Tim Glister: Red Corona

‘Argon is a noble gas,’ Zukolev finally said, his eyes still fixed on his papers.

‘Yes,’ Valera replied.

‘That means it doesn’t do anything.’ He scooped up a handful of berries and tipped them into his mouth. He insisted on getting the best of the summer fruits that grew wild around Povenets B delivered to him every morning. No one else was allowed to forage for them, because no one apart from Zukolev’s lackeys were allowed to leave the naukograd .

Valera hesitated for a moment. ‘Actually, it means that—’ she started.

But before she could correct him, Zukolev slammed the report he was holding down on the desk and looked up at her.

‘If it doesn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Why do you want five twenty-kilogram canisters of it?’

It was clear from his tone that he thought he’d caught Valera out. He hadn’t. She tried to make her explanation for the supply request she’d put in a week ago as simple as possible.

‘Argon is inert,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t react to stimulation. However, it can cause a reaction in other things. It can, in certain circumstances, act like a catalyst.’ She could already tell he wasn’t following her. But he’d demanded she explain herself, so that’s what she was going to do. ‘It’s an atmospheric gas. It makes up less than one per cent of the air we breathe, but we don’t know exactly how much of it there is higher up. It doesn’t affect radio waves near the surface of the planet, but in larger quantities it might.’

‘You want to create different levels of the atmosphere?’

Valera, surprised that Zukolev appeared to have grasped the concept after all, nodded. ‘I want to try.’

‘Your job is to find a way to talk to space. Not go there, or bring it here.’

‘I simply want to—’

‘Is the ground not good enough for you?’ He interrupted her again. ‘Would you like us to put you on a rocket too? Spend untold millions of rubles so you can satisfy your curiosity?’

She couldn’t resist the bait. ‘I think it would make more sense to send scientists into space than someone who was chosen because he was short enough to fit in the cockpit.’

Zukolev slammed his hands down on the desk again. ‘Major Gagarin is a hero of the Soviet Union!’

Yuri Gagarin was Zukolev’s second idol after Stalin, though his affinity for Russia’s most celebrated cosmonaut was primarily based on their shared first name. Valera knew this, and while she also knew better than to ever say anything critical about Stalin to Zukolev, Gagarin was a nerve she was happy to pinch to put him off balance.

Zukolev sighed deeply and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fat thumb and forefinger, dramatically transforming in a moment from irate dictator to disappointed father. He pushed his chair back – it dragged loudly under his weight – and walked round his desk.

‘We are a small part of a great family,’ he said, raising his arms as if gesturing to the whole of the Soviet Union. The gold buttons on his jacket struggled to stay fastened. ‘I want you to be happy, Irina. I want people to understand your genius. We must work together, to make life better for all of us, to protect each other from our enemies.’

He got closer and closer to her until Valera could see nothing but his large stomach and feel his sweet, heavy breath on her. His hand hovered over her shoulder, then drifted over to her face. She looked up at him before his palm could cup her chin and force her head upward. He met her stare, his eyes pleading. She could see the blood-red flesh of berries stuck between his teeth.

‘But I can’t protect you, or Ledjo,’ he said, ‘if you keep asking for things without giving anything back.’

It was a threat, and it didn’t work. Valera had spent her whole life being threatened. Her family history was intimately connected with the darker side of the Soviet Union. Her father, a celebrated linguist who specialised in early Asian languages, had been killed in the Great Purge when Valera was eight years old, accused of being a spy for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist China. Her mother, a gifted chemist, starved to death in the siege of Leningrad five years later. Valera herself only barely survived to see the city liberated. She was not a happy child of Mother Russia, and she was immune to intimidation.

‘You cannot just keep experimenting,’ Zukolev continued. ‘Moscow is demanding results. And we must provide them.’

Valera had no desire to hear more of Zukolev’s lecture and knew the quickest way to get out of his office would be to simply agree with everything he said and promise to do better.

‘I believe I’m close to a breakthrough. I’m sure I can give Moscow everything they want…’ She paused a moment for effect ‘…without any more resources.’

A broad smile spread across Zukolev’s face. Victory was his.

‘Very good,’ he said.

He turned away and walked back towards his desk, a blunt signal that Valera was now free to go.

Malcolm White was stressed. One of Holland’s ambitions had been to transform MI5 into a truly modern intelligence service that combined the best of both human and technological expertise. In Manning’s new world order the pendulum was already swinging back towards something far more arcane, and MI5’s head of research and development was not happy about it.

White, like Knox, had been one of the shining stars of MI5. In the three years that Holland had been director general, White had built up the Service’s formidable research and development section from nothing to a point where it could rival America’s and Russia’s.

He was also the creator of Operation Pipistrelle. Pipistrelle, a top-secret bugging system, was MI5’s most advanced piece of surveillance technology. It was the current jewel in the research and development department’s crown, but Manning’s first decision as acting director general had been to hand control of it over to his freshly appointed liaison to GCHQ, the UK’s dedicated signals intelligence agency.

‘If we aren’t going to let our signals intelligence agency run our signals intelligence, then what’s the point in having one?’ Peterson, who had relayed Manning’s orders, had said when White challenged him.

Intercepting communications and secreting listening devices in sensitive locations had been standard practice for every self-respecting security service since the war. But the technology was far from perfect. Devices were cumbersome, difficult to install, and easy to detect. A simple sweep for radio signals would reveal their presence, no matter how well they were hidden.

After the Americans had discovered ‘The Thing’, a passive listening device the KGB had buried in a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States given to the American ambassador in Moscow as a gesture of post-war friendship, intelligence agencies on either side of the Iron Curtain had been developing more advanced and less detectable bugs.

Operation Pipistrelle was the game-changer everyone was looking for. White had not only worked out a way to radically shrink MI5’s listening devices so they could be installed in more places in less time and removed just as easily. He’d also introduced a failsafe into the bug’s transmitters, which temporarily shut them down whenever a room was being swept.

When White had first unveiled Pipistrelle to Holland and Knox in its full miniature glory, they’d immediately seen its potential. Even the most secure rooms, buried deep in embassies and wrapped in layers of soundproofing, would become vulnerable to MI5 eavesdropping. Knox also couldn’t believe how small and deceptively innocent it looked. Somehow White had managed to fit Pipistrelle’s battery, aerial and transmitter in a simple square metal box half the size of Knox’s thumb.