visited – or his car. To date, his vigilance had yielded absolutely nothing, because RAVEN had simply failed to make contact.
Rigby drank the last of his milk, and then went into the toilet at the back of the restaurant. When he returned to his table, he called for the bill, paid it, and collected his coat. He glanced carefully around the restaurant before he left, but paid no particular attention to the grey-haired man sitting alone at the far corner of the bar, head buried in his newspaper, which was perhaps unfortunate. The man’s face would have been almost as familiar to Rigby as his own, and if he had identified him, the CIA’s search for source RAVEN would have been over.
It wasn’t until he was outside in the street and walking away from the restaurant that his probing fingers detected the small cylindrical object in his overcoat pocket. Rigby returned immediately to the restaurant, and looked closely at everyone there, even checking the restroom. As he turned to leave for the second time, he noticed that the bar stool in the far corner was unoccupied, the newspaper and an empty glass sitting innocently on the bar top.
‘Hullo?’ Genady Arkenko said as he picked up the telephone.
The voice at the other end didn’t bother with introductions, just passed the message. ‘Phase Two has been truncated. Implement Option Two Alpha immediately.’
Genady Arkenko repeated the message and put down the telephone. Then he removed a single page from a large notepad and placed it on a piece of hardboard, which he had already confirmed would not register the impression of anything written on it, sat down and composed a short message in block capitals. He walked over to the radio, took a one-time pad from a locked drawer, sat down again at the table and encoded the message.
The radio set Dmitri Trushenko had provided included a squirt or burst transmitter – a device which allowed messages to be compressed to a fraction of their proper length, transmitted, and then recorded and expanded by the receiving equipment. Arkenko initialized the system, and input the encrypted message into the transmitter’s tape recorder using a Morse key. Then he re-recorded the message on to the second, high-speed tape deck. When he pressed the transmit key, the red ‘transmit’ light illuminated for less than a quarter of a second, barely time enough for any detection equipment to register the transmission, and nowhere near long enough for any kind of fix or triangulation to be obtained.
In the corner of the room, tucked behind a bookcase, was a small paper shredder. Arkenko took the page from the one-time pad, and the sheet of notepaper he had used to compose the message, and fed them both through the machine. Then he opened the shredder’s receptacle, removed the thin strips of paper, took them over to the fireplace and burned them. Finally, he used the master erase function on both the tape recorders in the radio installation to obliterate the two copies of the message he had sent.
Six minutes after he had received the telephone call, no trace of the message he had relayed could be found anywhere in the room. Genady Arkenko was a very careful man.
In the XJ6 on the way back to London, Simpson sat silent most of the time, which Richter ascribed to perhaps one glass of wine too many at lunch – certainly he had tossed Richter the keys as they had made their way back to the car park. However, as the Jaguar approached the northern suburbs Simpson seemed to rouse himself. ‘Conclusions?’ he asked.
‘At the moment I haven’t got any,’ Richter replied, ‘but I think I’m beginning to see what’s going on. More importantly, I can understand why my CIA source was telling me that the problem had two components, and that I was looking at the wrong one.’
‘Go on,’ Simpson nodded.
‘Since we got involved with this, we’ve been looking for things on films. We looked at the hill on the KH–12 films, and at the hole where the hill used to be on the Blackbird footage. In fact, I think the hill’s irrelevant. What’s important is how the Russians destroyed it – that’s the second component of the problem, and that’s what my source was trying to tell me.’
Simpson mulled over this for a few minutes. ‘What are your intentions now?’ he asked.
‘Research. Shifting that much earth had to cause a bang, so the first thing I’m going to do is check the seismic records. Then I’m going to have to think about it.’
Simpson nodded. ‘Don’t think for too long. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this, and I think it’s time we started taking some action.’
Anton Kirov
The
‘Yes?’ Bondarev put down his fork and looked up.
Colonel Zavorin smiled. ‘Nothing too drastic. We have been ordered not to call at Piraeus. Moscow wants us to make best speed across the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and our first port of call will probably now be Tunis.’
Bondarev grunted. ‘Did our lords and masters say why?’
‘No, but I presume that our arrival time in Gibraltar has been brought forward.’
Bondarev grunted again. He wasn’t fond of Piraeus, but he was finding it increasingly irksome being a ship’s captain who was not allowed to take any decisions. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will make the signals.’
Le Moulin au Pouchon
Unusually, there were three emails containing encrypted messages for Hassan Abbas to decode that afternoon. All from a German address, they had actually originated in Moscow, sent from Dmitri Trushenko’s spacious office at the Ministry. As a minister, Trushenko was entitled to a single unmonitored telephone line with international access. All the other office lines went through one or more switchboards where, Trushenko was quite certain, either or both the SVR and the GRU – and maybe even the CIA and SIS – had placed taps.
The secure line was checked for bugs daily, and he was certain it was safe. Early in his term at the Ministry, Trushenko had telephoned a trusted colleague and, with his agreement and – for the safety of both men – with witnesses present at both ends of the line, the two men had engaged in a pre-scripted conversation so blatantly traitorous that no monitoring organization could have failed to take immediate action. Nothing had happened. Nobody had kicked in his door in the early hours of the morning, or frog-marched him out of the Ministry to the cells at the Lubyanka. He had repeated the exercise a couple of times a year ever since then, with precisely the same absence of results.
The line was intended to allow ministers to converse frankly with colleagues without fear of being overheard and subsequently forced to listen to taped statements that they should never have made. Trushenko used the line sparingly for telephone calls, partly because he was supremely conscious of the security implications of the operation in which he was involved, but mainly because he was essentially a loner and not much given to chatting with colleagues.
However, virtually every day he connected his laptop to the telephone socket next to his desk, because that enabled him to send and receive email messages with as much security as was possible in Moscow. And with
The first two emails Abbas decoded were simple enough. One confirmed that the last device – the London weapon – was as good as finished and would be ready to leave the factory in Russia the following evening. The second advised him that the route of the small freighter carrying the demonstration device had been changed so that the ship would arrive in Gibraltar earlier than had originally been planned. Abbas read them, opened a spreadsheet on his computer and input the dates and times. Then he spent some time composing and encrypting an email for Sadoun Khamil which relayed the same information to him.
