The Blind Run

Chapter Seventeen

Sampson’s transfer was more of a leap than a move. The new apartment was directly off Pushkinskaya Ulitza, a smaller but far more modern and complete place than that he shared with Charlie. And without smell or neighbour intrusion, a special place for special people. The furnishings were modern – mostly from Finland he discovered, by turning them over and seeing their country of origin – and the decoration unmarked anywhere, so that he knew everything had been redone before his occupation. There was a modern refrigerator and stove in the kitchen – where the previous ones had been antiquated and barely running – and a disposal unit and a television in the lounge, neither of which had been available before. Sampson surveyed everything with smiling satisfaction. A special place for special people, he thought again. They’d even thought of providing alcohol, the inevitable vodka and imported whisky and gin. The initial satisfaction increased, with every day. He was allocated a car – a Lada and comparatively small, but still a car – and before the end of the first week was officially informed that he was being placed on salary, 4,000 roubles a month which he recognised – even without a gauge with which to compare – as being high. By some standards exceptionally so. And even higher if equated against the additional grant of access to the special concessionary stores. No day passed without there being for Sampson some reminder of the accepted and adjusted change in his importance but the most indicative was the selection of his place of work. Dzerzhinsky Square itself. There was a practical reason for the choice – Kalenin was there and Berenkov was there and the specially selected cryptologists were there – but for Sampson to gain admission to the KGB headquarters was for the man the most positive – and the most dramatic – evidence of what he was required to do. Sampson responded fittingly and properly, accepting the elevation but not becoming over-confident because of it.

Everything was provided for him: the raw, originally incomprehensible interceptions and then the increasing decipherment and from them he was able to distinguish that his original assessment – during the meeting with Berenkov – that the code was random computer choice was wrong. It was computer. But not random. It was a mathematical alternative, and then with an alternative built in. Within intelligence it was called a ripple code. A denominator figure was decided upon, from base – in this case London – and from it letters accorded to figures. The letter against figure numbers rippled twice, once from the origin of the original message and then upon a factor of two, to quadruple – two times two – the transmitted message. An additional precaution that the British had imposed – a precaution that had delayed the final translation for a month, even though with hindsight the protection was obvious – was that even from the dispatch from Moscow the receiving message had to be multiplied by a factor of two to be intelligible.

Sampson’s influence did not end with the apartment allocation or by the admission into Dzerzhinsky Square. There was an office staff – secretaries and two aides – and he utilised them completely, ordering easels and graph charts and spending days creating his own charts and maze paths, calling upon the advantage that the cryptologists and their computers did not – could not – possess. Which was his awareness of the customs of the British – and Russian desk – working pattern.

Employing their best technology – to confuse the first metaphor – the Russians had unpicked a haystack, straw by straw. And found not a pin but a needle. Without knowing what pattern the needle would knit. Further to mix the metaphor, Sampson recognised his function to be to continue the unravelling of that pattern and reverse the finished design. Metaphor was actually the word that Sampson used, in his by-now regular meetings with Berenkov – of whose identity he was finally aware, a further pointer to his importance – in a continuing admission of difficulty.

‘There’s somebody here, within these headquarters, with access from division to division,’ said Sampson. ‘It runs right throughout the building.’

‘We’re already aware of that,’ said Berenkov, disappointed. He’d swung completely behind the man: provided a guarantee almost. He’d expected more than this. And quicker.

‘You’re insisting that I work backwards, to find source,’ said the Englishman. ‘Why can’t you? The number of people who have access over that sort of range must be limited. It has to be.’

Berenkov had thought of that, too. It came down to six deputies and their immediate subordinates. Twelve people at most. Thirteen, if Kalenin were to be included. And he had to be included, unthinkable though it might be. Berenkov had imposed his own surveillance – and from it learned of other surveillance imposed upon himself. Kalenin, he guessed. He was not offended. It would not take long, Berenkov recognised, before the uncertainty started to become insidious and undermine the very centre of their organisation.

‘How much longer?’ demanded Berenkov, wanting the impatience to show.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sampson. ‘I’ve got everything – perhaps too much – but I can’t progress beyond it: the one thing I don’t have is the key they are using in London.’

‘We do,’ insisted Berenkov. ‘Our mathematicians worked out the multiples and the progressions.’

Sampson had come prepared for the dispute, because it hadn’t been the first. He threw across four of the raw messages and the transcriptions and said, ‘OK, what’s missing?’

Berenkov sighed, prepared also. ‘The complete identity line,’ he admitted.

‘Right!’ said Sampson, triumphantly. ‘We can read the message but not anything beyond the recipient, Sir Alistair Wilson. Why haven’t your cryptologists been able to get past the addressee?’

‘It’s a different code,’ said Berenkov, making a further concession.

‘Which you’re expecting me to crack without a computer: or even mathematical training!’

‘You worked there!’ came back Berenkov. ‘People make codes, not the computers that merely put them into practice. What code would Wilson have created, for absolutely secure and personal messages, that only he – and maybe a handful of other people – were handling?’

Sampson smiled, a moment of sudden and hopeful understanding. ‘It would smell,’ he said.

Berenkov looked at the other man in blank incomprehension.

‘And they’re a favourite in Britain,’ added Sampson.

It was for Charlie Muffin a suspended time, existence within some sort of capsule. Almost literally that because apart from the interrogation periods with Natalia it was spent incarcerated in the odorous apartment, a prison like the other prison he had known. Two nights after Sampson’s departure he had tried to leave, to be immediately confronted outside the main entrance by a plain-clothes guard who told him – in English, which meant the man was specifically assigned – that he wasn’t allowed out of the building. With no other access to anyone in authority, Charlie complained to Natalia, who appeared unimpressed – even uninterested – in his protests. So he taught them all a lesson – and to prove that he could still do it – slipping out through the rear entrance and managing to avoid the obvious guard posted there. He stayed out for over two hours, just aimlessly wandering the streets – belatedly aware that he didn’t possess any roubles to do anything else – before presenting himself at the front of the building through which he wasn’t supposed to pass and in such a way that the concierge as well as the guard saw him, so that both had to report upon one another. He knew both had, from the next meeting with Natalia. She attempted, in her usual method of interrogation, to approach it obliquely but, completely accustomed to her now, Charlie avoided it until finally she had to ask outright and he grinned at her, like he had on the occasion presenting the listening devices and said, ‘I was out spying!’

She sighed, although not unkindly. ‘Do you know something?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve got to make a recommendation about you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to assess all our conversations and all our debriefings and I’ve actually got to make a recommendation about what use you could be, if you stayed here.’

Charlie was glad of her impatience because he was impatient also. Although it was only conjecture he was increasingly convinced he had been correct about the reason for Sampson’s abrupt removal. Which had been three and a half weeks ago. Which – taking into account the period it had taken them to reach Moscow – meant one of his six months had already gone and he’d achieved absolutely fuck all except to soften the attitude – and he was sure he’d softened the attitude – of a very attractive girl with big tits. Which wasn’t the point of his being there. ‘I haven’t got any money,’ he said, wanting to increase her annoyance.

Natalia frowned, accustomed by now to his changes. ‘So what?’ she said.

‘So I can’t invite you out to dinner. Why don’t you ask me?’ It worked better than he expected.

Allowing her irritation to show – which she rarely did, despite his previous provoking – she said, ‘Why don’t I recommend your being sent back to England, as someone no use to us?’

‘Is that what happened to Sampson?’ demanded Charlie.

Her face became fixed, almost a pained expression. ‘What happened to Sampson isn’t of any concern to you.’

‘It would be, if he’d gone back,’ said Charlie, refusing to give up. ‘I’d like to know the bastard has been sent back.’

‘He hasn’t been,’ she said, exasperated. ‘There was a purpose for him.’

‘More than me?’ demanded Charlie, at once, not wanting to lose the momentum.

‘Yes,’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘Far more than you.’

‘Great mistake,’ said Charlie.

‘Prove it!’ she came back, just as determined.

‘Let me,’ he said, matching her.

That night, in the lonely, smell-steeped apartment in which nothing ever happened the telephone rang. So unusual was it that Charlie stared at the instrument, surprised, only snatching it off the cradle when he realised the caller might ring off.

‘Charlie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alexei,’ said the voice. ‘Alexei Berenkov.’

Thank Christ, thought Charlie.