The Looking Glass War (6 page)

‘Made the saucer as well,’ he said. He began talking about the classes she went to, the amusing way it had caught on in Wimbledon, how his wife was tickled to death.

It was nearly eleven; they could hear the others gathering in the corridor.

‘I’d better go next door,’ Avery said, ‘and see if he’s ready. He’s taken quite a beating in the last eight hours.’

Woodford picked up his mug and took a sip of tea. ‘If you get a chance, mention that Registry business to the Boss, John. I don’t want to drag it up in front of everyone else. Adrian’s getting a bit past it.’

‘The Director’s very tied up at the moment, Bruce.’

‘Oh, quite.’

‘He hates to interfere with Haldane, you know that.’ As they reached the door of his room he turned to Woodford and asked, ‘Do you remember a man called Malherbe in the Department?’

Woodford stopped dead. ‘God, yes. A young chap, like you. In the war. Good Lord.’ And earnestly, but quite unlike his usual manner: ‘Don’t mention that name to the Boss. He was very cut up about young Malherbe. One of the special fliers. The two of them were quite close in a way.’

Leclerc’s room by daylight was not so much drab as of an impermanent appearance. You would think its occupant had requisitioned it hastily, under conditions of emergency, and had not known how long he would be staying. Maps lay sprawled over the trestle table, not in threes or fours but dozens, some of a scale large enough to show streets and buildings. Teletape, pasted in strips on pink paper, hung in batches on the notice board, fastened with a heavy bulldog clip like galley proofs awaiting correction. A bed had been put in one corner with a counterpane over it. A clean towel hung beside the basin. The desk was new, of grey steel, Government issue. The walls were filthy. Here and there the cream paint had peeled, showing dark green beneath. It was a small, square room with Ministry of Works curtains. There had been a row about the curtains, a question of equating Leclerc’s rank to the Civil Service scale. It was the one occasion, so far as Avery knew, when Leclerc had made any effort to improve the disorder of the room. The fire was nearly out. Sometimes when it was very windy the fire would not burn at all, and all through the day Avery could hear from next door the soot falling in the chimney.

Avery watched them come in; Woodford first, then Sandford, Dennison and McCulloch. They had all heard about Taylor. It was easy to imagine the news going round the Department, not as headlines, but as a small and gratifying sensation, passed from room to room, lending a briskness to the day’s activity, as it had to these men; giving them a moment’s optimism, like a rise in pay. They would watch Leclerc, watch him as prisoners watch a warder. They knew his routine by instinct, and they waited for him to break it. There would not be a man or woman in the Department but knew they had been called in the middle of the night, and that Leclerc was sleeping in the office.

They settled themselves at the table, putting their cups in front of them noisily like children at a meal, Leclerc at the head, the others on either side, an empty chair at the farther end. Haldane came in, and Avery knew as soon as he saw him that it would be Leclerc versus Haldane.

Looking at the empty chair, he said, ‘I see I’m to take the draughtiest place.’

Avery rose, but Haldane had sat down. ‘Don’t bother, Avery. I’m a sick man already.’ He coughed, just as he coughed all year. Not even the Summer could help him, apparently; he coughed in all seasons.

The others fidgeted uncomfortably; Woodford helped himself to a biscuit. Haldane glanced at the fire. ‘Is that the best the Ministry of Works can manage?’ he asked.

‘It’s the rain,’ Avery said. ‘The rain disagrees with it. Pine’s had a go but he made no difference.’

‘Ah.’

Haldane was a lean man with long, restless fingers; a man locked in himself, slow in his movements, agile in his features, balding, spare, querulous and dry; a man seemingly contemptuous of everything, keeping his own hours and his own counsel; addicted to crossword puzzles and nineteenth-century water colours.

Carol came in with files and maps, putting them on Leclerc’s desk, which in contrast to the remainder of his room was very tidy. They waited awkwardly until she had gone. The door securely closed, Leclerc passed his hand cautiously over his dark hair as if he were not quite familiar with it.

‘Taylor’s been killed. You’ve all heard it by now. He was killed last night in Finland, travelling under another name.’ Avery noticed he never mentioned Malherbe. ‘We don’t know the details. He appears to have been run over. I’ve told Carol to put it about that it was an accident. Is that clear?’

Yes, they said, it was quite clear.

‘He went to collect a film from … a contact, a Scandinavian contact. You know whom I mean. We don’t normally use the routine couriers for operational work, but this was different; something very special indeed. I think Adrian will back me up there.’ He made a little upward gesture with his open hands, freeing the wrists from his white cuffs, laying the palms and fingers vertically together; praying for Haldane’s support.

‘Special?’ Haldane repeated slowly. His voice was thin and sharp like the man himself, cultivated, without emphasis and without affectation; an enviable voice. ‘It was different, yes. Not least because Taylor died. We should never have used him, never,’ he observed flatly. ‘We broke a first principle of intelligence. We used a man on the overt side for a clandestine job. Not that we have a clandestine side any more.’

‘Shall we let our masters be the judges of that?’ Leclerc suggested demurely. ‘At least you’ll agree the Ministry is pressing us daily for results.’ He turned to those on either side of him, now to the left, now to the right, bringing them in like shareholders. ‘It is time you all knew the details. We are dealing with something of exceptional security classification, you understand. I propose to limit to Heads of Sections. So far, only Adrian Haldane and one or two of his staff in Research have been initiated. And John Avery as my aide. I wish to emphasize that our sister service knows nothing whatever about it. Now about our own arrangements. The operation has the codeword Mayfly.’ He was speaking in his clipped, effective voice. ‘There is one action file, which will be returned to me personally, or to Carol if I am out, at the end of each day; and there is a library copy. That is the system we used in the war for operational files and I think you are all familiar with it. It’s the system we shall use henceforth. I shall add Carol’s name to the subscription list.’

Woodford pointed at Avery with his pipe, shaking his head. Not young John there; John was not familiar with the system. Sandford, sitting beside Avery, explained. The library copy was kept in the cypher-room. It was against regulations to take it away. All new serials were to be entered on it as soon as they were made; the subscription list was the list of persons authorised to read it. No pins were allowed; all the papers had to be fast. The others looked on complacently.

Sandford was Administration; he was a fatherly man in gold-rimmed spectacles and came to the office on a motorbike. Leclerc had objected once, on no particular grounds, and now he parked it down the road opposite the hospital.

‘Now, about the operation,’ Leclerc said. The thin line of his joined hands bisected his bright face. Only Haldane was not watching him; his eyes were turned away towards the window. Outside, the rain was falling gently against the buildings like Spring rain in a dark valley.

Abruptly Leclerc rose and went to a map of Europe on the wall. There were small flags pinned to it. Stretching upwards with his arm, riding on his toes to reach the northern hemisphere, he said, ‘We’re having a spot of trouble with the Germans.’ A little laugh went up. ‘In the area south of Rostock; a place called Kalkstadt, just here.’ His finger traced the Baltic coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, moved east and stopped an inch or two south of Rostock.

‘To put it in a nutshell, we have three indicators which suggest – I cannot say prove – that something big is going on there in the way of military installations.’

He swung round to face them. He would remain at the map and say it all from there, to show he had the facts in his memory and didn’t need the papers on the table.

‘The first indicator came exactly a month ago when we received a report from our representative in Hamburg, Jimmy Gorton.’

Woodford smiled: good God, was old Jimmy still going?

‘An East German refugee crossed the border near Lübeck, swam the river; a railwayman from Kalkstadt. He went to our Consulate and offered to sell them information about a new rocket site near Rostock. I need hardly tell you the Consulate threw him out. Since the Foreign Office will not even give us the facilities of its bag service it is unlikely’ – a thin smile – ‘that they will assist us by buying military information.’ A nice murmur greeted this joke. ‘However, by a stroke of luck Gorton got to hear of the man and went to Flensburg to see him.’

Woodford would not let this pass. Flensburg? Was not that the place where they had located German submarines in ’forty-one? Flensburg had been a hell of a show.

Leclerc nodded at Woodford indulgently, as if he too had been amused by the recollection. ‘The wretched man had been to every Allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him.’ Implicit in Leclerc’s way of describing things was an assumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. ‘This is Jimmy’s report,’ he said. ‘It’s a first-class bit of work by any standard.’ The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. ‘The defector’s name,’ he added inconsequentially, ‘was Fritsche.’

‘Defector?’ Haldane put in quickly. ‘The man’s a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don’t usually talk about men like that
defecting.
’

Leclerc replied defensively, ‘The man’s not only a railwayman. He’s a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer.’

McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.

‘On the first or second of September – we don’t know which because he can’t remember – he happened to be doing a double shift in the dumping sheds at Kalkstadt. One of his comrades was sick. He was to work from six till twelve in the morning, and four till ten at night. When he arrived to report for work there were a dozen Vopos, East German people’s police, at the station entrance. All passenger traffic was forbidden. They checked his identity papers against a list and told him to keep away from the sheds on the eastern side of the station. They said,’ Leclerc added deliberately, ‘that if he approached the eastern sheds he was liable to be shot.’

This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.

‘It’s the Russians we’re fighting,’ Haldane put in.

‘He’s an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and Heaven knows what. It didn’t do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o’clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important,’ he continued. ‘One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work.’

Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault.

What sort of officer, someone asked, was he German or Russian?

‘German. That is most relevant. There were no Russians in evidence at all.’

Haldane interrupted sharply. ‘The refugee saw none. That’s all we know. Let us be accurate.’ He coughed again. It was very irritating.

‘As you wish. He went home and had lunch. He was disgruntled at being ordered around in his own station by a lot of young fellows playing soldiers. He had a couple of glasses of schnapps and sat there brooding about the dumping shed. Adrian, if your cough is troubling you … ?’ Haldane shook his head. ‘He remembered that on the northern side it abutted with an old storage hut, and that there was a shutter-type ventilator let into the party wall. He formed the notion of looking through the ventilator to see what was in the shed. As a way of getting his own back on the soldiers.’

Woodford laughed.

‘Then he decided to go one further and photograph whatever was there.’

‘He must have been mad,’ Haldane commented. ‘I find this part impossible to accept.’

‘Mad or not, that’s what he decided to do. He was cross because they wouldn’t trust him. He felt he had a right to know what was in the shed.’ Leclerc missed a beat then took refuge in technique. ‘He had an Exa-two camera, single lens reflex. East German manufacture. It’s cheap housing but takes all the Exakta-range lenses; far fewer speeds than the Exakta, of course.’ He looked inquiringly at the technicians, Dennison and McCulloch. ‘Am I right, gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘You must correct me.’ They smiled sheepishly because there was nothing to correct. ‘He had a good wide-angle lens. The difficulty was the light. His next shift didn’t begin till four, by which time dusk would be falling and there would be even less light inside the shed. He had one fast Agfa film which he’d been keeping for a special occasion; it had a DIN speed of twenty-seven. He decided to use that.’ He paused, more for effect than for questions.

‘Why didn’t he wait till next morning?’ Haldane asked.

‘In the report,’ Leclerc continued blandly, ‘you’ll find a very full account by Gorton of how the man got into the hut, stood on an oil drum and took his photographs through the ventilator. I’m not going to repeat all that now. He used the maximum aperture of two point eight, speeds ranging from a quarter of a second to two seconds. A fortunate piece of German thoroughness.’ No one laughed. ‘The speeds were guesswork, of course. He was bracketing an estimated exposure time of one second. Only the last three frames show anything. Here they are.’