Lazenby thought about this.
‘Have you considered the man might be a nut?’ he said.
‘He’s gone to rather a lot of trouble, Prof.’
‘Nuts do go to a lot of trouble.’
‘Quite. This one would be a Jewish nut, incidentally, or one of Jewish extraction.’
‘Because of the Bible?’
‘Because of his thumbs. He left two good prints on each of the papers.’
‘You can tell a Jew by his thumbs?’ Lazenby said, staring.
‘There is apparently something called a Jewish whorl. The Israelis are expert at it. Yes, Department of Criminology,’ Philpott said, checking. ‘Tel Aviv. Rather keen on spotting a Jew from an Arab out there. Genetically it’s a dominant, so even with a racial mix it tends to come through. The interest here being – you’ll see he seems to be stressing that he’s alive, as if you might suppose he isn’t. What we’re hoping is that you might recall a Jewish biologist who has dropped out of sight for some years. We think he has met you. He’s certainly addressing you very directly as if he thinks you will know him. Which would mean he’s travelled abroad to conferences and so forth, since you never yourself visited the old Soviet Union.’
Lazenby tried to think when he had told Philpott that he had never visited the old Soviet Union. He decided he had never told him this.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘We’d be very grateful. Some preliminary work has been done, actually. I wonder what you know about these people.’ He handed over a list.
There were ten or so names on it, all distantly familiar to Lazenby; all in biological sciences.
‘A thing I know about Stolnik,’ he said, perusing it, ‘is that he’s dead. Some years ago, I believe.’
‘Yes. We have the obituaries. I shouldn’t worry too much about that. If the chap has had to go out of sight.’
‘Ah … Well, it’s all a long time ago, of course,’ Lazenby said. It was a very long time. He had thought most of the men on the list were dead. One of them had certainly had a serious motor accident. ‘I expect I met them all.’
‘Might they appear in your diaries?’
‘I don’t keep diaries.’
‘Miss Sonntag’s, perhaps – appointments diaries?’
‘When from?’
‘Upwards of five years? Maybe ten.’
‘Highly unlikely. What would you expect to find there, anyway?’
‘Meetings. Which we might be able to reconstruct. Perhaps some mention of the other chap.’
‘Which other chap?’
‘He wants you to send him one.’ Philpott found the place for him. ‘“Send me therefore the man understanding science – of every living thing” … Another drink, Prof?’
‘All right, very small. With a great deal of soda.’
Philpott got the drinks. ‘The feeling is,’ he said, settling himself, ‘that it must be some particular chap. Whom you have jointly met, or discussed. Feasible?’
‘Yes. I suppose it is.’
‘Might there be anything in your correspondence?’
‘In ten years of letters –’
‘Well, we could help there, of course,’ Philpott said.
Lazenby drank a little, musing.
Philpott, although not a big brain at science, had never struck him as a total idiot. It must surely be obvious to him that a prankster was at work here.
‘Philpott,’ he said, ‘why do you suppose anyone should choose to write to me on cigarette papers?’
‘As the only choice – if it was – it isn’t such a bad one. An advantage of a cigarette is that, if apprehended, you can smoke it.’
‘Yes. Why bother writing in code on it, then?’
‘In case you are apprehended, and can’t smoke it.’
‘The code didn’t seem to give your people much trouble, did it?’
‘Once they spotted it was the Bible, no. People not brought up on it aren’t so likely to do that, of course. Also the Russian Bible isn’t the English one – different book names, I believe, and some other kind of ordering for chapter and verse. In any case, belt and braces. He’s a careful fellow.’
‘Hmm.’ Lazenby mused again. ‘Send him a man,’ he said. ‘How send him a man?’
‘Well, the American view there –’
‘What American view?’
‘He wants answering on the Voice of America. Radio station. The Americans run it … Anyway, their view is, find the man and you have probably found the how. He will know how.’
‘You don’t think it would be more sensible for him to send some cigarette papers to that man?’
‘I do. Much more sensible,’ Philpott agreed. ‘It leads to a view either that he doesn’t know where that man is or doubts that he has your contacts.’
‘Nobody to show cigarette papers to?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Yes.’ Lazenby gazed again at the papers. It was plain that any question he cared to put would meet with a ready answer. There were some other questions but he decided not to put them. The River Spey awaited in a few days, and nothing – in particular nothing as crazy as this showed signs of being – was going to interfere with it.
‘Might I ask, Prof,’ asked Philpott, ‘if I could get at your archive right away? Spread the load – if you had no objection.’
‘I would have every objection. Of course you can’t, Philpott.’
‘Ah … Miss Sonntag, then?’
‘I’ll ask her. What is it you want exactly?’
‘Anything from the men on this list. We think he must be one of them.’
‘Why?’
‘They have all had some contact with you at one time or another. And they are now all out of circulation. They aren’t hospitalised, not over this period of time. They haven’t retired. Not drawing pension, at any rate. And they’re not dead, barring a couple of doubtful cases. Almost certainly they are working at something.’
‘Yes. Who says all this?’
‘The Americans. Far and away the best at it,’ Philpott said, nodding. ‘And with an outstanding biographical department – exceedingly detailed and current. For instance, they know the locations and the senior staff of all establishments in the business of – well, in various kinds of business. This man is not at any of them. He must be at some other, which they don’t know about. And that bothers them. It bothers them very much. They want to liaise on it urgently, the moment we have something to show.’
‘Yes. I see,’ Lazenby said, frowning. What he principally saw was a time-waster of prodigious proportions here, if allowed to develop.
‘Can Miss Sonntag get at it right away?’
‘I will certainly ask her.’
‘It’s a matter of the greatest urgency. There is another question. Has something like this ever happened before – that is, some other envelope that has turned up with apparently nothing in it? It probably wouldn’t have been from Gothenburg. More likely Rotterdam or Hamburg, Rotterdam the likeliest.’
‘I could ask that, too. Why?’
‘I can’t tell you that now. I will as soon as I am authorised – together with a great deal of other information. Of course, if you have any thoughts yourself, Prof, I hope you will contact me right away.’
‘Certainly, certainly, Philpott,’ Lazenby said, and allowed the subject to drift at once out of his mind. There would not be any other thoughts, he was quite clear on that. Secret codes, unknown establishments … All that, they could get on with very well by themselves.
And this, as a matter of fact, they were doing.
3
The unknown establishment was assumed to be biological and its work to do with military biology. This was the first point of interest for the CIA and at their headquarters in Langley, eight miles from Washington, a team of specialists was engaged in hunting it down.
They started by assuming that it must have independent sources of water and power; also chemical stores, animal pens, cleansing stations,
and various kinds of security arrangements. All this needed people, and places for them to live, and some means of access, probably a landing strip. Above all, it needed isolation.
The ‘waste howling wilderness’ of the ‘north country’, evidently Siberia, remained even in modern times unmatched for isolation. Its forested area alone was one and a third times the size of the United States. Over the land lay deep snow and ice all winter, and quaking bogs in summer. This made for a road system so rudimentary that transport went mainly by air or river, with access to security areas available only on official permit.
This provided the first problem. If the place was so hard to get at, why should the unknown correspondent suppose anyone from outside could get at it? Just as important, how had he got anything out of it himself?
Specialists in global transportation put up a possible answer to this. The Siberian inland waterway system was very extensive. Two rivers in the north-west alone, the Ob and the Yenisei, had some dozens of ports with several others under construction. The reason for this was the extension of the huge natural gas deposit, the biggest in the world, which lay between the two rivers. As Russian oil production declined, the gas was due to replace it, both for internal energy and for external trade. For both purposes the product was urgently needed; and as satellite observation showed work was going on round the clock to get it.
To finance the project (which included a tunnel to west Europe 3000 miles long), massive foreign loans had been negotiated. The loans would be repaid in gas and were being supplied in the form of equipment. The amount of equipment was staggering. Apart from the rigs and drilling gear, there was all the piping to go inside the tunnel. There were giant compressors and pumping stations at intervals along it. There were thousands of earth-moving machines, tens of thousands of tractors.
In the lively scramble for orders, western shipping companies had not been backward. The equipment for the original field had been carried largely by ships of the old Soviet Union, but for the new deal the managing consortium had specified that new equipment, wherever possible, should be transported in vessels of the countries supplying it.
The countries supplying the new equipment were Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Holland. Ships from all of them were now ferrying loads along the Arctic sea route. Russian icebreakers were guaranteeing the route from early June to early October, the latter date varying with the ice pack: a fact that led the experts to a prediction.
It was now the first week of July, and the ice was building early. The prediction was that nothing could be expected from the unknown correspondent after the end of August. Western shippers, reluctant to hazard their vessels even in a ‘guaranteed’ September, were handing this slice of business to Russia’s own merchant fleet. It was not thought that a member of this fleet had posted the message. A foreign seaman, more familiar with foreign ports, and with greater privacy to fiddle with ambiguous cigarettes, had done it. He would not therefore be doing it after August.
But this raised other questions.
The ports opened to the foreign vessels were Dudinka and Igarka on the Yenisei, and Noviy Port and Salekhard on the Ob. Because they were guaranteeing a quick turnaround at these ports, the Russian authorities had provided no shore facilities for foreign crewmen. None of them was allowed ashore anyway.
If sailors were not allowed ashore, how had one of them got the message?
Tentative answers were provided for this, too. An intermediary had given the sailor the message. The intermediary must have had time to establish a relationship with the sailor. The sailor had to be a regular on the route. However regular he was, the only local citizens he could meet were those allowed on his ship – in the normal way port officials or dock workers. But the area was a security area, which neither port officials nor dock workers were free to move in and out of at will. The intermediary had to come from outside. He had to have access to the ship – and also to the research station. What kind of intermediary could this be?
The experts proposed a transport worker. The foreign ships were not leaving Russian ports unladen. Some carried specialist return cargoes, of a kind which might afford access to the ship of a specialist worker. A closer examination of the ports concerned showed Dudinka, on the Yenisei, as the likeliest to have specialist return cargoes. Dudinka was the port for Norilsk, a large mining and industrial centre, and its main business was nickel and precision nickel-alloy parts.
A report was called for on the handling of nickel-alloy parts, and meanwhile three working propositions were set out:
The message had been posted by a sailor who regularly worked the Arctic route,
It had been given to him by an intermediary with access to his ship.
The intermediary was a specialist worker whose duties allowed entry to the research station and to the port.
These propositions (every one of them accurate, as it turned out) were then addressed very vigorously.
Let me hear thy voice concerning this matter the first day at midnight, VOA, the unknown correspondent had asked. The Voice of America was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA, so there were no problems with this one. The first day, in biblical terms, was Sunday, and the VOA had a taped religious programme that went out then. A substitution was made and a man with a powerful voice preached a sermon on communication and identity. He used Exodus, 12.3: ‘I have heard thy voice’, and also Samuel, Joel and Esther: ‘Where art thou?’, ‘Who art thou?’ and ‘What is thy request?’ and he said these questions needed plain answers from everyone, particularly those in the waste howling wildernesses of life.
On the message itself were the prints of the man who had written it, and who had evidently rolled the cigarettes. They were on the address paper too, but not on the envelope or the tape. On all these appeared another set of prints, some very smudged and fragmentary, but similarly traceable to a single source: evidently the sailor.
For the reasons agreed, the sailor had to be a regular on the route. He was the postman. His regularity had to be relied on. From the internal evidence of the message – Wherefore do you not answer me? – he had been used before. It was not possible to say when he had been used before, or where he had posted the message before. But it was known where he had posted it this time.
The global list of ship movements showed three vessels from the Arctic as having been in Gothenburg around the date of the postmark. One of them, a Japanese tramp which had merely used the Arctic as a cheap delivery route for a random load to west Europe, could be discounted; but the other two, a Dutch ship and a German, were of greater interest. Both were in regular service on the Siberian run, and the Dutchman had returned with a cargo of nickel parts.
Gothenburg was not a regular stop for this ship but part of its nickel had been consigned there, and it had put in to the port for twenty-four hours: ample time for someone to slit cigarettes, buy an envelope and post the letter. This ship had then sailed for Rotterdam. The German had gone to Hamburg.
CIA officials in Holland and Germany were instructed to obtain, by any means possible, fingerprints of the crews of both these ships. But it was known already that the Dutchman had come from Dudinka. The origin of its cargo was not in doubt either.
Between Dudinka and the nickel mines of Norilsk was a road forty-five miles long, and the cartographic department had every inch of it mapped. Most of Siberia was similarly mapped. The maps came to them from the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center at St Louis, and they were updated every few weeks. They showed not only geographical features and roads but the progress of all building works, both above and below ground.
The area around Norilsk was covered with a network of minor roads linking its industrial centre with outlying districts. The roads were well maintained, summer and winter, and heavily used.
Although the complex was large – the largest in the Arctic circle – it was still only a dot on the vast expanse of taiga surrounding it. Much of this area had been under regular surveillance for years, large n
umbers of ‘objectives’ being in it. The purpose of most of them was known but a few still remained in doubt. These were the ones that came under scrutiny now.
The major requirements for the secret establishment were still as specified; but in analysing satellite photographs a few other features were added. It had to have buildings whose precise function was still uncertain. It had to have barracks, probably with separate areas to accommodate scientific, maintenance and security staffs. And it had to have a road: to accommodate the transport worker.
Shortly afterwards, in a flurry of activity, St Louis was being urgently asked for further information: analytical material, to determine the mineral content of two lakes in the area, and gazeteer material to support the words ‘dark waters’ as a local name for them.
4
Miss Sonntag, while this work proceeded, was getting on with her own.
Something had come to mind after her cold. She had an idea that an envelope without a letter had appeared once before – she did not exactly remember when. But she didn’t associate it with Sweden. There was not much correspondence with Sweden. Her impression was that it was from Holland. In the same post, if she was not mistaken, there had been a number of circulars from there – academic book promotions from Amsterdam or The Hague or Rotterdam, most addressed with bits of stuck-on paper. Quite often these mailings were duplicated. She had thought that one was duplicated. Nothing in the envelope and she had shot it into the bin and thought no more about it. But after her cold she thought about it.
She had mentioned it to Lazenby, and seemed to catch him by surprise.
‘Holland, you say?’
‘I think Holland.’
‘Ah … Rotterdam, would you think?’
‘I can’t be certain Rotterdam. Perhaps Rotterdam.’
‘Well, I was supposed to … Hmm. I wonder,’ he said, and was thoughtful for a moment. ‘When are you off, Miss Sonntag?’
Kolymsky Heights Page 3