Revelation

18 The Venona Files

The cost of doubling back, taking nonsense routes and side roads on the two hundred mile journey from Santa Fe to Flagstaff was eight precious hours. It left Findhorn screaming with frustration. It was late afternoon by the time he reached the entrance to the wooded camp site at the Grand Canyon, but at least he was sure that he was not being followed.

He drove past the entrance just the same.

Five miles on he slowed down, did a U-turn on the empty road and turned back, wondering if everyone on the receiving end of surveillance ended up with galloping paranoia. On the way back to the canyon not a vehicle passed him, in either direction.

The trees and ground were lightly dusted with snow. The Mather Campground was bigger than he had visualized and he hoped that finding Romella, if she was here, wouldn't turn out to be a major headache. There was a light scattering of cars and tents amongst the trees, and he nosed the camper around the roadways lacing the site. He wondered where, fifty years earlier, Petrosian and Kitty had stayed. There was no sign of Romella, and no telling which if any of the handful of vehicles around was hers. He parked in a quiet spot — the nearest car was a made-in-Japan, four-wheel-drive effort two hundred yards away, all gleaming chrome and hideous purple. He put diaries, laptop and notebook into a backpack rather than risk leaving them in the van. He stepped out, took a moment to stretch and fill his lungs with cool, pine-scented air, and then walked briskly along a path towards a little cluster of shops he had passed earlier. He headed east along a trail skirting the rim from Mather Point.

Findhorn had seen the photographs often enough; but the reality still impressed. The scale was inhuman, too large to absorb. He leaned over the low parapet and traced the path of a little trail far below. He thought he would like to do it some day but he couldn't see a way out of the fix he was in and he might not manage it before he met his assassins.

A few people — families, couples, individuals — were scattered around. They were doing normal things: taking photographs, sitting on the low wall, looking out over the vista, eating. Findhorn looked at them all with deep suspicion and wondered if he would ever recapture his lost innocence. He walked off, exploring the unfamiliar surroundings, looking into curio shops and restaurants with names like Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, Lookout Studio, Verkamp's Curios.

There was no Romella.

Then he wandered west to Hermit's Rest, and back along the tracks interspersing the tree-scattered camp site. He was now shivering in the cold air. Hopelessly restless, he returned to the Canyon rim and again looked out over the great pink scar. Heavy, snow-laden clouds were coming in low and the air temperature was plummeting.

He turned in the direction of Bright Angel Lodge and a caffeine hit. With a pile of dollars at the ready, he phoned through to the Edinburgh flat. It would be around noon.

A male voice answered.

'Dougie?'

A pause, then, 'Fred!'

Findhorn's younger brother. 'Hi, Dougie, you're back early?'

'Too much snow, the skiing was lousy. Hey, am I glad you phoned! I got home in the early hours to find guess what…'

'Stefi Stefanova. I'm sorry, I hope you don't object.'

A pause, then, 'Object? The day I complain to coming home and finding a blonde stunner in my flat… I just wondered if she was an impostor or something.'

'No, she's genuine.'

'And under a grilling from me, I find you've had two wenches staying with you.' There was a wicked chuckle. 'I'm highly impressed, but this isn't the big brother I know at all.'

'Come on, Doug, it's business.'

'Business? If the old man gets to hear of this…'

'Translation business, you total idiot. Listen, has Stefi explained things?'

'Not a thing. I don't think she really believes I'm me.'

'Put her on.'

A minute later a nervous voice came over the telephone. 'Fred?'

'Stefi, you can relax. That's my brother Dougie, he's just come back early from Gstaadt.'

The relief in her voice was unmistakeable. 'Oh thank goodness. I suppose I should move out now. No, he's shaking his head.'

'Stefi, you can trust Dougie absolutely, except maybe at bedtimes, if you see what I mean. Now, business. Can you find out what happened to HMS Daring in 1894?'

'I think so. What's that about bedtimes?'

'I'll phone you later today. And it's okay to tell Dougie the whole story provided that he wants to hear it. Remember he's a lawyer, he may not want to know about it.'

Dougie came back on line. Findhorn said, 'Dougie, Stefi has a story to tell that you'll hardly believe. There could be a huge amount at stake, or nothing at all. The only thing is, you may not want to become privy to information which might compromise your position as a pillar of the legal community. Anyway, it's up to you.'

Findhorn could practically feel his brother straining at the leash. Dougie was saying, 'My God, Fred, get the hell off the phone so I can quiz this woman.'

'I'll be in touch.' Findhorn sipped at his coffee and thought that, knowing Little Brother, it wouldn't be long before he was looking for ten per cent.

ZPE. Zero point energy. The lowest possible energy state, the energy of empty space. But how much energy was that? A fantastic thought jumped into Findhorn's head. Could you get at that energy, whatever it amounted to? Could you somehow mine the vacuum?

Now Findhorn was beginning to remember the cosmologists' claim: that the Universe was created ex nihilo, that the Big Bang itself was a fluctuation in the vacuum. The ultimate free lunch, they said. The Creation was God's industrial accident, a vacuum fluctuation that had gotten out of hand.

And Petrosian, that November night in 1953, had become very excited about zero point energy.

Something was beginning to connect.

At a table in the Lodge, Findhorn wrote down some barely remembered numbers on the hotel stationery. In the beginning was the erg, about the energy of a small, falling feather. At a million grams to a ton, a fifty-ton express train moving at one hundred kilometres an hour carried — he did the sums — two hundred million million ergs, or two followed by fourteen zeroes, or 2 x 10¹⁴ ergs. He doodled a little more and finally wrote out a small table:

So the energy coming out of the Sun, if suitably concentrated, would evaporate the Atlantic Ocean in one second. Not many people know that, he told himself with satisfaction. He hadn't known it himself until now.

Then he remembered the figure he was after. The Planck energy, the ultimate energy contained in a cubic centimetre of vacuum. He added to his little column:

He looked at the scribbled number, compared it with the others he had written. He thought: no, no way.

The number looked at him, hypnotizing him. 10⁹³ ergs. Per cubic centimetre. He ran from it, crossed quickly to the reception desk. The girl was very friendly, very smooth, very American. 'I need to do some e-mailing. Can I plug in somewhere?'

'Sure. Use the office. Round here.'

Archie — As a matter of top priority I need to speak to the best people going about the vacuum, about the energy it contains, and about the possibility of extracting energy from it. Can you recommend anyone? Or even fix something? I'll phone later.

Findhorn ordered another espresso and sat at the table. The afternoon sun briefly peeked out from below heavy cloud, changed its mind and disappeared again. He wrote out a one and followed it with ninety-three zeroes. Findhorn looked at it. It wasn't a number, it was a battering ram. It was power beyond imagination. It was the heat of God's forge.

'Hi, Fred.'

Findhorn's heart leaped. She was in a cream-coloured designer fleece with black jeans and black leather boots. The fleece was open and beneath it Findhorn glimpsed a Rennie Mackintosh necklace and a nicely rounded black T-shirt with an 'I Love ET' motif, complete with a picture of the cuddly alien. Somewhere she had taken time off from the mayhem to have her hair styled in a boyish cut. A casual black bag was draped over her shoulder. The bruise over her eye was well down and she was trying not to look too pleased to see him.

Findhorn caught a light whiff of expensive perfume. 'Hi, Romella. Any problems on the way here?'

'Nope. If there was surveillance I missed it.' She tapped her bag. 'I've got some goodies.'

'Would you like to walk?'

'Later. I haven't eaten since yesterday. And I'll want to spread some papers out, but not here.'

'Okay, let's visit the grocery store and go back to my car. You're sure we're safe here?'

At last she smiled, a sly, mischievous smile. 'Am I safe from you?'

At the little table in the RV, Romella produced a thick wodge of papers. The bottled-gas stove was bringing a pot of water to the boil and the little blue flames were warming the air. 'The FBI people couldn't have been more helpful,' she said.

Findhorn nodded at the papers. 'I can't wait to get into this. But it'll surely take all night.'

'Yes. It's almost their entire take on Petrosian.'

'Almost?'

'There are deletions, allowed under the Act. Where national security is involved, or innocent people still alive might be compromised in some way, they delete things.'

'Okay. I guess we now have about everything we're going to get.'

Romella pulled off her Muscovado boots with a sigh and kicked them into a corner. The Berghaus fleece was dropped on the floor, and she lounged back on a low, maroon-coloured sofa. The water was beginning to simmer and the windows were steaming up. Irrationally, the steamed windows gave Findhorn a cocooned, protected feeling, as if they somehow kept out a hostile world.

'I got three things out of the FBI,' she said. 'But first why don't you tell me how you got on at Los Alamos?'

He moved over to the cooker, tore open a packet of spaghetti and rattled plates onto a work surface. He poured olive oil into a little bowl, chopped basil into shreds with a gleaming kitchen knife and added it to the oil. He started on the pine nuts, chopping them finely. 'They think he was mad. No way could he have found anything they haven't. And they have fifty years of high energy physics since Petrosian to back them up.'

'What's your gut-feeling, Fred?'

'There's a cover-up.'

Romella said, 'Wow.' She tucked her legs under herself, gave Findhorn an astute look and said, 'And what about Petrosian's secret? You have the look of a man who's onto something.'

Findhorn was grating a little hard lump of Parmesan cheese. 'You must be CIA. How else did you get all that help from the FBI?'

'You're wrong, Fred. I work for Alien Abductions. You should know that, you've hardly taken your eyes off my T-shirt.'

'Sorry. It's the ET picture, I assure you.'

She laughed. 'Which would be damned insulting if true. I forgive you, Fred, you're just back from ten years at the north pole. And I notice you haven't answered my question.'

Findhorn was adding spaghetti to the boiling water. 'This will take a few minutes. Keep talking.'

'I think not.' She was looking in a compact mirror, gently prodding the bruise around her eye with her little finger.

'What?'

'Fred, I've come bearing three gifts. I want something in exchange. Tell me what you're onto.'

Findhorn stopped stirring. Romella's voice was cold. 'You don't trust me, do you?'

She snapped the compact lid shut, started to pull on her boots.

'What are you doing?' Findhorn asked in alarm.

'Enjoy your spaghetti.' She slipped into her coat, picked up her casual bag and slid the camper door open.

'Romella!' He grabbed her arm in panic. 'I can't do this on my own.'

She kissed the air next to his cheek. 'Goodbye, darling.' Then she was out and flouncing through the snow towards the chrome and purple monster.

'I surrender, damn you. I'll tell you everything.'

She turned, already shivering in the thin cold air. Findhorn was holding his hands together in an attitude of prayer. Inside, he closed the door, took her coat off, helped her off with her boots and said, 'I'm beginning to think that Petrosian thought of some way to extract energy from empty space. The amount of energy involved might be huge. Please don't leave me.'

'Energy from empty space? You surely don't mean from nothing?'

The water was spilling over the pot. Findhorn turned the gas down. 'I can't tell you more just yet. I'm waiting for Stefi to tell me what happened to HMS Daring in 1894. Now it's your turn.'

'You're telling me the truth,' Romella declared. 'That is so crackers that you couldn't make it up. Okay. First, the Venona files.' Findhorn opened his mouth, and Romella said, 'These are transcripts of Soviet secret messages covering 1940 to 1948. They tell me about three thousand of them were partially decrypted. I got copies of about a hundred relating to Los Alamos.'

'Do they mention Petrosian?'

'Maybe. We'll have to dig. Second, transcripts of FBI interrogations of scientists during the McCarthy era, especially those involved in the hydrogen bomb project. Petrosian included; they had a go at him more than once. And third, we have the FBI surveillance reports on Petrosian.'

Findhorn paused from his cooking. 'The Times' obituary claimed that Petrosian spied for the Russians.'

Romella patted the heap of papers in front of her. 'The trail to Petrosian's secret is somewhere in here, Fred, if it's anywhere. Some clue that will lead us there.'

The RV was now warm, and the air was light with Diorissimo and pesto. Findhorn popped a cork. The evening promised a heady mixture of spaghetti al pesto, Valpolicella and espionage, and who knew what else.

'Is that before or after decryption?' Findhorn wanted to know. He lifted a strand of spaghetti from the saucepan with a fork.

'Say you have a message. You look up the words in a codebook, a sort of dictionary which replaces each word by a four-figure number. Then you group all these numbers into sets of five. Then to each set of five you add another five-figure number which you take from a one-time pad. It can only be read by the guy at the other end holding the same one-time pad. The Russians kept each and every one-time pad under permanent armed guard. And because you use each page from the pad only once, the code is unbreakable.'

Findhorn gave a satisfied grunt. 'Al dente. But it was broken nevertheless.'

Romella was sipping red wine. Tartly. After a few thousand hours, a few million dollars and one or two nervous breakdowns.'

'How come?' Findhorn was using a fork and spoon to heap pasta onto plates.

'In late 1942, when the Russians were under pressure from the German invasion, somebody blundered. They duplicated the one-time pads. As soon as you do that you create patterns. It was just enough for some very clever people to get into parts of the messages. Another thing was that the Finns, who were fighting the Russians, overran a Soviet consulate in December 1941: The NKVD had to quit in a hurry and they left behind four codebooks which were only partially burned. One codebook was for diplomatic messages, one was for the NKVD — that's the old KGB — one for the GRU, that's Soviet Military Intelligence, and one for the Naval GRU. They sent the stuff to Sweden to avoid the risk of recapture. The Swedes were of course neutral but they knew damn well that if the Russians took Finland they'd be next in line. So the codebooks ended up in America.'

He spooned pesto sauce onto the plates and sprinkled parmigiano over it. 'So what's the significance of Venona?'

'To the Americans and the Brits? It was a dream come true. It gave a picture of the depth of penetration of the Soviet spy apparatus in every sort of place. It caught big spies like Klaus Fuchs, it uncovered the Cambridge Apostles like Philby, Burgess and McLean, and it electrocuted the Rosenbergs. And it caught hundreds of small fry worldwide.'

'Presumably the numbers here are bits of code that nobody has been able to break.'

Romella nodded with her mouth full. Then she said, 'You may be a human relations disaster, Fred, but you can cook. The names are cryptonyms, jargon used by the GRU and NKVD. Take "Charles". That refers to Klaus Fuchs. "Bill of Exchange" is Oppenheimer, "Camp-2" is Los Alamos and so on. The FBI gave me a list. So, the message translates to:

"Theodore Hall is currently in charge of a group at Los Alamos, and has handed Beck a report about present activities there along with a list of the key personnel in the Manhattan Project. There is still no indication of when the Bomb will be operational. Beck considers that it is almost impossible blah blah cultivate Quantum.

"Fuchs, Quantum and Oppenheimer are travelling to the Argonne Radiation Laboratory" — that's in Chicago — "and will meet with Vogel and Tina."'

'Who are "Quantum", "Vogel" and "Tina"?' Findhorn asked.

'Nobody knows. "Vogel" and "Tina" were a husband-and-wife spy team. "Vogel" was also known as "Pers".'

'That must narrow things down.'

'You can play detectives. It's like Jack the Ripper, about two dozen suspects and every one made to sound plausible. Some people named a physicist called Rudolf Peierls, apparently on the grounds that his wife Eugenia was Russian and they were friendly with Fuchs. MI5 took Peierls's security clearance away after the war. Unfortunately for the amateur detectives, the US gave Peierls the medal of freedom in 1947 and the UK gave him a knighthood in 1968, and the accusation was eventually shown to be ridiculous.'

Findhorn said, 'Okay, so we'll never know if Petrosian was a spy.'

Romella looked doubtful. 'I disagree. We have one big advantage over the FBI.'

'Haven't we just?' Findhorn said. He waited while Romella sucked up a long strand of spaghetti. Then she continued, 'Yes. If we can collate something in the diaries with something in the Venona files…'

'Let's go through them, match the dates with diary entries, and see if we can make a connection.'

Romella flicked through the FBI files with her free hand. 'It'll take for ever.'

Findhorn topped up her half-empty glass. 'We can get drunk while we're at it.'

The first connection came two hours later, in a short, cryptic message from Aleksandr, the New York rezident. By now, enveloped in the warm air of the RV, and with the gas still burning, drowsiness was beginning to overtake them. While Findhorn, propped up against a wall, read the FBI files, Romella was sprawled out on a couch, translating the Armenian text at the corresponding dates.

'Hey.' Findhorn was suddenly alert. 'Kitty Cronin.'

Romella sat up. She picked up the little blue 1943 diary and flicked to 14 January. She scanned the entry rapidly and her face lit up. 'Fred, listen to this:

Another of those rare days off.

Klaus, Dick and I had an early start. Met up at the East Gate and took off in Dick's car. He had some girl lined up in Santa Fe, who turned out to be a brassy blonde called Halina, terrific looker but utterly brainless. Klaus's sister Kristel was down from Cambridge. A thin, nervous sort of girl. Picked them both up near the Post Office, then up into the hills to collect Kitty.

Spent an exhausting day on Sawyer Hill, learning to ski. The brassy blonde surprised us all by being very good at it, although with a skirt that hardly covered her knees she must have been frozen to the bone.

In the evening, back to Kitty's, starving and frozen. She had a table made up for us. Cold roast chicken, plenty of wine, milk, bread and apples. Nectar! Later, Dick went off with the blonde, Klaus and his sister. The round trip must have used up his gas allowance for the month.

Stayed over at Kitty's. Both of us bruised in awkward places!'

'Okay. "Charles" is Klaus Fuchs. Who's "Ant"?'

Romella shuffled papers. 'I've an FBI dossier on her someplace. Here we are.' She skimmed the pages. 'Kristel Fuchs, younger sister of Klaus, alias Kristel Heineman. Unhappily married with three children. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic, recovered, married again and had another three kids.'

'Was she a spy?'

'It says that Fuchs used to meet his contact, Harry Gold, alias "Goose", in Kristel's home. But there's no evidence that she knew what was going on.'

'Okay,' said Findhorn, 'We have Klaus and Kristel Fuchs, Dick Feynman and Kitty Cronin in the Venona message. And we have "Quantum".'

'And we have Klaus and Kristel Fuchs, Dick Feynman and Kitty Cronin in Petrosian's account of a picnic held on the same day. And Petrosian.'

Findhorn drew up two columns on a sheet of A4 paper:

He said, 'So the question is, where do we place "Quantum"?'

'We can forget Kitty and the blonde,' Romella said. 'Kitty wasn't part of the Manhattan Project and the blonde was just a casual pick-up.'

Findhorn blew out his cheeks. 'And Feynman was an all-American kid from the Bronx. He's never been a suspect. In that case the chances are that Petrosian was "Quantum".'

'Hey, we've found something. If that's right, he probably wasn't a spy. At least, Beck considered he couldn't be cultivated as one.'

'So why the hell was Petrosian fleeing to Russia with useless diaries?'

Romella said, 'It's hot in here.' She started to slip off her dark, lace-topped stockings. She stretched, and ET stretched along with her. 'Okay, Fred, let's call it a day.' Then, eyes full of innocent enquiry, 'I was wondering about the sleeping arrangements.'

Findhorn looked across at the purple and chrome, made-in-Japan monster a few hundred yards away. Light flakes of snow were drifting past the window and the sky was now dark grey.

'Is that vile thing yours?'

'The purple people eater? Yes, I've rented it.'

'It's going to be a cold night. You could freeze to death in it.'

'So what do you suggest?' Romella asked.

'I'll lend you a blanket.'

'You know, Fred, there's a sort of purity about my hatred for you. It's undiluted by any other emotion. It has the intensity of a laser. Can't you feel it? Or are you made of stone?'

Findhorn's face showed bewilderment. 'Two blankets, then.'