A basic error of tradecraft, one that had cost him dear. Needless to say, Russian agents didn’t make such mistakes.
‘Get to work,’ Bezukhov said. ‘I expect results, Agent Petrov, and I expect them soon. And for pity’s sake, get a shave and a haircut. You look like one of the beatniks we used to send to the Gulag.’
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 he’d 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, Ingram’s 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 he’d forgotten he had. The laptop was loaded with a decryption program he’d 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, he’d 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 couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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. ‘You’ve 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 didn’t 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.
Yuri’s 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.
Ingram’s 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 didn’t 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 he’d snatched his regular phone instead of the burner he used to communicate with Grisha. He’d been so busy he hadn’t 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 Valentina’s last trips to Moscow, he’d failed to turn up to collect her.
Yuri knew he was guilty as charged. But Eloise’s vindictiveness had reached new heights. She couldn’t do this! Then again, Yuri thought angrily, maybe she could. Eloise’s 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. He’d been so focused on the cipher, he’d nearly forgotten that she was visiting for the next five days. He couldn’t 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 Yuri’s mind wasn’t 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
