Red Corona Page 11

  Peterson sighed again, and took half a step back. ‘And that sounds more than a touch paranoid.’

  ‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ Knox replied, throwing Peterson’s line from the previous night back at him.

  ‘You seriously want me to believe the director general hid evidence in the middle of a crime scene and a whole team of investigators missed it?’

  Peterson’s tone was dismissive but he still peered through the Fountain’s windows again, checking that Manning was still distracted by his lunch guests.

  Knox shrugged.

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘But it’s not impossible, is it?’

  Peterson paused before he answered. Knox wondered if Manning’s faithful servant was finally starting to have doubts about his master.

  ‘If Manning was behind all this, why would he have sent for you in the first place?’ Peterson asked. ‘He could have taken whatever he wanted from that flat and no one would have questioned him.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Knox conceded. ‘But it’s a bit too much of a coincidence when the city’s about to become the world’s biggest intelligence powder keg.’

  ‘And we’re doing everything we can to make sure it doesn’t go off. Which includes not jumping to conclusions. For all we know half of these new calculations are gibberish, and they just stumbled onto something that looks like Pipistrelle by dumb luck.’

  ‘Or,’ Knox countered, ‘this is just a fragment of what they had, and the fuse has already been lit by someone.’

  Peterson thought for another long moment. ‘Even if you’re right,’ he said, finally, ‘and the security of the conference is in question, and your conspiracy is real, you still have to follow proper procedures. Give what you’ve got to White for review and we’ll reassess the threat.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you go home.’

  CHAPTER 27

  Medev’s Tupolev Tu-104 jet came into land over Lake Onega a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been lucky that none of the planes kept on standby for the KGB at Chkalovsky airbase north of Moscow had been requisitioned for other emergencies that morning. He’d left the Lubyanka at half past nine, and was in the air an hour later.

  He was the only passenger on the plane, and for the last two hours he’d let his mind reach back into his own memories of Karelia.

  He’d been to this corner of the Soviet Union once before. In the winter of 1937 he’d been stationed on the Solovetsky Islands, five hundred kilometres north of Petrozavodsk in the middle of the White Sea. The islands were home to the Solovki special prison camp, where the people who had been deemed the greatest threat to Stalin’s authority were sent during the Great Purge. The islands had originally been a single, vast Orthodox Christian monastery before they were taken over by the Party and turned into what would become the model for all the other gulags that would spring up across the country’s more remote areas.

  The islands were not hospitable. Living conditions for the NKVD interrogators, their staff, and the prison guards were harsh. For the prisoners, they were wretched. Many of the academics and intellectuals imprisoned at Solovki lost limbs either to frostbite or to forced labour. Others simply died overnight as temperatures, already below zero during the short days, plunged even further in the long nights.

  Medev was a promising, young NKVD lieutenant when he was sent to Solovki. It was a formative experience. For five months, he saw first-hand the casual ruthlessness of absolute power, and learned how much ambition could advance your standing in Stalin’s world, and how much could see you ending up in a mass grave. He also saw that doing what was right and doing what was right in the eyes of the Party were not always the same thing, even if they looked like they were.

  The Solovetsky Monastery had originally been taken over to house forced labourers during the construction of the White Sea Canal, which would eventually link the Arctic coast to the Baltic Sea. By 1937 the first section of the canal had been completed and work had moved west.

  The White Sea froze over in winter, and the thick ice could damage the entrance of the canal if it was left to build up. So, every day during winter fifty prisoners were taken out across the frozen sea to break the ice at the mouth of the canal. Because of the obvious opportunities for escape, extra men were drafted in for guard duty, often including Medev.

  Prisoners, wearing whatever heavy rags they could find, would be marched from the camp before the sun rose, watched over while they worked for six hours without rest or food, and then marched back after the sun had fallen again. Some perished before they even reached the canal, and more as their bodies finally gave up after hours and hours of brutal work. The ones who managed to survive the day tended to make it back to the islands, the prospect of a metre or two of dry floor to rest on suddenly enough to keep them going.

  None of the guards paid particularly close attention to how many prisoners died on any day, but one night, as the men were being lined up to head back across the ice, Medev sensed that there weren’t enough of them still standing. He quietly left his position at the back of the loose column and walked towards the forest that ran near the edge of the canal. He immediately saw a messy path cutting through the trees. It looked like two sets of footprints, lopsided as if each was dragging the other.

  Medev followed them into the forest, lifting his feet up to his knees with every step he took through the deep snow. The weak light of the day was almost completely gone, but after ten minutes of following the path Medev saw two hunched-over figures a hundred metres ahead of him. They turned, saw him, and began to desperately scramble away. Medev called out to the men to stop, but they wouldn’t. He was forced to chase them. By now the snow was up to his thighs and pushing through it was exhausting. He had no idea how the prisoners were managing it, or how long it had taken them to get this far.

  ‘Stop!’ he shouted again.

  But they kept struggling through the snow, grabbing onto each other and the bare trunks of trees to push themselves on until they finally tripped over something hidden in the snow and crashed into a drift.

  It took a full minute for Medev to reach them. When he did, he saw that one had a makeshift splint on his right leg, and they were both so gaunt and grey he could barely believe they were still alive at all. He knew there was no way they could survive the journey back to Solovki, or whatever punishment the other guards might inflict on them for their attempted escape. He also knew they’d never survive a night in the snow without shelter. From the looks in both men’s eyes, they knew all this too.

  They gave up trying to struggle to their feet and just half kneeled, half slumped in the snow.

  ‘Please,’ one of them whispered.

  It was so dark by then that Medev couldn’t tell which one of them had said it, but he understood what they both wanted. He pulled his pistol from the leather holster on his hip and shot them each in the head. The deep scarlet blood was slow to seep out of their frail, withered bodies. Ten minutes later two more guards arrived, alerted by the sound of gunfire. The next day Medev was promoted.

  He was brought out of his memory as the Tu-104 touched the runway at Petrozavodsk airport. The plane taxied to a halt next to a large, black GAZ M21, freshly polished by the local KGB office in preparation for his arrival.

  As he sat in the back seat he was handed a slim manila folder – the latest casualty and assessment report from Povenets B. It was considerably more detailed than the one that had been dispatched to Moscow. It also showed just how much that report had played down the scale of the disaster.

  He read through the initial findings about the cause of the explosion, the city-wide loss of power that still hadn’t been restored, and the multiple fires that had broken out overnight. Then he scanned the list of the deceased: twenty-seven power plant workers, sixteen children, and two teachers. Finally he reviewed the missing: three more workers and five more children, all presumed dead, and one scientist, unaccounted for. He recognised the scientist�
�s surname from the reports he received from the GRU. But he was sure he’d seen it somewhere more recently too, much more recently. He checked the names of the dead, and found it halfway down the list of children.

  CHAPTER 28

  It hadn’t taken long for Zukolev to be moved to a private room in Petrozavodsk hospital. He believed this was because the hospital staff had realised just how important he was. But in reality the doctors had needed their intensive care beds for the more seriously wounded, and Zukolev’s injuries had been relatively minor – just a broken arm and a deep gash across his chin, once all the dust had been cleaned off him.

  Now he was propped up in his bed, his injured arm strapped to his side, and his stomach held down by tights sheets. He had a bandage across his jaw, but he was still feeding himself raspberries with his free hand. When he’d demanded them as soon as he’d been transferred to his private room, the nurses looking after him had thought it was some kind of delirious joke brought on by shock, until a man in dusty overalls arrived at the ward station, punnet in hand.

  He was savouring a particularly large berry when the door to his room opened and Medev stepped inside.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, berry juice slipping across his lower lip.

  Unlike Zukolev, Medev preferred the more anonymous attire of a dark suit to the general’s uniform he could have worn. So Zukolev had no idea that he was talking to someone unfathomably more powerful than him.

  Medev quietly closed the door behind him before responding, ‘I’m the person who has to clean up the mess you’ve made.’

  Then he crossed the short distance to Zukolev’s bedside, picked up the bowl of berries, and moved them out of reach.

  ‘How dare you come in here like this.’ Zukolev couldn’t believe this stranger’s impudence. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

  ‘You’re Major Yuri Zukolev,’ Medev replied, now at the foot of his bed. ‘GRU administrator of Povenets B. Charged with the safe keeping of three hundred souls.’ His voice was measured, emotionless. ‘And responsible for the deaths of fifty-four of them.’

  Zukolev’s face paled. Suddenly, for the first time in a very long time, he was scared.

  ‘You’re KGB,’ Zukolev said, his voice faint.

  Medev didn’t need to confirm Zukolev’s suspicion. His presence was enough.

  ‘Do you have anything to say in your defence?’ Medev’s voice was still calm.

  ‘You can’t blame me for the incompetence of my workers,’ Zukolev spluttered.

  ‘Yes I can.’

  Medev moved up the bed towards Zukolev. Zukolev frantically tried to claw his way out from under the sheets holding him down.

  ‘The GRU will protect me from these baseless accusations,’ Zukolev said. His voice was now high and desperate.

  Medev put a hand on Zukolev’s shoulder, as if trying to soothe him. Zukolev stopped moving, frozen in terror.

  ‘They won’t,’ Medev replied.

  The GRU and KGB might trade occasional jurisdictional blows, but everyone knew who held ultimate power. Medev tightened his grip on Zukolev’s shoulder, then pulled a syringe from his jacket pocket and plunged it into Zukolev’s neck. Zukolev tried to call out, but no sound came from his mouth. He was dead by the time Medev slipped quietly back out of the room.

  As Medev made his way back down the corridor to the nurses’ station, his mind finally made a connection it had been groping at since his morning briefing from Rykov.

  He asked the nurse on duty if he could borrow her phone, then dialled the long list of numbers that could connect him securely to the Lubyanka. When Rykov answered, he told him that under no circumstances could the Americans be allowed to retrieve the next Corona payload. With twenty-two million square kilometres of Soviet Union for them to spy on it would be terrible luck if the Americans had managed to photograph one small, smouldering naukograd. But it wasn’t a risk Medev wanted to take.

  CHAPTER 29

  Bennett made her way across the north side of Grosvenor Square towards the US embassy. It was an imposing presence. Its hard-edged, Modernist facade took up the whole western side of the square, and a large sculpture of a bald eagle with outstretched wings looked down from its roof on everyone who approached it.

  The embassy had opened just over a year ago, and its interior had been designed to be as much of a statement about America’s sense of importance as its brash exterior. The six above-ground levels contained vast conference rooms, banks of communications stations, and row after row of offices – each one’s size correlating precisely with the rank of its occupier. The CIA took up the entire fourth floor, as well as a considerable amount of the building’s subterranean levels, which had been given over to the agency’s local archives.

  This was where Bennett headed after flashing her security credentials at an uninterested guard and slipping through one of the small staff entrances on the side of the building.

  The embassy was a piece of the United States on British soil, so American social mores ruled. In the rest of the city the golden hue of Bennett’s skin and ice blue of her eyes might make her look like a northern European who had spent a long summer in warmer climes. In the embassy, they singled her out as what she really was – someone whose very existence made her fellow countrymen uncomfortable.

  Many of the women who worked at the embassy lived together in houses in the area of the city bound to the north by Hyde Park and the south by the Thames. They were attracted by famous names and landmarks like the King’s Road, Harrods, and the Royal Albert Hall. Rooms were often shared, and beds passed on to newcomers as people returned to America or found a Brit to marry and moved out. The embassy encouraged the system as it created a kind of sisterhood and support network that helped its female staff feel safe and settled.

  But when Bennett arrived in London, she was told there was nowhere for her in any of the women’s houses. A month later, after she’d found her own room in a boarding house off Gloucester Road, another woman had arrived, a blonde, white woman from New England. The embassy houses practically fought each other for her. There had been plenty of space all along, Bennett just wasn’t wanted.

  People did their best to ignore Bennett in Grosvenor Square. Most of the time it irritated her, but today she was more than happy to let it work in her favour, especially in the archive, where the file clerks on duty chose not to see her moving through the aisles of record stacks.

  First she went to the set of thick files the CIA held on Bianchi and Moretti. The agency had kept the two Italians under surveillance since they’d arrived in London to see if they posed a threat to local operations or if they were worth recruiting. Bennett wanted to see if anything had been added to their records since they’d been found dead. There was just a note saying MI5 were investigating their suspected murder. The front file had also been tagged with a green strip – code that all records relating to the Bianchi and Moretti should be moved into deep storage during the next reconciliation cycle.

  Her superiors may have stopped caring about the Italians, but she was still very interested in them. And so, apparently, was MI5. Bennett didn’t know where Knox had gone after he’d given her the slip in Soho the night before, but she was willing to bet he’d gone to Deptford and Bianchi and Moretti’s flat. Now she wanted to know what connected Kaspar, Horne, and the Italians. Unfortunately, the CIA didn’t have any records on Horne or the Calder Hall Ring, and Bennett had already exhausted the information held on Kaspar in London. She could have put in a request to the central records store in Virginia for whatever they held on him, but that would take too much time and probably earn her a reprimand.

  Before she gave up completely on the archive, she stopped by the large pile of new files waiting to be carried off into the stacks and quickly scanned through them. The fourth folder just held a single photo. It was of a woman, her hair caught mid-turn as she walked into a building. The image was slightly blurry, taken with a long lens. The woman’s narrow eyes looked more like sunken s
lits, and wisps of loose hair hung over her cheeks. But the expression on her face was clear enough. She looked long past the point of exhaustion. But more than that, Bennett thought she looked haunted, like something unspeakably awful had happened to her. She turned the photo over, reading the location and timestamp: Swedish embassy, Helsinki, 16:47, 16 July. Yesterday afternoon. It must have been sent to London almost as soon as it had been taken.

  The woman’s name was written underneath in different-coloured ink, added by someone once a source inside the Swedish embassy had confirmed her identity: Irina Valera. Bennett recognised the name, but she had no idea how she’d ended up in Helsinki. She turned the photograph over and looked at it again, trying to work out what had happened to her.

  Bennett had a choice: put the photo back in its folder or do something else, something that could end up with her facing much more than a reprimand. She stood still for a moment, deciding if she was ready to cross a very big line. Then she took the photograph to the unattended Xerox machine next to the chief clerk’s desk and made a copy of it before slipping the original back onto the pile of filing.

  CHAPTER 30

  An hour after the bus left Ilomantsi, it had deposited Valera in the city of Joensuu. Joensuu was the biggest place she had been since she’d left Leningrad, and it was well away from the border with Russia. It felt like a metropolis compared to Povenets B. Well-fed people walked along its streets and riverbanks, cars drove on its roads, and a never-ending stream of boats sailed beneath its bridges.

  Valera could have stayed in Joensuu, found somewhere out of the way to rest and build up her strength for a day or two, or stowed away on a ship heading out onto Lake Pyhäselkä and disappeared into the network of waterways that criss-crossed Finland. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment she might be snatched up and taken back to Russia. The ties that bound Finland and its neighbour ran almost as deep as the divisions that separated them. Russia had exerted influence over Finland for centuries, and even after independence and multiple, bloody wars there were still plenty of people whose loyalties lay to the east. For every good Samaritan Valera might encounter, she might also meet someone looking to curry favour with Moscow.