The London Cage

by Mark Leggatt

  “Where are we going?”

  “I know somewhere close to here. There are still places around here that charge by the day.”

  Montrose was about to ask what the hell she was talking about, but she moved quickly to the door and out into the street.

  He saw her go left and caught a glimpse of her turning into a wide boulevard, slipping on the stolen coat just before she turned the corner. He hurried after her and dropped his jacket onto some rubbish bags lying outside the coffee shop. He pulled on the coat, half-expecting a customer to come running after him. Yeah, I’m wearing stolen gear and this place is crawling with cops.

  He watched her check the porticoed doorways as she passed and then quicken her step, moving towards a hotel. Several tourists hung around outside the door and she slipped behind them as a group of young kids came down the steps, hauling luggage and carrying bulging rucksacks. Montrose ran up the steps, looked over their heads and saw an armed cop take up position on the corner. Two others joined him and pointed along the road. They listened to their radios and then the two cops began slowly walking towards them, checking the doorways. Montrose nudged Kirsty and hid behind a potted plant whose brown leaves littered the entrance. “Cops on the street.”

  “Did they spot us?”

  “No. They’re checking all the doors.”

  “Good. Let’s make this fast.”

  A tarnished brass plaque on the wall showed three stars and Montrose held open the grimy glass door covered in sticky handprints. The last of the kids shuffled past them and down the steps. “Charge by the day?” he said.

  “Oh, Connor, you’re such a prude.” She hurried through the door and into a wide entrance hall.

  He looked up at the high roof and the stained and peeling paint. Gaps in the cornicing glared like broken teeth where the plaster had fallen away.

  Kirsty stood before a chipped and stained check-in desk, where a shaven-headed clerk was engrossed with his phone. She knocked on the counter. “Hey, time is money. Let’s go.”

  The clerk looked up but said nothing.

  Kirsty pulled out a wad of notes and pushed them across the counter. “If you want to put that through the register, that’s up to you. I’ll be done in an hour.” She turned to Montrose. “That okay with you?”

  Montrose shrugged.

  “Well, I’m not giving you a choice.” She tapped the money on the desk and then covered it with her hand. “Are we good?”

  The clerk looked around, then reached for the money.

  Kirsty kept her hand flat on the desk. “And if the Old Bill come looking, you’ve never seen us. Understood?”

  The clerk nodded slowly.

  Kirsty lifted her hand and the clerk slid the notes across the desk and slipped them into his pocket without counting them.

  “And give me the wi-fi password. He likes a soundtrack.”

  The clerk pushed over a slip of paper. “Not too loud,” he said in a thick Eastern European accent.

  “Hey, you won’t hear a thing.” She held up a hand and intimated a gag around his mouth. “That’s how I like it.”

  The clerk dropped the key on the counter. “Downstairs. Room three.”

  Kirsty grabbed the key and made for the stairs. Before them, a wide marble staircase rose up to a landing, the stone balustrades stained with age and lined with deep gouges, the steps covered in a threadbare carpet. Kirsty pushed through a door at the side of the staircase and headed down a flight of plain wooden steps.

  Montrose waited until they turned into a narrow corridor littered with service carts. He could smell damp laundry and fried food from the kitchen. “Kirsty, what the hell? Is this going to work?”

  “It’s working right across London as we speak. He’ll keep his mouth shut.” She unlocked the door and stepped into a cramped basement bedroom. He felt his sneakers sticking to the carpet and heard the crash of pots and pans from the kitchen next door.

  Kirsty dropped onto the bed and jabbed at the iPad screen. She connected to the wi-fi, then hit the encryption app. “Zac?”

  “Hey, I’m on,” replied Zac. “I’ve got the photos of the apartment. I can’t make out the numbers, but it all fits. Check out the newspaper that’s on his desk.”

  Kirsty brought up the photos on her phone. “It’s open at the crossword page.”

  “He was waiting for the next message,” said Zac.

  Pilgrim’s voice came over the line, metallic-sounding and stilted until the encryption resolved the signal. “Kirsty, your description of the apartment,” he said. “The numbers on the wall. It all makes sense. This is more than an obsession with crosswords and you may be right that the motive was love. Perhaps I am too jaded. These things obviously meant a great deal to him. The stack of newspapers indicates the length of his obsession. He may have moved location many times, but he took them with him.”

  Montrose pictured the flat in his mind. One newspaper a day. Three hundred and sixty five in a stack. That isn’t so high. But he had stacks everywhere. “I’m looking at the photo now. There might be twenty, thirty years of newspapers.”

  “He’d been collecting them since the Cold War,” said Pilgrim. “It all fits. And he was ready to destroy it all. Both Zac and I are convinced that The Times’ crosswords are one-time pads. And they correlate to the numbers on the wall. The code changed every day because every day there was a new crossword. Every day a new one-time pad.”

  “And since Warrender was British,” said Zac, “that only means one thing. RAF Akrotiri.”

  “Where the hell is that?” said Montrose.

  “Cyprus,” replied Pilgrim. “The last of the Cold War transmitting stations. That’s the only transmitter the British have left. They use a special frequency for this kind of work, but anyone can listen to it. And they are broadcasting right now on 14487 KHz. We caught the end of the last message, but it’s being repeated every ten minutes. That’s not a coincidence. I think someone is trying to contact Roger Warrender. But who? If our theory is correct, the person trying to contact him was the person who killed him. Why would she send a message?”

  “14487 KHz. I’ll find it,” said Kirsty and searched for a shortwave app on her iPad.

  “It’s time for the next broadcast,” said Zac. “I’m offline for five, I have to write this down.”

  Kirsty started the app and dialed in the frequency. A synthesized tune began to play single, wavering notes. The iPad shook in her hand.

  Montrose grabbed her arm. “What is it?”

  “That tune. The Lincolnshire Poacher. My mother used to sing it.”

  He watched her face lose twenty years and her eyes glaze over.

  She shook her head and a thin reedy voice came over the air in an immaculate cut-glass English accent.

  … nine, three, nine, one, seven....

  “How is this going to work?” said Montrose. “Don’t you need the answers to the crossword?”

  “No doubt,” said Pilgrim. “The Times’ crossword has a reputation of being amongst the most difficult. Perhaps Mr. Warrender was something of a crossword fan and I’m sure after all those years he was something of an expert. But nowadays all the answers are online. The wonders of the internet.”

  “Okay, so it’s a message for Warrender,” said Montrose, “But whoever it’s from, they don’t know the third password. Only Warrender knew the password.”

  The voice of Zac cut in. “It’s not for Warrender. It’s for Mr. Pilgrim.”

  Montrose looked up at Kirsty. What the hell?

  There was silence for a moment and then Pilgrim spoke slowly. “Read it, Zac.”

  “Pilgrim, if you receive this, then I am dead. Our enemies, whoever they may be, will find a way to break into the Red Star in a few hours. If you find what you are looking for, you must destroy it or no one will be safe. You must find it before anyone el
se. Warrender only told me that the secret he held was written in stone. Nothing else. And you must know, it was I who betrayed your brother all those years ago. But when I found out the nature of the secret, I resolved that no one should know it. I hope I can rely on you, Mr. Pilgrim. I realized too late that your brother’s sacrifice kept us safe from the horrors of nuclear war. That threat has never gone away. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  Montrose stared up at the sagging ceiling. She kept Warrender safe all those years. And then she killed him. It must have broken her heart.

  Pilgrim spoke. “I can only conclude that Miss Purley left this message as insurance.”

  “Who?” said Kirsty.

  “Our informant.”

  “The woman in the photo?”

  “I believe so,” replied Pilgrim.

  Montrose spoke. “She was the one who told the Soviets where to find your brother once Warrender had reported back to her.”

  “So it would seem,” said Pilgrim. “In which case I won’t mourn her death, apart from the fact that we have lost our most valuable asset in MI5. I spoke to her today. She was the contact that led us to Captain Wolff.”

  “There’s more to the message,” said Zac. “No words, just a bunch of web links and codes. Mr. Pilgrim, I’m copying it through to you.”

  “Okay,” said Kirsty. “I’ve got an idea.” She flicked her eyes towards Montrose. “Bear with me on this. Warrender told us when we spoke to him that he was held in the Soviet Embassy, right? And before that, the Soviet Embassy was an MI9 torture center called the London Cage. The Soviet Embassy is now the Russian Embassy. And this Colonel Furstenberg guy was a high-ranking Nazi…”

  “Yeah,” said Zac, “and rumored to have died in The London Cage.”

  “What if,” said Kirsty, “Warrender was held in the same cell that Furstenberg had been held in? After all, he said that Furstenberg had died years before. It would make sense.”

  Montrose stared blankly out of the window at the feet of the passersby, trying to picture the cell. “She said that Warrender told her it was carved in stone. Like a prisoner carves his name on a cell wall.”

  “Yeah, I see where you’re going with this,” said Zac. “Condemned Nazi dude carves his name into the wall of his cell. The same cell that Warrender was held in. And Furstenberg died in 1946. Like your guy Warrender said, that was way before his time. And that’s the only connection between the two. The cell.”

  “My God,” said Kirsty. “That’s where it is. The password is in that cell. When Warrender thought he was going to be tortured to death, he carved it into the wall. Beside where Colonel Furstenberg carved his name. That’s what he meant. Written in stone.”

  “I admire your imagination,” said Pilgrim. “I would normally criticize such a notion, but I can see no other explanation.”

  Montrose blew out a breath. “How the hell are we going to get to it? Sure as shit the Russian Embassy don’t do guided tours of British torture cells.”

  “That’s where Miss Purley has left us one last gift,” said Pilgrim. “The second half of the message that Zac has just sent me contains links to certain areas of MI5 archives.”

  “I’m in there, man,” said Zac. “And I got to say, this is full of real spooky shit. What am I looking for?”

  “Project Orbital,” said Pilgrim. “One of the most closely guarded secrets of the past fifty years.”

  “Searching for it now.”

  “When the British gave that house to the Soviets as an embassy,” said Pilgrim, “the Soviets expected it to be extensively bugged. But they searched the whole building and found nothing. I assume they put it down to the British sense of fair play. But the British had other ideas.”

  “I’m there,” said Zac. “Project Orbital. I got the plans.”

  “The plans of the building?” said Pilgrim.

  “Yeah, that and more.”

  “That’s what we need,” said Pilgrim. “Now I understand why the British demolished part of the London Cage. It was to hide the fact that they were building a listening network on a grand scale. It must have been a major feat of construction and hidden by the demolition and development work. When they were finished, the Soviet Embassy was closely ringed by huge utility pipes. Hence the name Project Orbital.”

  “Utility pipes?” said Montrose. “That’s going to get us in?”

  “Access was a secondary option. When the old building was destroyed, a new one was built on the foundations right beside the Embassy. During construction they built an entire new utility network: power, gas and water. And upgraded the sewer system around the whole site, including the Russian Embassy. But before they connected the sewer pipes to the public system, MI5 went in behind the construction workers and installed a smaller core through the pipes. The objective was to listen. Every sewer pipe was fitted with an inner core containing the most advanced and sensitive monitoring equipment. Over the years, the technology has been upgraded to a degree where they can triangulate voices to a particular room and computers can recognize and filter out any extraneous noise. Like footsteps or running water.”

  “I’ve got the blueprints. This is some crazy shit,” said Zac.

  “Wouldn’t they work it out?” asked Kirsty.

  “The whole house was searched for bugs,” replied Pilgrim. “Who would break into a functioning sewer pipe?”

  “I’ve got the entire network,” said Zac. “And I’ll send you the plan by screen capture. But it’s going to cut comms if you go underground. I’ll talk you down as far as I can.”

  “I’ll go too,” said Kirsty.

  “No,” said Pilgrim. “We will need a distraction.”

  “A distraction?” said Zac. “You’re gonna need a thirty piece jazz band and strippers for this one.”

  “I take your point, Zac. And I have an idea,” said Pilgrim.

  “Okay,” said Montrose. “Where do I go? How do I get in?”

  “Kensington Palace,” replied Zac. “And go through Hyde Park. There’s hardly any cameras if you stick to the grass. Oh and Connor? Just one thing.”

  “Yeah?” Montrose got up from the bed.

  “I hope you’re not claustrophobic.”

  *

  Arkangel stood behind the bank of desks where technicians sat hunched over their laptops. A phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled out the old Nokia and stared at the screen where a list of digits appeared. He cleared his throat and handed it to a technician. “Here are the numbers. Enter them into the system.”

  The technician examined the phone. “I haven’t seen one of these in ten years.”

  “Old but basic technology. Unlike a smartphone, it cannot be hacked unless you know the number. And now there are millions of numbers. Hundreds of millions of numbers.”

  The technician entered the digits into his keyboard. “These are coordinates,” he said. Several names flashed up on the screen. The technician sat back and looked up towards Arkangel. “You know what these are?”

  “Just do it.”

  The technician said nothing and hit the keys. “The attack plan is processing. But we’ll need the activation password.”

  Arkangel turned to another technician studying a scroll of letters and numbers flashing across his screen. “How long?”

  “Two hours. I have accessed more databanks in Moscow and all the processing power they can give me. We’ll crack it.”

  Arkangel nodded, his head jerking up and down. “And the attack plan? Once we have the password?”

  “I estimate thirty minutes for some and forty minutes for others. It’s never been tested before.”

  Another technician got to his feet. “Our friend is online. We are getting closer. Soon we will be able to see exactly what he is doing. We will have his location in the next ten minutes. He is being clever, but not clever enough. We’ve tracked hi
m to Cambridge.”

  Arkangel stuffed the Nokia in his pocket. “Get the team airborne. And I want an ETA for Cambridge. Our little friend is about to get a surprise.”

  Chapter 18

  “Kirsty?” He pointed to the narrow window near the roof. “Cops.” Two pairs of boots stood outside.

  “Okay, I have an idea.” She skipped around the bed and opened the door to the corridor. “Kitchens were to the right when we came in. Good for weapons, but chefs are particular about their knives so we’ll give that a miss. The laundry was to the left. Stay here and keep this door open. I’ll be back in a moment.” She turned into the corridor.

  Montrose poked his head around the corner and saw her wheeling a laundry cart towards him.

  “Out of the way!” She pushed the cart into the room and kicked the door closed behind her. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” She began to rummage through the white plastic bags, holding them up. “Dirty underwear. Not my thing.” She threw the bags onto the bed and ripped one open. Several men’s business shirts tumbled out. “Check them for size.” She grabbed another bag.

  Montrose held up a shirt, noticing the grimy collar and cuffs. “Kirsty...”

  “Forget them. Look what I’ve got.” She pulled out a dark blue Pakistani kurta, held it by the shoulders and placed it against his chest. The long shirt reached down past his knees. “Put it on.”

  Montrose held it up. It was a damn sight cleaner than the shirts.

  “Bingo!” she said, handing him a white lace kurta.

  “What is it?”

  “A Muslim skull cap. That’s you sorted. At least the kurta will save you wearing that shit Elvis wig. You’re not ready for Vegas.” She returned to the laundry cart and pulled out a heavy bag.

  Montrose could see the leopard skin pattern through the thin plastic.

  She ripped it open and a faux fur coat fell out. The reek of cheap perfume filled the air. “Christ,” she said, “if I’m going to pretend I’m a whore, I might as well dress like one.”

  Montrose pulled off the jacket and slipped the kurta over his head.