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  Knox didn’t know if the silent treatment was just the traditional dislike Watchers had for their more menial tasks or a result of recent events. Given their low level in MI5’s pecking order, the Watchers shouldn’t know the details of Knox’s review board and suspension. But if there was one place gossip spread faster than the halls of Parliament, it was the corridors of MI5’s headquarters. And if there was one person in the Service the Watchers weren’t inclined to like, it was Knox. At the same time as Holland had been fighting to modernise MI5, Knox had made it his mission to retrain the Watchers, breaking them out of the stale techniques they used in their never-ending games of cat and mouse with foreign operatives. The Watchers considered themselves part of an ancient brotherhood and very much resented the interference from someone who wasn’t one of their own.

  The envelope contained a preliminary autopsy report on the Italians, and it threw up about as many questions as everything else about their deaths did.

  Knox poured himself a drink and tried to make sense of it. The coroner now believed they had died closer to seventy-two hours before being discovered, which explained the slick liquid Knox had seen around their noses and mouths – it was lung fluid, expelled as rigor mortis started to wear off. The marks on the men’s necks suggested they’d been choked to death, but on closer inspection their windpipes showed no signs of being crushed. Toxicology tests were being run but the results would take another day to come through.

  So, Knox didn’t know anything about the two dead men beyond the most basic information. He didn’t know how they’d been killed, or why. It was hard for him not to feel like Manning was setting him up.

  CHAPTER 7

  In her cramped, windowless lab, Valera thought about the lie she’d told Zukolev.

  She didn’t need the argon. He was right – it was inert. It didn’t do anything. It wasn’t a catalyst and it had nothing to do with her research. She’d just requested the gas because she wanted to know how much attention Zukolev was paying to her work.

  She was telling the truth about something else, though. She really did feel close to a breakthrough. After years of struggle, toil, and setbacks, she was convinced she was on the edge of glory – because she had to be.

  Valera’s father had had two passions in life: early Asian languages, and British detective stories. Every evening when Valera was a child, he would read the Russian translations of novels by Arthur Conan Doyle to her. She was too young to understand the complicated plots, but one line from The Sign of the Four – the novel they had been reading the night her father was seized by the NKVD and never seen again – had been seared into her mind. The Russian translation was ‘when you have removed every other possibility, the truth is all that’s left’.

  After three years of wrestling with the same problem every day, she’d eliminated so many possibilities that, by Conan Doyle’s logic, she must be near the answer.

  ‘What shall we try today?’ she asked the portrait of Stalin hanging on the wall opposite her.

  Zukolev insisted that a portrait of the great man hung in every office and workroom in Povenets B, so the city’s workers could always feel him looking down on them. It was always the same portrait, and always shrouded in black velvet.

  But to Valera the face hanging in her office didn’t belong to Stalin. It was her lab assistant, her collaborator, her confessor. His identity changed day by day, depending on what Valera needed to keep herself sane – another little rebellion.

  She had wasted her first year in Povenets B chasing theoretical dead ends. Eventually, she had realised she needed help and, with none on offer, she’d created her own. She started talking to the painting. It helped her externalise her thoughts, consider fresh perspectives, vent her frustrations. The painting never talked back. It didn’t need to. It just needed to listen. Until one day, when Valera felt like she was lost and trapped at the same time. She had looked into Stalin’s eyes and heard in her mind, in a voice that wasn’t quite her father’s but wasn’t quite anyone else’s either, the line from The Sign of the Four.

  Protecting standard radio communications from interception was relatively straightforward. By encrypting signals across a broad spectrum of channels, constantly hopping between a preset range of bandwidths, messages could be sent between two locations without being jammed or listened in to. This was how all major militaries, intelligence agencies, and the more private of the world’s global corporations kept their conversations secure and their secrets safe.

  Unfortunately, this technique didn’t work when it came to getting anything but the most basic messages from the Earth’s surface to orbit and back again. This was because of the scattering effect of the planet’s atmosphere. No matter how many bandwidths were jumped, messages never pierced the atmospheric barrier. Only the most simple signals that were barely a step up from Morse code could pass through.

  Valera had convinced herself that the secret to breaking the barrier lay in unlocking some new, undiscovered realm of physics. It was an arrogant idea, and after months of questioning proofs, exploring half-cooked theories, and drafting calculations that didn’t add up, she’d conceded defeat.

  That was the day the portrait on her lab wall started talking to her, and she realised that if the answer wasn’t to be found in creating something new, then it must be in doing something different with what she already had.

  She broke down the problem into its simplest form. There was a wall in her way, and she needed something to punch through it. She needed a bigger signal.

  Zukolev may have been a skinflint when it came to supplies and equipment, but he had furnished Valera with an impressive library. He fed her a regular supply of papers by other Russian scientists, along with some of the latest research by physicists working in America, Britain, Germany, and Sweden, all clandestinely acquired by the GRU. He always handed them over with great ceremony, as if he himself had risked his life to bring them to her. The first few sets of papers had even been translated for Valera, but the efforts were so poor that she’d ended up just asking for the originals. She still struggled with German, but her Swedish was now passable and her English was almost fluent.

  She reread every paper and report she had. Then she went to Zukolev and asked for two things. The first was a travelling wave tube amplifier, a technology developed by the British and Americans during World War Two to boost radio signals. The second was a set of plans for something called a rake receiver. Valera thought that combining a stronger signal with a more sensitive receiving system might be the key to opening up a hole in the atmospheric barrier and getting a message into space. She made her case to Zukolev and, after his usual complaining about time and expense, both pieces of equipment were delivered to her lab the next month.

  Combining the travelling wave tube amplifier with the rake receiver did exactly what she’d hoped, but it wasn’t a solution. For every broadcast that worked, another didn’t. A fifty per cent success rate in lab conditions wasn’t good enough. But she was convinced she was on the right track. So she repeated test after test, each time getting different results, and each time pretending that she wasn’t getting closer and closer to the definition of madness.

  After two more months, Valera had gone back to reading through her library for fresh inspiration. She was now halfway through.

  She poured herself a weak cup of coffee from her samovar – another hard-fought-for gift from Zukolev – and carried the next stack of papers over to her desk.

  Valera could read for hours, and she did, stopping only for occasional refills of coffee. She was happy losing herself in the theoretical world and forgetting the reality of Povenets B. But by late afternoon she’d found nothing to help her solve her problem. It was frustrating. She knew she couldn’t rush the science, but she also knew after her meeting with Zukolev that she needed to deliver something resembling progress soon.

  She emptied the last of the samovar and started on the next pile of papers. Halfway down was a slim report from 1
957 by a military engineer called Leonid Kupriyanovich about his development of an experimental portable telephone. She paced up and down the small amount of free floor space, clutching her coffee in one hand and Kupriyanovich’s report in the other. By the third page she knew she was on to something.

  Because of its diminutive size, Kupriyanovich’s phone could only broadcast a very weak signal. He’d overcome this limitation not by trying to make his signals stronger, but by making them larger, wider. He used asynchronous code division to spread his transmissions across a much broader bandwidth than they needed, effectively increasing the odds of them reaching their destination. Instead of trying to turn the signal into a rocket, he turned it into the wind.

  Before she had finished Kupriyanovich’s report, Valera was already trying to work out if she could apply the same principle to her work. If one big signal couldn’t break through the atmospheric barrier, could a hundred smaller ones? She asked Stalin what he thought. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either.

  She recalibrated the amplifier and receiver to asynchronous code division and sent a basic test signal. It worked. She reset the equipment and encoded a more complex message. She transmitted the signal and, after a split second that felt like a year, the receiver captured it completely intact, with no degradation or corruption.

  Valera almost didn’t believe it. She might actually have found a way to talk to the stars. This could change everything. For Russia, for science, for her, and for Ledjo. She allowed herself the briefest moment of celebration before resetting her equipment to send another signal. She needed to prove it wasn’t a fluke. She picked her message, encoded it, and sent it. But as soon as she did the room plunged into darkness.

  The power to her lab had been cut. She looked around for a moment, confused. Then her eyes landed on the luminescent hands of the clock that hung above the lab’s door. In her excitement she’d missed the double blare of the siren that had sounded a minute before. It was five o’clock, and the working day in Povenets B was over.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘They’ll hate you for this,’ Holland had said to Knox the day he’d asked him to become MI5’s own grand inquisitor and mole hunter in his large, wood-panelled office on the fifth floor of Leconfield House.

  ‘Most of them already do,’ Knox had replied.

  Knox knew he didn’t have many friends in the Service. After a decade and a half, he was still an outsider. He didn’t come from the right sort of family and hadn’t gone to the right sort of schools. He was an orphan from the East End who had spent his childhood dodging Blitz bombs instead of learning the classics. He’d never doffed his cap to the great and good, or asked people to do something when he could just tell them, because with Holland’s ever-present support, he’d never had to.

  ‘I’ve already been told by various quarters that this is all baseless paranoia, sheer McCarthyism, a classic Russian misinformation tactic that we shouldn’t fall for, and generally beneath the Service’s attention,’ Holland said.

  ‘What do you think?’ Knox asked.

  ‘Frankly, I hope they’re all correct,’ Holland said. ‘But the onus is on us to prove it one way or the other. We find ourselves in a rather precarious position, caught between two old allies. We can’t afford any missteps.’

  ‘Only one is still our ally,’ Knox countered.

  ‘True, but for every person in Whitehall who thinks we should be cosying up even closer to America there’s someone else who wants us building bridges with the Russians,’ Holland said. ‘And if they end up firing nuclear warheads at each other they’ll be flying over our heads.’

  Britain’s own nuclear defence development had stalled after the de Havilland Blue Streak missile programme had been cancelled a year earlier. And no rocket with the Union Jack on its side would be shooting for the moon any time soon. This was one of the reasons Pipistrelle was so important – the intelligence it collected gave MI5 a much-needed edge in a rapidly changing world.

  ‘Or they’ll get us to do it for them,’ Knox said.

  Desperate to make up for the UK’s shortfall, Macmillan had authorised the RAF to carry US nuclear warheads. The arrangement was supposed to be built on clear distinctions: the missiles were American, and the planes were British. But it was never certain whose finger would really be on the launch button. The idea of the UK being dragged into a nuclear war because of a trigger-happy US general or president made a lot of people nervous, including in Leconfield House.

  ‘Quite,’ Holland replied.

  ‘Which side do we pick?’ Knox asked.

  ‘Neither,’ Holland said. ‘We stay vigilant, and pay close attention to anyone inside or outside this building who might be trying to curry too much favour with either one. I don’t like the idea of surviving the battering of two world wars just to end up as the fifty-first state or a tinpot Soviet republic.’

  That conversation had happened three years ago, and ever since Knox had been hunting moles. He’d been exhaustive in his quest, but had found little evidence of anyone working against MI5 from the inside, until a throwaway revelation in Sandra Horne’s testimony eventually led him to suspect that Manning, then an assistant director, was a Soviet agent.

  While most of the information Sandra and Peter passed on to Moscow came personally from Montcalm, Peter would also travel into London once every two months to retrieve coded messages from a second-hand bookshop in Cecil Court. Knox had cross-referenced the times of these trips with Montcalm’s movements and established that he hadn’t been leaving the messages for Horne to collect. The question then was, who had?

  Knox reviewed the records of the Service’s most senior members, looking for signs that would point to one of them being the guilty party. After several late nights reading through old reports called in from record storage, Knox had begun to appreciate some of White’s enthusiasm for the speed and efficiency offered by Atlas. But he still believed there was no substitute for studying the actual files, understanding their context and subtext, and reading the specific words that were used and – importantly – the ones that weren’t.

  When he reached Manning’s service record he found it was littered with enough basic errors and operational missteps to convince Knox he should never have been allowed in the field, let alone made acting director general. But there was nothing in it to suggest malice was hiding beneath his incompetence. At least, not until Knox found one very odd and very deeply buried operation.

  On 7 March 1947, Yevgeny Kuznetsov walked into a small, backstreet restaurant in Singapore. It was midday, and Paul Fenwick, a low-ranking member of Singapore’s British Military Administration, was eating his lunch. Kuznetsov approached Fenwick’s table, sat down opposite him.

  ‘You are British,’ the Russian said. ‘I am MGB, and I want to defect.’

  Singapore in 1947 was, to put it kindly, a mess. The British Military Administration was still restoring most of the colony’s infrastructure after the Japanese occupation of the island during the war. Food was scarce, crime was rampant, and Chinese communist seditionists were stoking anti-colonial protests. In other words, the Military Administration was stretched thinly enough without worrying about a Russian walk-in. But Kuznetsov made Fenwick a tantalising offer.

  ‘Get me back to civilisation, and I’ll give you the names of all the Russian agents in your country.’

  The Administration made a blanket request for assistance to Military Intelligence, MI6, and MI5. All three could have claimed jurisdiction over Singapore. But it was Manning, then working in MI5’s counter-intelligence division, who quickly drafted a memo making the case that as Singapore was a colony, all intelligence operations there fell under MI5’s purview. He also said that, given Kuznetsov’s suggestion about Soviet infiltration, this matter was too serious to be handled by the MI5 security liaison officer assigned to Singapore and someone from counter-intelligence should fly out to interrogate him – and that he was happy to volunteer.

  Neither MI6 nor M
ilitary Intelligence were inclined to put up a fight, and Manning was on a plane to Singapore the next morning.

  It was clear from Manning’s record that this was the moment he became tipped for bigger things. Everyone was impressed with how he handled the mission, and his conclusion after meeting Kuznetsov that every piece of information he’d offered up was entirely fictitious. The report’s coda stated that two days after meeting Manning Kuznetsov’s body was found on the edge of Singapore’s north coast, washed up from the Johore Strait – the price, it seemed, of his failure to trick the British.

  This conclusion made sense to Manning’s superiors, but not to Knox.

  Honeytraps were a favourite KGB tactic for keeping Russia’s enemies on their toes. But Knox didn’t know of any instance when an aborted trap had resulted in the death of the agent involved. They usually just faded away, disappearing overnight to pop up again somewhere else with a different identity and new deal to make. The only reason Knox could think the Soviets would have for killing Kuznetsov was if he really was a defector.

  Manning’s claim that all his information was false also didn’t ring true to Knox. The best chicken feed always had at least some truth mixed in with it. Working in counter-intelligence, Manning of all people would know this.

  To Knox, Manning’s insistence that he should be the one to run the Kuznetsov case didn’t look like healthy ambition and dedication to duty. It looked like someone acting very swiftly to remove a threat.

  None of this amounted to hard proof that Manning was secretly working for the Russians, but Knox couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility. He’d looked back through Manning’s record again with different eyes. Suddenly all the little mistakes looked like part of a much larger pattern. He’d started to see connections between events separated by years, and Manning’s whole career turned into a grand narrative of subtle manipulations.