Tim Glister: Red Corona

‘Including myself,’ Holland said. ‘Whatever drug I’d been slipped finally wore off and I woke up at four in the morning on Tuesday, with no idea where I was or what was going on.’

‘That sounds like one hell of a sedative,’ Knox said.

‘We know the KGB have been inducing comas and staging fake deaths for years, but we haven’t heard of any cases of it lasting over a week. I may have set a record.’

‘I’ll bet White will want to run some tests on you.’

‘He’s already tried,’ Holland replied, a touch of irritation creeping into his voice. ‘But I have no desire to continue being someone’s guinea pig.’

Thinking about White reminded Knox of the other fear that had been driving him on. ‘Is Pipistrelle secure?’ he asked.

Holland nodded. ‘Now the conference delegates are leaving, the retrieval teams are clearing out our bugs. So far none of them have found anything to suggest the Russians – or anyone else – were listening in too. They’ve also disavowed Peterson.’

‘Hardly a surprise. What about Manning?’

‘He’s going to quietly stand down in a week or so, once I’ve been given the all-clear. He’ll probably be pensioned off with an OBE.’

It had been very quickly agreed to keep Holland’s miraculous recovery and Manning’s departure quiet until after the conference had ended to avoid any awkward questions. The last thing MI5 needed was to make public not only that it had been penetrated by the KGB, but also that their mole had ended up with unfettered access to all the Service’s intelligence and the complete trust of its freshly installed director general.

‘So you’re still DG?’ Knox asked.

‘Can you think of a reason I shouldn’t be?’ Holland replied.

‘No, sir,’ Knox replied, relieved that their shared secret was still safe. ‘What about me?’

‘You have Peterson’s mess to clear up once you’re discharged.’

Another wave of relief washed over Knox. In a few days he’d be back in Leconfield House, working with Holland again. Investigating Peterson’s crimes after his punishment had been dispensed wasn’t the usual way justice was served, but he could live with it.

‘I could use some help,’ Knox said to Bennett. ‘If you’re available.’

‘My fate is still being decided,’ she replied.

‘I’ve already told Finney she has a job waiting for her at Leconfield House if he doesn’t give her one.’

‘He should,’ Knox said. ‘She was right about everything.’

‘You’ll make me blush if you talk like that,’ Bennett said. ‘And I was wrong about plenty.’

‘Miss Bennett has more than proven her worth,’ Holland said. ‘No one else even had any idea who Irina Valera was. People should have paid attention to what she was saying a lot sooner.’

‘Speaking of Valera…’ Knox said.

‘She was on a plane to DC by lunch on Monday,’ Bennett said. ‘That I was right about,’ she added, smirking.

‘Shame.’ Knox’s voice took on a sharp tone. ‘I’d have liked to have continued our conversation.’

‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ Bennett said.

‘She shot me in the heart,’ Knox replied.

‘She was the one who told the receptionist at the Richmond to call the emergency services,’ Bennett replied, smiling again. ‘Technically, she saved your life.’

Mission control was buzzing with nervous energy. Dixon watched scientists and engineers rush between huge banks of whirring computers and the blinking control panels and screens they fed a constant stream of information to. Everyone around him was busy with some crucial job, but he knew he was basically just there to pad out the room.

It was almost a year to the day since he’d found himself sitting in a room in central London, straight off a red-eye from Washington, with little idea about why he’d just spent the night crossing the Atlantic.

Murphy had refused to tell him who he was supposed to be meeting despite him asking on the flight, in the taxi into the city, and as they’d climbed the several flights of narrow stairs that led up from the anonymous black-lacquered door just off Dover Street in Mayfair to their mysterious ap-pointment. There had been no one waiting to greet them. Murphy had produced a key to unlock the door on the street, then another one for the room at the top of the building.

It turned out Dixon had travelled three and a half thousand miles to meet a lady called Irina Valera. She’d arrived twenty minutes after they had. When she stepped into the room by herself, Murphy, for the first time, didn’t seem entirely in control of the situation.

‘Where’s Devereux?’ Murphy asked Valera, using Peterson’s alias.

‘He is no longer part of this arrangement,’ she replied. She didn’t offer any further explanation.

Murphy became even more confused when it became apparent that the woman who’d come to meet them wasn’t there to sell them some new type of clandestine listening technology, but something several orders of magnitude more valuable.

Valera described her breakthrough using the same analogy of her room that stretched around the world, at which point Dixon realised she might be the answer to most, if not all, of his problems. He asked her a string of technical questions and could tell from their short conversation that Valera was on the level – and that she was in a rush to do a deal.

Once he’d given his nod to Murphy, she laid down her terms. Her spread-spectrum code-division technology in exchange for a home in America, a job, and protection.

‘If we go back to the States and this thing checks out, we’ll give you a green card and all the work you can handle,’ Murphy said. ‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll go our separate ways on good terms.’

He was playing it cool, but now that he understood the full scope of what Valera was offering, Dixon could tell Murphy would have said anything to get her on a plane.

When they did get back to America, they realised just how valuable Valera was, and the impact of the events surrounding her escape from the Soviet Union. An entire naukograd had been put out of commission, and the KGB scientific directorate had lost its chief. The CIA had been handed a major advantage and it didn’t intend to squander it.

Dixon and Valera had made a good team, working together to bring her lab work to life in the real world, and slowly getting to know each other.

They’d spent months developing and refining Valera’s discovery into a fully fledged Earth-to-orbit communications system, secretly testing it in Corona satellite after satellite. They’d even included a version of it in John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule when he finally became the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7 six months ago.

Dixon had led the celebrations when the communications system took over control of Friendship 7 as Glenn briefly lost contact with ground control over his standard radio during his descent back to Earth. The official story was that Glenn had triumphantly piloted the Mercury capsule all the way to its splashdown site by himself, but as far as Dixon was concerned, his electronic co-pilot had been the real hero.

Suddenly Kennedy’s twin dreams of putting a man on the moon and advancing America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities so fast and so far that no one else would be able to catch them both seemed achievable. Dixon could relax at last after two years of constant stress. But his downtime didn’t last long. The president and the CIA were still waiting for him to come up with a way to hunt the Vietcong from space. And Valera, as Murphy had promised, was offered all the research projects she could handle.