As Medev made his way back down the corridor to the nurses’ station, his mind finally made a connection it had been groping at since his morning briefing from Rykov.
He asked the nurse on duty if he could borrow her phone, then dialled the long list of numbers that could connect him securely to the Lubyanka. When Rykov answered, he told him that under no circumstances could the Americans be allowed to retrieve the next Corona payload. With twenty-two million square kilometres of Soviet Union for them to spy on it would be terrible luck if the Americans had managed to photograph one small, smouldering naukograd. But it wasn’t a risk Medev wanted to take.
CHAPTER 29
Bennett made her way across the north side of Grosvenor Square towards the US embassy. It was an imposing presence. Its hard-edged, Modernist facade took up the whole western side of the square, and a large sculpture of a bald eagle with outstretched wings looked down from its roof on everyone who approached it.
The embassy had opened just over a year ago, and its interior had been designed to be as much of a statement about America’s sense of importance as its brash exterior. The six above-ground levels contained vast conference rooms, banks of communications stations, and row after row of offices – each one’s size correlating precisely with the rank of its occupier. The CIA took up the entire fourth floor, as well as a considerable amount of the building’s subterranean levels, which had been given over to the agency’s local archives.
This was where Bennett headed after flashing her security credentials at an uninterested guard and slipping through one of the small staff entrances on the side of the building.
The embassy was a piece of the United States on British soil, so American social mores ruled. In the rest of the city the golden hue of Bennett’s skin and ice blue of her eyes might make her look like a northern European who had spent a long summer in warmer climes. In the embassy, they singled her out as what she really was – someone whose very existence made her fellow countrymen uncomfortable.
Many of the women who worked at the embassy lived together in houses in the area of the city bound to the north by Hyde Park and the south by the Thames. They were attracted by famous names and landmarks like the King’s Road, Harrods, and the Royal Albert Hall. Rooms were often shared, and beds passed on to newcomers as people returned to America or found a Brit to marry and moved out. The embassy encouraged the system as it created a kind of sisterhood and support network that helped its female staff feel safe and settled.
But when Bennett arrived in London, she was told there was nowhere for her in any of the women’s houses. A month later, after she’d found her own room in a boarding house off Gloucester Road, another woman had arrived, a blonde, white woman from New England. The embassy houses practically fought each other for her. There had been plenty of space all along, Bennett just wasn’t wanted.
People did their best to ignore Bennett in Grosvenor Square. Most of the time it irritated her, but today she was more than happy to let it work in her favour, especially in the archive, where the file clerks on duty chose not to see her moving through the aisles of record stacks.
First she went to the set of thick files the CIA held on Bianchi and Moretti. The agency had kept the two Italians under surveillance since they’d arrived in London to see if they posed a threat to local operations or if they were worth recruiting. Bennett wanted to see if anything had been added to their records since they’d been found dead. There was just a note saying MI5 were investigating their suspected murder. The front file had also been tagged with a green strip – code that all records relating to the Bianchi and Moretti should be moved into deep storage during the next reconciliation cycle.
Her superiors may have stopped caring about the Italians, but she was still very interested in them. And so, apparently, was MI5. Bennett didn’t know where Knox had gone after he’d given her the slip in Soho the night before, but she was willing to bet he’d gone to Deptford and Bianchi and Moretti’s flat. Now she wanted to know what connected Kaspar, Horne, and the Italians. Unfortunately, the CIA didn’t have any records on Horne or the Calder Hall Ring, and Bennett had already exhausted the information held on Kaspar in London. She could have put in a request to the central records store in Virginia for whatever they held on him, but that would take too much time and probably earn her a reprimand.
Before she gave up completely on the archive, she stopped by the large pile of new files waiting to be carried off into the stacks and quickly scanned through them. The fourth folder just held a single photo. It was of a woman, her hair caught mid-turn as she walked into a building. The image was slightly blurry, taken with a long lens. The woman’s narrow eyes looked more like sunken slits, and wisps of loose hair hung over her cheeks. But the expression on her face was clear enough. She looked long past the point of exhaustion. But more than that, Bennett thought she looked haunted, like something unspeakably awful had happened to her. She turned the photo over, reading the location and timestamp: Swedish embassy, Helsinki, 16:47, 16 July. Yesterday afternoon. It must have been sent to London almost as soon as it had been taken.
The woman’s name was written underneath in different-coloured ink, added by someone once a source inside the Swedish embassy had confirmed her identity: Irina Valera. Bennett recognised the name, but she had no idea how she’d ended up in Helsinki. She turned the photograph over and looked at it again, trying to work out what had happened to her.
Bennett had a choice: put the photo back in its folder or do something else, something that could end up with her facing much more than a reprimand. She stood still for a moment, deciding if she was ready to cross a very big line. Then she took the photograph to the unattended Xerox machine next to the chief clerk’s desk and made a copy of it before slipping the original back onto the pile of filing.
CHAPTER 30
An hour after the bus left Ilomantsi, it had deposited Valera in the city of Joensuu. Joensuu was the biggest place she had been since she’d left Leningrad, and it was well away from the border with Russia. It felt like a metropolis compared to Povenets B. Well-fed people walked along its streets and riverbanks, cars drove on its roads, and a never-ending stream of boats sailed beneath its bridges.
Valera could have stayed in Joensuu, found somewhere out of the way to rest and build up her strength for a day or two, or stowed away on a ship heading out onto Lake Pyhäselkä and disappeared into the network of waterways that criss-crossed Finland. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment she might be snatched up and taken back to Russia. The ties that bound Finland and its neighbour ran almost as deep as the divisions that separated them. Russia had exerted influence over Finland for centuries, and even after independence and multiple, bloody wars there were still plenty of people whose loyalties lay to the east. For every good Samaritan Valera might encounter, she might also meet someone looking to curry favour with Moscow.
She’d decided that she had to keep moving.
Her ride from Ilomantsi had dropped her off in the middle of Joensuu’s old town and, not wanting to expose herself as an outsider by asking for directions, she had spent almost an hour finding the main city bus station.
She’d tried to buy a ticket to Helsinki, but this time the clerk had refused her rubles. He’d said something to her, but Valera had no idea what. She’d tried, quietly, speaking to him in Swedish and then English, but he didn’t understand either.