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.He couldn’t remember what he’d said.‘Is he known, this traitor?’‘Director knows.Wanted confirmation.’ Abruptly Deedes thought it was funny and laughed.‘Won’t get it, not now.’William Davies had been right in surmising that the spy within the Factory bypassed the department in which he had been placed by using the diplomatic bag from the London embassy.But because they believed their informant had been discovered and the emergency justified it, the KGB used the department to send the warning message.And Davies saw it.But there was no positive identification.It said: ‘Warn the Charles is blown.’He planned to get back to London that night.He set out on foot and by a very circuitous route to disguise his destination as the British embassy, from which he could communicate with Samuel Bell at the Factory before being repatriated under embassy guard protection.He moved constantly alert for any surveillance, particularly from the distrustful Oleg who he had detected following him on other occasions.It became impossible to conceal where he was heading at the very end, however, when he was crossing the river, so he began to hurry, although he was fairly confident he was not under observation.He was about fifty yards from the embassy gates and safety when he heard the acceleration of a car and turned, seeing the vehicle.It was still a fair distance away but Davies could see Oleg at the wheel and another man behind.Davies ran.He fled arms pumping and head thrown back, those embassy gates tantalizingly too far away, the car screaming in pursuit easily gaining on him.He snatched a look behind, seeing Oleg’s passenger leaning out of the window with something in his hand, and heard the crack of the shot, but the bullet missed.The second shot didn’t.Davies was actually through the gates and in the forecourt when he felt a crushing blow in the back and then the numbness as his spine was shattered.Andy Pugh was one of the first to reach him.Davies gasped: ‘Charles.Say Charles,’ and died.‘What did he say?’ demanded one of the embassy guards.‘Nothing that made sense,’ said Pugh.11The Listening PostRichard Axton was one of the particular specialists at the Factory.He was a small man, with a hedge of hair around the edge of a completely bald head and vague eyes which conveyed the impression that he was thinking about something else during a conversation, which he frequently was.His predominant training had been in higher mathematics although he did not follow the art like the financial experts in the department: in fact money and finance often confused him and brought sharp letters from his bank manager.He also held a First-Class Honours degree in electronic theory and engineering.He did word puzzles and arithmetic riddles, the most difficult he could find, and played chess at a club which was on his way home to his bachelor apartment in the Hampstead district of London.Axton was a man of few regrets but one of them was that the security needs of the Factory made it impossible for him ever to attend the Grand Master tournaments in which the great Russian exponents played.He read their books, though, and followed the competition moves when they were reproduced in newspapers.There were occasions when Axton felt his standard sufficient to have confronted them: and others when he dismissed the ambition as a daydream.There was a consolation during those daydreams that he was daily confronting Russians in another sort of competition: maybe even unknowingly opposing some of the chess masters themselves because it was rumoured that they were sometimes used by the KGB to do what Axton did.Axton broke and read Soviet codes.Or at least attempted to.And created those for British intelligence that would hopefully be unreadable by Russian experts, although he accepted, objectively, that codes rarely remained unbroken for long.For that reason he had introduced at the Factory a system of operating codes only for a limited time, usually a month.At the end of every month all the code keys were changed, whether or not they were suspected of having been broken.If they had been, it greatly reduced the damage.If they hadn’t, it meant the Eastern bloc codebreakers had wasted their time for four weeks and had to start all over again on a different cipher.It had actually provided Axton with the intelligence that some of his codes had been broken: over the course of time he’d realized that Russia and Poland, for instance, had copied him and were switching their transmission code every month, as well.Ironically the incredible advances in computer and space technology had been of mixed benefit to the code senders.Messages, having been encoded, can be recorded on electronic tape and sent at speeds of a fraction of a second, inaudible to the human ear: the procedure is called spurt transmission.However, permanently space-based satellites of both sides can hear well enough and, having recorded the split-second babble of a spurt transmission, break it down to an intelligible speed and set out the puzzle for the code-breaker.Modern telephones no longer operate by underground cable but by above-ground radio and electronic frequencies.And those frequencies are more easy to tap, again by satellite, than the underground cables ever were.People rarely talk in code for any prolonged period, so telephone eavesdropping produces what is technically referred to as conversation in clear, which simply means the normal spoken word.Britain, with the United States as its most active partner although there is cooperation with other European countries, listens by satellite to all telephone conversation between government ministries in East European capitals and certainly to every known intelligence wavelength.The potential daily result would be literally tons of printed paper, far too much to be read before the arrival of another daily batch.So computers are used.The eavesdropped conversations are played at the speed of spurt transmission through computers programmed to react to fed-in trigger words and print out an actual transcript.The theory is that a conversation between an intelligence officer and his wife about that day’s shopping list is ignored.If the man uses a phrase like Warsaw Pact or secret or classified, the computer print-out is activated.It was Richard Axton’s job also to programme the computers at the Factory to recognize all trigger words he believed appropriate to the department’s overseas activities.The Director General believed he had a very positive need for Axton’s expertise.The chess-playing, balding man showed no reaction whatsoever to Bell’s announcement that the Factory had been penetrated by a Soviet informant.And the Director General had no reluctance in telling the man something he had tried to keep secret for so long because he had decided at last to call in the outside investigation branch whose inquiries would make the fact public knowledge within hours.‘You think some sort of message was relayed here to London by the KGB?’ asked Axton.‘I’d managed to penetrate Soviet headquarters,’ said Bell, in further disclosure.‘It was William Davies
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