‘Where’s Devereux?’ Murphy asked Valera, using Peterson’s alias.
‘He is no longer part of this arrangement,’ she replied. She didn’t offer any further explanation.
Murphy became even more confused when it became apparent that the woman who’d come to meet them wasn’t there to sell them some new type of clandestine listening technology, but something several orders of magnitude more valuable.
Valera described her breakthrough using the same analogy of her room that stretched around the world, at which point Dixon realised she might be the answer to most, if not all, of his problems. He asked her a string of technical questions and could tell from their short conversation that Valera was on the level – and that she was in a rush to do a deal.
Once he’d given his nod to Murphy, she laid down her terms. Her spread-spectrum code-division technology in exchange for a home in America, a job, and protection.
‘If we go back to the States and this thing checks out, we’ll give you a green card and all the work you can handle,’ Murphy said. ‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll go our separate ways on good terms.’
He was playing it cool, but now that he understood the full scope of what Valera was offering, Dixon could tell Murphy would have said anything to get her on a plane.
When they did get back to America, they realised just how valuable Valera was, and the impact of the events surrounding her escape from the Soviet Union. An entire naukograd had been put out of commission, and the KGB scientific directorate had lost its chief. The CIA had been handed a major advantage and it didn’t intend to squander it.
Dixon and Valera had made a good team, working together to bring her lab work to life in the real world, and slowly getting to know each other.
They’d spent months developing and refining Valera’s discovery into a fully fledged Earth-to-orbit communications system, secretly testing it in Corona satellite after satellite. They’d even included a version of it in John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule when he finally became the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7 six months ago.
Dixon had led the celebrations when the communications system took over control of Friendship 7 as Glenn briefly lost contact with ground control over his standard radio during his descent back to Earth. The official story was that Glenn had triumphantly piloted the Mercury capsule all the way to its splashdown site by himself, but as far as Dixon was concerned, his electronic co-pilot had been the real hero.
Suddenly Kennedy’s twin dreams of putting a man on the moon and advancing America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities so fast and so far that no one else would be able to catch them both seemed achievable. Dixon could relax at last after two years of constant stress. But his downtime didn’t last long. The president and the CIA were still waiting for him to come up with a way to hunt the Vietcong from space. And Valera, as Murphy had promised, was offered all the research projects she could handle.
Dixon had always been astonished by Valera’s seemingly limitless capacity for work. She was always the first in the lab in the morning and the last to leave at night. When he’d finally persuaded her to take a little break of her own and celebrate everything she’d achieved he understood why.
She told him about her years in Povenets B, growing up in Leningrad, and everything in her life that had been taken away from her, including her son. She talked about the old dream of her and Ledjo floating in a small boat on a calm lake, which she hoped would return every night when she fell asleep, but still hadn’t. And about the single physical memento she had – Ledjo’s small backpack – that had been lost when she’d been snatched from Stockholm. Her work was the only thing she had left.
It took a few weeks of phone calls, but Dixon managed to find the backpack. It had been given to the Swedish security service by the Hotel Reisen and filed away in evidence storage. They had no use for it now Valera was a long way from their jurisdiction and were more than happy to send it on. It was a small gesture, but Dixon was glad to see Valera produce a thin, brief smile when he returned it to her.
Now, she was about to unveil her latest world-changing piece of technology and Dixon was, as ever, behind in his work and chasing an elusive breakthrough. Half of him wanted to be back in his lab, but the other half didn’t want to miss out on what was about to happen.
So, he stood at the back of the room, waiting for Murphy to show up, and watching Valera move anxiously from panel to panel, surrounded by a cadre of assistants, checking every readout and making adjustment after adjustment to be sure everything would work perfectly when the big moment arrived.
Dixon hoped she felt some pride about everything she’d achieved since she’d come to America. But she didn’t.
Valera had felt something like relief when she reached Washington and wasn’t immediately arrested, but she had quickly realised that the United States wasn’t so different from the Soviet Union. She was still watched, still suspected, and still controlled. She was in the so-called land of the free, but she wasn’t. She’d been put to work at Langley straight away and even now she was called in for questioning whenever the CIA wanted to go over her life story again or check some new piece of intelligence about somewhere or something in Russia she’d never heard of.
At least most of the people she worked with respected her and tended to leave her alone. But there were still stares whenever she walked into a canteen or was seen outside the NASA compound. And some of her supposed colleagues were less than thankful when she was called in to solve an impossible problem that had stumped them for months.
She knew she owed the CIA for getting her out of the KGB’s reach, and she owed Dixon for giving her work that actually challenged her and for giving her back her only physical memory of her son. But she also knew she couldn’t work for them forever, being allowed to stray gradually further and further from her lab but always kept on an invisible leash.
Valera had been generous, giving NASA and the CIA as much of her brain as they could handle. But she was close to paying off her side of the bargain she’d struck in London with Dixon and Murphy. In fact, she’d decided that after her next major success, which might be mere minutes away, she’d wait for the celebratory party Americans were so fond of throwing to reach its height, then quietly slip out, put a jumper and some biscuits in her small backpack, disappear into the great American wilderness, and go find a lake somewhere to sail a boat on.
So, she was anxious as she moved from panel to panel, followed by her assigned acolytes, but not for the reasons Dixon imagined.
CHAPTER 65
Knox walked through the front door of Leconfield House with absolutely no attention or fanfare, which was exactly how he liked it. For the first month after the Peterson affair and Holland’s return, whenever he arrived at MI5 headquarters he’d always encounter someone who wanted to congratulate him or apologise for believing the rumours and character assassinations that had been spread about him during his suspension. Now, a year later, things had settled down and it was back to business as normal.
MI5 had covered the cost of restoring Knox’s flat, and his extended stay at Duke’s Hotel on St James’s Place. When he’d stepped back into his flat again for the first time after everything had been repaired, he remembered Peterson calling him a hypocrite for using his connections to buy it in the first place. After three weeks of building work he decided the least he could do was introduce himself to the other residents who were starting to fill up the building, if only to say sorry for the inconvenience he’d put them through.