‘I’m debriefing Radtsic,’ broke in Rebecca, too quickly.
‘No you’re not,’ rejected Smith, at once. ‘You’re being conned—until now we’ve all been conned—by the man. Joe’s a professional interrogator, the best my service has got. You’re not: he’d go on trying to use you and we haven’t got time for that. I want to play one off against the other. Their treating us like fools has ended. Now it’s our turn and that’s what’s going to happen to them: they’re going to be turned like pigs on a spit when we decipher the tictac sleight of hand. It also means, Ms Street, that you can return to MI6 and my deputy can come back to her position in my service.’
‘Obviously sensible, all the way round,’ decreed Bland, bustling on. ‘What else?’
‘I can’t see any way Radtsic could have learned the location of his safe house, nor that of the Novikov woman, but I’ve already drafted in additional personnel to guard against their disclosure in that code we still can’t read—’
‘Do you seriously believe the Russians might physically attempt to get to both of them … take them back to Russia?’ stopped Palmer.
‘I seriously believe if they knew where either were—and believed their covers blown—that the Russians would attempt their assassination to prevent the deception being understood or becoming public,’ said Smith. ‘Consider for a moment how well their deaths would fit the propaganda they’ve managed so far.’
‘Why don’t you move them?’ asked Bering.
‘I intend to if the code isn’t broken quickly,’ said Smith.
‘I believe Radtsic is officially MI6’s responsibility,’ reminded Rebecca, tightly.
‘You are part of this group,’ reminded Smith. ‘No decisions are taken without your being involved in the consultation. I moved extra protection in as a matter of urgency when I failed to make contact with you. I was told you’d already left for this meeting.’
‘For the forethought and quickness of which I think we’re all grateful,’ said Bland, as Rebecca subsided again in her seat, a flush of anger for the first time visible.
‘And in view of today’s involvement of our FBI partners, I think they should be included in our subsequent sessions until this is concluded,’ continued Smith. ‘Which will be on our terms: for the first time ours is the strongest position.’
26
‘Who are you!’
‘The person you and your wife are going to be talking to from now on, sir.’
‘I decide who we talk to,’ insisted Radtsic, the arrogance perfectly pitched. ‘Get the woman back. You can go.’
Goody smiled, shaking his head. ‘I want you to believe that I admire very much how you’ve handled your assignment, sir: you too, ma’am. I genuinely respect professionalism, which is what you’ve both shown. I’m looking forward to our association.’
The Russian turned the flush of uncertainty into feigned anger, eyes bulging as he came forward in his chair. ‘Get out and do what I told you, get the woman back! I want to talk to someone in authority: someone I can trust and understand. You’re a madman and I don’t talk to madmen.’
Beside Radtsic, Elena remained totally unmoving, arms outstretched along the sides of her chair, hands cupped tightly over each edge, looking fixedly at Goody.
‘Trust! That’s the touchstone, isn’t it, sir? When you’re working with a partner, no matter how long you prepare—and to be fair to Irena Yakulova, neither of you could have had long to prepare for an assignment like this—there has to be trust, a reliance, upon your partner not to collapse as Irena Yakulova has collapsed. It’s all over once that happens, isn’t it, sir?’
‘I won’t talk to you, deal with anyone except the woman. Get out!’
‘I didn’t expect you to, not as quickly as this, Yuri Georgevich: didn’t even come prepared for you to do so. I suppose you’d call this a courtesy visit, to let you both know how things are going to be from now on. You’ll both remain here for the time being, but you’re technically under arrest now: the helicopter you obviously saw arrive this morning has doubled the security here, so don’t think of escape or anything silly like that. It really would be stupid and I don’t believe either of you are stupid.…’ Goody snapped his fingers, making Elena visibly jump. ‘I’ve forgotten the code, haven’t I! Now that’s something I really do admire, Yuri Georgevich. I think that’s all for the moment. I’m not sure when I’ll be back: Irena Yakulova is going to take up a lot of our time for the moment but if—’
‘I want contact with my embassy,’ stopped Elena.
Radtsic turned sharply to look at her but didn’t speak.
‘They’ll be informed of your detention, of course, but it’s far too early for talk of consular access.’ Goody smiled again. ‘And when—if—it comes, you’ll be able to talk openly, not bother with those juggling gestures, won’t you?’
‘I demand to know what charges we are being held upon!’ declared Radtsic.
‘Your not being in a position to demand anything is probably the most difficult adjustment you’ll have to make now that it’s all over, Yuri Georgevich. That’s who you are now, Yuri Georgevich Demin, no longer play-acting the part of one of the most important men in the Russian Federation. From now on, for as long as we choose for you to remain here, you’ll be told what to do.’
‘What does that mean, for as long as we remain here?’ asked Elena.
‘You surely don’t imagine you’re going to stay here, in surroundings like this! As soon as we’re ready you’ll be moved to another secure establishment which I’m afraid will be much inferior to this. Split up, I’d expect, between different secure establishments.’
‘A prison, you mean!’ demanded the woman, her voice flickering apprehensively.
‘That’s what I would expect,’ agreed Goody, affably. ‘After all, one of the most likely reactions from Moscow learning their scheme has gone wrong will be to try to eliminate the embarrassment of your being here, which would make prison the safest place for you to be.’
‘You cannot hold us without charge, nor prevent our having consular access,’ insisted the man, dropping the arrogant Radtsic persona.
‘Yuri Georgevich! As far as Moscow is concerned, you and Elena have buried yourselves deeply into our confidence, telling us all your carefully rehearsed stories. You even told them so, at the prison meeting. They believe the same about Irena and will go on believing it until we choose to tell them otherwise. Which we’ve no intention of doing for a long time yet. And do, please, drop the nonsense about there needing to be specific charges and the rights of consular access. We don’t operate within the law, giving ourselves those rights. We accord them if it suits us and if it doesn’t, we don’t bother.…’ Goody gestured broadly around the conservatory. ‘Enjoy all this for a couple of days, until I get back. Although I’m not—’
‘I want to discuss things,’ declared Elena.
‘I really don’t have time, not today.’
‘When…? Tomorrow…?’
‘Look, why don’t you talk things through, the two of you, and when you decide what—and how much—you want to tell me, you let the guards know. And that’s what they are, from now on. Your guards. Get used to it because whatever happens, guards are going to become a very positive feature of your lives for some time to come yet.’
* * *
It required positive willpower for Rebecca to suppress the easily aroused frustration, despite realistically acknowledging that Thames House was the obvious venue for her to be summoned under the revised circumstances, in which she was now very much the junior participant. Aubrey Smith and Jane Ambersom were already in the conference room when Rebecca arrived. The only other person she recognized was Joe Goody, intent upon a selection of illustrated wall charts still in the process of being hung by three strangers. A lectern separated the charts from two wide-screen television sets placed side by side in readiness. The Director-General nodded in greeting to Rebecca but didn’t speak, also more occupied with the charts. Jane smi
led and said it had to be good to at last be back at Vauxhall Cross, resettling herself, and Rebecca smiled back and agreed that it was, concealing her impression of the other woman’s gloating satisfaction at her relegation to the periphery of what they were now confronting. The two newly seconded Americans were the last to arrive, with apologies for their lateness. Mort Bering extended that apology with the admission that neither the FBI, the CIA, nor the National Security Agency code breakers had so far penetrated the finger-and-arm exchanges beyond agreeing with Britain’s GCHQ that it unquestionably had been a coded exchange between Radtsic and the Russian delegation.
‘Which is scarcely surprising, considering how little time your experts have had to work on it,’ took up Aubrey Smith, introducing a plump, pink-faced man he beckoned towards the lectern as head of GCHQ’s linguistic division. ‘What have we learned from having had more time?’
‘Not as much as we would have liked,’ conceded the unidentified man, putting himself between the wall charts and the inactive televisions and accepting a marker light from one of his waiting companions. ‘It’s very clever encryption that’s going to be very difficult satisfactorily to break. We’ve made some preliminary progress but not enough. We think we’ve got close, in places, but so far we’re beaten by what we believe to be the deciphering being open to different, even contradictory, interpretations.…’
‘I’m having difficulty following this,’ complained Rebecca. It was a professionally objective remark.
‘As we are,’ smiled the man. ‘The code is composed of what I can only describe as several different linguistic or communicative elements. There’s deaf-and-dumb sign woven into what we’ve identified as apparently randomly introduced Middle Eastern picture and some identifiable Asian picture languages: the code depends predominantly on straight-line imagery, with adjustments for slightly bent digits using the human hand. There are differences, in phonetically based sign, between word languages: we’ve isolated some, but not all. There are, obviously, complete differences between Middle East and Asian picture scripts. Again, we think we’ve identified some. What we don’t have—nor any way of discovering—is whether in addition to the various picture-and-sign languages there’s been introduced a mathematical manipulation, remembering that mathematics is the core base of most codes: whether to subtract, add, or multiply by a specific number sequence or amount the letter or symbol represented in the recognizable exchange.’
‘How the hell can we work that out?’ demanded Barry Elliott.
‘We can’t, just as Bletchley Park couldn’t have broken the Enigma code without actually having a captured machine to reverse engineer,’ said the linguistic scientist. ‘With the cipher, children of ten could communicate as easily as they’re doing now on the Internet. Without it, we’ll never be sure that our translation, which we’ll eventually get in full and which will probably read quite coherently, is actually what was communicated between the two Russians in that prison interview room.’
‘Would it be a static cipher, relevant to every exchange?’ asked Rebecca, another objective query.
The man smiled. ‘A clever question. That’s the value of ambiguous meanings. The positive definitions, if they are mathematically governed, are probably fixed by the particular day of the exchange: let’s say Monday is numbered one, Tuesday is two, Wednesday is three, and so on. Each number would dictate the definition for its appropriate day. Radtsic’s prison meeting was on a Wednesday. That day’s definitions could—and probably would—be different from those of Thursday.’
‘What you’re telling us is that without the day-by-day cipher—if one even exists—we’re beaten,’ said Aubrey Smith.
‘Not completely,’ qualified the expert. ‘Eventually we’ll get a virtually complete translation of what passed between Radtsic and those who confronted him in Belmarsh for that Wednesday, but every word—and more importantly every picture symbol, all of which have a number of variations—will have to be considered: we’ll eventually be able to provide you with possibly four different versions of the same code.’
‘Which is a roundabout way of saying that we’re beaten,’ repeated Smith.
‘Not necessarily,’ contradicted Goody. ‘Can you take us through what you are so far able to read?’
It took a long time, the marker beam almost permanently alight, stop-starting the television recordings between the actual Belmarsh encounter and the separated, itemized code examples, switching at every break to the wall-chart illustrations of each individual symbol, word, gesture, and sign. A reliance emerged upon single-, two-, or three-finger improvisations, sometimes topped by single or double finger positioning to create Mandarin Chinese or Japanese symbols (‘Chinese is the root of the Japanese language’), and some Hebrew straight-line characters re-created with finger representation—even one ancient Sumerian triangular symbol—to support an arm-brushing sign gesture designating a road, a route, or a distance. There was easily decipherable disability sign for water, river, sea, or lake, and a combination of Cantonese and Japanese to designate a person, people, or a number of people, conceivably sufficient to constitute a crowd. None of the hybrid mishmash had grammatical prefix, preposition, or suffix to identify plural or singular.
There was a protracted silence at the end of the dissertation, broken only when Goody looked up, smiling, from his note scribbling. ‘I’m surprised and impressed, sir. You got a lot, accepting all the caveats: far more than I expected from your earlier presentation. I wouldn’t normally ask such a favour, but I wonder, sir, if you couldn’t save me valuable time by suggesting what minimal interpretation you’ve so far reached?’
The linguist’s smile of appreciation remained throughout Goody’s remarks. ‘Accepting all the caveats?’ he qualified.
‘Absolutely.’
The marker beam came on again, now with only one television operating. ‘Two, maybe connected, possibilities: and I want you to understand that we’re not working from the obvious supposition of what a defector—or supposed defector—would want to convey,’ embarked the man, pink face flushed from the interrogator’s praise. ‘One of the simplest translations of that mixture of Mandarin script and lower-class Japanese that the leader of the Russian delegation is using is success or progress. There’s the immediate deaf-and-dumb response,’ identified the man, switching the beam upon Radtsic’s hands. ‘It’s yes or agreement: certainly an affirmative.’ The beam jumped. ‘I have a question here but I’ll delay it, to avoid a pre-judgement. Here’s the Chinese–Japanese combination I pointed out earlier that could indicate people or a single person. We’ve only been asked to assess the encounter of a single person, Maxim Radtsic.’ The beam danced through several freeze-frames. ‘The repetition makes us believe the reference is to more than one person: maybe two or three. There’s no grammar or tense, as I’ve explained, but we’re surmising from Radtsic’s responses here.…’ The beam jabbed to a series of deaf-and-dumb sign. ‘Here’s the marking for water or river or lake and here’s Radtsic’s reply, no. Here’s forest or trees or woods and here’s Radtsic replying in the affirmative. And look here, at the repeated sign for distance or road or route. Our initial assessment is that the Russian delegation was trying to establish location: where Radtsic was being held. Now you help us, as far as tense is concern. The code for people or a single person: what is it, plural or singular?’
‘Plural,’ replied Jane. ‘It could be as many as four but more like three—Radtsic, his supposed wife, and Irena.’
‘That’ll help us,’ thanked the GCHQ expert.
‘I still don’t understand the significance of it all,’ said Jane.
‘Radtsic was telling the delegation that he—maybe even the others—were succeeding in their mission or assignment but wasn’t able to identify where he or the others were being housed,’ elaborated the man.
‘That’s more than enough for me,’ said Goody.
‘It would have been more than enough for Natalia, too,’ Jane remarked sideways to Au
brey Smith.
* * *
‘You lied: tried to trick me,’ accused Mikhail Guzov. ‘You pretended not to recognize five of the photographs I showed you of people we’d definitely identified to be MI5 operatives: your colleagues.’ The man was hunched aggressively forward in his rustic chair, the door behind him still swinging back and forth from the force with which he’d burst into the dacha.
‘I didn’t lie or trick you,’ refused Charlie, unmoved by the performance. ‘I told you from the beginning that MI5 field officers don’t mix or fraternize, precisely to prevent one being able to identify another in a hostile situation. I picked out those I thought I could recognize. If you’d already identified others the trickery was yours, trying to trap me.’ Acting out the feigned anger—anger becoming genuine at the rejection—Guzov wasn’t bothering with his grotesque impression of a smile: Charlie was grateful. He decided against mocking the man further by getting up to close the unsecured door.
‘You’re good at lying, aren’t you?’ persisted the Russian.
‘Isn’t it essential to our trade, until it’s pointless, as it now is?’ said Charlie, cautiously.
‘I mean particularly good.’
This was prepared, maybe even rehearsed from someone else’s script. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say to that: I don’t understand it.’
‘Tell me about Edwin Sampson.’
The immediate chill, an actual sensation, rose like nausea throughout Charlie’s body, physically numbing him, but his mind remained clear but racing. Edwin Sampson was the British traitor with whom he’d faked defection to Moscow and succeeded in discrediting during those initial, first-day debriefings with Natalia. ‘It was a professional assignment.’
‘Sampson wasn’t the phoney you convinced us he was. It was you who were the phoney, cheating us so well we didn’t believe anything Sampson told us.’
Red Star Falling: A Thriller Page 32