Tim Glister: Red Corona

‘You also have a personal interest in finding the solution to this little puzzle,’ Manning said.

‘I do?’ Knox asked.

‘I know you think I’m working for the Russians.’

Knox didn’t rise to Manning’s bait. But he also didn’t deny his accusation. Knox had a short list of possible moles operating at the highest level of MI5 – people who would have enough access to sensitive information to compromise the Service, and enough power to act without scrutiny and cover their tracks – and Manning was at the top of it.

‘It’s a natural conclusion to reach,’ Manning continued. ‘Particularly with my rather unconventional elevation to DG.’

‘It’s one possible conclusion,’ Knox replied, eliciting a thin smile from Manning.

‘And this,’ Manning said, gesturing around him, ‘bears all the marks of a KGB hit squad.’

Knox had to concede that what he’d seen so far – the lack of forced entry or disturbance, and the neatness of the bodies – fitted the Soviet security agency’s modus operandi.

‘For all we know,’ Manning continued, ‘they’re quietly up to things like this all over the city. Lord knows they’re enjoying keeping us on our toes at the moment, sending that cosmonaut of theirs to take photos with the PM.’

While Knox was being questioned about Holland in Leconfield House, Major Yuri Gagarin, the first human to slip the surly bonds of Earth and successfully orbit the planet in the Russian Vostok 3KA space capsule, was being entertained by Macmillan at the end of a highly publicised trip to London. It had been a coup for Russia, and a very large headache for MI5 and the Metropolitan Police.

Manning pulled his hands out of his pockets and made a brief, ineffective show of patting them back into place.

‘The point is,’ he said, ‘if it is the Russians behind all this, you’ll do your damnedest to find a connection to me, and when you can’t this mole hunt can be put to bed and we’ll all be able to get on with our jobs.’

And with that, Manning made his way out of the flat, trailed by Peterson. He paused briefly at the front door, turning back and looking at Knox across the bodies.

‘I’m throwing you a bone, Richard,’ he said. ‘Possibly your last one.’

Irina Valera was running late. She knew she was late because by the time she reached the gates of her son Ledjo’s school, he was the only child left waiting to be collected.

When Ledjo saw his mother finally arrive, he quietly walked across the small concrete playground to her and, saying nothing, held out his hand for her to take. It might have looked like the six-year-old was so angry he was giving his mother the silent treatment. But he wasn’t. He was just obeying one of the many rules of life in Povenets B.

Valera and Ledjo walked in shared silence, hand in hand, down the wide tarmac strip that doubled as road and pavement, and stretched from the centre of town to the small bungalow they called home. The buildings changed the closer they got, becoming more uniform until each one was identical to the last. The outskirts of Povenets B were made up of row after row of single-storey homes, with clapboard walls, flat shingle roofs, and five metres of empty scrub between them. Beyond the outermost row of bungalows stood two three-metre high fences, topped with barbed wire and patrolled day and night to stop anyone from entering or leaving.

Nestled in thick forest at the top of Lake Onega in the semi-autonomous region of Karelia near the Finnish border, Povenets B wasn’t on any maps. It was so secret it hadn’t even been found by the stray street dogs that were a permanent feature of towns and villages all over Russia. And if Povenets B looked like an internment camp, it was because that’s exactly what it had been. And in Valera’s mind it still was.

Povenets B had started life as a prison, a remote set of grey huts where members of the Karelian population who hadn’t sufficiently demonstrated their commitment to the Soviet cause were indefinitely interred. Since then it had grown in fits and starts. Larger, equally grey slabs of buildings were hastily erected; drab, prefabricated housing extended the original grid of prison blocks; basic roads were laid. Then the fence had gone up.

Povenets B was now a naukograd , a science city closed off from the outside world and administered by the GRU, the Soviet Union’s foreign military intelligence directorate.

As World War Two had given way to the Cold War, all sensitive state-sponsored operations like advanced scientific research, nuclear development, and weapons testing had been moved to secure locations across the Soviet Union. Some closed cities were little more than a factory with a few cabins for housing workers; others were entire cities, either built almost from scratch, like Povenets B, or simply redesignated, like Perm or Vladivostok, with fences and sentry posts surrounding them seemingly overnight.

Three years ago a member of the GRU had approached Valera outside Andrei Zhdanov University in Leningrad and made her the same offer that had been extended to a select group of academics across the country – to leave her low salary and cold apartment for the higher standards of living and unlimited research budgets of a naukograd . Facing another bitter winter in a draughty, underheated two-room home at the top of a housing block that somehow managed to bear the brunt of winds from the Baltic and the Arctic, Valera decided she couldn’t refuse. Along with fifty other families, she and Ledjo moved to Povenets B. She soon regretted her decision.

A quarter of the homes in Povenets B were old prison barracks, and the rest had been built in the same utilitarian style. Valera and Ledjo’s bungalow was one of the prefabricated additions. It had looked solid enough when they’d first arrived, but a few Karelian winters had revealed just how fragile it was. The walls were paper-thin, wind crept between the door and windows, and the water pipes that had been left running along the outside of it were bent and rusted from exposure.

There was a school for Ledjo, but so few teachers that all the children were taught together. There was no hospital, and only one food shop, which, depending on the day, might or might not be stocked.

All naukograds were expected to generate their own energy, a necessity both for security and because they tended to be built away from established supply lines. Povenets B’s power plant was by far its largest building. It was three storeys of dark concrete, patterned by stains from months of sun and more of ice; black, painted pipes that were big enough for a full-grown man to walk through and which seemed to knot through each other; and a tall, stretched-out cooling tower that for much of the day cast a deep shadow on the smaller structures next to it, including the school.

Valera had never understood why Povenets B’s planners had put these two buildings next to each other. There was some kind of minor emergency at the plant every day, and power cuts were a regular occurrence. But whenever she voiced her concerns she was informed that infrastructure policy was none of her concern.

Major Yuri Zukolev, the GRU administrator in charge of Povenets B, treated the city like a medieval fiefdom, and its scientists and their families as his personal serfs. Povenets B was a long way from Moscow and the prying eyes of Zukolev’s superiors, and as long as he kept the peace, didn’t ask for too much money, and delivered regular, positive progress reports, he was mostly left to run the naukograd as he saw fit. His chosen methods involved regimenting daily life down to half-hour intervals, restricting the supply of food to encourage obedience, and constantly demanding that the scientists under his care produced more results with fewer resources.