bored.

  The captain of the small Mexican fishing trawler’s arms ached from holding the same position off the California coast for the last three hours. The crew hadn’t thrown out any nets for days and were stiff from inaction. Even the KGB officer standing alone on the forward deck had grown weary of endlessly searching the sky for a sign of his target.

  For the last six months, instead of sailing south out of the Sea of Cortez to the fertile waters of the southern Pacific, every few weeks the Shining Emerald had left its home port of La Paz, rounded the Baja peninsula, and headed north. Always to the same spot fifty nautical miles out to sea, and always with a KGB officer aboard.

  The Russian held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, scanning the sky. He completed a wide arc, dropped his head a few degrees, and began again. The work wasn’t hard, but it was tiring, on his eyes and his mind.

  He was anxious. Mexico was supposed to have been an easy posting. America was busy obsessing over the Caribbean turning red and for once its politicians and spies weren’t paying attention to her southern neighbour, which meant neither were Russia’s. That was until the Cold War turned into a space race.

  Arc after arc he saw nothing but bright blue until, on what felt like the hundredth sweep of the sky, he spotted a distant glint. He gently stroked the large dial on the top of the binoculars and slowly, very slowly, it began to change shape and come into focus. Suddenly there it was: a parachute no more than five metres across. Hanging beneath it was a silver cone-shaped canister with the letters NASA written in dark red letters along its side – the payload capsule of a Corona spy satellite.

  ‘Hello, Falling Star,’ the KGB officer whispered to himself.

  The Shining Emerald’s crew sensed a change in the Russian, from tense frustration to anticipation, and finally began to prepare their nets. Moments later a familiar droning sound started to fill the air. A US Air Force Hercules C-130 transport plane was rapidly approaching from the California coast.

  ‘Star Catcher.’ Another nickname.

  The Hercules wasn’t as large or elegant as its Soviet counterpart, the Tupolev Tu-95 with its swept-back wings and chromed, missile-shaped fuselage, but the Russian had to admit it was an impressive beast.

  It had taken the KGB months to find out exactly what Corona was, and where it was operating from, after a Soviet submarine stumbled on a jettisoned test capsule in the Arctic Ocean near Svalbard. Their breakthrough came when an informant at Cooke Air Force Base outside Lompoc, California, reported that one of the Hercules transports stationed there was undergoing a very strange refit.

  As the KGB officer watched the American plane fly over the trawler its rear cargo door opened and a large hooped hook extended from it, snaking out into space.

  The Hercules had been sent to retrieve the Corona payload as it fell through the sky. It slowed down as it closed on its prey, letting its hook fall beneath it. It swooped mere metres over the parachute, but failed to snag the thin guidelines. The plane banked, lined up again, and missed again.

  When the Hercules came back round for a third pass, the crew of the Shining Emerald started to smell a catch. And the Russian started to hope. He’d already watched the Americans snatch their capsule out of thin air twice. If he reported a third failed mission to the KGB residentura in Mexico City he wasn’t sure what would happen to him – a demotion if he was lucky, a trip somewhere far less hospitable than Mexico or Moscow if he wasn’t.

  The captain swung the wheel and pushed the throttle. If the Hercules missed again and the capsule splashed down, the Shining Emerald would only have a few minutes to grab it off the ocean surface before its salt plug dissolved, flooding it and consigning it to the depths.

  ‘Andale! Andale!’ the crew chanted as one. In the sudden excitement of the race the KGB officer didn’t know if they were begging their captain or the Americans to go faster.

  The Hercules had one last chance. It went into a steep dive, racing the capsule and the trawler to the splashdown point. For a terrifying moment, the Russian wondered if the Americans were going to ram the capsule and maybe even the Shining Emerald, destroying them both rather than letting the KGB capture the precious secrets the spy satellite had dropped from orbit.

  But at the last second the plane flattened out, barely ten metres above the water. Then it pulled up, inclining over the capsule so the parachute grazed and snagged on the underside of the fuselage. The payload smacked against the Hercules until the force of the plane thrusting up into the sky shook the parachute loose and at last it was caught by the hook and swept up behind the plane.

  A minute later, the Hercules disappeared back over the horizon towards California, leaving the Shining Emerald and the KGB officer sitting alone in the middle of the ocean.

  JULY 1961

  CHAPTER 1

  The Gresham Arms was not a salubrious establishment.

  A casual observer might assume it had seen better days, but it hadn’t. Tucked away in a quiet backstreet off Whitehall, it had struggled to deliver its various owners any kind of profit for two hundred years. But, from the height of Empire and through two world wars, its doors had opened at the same time every day, offering the same three things to whoever needed them – time, space, and a drink.

  Richard Knox wasn’t a regular. In fact, he’d only been to the Gresham Arms once before. But sitting alone at a corner table, two empty pint glasses in front of him and another well on its way at one o’clock in the afternoon, he looked like he belonged. His tie was loose, the top button of his shirt undone. His suit jacket had been discarded on the stool next to him. His face was drawn, and his thick black hair, normally kept in place with a heavy pomade, had fallen over his forehead, concealing the old scar that stuck out from his hairline above his left temple. He looked like someone had recently done a number on him, because they had.

  Two weeks ago Knox had been the darling of MI5. The officer who had broken the Calder Hall Spy Ring, a network of Soviet sympathisers who had been passing classi
fied information about the nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria to the KGB. Two hours ago he had been summarily suspended from the Service, escorted from its headquarters in Leconfield House in Mayfair, and found himself walking the short distance to the Gresham Arms. It was a sunny morning, but he’d felt very much out in the cold.

  The breaking of the Calder Hall network – made up of Nigel Slaughter, a security guard at the nuclear plant, Patrick Montcalm, a travelling salesman, and Sandra and Peter Horne, a retired couple in Richmond with a house full of radio equipment and one-time code pads – had been a major triumph for Knox.

  Rumours had lingered about Soviet infiltration of MI6 ever since Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had disappeared from a trip on the cross-Channel ferry SS Falaise and popped up in Moscow a decade ago. Then those same quiet voices had started talking about moles in MI5. It was Knox’s job to find any leaks and, if they existed, stop them.

  Both Knox and James Holland, the director general of MI5, were convinced that groups like Calder Hall couldn’t flourish without someone inside the intelligence community supporting them, and that breaking the network would be a crucial step in discovering whoever this invisible someone was. But three days ago, on the night of Sunday 9 July, Holland had been found unconscious and unresponsive on the floor of the living room in his Highgate home by his wife, Sarah. His personal diary showed that he was supposed to be having dinner with Knox, his loyal deputy, but Knox hadn’t appeared.

  For two days Knox was grilled by interrogators in Leconfield House, and, he assumed, shadowed by Watchers, the Service’s leg men, whose job it was to keep an eye on persons of interest. Knox refused again and again to admit where he’d been on Sunday night, claiming that Holland himself had sworn him to secrecy. Eventually, the interrogators gave up, and a summary review board was convened. Knox didn’t expect to emerge unscathed, and he didn’t.

  He took another swig of his beer. It was warm and flat. He needed another one.

  ‘Well, that didn’t take long,’ a voice above him said.

  Knox looked up from his glass at Nicholas Peterson.

  ‘Come to rub it in, Nicholas?’

  ‘The DG wants to see you,’ Peterson replied. His voice was a clipped, officious staccato.

  Peterson was the right-hand man of Gordon Manning, the newly installed acting director general. His garish Prince of Wales check suit, currently in fashion among a certain type of civil servant, looked very out of place in the middle of the Gresham Arms. Peterson was, according to Knox, a subservient, bureaucratic yes-man who had no business being anywhere near MI5. They did not get on.

  ‘You just suspended me.’

  ‘The Service suspended you.’

  ‘Of course.’ Knox reached out to finish the dregs of his beer, but thought better of it. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Peterson replied, ‘Manning does.’

  ‘Well, he knows where to find me.’

  ‘Don’t be tedious, Richard. He’s offering you a way back in.’

  ‘Really? Thanks, but I think I’m done.’

  ‘You’re done when the Service says you’re done. You’re suspended, not fired,’ Peterson said. ‘And when you are fired, you’ll have a résumé almost entirely covered by the Official Secrets Act.’

  Knox caved. He knew Peterson was right. He couldn’t just walk away from MI5 after fifteen years, and deep down he didn’t want to.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Deptford.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Knox said, smoothing back his hair and picking up his jacket. ‘It must be serious.’

  CHAPTER 2

  The further east they went, the worse the city looked. From the alabaster facades of Mayfair and Westminster to the shuttered shops and Blitz bomb craters of Lewisham, Knox watched the city decline through the window of Peterson’s MI5 standard-issue Ford Consul as he did his best to sober up.

  ‘We’ve never had it so good,’ he said to himself, parroting Harold Macmillan’s favourite slogan as he watched an old, broken-backed woman lean over to brush her cracked and pitted front step. Peterson ignored him.

  Half an hour after leaving Whitehall the car pulled into a narrow turning off Deptford High Street and stopped outside a low-rise tenement block.

  Knox and Peterson made their way up the dim staircase to the top floor. Peterson watched his step as they plunged into darkness between landings, making sure he never came close to touching the walls, the banister, or the half-hidden bits of detritus littering the stairs.

  The higher they got, the more stale and warm the air became. At first, Knox thought this was just a lack of airflow in the old building conspiring with the summer afternoon heat. But, as they walked down the short corridor to the only open door, he began to suspect otherwise. And, as Peterson stepped into the flat ahead of him and doubled over, retching, his suspicion was confirmed.

  In the hallway of the flat were two bodies. The odour was now pungent, acrid, familiar. Knox had seen, and smelled, death enough during the war to not be shocked by it now. Apparently Peterson hadn’t. Whoever these people were, they’d been lying there for a while.

  Knox was curious about what two dead bodies might have to do with him. He was also curious about why there were no police officers or forensics team present but the acting director general of MI5 was. Gordon Manning emerged from a door at the end of the hallway that ran the length of the flat. He stopped for a moment on the other side of the bodies, looking at Knox and Peterson, then beckoned them to follow him as he ducked back into the room he’d just stepped out of.

  Manning was a tall man. Too tall, and thin. He’d never carried either well. The three-piece grey worsted suits he insisted on wearing whatever the weather always hung off his skeletal frame, their jacket pockets bagging slightly from his habit of planting his long, bony hands in them.

  Knox looked down at the corpses as he stepped around them. The bodies were neat, lying next to each other, their legs straight and arms by their sides. The men’s clothes were plain, dark, normal. They looked like the type of people you’d pass on the street without noticing, except that their mouths and noses were wet with some kind of liquid and they both had thick marks across their necks.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Richard,’ Manning said, as Knox stepped into the small room. ‘Though I suspect you’re wondering why you’re here.’

  ‘Actually, I’m wondering why you’re here, sir,’ Knox replied.

  ‘Those men out there,’ Manning said. ‘I want to know who killed them.’

  ‘Why?’ No sir this time.

  ‘They were troublemakers, Italians,’ he said, as if that was explanation enough. ‘Camillo Bianchi and Piero Moretti. Liked breaking into electronic systems, then holding people to ransom to find out how they’d done it. Five has been keeping an eye for some time.’

  Manning slowly circled the room, as if showing it off to Knox. It had been set up as an office. A small desk strewn with a mess of papers, a few boxes stacked in a corner, and an empty bookcase.

  ‘They’d been pitching themselves all over,’ Manning continued. ‘National Provincial Bank, British Petroleum, even tried to get a meeting at the Ministry of Defence. After they briefly interrupted a BBC Overseas Service broadcast, the director of radio passed on their information to us.’

  Knox took another look at what potential evidence the room had to offer. There wasn’t much.

  ‘They sound like chancers,’ he said. ‘With a couple of clever tricks.’

  ‘Perhaps, but those tricks were making them rather well known in some circles. People were starting to pay attention to them. Serious people. Then they seemed to drop off the face of the earth. Now we know why.’

  ‘The coroner estimates they’ve been dead between forty-eight and seventy-two hours,’ said Peterson, stepping through the door, face still as grey as the dead men’s. ‘But he can’t be more precise about time, or cause, until he’s done an autopsy.’

  ‘Can’t
the Watchers give you a smaller window?’ Knox asked.

  ‘They were on light surveillance. Weekly check-ins only.’

  ‘Sounds like they weren’t much of a priority.’

  ‘They weren’t,’ Peterson said, the colour slowly returning to his face.

  ‘So, my original question,’ Knox said, turning to Manning. ‘Why are you here?’

  Manning slid his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m here because of you,’ he said. ‘I need to know what happened to these men, and I need to know quickly. Five is stretched preparing for the OECD conference, but you aren’t.’

  In less than a week’s time, London would be hosting the inaugural conference of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. It was a major political event, bringing leaders from nineteen of the world’s most powerful nations together in one city, and the primary reason Whitehall had been so fast to put someone else at the top of MI5. Manning was one of the Service’s longest-serving officers. Like Holland, he’d worked for MI5 through the war and ever since. He’d also gone to Eton and Oxford with most of the cabinet. He was the obvious choice.

  ‘You also have a personal interest in finding the solution to this little puzzle,’ Manning said.

  ‘I do?’ Knox asked.

  ‘I know you think I’m working for the Russians.’

  Knox didn’t rise to Manning’s bait. But he also didn’t deny his accusation. Knox had a short list of possible moles operating at the highest level of MI5 – people who would have enough access to sensitive information to compromise the Service, and enough power to act without scrutiny and cover their tracks – and Manning was at the top of it.

  ‘It’s a natural conclusion to reach,’ Manning continued. ‘Particularly with my rather unconventional elevation to DG.’

  ‘It’s one possible conclusion,’ Knox replied, eliciting a thin smile from Manning.

  ‘And this,’ Manning said, gesturing around him, ‘bears all the marks of a KGB hit squad.’