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  Knox became convinced that Manning had played a very long, very calculated game. And now it felt like he was playing one with Knox. He knew Manning wouldn’t have dangled the carrot of finally finding a solid link between him and Russia without being able to pull it away whenever he wanted. But Knox was determined to grab it before he did.

  He needed to move fast, because he knew the longer Manning was acting director general the harder it would be to get him thrown out of Leconfield House, even with evidence that he was a traitor of the highest order. It was also very likely Manning had sent his own inquisitor hunting through Knox’s records for a reason to get rid of him permanently. And if they looked closely enough they’d find one. Because in his files was the secret of why he hadn’t shown up at Holland’s house for dinner on Sunday. The old deep secret that bound Knox and Holland together. The secret that Knox knew could so easily be twisted to make it look like he was the traitor in MI5’s midst.

  CHAPTER 9

  Another morning in Povenets B, another relentless sequence of sirens. But this morning Valera wasn’t running late. She was early. By the third siren, she’d already hurried Ledjo out of the house and halfway to school.

  Today, Valera had dressed in a dull brown blouse and the same pair of old, worn trousers she wore almost every day, and Ledjo had a small, bright red neckerchief under his white collar. This short length of fabric was the symbol of the Young Pioneers, the Soviet Union’s mass youth organisation. Technically, Ledjo was three years too young to join the Young Pioneers but Zukolev had made membership mandatory for every child in Povenets B. Young Pioneer neckerchiefs were also technically supposed to be a neatly folded triangle of plain red fabric, but Ledjo’s had recently been part of the right sleeve of one of Valera’s few brighter shirts, which she had sacrificed for her son’s happiness. From a distance it looked plain, but up close it was an abstract pattern of intermingling triangles and squares.

  Young Pioneer day was Ledjo’s favourite day of the week, and he would normally be pulling on his mother’s arm to get to school as early as possible. But today he struggled to keep up with her. He kept tugging on her hand to get her to slow down, but it didn’t work.

  When they reached the school gates a full twenty minutes before the fourth siren, Ledjo decided it was time for his own small rebellion against Povenets B’s draconian rules.

  He let go of Valera’s hand, stepped in front of her, and said, very loudly, ‘Goodbye, Mama.’

  His voice snapped Valera out of the swirling thoughts about radio waves and rake receivers that had consumed her all night. She looked down at him, really seeing him and the tears threatening the corners of his eyes properly for the first time that day.

  ‘Oh, Pikku, I’m so sorry.’ She opened her arms, and Ledjo rushed straight into them, his pout instantly dissolving. ‘I’ve been very bad,’ she said to the top of his head, ‘but I’ll make up for it. I think today is going to be a great day.’ She kneeled down, holding Ledjo out in front of her. ‘Be a good boy. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Mama.’

  Valera smiled, turned him round, and gave him a gentle shove to start him running through the gates.

  As soon as he was inside the school, she turned away, letting herself get lost in her thoughts again. She ignored the other mothers with their plaited hair and children in perfect neckerchiefs passing her on their way to school, and the men in overalls rushing to deal with the latest problem at the power plant.

  Valera would never say luck had played much of a part in her life. But she had been fortunate that her natural aptitude for physics had been spotted late.

  When the siege of Leningrad ended, what remained of the city’s population hoped their liberation would be cause for a national celebration. It wasn’t. Stalin had never liked Leningrad or its people, and as the city began to rebuild, he worried about the influence its new generation of leaders was starting to wield. The Soviet Union could only have one seat of power – Moscow – and one unassailable leader – Josef Stalin.

  Five years after the city was decimated by the siege, it was purged. The mayor was executed, two hundred city officials were sentenced to hard labour in the Siberian gulags, and two thousand public figures, including industry leaders, scientists, and university professors, were deemed to be anti-Soviet agitators and exiled from the city. By then Valera had become a junior member of the physics faculty at Andrei Zhdanov University. As a survivor of the siege and the daughter of an acknowledged anti-Soviet intellectual, she naturally fell under suspicion. But one thing saved her life. To make the purge as efficient as possible, an arbitrary combination of age and rank was used to decide who posed a threat. Valera was too young and too junior.

  She suddenly had the run of Andrei Zhdanov’s labs, with no old intellectuals blocking or belittling her. Then, with Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s political thaw, her superiors began to return from the Siberian wilderness, and she was back to begging for respect. So, when the GRU agent approached her with the offer of moving to Povenets B, it wasn’t just fleeing the penury of life in Leningrad that enticed her, but escaping the prejudice of academia as well. But Povenets B had just been another kind of cage. And not even a gilded one.

  Valera dreamed of a different life, when she was awake and when she was asleep. Almost every night since Ledjo had been born she’d dreamed about the two of them in a small rowing boat, floating in the middle of a calm lake. The details of the dream changed over time – sometimes it was winter and they were bundled up, surrounded by distant, snowy peaks, other times it was summer and she could hear the far rustling of reeds and grassy fields – but the feeling was always the same: freedom.

  With the promise of a new life in Povenets B, it felt like her dream might come true at last. She imagined lazy summer days on Lake Onega, fishing for their supper, or long nights curled up in front of a fire, reading stories together like she’d done with her father. None of that had happened. Life in the naukograd was the same, day after grinding day. But last night her dream was the most intense it had ever been. The scenery constantly changed, mountains rising and falling as the sky moved through hues of blue, yellow, and pink, and the sound of Ledjo’s laughter echoed across the water.

  When she reached her lab, Valera checked that her equipment hadn’t been tampered with overnight. It wasn’t beyond Zukolev to go snooping when she wasn’t there and try to uncover some piece of information she hadn’t included in her latest official report. Unfortunately for him, he wouldn’t find anything useful if he did. Valera wasn’t stupid. She didn’t keep notes. Everything she did, every experiment she tried, and every discovery she made was locked up in her head. And only a fraction of it made it into her official reports.

  The travelling wave amplifier and rake receiver were both exactly as she’d left them. So she fired them up, encoded a test signal, and sent it. There was some slight degradation of individual signals, but the rake receiver easily reconstructed the full message. She encoded another signal, and threw in a couple of random problems of her own. This one came through perfectly. Then, just to be sure, she spent an hour taking the amplifier and the receiver apart and putting them back together again, and sent one more message. When this one was captured without any issues, she leaned back and burst out laughing. Then she stood in front of the portrait of Stalin, looked it square in the eyes, and shouted, ‘The truth is all that’s left!’

  She’d really done it. She’d solved the impossible problem, and given herself and Ledjo a way to escape Povenets B.

  She ran down the corridor to her research block’s one communal telephone to call Zukolev’s office and deliver the news that would finally free her of him. But before she reached the phone it flew past her, blasted off the wall by a massive shockwave. A split second later she was hurled off her feet, slammed into the floor, and knocked out as the ceiling collapsed on top of her.

  CHAPTER 10

  Valera didn’t know how long she was unconscious for, but she came
to with her ears ringing and her chest pinned under a huge chunk of plaster. The wall where the phone had hung was in pieces, the wooden beams that had been holding it up exposed and buckled.

  She knew only one thing in Povenets B could have caused this much damage. The power plant.

  She pulled herself up, causing a loud creak to echo through the wrecked building, and crept backwards, away from the collapsed wall towards the staircase at the opposite end of the corridor. She didn’t look into her lab as she passed it. She knew she’d only see her equipment destroyed and her library in ruins.

  The staircase was made of thick wooden boards bolted to the bare concrete wall. Valera tested the first step. It held. So she ran down the rest, and burst out into the madness that was consuming the naukograd. She passed other scientists, stumbling out of their labs and offices into the street, and started to sprint towards the school. She outpaced the guards rushing from their posts and parents abandoning their jobs, all running in the same direction, all sharing the same terrifying thought.

  The closer she got to the plant, the more damaged the buildings she sped past were. Some had holes blown out of their roofs, some had lost entire walls, exposing all the secret bits of life and work that had been locked up inside them.

  She told herself over and over that if the explosion had happened on this side of the plant then the rest of the complex itself might have protected the school from the worst of the blast. That Ledjo and all the other children would be fine – shaken and scared but safe. That any second she’d hear their cries and sobs rise above the shouting of the grown-ups around her. But then she turned a corner and saw in the distance a sight that even her worst nightmares over the last three years had never dared to conjure up.

  The cooling tower had collapsed and the plant had been ripped in two, a deep gouge cut through it. And beyond, where the school should have been, was only rubble.

  She slowed to a walk, then stopped, frozen, in the middle of the road. She didn’t register the people knocking into her as they ran past. She didn’t notice the hot embers in the air stinging her eyes and burning her nostrils. She only felt a sudden and total emptiness.

  Her head told her there was no use rushing towards the gaping void where the school should have been, no point screaming out Ledjo’s name. No one could have survived such a violent explosion. But her heart refused to listen.

  After a long, agonising moment she was running again. She clambered through the chasm that had opened up in the middle of the plant. She crushed wood and glass under her feet, climbed over lumps of twisted metal and chunks of brick. It was a gauntlet, and every few metres the carnage was punctured by the raggedy edge of an overall or the blank stare of dead eyes poking up through the rubble.

  Then the fabric changed from the dark green of workers’ uniforms to the grey, white and red of children’s. Valera cried out Ledjo’s name, just like all the other parents who were scouring the chaos searching for their babies.

  She rushed from body to body, feeling sick and ashamed of herself for leaving them as soon as she realised they weren’t her son. She couldn’t stop until she’d found Ledjo. She couldn’t even help the people who had heard faint, whispering voices and were racing to move the broken pieces of walls and desks on top of them. Any one of them could have been her son, but something inside her told her they weren’t.

  Valera reached a large slab of wall that had tipped over, jutting up into the air at a perilous angle. Half-torn posters of colourful Cyrillic letters were still pinned to it, fluttering in the gentle wind that had been stirred up by the city wrenching itself apart. She was in the ruins of a classroom. Jagged metal and glass blocked any other path than the way she’d come.

  ‘Ledjo! Ledjo!’ she finally screamed. ‘Where are you, Pikku?’

  She had to keep going, keep searching. The only route she could take was over the wall. She didn’t know how she was going to scale it, but she knew she had to. She told herself it might even have saved Ledjo from the brunt of the blast, and he was trapped just on the other side of it, waiting for her to rescue him.

  She looked for a foothold, something that would help her up onto the wall so she could test her weight. But another flash of red caught her eye almost directly beneath her. It was tiny, barely visible through a gap between two chunks of wall that hadn’t survived the blast, and almost smothered in dust. But as she focused on it she saw the intricate, abstract pattern of triangles and squares that covered the fabric.

  ‘No. No, no, no,’ she whispered as she pulled away shards of glass and broken plaster. She dug, and dug, and dug. The wall began to creak and shudder as Valera shifted its new foundations, but she didn’t stop until she uncovered the bruised, soot-covered face of her son.

  CHAPTER 11

  After a very short and very cold shower, Knox made himself a very strong coffee. He had no food in the flat for breakfast. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, his cupboards were usually bare beyond a bag of coffee beans from the Algerian Coffee Stores, the shop on Old Compton Street that had been supplying caffeine addicts with their domestic fixes since 1887.

  This morning Knox took his coffee short as he got dressed. He didn’t like suits and only owned two that he’d had made on Savile Row several years ago for special occasions, like disciplinary review boards. Day to day, he preferred clothes that didn’t obviously mark him out as a government servant.

  He’d recently bought several summer jackets, shirts and trousers from Hardy Amies’ new line of menswear, and picked out a suitable combination. He matched them with a pair of brown brogues from Crockett & Jones, his Omega watch, and a slim black leather wallet from Dunhill.

  Dressing less conspicuously was another lesson he’d tried to teach the Watchers. Their dark suits and light mackintoshes, which had been intended to make them blend in, were starting to date and become easy to spot as austere post-war fashions started to relax. Knox had encouraged them to broaden their sartorial horizons, but this had just resulted in more resentment. It had taken the Watchers a lot of hard work to earn enough to buy their uniform, and they wore it with pride.

  He took an early train to Cambridge. It wasn’t busy – most people were making their way into London, not the other way round – yet Knox still didn’t have his first-class carriage to himself. Just before the train pulled out of King’s Cross a man joined him in the small compartment. The day was already warming up and the man was sweating in his oversized three-piece suit. Even though it was summer he also carried a thick coat along with his bulging suitcase. He had the look of a travelling salesman.

  Thankfully the man didn’t seem interested in making conversation and sat silently across from Knox, reading his newspaper, until the train reached Hitchin. Knox watched him drag his suitcase down onto the platform and then, as the train pulled out of the station, reached over for the paper he’d left behind. Knox scanned the headlines as the countryside rolled by. Calder Hall, which had been front-page news a few days ago, was already relegated to a single column on page five, replaced by a large, close-up photo of Yuri Gagarin sipping champagne. Knox, happily, couldn’t find any mention of Holland, Manning, or himself anywhere.

  Once he reached Cambridge, Knox headed to the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane, home to the university’s physics department. The Cavendish was a warren of narrow passages, dead ends and staircases. He passed a steady stream of postgraduate students – some, he thought, more than once – who all shuffled quietly around him, their eyes glazed over from a summer buried in experiments and books.

  Eventually, he stopped one and asked for directions. Two staircases and more corridors later he found the door with a little brass plaque next to it that read:

  Dr Ludvig Kaspar, Emeritus.

  Kaspar was German, and a polymath. He was a prodigious mind who had made a name for his young self across Europe by being able to take on almost any problem in any scientific field. Then the war came, and the Nazis put him to work on a task that in Kas
par’s mind was entirely beneath him – improving the guidance systems of their V2 rockets.

  At the end of the war, Kaspar, who had been brought to Berlin to avoid him falling into enemy hands, fell into enemy hands. He had been high on the GRU’s list of prizes, and when Russian soldiers found him working in his temporary lab as if the Third Reich wasn’t crumbling outside, he was transported to Moscow, where he was thoroughly and relentlessly debriefed.

  Once the GRU had learned all they could from him to help them advance their own intercontinental ballistic missile programme, he was allowed to return to Berlin. Kaspar hoped to find his lab still intact. It wasn’t. Deep inside the Soviet-controlled eastern sector of the city, the building had long since been repurposed and all traces of his lab gone. He wrote to several universities in the Bundesrepublik to the west seeking a position, but none of them wanted anything to do with someone now considered a Nazi and Soviet collaborator.

  The CIA, however, did. He was approached, and then spirited out of East Berlin to Washington as part of Operation Dragon Return. When the US had extracted everything of value from him about both the Soviet Union’s missile programme and life behind the Iron Curtain, the British were given their chance.

  Kaspar had been a brilliant young scientist, but after almost ten years being traded between superpowers and endlessly debriefed, the light of his genius had become dim and jaded. There was little flesh on his intellectual bones for the British to pick on. But there was also nowhere else for Kaspar to go. He was almost sixty and had no family, and no desire to return to a Germany that didn’t want him back.

  In a fit of generosity, he was given rooms and a small office in Cambridge where he could live out his dotage quietly. In the last six years he’d given two lectures, had published one short paper, and had generally been ignored by successive generations of students passing through the university. It was a stroke of luck that the postgraduate Knox stopped for directions knew about ‘the old Nazi in the rafters’.