The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

by Desmond Bagley

  He took out a case and offered me a cigarette. ‘The politicians are deathly afraid of a centralized intelligence outfit; they don’t want anything monolithic like the CIA or the KGB because they’ve seen what happens when such a group becomes too big and too powerful. And so, in the classic way of divide and rule, intelligence work in Britain is broken down among relatively small groups.’

  He accepted a light. ‘That has its drawbacks, too. It leads to amateurism, rivalry between departments, overlapping functions, the building of empires and private armies, lack of co-operation, a breakdown of the lines of communication—a whole litany of petty vices. And it makes my job damned difficult.’

  His tone was a mixture of bitterness and resignation. I said, ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘In the early 1950s the risks of industrial espionage became noticeable. We weren’t really bothered about one firm stealing secrets from another, and we’re still not, unless it affects state security. The whole problem was that our friends to the east have no private firms, so any industrial espionage from that direction was ipso facto state inspired, and that we couldn’t have. In our inimitable British fashion a new department was set up to cope. This department.’

  ‘I know what we’re doing, but I didn’t know how we got started.’

  Ogilvie drew on his cigarette. ‘There’s an important point. In an attempt to cut down on duplication of effort, several other departments had to hand over large chunks of their interests to us. In fact, a couple of them lost entirely their raison d’être and were closed down completely. They were only small fry, though. But it all led to jealousy and bad blood which exists in a dilute form to this day. And that’s how we inherited the problem of Ashton.’

  I said, ‘Who did we pinch Ashton from?’

  ‘Lord Cregar’s department.’ Ogilvie leaned forward. ‘This afternoon the Minister came down on our side. Ashton is still our baby and we have to find him. You are still inside man, and that means you find him. Any help you need just ask for.’

  ‘That suits me,’ I said. ‘I want clearance for Code Purple.’

  Ogilvie shook his head. ‘Not that.’

  I blew up. ‘For Christ’s sake! How can I look for a man when I don’t know anything about him? Back in Marlow I had an interesting lecture on trust which has soured me to the belly, and this job has already interfered too much with my private life. Now you either trust me or you don’t—and the crunch comes here. I get clearance for Code Purple or my resignation will be on your desk at nine tomorrow morning.’

  He said sadly, ‘I have warned you about being impetuous. To begin with, I couldn’t get you clearance in that time, and even if you did you wouldn’t find what you’re looking for because Ashton is in Code Black.’ His voice was grim. ‘And you couldn’t be cleared for Code Black inside three months—if ever.’

  Code Black sounded as though it was the end of the rainbow and Ashton was the pot of gold. There was a silence which I broke by saying diffidently, ‘That’s it, then. I’d better go along to my office and type my resignation.’

  ‘Don’t be a young fool!’ snapped Ogilvie. He drummed on the desk, then said, ‘I’ve come to a decision. If it gets out I could be fired. Wait here.’

  He got up and went to an unobtrusive door behind his desk and disappeared. I waited a long time and wondered what I’d done. I knew I’d laid my career on the line. Well, I was prepared for that and with my financial backing I could stand it. Maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I had only my pay to depend on. I don’t know. And I’d pushed Ogilvie into doing something he might be sorry for, and that was bad because I liked him.

  Presently he opened the door, and said, ‘Come in here.’ I followed him into a small room where there was one of the ubiquitous computer terminals. ‘I’m cleared for Code Black,’ he said. ‘The information on Ashton is coming on line. If you sit there you’ll know what you need to know. The computer won’t know who is pushing the buttons.’ He checked the time. ‘I’ll be back in two hours.’

  I was a bit subdued. ‘All right, sir.’

  ‘I want your word,’ be said. ‘I don’t want you roving at random in Code Black. I want to know that you’ll stick to Ashton and only to Ashton. There are other matters in Code Black that are better for you not to know for your own peace of mind.’

  I said, ‘You can make sure of that just by sitting in here with me.’

  He smiled. ‘You made a point just now about trust. Either I trust you or I don’t, and there’s an end to it.’

  ‘You have my word.’

  He nodded abruptly and left, closing the door behind him.

  I glanced at Nellie who was staring at me with an interrogative bright green question mark and then glanced around the small room which was really more of a cubicle. On one side of the terminal was a small plotter, very much like the one in Ashton’s cellar; on the other side was a line printer.

  I sat at the console and reflected that if Ashton was so important and had been around and of interest since before the department had started then there was probably reams of stuff about him in Nellie’s guts. This idea was reinforced by the two hours Ogilvie had allowed for reviewing the information, so I switched on the printer, and typed:

  OUTPUT MODE—PRINTER

  Nellie had an attack of verbal diarrhoea. She came back at me with:

  PRINTER OUTPUT NEGATIVED UNDER CODE BLACK

  NOTE WELL: NO WRITTEN RECORD TO BE MADE UNDER CODE BLACK

  NOTE WELL: NO TAPE-RECORDED TRANSCRIPTIONS TO BE MADE UNDER CODE BLACK

  NOTE WELL: NO PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE TAKEN OF THE CRT UNDER CODE BLACK

  I sighed and switched off the printer.

  I’ve described before how one juggles with Nellie so there’s no point in going into that again. What I haven’t said is that Nellie is accommodating; if she’s going too fast you can slow her down, and if she’s producing something of no interest you can speed her up. You can also skip about in the record, going back to items forgotten or neglected. She’s quite a toy.

  I did quite a bit of skipping when swanning around in Ashton’s life. He’d lived quite a bit.

  THIRTEEN

  Aleksandr Dmitrovitch Chelyuskin was born to poorish, but respectable, parents in the small town of Tesevo-Netyl’skiy, just to the north of Novgorod in Russia. The year was 1919. Both parents were schoolteachers; his mother taught in an infants’ school and his father taught mathematics and allied subjects to older boys.

  These were the years of revolution, and whether the Whites or the Reds were to come on top had not yet been decided in 1919. Armies of foreigners—British, French, American—were on Russian soil, and it was a time of turmoil and conflagration. Little Aleksandr was very nearly snuffed out just after birth as the waves of war swept over the country. In fact, his elder brother and his two sisters did die during this period as the family was buffeted in the storm; the record did not disclose just how they died.

  Eventually, in 1923, the family Chelyuskin came to haven in the town of Aprelevka, just outside Moscow. The family had been reduced to three and, since Aleksandr had been a late child and his mother was now apparently barren, there were to be no more children and he was brought up as an only child. His father found a job teaching mathematics and they settled down to a life of relative security.

  Although Dmitri Ivanovitch Chelyuskin was a teacher of mathematics he was not a good mathematician himself in the sense that he produced original work. His role in life was to teach small boys the elements of arithmetic, algebra and geometry, which he did largely by rote, a sarcastic tongue and a heavy hand. But he was good enough at his job to notice that he did not have to tell young Aleksandr anything twice, and when the time came that he found he did not have to tell the boy once and that his son was beginning to ask unanswerable questions it was then that he thought he might have an infant prodigy on his hands.

  Aleksandr was about ten years old at the time.

  He played chess very well and joined the chess club in Aprel
evka where he proceeded to lick the pants off his elders and betters. The elder Chelyuskin forgot about the mathematics and thought of the possibility of having a Grand Master in the family, a great honour in Russia.

  One Suslov, a member of the chess club, disagreed. He persuaded Chelyuskin père to write to a friend of his in Moscow, a member of the Board of Education. Letters and months passed, and eventually, after a series of supposedly gruelling examinations which Aleksandr went through without so much as a qualm, he was admitted to a Lycée in Moscow at the hitherto unheard-of age of twelve years and ten months. Whether the fact that Suslov had been the undisputed chess champion of Aprelevka, until the appearance of Aleksandr had anything to do with that, is not known. At least, Suslov said nothing for the record but went on to win the club championship the following year.

  In Britain the left wing decries elitism; in Russia the communists foster it. When a bright youngster is found he is whisked away to a special school where his mind is stretched. He can no longer count on having an easy time walking nonchalantly through the school subjects without effort, coming out on top while his duller brethren work like hell plodding along behind. Aleksandr was subjected to a forced draught of education.

  He liked it. He had the cast of mind which loves grappling with the abstruse and difficult, and he found much to his liking in pure mathematics. Now, mathematics at its purest is a game for adults and need have no relationship at all to the real physical world, and the fact that it sometimes does is a bit of luck. The pure mathematician is concerned with the concept of number at its most abstract, and Aleksandr played happily among the abstractions for quite a while. At the age of sixteen he wrote a paper, ‘Some Observations on the Relationship between Mathieu Functions and Weierstrass Elliptic Functions’. It consisted of three paragraphs of written text and ten pages of mathematical formulae, and was rather well received. He followed it up with another paper the following year, and that brought him under the eye of Peter Kapitza and led to the second great change in his life.

  It was 1936 and Kapitza was the white hope of Russian physics. He was born in Kronstadt and studied in Kronstadt and Petrograd, as it was then. But in 1925 he made a change which was rather odd for a Russian at the time. He went to Cambridge, then the leading university dealing with physics. He became a fellow of Trinity College, and assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory under Rutherford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929, and managed to pick up about every scientific honour that was not absolutely screwed down except the Nobel Prize which he missed. In 1936 he went back to Russia, supposedly on a sabbatical, and never left again. Stalin is reputed to have lowered the portcullis on him.

  This, then, is the man who extended his influence over Aleksandr Chelyuskin. Perhaps he looked at the youth and was reminded of himself at the age of seventeen. At any rate, he diverted Aleksandr from his playground of pure mathematics and showed him that there were real problems to be solved in the world. Kapitza introduced him to theoretical physics.

  Physics is an experimental science, and most physicists are good mechanics and have broken fingernails caused by putting bits and pieces of equipment together. But there are a few—a very few—who do nothing but think. They tend to sit around, gazing into space, and their favourite weapons are blackboard and chalk. After a few hours, days or years of thought they diffidently suggest that an experiment should be made.

  The realm of the theoretical physicist is the totality of the universe, and there are very few good ones around at any one time. Aleksandr Chelyuskin was one of them.

  He studied magnetism and low temperature physics under Peter Kapitza and, applying quantum theory to the earlier work of Kamerlingh Onnes, did important work relating to phase II of liquid helium, and the new field of superconductivity got under way. But this was just one of the many things he thought about. His work was astonishingly wide-ranging and eclectic, and he published profusely. He did not publish everything he thought because he liked to have things wrapped up tidily, but some of his work, reproduced in the record from his notebooks written at this time, clearly anticipated the cosmological theories of Fred Hoyie in the ’50s and ’60s. Other work from his notebooks included thoughts on the nature of catalyctic action and a brief sketch extending these thoughts into the organic field of enzymes.

  In 1941 the war came to Russia, but the brain the state had so carefully nurtured was considered too valuable to risk having a bullet put through it, and Chelyuskin never saw a shot fired in anger. For most of the war he sat behind the Urals and thought his thoughts. One of the many things he thought about was the fine structure of metals. The resultant improvement in Russian tank armour was quite noticeable.

  In March 1945 he was visited by a high official and told to give careful consideration to the atomic structure of certain rare metals. Stalin had just come back from the Yalta Conference where he had been informed of the existence of the atomic bomb.

  In the period immediately following the war Chelyuskin became increasingly dissatisfied, mainly because, although the war was over, he was still constrained to involve himself in weapons research. He did not like what he was doing and deliberately slowed his pace. But a mind cannot stop thinking and he turned to other things than physics—to sociology, for example. In short, he stopped thinking about things and began to think about people.

  He looked at the world immediately about him and did not like what he saw. This was the time when Stalin was conducting an extended post-mortem on the mistakes made during the war. Returning Russians who had been taken prisoner were hardly given time to sneeze before being whisked into Siberian camps, and hundreds of former officers mysteriously dropped out of sight. He reflected that continuous purging is as bad for a society as it is for a body, and he knew that the infamous army purge of 1936 had so weakened the army that it had contributed largely to the startling defeats at the beginning of the war. And yet the process was continuing.

  He was determined, on moral grounds, not to continue with atomic research, and beyond that he was sure he did not want to put such weapons into the hands of a man like Stalin. But he was equally determined not to end up in a forced labour camp as some of his colleagues had done, so he was presented with quite a problem which he solved with characteristic neatness and economy.

  He killed himself.

  It took him three months to plan his death and he was ruthless in the way he went about it. He needed the body of a man about his own age and with the same physical characteristics. More complicatedly, he needed the body before it had died so that certain surgical and dental work could be done and given time to age. This could not be done on a corpse.

  He found what he wanted on a visit to Aprelevka. A boyhood friend of his own age was afflicted with leukaemia and there was much doubt about his survival. Chelyuskin visited the hospital and chatted to his friend, at first in generalities and then, more directly and dangerously, about politics. He was fortunate in that he found his friend to have much the same convictions as himself, and so he was encouraged to ask the crucial question. Would his friend, in the terminal stages of a killing illness, donate his body for Chelyuskin’s survival?

  The record does not disclose the name of Chelyuskin’s friend but, in my opinion, he was a very brave man. Chelyuskin pulled strings and had him transferred to another hospital where he had the co-operation of a doctor. File entries were fudged, papers were lost and bureaucracy was baffled; it was all very efficiently inefficient and ended up with the fact that Chelyuskin’s friend was effectively dead as far as anyone knew.

  Then the poor man had his leg broken under surgical and aseptic conditions and suffered a considerable amount of dental work. The fracture in the leg corresponded exactly with a similar fracture in Chelyuskin’s leg and the dental structure duplicated Chelyuskin’s mouth exactly. The bone knitted together, and all he had to do was to wait for his friend to die.

  Meanwhile, going through underground channels, he had contacted Bri
tish intelligence and requested political asylum. We were only too glad to oblige, even on his terms. To wave a defecting Russian scientist like a flag is not necessarily a good ploy, and we were quite happy to respect his terms of secrecy as long as we got him. The necessary arrangements were made.

  It took a long time for Chelyuskin’s friend to die. In fact, for a period there was a marked improvement in his condition which must have infuriated my masters. I doubt if it worried Chelyuskin very much. He went about his work as usual, attending the committees which were an increasing and aggravating part of his life, and soldiered on. But his friends did comment that he appeared to be doing his best to drown himself in the vodka bottle.

  Seven months later the Russian scientific community was saddened to learn that Academician A. D. Chelyuskin had been burnt to death when his dacha, to which he had retired for a short period of relaxation, had caught fire. There was a post-mortem examination and an enquiry. The rumour got around that Chelyuskin had been smoking in bed when in his cups and that vodka added to the flames had not helped him much. That was a story everybody could believe.

  A month later Chelyuskin slipped over the Iranian border. Three days later he was in Teheran and the following day he was put down at RAF Northolt by courtesy of Transport Command. He was given an enthusiastic welcome by a select group who turned out to welcome this genius who was then at the ripe age of twenty-eight. There would be a lot of mileage left in him.

  The powers-that-be were somewhat baffled by Chelyuskin’s comparative youth. They tended to forget that creative abstract thought, especially in mathematics, is a young man’s game, and that Einstein had published his Special Theory of Relativity when only nineteen. Even the politicians among them forgot that Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four.