Before she had finished Kupriyanovich’s report, Valera was already trying to work out if she could apply the same principle to her work. If one big signal couldn’t break through the atmospheric barrier, could a hundred smaller ones? She asked Stalin what he thought. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either.

She recalibrated the amplifier and receiver to asynchronous code division and sent a basic test signal. It worked. She reset the equipment and encoded a more complex message. She transmitted the signal and, after a split second that felt like a year, the receiver captured it completely intact, with no degradation or corruption.

Valera almost didn’t believe it. She might actually have found a way to talk to the stars. This could change everything. For Russia, for science, for her, and for Ledjo. She allowed herself the briefest moment of celebration before resetting her equipment to send another signal. She needed to prove it wasn’t a fluke. She picked her message, encoded it, and sent it. But as soon as she did the room plunged into darkness.

The power to her lab had been cut. She looked around for a moment, confused. Then her eyes landed on the luminescent hands of the clock that hung above the lab’s door. In her excitement she’d missed the double blare of the siren that had sounded a minute before. It was five o’clock, and the working day in Povenets B was over.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

‘They’ll hate you for this,’ Holland had said to Knox the day he’d asked him to become MI5’s own grand inquisitor and mole hunter in his large, wood-panelled office on the fifth floor of Leconfield House.

‘Most of them already do,’ Knox had replied.

Knox knew he didn’t have many friends in the Service. After a decade and a half, he was still an outsider. He didn’t come from the right sort of family and hadn’t gone to the right sort of schools. He was an orphan from the East End who had spent his childhood dodging Blitz bombs instead of learning the classics. He’d never doffed his cap to the great and good, or asked people to do something when he could just tell them, because with Holland’s ever-present support, he’d never had to.

‘I’ve already been told by various quarters that this is all baseless paranoia, sheer McCarthyism, a classic Russian misinformation tactic that we shouldn’t fall for, and generally beneath the Service’s attention,’ Holland said.

‘What do you think?’ Knox asked.

‘Frankly, I hope they’re all correct,’ Holland said. ‘But the onus is on us to prove it one way or the other. We find ourselves in a rather precarious position, caught between two old allies. We can’t afford any missteps.’

Only one is still our ally,’ Knox countered.