CHAPTER 11
After a very short and very cold shower, Knox made himself a very strong coffee. He had no food in the flat for breakfast. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, his cupboards were usually bare beyond a bag of coffee beans from the Algerian Coffee Stores, the shop on Old Compton Street that had been supplying caffeine addicts with their domestic fixes since 1887.
This morning Knox took his coffee short as he got dressed. He didn’t like suits and only owned two that he’d had made on Savile Row several years ago for special occasions, like disciplinary review boards. Day to day, he preferred clothes that didn’t obviously mark him out as a government servant.
He’d recently bought several summer jackets, shirts and trousers from Hardy Amies’ new line of menswear, and picked out a suitable combination. He matched them with a pair of brown brogues from Crockett & Jones, his Omega watch, and a slim black leather wallet from Dunhill.
Dressing less conspicuously was another lesson he’d tried to teach the Watchers. Their dark suits and light mackintoshes, which had been intended to make them blend in, were starting to date and become easy to spot as austere post-war fashions started to relax. Knox had encouraged them to broaden their sartorial horizons, but this had just resulted in more resentment. It had taken the Watchers a lot of hard work to earn enough to buy their uniform, and they wore it with pride.
He took an early train to Cambridge. It wasn’t busy – most people were making their way into London, not the other way round – yet Knox still didn’t have his first-class carriage to himself. Just before the train pulled out of King’s Cross a man joined him in the small compartment. The day was already warming up and the man was sweating in his oversized three-piece suit. Even though it was summer he also carried a thick coat along with his bulging suitcase. He had the look of a travelling salesman.
Thankfully the man didn’t seem interested in making conversation and sat silently across from Knox, reading his newspaper, until the train reached Hitchin. Knox watched him drag his suitcase down onto the platform and then, as the train pulled out of the station, reached over for the paper he’d left behind. Knox scanned the headlines as the countryside rolled by. Calder Hall, which had been front-page news a few days ago, was already relegated to a single column on page five, replaced by a large, close-up photo of Yuri Gagarin sipping champagne. Knox, happily, couldn’t find any mention of Holland, Manning, or himself anywhere.
Once he reached Cambridge, Knox headed to the Cavendish Laboratory on Free School Lane, home to the university’s physics department. The Cavendish was a warren of narrow passages, dead ends and staircases. He passed a steady stream of postgraduate students – some, he thought, more than once – who all shuffled quietly around him, their eyes glazed over from a summer buried in experiments and books.
Eventually, he stopped one and asked for directions. Two staircases and more corridors later he found the door with a little brass plaque next to it that read:
Dr Ludvig Kaspar, Emeritus.
Kaspar was German, and a polymath. He was a prodigious mind who had made a name for his young self across Europe by being able to take on almost any problem in any scientific field. Then the war came, and the Nazis put him to work on a task that in Kaspar’s mind was entirely beneath him – improving the guidance systems of their V2 rockets.
At the end of the war, Kaspar, who had been brought to Berlin to avoid him falling into enemy hands, fell into enemy hands. He had been high on the GRU’s list of prizes, and when Russian soldiers found him working in his temporary lab as if the Third Reich wasn’t crumbling outside, he was transported to Moscow, where he was thoroughly and relentlessly debriefed.
Once the GRU had learned all they could from him to help them advance their own intercontinental ballistic missile programme, he was allowed to return to Berlin. Kaspar hoped to find his lab still intact. It wasn’t. Deep inside the Soviet-controlled eastern sector of the city, the building had long since been repurposed and all traces of his lab gone. He wrote to several universities in the Bundesrepublik to the west seeking a position, but none of them wanted anything to do with someone now considered a Nazi and Soviet collaborator.
The CIA, however, did. He was approached, and then spirited out of East Berlin to Washington as part of Operation Dragon Return. When the US had extracted everything of value from him about both the Soviet Union’s missile programme and life behind the Iron Curtain, the British were given their chance.
Kaspar had been a brilliant young scientist, but after almost ten years being traded between superpowers and endlessly debriefed, the light of his genius had become dim and jaded. There was little flesh on his intellectual bones for the British to pick on. But there was also nowhere else for Kaspar to go. He was almost sixty and had no family, and no desire to return to a Germany that didn’t want him back.
In a fit of generosity, he was given rooms and a small office in Cambridge where he could live out his dotage quietly. In the last six years he’d given two lectures, had published one short paper, and had generally been ignored by successive generations of students passing through the university. It was a stroke of luck that the postgraduate Knox stopped for directions knew about ‘the old Nazi in the rafters’.
Knox tapped on Kaspar’s door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder. Still no acknowledgement or movement inside. Thinking his luck might already have run out, Knox was about to give the door one last bang when it was suddenly pulled open by a short, flushed woman in a thin summer jumper and black capri pants.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded, in a strong Midwestern American accent. She looked very young, but that could have been her height, close-cropped dark hair, and flushed cheeks conspiring against her.
‘I’m looking for Dr Kaspar,’ Knox replied.
‘He’s not here.’ She tried to block Knox’s view of the office, but he could see straight over her head. The room was untidy. Open books had been left on every surface, and several trays containing the remnants of old meals were strewn across the floor. But the woman, who Knox assumed must be Kaspar’s assistant, was right – he wasn’t inside.
‘Do you by any chance know where he might be?’ Knox asked.
The woman checked her watch. ‘It’s twelve thirty. He’ll be on Sheep’s Green.’
‘And how might I recognise him?’
‘He’ll be the one with the swans,’ she replied. Then she slammed the door.
Knox decided there was no point trying to get any more information from her, so he traced his way back through the labyrinth of the Cavendish and made his way the short distance to Sheep’s Green.
The warm morning was turning into a hot afternoon. The River Cam was clogged with punts, and day-trippers swarmed over the small plot of open land where the river split in two. It was one of the prettier patches in the city that wasn’t locked behind a college’s walls.
Knox could see several people trying to tempt the swans on the river with bits of food, but only one of them was having any success. An old man, leaning on a stick, was doling out crusts of bread to the birds. He also looked like he was deep in conversation with several of them. Knox wondered if this whole trip might have been a trick by White.
He kept a short distance between himself and Kaspar. Knox didn’t want to get too close to the swans. He didn’t like swans, and these ones looked like they didn’t like anyone but Kaspar. Everyone else who approached them received either a hiss or a wide flapping of wings.
‘Are you just going to stand there?’ the old German said.