Dead Letter Drop

14

His name was Boris Karavenoff and he worked for the KGB. He’d been planted as a mole fourteen years back, assuming the dead Harrison’s identity. The Russians had been looking for someone in the computer field, with no living relatives to be able to positively identify him. When Harrison had been killed in Vietnam, Karavenoff, chosen for his similar appearance, had been neatly planted in the US with all mention of military service deleted from his records. I allowed myself a smile; in the language of the Americans, I’d got to first base.

Karavenoff blurted it out with a peculiar tone in his voice — there was an element of relief, a sense of shedding off all the years of deception and anxiety, of ecstasy at being freed of the shackles, yet also of regret, as if in casting off Charlie Harrison he was parting company with an old friend. His head sank down into the pillow and his body went limp; he lay still for several moments, then he lifted his head slightly and looked towards me. ‘Please take the gun out and I’ll tell you everything I know.’

I believed him. I took the gun out and he started to talk. He had been studying computer programming at the Leningrad Institute when the KGB approached him with the offer to go to America. In one year, at an academy in Izhevsk, he was meticulously converted into an American. He was taught how to be a good American, a nice American, a nasty American, what he should know about American history and what he shouldn’t know, how to talk about football and baseball, about Yogi Berra and the other great names of his youth, how to walk, how to talk, when to buy a battered Chevvy and when to change it for a slightly less battered Chevvy and why he shouldn’t change it for a Lincoln Continental, what to watch on the box, how to chew gum and how to eat hamburgers. They even taught him how to fart the American way.

Boris Karavenoff’s role was that of the last man in the line of Russian Intelligence inside the United States; he was the person that actually physically sent to Moscow the information that the KGB network in the US managed to acquire. He also received from Moscow any instructions for the network and was responsible for passing them on. The tools Karavenoff employed for his trade were, not unnaturally, computers.

Most computer owners suffer from the same problem as most car owners: they haven’t the faintest clue what goes on under the bonnet. The result is that they have to rely totally on the experts they hire to operate, run and maintain their computers. The scope for crooked operators is, as many have already discovered, enormous. One enterprising programmer for a New York banking concern added several noughts onto his own bank balance, withdrew the money, invested it wisely, earned himself several million dollars, then repaid the money to the bank, with full interest, and restored his balance to its original level, disposing of his profit in a numbered Swiss account. It took this self-made millionaire over a year to persuade his employers to believe what he had done.

There have been several instances of smart computer operators, who, discovering that the computers were capable of more than was required by their owners, have established profitable sidelines renting out space and time to other companies, without the knowledge of their employers. One such operator, who had advised the board of a food wholesaling combine on which computer to buy, ensured they bought one considerably in excess of their needs. Under a separate name, and in offices over a thousand miles away, he rented this same computer to a national car-hire firm, a toy manufacturer, a mining company, a travel agency and a hospital. Everything ran smoothly for over five years, and it was not until after his death in a car accident that his enterprise was discovered.

There is scarcely an airline in the world that is not on a computer system. The video screens are as much a part of airline ticket offices or check-in desks as are the smiles on the girls who sit beside them.

Every airline has a computer installation in each major city, and one master installation. All the installations are connected via telephone lines. Pan Am’s master installation is near New York: If Harry Smith, in Tokyo on a business trip, wants to book a seat on a flight from London to Los Angeles, a girl at Pan Am desk in Tokyo types the seat request into her terminal. That request is flashed through the telephone wires to New York, and in a fraction of a second the computer in New York checks the bookings on that flight and flashes back a reply: either the flight is full, or there are vacant seats. If there are vacant seats it says how many there are and which ones they are: first class, clipper or economy. The computer has to work fast because there may be a hundred people at Pan Am desks around the world all wanting information about that particular flight. The moment Harry Smith books his seat, the computer makes note, and tells everyone there is one seat less.

At the same time as making the bookings, the master computer is doing Pan Am’s accounts, sending out its bills, making up the payroll, keeping track of how many gallons of fuel each plane is using on each flight, making notes of VIPs, of kosher menus, vegetarian menus, of unaccompanied children, of elderly travellers in need of special assistance, of where the planes are at any given point in time, who is flying which, what the next month’s roster is going to be, figuring out who’s ordered what from the mail order catalogues on each flight, and sending the goods off. In addition it is linked via telephone lines to all the computers of all the other airlines, so that if Harry Smith is unable to get a flight to New York with Pan Am, Pan Am can maybe book him on either TWA, or British Airways, or Air India, or Japan Airlines, or Singapore Airlines or KLM or Lufthansa or Air France, or any other of the myriad of glittering, silver-bellied birdies that shimmer and thunder through the dawn, midday, dusk and night skies of the world.

It’s a busy little fellow.

The international airline business is unique among all other businesses in its worldwide spread of offices. Some travel agencies and car-hire firms are making valiant efforts to join these ranks, but still have nowhere near the spread of the airlines. In every major town and in every airport of the world are offices or desks with computer terminals that have instant access to the flight data of their own and every other international airline in the world.

The data that travels, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, freely and speedily between the countries and the cities of the world, seems innocuous enough: flight number, starting point, stopover points, destination, day of week, time of day, type of aircraft, number of seats. For most passengers there is no special information and they travel purely as names on a list. But for some there can be many lines of information. The contents of two or three pages of a novel could be stored in the space available in the computer for a single seat.

Boris Karavenoff used the space available for seat numbers 14B for his communications with Moscow. He had, without the slightest difficulty, hooked the Intercontinental computers into the international airlines network, by tapping into the wires running from a branch booking office. Using an identically programmed silicon chip to the one I had in my pocket, he could, whenever he liked, book a seat 14B on any flight of any airline in the world. A short coded signal would inform an Aeroflot ticket desk in Moscow of the relevant flight, and the information, naturally in code, would be recorded; the reservation would then be cancelled, and the information would be gone from the teletype screens and the computer memory banks for ever. The process was reversed if Moscow wished to pass a communication to Karavenoff. The solution to part one of Dr Yuri Orchnev’s cryptic puzzle had emerged.

Psychologists say that almost all criminals, petty or major, have a secret desire to confess their crimes, almost as an act of bravado. Under skilful interrogation the criminal can be made to open up like an enthusiastic schoolboy, to cheerfully pour out everything he knows and, while talking, to develop an obsession not to miss out a single detail. Right now Boris Karavenoff was in this frame of mind; provided I could get off this island alive I was going to have one hell of a report to make back to London.

The one subject on which he knew nothing was the man up on the roof; he seemed genuinely surprised that there was someone there and pointed out that it could as easily be himself as me that the man was after. I nodded agreement, although I knew that wasn’t true — if it was, Karavenoff and his chum would have been dead long before I’d arrived. I asked him about Sleeping Beauty in the kitchen: he was a computer programmer in the US Defence Bureau; Karavenoff pointed up at the ceiling; in a sunken light socket. I could clearly see a camera lens. ‘Automatic,’ he said, ‘comes on with that light.’ He pointed up at one of the bulbs that was glowing brightly — just a little too brightly for normal room lighting. It was a routine blackmail setup.

I broached the subject of the great mystery writer and nocturnal sharpshooter, Dr Yuri Orchnev. Karavenoff didn’t know much about him, other than that he was a fairly senior member of the KGB computer technology team in Moscow.

What he did know, however, was something I had spent six years under Fifeshire’s instructions trying to verify: that there was a Russian agent in a very senior position in British Intelligence. Orchnev had had communications with him via the British Embassy in Washington on a number of occasions during the last year. His true identity had never been revealed to Karavenoff; he knew of him only by his code name. It was the Pink Envelope.