High Jinx (11 page)

The two British technicians were amiably treated by Hallam Spring as first they waited in the reception room, and then rode up in the lift together, entering the Code Room without any discernible tension. This would not have been so if Bruce Pulling, a short, hairy man in his thirties, had met them alone, because Pulling had a distracting habit, whatever the company he found himself in, or the circumstances, of leaning over and making notes on his notepad, causing light banter to come to an excruciatingly self-conscious halt. But while his colleague made his notes, Hallam Spring chatted.

There they were, in a simple enough, utilitarian room, but a room designed to receive and to transmit data of trivial but also of momentous consequence. Rather like the room that holds the electric chair, Anthony thought: all of the support systems are outside.

No files cluttered the room. Just the two chairs for the two clerks (top-secret material was never handled by only a single employee). A steel table running across two thirds of the middle of the room. The transmitting unit, set on its own table on the left against the wall, adjacent to the paper shredder. The other walls were bare; not even a picture of President Eisenhower.

On the table at the centre, the teletype machine, its electric wires running down to an elaborate electrical socket-grid underneath. Immediately on its right, the encoder; on its left, the code-to-print transcriber.

The number one communications clerk would receive from the embassy official the sealed message to be transmitted. The clerk would open it and place it flat on the table beside the keyboard.

He would then type out the message, which would emerge—on oily yellow inch-wide scrolled paper, with perforated dots that corresponded to the letters being typed—from a slot on the left of the machine onto a horizontal three-inch open tray. Gravity would impel the paper, on reaching the end of the tray, down onto a stainless-steel receptacle on the floor.

After the message had been typed out, the number two clerk would collect the scroll of perforated paper and feed it into the third machine, which looked like a large electric typewriter. The perforated tape would activate the typewriter, which would type back the message on regular office-sized paper, on a roll that issued out of the back of the machine, once again dropping slowly into another receptacle.

When this operation was completed, clerk number two would pick up the printed copy and read aloud to clerk number one, who would check what he heard against the original. When there was an error he would stop the reader, make the correction on the teletype, and the reading would resume.

When the clerk-reader had finished, clerk number one would take the numbered corrections from the roll and apply them over the indicated lines (every line was numbered)—a routine splicing operation.

The edited tape was then fed into the encoder, whose internal arrangements changed once a day, pursuant to radio impulses reaching it from Washington.

Clerk number one that took the encoded paper and walked to the heavy transmitting unit to the left of the table. He inserted the roll into a slot at waist level, and a tractor feed chug-chugged the scroll through the mechanism. As this was being done, an identical roll of paper was emerging in the office of the State Department or the CIA, depending on the designated destination.

Meanwhile, clerk number two was feeding the non-coded tape into a shredder. After the encoded roll had been ingested by the transmitter and returned through a second slot below the first, that roll was also fed into the shredder.

The original message was put back into the envelope, resealed, and a button inside the Code Room depressed. The duty officer outside would reply with the signal for that day, a signal divulged to clerk number one only after he had gone into the signal office for duty.

On hearing the proper signal, clerk number one would open, from inside the Code Room, the heavy steel door, and return the sealed envelope to the duty officer, who would take it for filing in the principal vault of the embassy, located in the basement, about which someone had once said that a force ‘on the heavy side of Hiroshima' would be required to open it forcibly.

There are rote procedures all secret service sweepers have in common. They begin by searching for electronic bugs. Never mind that the four technicians knew that audio bugs were not the suspected problem. They began searching for them even as a physician, called in to attend to a cyst, begins by taking the patient's blood pressure. As a matter of professional deference, the Britishers, following Pulling and Spring about, did not make identical soundings—that is, if the Americans found nothing under the lamp light, the British team would assume there was nothing under the lamp light. Occasionally they might go further, for instance by taking readings on the steel wall with their electrical impulse recorders at shorter intervals than Spring and Pulling. But that kind of thing is done unprovocatively.

Then the major job began, the careful disassembly of the four basic electronic units: the teletype, the encoder, the code-to-print unit, and the transmitter. Were there any extraneous wires there? Any hidden tubes that might be used for transmission? Any suspicious circuitry? On the transmitter: was there anything, really, to look for, given that it was fed tape already coded, and that that code was assumed to be unbreakable? A Soviet radio disk, catching and recording those transmissions, lacking the code, would be helpless in trying to penetrate those signals. And that code, assuming that by extraordinary enterprise the Soviets succeeded in getting its key, would expire at midnight that night.

So having one by one exonerated the three other instruments, when it came to the transmitter mostly they just sat and stared at it. Conversation gave out. They found themselves leaning against the wall, three of them, while Pulling sat on one of the chairs, writing on his notepad.

They had found nothing.

And, at Leconfield House on Curzon Street where three hours later they completed a similar search of the British installations, they found: nothing.

Rufus received the report fatalistically. At least, under present arrangements, he had a little time. Because, effective two days before, no clandestine messages of substance were being sent from Washington to London, either to the U.S. Embassy or to Leconfield House. The volume of transactions was not reduced; it was contrived to send classified material of a noncritical kind. Scheduled, in about a week, would be a transmission revealing that Counterintelligence had discovered the identity of a particular KGB agent working with the United Nations and travelling frequently to London. Rufus would time what happened next, and note how long it would be before that agent, whose identity and activity had been detected a year earlier but who had proved of no particular use to the CIA, was recalled to the Soviet Union.

And so Rufus began to conceive an elaborate plan. But, difficult though it would undoubtedly be to execute, the burden was great to expose The Spook. Whatever it was. Whatever he was. Whatever she was. Whatever he-she-it was.

12

Rufus's plan called for Blackford's going to Washington. He had informed Blackford that he would serve as Rufus's personal aide in developing the plans for the operation and in coordinating with Anthony Trust and his small but highly trained staff. The evening before the day of his planned departure, Blackford went to Trust's apartment on Baker Street and from there to a neighbourhood restaurant Trust spoke about with some enthusiasm.

Still, their spirits were low. The ignominious failure of Operation Tirana continued to fester, and the continuing insecurity of the existing situation was a reminder of their humiliation and of the terrible ends that had resulted from a security failure for which, by definition, they—not the enemy—were guilty. It is a government's duty to provide for its security. Sure, Rufus had a plan, not all the details of which had yet been disclosed. But would even the penetration of the Soviet Embassy yield the secret? Short of holding a dagger up to the throat of KGB chief Boris Bolgin, neither Anthony Trust nor Blackford Oakes knew what could be done.

And, in the meantime, top secret U.S.-British communications were being transmitted as if by pony express. An urgent communication by President Dwight Eisenhower to Prime Minister Anthony Brogan had either to be telephoned directly over the protected line or else written out and transported physically across the ocean and hand-delivered.

Both official London and official Washington deemed this a singular humiliation, and if Rufus hadn't solemnly decreed that until further notice no reliance was to be placed on conventional electronics, President Eisenhower would have pounded his fist on his desk in the Oval Office and ordered Allen Dulles to reinstitute regular communications via regular channels. He was tempted by one of his advisers who argued that the tragedy of Tirana had to be the result of one of those awful coincidences: a single mole, accumulating the diverse data from here and there, putting them all together, and delivering the package to the KGB. There was, he insisted, no other possible explanation. But Eisenhower agreed to go along with Rufus. For the time being.

Rufus had not specified what his plan was, but it was known that he had something in mind that required patience and a continued irregularity of secret communications between Washington and London.

‘We'll do as asked, and see, right?' Anthony Trust sought, during dinner, to put the matter out of their minds as they sat down at the small table, the candle at its centre, over the traditional red-checkered tablecloth. There was the faint and all the more appealing smell of wine and herbs and cooking butter, and the genial concern of the maître d'hôtel to leave his clients happy. The braised chicken and petits pois were fine, the claret excellent, the mille-feuilles sensational.

And so they moved on. The residual frustration imposed a certain drag on their mounting spirits so that it took longer than usual to reach overdrive. But they would do so.

When professionally burdened, his old friend Anthony, Blackford knew, tended to turn his mind to stimulations unrelated to the world of getting and spending and the cold war. And, as ever, Blackford was bracingly acquiescent. For one thing it was very much worthwhile just listening to Anthony Trust in his romantic mode, if only for the sake of listening to Anthony Trust in his romantic mode. He was very good at it, and it was heavily contagious.

Anthony was just one year older than Blackford. They had met as the only two American boys at Greyburn College, in 1941: Anthony a shrewd, urbane senior whose precocious social skills had got him named a prefect by the time Blackford Oakes, the irrepressible young Yankee, arrived, causing by his informality something of a sensation, which had culminated in the ironic scene of Blackford being physically held in place by his fellow American while the headmaster applied a savage beating with a birch rod to punish Blackford's insolence. Trust did his formal duty, but then risked his prefectorial standing by acting as an accomplice in Blackford's altogether unauthorised departure from Greyburn.

They had coincided again at Yale, the one (Anthony) a junior, the other a sophomore. In due course Anthony Trust recruited Blackford into service with the CIA.

Anthony Trust was something of a sentimentalist. Unmoved by facile pain, by quotidian vicissitudes; but deeply moved by genuine pain, and positively outraged by sadistic pain. It was, he once confessed to Blackford, primarily for that reason that he devoted himself so completely to the political struggle against communism. ‘Every time the spirit lags,' he told Blackford as they fought their way clear of the inscrutable problem of the Comprehensive Mole, ‘I pick up a book on a particular shelf in my library. I have another sequestered library shelf: it chronicles the atrocities of the Nazis. Do you know of Rolf Hochhuth? He has a play. I've read it. It will hit Broadway one of these days, hit it big, I predict. It's called
The Representative,
and makes out a case against Pope Pius XII. The thesis is: the Pope didn't do enough to alert the world to the evil of Adolf Hitler. I want to know: how would Rolf Hochhuth (or his followers) treat the same Pope—or the present Prime Minister of England or the President of the United States—if he used the kind of language Hochhuth thought appropriate to use against Hitler, but used it now against Malenkov, successor to Stalin? And, in fact, many of them never even approved of tough language against Stalin.' Anthony Trust was gripping his glass.

‘Anyway, when my spirits flag, I pick up one of those books. I'll give you just four or five titles—you know them all.
I Speak for the Silent. The Captive Mind. I Chose Freedom. Darkness at Noon.
Tchernavin, Milosz, Kravchenko, Koestler, and twenty-five more. Then I reach out and I pick up
The Diary of Anne Frank,
but I say to myself: “The people who did that to her are dead or in prison.” We managed that! We finally reduced the Thousand-Year Reich to one bunker and an automatic pistol, and Hitler took it from there. The remaining bastards we dithered over at Nuremberg before hanging them (should just have shot 'em, Black, and then hanged them). There is no such thing any more as a Nazi threat. But the
other
bastards are doing it all the time. Every year there is another book I add to that shelf.' His smile was grave. But then, and this quality in Anthony Trust Blackford cherished, it was gone—flash!—in a moment, replaced by a smile that Black-ford or anyone else could only describe as, well, joyful—lascivious, though that perhaps is a word unfairly freighted against those whose keenest sensual distraction happens to be carnal.

Anthony Trust was at once deeply in love with women and resigned to the knowledge that, in the absence of engaging any one woman in an eternal embrace, they were capable, on a quite casual and, so to speak, disposable basis, of yielding intense pleasure, pleasure he made certain to reciprocate. Anthony had started to talk about the Bag o' Nails, a London ‘gentlemen's club,' here defining a collective of particularly attractive ladies of pleasure. Blackford leaned back and listened to Anthony Trust, who went on as though extemporising the last, elating act of
South Pacific.