Tim Glister: Red Corona

This conclusion made sense to Manning’s superiors, but not to Knox.

Honeytraps were a favourite KGB tactic for keeping Russia’s enemies on their toes. But Knox didn’t know of any instance when an aborted trap had resulted in the death of the agent involved. They usually just faded away, disappearing overnight to pop up again somewhere else with a different identity and new deal to make. The only reason Knox could think the Soviets would have for killing Kuznetsov was if he really was a defector.

Manning’s claim that all his information was false also didn’t ring true to Knox. The best chicken feed always had at least some truth mixed in with it. Working in counter-intelligence, Manning of all people would know this.

To Knox, Manning’s insistence that he should be the one to run the Kuznetsov case didn’t look like healthy ambition and dedication to duty. It looked like someone acting very swiftly to remove a threat.

None of this amounted to hard proof that Manning was secretly working for the Russians, but Knox couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility. He’d looked back through Manning’s record again with different eyes. Suddenly all the little mistakes looked like part of a much larger pattern. He’d started to see connections between events separated by years, and Manning’s whole career turned into a grand narrative of subtle manipulations.

Knox became convinced that Manning had played a very long, very calculated game. And now it felt like he was playing one with Knox. He knew Manning wouldn’t have dangled the carrot of finally finding a solid link between him and Russia without being able to pull it away whenever he wanted. But Knox was determined to grab it before he did.

He needed to move fast, because he knew the longer Manning was acting director general the harder it would be to get him thrown out of Leconfield House, even with evidence that he was a traitor of the highest order. It was also very likely Manning had sent his own inquisitor hunting through Knox’s records for a reason to get rid of him permanently. And if they looked closely enough they’d find one. Because in his files was the secret of why he hadn’t shown up at Holland’s house for dinner on Sunday. The old deep secret that bound Knox and Holland together. The secret that Knox knew could so easily be twisted to make it look like he was the traitor in MI5’s midst.

Another morning in Povenets B, another relentless sequence of sirens. But this morning Valera wasn’t running late. She was early. By the third siren, she’d already hurried Ledjo out of the house and halfway to school.

Today, Valera had dressed in a dull brown blouse and the same pair of old, worn trousers she wore almost every day, and Ledjo had a small, bright red neckerchief under his white collar. This short length of fabric was the symbol of the Young Pioneers, the Soviet Union’s mass youth organisation. Technically, Ledjo was three years too young to join the Young Pioneers but Zukolev had made membership mandatory for every child in Povenets B. Young Pioneer neckerchiefs were also technically supposed to be a neatly folded triangle of plain red fabric, but Ledjo’s had recently been part of the right sleeve of one of Valera’s few brighter shirts, which she had sacrificed for her son’s happiness. From a distance it looked plain, but up close it was an abstract pattern of intermingling triangles and squares.

Young Pioneer day was Ledjo’s favourite day of the week, and he would normally be pulling on his mother’s arm to get to school as early as possible. But today he struggled to keep up with her. He kept tugging on her hand to get her to slow down, but it didn’t work.

When they reached the school gates a full twenty minutes before the fourth siren, Ledjo decided it was time for his own small rebellion against Povenets B’s draconian rules.

He let go of Valera’s hand, stepped in front of her, and said, very loudly, ‘Goodbye, Mama.’

His voice snapped Valera out of the swirling thoughts about radio waves and rake receivers that had consumed her all night. She looked down at him, really seeing him and the tears threatening the corners of his eyes properly for the first time that day.

‘Oh, Pikku, I’m so sorry.’ She opened her arms, and Ledjo rushed straight into them, his pout instantly dissolving. ‘I’ve been very bad,’ she said to the top of his head, ‘but I’ll make up for it. I think today is going to be a great day.’ She kneeled down, holding Ledjo out in front of her. ‘Be a good boy. I love you.’

‘I love you too, Mama.’

Valera smiled, turned him round, and gave him a gentle shove to start him running through the gates.

As soon as he was inside the school, she turned away, letting herself get lost in her thoughts again. She ignored the other mothers with their plaited hair and children in perfect neckerchiefs passing her on their way to school, and the men in overalls rushing to deal with the latest problem at the power plant.

Valera would never say luck had played much of a part in her life. But she had been fortunate that her natural aptitude for physics had been spotted late.

When the siege of Leningrad ended, what remained of the city’s population hoped their liberation would be cause for a national celebration. It wasn’t. Stalin had never liked Leningrad or its people, and as the city began to rebuild, he worried about the influence its new generation of leaders was starting to wield. The Soviet Union could only have one seat of power – Moscow – and one unassailable leader – Josef Stalin.

Five years after the city was decimated by the siege, it was purged. The mayor was executed, two hundred city officials were sentenced to hard labour in the Siberian gulags, and two thousand public figures, including industry leaders, scientists, and university professors, were deemed to be anti-Soviet agitators and exiled from the city. By then Valera had become a junior member of the physics faculty at Andrei Zhdanov University. As a survivor of the siege and the daughter of an acknowledged anti-Soviet intellectual, she naturally fell under suspicion. But one thing saved her life. To make the purge as efficient as possible, an arbitrary combination of age and rank was used to decide who posed a threat. Valera was too young and too junior.

She suddenly had the run of Andrei Zhdanov’s labs, with no old intellectuals blocking or belittling her. Then, with Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s political thaw, her superiors began to return from the Siberian wilderness, and she was back to begging for respect. So, when the GRU agent approached her with the offer of moving to Povenets B, it wasn’t just fleeing the penury of life in Leningrad that enticed her, but escaping the prejudice of academia as well. But Povenets B had just been another kind of cage. And not even a gilded one.

Valera dreamed of a different life, when she was awake and when she was asleep. Almost every night since Ledjo had been born she’d dreamed about the two of them in a small rowing boat, floating in the middle of a calm lake. The details of the dream changed over time – sometimes it was winter and they were bundled up, surrounded by distant, snowy peaks, other times it was summer and she could hear the far rustling of reeds and grassy fields – but the feeling was always the same: freedom.

With the promise of a new life in Povenets B, it felt like her dream might come true at last. She imagined lazy summer days on Lake Onega, fishing for their supper, or long nights curled up in front of a fire, reading stories together like she’d done with her father. None of that had happened. Life in the naukograd was the same, day after grinding day. But last night her dream was the most intense it had ever been. The scenery constantly changed, mountains rising and falling as the sky moved through hues of blue, yellow, and pink, and the sound of Ledjo’s laughter echoed across the water.