After this encounter in Moscow I didn’t hear from Dimitri Grenyov for over four years. Back in London I set about refreshing my knowledge of physics
and in particular the esoteric ideas of relativity combined with quantum theory that lay at the heart of what Grenyov had talked about – the concept of quantum gravity.
I attended seminars at my alma mater, Trinity, Cambridge; I subscribed to
Nature
and the
Journal of Theoretical Physics
; I did as much as I could to use my
contacts in British Intelligence to learn whatever I could concerning Einstein’s attempted test in 1937.
Although this effort meant I brushed up on my modern physics – which came as a welcome diversion from low-key espionage, rationing and a drab, shared office five days a
week – it produced nothing of value in my quest. I longed to share my fascination with others. I always was a great believer in the adage that two heads are better than one, but of course I
could not breathe a word of what Grenyov had told me. And all the time the word ‘Pioneer’ stuck in my mind, but it meant no more to me than it had the day the Russian scientist had
half-whispered it to me over a cafe table in Moscow.
Two years after my trip to Russia, I was promoted to the higher ranks of the service and a year after that, in November 1952, I was invited to Washington for a joint services
conference with the CIA. It was an important step and it increased my profile with my unofficial employer – the Kremlin. I did my best to extract anything useful from the visit, but the Yanks
were in a state of fevered paranoia. The Rosenbergs were in jail and little over six months from execution. I have to admit, the Zeitgeist affected me. I often felt as though I were treading a very
dangerous path, that the risk was not worth the taking. But another voice in my head kept telling me that I had already gone too far.
Then, on my second visit to Washington, in March 1953, news broke that Stalin had died. I don’t know why I was so shocked, but I was. He was an old man, he drank too
much and was in bad health, but Stalin? Dead? Impossible, surely?
Lord only knows what the full extent of the repercussions were from this singular death. People died, others were reprieved, policies changed, plans scrapped, new ideas
proposed, fresh battles begun, old victors defeated, young ones invited to the fray. And, unknown to almost anyone aside from those directly involved, as Georgy Malenkov grabbed the reins of
political power, Dimitri Grenyov’s beloved project to do what Einstein had failed to achieve – the construction of a quantum gravity shield – was shut down, the Movlovyl Research
Base decommissioned.
I did not learn of this until June that year; some three months after it happened. I received a letter from Grenyov that he had somehow managed to slip past the censors and
the KGB. I later discovered that to get it to me had required calling in favours from the last remaining friends he had in any position of power or influence.
In the letter Grenyov explained that his life had been turned upside down. The new leadership had decided to institute cutbacks in some areas of scientific research and divert
money into other projects. Anything Stalin had been particularly supportive of was axed unceremoniously. This meant his project to construct a force shield had been put in the firing line early. At
the end of the letter, Grenyov begged me to find my way to Moscow so that we might meet and talk again. He had something very important he wished to tell me.
But this was no easy task. Our countries had few diplomatic ties officially; and although I had been promoted again in the spring of 1953, I was not exactly a mover or shaker.
I could not even risk replying to Grenyov’s missive, even to tell him there was almost no chance I could see him. And, of course, there was no way he could risk writing with his
secret.
But luck . . . hah! There are two very distinct sides to the concept of luck, are there not? Luck of a black hue, I now know, came my way. Keen to find out whatever they could
about the new regime in the Kremlin, my superiors wanted to send a new man to Moscow. Thanks to the intelligence grapevine, my name was mooted because I had done well on my previous
information-gathering mission in the guise of a British government trade negotiator years before. So, come November 1953, I was once more in Moscow.
The machinations of my work in an official capacity have nothing to do with this story and are indeed pretty dull, but of course I had a second, covert purpose in being there.
During a break in discussions with a pair of junior trade and farming ministers concerning tractor parts and strawberry quotas, I managed to slip away unnoticed to meet Dimitri Grenyov at our
previous rendezvous, where again we drank coffee and talked.
The four and a half years since our first visit there together had not been kind to Grenyov. His skin was even pastier than I had remembered it to be, and his wisps of hair
lay thinner on his scalp. When he spoke, he sounded weary, as though it were the middle of the night.
‘It is good to see you again my young friend.’ He shook my hand and indicated we should sit.
In a few minutes it was almost as though the years had been rolled back. The coffee pot stood on the table, hot cups at our fingers, an icy breeze coming from the north-west,
patches of sunshine spread out upon ice across the pavement close to the edge of the restaurant forecourt where we sat.
‘Do you wish to tell me what has happened?’ I asked after a long silence.
‘It’s hard to know where to start, Michael.’
I let it go and simply waited for the scientist to find the words he wished to use; it would not do for me to push or persuade.
‘As I told you in my letter, they have closed down the project.’ He took a deep breath and I could see a flash of anger.
‘I am sorry.’
He waved a hand in the air. ‘Thank you, Michael, but we are beyond words now.’
I felt a ripple of sudden anxiety. ‘What do you mean by that, Dimitri?’
He glanced around and leaned forward. ‘In a way, I have been fortunate,’ he began. ‘Some of my colleagues in other departments at the Academy have simply
vanished. They were in their labs one day, then . . .’ He clicked his fingers silently in the air between us. ‘But actually I have been doubly lucky. I am still here, assigned to new,
admittedly very dull work, but . . .’ he said, lowering his voice a dozen decibels, ‘I also had some warning that the authorities were about to shut down my
experiments.’
I looked at him slightly confused and then realized what he meant.
‘Yes,’ Grenyov whispered. ‘Two hours. Not long, but enough. I have copies of all the important research, and I have the Kessler Document.’
I shook my head slowly. ‘You are a brave man, Dimitri.’
‘A desperate man, Michael. I was drawing close, you see. I was on the right path. Six months, that’s all I needed, six damn months, and they shut me down.’
His face was contorted with fury. He looked around him again. ‘I could not throw away my work, the chance to make the discovery of the century . . . Could I?’
‘OK, but what do you plan to do with it?’
He drew back and drank some coffee. I watched his Adam’s apple bob. Returning the mug to the table, he tilted his head to one side. ‘I plan to get it to the
Americans.’
‘What!’ I rubbed a hand over my mouth and glanced around nervously. Part of me wanted to get up, walk away and never look back, but a more powerful aspect of my
mind rooted me to my chair.
Grenyov broke into a smile, the first I had seen from him in four and a half years. ‘Why so shocked, Michael? What would you do?’
‘The Americans, Dimitri?’
‘You and I both know there is a higher calling than serving one’s country. You of all people know this.’
And for a moment, he threw me. What did I feel? I could not refute the man, but I felt a pang. What was it? Guilt? Shame? I can admit it now, it was a little of each. But then
my intellect took command pushing away anything sentimental or emotional. There was no room for those things now, not in the world in which I lived.
‘You’re going to give them your secrets?’
‘I plan to take the secrets to them. They will have greater resources than we ever had here, better than the Nazis. There’s even a chance they know enough to
decipher the Kessler Document. Einstein knew Kessler, remember. I intend on working closely with Einstein.’
I must have looked horrified because Grenyov paused as he went to speak. He drew in a breath and glanced around the terrace. The other people who had been out there were
leaving.
‘How on earth are you going to do that?’ I hissed.
‘That’s where you come in, Michael. I need you to organize it.’
I simply stared at him, lost for words.
‘You are on the inside. You have contacts in Washington. Wouldn’t your people and the Americans grab the chance with both hands? Wouldn’t it impress your
superiors?’
‘Well, yes, but . . .’
‘Why any buts, Michael? Is it not obviously a perfect plan? You get me and what I know to America. They obtain a secret lost over sixteen years ago. You receive a pat on
the back, perhaps another promotion.’
He had a glint in his eye and his voice was now perfectly calm.
‘But don’t you think it would be a tad difficult?’
Grenyov was shaking his head and smiling. ‘Nothing worth doing is easy, my friend.’
‘Oh please, save the clichés.’ I felt suddenly angry. How dare this man bring me into his crazy plans? Did I deserve this? Wasn’t my life already
complicated enough?
Grenyov drew back in his chair and eyed me dispassionately. ‘Perhaps I have misjudged you.’ He started to rise. ‘Forgive me.’
I let him turn and start for the path beside the terrace. Then I got up from the table. By the time I caught up with him my shock had evaporated and I pulled alongside him as
he strode quickly towards Red Square. ‘Dimitri, wait,’ I said and tugged on his arm.
He stopped and whirled on me. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ I replied and held his eyes for a second. It started to snow, huge feathery flakes drifting down from the leaden sky.
‘I have tried to think through the alternatives.’ He looked into my eyes and I had the sense that he was already wondering who else he could turn to.
‘Fine, Dimitri,’ I said. ‘You just surprised me back there. I didn’t . . . well, I didn’t expect that. What do you say we walk and you tell me
how you think this could work?’
On the plane back to Croydon Airport I came to the conclusion that I would hand over what I had learned to my superiors and that they would assign tasks to the appropriate
departments, contact the Yanks, and that would be the last I would hear of it.
I could not have been more wrong. Within forty-eight hours of arriving in London I was flying to Washington for a rigorous debriefing. Forty-eight hours after that I was
assigned as chief liaison officer for what was quickly dubbed ‘Operation Retrieval’.
It sounds glamorous, but it really wasn’t. My unenviable task was to plan and implement getting Dimitri Grenyov and his invaluable information out of Russia.
I learned very quickly that for all the surface palliness and talk of ‘cousins across the pond’ there was almost no mutual trust between London and Washington. We,
that is, MI6, had not passed on the knowledge of Grenyov’s work out of gentlemanliness; it was simply that the Americans had done a lot of the ground work and that Einstein, the chief
architect of applying quantum gravity to creating a force shield, still lived and worked in Princeton. Reports indicated that the great man was not the figure of genius he once was and that many of
his colleagues believed he was messing around with flaky notions beyond what might be considered ‘empirical science’. But then other scientists worked on the principle that an ailing
and unfocused Einstein was worth a dozen lesser physicists.
The upshot was that we gave the CIA the nod, they got me over to Washington, grilled me . . . politely, and then refused to share anything more they learned about Grenyov and
Einstein. The only reason they had me assigned to the operation was that Grenyov knew me and would not have trusted anyone else.
Communication via letter was impossible of course; telegram or telex were out of the question and telephones were assumed to be bugged and unusable. The only thing we could do
was to contrive another plausible excuse for me to return to Moscow and then to make personal contact with Grenyov.
It took two months, during which time there was no contact between Dimitri and me. Indeed, I had no idea what progress was being made in getting me to Russia. In the event, I
was given just eight hours’ warning that everything had been arranged and I was booked onto a BOAC flight.
It was February 1954. Croydon Airport looked utterly desolate and I felt only anxiety as I boarded the Comet. A mere four weeks had passed since a plane identical to this one
had broken up on take-off from Rome Airport. I thought I was used to flying, but I was jumpy the whole way, first to Paris, then Copenhagen and on the final leg to Moscow. It was only later as I
dived into the vodka in my hotel room that I realized my nerves were shot, not just through fear of flying, more important was my growing unease with the course my life was taking. I had started
out in purity, working for my country. Then I had taken the leap and the money, convincing myself that I was motivated solely by integrity and by political conviction. Now, here I was drawn into a
complex intrigue that was way out of my league. I resolved that when this operation was over I would say goodbye to my Russian paymasters and keep my head down.