Working girls had a long history of employment with the KGB as low-level intelligence, and particularly as entrapment, agents. They were known in the trade as ‘swallows’ – an exceptionally apt nickname bearing in mind what they were required to do – while their male equivalents, trained to seduce either men or women, were called ‘ravens.’ Both swallows and ravens were given extensive training in the various arts and techniques of seduction and the operation of so-called ‘honeypots’ or ‘honeytraps,’ where they would entice suitable targets to locations that had been wired for audio and video, and where the subsequent events would be recorded for blackmail purposes.
The dacha was an older construction dating from the early 1970s that had been renovated and updated several times since it had been built. The building didn’t have the appeal of some of its more upmarket neighbours in the Rublevka area near the village of Zhukovka, some 15 miles west of the centre of Moscow, and tended to be employed for more utilitarian functions like awards ceremonies for small numbers of SVR officers, rest and recuperation for agents who had returned from the field, and the questioning of less important defectors. But what it did have that most of its neighbours didn’t was a 15-foot-high steel, concrete and brick wall topped with razor wire that entirely surrounded the building and the acre or so of ground that was a part of the property, and which gave it an extremely impressive level of privacy. The wall ensured that when the double solid steel gates had been closed behind their vehicles, and the senior officials who had been summoned to the meeting climbed out of their armoured Zil and Mercedes limousines with their heavily tinted windows, nobody outside the property could possibly see and identify them. And that was important for several reasons.
It wasn’t just SVR officers who had been ‘invited’ to attend that day. The unwritten guest list included two senior officers from Russian military intelligence, two from the GRU, three naval officers of flag rank, one of whom was a submariner, two senior Air Force officers and another two of matching rank from the Russian Army, one man from the very highest echelons of the FSB, Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii, Russia’s counter-intelligence unit, two senior government officials – a minister and his deputy – and four very senior scientists.
Somewhat analogous to the relationship between the British Secret Intelligence Service – SIS, responsible for espionage outside the United Kingdom – and the Security Service or MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence unit, the SVR and the FSB have frequently worked at cross purposes. Sometimes very cross purposes. The other entity in the mix was the GRU, which had the same remit as the SVR but concentrated on military, rather than civilian, espionage, although there was invariably a high degree of crossover between the two organizations.
To say that the composition of the assembled group was unusual for an ongoing operation was an understatement. Never before had so many specialists and senior officers and officials from such a large number of different organizations and disciplines been involved in a single covert project. But because of the complex and disparate nature of the operation, their individual expertise and experience had been deemed essential for its success.
What they were involved in had been set in train by somebody in the very highest levels of the Russian government, possibly even by the autocratic leader of the country himself, though none of them knew this for certain: they were all just following orders. It was, some of the participants privately thought, exactly the kind of idea that he would have come up with.
The project bore no security classification, nor even a formal name, because it was completely off the books. The SVR was nominally in charge of it, or at least the military aspects, but no filename or even a number had been allocated to it, because once a project was recorded and paperwork generated, there was always the possibility that word about it might spread and potentially leak.
So the very few documents that had so far been produced, because some basic paperwork was clearly essential just to keep track of things like dates and actions, had mostly been handwritten and then scanned onto the hard drive of a laptop computer that was devoid of all means of connecting to any network: it had no built-in network adapter, nor an Ethernet socket nor USB ports, and only a serial port for the scanner. After the documents had been transferred, the handwritten records had been destroyed by shredding and the resulting debris incinerated. Other notes of action had been prepared directly on the computer and saved to the hard disk.
When not being used at one of the infrequent meetings, the computer – which was additionally protected by a 12-digit password known to only two of the people involved in the project – was locked inside a safe that was itself bolted to the wall on the inside of a small closet manufactured entirely from reinforced concrete and with a steel door, located in the centre of the building.
Until about a week earlier the dacha had been permanently occupied by a mixed team of eight SVR and GRU guards, four from each organization, and working in pairs so that there were always two people on watch at any given time. The SVR and the GRU have never entirely seen eye to eye, and so the pairs of guards came either from the GRU or from the SVR, but never one person from each organization.
The new routine was very different. Now the guards were only drawn from the ranks of the SVR, and there were 15 troopers – almost double the previous number – working eight-hour shifts in groups of three, two troopers under the command of a non-commissioned officer, an NCO. The doors to both the dacha and the steel gates in the outer wall were all permanently locked unless a vehicle or person was actually entering or leaving the property. As far as physical security was concerned, it was difficult for any of the participants to envisage any further measures that they could now take.
The meetings were conducted with operational security very much in mind. With the single exception of the SVR general – general’naya – Dmitri Yasov, who was the nominal working head of the project, none of the members of the group were permitted paper or pens during the meetings, and the general only noted down information and decisions that were essential to the progress of the operation. All participants, including the general, were electronically scanned before entering the meeting room – the former library – in the dacha to ensure they were not carrying any form of recording equipment.
But although the project had no official nomenclature, for simple convenience the members had unofficially begun referring to it as the котел проект or the Kotel Proyekt, the Kotel Project, the Russian word meaning a ‘boiler’ or ‘cauldron’.
That day, the project members assembled in the anteroom drinking coffee or tea as their tastes dictated while they waited for the arrival of the last couple of people, the mood clearly subdued, and for good reason. Once the latecomers had arrived and collected their own drinks, they all filed one at a time into the meeting room, passing through the metal detectors and scanners as they did so. When they were all seated, the general – tall and completely bald, and with blue eyes and somewhat delicate features that contrasted with his heavy build – glanced around the long oblong table, then stood up, walked over to the open door through which they had entered, and closed and locked it.
The former library where they met was in the middle of the dacha and surrounded by other rooms, so there was no possibility of eavesdropping by anyone outside of the property armed with a laser microphone or other sophisticated listening equipment. Even so, once the door was locked the general switched on a white noise generator that produced sound at a sufficiently high volume to defeat any hidden microphones. Then he returned to his seat, sat down and opened the lid of the laptop computer in front of him. He pressed the start button and waited for the operating system to load.
Some of the participants had been talking quietly to their neighbours around the table, but as the general resumed his seat with one accord they fell silent and waited for him to speak. He waited until the laptop was running and the single large file entitled действия – Deystviya, meaning
‘actions’ – had opened on the screen in front of him. Then he cleared his throat and again looked around the table.
‘The situation,’ he began in Russian, his voice deep and gravelly, ‘is now critical.’
Chapter 9
Thursday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
Richter held the envelope up to the light one more time, making a final check that there was nothing inside it that could do him any damage. Then he walked across the room to where he’d left his foul weather clothing, picked up the padded gloves he had bought as part of the outfit and pulled them on. If he was wrong about what he was going to do, then they just might offer him a slim final layer of protection.
Clumsily, because the gloves were designed to keep his hands warm, not to help him perform a fairly delicate operation, he picked up the envelope in his left hand and used his pocket comb with his right to tear open the flap. It was almost a disappointment when all that fell out was an oblong piece of lined paper, folded once. Deliberately holding his breath, he examined the inside of the envelope carefully, looking for any sign of dust or powder, but as far as he could tell the interior was completely clean. He crumpled the envelope in his gloved hands and dropped it into the waste bin in the bedroom. Then he picked up the sheet of paper from the floor, looked at it closely, and unfolded it.
There was a message – of a sort – written in block capitals on one side of it. Richter read it three times without any part of it making any kind of sense to him. It looked like the kind of encrypted message produced by using a one-time pad or maybe even a single or double transposition cipher. The problem was that to decode a one-time pad message you needed access to the same sheet on a one-time pad identical to the one that had been used by the person who had done the encryption, and to decipher any kind of transposition cipher you needed the relevant codewords. Or possibly a really fast supercomputer, though not even that was guaranteed to work if you needed the result quickly. None of which, of course, he had.
It looked to him as if it was a case of mistaken identity, as if whoever had sent him the message had thought he was somebody else. But that didn’t really make sense. ‘Richter’ was not that common a name, and for there to be two men called Paul Richter on Svalbard and in Longyearbyen and in the same hotel at the same time stretched his credibility to breaking point. And that meant the probability was the message had been intended for him, which in turn meant that it had to be decipherable, unlikely though that appeared.
Richter stared again at the block capitals on the sheet of paper, a seemingly incomprehensible mix of numbers and letters:
-2 -8 -6 +4 -7
KLQXX OZHKX WBHMX PXBXX EMAKX
78 22 11 50 15 64 67 11
+3
OQJXX
1640-52/1650-(5x3)
None of it made any immediate sense, but whoever had sent it obviously thought he should be bright enough to work out what it meant, which he found intimidating, perhaps even slightly alarming, codes and ciphers not really being his thing. The one thing that did strike him as significant was the large number of times the letter ‘X’ appeared in the code. One technique used in encrypting messages was to insert the letter ‘X’ in place of a missing letter at the end of a word to fill in the five spaces necessary for each group in the encoding, five-letter groups being one of the commonest code formats. If he was right about that, it suggested that the encrypted words were very short – the first word being only three letters long.
But there was another technique sometimes used for encryption whereby all the vowels were stripped out of the plaintext message before it was enciphered, because what gives words their shape and sound are the consonants. With only five vowels, it is very easy to reconstruct almost any original word once all the consonants have been determined. Maybe that was what the compiler of this message had done.
The only bit of the cipher text that made any immediate sense to Richter was the last group of numbers – 1640-5^2^/1650-(5x3) – because that was simple basic mathematics, and even he could do that kind of thing. Five squared obviously came to 25, and if that number was subtracted from 1640 the solution was 1615, which most logically suggested a reference to a time: a quarter past four in the afternoon. The second group of numbers decoded in the same way: 1650 minus 15 – five multiplied by three – gave the result 1635. And, logic again suggested, if one piece of the message was a time, or rather a short period of time – 20 minutes in this case – possibly for a meeting or a rendezvous, then presumably the other part must refer either to directions or to a specific location where he was intended to meet the sender.
Richter glanced at his watch. He taken longer than he realized getting almost nowhere, and it was already nearly 3.30 in the afternoon. Assuming he was right and the numbers did relate to an appointment somebody wanted him to make, he had very little time left to solve the riddle. In fact, maybe not enough time, if the rendezvous position was a long way away, because Longyearbyen had almost nothing in the way of public transport. Everyone there used snowmobiles – snow scooters – in the winter, and cars in the summer. And he had no immediate access to either, though he guessed there might be a taxi or two somewhere about the place.
He took a piece of paper and a pencil and sat down at the small desk on one side of his room, but for a few moments he just stared at the message. It had to be simple, otherwise sending it made no sense. He wondered if it was some kind of transposition cipher based on hotel documentation, something like a brochure or instructions about what to do in the event of a fire, printed material that would be found in every room, but again that didn’t make sense because he would still need to know which word or words he would have to employ to decode it. It had to be something simpler than that, something he just wasn’t recognizing.
Then he noticed one thing that he probably should have seen before. There were five groups of five encrypted letters, and above them there were also five numbers, each preceded by an arithmetical sign. And at the bottom of the message, above what he was assuming was nothing more than a reference to time, was another single group of five letters above which was the single number three preceded by a plus sign. That at least implied that the numbers and the groups of letters were related. Could he possibly be looking at nothing more complicated than an alphabetical substitution code? A kind of variant of the classic Caesar cipher?
That was the only idea he’d had, so it made sense to give it a try. He wrote out the alphabet in a horizontal line across the top of the sheet of paper in front of him, then jotted down the five groups underneath it. The first five letters were KLQXX, and if his guess was right he could ignore the last two completely, because they were probably nothing more than a couple of blank spaces. Again, if his guess was right.
Richter applied a shift of minus two letters to the KLQ, which gave him IJO.
‘That’s no bloody help at all,’ he muttered.
Then he realized that in fact it was a help, because that substitution had generated two vowels, the I and the O, and if his assumption that the person who composed the message had stripped the vowels out of the words before enciphering them was correct, the decrypted text would contain no vowels at all. And that meant that he was applying the substitution the wrong way. The ‘-2’ notation had to mean that the encoder had himself applied the minus two shift. So instead of picking out the letters two before the KLQ, he wrote down the letters that occurred two places after those three. That gave him MNS, which looked a bit more hopeful, though the only words that immediately occurred to him that would fit were MANS or MENS, the proper name MONS, or MINUS.
So he tried the next one, again applying the shift indicated by the number -8, which converted OZHK into WHPS. Only one word seemed to fit: WHIPS, so the first two words read MANS, MENS, MONS or MINUS plus WHIPS, which didn’t seem particularly helpful.
He tried the third word, applying a reversed -6 shift to WBHM, which gave him CHNS. Maybe CHINS, though in the context of the fir
st two words that seemed unlikely, if they were right. Then light suddenly dawned and a memory – a fairly recent memory –surfaced in his brain. At that moment he knew, or least he thought he knew, exactly who the message was from, and the decryption of the next two groups – PXBXX and EMAKX, which decoded as LTX and LTHR – more or less confirmed it for him.
So he knew the when, and now he was pretty certain he also knew the who, which just left the where. And he didn’t think that would be too difficult to work out, because of the line of eight groups of two numbers. It wasn’t that big a leap of logic to assume that the first four groups referred to the first part of an accurate geographical position, especially as he already knew that the Svalbard Archipelago was located between 74 and 81 degrees north latitude and between 10 and 35 degrees east longitude. That information had been part of his initial standard briefing notes covering his destination. So what he was looking for was whatever building occupied the position 78° 22’ 11.50" north and 15° 64’ 67.11" east.
He had a mapping application on his smartphone, which included the ability to search for a location based upon its position using degrees, minutes and seconds, and a few moments later he found himself staring at a greyish shape on the map on the screen of his smartphone beside the legend ‘Radisson Blu Polar Hotel’, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Decoding the last, the standalone, group – OQJXX – was almost a formality. The plaintext was LNGXX, and the place that that was indicating was immediately obvious to him.
‘Who’s a clever bugger, then?’ he muttered, looked at his watch, walked across to the bed to pick up his foul weather clothing, pulled it on and then left the room.
A little over ten minutes later Richter glanced again at his watch as he walked into the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel. According to his Citizen Eco-Drive, which was almost never wrong and which he had reset to the local time shortly after he’d arrived at the airport, it was just after 16.30, which meant he had a mere five minutes in hand to make the rendezvous on time.
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