Red Corona Page 3

  The equations, however, he might be able to get help with sooner.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ledjo stood pressed against the front door, his nose rubbing the unvarnished wood and his mouth moving as he silently counted to himself. When he reached five he spun round and Valera, who had been creeping up on him from the kitchen, froze like a statue. He stared at her. Ledjo had inherited his mother’s eyes, but also his father’s, so they looked more like raindrops than almonds, with a slight upward curve at the edges that made him look permanently on the verge of breaking into a smile. He giggled and waited for her to make the slightest movement. She didn’t budge.

  He faced the door again, counting faster this time. When he turned back, Valera was already halfway across the living room. He started to spin round and round, giggling more with every turn until Valera reached him, scooped him up, and pulled him into a tight, bony hug.

  ‘Be a good boy today at school,’ she said into his neck.

  ‘Yes, Mama.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Mama.’

  She put him down and straightened his simple uniform of a white shirt and grey shorts.

  ‘Goodbye, my little Pikku,’ she said once she was done.

  Then she took his hand in hers, opened the door, and stepped outside.

  Ten minutes later she had delivered Ledjo to school and was heading back to her lab. As she passed the power plant, its own siren began to wail and men ran to deal with today’s little crisis. Valera silenced the ever-present worry at the back of her mind that one morning the emergency at the plant would be really serious. Instead, she focused on the hope that she would get through the day without being summoned to see Zukolev. Unfortunately, when she reached her lab two of his goons were already there waiting for her.

  Every ruble that came into Povenets B passed through Zukolev’s office, and it showed – on both the man and room. Zukolev had grown fat on his excess. His GRU dress uniform, which he wore at all times, strained against his stomach, and his face was flushed red from too much rich meat and vodka.

  His office was modelled on Stalin’s own in the Kremlin, to which Zukolev had made a pilgrimage as a young GRU officer. The walls were covered in dark maroon wallpaper and hung with ugly paintings on revolutionary themes. A large wooden desk sat in the middle of the room. Marble busts of Lenin and Stalin stared at each other from either end.

  Zukolev, of course, proclaimed his loyalty to Nikita Khrushchev, the current leader of the Soviet Union, but his heart belonged to Stalin. He had come of age at the height of Stalin’s personality cult, and now that he had a little nation of his own to govern, he took his cues from the true father of the Soviet Union. However, where Stalin had been one of the shrewdest minds ever to rise to power in the long history of Russia and inspired devotion across the nation, Zukolev was heavily deluded about his own competence and how much the people of Povenets B loved him.

  Valera sat on the single, small chair pushed against the wall opposite Zukolev’s desk. She sat there for almost ten minutes while he silently pored over a stack of documents and fed himself from a large bowl of raspberries. It was a simple, childish power play, and one that Valera was extremely bored by after three years.

  ‘Argon is a noble gas,’ Zukolev finally said, his eyes still fixed on his papers.

  ‘Yes,’ Valera replied.

  ‘That means it doesn’t do anything.’ He scooped up a handful of berries and tipped them into his mouth. He insisted on getting the best of the summer fruits that grew wild around Povenets B delivered to him every morning. No one else was allowed to forage for them, because no one apart from Zukolev’s lackeys were allowed to leave the naukograd.

  Valera hesitated for a moment. ‘Actually, it means that—’ she started.

  But before she could correct him, Zukolev slammed the report he was holding down on the desk and looked up at her.

  ‘If it doesn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Why do you want five twenty-kilogram canisters of it?’

  It was clear from his tone that he thought he’d caught Valera out. He hadn’t. She tried to make her explanation for the supply request she’d put in a week ago as simple as possible.

  ‘Argon is inert,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t react to stimulation. However, it can cause a reaction in other things. It can, in certain circumstances, act like a catalyst.’ She could already tell he wasn’t following her. But he’d demanded she explain herself, so that’s what she was going to do. ‘It’s an atmospheric gas. It makes up less than one per cent of the air we breathe, but we don’t know exactly how much of it there is higher up. It doesn’t affect radio waves near the surface of the planet, but in larger quantities it might.’

  ‘You want to create different levels of the atmosphere?’

  Valera, surprised that Zukolev appeared to have grasped the concept after all, nodded. ‘I want to try.’

  ‘Your job is to find a way to talk to space. Not go there, or bring it here.’

  ‘I simply want to—’

  ‘Is the ground not good enough for you?’ He interrupted her again. ‘Would you like us to put you on a rocket too? Spend untold millions of rubles so you can satisfy your curiosity?’

  She couldn’t resist the bait. ‘I think it would make more sense to send scientists into space than someone who was chosen because he was short enough to fit in the cockpit.’

  Zukolev slammed his hands down on the desk again. ‘Major Gagarin is a hero of the Soviet Union!’

  Yuri Gagarin was Zukolev’s second idol after Stalin, though his affinity for Russia’s most celebrated cosmonaut was primarily based on their shared first name. Valera knew this, and while she also knew better than to ever say anything critical about Stalin to Zukolev, Gagarin was a nerve she was happy to pinch to put him off balance.

  Zukolev sighed deeply and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fat thumb and forefinger, dramatically transforming in a moment from irate dictator to disappointed father. He pushed his chair back – it dragged loudly under his weight – and walked round his desk.

  ‘We are a small part of a great family,’ he said, raising his arms as if gesturing to the whole of the Soviet Union. The gold buttons on his jacket struggled to stay fastened. ‘I want you to be happy, Irina. I want people to understand your genius. We must work together, to make life better for all of us, to protect each other from our enemies.’

  He got closer and closer to her until Valera could see nothing but his large stomach and feel his sweet, heavy breath on her. His hand hovered over her shoulder, then drifted over to her face. She looked up at him before his palm could cup her chin and force her head upward. He met her stare, his eyes pleading. She could see the blood-red flesh of berries stuck between his teeth.

  ‘But I can’t protect you, or Ledjo,’ he said, ‘if you keep asking for things without giving anything back.’

  It was a threat, and it didn’t work. Valera had spent her whole life being threatened. Her family history was intimately connected with the darker side of the Soviet Union. Her father, a celebrated linguist who specialised in early Asian languages, had been killed in the Great Purge when Valera was eight years old, accused of being a spy for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist China. Her mother, a gifted chemist, starved to death in the siege of Leningrad five years later. Valera herself only barely survived to see the city liberated. She was not a happy child of Mother Russia, and she was immune to intimidation.

  ‘You cannot just keep experimenting,’ Zukolev continued. ‘Moscow is demanding results. And we must provide them.’

  Valera had no desire to hear more of Zukolev’s lecture and knew the quickest way to get out of his office would be to simply agree with everything he said and promise to do better.

  ‘I believe I’m close to a breakthrough. I’m sure I can give Moscow everything they want…’ She paused a moment for effect ‘…without any more resources.’

  A broad smile spread across Zukolev’s face. Victory was his.


  ‘Very good,’ he said.

  He turned away and walked back towards his desk, a blunt signal that Valera was now free to go.

  CHAPTER 6

  Malcolm White was stressed. One of Holland’s ambitions had been to transform MI5 into a truly modern intelligence service that combined the best of both human and technological expertise. In Manning’s new world order the pendulum was already swinging back towards something far more arcane, and MI5’s head of research and development was not happy about it.

  White, like Knox, had been one of the shining stars of MI5. In the three years that Holland had been director general, White had built up the Service’s formidable research and development section from nothing to a point where it could rival America’s and Russia’s.

  He was also the creator of Operation Pipistrelle. Pipistrelle, a top-secret bugging system, was MI5’s most advanced piece of surveillance technology. It was the current jewel in the research and development department’s crown, but Manning’s first decision as acting director general had been to hand control of it over to his freshly appointed liaison to GCHQ, the UK’s dedicated signals intelligence agency.

  ‘If we aren’t going to let our signals intelligence agency run our signals intelligence, then what’s the point in having one?’ Peterson, who had relayed Manning’s orders, had said when White challenged him.

  Intercepting communications and secreting listening devices in sensitive locations had been standard practice for every self-respecting security service since the war. But the technology was far from perfect. Devices were cumbersome, difficult to install, and easy to detect. A simple sweep for radio signals would reveal their presence, no matter how well they were hidden.

  After the Americans had discovered ‘The Thing’, a passive listening device the KGB had buried in a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States given to the American ambassador in Moscow as a gesture of post-war friendship, intelligence agencies on either side of the Iron Curtain had been developing more advanced and less detectable bugs.

  Operation Pipistrelle was the game-changer everyone was looking for. White had not only worked out a way to radically shrink MI5’s listening devices so they could be installed in more places in less time and removed just as easily. He’d also introduced a failsafe into the bug’s transmitters, which temporarily shut them down whenever a room was being swept.

  When White had first unveiled Pipistrelle to Holland and Knox in its full miniature glory, they’d immediately seen its potential. Even the most secure rooms, buried deep in embassies and wrapped in layers of soundproofing, would become vulnerable to MI5 eavesdropping. Knox also couldn’t believe how small and deceptively innocent it looked. Somehow White had managed to fit Pipistrelle’s battery, aerial and transmitter in a simple square metal box half the size of Knox’s thumb.

  ‘How did you get it all in there?’ Knox asked White as he nudged the tiny prototype across his palm with his fingertip.

  ‘A lot of hard work,’ White replied.

  Pipistrelle was Britain’s greatest intelligence weapon since Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, and was years beyond Venona, the joint project between the UK, America, and Australia that was still decrypting decades-old Soviet cables. For the last three years it had provided MI5 with invaluable intelligence and remained completely undetected. However, six months ago White had revealed the next step in Pipistrelle’s evolution and it had driven a wedge between him and Knox.

  ‘Our problem,’ White had said when he presented his new proposal to Holland and Knox, ‘is processing power. We need to be able to work on everything in one place, as soon as we get it.’

  ‘You mean using a computer?’ Knox asked.

  ‘I’ve read the budget request,’ Holland answered. ‘He means more than that.’

  ‘A supercomputer,’ White replied. ‘The University of Manchester’s new Atlas machine is more powerful than anything IBM or CDC are working on in America, and far ahead of what we think the Russians are up to.’

  The Atlas was built on a solid-state germanium transistor infrastructure, using 128 high speed index register and 680 kilobytes of memory, which was roughly the same amount of storage and processing power as every other computer in Britain put together.

  Knox understood the value of technology – Pipistrelle had proven itself time and again – but he wasn’t ready to hand everything over to it. He believed there were still some things machines just couldn’t do.

  ‘How many analysts could we hire for what this will cost?’ he asked.

  ‘Atlas can analyse much more information than a person, and in a fraction of the time,’ White replied.

  ‘But it can’t make decisions, or draw conclusions.’

  ‘Nor is it burdened by habit or narrow viewpoints,’ White said, defensively. ‘It uses every variable to make the most likely predictions.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Knox countered, ‘our enemies don’t tend to do the most likely things.’

  Holland cut their argument short, approving White’s request on the proviso that flesh-and-bone analysts would continue working on Pipistrelle intelligence and check everything that was run through Atlas.

  It took almost a month for the research and development department deep in the bowels of Leconfield House to be turned into what was effectively one giant mainframe of blinking towers, cables, and stacks of index cards. By the time his team had finished enhancing and refining Atlas, White felt comfortable describing it as the most advanced computer on earth.

  But now he was standing in front of its primary control panel, watching hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment do absolutely nothing. It had taken weeks to install Pipistrelle devices all over London ahead of the OECD conference, and thanks to Manning White had no idea what conversations any of them were listening in on.

  The last person White wanted to see was Knox. He thought Knox wasn’t just responsible for Holland’s current condition, but his as well. And Knox was now very much persona non grata at MI5 headquarters, yet there he was, standing in the middle of what should have been one of its most secure departments.

  White had wanted to give Knox a piece of his mind for several days. But instead of making a scene in front of his staff he simply smoothed back the thick shock of blond hair that had earned some distant ancestor of his their surname, straightened his jacket, and nodded towards his office door.

  Before White could tell Knox exactly what he thought of him inside the small, gloomy room that had until recently been used for storage, Knox thrust the Italians’ papers into his hands.

  ‘These belonged to Bianchi and Moretti,’ Knox said.

  White’s scientific curiosity immediately took over and he scanned the sheets for a moment before holding them out for Knox to take back.

  ‘It looks like nonsense to me,’ White replied.

  ‘Don’t be modest,’ Knox said, trying to charm him. ‘If anyone can anyone make sense of this, you can.’

  ‘I’m not, and I can’t.’

  ‘I know you don’t exactly like me at the moment, Malcolm, but I need your help.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with whether or not I like you,’ White said, letting the sheets fall on his desk. ‘I might think your obsession with Russian moles is a childish obsession. I might think you’ve betrayed the one man who deserves your complete loyalty. And I might think you’re the reason I’m now stuck dealing with Manning and his cronies. But none of that has any bearing on the fact that these calculations don’t make sense to me.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry to have taken you away from your very important work,’ Knox said, scooping up the papers and heading for the door.

  It was already swinging closed behind him when White called out, ‘Try Kaspar.’

  ‘Who?’ Knox asked, leaning back into the office.

  ‘Dr Ludvig Kaspar. A German physicist up at Cambridge. One of the Dragons.’

  ‘You think he’ll know what they mean?’

  �
�I honestly don’t know if these symbols are some kind of code, or incredibly advanced maths, or total rubbish. But Kaspar had one of the most creative scientific minds in Europe once upon a time. If anyone can work out what this is, it’ll be him.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Knox said. ‘I owe you.’

  ‘You owe Holland,’ White replied.

  Knox slipped back through the old fire exit that connected the subterranean car park to the rest of Leconfield House. He’d temporarily relieved one of the custodians of the master key for the building’s emergency exits almost five years ago and made a copy. He’d been equal parts shocked and relieved to discover it still worked when he walked down the car park ramp ten minutes ago.

  The car park smelled of old oil and stale air. He passed several grey and black Consuls, then the bays that housed the nicer cars of more senior officers. There were two empty spaces. One was his, which he’d never used – living in the centre of town, he saw no reason to own a car – the other belonged to Holland. At this time of day his dark green Bentley S2 should have been there, but it wasn’t.

  Knox walked unnoticed back up the car park’s exit ramp and out into Mayfair.

  When he made it back to Kemp House, there was another Watcher waiting at his front door. This one handed Knox an envelope, sneered at him when he asked what was in it, and stepped into the closing lift before Knox had a chance to say anything else.