Tim Glister: Red Corona

‘How did you get it all in there?’ Knox asked White as he nudged the tiny prototype across his palm with his fingertip.

‘A lot of hard work,’ White replied.

Pipistrelle was Britain’s greatest intelligence weapon since Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, and was years beyond Venona, the joint project between the UK, America, and Australia that was still decrypting decades-old Soviet cables. For the last three years it had provided MI5 with invaluable intelligence and remained completely undetected. However, six months ago White had revealed the next step in Pipistrelle’s evolution and it had driven a wedge between him and Knox.

‘Our problem,’ White had said when he presented his new proposal to Holland and Knox, ‘is processing power. We need to be able to work on everything in one place, as soon as we get it.’

‘You mean using a computer?’ Knox asked.

‘I’ve read the budget request,’ Holland answered. ‘He means more than that.’

‘A supercomputer,’ White replied. ‘The University of Manchester’s new Atlas machine is more powerful than anything IBM or CDC are working on in America, and far ahead of what we think the Russians are up to.’

The Atlas was built on a solid-state germanium transistor infrastructure, using 128 high speed index register and 680 kilobytes of memory, which was roughly the same amount of storage and processing power as every other computer in Britain put together.

Knox understood the value of technology – Pipistrelle had proven itself time and again – but he wasn’t ready to hand everything over to it. He believed there were still some things machines just couldn’t do.

‘How many analysts could we hire for what this will cost?’ he asked.

‘Atlas can analyse much more information than a person, and in a fraction of the time,’ White replied.

‘But it can’t make decisions, or draw conclusions.’

‘Nor is it burdened by habit or narrow viewpoints,’ White said, defensively. ‘It uses every variable to make the most likely predictions.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Knox countered, ‘our enemies don’t tend to do the most likely things.’

Holland cut their argument short, approving White’s request on the proviso that flesh-and-bone analysts would continue working on Pipistrelle intelligence and check everything that was run through Atlas.

It took almost a month for the research and development department deep in the bowels of Leconfield House to be turned into what was effectively one giant mainframe of blinking towers, cables, and stacks of index cards. By the time his team had finished enhancing and refining Atlas, White felt comfortable describing it as the most advanced computer on earth.

But now he was standing in front of its primary control panel, watching hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment do absolutely nothing. It had taken weeks to install Pipistrelle devices all over London ahead of the OECD conference, and thanks to Manning White had no idea what conversations any of them were listening in on.

The last person White wanted to see was Knox. He thought Knox wasn’t just responsible for Holland’s current condition, but his as well. And Knox was now very much persona non grata at MI5 headquarters, yet there he was, standing in the middle of what should have been one of its most secure departments.

White had wanted to give Knox a piece of his mind for several days. But instead of making a scene in front of his staff he simply smoothed back the thick shock of blond hair that had earned some distant ancestor of his their surname, straightened his jacket, and nodded towards his office door.

Before White could tell Knox exactly what he thought of him inside the small, gloomy room that had until recently been used for storage, Knox thrust the Italians’ papers into his hands.

‘These belonged to Bianchi and Moretti,’ Knox said.

White’s scientific curiosity immediately took over and he scanned the sheets for a moment before holding them out for Knox to take back.

‘It looks like nonsense to me,’ White replied.

‘Don’t be modest,’ Knox said, trying to charm him. ‘If anyone can anyone make sense of this, you can.’

‘I’m not, and I can’t.’

‘I know you don’t exactly like me at the moment, Malcolm, but I need your help.’

‘This has nothing to do with whether or not I like you,’ White said, letting the sheets fall on his desk. ‘I might think your obsession with Russian moles is a childish obsession. I might think you’ve betrayed the one man who deserves your complete loyalty. And I might think you’re the reason I’m now stuck dealing with Manning and his cronies. But none of that has any bearing on the fact that these calculations don’t make sense to me.’

‘Then I’m sorry to have taken you away from your very important work,’ Knox said, scooping up the papers and heading for the door.

It was already swinging closed behind him when White called out, ‘Try Kaspar.’

‘Who?’ Knox asked, leaning back into the office.

‘Dr Ludvig Kaspar. A German physicist up at Cambridge. One of the Dragons.’

‘You think he’ll know what they mean?’

‘I honestly don’t know if these symbols are some kind of code, or incredibly advanced maths, or total rubbish. But Kaspar had one of the most creative scientific minds in Europe once upon a time. If anyone can work out what this is, it’ll be him.’

‘Thanks,’ Knox said. ‘I owe you.’

‘You owe Holland,’ White replied.

Knox slipped back through the old fire exit that connected the subterranean car park to the rest of Leconfield House. He’d temporarily relieved one of the custodians of the master key for the building’s emergency exits almost five years ago and made a copy. He’d been equal parts shocked and relieved to discover it still worked when he walked down the car park ramp ten minutes ago.

The car park smelled of old oil and stale air. He passed several grey and black Consuls, then the bays that housed the nicer cars of more senior officers. There were two empty spaces. One was his, which he’d never used – living in the centre of town, he saw no reason to own a car – the other belonged to Holland. At this time of day his dark green Bentley S2 should have been there, but it wasn’t.

Knox walked unnoticed back up the car park’s exit ramp and out into Mayfair.

When he made it back to Kemp House, there was another Watcher waiting at his front door. This one handed Knox an envelope, sneered at him when he asked what was in it, and stepped into the closing lift before Knox had a chance to say anything else.

Knox didn’t know if the silent treatment was just the traditional dislike Watchers had for their more menial tasks or a result of recent events. Given their low level in MI5’s pecking order, the Watchers shouldn’t know the details of Knox’s review board and suspension. But if there was one place gossip spread faster than the halls of Parliament, it was the corridors of MI5’s headquarters. And if there was one person in the Service the Watchers weren’t inclined to like, it was Knox. At the same time as Holland had been fighting to modernise MI5, Knox had made it his mission to retrain the Watchers, breaking them out of the stale techniques they used in their never-ending games of cat and mouse with foreign operatives. The Watchers considered themselves part of an ancient brotherhood and very much resented the interference from someone who wasn’t one of their own.

The envelope contained a preliminary autopsy report on the Italians, and it threw up about as many questions as everything else about their deaths did.

Knox poured himself a drink and tried to make sense of it. The coroner now believed they had died closer to seventy-two hours before being discovered, which explained the slick liquid Knox had seen around their noses and mouths – it was lung fluid, expelled as rigor mortis started to wear off. The marks on the men’s necks suggested they’d been choked to death, but on closer inspection their windpipes showed no signs of being crushed. Toxicology tests were being run but the results would take another day to come through.