by Tim Glister
Instead of trying to protect himself Peterson started to laugh again. ‘A predictable, small-minded hypocrite,’ he said between blows.
Knox was so confused by Peterson’s reaction to the battering he was taking that he didn’t notice his hands reaching out under him, searching across the smashed shards of onyx.
‘Are you here to defend Dear Old Blighty?’ Peterson asked. ‘Britannia’s long dead. This is just a sad little island trapped in a fantasy of self-importance.’
‘Is that the line Moscow sold you?’
Peterson’s laughter finally ran out. ‘Oh Richard, this isn’t about anything as trivial as ideology,’ he said. His voice was quiet, mournful, like he was explaining to a child that their dog had run away and wasn’t coming back. Then he suddenly sat up, and slashed at Knox’s leg with a razor-sharp onyx shard. ‘This is business.’
The pain knocked Knox off balance and he fell onto a sofa. As he did, Peterson sprang to his feet and plunged the shard into his thigh.
‘The future isn’t anything as small as politics or patriotism,’ Peterson said. ‘It’s about private enterprise. Finding something to sell and selling it to the highest bidder.’
‘And damn everyone else to a life of fear and oppression,’ Knox said through gritted teeth.
‘Maybe. Maybe they’ll fall into line like scared sheep. Or maybe they’ll finally realise all the promises of rewards for good behaviour are just lies to keep them in their place.’
It all finally, crashingly, hit Knox. He hadn’t been hunting the long machinations of a regime but the petty opportunism of someone caught up in them.
‘You’re a real hero of the revolution,’ Knox said, mustering some sarcasm.
‘I don’t really care what happens,’ Peterson said, leaning over Knox and driving the onyx shard deeper into his leg. ‘The only thing I need everyone to do, including you, is stay out of my way.’
‘Sorry about that,’ Knox said, between groans.
‘I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t take the hint. I thought you might when I burned down your flat, but you really are quite stupid.’
‘Was Holland in your way too?’
‘Well, I don’t have anything against him personally, but I couldn’t have him sniffing round, asking questions. And he wasn’t the only one who knew about your dirty little parental secret.’
Peterson stepped out of the remnants of the table and towards the sofa on top of the Beretta, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Knox.
‘My Russian friends were happy to help me arrange his unfortunate medical problem.’ Peterson kneeled down and reached under the sofa, this time wrapping his fist around the barrel of the Beretta. ‘They’ll be less than thrilled when they realise it’s only got them a halfwit as a new DG, but they tend to take a long view at the Lubyanka, so it won’t be a total disappointment.’
Knox couldn’t move. The pain in his leg was too intense. But he needed to stall Peterson, keep him talking. ‘Aren’t you worried about them coming after you?’ Knox asked.
‘They can try. But by tomorrow I’ll be untouchable.’ Peterson stood up, levelling the gun at Knox. ‘Now, I’m afraid I’ve got a schedule to keep.’
In the split second it took Peterson to steady himself before shooting, Knox pulled the shard from his thigh and lunged at Peterson, driving the onyx into his stomach as he shoved the gun away from him with his other hand. Peterson’s finger pulled the trigger, sending a bullet into the carpet as he doubled over. Then Knox pulled the makeshift dagger out of Peterson’s side and plunged it into his neck.
Peterson tried to say something as he fell to the floor, but whatever it was just came out as a bloody gurgle. He landed first on his knees, then on his side. By the time his head hit the suite’s deep-pile carpet he was dead.
Knox stumbled over to Bennett. She didn’t look good. Her shoulders had dropped, her hands had fallen into her lap, and her eyes were half closed. Her breathing was shallow. He pressed his hands against the large red stains on her side. The fresh pressure brought her round, and she stared at him. A thin smile curled her mouth.
‘Looks like we got there in the end,’ she said in a whisper.
‘Who said anything about the end?’ Knox replied, matching her smile.
He heard the click of a lock. The door to Valera’s bedroom opened and she cautiously stepped out. She looked down at Knox and Bennett, then walked slowly over to where Peterson’s body lay.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Knox replied. ‘You’re safe now.’
Valera looked at the folder that was still on the desk, then at Peterson again.
‘Who are you?’
‘MI5.’
Knox could tell Valera’s mind was racing to understand what was happening.
‘So was he,’ she said, after a pause. She nudged the Beretta out of Peterson’s mortis grip with her foot. ‘What will happen now?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Knox said, turning back to Bennett to check that she hadn’t passed out again. ‘But there’s plenty of time to work that out.’
‘No,’ Valera said, her voice suddenly very hard, ‘there isn’t.’
Knox twisted round just in time to see her lean down, pick up the Beretta, and shoot him in the chest.
As Knox slumped down next to Bennett, a fresh blood bloom staining his front, Valera dropped the gun next to Peterson, picked up the folder, and walked out of the suite.
CHAPTER 63
Knox knew where he was before he opened his eyes. He recognised the quiet hum punctured by distant footsteps and beeps, the smell of bleach masking other odours, and the rough cotton sheet tucked tightly under his arms. He forced his eyelids apart. It felt like a long time since they’d closed as he slid down the wall of Peterson’s hotel suite, blood seeping from his chest and thigh.
It took a moment for him to focus, taking in first the general, fuzzy details of the private hospital room he was in and then, more clearly, the two people sitting in wheelchairs at the end of his bed.
‘Hello, sir,’ Knox said to Holland.
‘Ah, the sleeper awakes,’ Holland replied.
‘It’s about time,’ Bennett added.
‘I told you it wasn’t the end,’ Knox said, trying, and failing, to shift his weight. He didn’t know how long he’d been in this bed, propped up on pillows and pinned in place, but he guessed it had been a while.
‘That was before you got yourself shot,’ Bennett replied.
‘True. How long have I been out?’
‘Two days,’ Holland answered. ‘You spent most of Monday in surgery. The doctors decided to keep you sedated for twenty-four hours to make sure you didn’t undo any of their hard work straight away. They thought you might come round yesterday, but they had to make do with me instead.’
‘Sounds like a reasonable trade. What did I miss?’ Knox asked.
‘Rather a lot, as it happens.’
Holland recounted the events of the last two days, starting with the chaos that MI5 had been quietly plunged into when the police informed them what and who a team of paramedics had been called to the Richmond for on Monday morning.
Peterson was pronounced dead at the scene, but Knox and Bennett, who were still clinging onto life, were rushed to Guy’s for emergency surgery. Bennett was out of the operating theatre relatively quickly once her surgeon established that the bullet that had pierced her side had missed her vital organs. She was stitched up, given a blood transfusion, and sent to recovery.
Knox, however, took considerably longer to stabilise. The bullet Valera had shot into his chest had ricocheted off one of his ribs and come to a stop with its tip lodged in the wall of his left ventricle. It took his surgeon several hours to safely remove the bullet, repair the lining of his heart, assess the damage to his rib, and then take a look at his thigh. Luckily, the rib was cracked but not shattered, and the onyx shard had created a clean wound in his leg without slicing any important tendons. After enough rest an
d some light physiotherapy, the surgeons predicted Knox should make a full recovery.
Knox looked at his wrists, realising there were no handcuffs or straps on them. ‘How are the police treating Peterson’s death?’ he asked.
‘As an internal MI5 matter,’ Holland replied. ‘Thanks, in large part, to Miss Bennett.’
‘I wasn’t totally out of it,’ Bennett said. ‘I heard everything Peterson confessed, and told everyone I could as soon as I came round.’ She smiled at both men. ‘By Tuesday morning people were lining up to listen to me.’
‘Including myself,’ Holland said. ‘Whatever drug I’d been slipped finally wore off and I woke up at four in the morning on Tuesday, with no idea where I was or what was going on.’
‘That sounds like one hell of a sedative,’ Knox said.
‘We know the KGB have been inducing comas and staging fake deaths for years, but we haven’t heard of any cases of it lasting over a week. I may have set a record.’
‘I’ll bet White will want to run some tests on you.’
‘He’s already tried,’ Holland replied, a touch of irritation creeping into his voice. ‘But I have no desire to continue being someone’s guinea pig.’
Thinking about White reminded Knox of the other fear that had been driving him on. ‘Is Pipistrelle secure?’ he asked.
Holland nodded. ‘Now the conference delegates are leaving, the retrieval teams are clearing out our bugs. So far none of them have found anything to suggest the Russians – or anyone else – were listening in too. They’ve also disavowed Peterson.’
‘Hardly a surprise. What about Manning?’
‘He’s going to quietly stand down in a week or so, once I’ve been given the all-clear. He’ll probably be pensioned off with an OBE.’
It had been very quickly agreed to keep Holland’s miraculous recovery and Manning’s departure quiet until after the conference had ended to avoid any awkward questions. The last thing MI5 needed was to make public not only that it had been penetrated by the KGB, but also that their mole had ended up with unfettered access to all the Service’s intelligence and the complete trust of its freshly installed director general.
‘So you’re still DG?’ Knox asked.
‘Can you think of a reason I shouldn’t be?’ Holland replied.
‘No, sir,’ Knox replied, relieved that their shared secret was still safe. ‘What about me?’
‘You have Peterson’s mess to clear up once you’re discharged.’
Another wave of relief washed over Knox. In a few days he’d be back in Leconfield House, working with Holland again. Investigating Peterson’s crimes after his punishment had been dispensed wasn’t the usual way justice was served, but he could live with it.
‘I could use some help,’ Knox said to Bennett. ‘If you’re available.’
‘My fate is still being decided,’ she replied.
‘I’ve already told Finney she has a job waiting for her at Leconfield House if he doesn’t give her one.’
‘He should,’ Knox said. ‘She was right about everything.’
‘You’ll make me blush if you talk like that,’ Bennett said. ‘And I was wrong about plenty.’
‘Miss Bennett has more than proven her worth,’ Holland said. ‘No one else even had any idea who Irina Valera was. People should have paid attention to what she was saying a lot sooner.’
‘Speaking of Valera…’ Knox said.
‘She was on a plane to DC by lunch on Monday,’ Bennett said. ‘That I was right about,’ she added, smirking.
‘Shame.’ Knox’s voice took on a sharp tone. ‘I’d have liked to have continued our conversation.’
‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ Bennett said.
‘She shot me in the heart,’ Knox replied.
‘She was the one who told the receptionist at the Richmond to call the emergency services,’ Bennett replied, smiling again. ‘Technically, she saved your life.’
JULY 1962
CHAPTER 64
Mission control was buzzing with nervous energy. Dixon watched scientists and engineers rush between huge banks of whirring computers and the blinking control panels and screens they fed a constant stream of information to. Everyone around him was busy with some crucial job, but he knew he was basically just there to pad out the room.
It was almost a year to the day since he’d found himself sitting in a room in central London, straight off a red-eye from Washington, with little idea about why he’d just spent the night crossing the Atlantic.
Murphy had refused to tell him who he was supposed to be meeting despite him asking on the flight, in the taxi into the city, and as they’d climbed the several flights of narrow stairs that led up from the anonymous black-lacquered door just off Dover Street in Mayfair to their mysterious ap-pointment. There had been no one waiting to greet them. Murphy had produced a key to unlock the door on the street, then another one for the room at the top of the building.
It turned out Dixon had travelled three and a half thousand miles to meet a lady called Irina Valera. She’d arrived twenty minutes after they had. When she stepped into the room by herself, Murphy, for the first time, didn’t seem entirely in control of the situation.
‘Where’s Devereux?’ Murphy asked Valera, using Peterson’s alias.
‘He is no longer part of this arrangement,’ she replied. She didn’t offer any further explanation.
Murphy became even more confused when it became apparent that the woman who’d come to meet them wasn’t there to sell them some new type of clandestine listening technology, but something several orders of magnitude more valuable.
Valera described her breakthrough using the same analogy of her room that stretched around the world, at which point Dixon realised she might be the answer to most, if not all, of his problems. He asked her a string of technical questions and could tell from their short conversation that Valera was on the level – and that she was in a rush to do a deal.
Once he’d given his nod to Murphy, she laid down her terms. Her spread-spectrum code-division technology in exchange for a home in America, a job, and protection.
‘If we go back to the States and this thing checks out, we’ll give you a green card and all the work you can handle,’ Murphy said. ‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll go our separate ways on good terms.’
He was playing it cool, but now that he understood the full scope of what Valera was offering, Dixon could tell Murphy would have said anything to get her on a plane.
When they did get back to America, they realised just how valuable Valera was, and the impact of the events surrounding her escape from the Soviet Union. An entire naukograd had been put out of commission, and the KGB scientific directorate had lost its chief. The CIA had been handed a major advantage and it didn’t intend to squander it.
Dixon and Valera had made a good team, working together to bring her lab work to life in the real world, and slowly getting to know each other.
They’d spent months developing and refining Valera’s discovery into a fully fledged Earth-to-orbit communications system, secretly testing it in Corona satellite after satellite. They’d even included a version of it in John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule when he finally became the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7 six months ago.
Dixon had led the celebrations when the communications system took over control of Friendship 7 as Glenn briefly lost contact with ground control over his standard radio during his descent back to Earth. The official story was that Glenn had triumphantly piloted the Mercury capsule all the way to its splashdown site by himself, but as far as Dixon was concerned, his electronic co-pilot had been the real hero.
Suddenly Kennedy’s twin dreams of putting a man on the moon and advancing America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities so fast and so far that no one else would be able to catch them both seemed achievable. Dixon could relax at last after two years of constant stress. But his downtime didn’t last long. The president and the CIA were s
till waiting for him to come up with a way to hunt the Vietcong from space. And Valera, as Murphy had promised, was offered all the research projects she could handle.
Dixon had always been astonished by Valera’s seemingly limitless capacity for work. She was always the first in the lab in the morning and the last to leave at night. When he’d finally persuaded her to take a little break of her own and celebrate everything she’d achieved he understood why.
She told him about her years in Povenets B, growing up in Leningrad, and everything in her life that had been taken away from her, including her son. She talked about the old dream of her and Ledjo floating in a small boat on a calm lake, which she hoped would return every night when she fell asleep, but still hadn’t. And about the single physical memento she had – Ledjo’s small backpack – that had been lost when she’d been snatched from Stockholm. Her work was the only thing she had left.
It took a few weeks of phone calls, but Dixon managed to find the backpack. It had been given to the Swedish security service by the Hotel Reisen and filed away in evidence storage. They had no use for it now Valera was a long way from their jurisdiction and were more than happy to send it on. It was a small gesture, but Dixon was glad to see Valera produce a thin, brief smile when he returned it to her.
Now, she was about to unveil her latest world-changing piece of technology and Dixon was, as ever, behind in his work and chasing an elusive breakthrough. Half of him wanted to be back in his lab, but the other half didn’t want to miss out on what was about to happen.
So, he stood at the back of the room, waiting for Murphy to show up, and watching Valera move anxiously from panel to panel, surrounded by a cadre of assistants, checking every readout and making adjustment after adjustment to be sure everything would work perfectly when the big moment arrived.
Dixon hoped she felt some pride about everything she’d achieved since she’d come to America. But she didn’t.
Valera had felt something like relief when she reached Washington and wasn’t immediately arrested, but she had quickly realised that the United States wasn’t so different from the Soviet Union. She was still watched, still suspected, and still controlled. She was in the so-called land of the free, but she wasn’t. She’d been put to work at Langley straight away and even now she was called in for questioning whenever the CIA wanted to go over her life story again or check some new piece of intelligence about somewhere or something in Russia she’d never heard of.