Skydancer Read online

  The civil servant frowned as he opened the folder and stared at the single sheet of paper inside. Suddenly his eyebrows shot upwards in undisguised horror.

  ‘Good Lord!’ he exploded. ‘In a rubbish bin? Are you sure?’

  Twining looked affronted.

  ‘Well of course you’re sure. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here!’

  Beckett swung round sharply to press the switch on his office intercom, asking his secretary to send immediately for the head of security.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down please, General,’ he gestured to a chair, while taking a longer and closer look at the document. After a moment he groaned softly. ‘This does not look good.’

  He put the folder down again.

  ‘Anyone else know about this? Was anyone with you when you found it?’

  Twining shook his head. ‘Only my dog.’

  Sir Marcus winced.

  There was a respectful tap at the door.

  ‘Come in!’ Beckett yelled. ‘Ah, Commander Duncan! We’ve got some work for you, I’m afraid.’

  After brief introductions Sir Marcus slipped the buff folder across his desk towards his head of security.

  ‘What, er . . . what do you make of that then?’ he asked, after allowing the commander a few moments to study it.

  ‘Well, sir,’ Duncan answered grimly, ‘I know what it is, and I know which security vault it’s come from. What I don’t know is what it’s doing up here.’

  ‘He found it! This morning! Lying around on Hampstead Heath! General Twining here!’ Sir Marcus spluttered in his anger and concern. ‘How could it have got there, Commander?’

  Duncan looked uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s clearly been some sort of lapse . . .’ he began lamely. ‘Clearly a major breach of security. And er . . .’ – glancing uneasily towards the retired general – ‘I think it’s something we should discuss in private, if you don’t mind, sir.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Beckett nodded. ‘General, would you like to explain to Commander Duncan just exactly what happened this morning, and then we won’t need to detain you any further.’

  The security man pulled a pad from his pocket and began to take a careful long-hand note of Twining’s description of events. Then, with a request that the general keep himself available at home to help investigating officers later, Sir Marcus shook him warmly by the hand and thanked him profusely for his discretion in bringing the document to the Ministry directly.

  ‘Right! Tell me the worst!’ Sir Marcus barked as soon as the door had closed behind their elderly visitor.

  ‘It’s project Skydancer, sir. Here’s the identification code in the bottom right-hand corner. This paper is one of a set of engineering plans – classified “top secret”. This is probably a photocopy, but the originals are under the custody of the Strategic Nuclear Secretariat, down on the fifth floor. Must be only a handful of people with access to such a document.’

  ‘Bugger!’ Beckett exploded. ‘How the hell could this one have got loose?’

  Commander Duncan felt a prickling at the back of his neck. By his tone the Permanent Undersecretary almost seemed to be blaming him for it.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Give me a little time and I’ll try to find out,’ he answered as coolly as he could.

  Sir Marcus paced over to the window and stared down at the passing traffic.

  ‘We’d better call a conference, right away,’ he decided, turning back towards his desk. ‘The key people in Skydancer – I’ll get them here, so we can evaluate the seriousness of this business. I mean . . . God Almighty! The whole bloody project might be compromised! It has to be the bloody Russians!’

  Peter Joyce squealed the tyres of his car as he turned through the gates of Aldermaston in his hurry to reach the motorway for London. The gaggle of protesters had dispersed by now. The permanent residents of the ‘peace camp’ were settling down to their morning chores, while the other protesters – including his wife – had gone off to their daily work.

  On the insecure telephone line from the Ministry of Defence, Sir Marcus Beckett had been understandably vague about the exact nature of the security breach. But his voice carried an edging of ice which had made that vagueness additionally disturbing.

  The road from the atomic weapons plant wound through picturesque villages and over bridges, which were a pleasure to pass on any normal day. But Peter cursed them as he struggled unsuccessfully to overtake a slow-moving lorry. Eventually, with a surge of relief, he swung his car on to the motorway and, pressing his foot to the floor, raced towards the capital. He leaned forward in his seat, concentrating on the road ahead, his dark eyes focusing far in front. Occasionally he lifted a hand briefly to push back the hank of straight brown hair that fell across his forehead.

  In less than two hours he had reached the Defence Ministry in Whitehall. In the PUS’s office he found himself joined by Alec Anderson, the civil servant at the head of the Strategic Nuclear Secretariat. Unsuspectingly, Anderson had arrived a little late for work that morning, and now looked shocked and confused. He was a policy man, not a technician, and like Sir Marcus Beckett was waiting anxiously for Peter Joyce to reveal whether General Twining’s discovery was as significant as they feared.

  Several pairs of eyes focused on Joyce’s tall figure as he scanned the page of secrets.

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ he breathed after the first glance. ‘This is a page from the Skydancer plans. Shows the re-entry vehicle separation mechanism. The full set describes precisely how the decoy system works, how it can defeat the Soviet defences. This page on its own is sensitive enough, but if someone’s given the Russians the full set . . . it’ll be a disaster!’

  ‘Well let’s not jump the gun,’ Beckett countered hurriedly. ‘It may not be as serious as that.’

  As a personal friend of the Prime Minister, the civil servant was dreading the public outcry and political uproar that could result from a full-blown security leak in his Ministry. The previous government had been brought down by a top-level Soviet infiltration of the security service MI5.

  ‘Commander Duncan,’ Beckett turned hopefully to his security chief. ‘What have you been able to find out?’

  ‘Well, sir, I checked in the documents register and I’ve found there are only two sets of these papers in existence, one kept here and the other at Aldermaston. While Mr Joyce was on his way up here, I took the liberty of ringing George Dogson, head of security at AWRE, and got him to check the vaults. Hope you don’t mind, Mr Joyce,’ he added, looking across.

  ‘Of course not. What did he say?’

  ‘All in order. Nothing missing there. Now, as for the other set, the ones here in MOD, they are kept in a strictly controlled security room, but a room to which dozens of people have access. All of them with top-level clearance, of course. But the nuclear papers are kept in a special filing cabinet there, and the only people with keys to that cabinet are Mr Anderson here and his secretary Miss Maclean.’

  ‘Well.’ Alec Anderson felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. ‘We’d better go and look, hadn’t we?’

  Now a deeply unhappy man, he led the commander down to his office, to check the file. Mary Maclean, an attractive dark-haired woman in her late thirties, looked up in surprise at the sight of her principal being escorted into the room by the stern-faced security chief. She blanched when Anderson asked her to collect the Skydancer technical file from the secure room. Closing her eyes momentarily, she seemed to hesitate as if struck by some painful realisation.

  The two men watched closely as she slowly opened her desk drawer, took from it a key, then stood up and walked rigidly from the room. Anderson and the commander looked at one another with silent alarm.

  ‘Do you always keep that key in your desk drawer?’ the policeman asked her icily when she returned with the file.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Mary Maclean replied defensively. ‘But I keep the drawer locked whenever I’m out of the room. And I keep the key to the drawer in my handbag. It’s
always with me, I can assure you.’

  The Commander’s heart sank. This simple lapse of security procedures meant that his list of suspects had grown dramatically. Literally dozens of people could have attained access to the vital papers.

  He watched intently as Anderson opened the file and checked through the sheaf of papers. The thirty sheets of paper were all numbered – and they were all there.

  Duncan then took hold of the file and thumbed through the pages himself, until he found the one that matched the photocopy in the buff folder. Each sheet had been hand-stamped with a Ministry seal. He checked the angle of the imprint on the original and on the copy. They matched perfectly.

  ‘No doubt about that,’ he muttered to himself with a certain satisfaction.

  ‘May I . . . may I enquire what this is about?’ Mary asked uneasily.

  ‘Someone’s got at the file – and copied it,’ Duncan responded bluntly.

  She gasped. ‘And you think it’s because . . .’ her voice faltered.

  ‘We’re not thinking anything yet, Mary,’ Anderson interposed as gently as he could.

  ‘Well I should hope not,’ she remarked almost indignantly. She had put in long service at the Ministry and was proud of her record. Skydancer had played a significant part in her recent life, and it was not solely because of her professional involvement. In the last three months there had been personal reasons why she found it painful just to hear mention of the project.

  From the look on Alec Anderson’s face it was beginning to hurt him too.

  ‘Would you mind, Mary?’

  Anderson was handing her the file.

  ‘Would you mind putting this back in the vault?’

  As the two men re-entered the office of the Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Marcus Beckett’s face expressed his heartfelt wish that they could have solved the mystery. But the Commander’s brooding scowl and Anderson’s look of shocked bewilderment soon dashed his hopes.

  ‘How the hell could this have happened?’ he demanded when they had told him what they had learned. ‘These are about the most sensitive documents in the whole bloody building, for Christ’s sake! How on earth could someone make copies without your knowing?’

  Anderson made as if to speak, but no words emerged.

  ‘What do you know about this, Anderson?’ Sir Marcus continued, looking ready to launch a physical attack on anyone he could hold responsible for the disaster.

  ‘Nothing at all, PUS,’ Anderson half stammered in reply. His face was flushed. ‘I’m shocked . . . utterly.’

  ‘I’ll start a review of procedure immediately, sir,’ the security man broke in, eager to press on with a detailed investigation.

  ‘It’s a bit bloody late for that!’ Beckett snapped. ‘The bird seems to have flown!’

  He strode across the room to glare angrily out of the window at the Thames Embankment below. Peter Joyce stared at the Undersecretary’s hands clasped tightly behind him. The fingers of one hand turned white with the pressure of his grip, and then began to colour again as the sight of the slow-moving river traffic seemed to exert a calming effect.

  ‘All right,’ Sir Marcus said eventually, breaking the uneasy silence, ‘let’s look at the worse case scenario.’

  He sat himself at his desk, and drew a blank sheet of paper from a drawer. Then he wrote the figure ‘1’ at the top left-hand corner.

  ‘We have to assume that every page of the document has been photocopied,’ he began. ‘There would be little purpose in doing just one, unless someone is simply trying to make a point.’ He paused to look round at the expectant faces of the three men opposite.

  ‘Well? Is someone trying to make a point?’ he demanded. ‘Someone who knew there was a weakness in the security system, and wanted to show it up?’

  His enquiry was greeted by murmured denials and frowns.

  ‘What about your secretary, Anderson? Could she be up to something? Any odd behaviour lately? Change of life, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh . . . I hardly think so, PUS,’ Alec Anderson answered hurriedly. ‘She’s a bit young for that, and although she’s been careless with the keys, I’m sure her loyalty is not in question.’

  Anderson cast a furtive glance at Peter Joyce, but the scientist stared back impassively.

  Sir Marcus began to write.

  ‘Then we have to assume we are talking about espionage,’ he declared. ‘The assumption must be that someone had copied the Skydancer plans and is feeding them to the Russians. But why was this single page found in a rubbish bin? Were the Russians meant to pick it up from there? It’s damned odd; I mean there must be dozens of safer places to make the handover – why choose a rubbish bin?’

  ‘I’ve already got someone observing the place, sir,’ the Commander interjected, ‘in case someone comes looking for the document. But I agree it’s an odd place.’

  ‘The big question,’ Beckett continued, as if he had not heard what the security man had just said, ‘is whether this bungle occurred at the start of the handover process, or whether the Russians already have all or most of the rest of the papers.’

  There was no sure answer to that question, but as Peter Joyce had explained, the Skydancer plans were of critical national importance, and if the secrets were already largely in the Russians’ hands, several hundred million pounds of taxpayers’ money could now have been totally wasted. A political hornet’s nest of huge dimensions would be stirred up the moment news of this security leak emerged.

  There was a chance, just the slightest chance that the mystery could be solved rapidly, Beckett thought to himself. In which case it might never need to become public knowledge, and the Prime Minister could be spared the damaging publicity and the taunting from the opposition in parliament. He would have to call in the security service immediately, that was clear, but he would hold back from telling his Secretary of State about it in the hope the matter could be quickly resolved, without the politicians’ involvement and the inevitable and damaging attention of the media that would follow.

  Bringing the meeting to an abrupt end, he instructed his officials to return to their duties, and to discuss the matter with no one other than the men from the security departments. After they left the sixth-floor office, Alec Anderson and Peter Joyce paused in the corridor outside to look at one another uneasily. Each recognised alarm and suspicion on the other’s face. Then they nodded at one another and walked off in different directions, without speaking.

  Peter Joyce hardly noticed the road as he motored back to Aldermaston. From time to time he touched his forehead to push back those strands of hair that stubbornly refused to grow any way but forwards. His usual air of confidence had largely evaporated that morning.

  He was driving back at only half the speed he had maintained on his journey up to London, his mind in turmoil as he began to assess what a devastating blow this security leak was about to deal him. For the moment he was less concerned by the critical national issue of the leakage of nuclear secrets; he was gripped instead by a personal foreboding, a fear that it could emerge that indirectly and unwittingly he himself had been somehow responsible for the leak – and that those closest to him would see this as just retribution on him.

  He vividly remembered the day, three months earlier, when he had first taken that set of vital documents up to London. They were to form the core of a top-level briefing of Government ministers who demanded to know in detail what this vast amount of public money had been spent on. He remembered the occasion with painful clarity, because it was the last time he had spent an evening with Mary Maclean – the night on which he had to tell her that their relationship was over.

  Their love affair had lasted two years. It had begun almost by accident, and had blossomed freely, without strains and complications, at a period when his marriage to Belinda was proving increasingly stressful. But eventually Mary had begun to make assumptions about their future together, assumptions involving steps he was not prepared to take.

&nb
sp; She had been devastated when he had told her their affair must come to an end. It was the night before the ministerial briefing; and he had visited her flat. Guiltily he remembered now that the top secret plans had been in his briefcase all the time. The crazy – but not so crazy – thought now passed through his mind, that she could have copied the papers later and given them to the Soviets in an act of revenge. ‘Hell hath no fury . . .’ But no – he could not really believe that.

  Peter stamped on the brake pedal and swerved into the left-hand lane, as he realised he was about to overshoot the turning off the motorway. He cut in front of a lorry which hooted loudly.

  ‘Damn!’ the scientist hissed. He would end up crashing if he was not more careful. Heading for the country lanes leading back to Aldermaston, he slowed down further, and continued to ponder how events might develop.

  His secret affair with Mary Maclean was bound to be uncovered. The security men would question him closely on his care of those secret papers, and be alarmed by what they learned. They would also talk to his wife, and discover she was a confirmed anti-nuclear activist – and an associate of political groupings well to the left of the normal British political spectrum. They might begin to speculate whether it really was only now that those secrets had gone missing, and not months or even years previously.

  And what would they say to Belinda? Would the security men ask her how much she knew of her husband’s affair with Mary? She had not known anything – Peter was certain of that. But how would she react when she found out? Would she walk out on him? And what of the children, for whose sake he had finally chosen to reject his mistress and preserve his marriage – would he lose them after all?

  ‘What a mess!’ he muttered as he finally turned the car through the gates of Aldermaston.

  Once back at his desk, he instructed his secretary to discourage telephone callers. Peter Joyce was a methodical man who had spent his working life confronting apparently insoluble problems. Pulling out a thick notepad, he sat back and forced his brain to concentrate. First he had to list and analyse the dangers that both he and the Skydancer project now faced. Then he had to think of ways to counter them, or at least to limit the damage.