The Factory (21 page)

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 traffic 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.

‘I'd feel a lot happier if I could solve the outstanding problem,' said Bell. The inquiry had become so bogged down that there were some days when Andrews didn't bother to come into the Factory at all any longer.

‘You'll find him, darling,' said Ann confidently. ‘I know you will.'

The following day Richard Axton sought a meeting.

‘So there is a link!' said the Director General. ‘A connection.'

‘Whatever that might be,' said Axton cautiously. ‘Davies, as he died, said Charles. Using that as the key – it was a one-time message pad again, incidentally – I've transcribed the message sent to London on the day Davies was shot to be: “Warn the Charles is blown.”'

‘It's connected,' insisted Bell. ‘It's got to be. So we know that our traitor is codenamed Charles and that presumably he's been warned that we are on to him. If only he knew how wrong that is!'

‘Perhaps he does. If he thought he was in serious danger, he'd have run,' pointed out Axton.

Bell nodded, agreeing. ‘So he knows he's still safe.'

‘Don't you think there's something odd, about that full message?' pressed Axton, the man of puzzles to whom everything was important.

‘
The
Charles,' picked out the Director General at once.

‘Yes,' said Axton. ‘That's not the way it would be written in English. There's no reason for
the
at all. And it's not Russian grammar, either.'

‘You mean it's not the codename of a person, after all?'

‘I don't know,' said Axton. ‘I don't know how to interpret it.'

The Director General sat quietly for several moments and then said: ‘I think I should know. I don't – I mean I can't think of it – but something in my mind tells me I should know!'

12

The Second Chance

The Director General was convinced that now, at last, he could find the traitor within the Factory: that he'd found the way to uncover him, at least. He was sure, he
knew,
that the intercepted Soviet message – Warn the Charles is blown – should have some significance to him: that it meant something. The problem was that Bell could not understand that significance. He felt like someone reaching out for an image reflected in a clear pool of water, trying to catch something shimmering in front of him which shattered into a thousand jumbled pieces the moment his fingers touched it, so that he lost the picture at the very moment it was becoming clear.

The clue had to be in something that had happened in the immediate past, something that had occurred during his personal search for the spy wrecking his organization. So where was it? Maybe it was linked to the failed traps he'd set, before calling in the outside investigators who remained as baffled as he was. Or maybe it was in one of the operations that had ended in disaster, the real indication that his department, the active branch of British overseas intelligence, had been penetrated by a Soviet mole eroding and destroying from inside, a cancer that couldn't be found or diagnosed.

He had to examine everything, then.

He had to go back to the absolute beginning, to the occasion it had all started a year ago. And scrutinize everything, review everything, until the reflected image remained intact when he reached out for it. Until, hopefully, he saw that proper picture.

So much, thought Bell, viewing the task before him. There had been so many disasters and so many mistakes, dragging the department of which he had once been so proud down into chaos until it had now reached the point where no one trusted anyone else, no one considered the person next to him a friend. Even less than a friend: it had become so bad that people who had worked and existed together for years no longer regarded their neighbours even as colleagues.