But he didnt.
Bezukhov shook his head. Before he knew it, he was carted off to Lubyanka for interrogation. Sadly for us, however, the clumsy fools who worked him over were a little overenthusiastic with their use of force. He expired before they were able to get much out of him.
Yuri felt sick. He tried not to visualise the scene too vividly, but couldnt shut off his imagination.
Before he died, the chief went on, he revealed knowledge of some highly sensitive information. And I do mean highly, he repeated for emphasis. We want to recover that information, and we believe the cipher is key to understanding how much he knew, who else might have been passed that information and how much damage might have been done to our security.
So long ago, Yuri said, frowning. How could it still be important?
The biggest secrets are like plutonium, Bezukhov replied. Their potency doesnt fade over time.
The chief let those words hang in the air for a moment, then yanked open a drawer of his desk. As you probably know, the old KGB archives on dissidents and enemy spies detained during the Cold War were never destroyed after the fall of the Soviet regime. They were simply hustled away to a new location and now reside inside a high-security underground vault, one to which I happen to have access. Ive examined the contents of Ingrams file and found something that may be of value to us. Ingram was carrying these items the night he was captured.
Bezukhov took a packet from the drawer and slid it across the desk towards Yuri. Yuri hesitated, looked inside, then glanced quizzically up at the chief.
Tuning forks, Bezukhov said. Part of his cover. Never mind those. Its the book Im interested in.
The paperback was an old mid-fifties edition of Lucky Jim by the English novelist Kingsley Amis, yellowed by decades spent in secret government storage.
Certain pages of the book appear to have been very well thumbed, Bezukhov said. You know what that means.
Yuri did indeed. Old-fashioned ciphers often made use of random phrases and passages from books, likewise chosen at random and known only to the codemaker and the codebreaker. Without the book, it could be literally impossible to decipher the encrypted message. Yuri shook his head. What a fool the British spy had been, to be caught with it. A basic error of tradecraft, one that had cost him dear. Needless to say, Russian agents didnt make such mistakes.
Get to work, Bezukhov said. I expect results, Agent Petrov, and I expect them soon. And for pitys sake, get a shave and a haircut. You look like one of the beatniks we used to send to the Gulag.
Chapter 3
Yuri returned to his dingy apartment, his nerves rattled by the idea that the intelligence services could just scoop him up and put him back to work like he was one of their mindless, unquestioning drones. But what choice had he, other than to do their bidding?
And if he was perfectly honest with himself, a tiny part of him was thrilled to be working on the cipher. For so long, he had lacked any sense of purpose. This was the stuff he did best, and he was determined to crack it. Not just to please Bezukhov, but to prove to himself that he still had what it took.
First impressions had been right: the cipher was indeed like nothing else hed encountered before. It was like a modern-day locksmith suddenly faced with picking some antiquated and fiendishly complex device from ancient China or Egypt. Yuri carried it over to the cluttered work table in the corner of his tiny living room. With a cup of coffee at his right elbow, Ingrams copy of Lucky Jim at his left and the cipher, notepad, pen and his trusty laptop in front of him, he got down to his task with an energy hed forgotten he had. The laptop was loaded with a decryption program hed designed himself, called CAESAR. But, just like in the good old days, technology would be no substitute for sheer brainwork. Man, not machine, would be doing most of the heavy lifting.
The thing was a modified Polybius square with straddling bipartite monoalphabetic substitution, superenciphered by double transposition. In short, it was a tough little bastard to crack. Without the yellowed, dog-eared old book, hed have been lost. Somewhere within its pages was the key to whatever message the British spy had been trying to pass to his colleagues. He was damned if he couldnt find it.
Yuri worked all night. And all of the next day. And all of the following night as well. He worked until he was exhausted, skipping meals, snoozing for short periods at the desk, reluctant to leave his chair even for toilet breaks. He worked until the whole room was littered with screwed-up sheets of paper covered in gobbledegook.
But he got it. Finally, as the first streaks of dawn were breaking on the third day, with just a little help from CAESAR, he got it.
When the computer finally spat out the finished decryption, Yuri fell back in his chair and stared at the screen for a long time. The decoded message was short. The bottom lines were a set of geo coordinates. The top line consisted of just five words, in English. OPERATION PUPPET MASTER IS REAL.
Those five words couldnt have hit Yuri harder if they had been bullets fired from a high-powered rifle.
Operation Puppet Master was the translation of the Russian Oперaция кукольныи мaстер, and one of the great mythical beasts in the pantheon of conspiracy theory dating back to Cold War times. On internet forums and all across the blogosphere, debate still raged among paranoid nutjobs and serious investigators alike over whether the highly classified Soviet project had ever been more than a wild fantasy. He and Grisha had talked about it often. While Grisha was an avid believer, of course, Yuri had been privately sceptical: file under Giant Alien Lizards.
Suddenly that scepticism had been blown to smithereens. Youve got to be fucking kidding me, he breathed.
The bastards had actually been developing this stuff all along? It was real?
Not only real, but worrying enough, apparently, to have drawn the attention of SIS, the British Intelligence Service, precursor to MI6, so long ago. Enough of a threat for the likes of Captain Leonard Ingram to risk and lose his life over. Things didnt get more real than that.
Yuri fed the geo coordinates into Google and discovered that they pointed to a location right here, in Moscow. It was obvious what he had to do next.
Yuris car was an ancient Volkswagen that wheezed and rattled and grew lighter each year as more parts dropped off. Traffic was mercifully sparse at that time of morning, and the banger was able to reach its destination without expiring. The area was in the east of the city, part of the Novogireyevo district where the KGB had apprehended the British spy back in 57. The coordinates led Yuri to a fenced-off row of old Soviet-era warehouses that must have been disused even then, now decades overdue for demolition.
Ingrams decoded directions were amazingly precise. Behind a stack of rusty, jagged metal and empty crates, Yuri came across the tobacco tin exactly where the spy had left it all those years ago. He hustled back to his car to open it. The round pocket-sized tin was red with rust on the outside, but when he used a coin to pop the lid he found the airtight seal still intact, opening with a little hiss of stale air trapped in there since 1957.
Ingrams decoded directions were amazingly precise. Behind a stack of rusty, jagged metal and empty crates, Yuri came across the tobacco tin exactly where the spy had left it all those years ago. He hustled back to his car to open it. The round pocket-sized tin was red with rust on the outside, but when he used a coin to pop the lid he found the airtight seal still intact, opening with a little hiss of stale air trapped in there since 1957.
Inside the tin was a roll of microfilm, then the summit of technology, nowadays easily scanned and read on a home computer. The other item left Yuri breathless. He peeled away the square of oiled cloth in which it had been wrapped, and let the thing roll into the cupped palm of his hand, careful not to drop it. It was only a few millimetres in length, oblong-shaped and rounded at both ends like a medicine capsule, but made of shiny metal that was smooth and cold to the touch. If it was what Yuri thought it was, it was beyond sensational. Its discovery could change everything. Never mind myths and speculation: here, for the first time, was the hard physical evidence that could blow the lid right off the whole conspiracy.
No wonder Bezukhov and his people didnt want this coming out. Like plutonium, the chief had said. The secret was as explosive now as it had been sixty years ago. Maybe even more so. What were these bastards still up to? How much more advanced must the technology be today? It was a terrifying thought.
He had to tell Grisha about this. Grisha would know what to do.
Yuri fished out his mobile, then swore as he realised that in his hurry to leave the apartment hed snatched his regular phone instead of the burner he used to communicate with Grisha. Hed been so busy he hadnt checked his emails the last two days and now there was one waiting there from Eloise, his ex-wife.
Bitch! he yelled out loud when he read it.
In her latest scheme against him, Eloise was now threatening to prevent future visits from their daughter and ending his custody rights, on grounds of poor parenting. Specifically, because for three out of five of Valentinas last trips to Moscow, hed failed to turn up to collect her.
Yuri knew he was guilty as charged. But Eloises vindictiveness had reached new heights. She couldnt do this! Then again, Yuri thought angrily, maybe she could. Eloises uncle, whom Yuri had always despised, had all the money and power in the world. He was probably a lizard person, too.
The email reminded Yuri that he was due to pick Valentina up at the airport later that day. Hed been so focused on the cipher, hed nearly forgotten that she was visiting for the next five days. He couldnt afford another no-show, in case that harpy of a mother of hers made good on her legal threat. The idea of not seeing his beloved kid again for a long time upset him enormously.
As if Yuris mind wasnt already overloaded with stress right now. What was he going to do about his discovery? Forcing himself to think logically, he realised his options were few. If he delivered the decryption and the contents of the tin back to Bezukhov, hed be signing his own death warrant. People who knew too much were made to disappear just as efficiently as in the days of the KGB. Maybe even more so. But if Yuri chose to deny Bezukhov his prize, he was a marked man. Theyd hunt him to the ends of the earth until they found him and put a bullet in his skull.
With shaking hands, Yuri replaced the precious items in the tin, screwed it tightly shut and was about to start the car when his phone rang.
Well? Bezukhovs voice rumbled in his ear. Any progress? Its been days.
Its you, chief, Yuri said, thinking furiously. It was decision time. Well, I, uh, you see
I told you I expected results.
And youll get them. I just need more time, thats all.
Whats taking so damn long?
Its been tougher to decipher than I expected. Ill get there, trust me.
Bezukhov growled a series of dire warnings about what would happen if he didnt, and soon, and then hung up.
Yuri started his engine with a rattle and a puff of blue smoke, and sped off. The thought of telling his secret to Grisha terrified him almost as much as letting Bezukhov have it. Grisha would waste no time plastering it all over the internet, and you didnt need to be a genius to figure out what would happen next.
Yuri couldnt wait to see what was on the microfilm, the final confirmation as if any were needed. Rushing back to his dingy apartment as fast as his jalopy would carry him, he dived into his desk chair and fired up his PC and scanner. The process of scanning the microfilm was a simple but time-consuming one, for such a small quantity of information. What in the fifties would take up a whole roll of microfilm now used only the tiniest amount of digital storage. But the data itself was even more astonishing than Yuri had anticipated. Everything was in Russian, officially marked with the stamp of a Soviet-era intelligence unit hed never even heard of. It comprised a mind-boggling collection of detailed instructions and plans, blueprints, case studies and more. Yuri didnt know whether to laugh out loud, or whimper in dread. He ended up doing both.
Yuri carefully encrypted the file, stored it on a flash drive that he would keep on his person at all times, and erased all trace of it from his computer. Even just walking around the apartment, he felt as though he was carrying a megaton warhead in his pocket.
At times like these, you need the counsel of an especially wise friend to guide you. Yuri swallowed down some coffee and a stale bagel, then ran back to his car and headed to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street to seek the advice of the wisest friend anyone could wish for, even if He wasnt always forthcoming with His reply. A while later, Yuri emerged from the church feeling somewhat let down; but there was little time to agonise over it, as he then had to scoot over to the airport in time to pick up Valentina.
Yuris twelve-year-old daughter was his pride and joy. So full of light and sharp intelligence, she almost made him forget his predicament as they spent the first day of her visit together. Hed promised her a super-fun time, and it was, exploring the parks, visiting the zoo, cooking lunch together, laughing at Valentinas hilarious impressions of her teachers, telling jokes, watching a goofy DVD. By evening, Yuri had managed to relax somewhat, and decided what to do. He called Grisha on his burner, but his friend didnt pick up. Drunk again, no doubt, or working double shifts warning the world of the evil plots being hatched against them.
The following day still no reply from Grisha and mercifully no more calls from Bezukhov, though that was just a question of time Yuri took Valentina out for lunch. Nothing expensive, because he had no money. Over a McChicken sandwich meal, conversing in Dutch as they generally did together out of habit from their Amsterdam days, he discreetly raised the subject of her mothers lawyer. Valentina appeared not to know anything about Eloises dirty little schemes, which was just as well. Yuri tried to console himself that it was just an idle threat. Eloise was well known for her manipulative ways, and this kind of emotional blackmail was not beneath her.
It was as they were walking home after lunch that Yuri passed a newsstand, did a double-take at something hed glimpsed on the front page of the latest edition of Metro Moscow, and went rushing over to buy a copy.
He had to blink several times before he was sure he wasnt dreaming.