Birth of a Spy Read online

  Duncan Swindells

  Birth of a Spy

  Birth of a Spy © 2019 by Duncan Swindells. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Rob Williams at ilovemycover.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Please follow me @dafswindells

  First published: February 2019

  ISBN- 9781794246430

  Birth of a Spy

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Prologue

  If childbirth had been the gift of life, then what she wondered would death prove to be? Absolution? The redemption she’d hoped but dared not pray for? At the least she supposed, a peaceful and never-ending sleep. She’d made sure the house had been empty before fetching the length of coiled grey electrical cable from its cupboard beneath the stairs. In the hallway she’d caught herself in the tall and damning giltwood mirror which hung by the door examining her profile. She gently pushed at her fragile blonde hair, feeling it bounce back into place under the duress of that morning’s generously applied hairspray. Seeing herself again like that, in the mirror as the questions persisted only threatened to strengthen her resolve. She smiled thinly, her mouth tired and quavering.

  Carefully, so there would be no mistake, she set about fastening the cable to the brass door handle which opened into the sitting room, twisting it this way, pulling it that, checking it was secure. The back of her hand travelled across her face, absently wiping away another tear. She would not look in the mirror again. She went to throw the cable over the door, succeeding only at the second attempt. One final inspection of her handiwork followed by a strange moment of pride; the knot would hold. Another hand across her damp cheek before closing, then locking the door firmly behind her, her hand spotted and flecked from the freshly applied mascara. Then she was pulling the cable taught through the ill-fitting doorframe. She had never wanted to live in an old house, that had always been his idea. They were so difficult to keep and cold in the winter too. Taking a chair from their dining set she carefully positioned it next to the door. Now for the other knot. She held the cable in a loose S, wrapping it back and around. Two, three attempts before it met her satisfaction. She slipped out of her shoes, arranging them neatly by the door and in stockinged feet stepped up onto the chair, facing the room. Her room, her home, her family. She checked her blouse, her pearls and smoothed down her skirt, re-arranging an errant pleat, then, trying not to disturb her hair, slipped the noose over her head and gently began to rock the chair. Her family she thought, it had always been her family, well now it was time to put an end to all of that. She felt the cold plastic cable by her ear as the chair tipped and slid away from her. An end to the memories. An end to the pain and the guilt.

  As her feet skidded on the highly polished leather she felt the bight of the noose. Soon everything would be better. Soon it would be over and he would be gone. Her foot slid off the edge of the chair as it rocked and tumbled out of control, the woman’s arms shooting out from her sides in an involuntary and unwanted closing gesture of self-preservation.

  She lost consciousness almost immediately, her hands instinctively clawing as the cable tightened around her neck. And then, in one final act of wanton self-destruction, unable or unwilling to maintain her balance, a flailing foot kicked the chair from beneath her.

  The cable whipped and flexed, straining hard against the sitting room door and then, under extreme pressure, the brass fittings buckled and twisted. First one and then with a harsh wrench, all of the soft metal screws deformed and tore from their mountings sending showers of splintered pine into the hallway. The handle flew upwards towards its frame as the woman’s writhing body dropped. The chair, kicked violently, sent crashing against an old and unloved oak cabinet. The sound of shattering glass, the acrid smell of urine as, her neck neatly broken, her body failed her. She lost her grip on the cable and then just as the last of her strength was about to abandon her, one final convulsive spasm.

  She came to rest on the carpeted floor, her body crumpled next to the upturned chair. And that was how they would find her.

  1

  Scott Hunter was conscious, all be it somewhat reluctantly, suspended in a somnolent limbo between the horrors of the sleeping world and the inconvenient yet ever present realities of the waking one. He’d woken alone, wearily regarding the vacant side of their bed and silently thanking her for not rousing him. He’d slept terribly, again, waking often, until finally at 2 o’clock, as he did most every night, he had given up and slipped from their bed to wander the house in search of distraction. He’d sat at the kitchen table, powerless to read a word of the paper which lay open in front of him. Awake enough to be unable to sleep, but not enough to be able to function meaningfully, he’d wondered about making a hot drink but had instead found himself staring torpidly into unavailing space.

  As a teenager Hunter had experienced a sudden and quite profound physical and nervous breakdown. There followed a prolonged and uncomfortable sojourn at the local children’s hospital where he had been prescribed a cocktail of drugs; Citalopram for the depression, Valium for his nerves and Temazepam for the sleepless nights. These had only succeeded in dulling his normally sharp wits and, ironically, causing him the intermittent yet chronic insomnia by which, nearly ten years later, he was still affected.

  Closing the paper Hunter slipped back upstairs, intent on examining his laptop, but then, not wanting to wake Amy had thought better of it and returned, past his snoring flatmate’s bedroom, downstairs to the sitting room and the television, the kitchen now out of bounds, in Hunter’s mind complicit in his wakefulness. Idly he’d flicked through a handful of channels, but in the early hours of the morning all that appeared available was a Hobson’s choice of televised gambling and documentaries about Hitler, aliens or often some obscenely far-fetched combination of the two. Finally, exhausted by his own exhaustion, and in danger of falling uncomfortably asleep on the couch, he had gingerly returned to bed. Amy had snuffled ominously but, he was relieved to see, had not woken.

  Now it was mid-morning and he was determined to salvage the remainder of the day. He’d showered but not shaved, thrown on an old Bauhaus t-shirt and a pair of skinny black jeans but no socks. With the house empty and a freshly brewed cup of coffee at his elbow Scott Hunter slid the MacBook from his khaki messenger bag and placed it on the desk. The ad had said the bag would be tough and durable, but already its stitching was beginning to fray and it would probably be long outlived by its contents. Hunter couldn’t afford for his computer to be damaged but until he found some work he couldn’t afford the price of a new shoulder bag either. He removed the silver laptop from its soft protective case and carefully lifted the lid. The machine sprang to life, displaying the last program he’d left running. He watched with pleasure as figures tumbled down the screen. A steady stream of numbers broken only by the occasional blank lending the page its peculiar rolling rhythm. Hunter sipped his coffee and thought about the hours, no the days spent writing this program. Having recently left uni
versity, he was now able to code purely for sheer pleasure and not for the gratification of his lecturers and so consequently this programme had satisfied him more than any other of his undergraduate assignments; a complete indulgence, of no use to anyone but himself and an extremely select few.

  Hunter had always been fascinated by codes. From an early age, whilst his peers had kicked at a football or each other he’d poured over anything and everything his limited yet earnest provincial library could muster on the subject, from the hieroglyphs of the Old Kingdom to Al-Kindi’s 8th century masterpiece Manuscript for the Deciphering of Cryptographic Messages, the procurement of which had caused no end of raised eyebrows and handwringing from the libraries chief librarian. He read about the various cyphers employed by The Papal States, and then in the nineteenth century the pioneering work of Charles Babbage and the Prussian Friedrich Kasiski. He devoured Edgar Allan Poe. Then one day, quite by chance, he’d found an article in his father’s newspaper about a hitherto unrecognised and highly secretive establishment which had only recently thrown open its doors to the general public. Hunter had insisted on visiting Bletchley Park the very next weekend and soon knew everything there was to know about the work carried out there, how ten thousand men and women had laboured tirelessly through the Second World War, to break message after message sent using an extraordinary machine christened Enigma by the Allies. Hunter had found himself seduced by the world of the Special Operations Executive and the OSS. Allan Turin became an unlikely teenage hero. And then as he’d delved deeper and deeper into the world of cryptographic analysis and his mathematical gifts had begun to be recognised Hunter realised that he saw and felt numbers differently from other people. To his private delight he would follow in the footsteps of so many of his heroes. Cambridge beckoned.

  Writing an advanced hill climbing algorithm for no other reason than to break messages sent more than fifty years before Hunter’s birth had just been a bit of fun. Initially he’d worked on codes which had already been broken, but that hadn’t lessened his satisfaction as it allowed him to compare his workings with the greatest minds of the 1940s. The algorithm started with an arbitrary solution and incrementally sought to improve upon it, changing one element after another at each turn. Then, when the algorithm came upon an improvement it would make this new solution its starting point and begin all over again, eventually arriving at a local optimum or a solution upon which it could not improve. But since those early programs Hunter had written increasingly more and more sophisticated ones, finally succeeding in breaking a message that had previously gone unsolved by Bletchley Park, GCHQ or anybody else since 1945. It’s content, once revealed had proven prosaic and mundane but that hadn’t mattered. For Hunter it had been the crowning vindication of his algorithm’s superiority over all other competition.

  Slightly to his annoyance, this achievement had earned him a brief moment of unwanted fame amongst his fellow students, with a couple of column inches in one of the less popular broad sheets. On the back of Hunter’s success a college professor had established a club and encouraged other prodigies to write their own software. The club was still active, but when people had started talking about committees and sub-committees Hunter had quickly lost interest. Instead he’d joined a small hardcore community of online enthusiasts spread around the globe. Hunter had never actually met or spoken to any of them in person, preferring to communicate solely through chat rooms and emails, an arrangement which suited him very well.

  As line after line of code continued to tumble down the screen, and with, for the moment his work largely done, Hunter wondered whether the other members of his select little band had jobs, commitments, bills to pay or mouths to feed. Not for the first time Enigma was proving a convenient distraction. He stared out of their bedroom window at the calm Cambridge street below, remembering the day they had agreed to live together. Then, as his programme continued to toil in the background, he recalled the day they had moved into the house. Hunter’s thoughts were about to leave him behind altogether when the sight of a smartly dressed man not significantly older than himself, carrying a briefcase and marching past on the opposite side of the street with a sense of purpose Hunter could only wonder at, dragged him back to his own workaday reality. He must do something meaningful before Amy returned.

  He was just about to open an internet browser and commence the ever tedious search for employment when the programme he’d been running abruptly stopped. Now no longer the algorithm’s rolling numbers but a page of letters, grouped in fours and seemingly in an utterly random order. These were the original Enigma codes. After some research Hunter was confident that the message his algorithm had been struggling to break had originated from a weather monitoring station somewhere in the North Sea, and had been sent in the last few months of the war. The Mac's arrow hovered over the decode tab and he clicked the mouse pad. The arrow was briefly replaced by a spinning progress indicator before the letters unravelled and to his delight Hunter saw half a dozen German words smeared together into one long and incomprehensible sentence. Languages had never been his strong point but he quickly recognised the words for wind and temperature. The rest would have to wait until his house mate returned from college. As Hunter looked at the rich German text he couldn’t help but wonder what Amy’s reaction would be. No doubt she’d be dismissively unimpressed and ask why he was wasting his valuable time with such nonsense. He took the page from his Brother Printer and slid it inside the MacBook’s protective soft case next to the laptop. The more he thought about Amy the more, reluctantly, he had to admit that she was probably right. He couldn’t carry on like this for much longer. He did need a job. However, that would all have to wait. With a freshly broken code in his shoulder bag, Hunter’s only real concern was how quickly he could be at the university.

  Before catching the bus into town he dropped in on his local newsagents and bought copies of The Times and, as something of an afterthought, The Cambridge News, in a half-hearted attempt at appeasing Amy. Standing at the bus stop outside the little parade of faded local shops he opened the Cambridge paper. One quick look at the jobs section was enough to confirm his worst fears. There were column after column of people looking for plumbers, cooks, cleaners and day carers. There was even, he noted with a raised eyebrow, a secretarial position at his old college which paid poorly, but better than he had imagined it might. But no one was recruiting for a maths graduate with a 2-1 or any other kind of degree. He knew Amy’s feelings on the subject. Get out there and earn some money. Pursue your dream job later. Well, that was fine for her, she had walked out of college and straight into employment. A job she had wanted too, in marketing. What, Hunter wondered, the hell were you supposed to do with a 2-1 in mathematics? What for that matter was his “dream job”? and why, in all the years of study and academic endeavour had no one spent the least bit of time with him discussing what he was to do with his hard-earned qualifications? He flicked through the remainder of the paper. A section of dual carriageway was due to be closed until November, inconveniencing local residents terribly and Hunter suspected for considerably longer than the six months stated, The Council was preparing to unveil a new and hopefully improved recycling initiative and the Dean of his old college had been involved in a sex scandal. Hunter really couldn’t have cared less about any of it, least of all the sex scandal. He’d only ever met the man twice and the second time had been at his graduation. The bus pulled into Drummer Street Station.

  ✽✽✽

  Sir John Alperton let a sun-washed hand fall down the crease in his trousers. His tailors had excelled themselves this time. He flicked his long legs crossed and admired the highly polished toecap of his black shoe. Not cheap, but worth every penny. His father had always told him you could judge a great deal about a chap from the shoes that he wore. Strange to think of the old man. Well, what would he have had to say about his son now? In spite of, or perhaps because of the Jermyn Street shirts, the suits from Savile Row and even the shoes, lovin
gly handmade in a naturally evasive little Etruscan hilltop village sleeping quietly, deep in the heart of rural Tuscany, he could picture the look of barely disguised contempt his father’s face would have worn. Not at the titles, the decorations or any of the other trappings, the shoes, the suits, the handmade silk ties, not even at the regular marital infidelities. No, it was the nature of his son’s work which had so offended the old man. He’d paid his debt after all. He’d worked at a proper job, he’d got his hands properly dirty by doing proper hard graft not from sitting behind a desk in Whitehall.

  Alperton still wore the old man’s belt from time to time. The object that had inflicted the punishments had ironically helped in some small part shape him into the man he had become. So now when he wore the belt, it was not through any perverse sense of self-loathing following the years of beatings, first at his father’s hands and then The Sisters of Mercy. Quite the opposite. A feeling of closeness, familiarity, even solidarity. Of being encompassed by the very thing that had surrounded his own father for so many years. In any case, now he had his own offspring to feel disappointed with. Strange to think of him now though.

  Sir John’s head fell back, tilting slightly towards the sun, momentarily causing him to squint. He removed a cigarette from its pack and lit it, thinking what a rare treat it was to be able to smoke without being made to feel like a social pariah. Hard for him to believe, but he couldn’t even smoke in his own office anymore and had to go and stand in a huddle of cleaners and backroom staff. Times had certainly changed. Through the smoke he watched a family of tourists. American he presumed from their clothing and their body language. The children were horsing around in front of Frampton’s statue of Peter Pan whilst a dowdy wife gave an overweight husband instructions on how to take the kid’s photograph with an iPad. No, not Americans. Canadians. Wherever they were from, their progeny were boisterous and noisy and just at that particular moment, quite unwanted. Their place, he was pleased to see, taken by a young couple, their heads reverentially bowed to read the brass plate of explanation at the statue’s base.