The Factory (20 page)

‘Why? What was important about the name?'

‘Traitor.' He felt exhausted and wanted to sleep again.

‘A British traitor.'

Deedes nodded, too tired to speak.

‘You were going to get the name of a British traitor?'

Deedes nodded again, agreeing. ‘Need to sleep.'

‘You can go to sleep soon now,' promised the questioner. ‘Just tell me where this British traitor is.'

‘At Factory.'

‘Your Factory? Your headquarters building?'

‘Yes.' Deedes closed his eyes and kept them shut, to stop the man growing and shrinking in his vision, but at once felt sick so he jerked them open again. He couldn't remember what he'd said.

‘Is he known, this traitor?'

‘Director knows. Wanted confirmation.' Abruptly Deedes thought it was funny and laughed. ‘Won't get it, not now.'

William Davies had been right in surmising that the spy within the Factory bypassed the department in which he had been placed by using the diplomatic bag from the London embassy. But because they believed their informant had been discovered and the emergency justified it, the KGB used the department to send the warning message. And Davies saw it. But there was no positive identification. It said: ‘Warn the Charles is blown.'

He planned to get back to London that night. He set out on foot and by a very circuitous route to disguise his destination as the British embassy, from which he could communicate with Samuel Bell at the Factory before being repatriated under embassy guard protection. He moved constantly alert for any surveillance, particularly from the distrustful Oleg who he had detected following him on other occasions. It became impossible to conceal where he was heading at the very end, however, when he was crossing the river, so he began to hurry, although he was fairly confident he was not under observation. He was about fifty yards from the embassy gates and safety when he heard the acceleration of a car and turned, seeing the vehicle. It was still a fair distance away but Davies could see Oleg at the wheel and another man behind.

Davies ran. He fled arms pumping and head thrown back, those embassy gates tantalizingly too far away, the car screaming in pursuit easily gaining on him. He snatched a look behind, seeing Oleg's passenger leaning out of the window with something in his hand, and heard the crack of the shot, but the bullet missed. The second shot didn't. Davies was actually through the gates and in the forecourt when he felt a crushing blow in the back and then the numbness as his spine was shattered.

Andy Pugh was one of the first to reach him. Davies gasped: ‘Charles. Say Charles,' and died.

‘What did he say?' demanded one of the embassy guards.

‘Nothing that made sense,' said Pugh.

11

The Listening Post

Richard Axton was one of the particular specialists at the Factory. He was a small man, with a hedge of hair around the edge of a completely bald head and vague eyes which conveyed the impression that he was thinking about something else during a conversation, which he frequently was. His predominant training had been in higher mathematics although he did not follow the art like the financial experts in the department: in fact money and finance often confused him and brought sharp letters from his bank manager. He also held a First-Class Honours degree in electronic theory and engineering. He did word puzzles and arithmetic riddles, the most difficult he could find, and played chess at a club which was on his way home to his bachelor apartment in the Hampstead district of London. Axton was a man of few regrets but one of them was that the security needs of the Factory made it impossible for him ever to attend the Grand Master tournaments in which the great Russian exponents played. He read their books, though, and followed the competition moves when they were reproduced in newspapers. There were occasions when Axton felt his standard sufficient to have confronted them: and others when he dismissed the ambition as a daydream.

There was a consolation during those daydreams that he was daily confronting Russians in another sort of competition: maybe even unknowingly opposing some of the chess masters themselves because it was rumoured that they were sometimes used by the KGB to do what Axton did.

Axton broke and read Soviet codes. Or at least attempted to. And created those for British intelligence that would hopefully be unreadable by Russian experts, although he accepted, objectively, that codes rarely remained unbroken for long. For that reason he had introduced at the Factory a system of operating codes only for a limited time, usually a month. At the end of every month all the code keys were changed, whether or not they were suspected of having been broken. If they had been, it greatly reduced the damage. If they hadn't, it meant the Eastern bloc codebreakers had wasted their time for four weeks and had to start all over again on a different cipher. It had actually provided Axton with the intelligence that some of his codes
had
been broken: over the course of time he'd realized that Russia and Poland, for instance, had copied him and were switching their transmission code every month, as well.

Ironically the incredible advances in computer and space technology had been of mixed benefit to the code senders. Messages, having been encoded, can be recorded on electronic tape and sent at speeds of a fraction of a second, inaudible to the human ear: the procedure is called spurt transmission. However, permanently space-based satellites of both sides can hear well enough and, having recorded the split-second babble of a spurt transmission, break it down to an intelligible speed and set out the puzzle for the code-breaker. Modern telephones no longer operate by underground cable but by above-ground radio and electronic frequencies. And those frequencies are more easy to tap, again by satellite, than the underground cables ever were.

People rarely talk in code for any prolonged period, so telephone eavesdropping produces what is technically referred to as conversation in clear, which simply means the normal spoken word. Britain, with the United States as its most active partner although there is cooperation with other European countries, listens by satellite to
all
telephone conversation between government ministries in East European capitals and certainly to every known intelligence wavelength. The potential daily result would be literally tons of printed paper, far too much to be read before the arrival of another daily batch. So computers are used. The eavesdropped conversations are played at the speed of spurt transmission through computers programmed to react to fed-in trigger words and print out an actual transcript. The theory is that a conversation between an intelligence officer and his wife about that day's shopping list is ignored. If the man uses a phrase like Warsaw Pact or secret or classified, the computer print-out is activated.

It was Richard Axton's job also to programme the computers at the Factory to recognize all trigger words he believed appropriate to the department's overseas activities.

The Director General believed he had a very positive need for Axton's expertise.

The chess-playing, balding man showed no reaction whatsoever to Bell's announcement that the Factory had been penetrated by a Soviet informant. And the Director General had no reluctance in telling the man something he had tried to keep secret for so long because he had decided at last to call in the outside investigation branch whose inquiries would make the fact public knowledge within hours.

‘You think some sort of message was relayed here to London by the KGB?' asked Axton.

‘I'd managed to penetrate Soviet headquarters,' said Bell, in further disclosure. ‘It was William Davies. His instructions were only to approach our embassy when he had some definite information, something he had seen. He was shot dead going into the embassy.' Another mistake, to go with all the others in his search for the traitor, thought Bell. But the last, now that he had started the proper investigation.

‘What he saw could have been something other than a transmitted message,' pointed out Axton.

‘I accept that,' said Bell wearily. ‘Quite frankly, I'm clutching at any chance there is.'

‘There's no guidance I can follow?'

‘Just the date on which Davies was shot,' said Bell apologetically. ‘At the moment that's all you have to work from.'

Surprisingly Axton smiled. ‘It looks like an intriguing puzzle.'

The task was a staggering one for Axton. He decided he had to extend the search at least a week before the date of the actual killing in Moscow, in case Davies had delayed his approach for any reason. As well as the Factory's own retained tapes for the period Axton asked for all the material intercepted at Britain's main eavesdropping establishment at Cheltenham. And used the special relationship with the United States to get everything available from America's listening organization, the National Security Agency.

The first problem was programming the computers with likely trigger words. Factory was obvious. He added the location of their headquarters building in London. Using the personnel records, Axton fed in every employee's name – including that of the Director General – and then split them into various combinations and possible identification codes. Working on the assumption that any message would have been a warning, he included all words that could have been associated with a search or discovery or instruction to flee.

He targeted first the Soviet embassy in London's Kensington Palace Gardens. None of his trigger words worked. Accepting that any message would have been short, he revised the programme for the computer to search out any message, either in coded or clear transmission, that did not extend beyond a small number of words, starting at two and running up to ten. This time there was a reaction. Axton was using three computers, with matching printers, and all burst into life, giving him twelve separate messages. All were in code, only one of which he recognized and was able to read. It was an acknowledgement of something that had been shipped from London in the diplomatic bag.

The rest he put to one side, to begin work upon, but before he did so he utilized three more computers and started to run through them the telephone conversations intercepted by America.

After so long at his job, Axton had the eye of a painter or a designer for code patterns and without being able to transcribe any of the letters or numerals was able to split the messages into three groups, recognizing that each stack was composed from its own code. One of his groups comprised a single, one-line message.

Axton worked late into the night, finally abandoning the idea of going home at all. By midnight he had unscrambled none of the messages lying on the desk in front of him. At last he decided to break, although not to stop work.

He made a tour of the six computers operating on the new and old trigger words, frowning at the amount of printed material there was waiting for him to examine. He started at once, despite his tiredness: he'd often found moving from one incomplete puzzle to another stimulated his mind into finding an answer. That night it didn't but something important was there: Axton merely failed to recognize it.

‘This should have been reported months ago!' accused the head of the investigatory branch at once. His name was Andrews and he was a heavy, thick-set man, a typical policeman.

‘It was not immediately apparent that there was a Soviet source here: I did not want to sound a premature alarm,' said Bell in weak defence. He badly wanted a drink and wondered how quickly Andrews and his squad would learn about the whisky bottle in his desk.

‘This department is a virtual shambles,' criticized Andrews. ‘You've had overseas operatives killed and seized and detected: God knows how much material has leaked out of this building itself.'

‘Not everything can be attributed to the traitor,' argued the Director General. ‘Some of the failures have been good counter-intelligence from the other side. This isn't a business with a hundred per cent success rate.'

‘To have lost one officer … one operation … because you've been infiltrated is too much,' said Andrews relentlessly.

How long would it be before the demand was made for his resignation, thought Bell. He said: ‘The leaks appear to have come from all over the department, not concentrated in one particular division.'

‘I think we'd better make our own decisions on that, don't you?' said Andrews stiffly. ‘And as you appointed yourself independent investigator, I think you're the person we should start with.'

‘How did it go?' asked Ann when he got to her apartment that night. Since beginning the divorce proceedings against his wife, Bell was spending more and more time at his personal assistant's home.

‘Badly,' said the Director General. ‘But then it could hardly have been any other way, could it?'

‘I've been thinking,' said Ann. ‘One of the criticisms to be made against you is our relationship. Why don't I just resign?'

‘Do you want to quit?' asked Bell.

‘Why not?' said Ann. ‘We're going to be married as soon as your divorce is finalized, aren't we? I would have left then anyway. Why not now, to get one embarrassment out of your way?'

‘It might be an idea,' agreed the Director General. He wanted to do everything he could to stay on in the job.

It was Richard Axton's ability to recognize patterns that led to a breakthrough although it was not in the direction that the Director General wanted, nor was it easy to pursue in the first place. Axton was, of course, a fluent Russian speaker able to recognize nuances and intonation and was caught by the phrasing of a conversation he heard in clear, not code, from an American intercept of an unidentified outside caller speaking to the Soviet Defence Ministry. Several times the recipient of the call, who was only ever referred to respectfully as General, used the phrase ‘assess and grade mobilization', and there were recurring lists of figures, which Axton guessed at last to be map coordinates. He was immediately disappointed when the coordinates did not connect with any English-published maps but encouraged again when they fitted perfectly to grid numbers on Eastern-bloc publications. There were some breaks and areas which did not accord, but substantially the map numbers ran for several hundred miles along the entire dividing border between Eastern and Western Europe, where the military forces of the NATO countries face those from the Soviet Warsaw Pact.