Stanway glanced at the wall clock opposite his desk. ‘I’ll be there,’ he replied, then replaced the telephone handset and began clearing his desk. In Vauxhall Cross, the avant-garde headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service on the south bank of the Thames, all offices operate a ‘clear desks’ policy. This means that no officer ever leaves his room with papers of any description remaining in view. Everything, including desk diaries, have to be locked away in the officer’s personal safe.
Stanway glanced back at his desk for a final check before spinning the combination lock on the safe door. Then he sat down again, in front of the computer terminal, and systematically closed all the open programs. When the display prompted for a username and password, he switched off the screen and left his office.
As Stanway walked in, he found Sir Malcolm Holbeche sitting at the head of the long table in the conference room. Two other heads of department followed him and, once all were seated, Holbeche began.
‘This briefing,’ he stated, ‘is classified Top Secret, and no notes of any sort will be taken. Is that clear?’ The men seated around the table nodded agreement, and Holbeche continued. ‘This situation is somewhat embarrassing, and has potentially very serious implications for both us and the rest of the security establishment, not to mention our “special relationship” with the American CIA. As Moore here will now explain.’
Holbeche leaned back in his chair, with a gesture to the man sitting on his right. William Moore opened the file in front of him, and glanced quickly round the table.
‘Three days ago,’ he began, ‘a low-level Russian clerk — but one working at Yasenevo — walked into the British Embassy in Moscow and asked for asylum. There was some confusion over who should handle this matter, and the Russian began to get visibly perturbed. It’s possible that he was worried that he would be refused asylum, or might even be arrested and handed over to the Russian authorities. Eventually, after half an hour or so, the clerk ran out of the embassy and vanished into the streets of Moscow.’
Moore looked around, at a collection of puzzled faces. ‘Nothing much to get excited about? You’re quite right. By itself, this episode would be of no real consequence, but what elevates it from the mundane to the significant is what the clerk left behind him at the embassy.’
‘Which was?’ somebody prompted.
‘A small package of papers,’ Moore said. ‘Most of it apparently was the usual sort of stuff you’d expect a defecting clerk to bring with him, in order to bargain with. We haven’t seen this material yet, because our people in Moscow are still going through it, but a copy of it has been sent to us, and should arrive here later today. What alarmed our Head of Station over there involved just one sheet of paper.’
Moore paused significantly. ‘It was simply a list of file names with a number handwritten against each one. Our Head of Station thought he recognized some of the file names, so he signalled us promptly. He was right to do so, because several of the names listed were those of SIS files. More importantly, all are classified as Secret and above, and most relate in some way to Russia or the CIS.’
‘And the numbers?’ Holbeche prompted.
‘Oh, yes,’ Moore replied. ‘On initial analysis, we deduced that the numbers weren’t directly relevant to the files — meaning they weren’t, for example, sizes or creation dates or access history or anything like that. What we think is that they indicate sums of money. The Head of Station’s interpretation of this — and I have to say we concur — is that this sheet of paper lists files that the SVR has received from somebody within SIS, and what they paid for them.’
‘Or perhaps files that the SVR wants from SIS, and what they’d be prepared to pay for them?’ one of the other men suggested.
‘No.’ Moore shook his head. ‘The Russian clerk said these files had already been obtained.’
There was an appalled silence.
‘You can all appreciate what this means,’ Holbeche declared. ‘Someone with access to SIS files — and that probably means somebody here in this building — has been selling our secrets to the SVR. What we have to find out urgently is who.’
‘And how do we do that?’ Stanway asked. ‘Call in The Box?’
‘The Box’ and ‘Box 500’ were slang terms for the Security Service, MI5, and were derived from its original postal address of PO Box 500, London.
‘We hope that won’t be necessary.’ Moore shook his head. ‘We’re hoping that the Russian clerk himself might be able to help us out.’
‘How?’
‘Before he ran off into the Moscow afternoon, he’d talked to the SIS duty officer for about ten minutes. The clerk explained to him that he had a number of other papers, similar to the one bearing the file names, and further information about the individual who had supplied the SVR with those files. Based on what he heard, the duty officer believed the source of the leak could probably be identified from those papers.’
‘As the clerk has completely vanished, I don’t see how that can help,’ Stanway said.
‘It helps,’ Moore replied, ‘because the clerk has now reappeared, in Vienna, along with the rest of the papers.’
Raya had always been conscientious in performing her duties, and invariably carried out to the letter all the procedures Abramov had specified for the security checks. One of her tasks was to inspect the access record, since the last full security check, of any files bearing a classification of Top Secret or above.
She looked forward to this task because, as well as inspecting a file’s access history, it also gave her — as the network manager in all but name — the absolute right to look at the contents of any file contained in the database. On every security check she’d carried out since she’d arrived at Yasenevo, what she’d done was not merely to inspect the contents of these files, but also to make copies of them within another hidden directory she’d created. She also selected a handful of highly classified files every day, and stored copies of these, too, in the same hidden directory. Most of these files were encrypted but that didn’t matter because, as network manager, she also had access to the encryption and decryption routines.
But, despite this unrivalled access, the number of highly classified files was so great that she had never managed to find a real ‘gem’, though she believed that the Gospodin material, and now the new and rapidly filling Zakoulok directory, would prove of crucial importance later. This was not because of what the files themselves contained, but because of what they could prove about the person who had sourced them.
During this latest check, she’d decided to carry out a database-wide search for any files containing English words. This produced a huge listing, and included even material dating back to the glorious days of what were known as ‘The Apostles’ — those ideological traitors whose names were still revered in the corridors of the SVR: George Blake, Anthony Blunt, Anthony Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.
The damage they had done to the British intelligence services had been quite literally incalculable, and the lack of trust engendered by their activities between Britain and America was almost as damaging. While The Apostles were operational, almost no penetration operation mounted by either the British or the Americans against the Soviet Union had been successful, and on several occasions they had even helped the KGB to prevent defections to the West. Possibly the classic example of that had been Constantin Volkhov, and that name was burned permanently into Raya’s brain.
Raya studied the listing on the screen and decided to add another filter. Using the listing she’d already generated as a dataset, she eliminated all files that hadn’t been accessed over the last six months. That more than halved the number originally displayed. Then she decided to approach the problem from the opposite direction, and she specified only those files, classified Top Secret and above, which had since been accessed by Directorate heads. That reduced the listing to a mere eighteen files, and Raya decided to take a careful look at all of them.