The Factory

by Brian Freemantle

  It was Richard Axton’s job also to programme the computers at the Factory to recognize all trigger words he believed appropriate to the department’s overseas activities.

  The Director General believed he had a very positive need for Axton’s expertise.

  The chess-playing, balding man showed no reaction whatsoever to Bell’s announcement that the Factory had been penetrated by a Soviet informant. And the Director General had no reluctance in telling the man something he had tried to keep secret for so long because he had decided at last to call in the outside investigation branch whose inquiries would make the fact public knowledge within hours.

  ‘You think some sort of message was relayed here to London by the KGB?’ asked Axton.

  ‘I’d managed to penetrate Soviet headquarters,’ said Bell, in further disclosure. ‘It was William Davies. His instructions were only to approach our embassy when he had some definite information, something he had seen. He was shot dead going into the embassy.’ Another mistake, to go with all the others in his search for the traitor, thought Bell. But the last, now that he had started the proper investigation.

  ‘What he saw could have been something other than a transmitted message,’ pointed out Axton.

  ‘I accept that,’ said Bell wearily. ‘Quite frankly, I’m clutching at any chance there is.’

  ‘There’s no guidance I can follow?’

  ‘Just the date on which Davies was shot,’ said Bell apologetically. ‘At the moment that’s all you have to work from.’

  Surprisingly Axton smiled. ‘It looks like an intriguing puzzle.’

  The task was a staggering one for Axton. He decided he had to extend the search at least a week before the date of the actual killing in Moscow, in case Davies had delayed his approach for any reason. As well as the Factory’s own retained tapes for the period Axton asked for all the material intercepted at Britain’s main eavesdropping establishment at Cheltenham. And used the special relationship with the United States to get everything available from America’s listening organization, the National Security Agency.

  The first problem was programming the computers with likely trigger words. Factory was obvious. He added the location of their headquarters building in London. Using the personnel records, Axton fed in every employee’s name – including that of the Director General – and then split them into various combinations and possible identification codes. Working on the assumption that any message would have been a warning, he included all words that could have been associated with a search or discovery or instruction to flee.

  He targeted first the Soviet embassy in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. None of his trigger words worked. Accepting that any message would have been short, he revised the programme for the computer to search out any message, either in coded or clear transmission, that did not extend beyond a small number of words, starting at two and running up to ten. This time there was a reaction. Axton was using three computers, with matching printers, and all burst into life, giving him twelve separate messages. All were in code, only one of which he recognized and was able to read. It was an acknowledgement of something that had been shipped from London in the diplomatic bag.

  The rest he put to one side, to begin work upon, but before he did so he utilized three more computers and started to run through them the telephone conversations intercepted by America.

  After so long at his job, Axton had the eye of a painter or a designer for code patterns and without being able to transcribe any of the letters or numerals was able to split the messages into three groups, recognizing that each stack was composed from its own code. One of his groups comprised a single, one-line message.

  Axton worked late into the night, finally abandoning the idea of going home at all. By midnight he had unscrambled none of the messages lying on the desk in front of him. At last he decided to break, although not to stop work.

  He made a tour of the six computers operating on the new and old trigger words, frowning at the amount of printed material there was waiting for him to examine. He started at once, despite his tiredness: he’d often found moving from one incomplete puzzle to another stimulated his mind into finding an answer. That night it didn’t but something important was there: Axton merely failed to recognize it.

  ‘This should have been reported months ago!’ accused the head of the investigatory branch at once. His name was Andrews and he was a heavy, thick-set man, a typical policeman.

  ‘It was not immediately apparent that there was a Soviet source here: I did not want to sound a premature alarm,’ said Bell in weak defence. He badly wanted a drink and wondered how quickly Andrews and his squad would learn about the whisky bottle in his desk.

  ‘This department is a virtual shambles,’ criticized Andrews. ‘You’ve had overseas operatives killed and seized and detected: God knows how much material has leaked out of this building itself.’

  ‘Not everything can be attributed to the traitor,’ argued the Director General. ‘Some of the failures have been good counter-intelligence from the other side. This isn’t a business with a hundred per cent success rate.’

  ‘To have lost one officer … one operation … because you’ve been infiltrated is too much,’ said Andrews relentlessly.

  How long would it be before the demand was made for his resignation, thought Bell. He said: ‘The leaks appear to have come from all over the department, not concentrated in one particular division.’

  ‘I think we’d better make our own decisions on that, don’t you?’ said Andrews stiffly. ‘And as you appointed yourself independent investigator, I think you’re the person we should start with.’

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Ann when he got to her apartment that night. Since beginning the divorce proceedings against his wife, Bell was spending more and more time at his personal assistant’s home.

  ‘Badly,’ said the Director General. ‘But then it could hardly have been any other way, could it?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Ann. ‘One of the criticisms to be made against you is our relationship. Why don’t I just resign?’

  ‘Do you want to quit?’ asked Bell.

  ‘Why not?’ said Ann. ‘We’re going to be married as soon as your divorce is finalized, aren’t we? I would have left then anyway. Why not now, to get one embarrassment out of your way?’

  ‘It might be an idea,’ agreed the Director General. He wanted to do everything he could to stay on in the job.

  It was Richard Axton’s ability to recognize patterns that led to a breakthrough although it was not in the direction that the Director General wanted, nor was it easy to pursue in the first place. Axton was, of course, a fluent Russian speaker able to recognize nuances and intonation and was caught by the phrasing of a conversation he heard in clear, not code, from an American intercept of an unidentified outside caller speaking to the Soviet Defence Ministry. Several times the recipient of the call, who was only ever referred to respectfully as General, used the phrase ‘assess and grade mobilization’, and there were recurring lists of figures, which Axton guessed at last to be map coordinates. He was immediately disappointed when the coordinates did not connect with any English-published maps but encouraged again when they fitted perfectly to grid numbers on Eastern-bloc publications. There were some breaks and areas which did not accord, but substantially the map numbers ran for several hundred miles along the entire dividing border between Eastern and Western Europe, where the military forces of the NATO countries face those from the Soviet Warsaw Pact.

  Axton played and replayed the phrase, listening curiously at the way the words were insistently repeated between the two speakers. And then abruptly concluded why. They were instructions, which the unnamed general was ensuring were completely and absolutely understood by the person to whom he was talking. Almost automatically Axton wrote down the words and numbers, and nearly as instinctively counted the letters and numbers and compared them with the blocks of code he’d selected from the interception of tr
affic going into the Soviet embassy in London. There was no match. Axton was about to discard the comparison, which had little logic anyway, but then grew angry at himself at the test. Why should there be a comparison when he was making it in English with a message transmitted by a Russian who would have created his code in Russian! He switched to the Russian Cyrillic. The match was perfect and Axton felt that familiar burn of satisfaction at possibly having stumbled on to a trail.

  He quickly decided that the code was one of the oldest but still one of the most secure, certainly against radio intercept: it was actually the system which he had adapted for his changed-every-month procedure. It is called the one-time pad. In advance of messages being relayed, a book of coded pads is sent to the eventual receiver: in this case the London embassy would have received them in the diplomatic bag. Each page of the pad would have been numbered, to match the sender’s pad in Moscow according to a certain day. On that day the message would have been sent, in the code of that day, transcribed, and the page from which it was made up destroyed, never to be used again. Even with computers it is virtually impossible to penetrate the system unless there is some indication of the key. And Axton thought he had it, from the eavesdropped telephone conversation with the insistent Soviet Foreign Ministry general.

  It still took him five hours to unravel. Nearly every cable was connected with Warsaw Pact troop movements at some unspecified time in the future, although from the extent of the traffic Axton guessed it was to be very soon. In two that same phrase – ‘assess and grade mobilization’ – was repeated precisely as it had been instructed by the general.

  What Axton had assembled was the first stage of intelligence-gathering, when the information is described as ‘raw’ – obviously of significance but as yet unexplained. To seek an explanation he went back to what America had provided and within an hour had collated seven messages from Moscow into the Soviet embassy in Washington which were practically identical to the messages sent to London. Once more ‘assess and grade mobilization’ was spelled out and Axton believed that gave him the final clue.

  The Director General agreed to see him immediately.

  ‘This wasn’t what I asked you to find out!’ rejected the Director General irritably. He’d been under virtual interrogation for three days, been openly accused by Andrews of incompetence and obstructiveness, and wasn’t thinking properly: not coldly, professionally, as he should have been thinking. It hadn’t helped that Ann had got back to the flat the previous night weeping from the aggressiveness of her questioning.

  ‘I think it’s important,’ said Axton, unoffended. He was, in fact, a man who rarely lost his temper.

  ‘Why?’

  The codebreaker set out his messages and his linking charts and said: ‘Identical instructions, to embassies in London and Washington. For no good reason: they’re hundreds, thousands of miles, from the borders where there are Warsaw Pact troop movements. But I think there is a connection: I think it’s a trick.’

  The Director General began to concentrate upon what the other man was saying: Axton had a brilliant mind, convoluted like a good intelligence officer’s mind has to be. ‘You’ve underlined “assess and grade mobilization”,’ said Bell. ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s the key,’ guessed Axton. ‘There’s been no announcement from any Warsaw Pact country about large-scale manoeuvres: I’ve already checked. But these clearly are large-scale: I couldn’t find anything to compare in size with this, either. I think there are suddenly going to be combined exercises all the way along the border … the coordinates cover the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. My guess is that the whole purpose is to study through the embassies how quickly the West responds. Or as Moscow says, assess and grade mobilization. They’ll learn how ready we are. And score a huge propaganda coup by saying they were only engaged on ordinary manoeuvres but clearly the West was prepared for war.’

  The Director General smiled, despite his depression. ‘I think you could well be right,’ he said.

  ‘It’s certainly worth checking the code and radio intercepts of other countries in Europe over the same period?’ suggested Axton.

  ‘What about the other business?’ pressed Bell. ‘Can’t you find anything there?’

  ‘I need the backward key,’ pleaded Axton. ‘Are you sure there was nothing Davies said before he died?’

  Andy Pugh, intelligence chief at the British embassy in Moscow, was bemused by the detail of the demand from the Director General. Pugh had already given what he considered to be the fullest account of the Davies killing and of the enormous diplomatic protests that had been officially lodged by the ambassador to the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

  He retrieved his earlier account and read through it, to ensure there was nothing he had omitted the first time, satisfied when he finished that there wasn’t. Well, just one thing, perhaps: so minor and insignificant that he hadn’t considered it of any importance, nothing more than the rambling of a deranged mind at the very moment of death.

  Pugh sighed. Rambling or not it was one of the specific requests in Bell’s query, so he’d have to answer it.

  He used a coded channel, because of the apparent urgency. ‘Davies said nothing comprehensible before he died,’ cabled the intelligence chief. ‘There was only one audible word. It was “Charles”.’

  An hour later, in London, the Director General gripped and ungripped his hands in furious frustration, his first angry decision to bring Pugh home for immediate censure. He held back, however, and was glad he did because it was wrong to let so much of his personal feelings and fear wash over into the department like this.

  Instead he summoned Axton and announced as the man entered the room: ‘Charles. That’s what Davies said before he died. Just: Charles.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s going to help at all,’ said Axton unhelpfully. ‘I’ve already cross-referenced and computer-checked every variation of name of everyone here. No one’s called Charles. No one.’

  There had been an arrogance, a seemingly natural expectation that it would be a short and successful investigation when Andrews and his squad had started at the Factory, but it wasn’t there any more. They’d interviewed all the active service officers and gone back through the files and found no one who could be remotely considered the traitor. Andrews was polite towards Bell in every conversation now, no longer critical or demanding. He’d actually sought Bell’s advice, encouraging him to talk about the inquiries he’d made before calling for a proper investigation, and at their last meeting said: ‘It can’t be so, because there have been too many disasters. But it would be easy to think there wasn’t a traitor after all. That it’s all a set of disastrous coincidences.’

  ‘There’s a traitor,’ insisted the Director General. He supposed he should have shared the Charles name with the investigator but he hadn’t, not yet. There was nothing Andrews could have done beyond what Bell was doing, having Axton search the coded transmissions, so he wasn’t hindering the inquiry. And although he acknowledged the danger of it – the stupidity even – the Director General still nursed the ambition to trap whoever it was himself and not have the job done for him by an outsider. He’d wait, to see if Axton came up with anything: maybe there’d be nothing at all.

  The Warsaw Pact manoeuvres went a long way towards restoring Samuel Bell’s self-confidence and the credibility of the Factory among a large number of people and countries.

  When Bell made the specific inquiry both German and French intelligence located messages similar to that transmitted to the Soviet embassies in Washington and London, although neither had isolated the significance. The United States admitted that they hadn’t, either, until it was brought to their attention by the British. The Foreign and Defence Ministers of all the NATO countries held secret meetings in Brussels, the most convenient gathering place, and unanimously decided what to do in the event of sudden and obvious manoeuvres. Which was nothing.

  The strategy worked brilliantly. For the first twenty-
four hours there was every impression of a concerted movement against the West along an almost one-hundred-mile front. Squadrons of aircraft and two entire Russian fleets were also involved and towards the end of that first day NATO commanders were openly talking about a catastrophic political misjudgement and urging a mass mobilization, to counter the obvious threat. Fortunately the politicians’ nerve held. The communist movement faltered on the second day and by the third had stopped altogether, apart from units still approaching from the furthest point in the Soviet Union. One by one the NATO countries issued strong condemnation of an exercise of that magnitude being mounted without advance warning and turned the propaganda completely, accusing Moscow and its satellites of warlike intentions. Within a month there was to be an announcement in the Russian capital of the premature retirement of the Defence Minister.

  There were messages of congratulations from every NATO country involved, particularly upon the standard and assessment of the intelligence shown in Britain.

  ‘Congratulations, darling!’ said Ann enthusiastically. She had left the Factory a week earlier with a farewell party and a crystal wine decanter as a leaving present. The first night of Ann’s retirement they had decided it was ridiculous his not living there all the time and so the following day Bell had moved in and they’d settled down to complete domesticity. The biggest change appeared to be in Bell’s drinking. He tried very hard to curtail it and didn’t seem to want it so much anyway.