by Tom West
‘This is one of a dozen and a small one at that. But it is the most interesting for our purposes.’
‘Why?’ Lou asked. ‘What sort of documents are kept down here?’
‘A vast range.’ Sergei stopped, turned to the nearest rack and pulled down a box. It was cardboard and coated with grey dust. He blew across the lid before lifting it. Inside sat a pile of papers. He pulled out a sheaf and scanned the top page, rifled through a dozen pages and tossed them back into the box. ‘Merchant shipping schedules from January 1948 for Zone 3; that’s the Baltic shore.’
‘Fascinating!’ Lou responded.
‘So, are you telling us the documents we are after are in here somewhere?’ Fleming asked and held Sergei’s gaze.
‘Well, I wouldn’t be so cruel as to just dump you here and leave you to it. There is a system.’
‘You can’t just point us to the document?’ Kate said.
‘And how do we know it’s actually here? I assumed you had it to hand.’ Fleming could not disguise his irritation.
‘Why should I make it easy, Adam? Whenever is anything worthwhile easy?’ His smile vanished. ‘I’m really not in the business of making things easy for Western Intelligence agencies!’
‘But . . .’ Lou began.
Sergei raised a hand. ‘I’m not trying to be deliberately obtuse. The Kessler Document is not here.’
Fleming exhaled loudly.
‘But that does not mean you will leave empty-handed. Far from it. I know where it is. However, it would be much better for you if you followed a paper trail and discovered what happened to the document yourselves. And besides, that’s what you two do, isn’t it?’ He turned to Kate and Lou. ‘Research? Exploration?’
‘Yeah, but . . .’ Lou began.
Kate caught Fleming’s eye. He looked barely able to control his anger.
‘We could just walk away,’ the MI6 man said stiffly. ‘After all, you could be wasting our time completely.’
Sergei knitted his brows. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’
‘A game? You said yourself you’re an unconventional man. Maybe it’s your idea of fun to get us down here and then lead us on a wild goose chase.’
‘And pass up millions of dollars?’
‘Loose change to you.’
Sergei nodded and pursed his lips. ‘Yes, I understand your reasoning, Adam. But you are actually quite wrong. I’m being perfectly genuine. I could sit you down and tell you a third-hand story to explain how this’ – and he swept his hand around again – ‘could lead to the Kessler Document, and then hand over what my people have unearthed. But where’s the fun in that?’
‘Actually . . .’ Fleming began, but Sergei held up his hand imperiously again.
‘No, really, Adam . . . please humour me . . . And actually, I have my more serious reasons.’
‘And they are?’ Adam snapped.
Sergei tapped his nose and left, flanked by his armed assistant.
35
‘Fuck!’ Fleming hissed as the door closed behind Sergei and his driver. ‘This is ridiculous. He’s a lunatic!’
‘I guess when you have a few billion and have to live down here you get your kicks wherever you can,’ Lou commented.
‘No. This is malicious.’
‘It’s not, Adam,’ Kate said, exasperated. ‘Stop being so paranoid. Sergei said he had serious reasons for doing this.’
‘And we should simply trust him?’
‘Any better ideas?’ Lou asked. ‘Anyway, I like a challenge.’
Kate read a couple of labels on the nearest shelves. ‘I suggest we take . . .’ She stepped back towards the door and counted the rows. ‘Four aisles each, see if we can find some sort of pattern.’
‘I don’t know about you, Kate, but my Russian is a little rusty,’ Lou said.
She pulled out her phone and started tapping. ‘Aha.’
‘What are you doing?’ Fleming asked.
Kate turned her iPhone to show Adam and then Lou. ‘No conventional above-ground provider of course, but we can hook up to the community’s Wi-Fi network. I knew there had to be one. I noticed it on the computer screen in our room just before we were taken to see Sergei. We can use Google and a translation app. I know your Russian is pretty good, Adam, but I only know a few words.’
Lou grinned. ‘You’re not just a pretty face are you?’
Kate gave him a phoney smile. ‘First, we’re going to have to try to track down the section of the archive that is relevant. Then we can narrow it down until we have something manageable . . . agreed?’
Lou pointed to their left. ‘I suggest we number the rows, one through twenty-four, two rows each aisle, starting that end. See the rows are divided into sections? We need to note down the row, the section and the shelf, starting with number one at ground level, going up to . . .’ He counted under his breath. ‘Eight . . . Jeez! There are . . . one hundred and sixty shelf sections in each row, and . . . what? Something like a dozen boxes in each. Almost fifty thousand boxes!’
‘Yeah, but the shelf sections must be organized in some way. They won’t be random. We have to narrow it down to what?’ Kate glanced round at Lou and Fleming.
‘Military, 1937 to . . . when did Sergei say this archive was first used?’
‘The 1970s.’
‘That’s probably only . . . what?’ Lou groaned. ‘A thousand boxes, maybe?’
‘No time to waste then,’ Kate said.
‘Fine,’ Fleming said giving a heavy sigh. ‘I’ll take rows one to eight, yeah? Kate, you search nine to sixteen. Lou, seventeen to twenty-four. Meet up at the end.’
Each row had a moveable ladder that slid along on castors. They quickly found the labels were well organized and comprehensive; each with a category, subcategory and date.
With the help of the online translators they soon identified keywords: voyennyy, ‘military’; grazhdanskogo, ‘civil’ and sovershenno sekretno, ‘top secret’, and the app could transpose from Cyrillic to Latin script. They simply had to scan the words with the phone and the app did the rest. Half an hour after starting, they met up at the far wall of the vast room.
‘OK,’ Kate said. ‘What do we have?’
‘Mine were all pre-World War Two files, nothing after 1935,’ Lou said.
‘Opposite problem,’ Fleming added. ‘All 1960s onwards to about a year before the date Sergei said the authorities constructed the archives.’
‘I thought I would come up dry too,’ Kate said. ‘I started in the low numbers, but by aisle fourteen I hit the right zone. The collection is clearly listed chronologically. I found 1937/Military/Naval.’
‘Cool,’ Lou said.
‘Only about fifty boxes.’
Lou exhaled loudly. ‘Lead the way.’
They brought all the appropriately labelled boxes to the floor. There were forty-one of them.
‘Best if I go through this, isn’t it?’ Fleming said as they stared at the piles despondently. ‘You can’t check every title of every document on your iPhone!’
‘Good point. But actually, how could the Kessler Document have ended up here anyway? I don’t know why we haven’t questioned that before.’
‘I have thought about it,’ Fleming said. ‘The Germans got the document from SS Freedom and tried to make something of the research data, but obviously failed. The Russians must have appropriated the document in 1945. Remember, the Yanks captured von Braun and the whole Peenemünde crew who built the V1 and V2? The German research into the defensive shield must have been carried out in a region of Germany the Russian Army overran at the end of the war.’
‘In that case, maybe we should be looking for files written in German.’
‘Actually, yes, that’s a very good point,’ Fleming said. ‘Lou, you take those piles.’ He pointed to a collection of some dozen or so boxes and swung round. ‘Kate you can handle those, and I’ll go through these.’
They were halfway through their assigned piles of boxes when Lou walk
ed over to Kate with a file. ‘This could be it.’
Fleming straightened up from a carton he had just opened and joined them.
It was a thin and faded Manila folder with Sovershenno Sekretno, ‘Top Secret’ stamped across the top third of the cover. Beneath this was written: LEGNICA ISSLEDOVATEL’SKAYA BAZA (1937–1944).
‘What is it?’ Fleming asked.
Lou held out the folder. ‘Legnica is a place: a town in Poland, fairly close to the border with Germany, I think. It was absorbed by the Reich when they invaded in 1939. The Russians would have taken it very early in 1945 as they advanced on Germany from the East.’
‘“Issledovatel’skaya Baza” means “Research Base”,’ Fleming responded. ‘And the year is right . . . 1937.’
Lou opened the file. It contained a single slip of paper stapled to the back cover and a few hand-written words: Perenapravljajut B-19-4c.
‘This must refer to the archive we’re in,’ Kate said. ‘The people who set up this place used their own system to categorize the boxes and shelves. We called them rows one to twenty-four, they designated a letter of the alphabet. Then the stacks were divided into numbers along the rows and up the levels.’
‘Very clever,’ Lou remarked. ‘So this is aisle B, stack nineteen along and up on the fourth level.’
They swung into the first aisle on the far side of the massive space. Kate tugged on the end ladder as they ran along counting the segments, slowing as they reached the fifteenth, sixteenth . . .
‘Here,’ Kate announced and started to climb. Reaching the fourth shelf of boxes, she could see ‘segment c’ a little to her right and indicated to Lou to shift the ladder a few yards. A moment later, she had a box in her hands and was descending the ladder carefully until she could pass it down to Fleming.
They rifled through the box. It was filled with more Manila folders and they created a pile of them to their left. Halfway down they reached a thick file again stamped: ‘Top Secret’. Beneath this: LEGNICA BAZA (1937–1944) hand-written in large capitals. Inside lay a thick wad of papers held together with a chunky metal clip. Across the front page, the title: A Litany of Errors: My Misguided Role in the Treachery of Dimitri Grenyov, Chief Scientist at Movlovyl Research Base, and His Attempts to Apply the Theories of Johannes Kessler by Michael Caithness.
36
A Litany of Errors: My Misguided Role in the Treachery of Dimitri Grenyov, Chief Scientist at Movlovyl Research Base, and His Attempts to Apply the Theories of Johannes Kessler
by
Michael Caithness
My name is Michael Caithness, prisoner X-R34, Camp 16, Kemerovo. I am told the date is 3 October 1954, but I only know this is true because the guard has vouched for it. Outside, the temperature is -12 degrees centigrade and the night is only just beginning to close in. Tomorrow I shall die; it has been arranged, the money passed on to the commander of the camp. It will be a mercy killing because men such as I, educated in a minor public school and then Cambridge, a man best suited to a soft desk job and a smart bachelor apartment in Knightsbridge, drawn into espionage in a moment of drunken weakness and then quickly trapped by both sides, could not countenance struggling for each breath in this vile place until I waste away. No, I procured the funds from good friends in Britain and they have paid for my death . . . hence this confession. I know it is not as it should be, but I have never considered myself a wordsmith. Nevertheless, it is an honest account. I have tried to recreate in this piece the events as they unfolded at the time, as true to life as I can be. So if I’m occasionally inconsistent or you spot imperfections of style, I apologize in advance.
I first heard of the Kessler Document soon after starting work at my aforementioned job as an MI6 pen-pusher. It was just a name that would have passed me by if it had not been for a strange confluence of events that began to unfold without my bidding. As I said before, I was ensnared at a weak moment and entrapped.
One of my juniors got wind of communications between Westminster and Washington in which the name Albert Einstein cropped up. He knew the great scientist was then living in Princeton and working at the university. He also knew I had read Physics at Cambridge. Now, you should know straight away that I am not a proper scientist; I have done no research, written no learned papers. I went straight from a science degree into the intelligence business. However, I’ve always had a fascination for many scientific disciplines, read widely, and of course, the name Albert Einstein is almost totemic. Indeed, I used to be something of a dinner party bore in London when recounting how I had once met the most famous scientist in the world in a lift when he visited Cambridge in 1933, and how I had shaken the man’s hand.
The young chap who had heard a rumour about Einstein and some vague intrigue between us and the Yanks did not know much but just enough to pique my interest. I conducted a little surreptitious digging and learned of a recent aborted attempt to complete some mysterious set of experiments that had involved Einstein and a former colleague of his in Berlin, one Johannes Kessler. According to the intelligence I managed to unearth, a set of secret papers acquiring the epithet ‘the Kessler Document’ had been en route to America aboard a British merchant vessel. The ship never arrived, the documents were mysteriously lost.
At the time, no more could be ascertained about the scientific papers or the intriguing experiments. The war came along and I forgot all about it.
Until, that is, my first major error to which I have already alluded. A friend I had not seen since we were habitués of the same staircase at Trinity invited me out to dinner at Claridge’s. He understood that deep down I had grave misgivings about the integrity of the West; that buried beneath layers of British reserve, upper middle class conformity and the bullying of my true blue father, I was actually a closet Commie sympathizer without myself being fully cognizant of the fact. Too much rather good Saint Emilion followed by a Cognac that dated from a time when Queen Victoria was newly widowed and I was open to all sorts of offers. That night, 4 April 1948, I became a double agent.
The first six months in this new role were actually rather dull. I passed on bits of information and received a payment in cash. The stuff I had access to was pretty low grade. I knew that and my handler knew that, but what I had not suspected was that acting the traitor was the best thing I could have done for my career. It was only later I discovered that the counter-espionage network of which my Cambridge friend was an integral part had tendrils extended deep into MI6 and this network moved me up the ladder, in part to reward me, but also to gain me easier access to more useful material.
Almost exactly a year after being recruited to betray my country, I was taken on my first trip to Russia. Officially I was there in the guise of a Whitehall official assigned the task of putting out feelers for negotiating a behind-the-scenes thawing of trade barriers between London and Moscow. Unofficially, the trip had been arranged by my Soviet masters, a stage in the further indoctrination process for young double agents.
And, somehow, the fact that I had studied science and maintained an abiding interest in exotic physics had gone before me, so that on only my second night in Moscow at a showy state banquet to which I was invited as a very junior delegate, I was introduced to the man at the heart of my story, Dimitri Yury Grenyov, Chief Scientist at Movlovyl Research Base. This is the man who has led me, just a few years later, to a Siberian labour camp and to this, the eve of my prearranged death.
Grenyov was immediately friendly, which at first surprised me, but as I drank more champagne I became less concerned by this and I genuinely warmed to the man.
He was a very plain-looking fellow with wispy grey hair, drooping eyelids over small eyes of a quiet indistinct colour. He had bushy eyebrows, thin lips and a pallid complexion. His handshake was limp and he spoke in uneven metre, quick bursts of energetic monologue and then a silence as though he constantly needed to recharge before the next burst. I found him hard work, but then, as he drank more, he relaxed and became surprisingly good company
, and especially interested in life at Cambridge. He had been only once a few years before the war and retained fond memories of the place.
The two of us ended up back at my hotel room where we cracked open a bottle of vodka and carried on talking and drinking well into the small hours. He finally made his exit about four o’clock and we agreed to meet up for coffee at eleven as I was not expected at the trade department until after lunch.
I passed out in my only suit and woke at nine to find I had vomited down the front. I felt so bad I was convinced I would never walk again, but twenty minutes under a cold shower and I started to come round. I cleaned the jacket of my suit with soap and water knowing that there was no laundry service at the hotel. I managed to make a half-decent job of it, changed my shirt and went for a brisk walk around Red Square hoping that the sub-zero temperatures and some air would do something for my hangover. Arriving early at the prearranged venue – a cafe close to Red Square – I ordered a pot of extra strong coffee, and after two cups I began to feel almost human again.
Grenyov’s first reaction when he saw me was to laugh. ‘Ah! Perhaps vodka is not your drink, Michael!’
I groaned and watched him pull up a chair and order more coffee from the waiter.
I had time to think about the previous night as I had trudged through the snow edging Red Square, and without further ado I said to Grenyov: ‘So, tell me, Dimitri, what is all this about?’
He gave me a puzzled look that slipped into a friendly smile. ‘I’ve been too obvious?’ He took a deep breath and thanked the waiter as the man placed a fresh pot on the table. ‘I have been asked to talk to you and get to know you . . . Not,’ he added quickly, ‘that it hasn’t been a pleasure, Michael. I find your company genuinely stimulating.’
