High Jinx (10 page)

No one had ever condescended to Alistair Fleetwood, to be sure. He had long ago begun to publish, and showed an originality, a comprehensiveness of knowledge, an interest in the productively esoteric that attracted not only national and international attention but inevitably the presumptive respect of associates even much older. ‘When Alistair's mind is engaged,' a colleague had said of him, in the refectory of Trinity one day, ‘which is most of the time, he would not notice an explosion in the corner of the room. But he would notice a political discussion, and when that happens, before your very eyes he simply dematerialises.' Fleetwood rather enjoyed the drama of his great imposture, because during the whole of that period he spent many hours doing his chores for his Alice: silly things, he often thought as he compiled clippings revealing the political attitudes of people he had been told to monitor—politicians, professors, newspaper reporters. Indeed sometimes he reflected that special pleasure was to be got from the relative tedium of his work for the Party. ‘A kind of mortification of the intellect,' he once dared say to Alice, who once went so far as to reveal to him, which was not to abide by the protocols of the profession, that more often than not it was not she who dictated what Agent Caruso, as his code name had it, was supposed to do. ‘Never mind. One day one of your services will perhaps even transform the struggle!'

‘Take your time, my dear Alice. I am not hurrying you,' he answered.

Fleetwood had made it a point to cultivate scholarly connections in Stockholm. And there he would frequently go, as would Alice Goodyear Corbett, her superiors in the KGB acquiescing in the arrangement on the grounds that Fleetwood would certainly prove extremely useful to them and was evidently disposed to continue to act through the young Soviet-American. In Stockholm the two would pass each other in the lobby of the Grand Hotel as strangers. They would meet in his suite, usually beginning with dinner; or if his formal commitments made that impossible, then later. And there they released their passion. One night he told her that he thought he would turn his mind to a formula that would express with electrical symbols the energy consumed by the average act of love. ‘In our case, I would multiply that by a factor of ten.' She smiled as she lay by him, stroking his hair, telling him how happy she was, except for the long periods they needed to spend apart. Their shared idealism was a form of communion.

Alistair Fleetwood replied that he believed war lay ahead of them and that the single privation he could not stand was the thought of a prolonged separation. ‘What will you do if there is war?'

‘Whatever I am asked to do,' she replied. ‘Perhaps they will want me in America. Perhaps they will want me to stay where I am. That will depend.'

‘You must never let them come between us.' She agreed, and every time they were together they renewed their pledges to each other.

His first nonclerical commission had been the recruitment of Bertram Heath. Actually, the initiative had been his. Fleet-wood had been attracted to the tall, rangy Wykehamist who devoted himself equally to physics, rugger, and politics: the quiet, determined young man with the even-featured straight face and the steady brown eyes that signalled what was coming before the laconic twenty-year-old got out what was on his mind.

It had been well after Fleetwood himself had retreated from over left-wing activity that he noticed, from reading the daily
Union Reporter,
the Cambridge student newspaper, Bertram Heath's name cropping up in the sports section as a rising star in rugby, and in the Cambridge Union as a fiery socialist speaker. During Heath's second year, he qualified to participate in a seminar guided by Fleetwood prompting, in a matter of weeks, a fascination with the strikingly gifted young scholar by the only slightly younger student which begged for social intimacy. This came first with Heath staying after class to pursue answers to one or two questions that especially vexed him. This became, a fortnight later, an invitation to tea at a local café. Fleetwood reciprocated with an invitation to drinks on Tuesday night at the Fellows' Lounge. A month later they were sharing an evening meal at least once every week.

Heath, Fleetwood learned, was highly mobilised on all the requisite issues: the problems of the working class, the threat of Hitler, the hold of the New York bankers on commercial life, the insensitivity of the government of Neville Chamberlain, the class structure that was so especially evident in the public schools including the renowned school from which Heath had graduated. Fleetwood permitted himself certain hospitable resonances when the young man spoke, and very gradually permitted him to know that he was, however silently, in sympathy with his basic positions, but had been too preoccupied with his professional researches to devote the time necessary to master the whole problem of international politics, and now he was encouraging Heath in effect to instruct Heath's brilliant mentor, an imposture he was sure would not be resented if the decision was finally taken to engage in recruitment.

He did notice about his young friend that he was less than charitable in his attitude toward those who disagreed with him, or indeed toward those who got in his way in any matter, whether it was a student competing with him for the higher grade in a physics paper or a rugby player on the other team or a Cambridge Union orator who disagreed with him, particularly if the form of that disagreement was patronising. Timothy Bethell, defending the policies of the British Government, had remarked a few weeks earlier that such criticisms as were being made of ‘the speaker' (it was Bertram Heath) would ‘lighten the political burden of the nation, especially if, as a consequence, he were to devote himself exclusively to rugby, in which activity he is said to excel, perhaps to the point of failing to recognise that he is in this chamber supposed to treat arguments other than as footballs. They really are different things, Mr. Heath.' There was great jubilation in the chamber, most of it at Bertram Heath's expense.

The following night, returning from a convivial supper with friends, Timothy Bethell, rounding the corner of Trumpington Street to approach his college, was accosted by a large man wearing a mask who proceeded to administer a beating so severe as to result in Bethell's hospitalisation with a fractured jaw. There was great commotion at the college, and suspicion instantly fell on Thomas Brady, the boxing champion of Clare College, whose steady girlfriend of several months had only the week before been annexed by Timothy Bethell. Brady was asked informally by common friends to account for his whereabouts at the time of the assault, and although he pleaded most vigorously his innocence, in fact he had no way of proving that he was on a bus returning from London where he had done nothing more mischievous than go to the cinema. Some believed Brady, some did not. Alistair Fleetwood did.

The time had come, Fleetwood decided late that spring, and he dutifully consulted Alice Goodyear Corbett, asking her permission to proceed.

It had been a revelation to Bertram to learn that in addition to everything else the man he admired most in all this world was also in fact a clandestine revolutionary, wholly mobilised behind the cause of the working classes. He joyfully accepted a commission as a revolutionary colleague. They spoke for hours on end about the excitement of their common purpose. It disappointed Heath only to learn that he would need to submit to the same discipline Fleetwood had submitted to, namely to recede from his firebrand mode as socialist and fellow traveller, but he was willing to do everything necessary to qualify fully.

So that by the time he was in his final year, Heath had crossed the aisle to the Liberal party in the Cambridge Union, and his high BTU former colleagues thought him a spent case in whom the fires of idealism had burned out. Though they conceded that nothing else in Heath had burned out: he had become the captain of the rugger team, and was regarded as certain to get a first in physics.

Bertram Heath was in Cambridge that summer doing a research project under the supervision of Fleetwood, and they dined together twice, sometimes three times a week in the suite Fleetwood had already begun to aggrandise with a cook-butler who served tolerable food, and a young but discriminating wine cellar. They ate now in the airy dining room, the windows on the side open to let in the summer air. Heath had been heatedly denouncing the pact; Fleetwood had patiently counselled him to wait, wait, wait, that the wisdom of it would one day transpire. He acknowledged that communists would now be on the defensive everywhere, but that what mattered was not such setbacks as these, but progress in major, historical terms. That, he reminded his impatient and severe young friend, ‘can't be measured by today's headlines.' And then, of course, the headlines a week later brought news that Hitler had invaded Poland. And forty-eight hours after that, the government of His Britannic Majesty George VI declared war, for the second time in a generation, against Germany.

The Army Recruiting Office ruled that certain categories of scholars should not be drafted into the army: they would be more valuable performing special services. Fleetwood fell instantly into such a category, Heath marginally. Fleetwood was asked to report to Bletchley Park where he learned that he was to help with the whole cryptographic enterprise. He had his misgivings, which he confessed to Alice by radio. He was not disposed to help an imperialist power in a fight against Adolf Hitler so long as Hitler was an ally of the Soviet Union. She counselled him to protect his cover by agreeing to serve. And while there at Bletchley Park he could keep Moscow informed of all technological developments that might prove useful, meanwhile being as sluggish as he thought he could get away with in contributing to the war effort against the Soviet Union's ally.

Fleetwood spoke with Heath about coming along into the Government Code and Cypher School. Heath on the one hand longed for more active work, but could not envision himself fighting on air, land, or sea against an ally of the Soviet Union. So he permitted Fleetwood to exercise his considerable influence to bring him into the bustling operation at Bletchley.

At Bletchley, Fleetwood learned what he could from his fellow scientists, but mostly he absorbed himself in a series of experiments about which he spoke little, even to Heath, who throughout the long period that lay ahead of them was manifestly demoralised. Heath was frequently late in coming to work. He was seen at the local bars with different women who, after a few days, were given the option of sleeping with Heath or being dropped by him like a stone. He calculated one night, as he left the hotel room he had hired for two hours, ahead of the American WAC lieutenant who would leave a decorous few moments later, that his rate of scoring came to about fifty-fifty, and those were reasonable odds. He cared nothing for any of the women he spent time with. His mind was occasionally stimulated at Bletchley, and he became a skilled radio operator, bringing his considerable knowledge of physics to his aid in helping to solve special problems.

Thus it went for two abysmal years, past the fall of France, through the Battle of Britain, through the bombings and blackouts, the shortages and rationing, and the general dreariness. His superiors no longer thought of him as a brilliant young scientist capable of creative work. It could be said that they lost interest in him. But all that changed on June 22, 1941, when Adolf Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union.

A week later, Fleetwood was working feverishly on projects directly related to the war effort. And one week later, Bertram Heath was receiving basic training at a camp for commandos in the south of England.

11

It had not been easy.

‘You'd think we were asking to inspect their ladies' boudoirs,' Anthony Trust said, stretching his legs over the coffee table.

‘Interesting idea,' Blackford replied.

‘Maybe
that's
where The Spook' (as they had taken to calling the vegetable-mineral-animal they were looking for) ‘is hiding.'

‘If so, Anthony, you'll be the first person to find it.'

But Rufus had entered and the schoolboy banter, at which they had had considerable experience since they had been, indeed, schoolmates at Greyburn College, ended abruptly. Trust removed his legs from the table.

‘It is set for ten tomorrow morning,' Rufus reported, sitting down opposite. ‘I began by asking our friends if Pulling and Spring could study the electronic schematics but they said,' Rufus paused, as though taking a deep breath before elaborating a profound ambiguity, ‘“No.”' That was as theatrical as Blackford had ever seen Rufus. ‘It became necessary,' Rufus said, back now in his understated mode, ‘to pursue the matter.'

The ‘matter' had gone all the way to the P.M., and finally Anthony Brogan simply overruled MI5 head Sir Eugene Attwood, who had several times remarked that in modern history no one had ever invited a foreign power, never mind how friendly, to ‘ransack' its private communications facilities. The Prime Minister assured Sir Eugene that ‘ransacking' the Code Room was hardly what the American specialists intended to do. The fact was, a monstrous leak had been unmistakably deduced, the result of which was that the passage of all American intelligence communications and high security information was as of this minute suspended, pending the elimination of that leak. ‘It has to be in our organisation or in theirs, inasmuch as the leaked information passed through both arteries and no other.'

Attwood finally agreed to cooperate, but only after wresting from the P.M. the promise that two equivalent British experts be present when time came to ‘sweep' (having capitulated, he now used a gentler word than ransacked) U.S. Embassy quarters. Moreover, as a matter of pride, the American Embassy would be first: ‘We are, after all, sir,' Attwood had reminded the Prime Minister, ‘in Great Britain, not in America, and I should think the presumption would be not that the host country was delinquent in security matters, but that the foreign country was. So we should begin by inspecting
their
quarters, and only
then,
our own.' Brogan sighed and said he would make the suggestion to Rufus, who said that was fine by him; he had no interest in the matter of precedence. And so, on that Monday morning, Bruce Pulling and Hallam Spring of the CIA arrived with Rufus and Anthony Trust at Number Two Grosvenor Square, where they were met by two agents of MI5.