The Einstein Code

by Tom West

  ‘Oh, good,’ I said, my tone a little brittle. ‘Obviously your engagement with me was sanctioned. What puzzles me is why?’

  ‘We each have an association with Cambridge . . . beyond Trinity being your alma mater,’ Grenyov said, glancing around.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I indicated last night that my work lies within the domain of particle physics. I should now say that it is actually a project first begun by Einstein years ago; work he started with a German scientist called Johannes Kessler . . . You look a little startled,’ Grenyov said and drained his coffee cup.

  ‘I have heard about Einstein’s experiments in the United States before the war. You are talking about those, yes?’

  Grenyov nodded and refilled his cup.

  I checked the tables near us. Closest was a young couple who were clearly only interested in each other. Behind the scientist, a single woman, middle-aged, soberly dressed, sat reading a book. ‘I was led to believe the Kessler Document was lost.’

  Grenyov winked. ‘It was lost . . . to the British and the Americans at least. The Nazis got hold of it. But it wasn’t easy for them. After a fight they boarded the British ship.’

  ‘SS Freedom?’

  ‘Yes . . . you know a little of the story?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘The crew were killed and the vessel towed back to Ifnl in Morocco a then-secret naval base the Germans built in the mid-thirties.’

  ‘This is some two years before the war began.’

  ‘Which illustrates the value the Germans placed on finding the document.’

  ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘They stripped the ship to its bare bones like hyenas on the savannah. They eventually found the document inside a redundant part of a cooling system.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. It seemed extraordinary that anyone would go to such lengths over a scientific document. ‘So,’ I said, ‘having gone to so much effort I assume the Germans tried to make something practical from the theoretical physics; tried to understand what Einstein’s contribution would have been.’

  ‘That’s precisely right. They constructed a dedicated research facility in occupied Poland, a place called Legnica. A very good scientist, Herman Gottleib from the University of Berlin, was put in charge and some of the best particle physicists in Germany were recruited. I’ve no idea how much money was thrown at the project, but it would have been considerable – at least until other demands on the Reich’s science budget cut the effort. Whatever the cost though, they got nowhere.’

  ‘Only one Einstein, I guess.’

  ‘Yes and no. Einstein is a consummate genius, of course, but there are many other great minds in his wake.’

  For a second, Grenyov looked a little affronted and I realized that beneath the affable persona, the Russian had an indelible self-respect and a clear awareness of his considerable ability and achievements.

  ‘Do you have any idea what the document contained? What the Germans were trying to do? What Einstein was trying to do, come to that?’

  He leaned in towards me across the table. ‘Of course I do, Michael. Surely, your memory is not that short.’

  I must have looked very confused because Grenyov grinned.

  ‘It was just over four years ago when the Red Army occupied Poland. The army took the researchers at Legnica by surprise. The scientists had little time to destroy their files – the work of almost seven years.’

  ‘And you have continued with the work?’

  ‘Yes. I was appointed head of the project in January 1946.’

  I said nothing for several moments, just studied Grenyov’s strange face.

  ‘Very well, I can accept all this. Indeed, it makes perfect sense. So maybe it’s time you actually told me what has occupied Einstein, the Germans and yourself for so many years?’

  ‘Two words,’ Grenyov said. ‘Defensive shield.’

  I repeated the words back to him. My expression must have been one of blank incomprehension because Grenyov began to explain straight away.

  ‘Imagine if a nation at war had the ability to fit a device to its ships, tanks and aircraft that could repel any weapon thrown at it. Imagine a ship being attacked by a more powerful vessel that launches torpedoes and shells that all come bouncing back at the attacker. It would be useful, no?’

  ‘But how could that be possible?’ I said.

  ‘You are familiar with the idea of trying to unify Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum mechanics?’

  ‘I left university before the war,’ I responded. ‘I’ve tried to keep up with new work, but it’s . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand. Well a refresher then.’ Grenyov looked at his empty cup, buying a little time to phrase properly what he had to say. He topped up his cup with the last of the coffee. ‘So . . .’ He had his hands out, palms up. ‘On the one hand we have relativity – Einstein’s great discovery.’ He moved his left hand up and down as though weighing a fruit. ‘This deals exclusively with phenomena on the large scale – solar systems, galaxies, the speed of light, etc.’ He raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then on the other we have quantum mechanics.’ And he mirrored the earlier action with his right hand. ‘This deals with only the very small scale – at the level of atoms and sub-nuclear particles.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘For years now physicists have tried to find a way to combine the two, to create what they call a unified theory. Einstein first postulated the notion back in 1916. More recently my countryman . . .’ Grenyov leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper ‘. . . Matvey Petrovich Bronstein, who was executed on the orders of our great ruler about ten years ago, tried to quantify the idea. He wrote a landmark paper on the subject published in Physikalische Dummheiten. Bronstein’s work is banned and must never be mentioned, so in all my studies based on the materials from Legnica I was unable to refer to Bronstein’s ideas and constantly forced to backtrack.’ With a pained expression, he leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Anyway, I digress. Einstein has been trying to further the idea of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics for over thirty years now. Back in 1935 he was approached by two US naval scientists who had followed the great man’s ideas and asked him if there was any way to harness his latest theories as a weapon of war.’

  ‘That’s surprising,’ I commented.

  ‘Indeed. As you know Einstein is a militant pacifist, if you will excuse the oxymoron.’ He laughed for a moment then leaned forward once more. ‘Apparently, he was on the point of throwing the men out of his office when he suddenly stopped and said: “Would a defensive device help?”’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘Wonderful!’

  ‘Yes. I have a friend of a friend who knows Einstein, and according to him Einstein has often said that he would like to make a machine that neutralized weapons and therefore saved lives. He believed this could be done by harnessing what he called “quantum gravity”. It is clear this interest began after the visit by the navy scientists, and from sources close to the man, he thought about little else for the next few years, a fascination that came to its climax in 1937 with his experiments to create a protective shield.’

  ‘He really did try it then?’

  ‘Oh yes. I know that for a fact. The Americans have done everything they can to hush up the experiments, but information has leaked out. It seems certain Einstein and his team conducted at least one experiment early in 1937, but it went wrong so disastrously that they did not try again. Well at least that is what we thought at first.’

  ‘We?’ I said.

  ‘The NKVD.’

  ‘Russian Intelligence? OK, so what do you think now?’

  ‘We still think only one test was conducted, but it wasn’t just because it went terribly wrong; it was also because Einstein couldn’t solve the problems it presented alone.’

  ‘And that’s where the Kessler Document came in?’

  ‘Yes.
I have learned that Einstein and Kessler worked together on a form of unified theory. They knew each other back in the early thirties and spent some time together in Cambridge when Einstein was in transit – an émigré from Nazi Germany – on his way to live in the United States. The Kessler Document turns out to be part of the key to explaining what went wrong with Einstein’s test and how to set it up in a better way.’

  ‘Part?’

  Grenyov sighed heavily. ‘What the Germans retrieved and we . . . inherited, was encoded. Some of the Nazis’ best brains spent years trying to crack the code. They made little headway, just scratching the surface of what they thought the two scientists had been visualizing. They blended these clues with cutting-edge knowledge of quantum mechanics and expansions of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The Germans did their best, but failed utterly.’

  ‘And you, my friend,’ I said. ‘You have fared better?’

  He shook his head, his shoulders slumping a little. ‘Some progress has been made. We have approached things from a number of different angles. It is a shame we have no access to the work of Bronstein, the Russian scientist I mentioned earlier. But what we need is the same thing the Germans were searching for, the cipher for the code Einstein and Kessler used.’ He gave me an earnest look. ‘That is where you come in, Michael.’

  I nodded, absorbing the incredible tale Grenyov had unfolded over a few cups of coffee. ‘I see,’ I said quietly. ‘Well, I will try.’

  ‘You have a totally different set of possible leads,’ he went on. ‘We need a fresh approach. I cannot impress upon you just how important this is.’

  ‘You do not need to, Dimitri. I do understand. Do you have any information on the cipher? Anything at all?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware the Germans made little effort to find it. The war itself diverted attention and resources, but it was also a matter of arrogance I think. They wanted to crack the problem themselves and had no faith in finding where the cipher had gone or what form it may have taken. They set their minds to cracking the code.’

  ‘But you have obtained some new information?’ I gave him a searching look.

  ‘You are a very astute young man, Michael. It is only a vague lead; the NKVD again. They learned that, as a security measure, the British got Kessler to encode the document and send it to England via a totally different route to the cipher. The document was hidden on SS Freedom, while the cipher was sent to the United States some other way.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Yes, annoyingly so.’ Grenyov produced a wan smile. ‘The NKVD have gone through every archive to see if the Nazis did try to get their hands on the cipher early on, but they’ve drawn almost a complete blank.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘One reference has been unearthed in a file from Himmler’s private office. An encoded message linked with Kessler’s people smuggling out the material to England in the spring of 1937. The code the courier had used was a relatively simple one and Wehrmacht Supreme Command cracked it quickly. It was a brief message that made reference to the Kessler Document. It stated that it would be encoded and the cipher sent separately. A single word had been highlighted by one of Himmler’s staff, a word that must have held some special relevance. The word was: “Pioneer”.’

  After this encounter in Moscow I didn’t hear from Dimitri Grenyov for over four years. Back in London I set about refreshing my knowledge of physics and in particular the esoteric ideas of relativity combined with quantum theory that lay at the heart of what Grenyov had talked about – the concept of quantum gravity.

  I attended seminars at my alma mater, Trinity, Cambridge; I subscribed to Nature and the Journal of Theoretical Physics; I did as much as I could to use my contacts in British Intelligence to learn whatever I could concerning Einstein’s attempted test in 1937.

  Although this effort meant I brushed up on my modern physics – which came as a welcome diversion from low-key espionage, rationing and a drab, shared office five days a week – it produced nothing of value in my quest. I longed to share my fascination with others. I always was a great believer in the adage that two heads are better than one, but of course I could not breathe a word of what Grenyov had told me. And all the time the word ‘Pioneer’ stuck in my mind, but it meant no more to me than it had the day the Russian scientist had half-whispered it to me over a cafe table in Moscow.

  Two years after my trip to Russia, I was promoted to the higher ranks of the service and a year after that, in November 1952, I was invited to Washington for a joint services conference with the CIA. It was an important step and it increased my profile with my unofficial employer – the Kremlin. I did my best to extract anything useful from the visit, but the Yanks were in a state of fevered paranoia. The Rosenbergs were in jail and little over six months from execution. I have to admit, the Zeitgeist affected me. I often felt as though I were treading a very dangerous path, that the risk was not worth the taking. But another voice in my head kept telling me that I had already gone too far.

  Then, on my second visit to Washington, in March 1953, news broke that Stalin had died. I don’t know why I was so shocked, but I was. He was an old man, he drank too much and was in bad health, but Stalin? Dead? Impossible, surely?

  Lord only knows what the full extent of the repercussions were from this singular death. People died, others were reprieved, policies changed, plans scrapped, new ideas proposed, fresh battles begun, old victors defeated, young ones invited to the fray. And, unknown to almost anyone aside from those directly involved, as Georgy Malenkov grabbed the reins of political power, Dimitri Grenyov’s beloved project to do what Einstein had failed to achieve – the construction of a quantum gravity shield – was shut down, the Movlovyl Research Base decommissioned.

  I did not learn of this until June that year; some three months after it happened. I received a letter from Grenyov that he had somehow managed to slip past the censors and the KGB. I later discovered that to get it to me had required calling in favours from the last remaining friends he had in any position of power or influence.

  In the letter Grenyov explained that his life had been turned upside down. The new leadership had decided to institute cutbacks in some areas of scientific research and divert money into other projects. Anything Stalin had been particularly supportive of was axed unceremoniously. This meant his project to construct a force shield had been put in the firing line early. At the end of the letter, Grenyov begged me to find my way to Moscow so that we might meet and talk again. He had something very important he wished to tell me.

  But this was no easy task. Our countries had few diplomatic ties officially; and although I had been promoted again in the spring of 1953, I was not exactly a mover or shaker. I could not even risk replying to Grenyov’s missive, even to tell him there was almost no chance I could see him. And, of course, there was no way he could risk writing with his secret.

  But luck . . . hah! There are two very distinct sides to the concept of luck, are there not? Luck of a black hue, I now know, came my way. Keen to find out whatever they could about the new regime in the Kremlin, my superiors wanted to send a new man to Moscow. Thanks to the intelligence grapevine, my name was mooted because I had done well on my previous information-gathering mission in the guise of a British government trade negotiator years before. So, come November 1953, I was once more in Moscow.

  The machinations of my work in an official capacity have nothing to do with this story and are indeed pretty dull, but of course I had a second, covert purpose in being there. During a break in discussions with a pair of junior trade and farming ministers concerning tractor parts and strawberry quotas, I managed to slip away unnoticed to meet Dimitri Grenyov at our previous rendezvous, where again we drank coffee and talked.

  The four and a half years since our first visit there together had not been kind to Grenyov. His skin was even pastier than I had remembered it to be, and his wisps of hair lay thinner on his scalp. When he spoke, he sounded weary, as though it were the
middle of the night.

  ‘It is good to see you again my young friend.’ He shook my hand and indicated we should sit.

  In a few minutes it was almost as though the years had been rolled back. The coffee pot stood on the table, hot cups at our fingers, an icy breeze coming from the north-west, patches of sunshine spread out upon ice across the pavement close to the edge of the restaurant forecourt where we sat.

  ‘Do you wish to tell me what has happened?’ I asked after a long silence.

  ‘It’s hard to know where to start, Michael.’

  I let it go and simply waited for the scientist to find the words he wished to use; it would not do for me to push or persuade.

  ‘As I told you in my letter, they have closed down the project.’ He took a deep breath and I could see a flash of anger.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  He waved a hand in the air. ‘Thank you, Michael, but we are beyond words now.’

  I felt a ripple of sudden anxiety. ‘What do you mean by that, Dimitri?’

  He glanced around and leaned forward. ‘In a way, I have been fortunate,’ he began. ‘Some of my colleagues in other departments at the Academy have simply vanished. They were in their labs one day, then . . .’ He clicked his fingers silently in the air between us. ‘But actually I have been doubly lucky. I am still here, assigned to new, admittedly very dull work, but . . .’ he said, lowering his voice a dozen decibels, ‘I also had some warning that the authorities were about to shut down my experiments.’

  I looked at him slightly confused and then realized what he meant.

  ‘Yes,’ Grenyov whispered. ‘Two hours. Not long, but enough. I have copies of all the important research, and I have the Kessler Document.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘You are a brave man, Dimitri.’

  ‘A desperate man, Michael. I was drawing close, you see. I was on the right path. Six months, that’s all I needed, six damn months, and they shut me down.’ His face was contorted with fury. He looked around him again. ‘I could not throw away my work, the chance to make the discovery of the century . . . Could I?’