He left the small office until last. It was as bare as the rest of the flat. The desk was clear, the boxes gone, the bookcase still empty. He was about to give up, until he realised that one side of the large set of shelves wasn’t quite flush with the wall. It was only off by less than half an inch, a small enough gap for most people to miss, but it caught his attention.
He squinted behind it, but couldn’t see anything in the narrow, dark void. So he grabbed both sides and started to walk it away from the wall. He heard a low thud as something fell to the floor, finally free from its hiding place. Knox reached behind the case and pulled out what he’d dislodged. It was another bundle of pages covered in equations. But these ones weren’t made up of nonsense symbols. They were letters and numbers, maths he could recognise. And, in the middle of the bundle, were two brand new Swiss passports.
CHAPTER 23
The sun was on its way back up into the sky when Valera woke up. For the briefest second her mind allowed her some peace before it reminded her where she was and what had happened. Her stomach cried out again for food, but she had no more to give it. All she could do was get up, stretch out her tired body, and wait for different kinds of pain to smother her hunger.
She shouldered her pack, picked up Ledjo’s in her arms, and started walking again. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but even though the sun was already getting higher the air was still cool. She might only have been unconscious for a few hours. She stopped at pools and small creeks for water, but with nothing to eat she quickly became light-headed.
After two hours of walking she reached a single, vast step in the ground. She stared at it for a moment, her mind unable to process its strangeness until it realised it was a road, raised up to protect it from the freeze-thaw swelling of the tundra, and she had hit it side on. Valera could either cross over it and keep going the way she was, or follow it and find out where it went. Her body decided it was too tired even to guide her by instinct, so she stepped up, turned right, and let the road lead her. Twenty minutes later she stopped dead in her tracks. There was a sign in front of her and it wasn’t in Cyrillic. Its letters were from the Latin alphabet. She wasn’t in Russia any more. She was in Finland.
The nearest place worth being on a road sign, somewhere called Ilomantsi, was only a few kilometres away. It turned out to be a small village, just a few paved streets and a few more muddy tracks rutted by cartwheels. But in the middle of its little square stood a large memorial to a battle that had been fought somewhere nearby. There was also, more importantly for Valera, a bus idling next to the monument.
The engine was running and a short queue of people was waiting to get on. Valera didn’t know where the bus was headed, but even her foggy, malnourished brain reasoned it wouldn’t be back across the border. So she joined the end of the line and pulled a purse out of the top of her rucksack, hoping the small amount of rubles she’d been able to secrete away over the last three years would be enough to buy her a ticket somewhere.
It turned out that Finnish bus drivers were as uninterested in asking questions about their passengers as Karelian truck drivers. It also turned out that Valera was not the first person to try to pay her fare with Russian coins. The driver took a few coins from the handful she offered him, and nodded at her to take a seat.
CHAPTER 24
Medev knew that one day someone, somewhere would decide he knew too much about something he shouldn’t and he’d suddenly become a threat to the people he’d spent his whole life serving. He’d been part of the Soviet intelligence apparatus long enough to have worked for the NKVD, the MGB and now the KGB. He’d survived Stalin’s purges of his own spies, and the jostling for control that had followed his death. Medev was now as near to the heart of the Party as he could be without being chairman of the KGB himself. His position as chief of the scientific directorate came with many powerful allies and untold, invisible enemies. But, for the moment, his standing was still good and his authority unquestioned.
He’d slept well, Korolev was already making his way back to the far side of the Urals, and he could enjoy his morning walk to the Lubyanka in peace. He strolled down Bolshaya Nikitskaya ul., and across Alexandrovsky Garden and Red Square, watching the city come to life around him in peace. Babushkas hurried their grandchildren to school, and the street sweepers went through their daily ritual of cleaning the pavements outside old pastel-stuccoed villas as the bright summer sun rose over the spires of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Like every other day, Medev reached his cavernous office at ten minutes to nine, and brewed himself a sour cherry and honey tea. Six five-metre-high windows flooded the room with light during the day, and a row of large, orb-shaped pendants hanging from the ceiling did the same at night. The room was far too large for one man in Medev’s opinion, but he knew its size was intended to reflect the power and importance of his position rather than Medev himself.
He sat at his desk, surrounded on all four sides by three metres of meticulously maintained parquet flooring, savouring his favourite drink and toying with the set of figurines he kept next to his blotting pad. The small figures were abstract human shapes, fashioned in clay by Kazimir Malevich, the great Modernist artist who had been lauded by Lenin and then derided by Stalin.
Medev loved the figures for their myriad contradictions. They were anonymous, homogenous, each without a face and all of them made up of the same basic shapes. But they bore such unique markings and indentations from Malevich’s tools that they were all completely individual. The same but different, different but the same.
No one knew if Khrushchev admired Modernism, and few officers would have risked displaying something so provocative as Malevich’s figures in case they were not to his taste. But Medev reasoned that the leader of the Soviet Union probably had more important things to worry about than this. If Medev was going to find himself bundled onto the back seat of a car and driven out to Khimki Forest, it wouldn’t be for a minor artistic indulgence.
At exactly nine o’clock there was a knock at Medev’s door. Medev’s assistant, Lieutenant Vadim Rykov, had arrived for his morning briefing. Rykov was barely into his twenties but he’d worked for Medev for almost two years and was well trained in his boss’s preferred working methods. So, as ever, he got the incidentals out of the way before the day’s big stories.
This morning’s less important news included the acquisition of a new wrist-mounted Tessina subminiature camera by a KGB agent from the manufacturer’s factory in Grenchen, Switzerland, and the progress of MIR and BESM research groups working on the development of the Soviet Union’s first solid-state computer. Then Rykov moved on to the three pieces of information that might require Medev’s review.
‘Our informant at Cooke airbase has confirmed the next Corona retrieval is still scheduled for tomorrow morning, Pacific time.’ He gave Medev a moment to file this away in his head. ‘And results for the latest SP-117 tests will be delayed again as more volunteers are recruited.’
SP-117 was the codename for the KGB’s range of psychoactive drugs. They were as close as the KGB had come to creating a real truth serum and were a cornerstone of its interrogation processes. But the latest generation, which should have gone into general circulation two months ago, was having teething problems. It either didn’t work, caused test subjects to become delirious, or killed them.
The lieutenant expected Medev to be angry about this latest setback, but if he was, he didn’t show it. He remained silent, turning one of Malevich’s squat figures over in his hands.