Orders from Berlin (25 page)

But Thorn had come too far now to back down. ‘Did you get Hargreaves’s memo the other day?’ he asked. ‘About the earlier radio message that they’ve matched to the one we discussed in the meeting, both using the same code?’

‘Yes. Sent four days earlier, giving a date for a drop, no doubt from an aeroplane, but no location. Signed C. Not exactly a breakthrough, is it?’ said C, who prided himself on his encyclopaedic memory for all the documents that passed across his desk.

‘The place had obviously been agreed in advance,’ said Thorn. ‘But that’s not what matters. The point is that this isn’t some run-of-the-mill mission like you thought it was before. The date of the drop was the same day as the radio message, which means that the agent receiving the message wasn’t likely to be the one picking up whatever equipment or documents were being flown in. There’s got to be a sleeper of some kind monitoring the location. And the people involved are using radios and a code that’s been hard to break, which points to a sophisticated operation, one that we should be taking seriously.’

‘And MI5 are taking it seriously,’ said C. ‘I can assure you of that. It’s just it’s their job to deal with it, not ours. We’re in the business of foreign intelligence, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘Unless it’s one of our agents who’s involved,’ Thorn countered. ‘Did you know that Seaforth was away on the day after the message about the drop was sent? He never came into work at all.’

‘Gone to meet the sleeper agent instead, I suppose you’re saying. Did he give a reason for his absence?’

‘He phoned Jarvis in the morning to say he was sick. But he looked healthy enough when he came in the next day. I can tell you that.’

C took a pull on his cigar, looking silently at Thorn as if weighing all that he’d said. ‘It’s not enough, Alec, and I think you know that,’ he said finally. ‘What you’re telling me is all circumstantial. You say that your dislike for Seaforth has nothing to do with you accusing him, but I’m not so sure of that. I’m sorry to say it, but, unconsciously or not, I think you’re trying to get rid of him because he’s after your job. And yes, I do think it’s affecting your judgement. This vendetta is going to have to stop. I’ve warned you before and I’m not going to warn you again.’

Thorn thought of responding. But instead he bit his tongue. He wasn’t a fool, whatever C might think. There was clearly nothing to be gained by further argument unless he wanted to earn himself an early retirement. C had made up his mind about Seaforth and he wasn’t going to change it, whatever Thorn had to say.

‘I hear what you say,’ Thorn said, forcing out the words as he stood up to leave. ‘But can we keep this in confidence between us? It wouldn’t help anyone for it to get out.’

‘Don’t tell Seaforth, you mean? Very well,’ said C, inclining his head. ‘But let this be the end of it.’

Thorn nodded his acquiescence as he backed away towards the door, leaving C standing in front of the fire beneath the portrait of his ancestor, looking as if he owned the place – which, of course, he did.

Back past the twins; back through the green baize door; bac
k into the world of peeling paint and grey lino floors and inadequate heat and light behind fraying blackout curtains. Back distracted down the creaking stairs and almost st
raight into
the arms of his arch-enemy. Thorn stood still with shock for a moment, adjusting to the experience of having the man who was so vivid in his mind appearing suddenly in front of him in the flesh. He hated these apparently chance encounters with Seaforth in the corridors of
HQ in inverse proportion to how much Seaforth seemed
to enjoy them, standing aside with sarcastic ceremony and
waiting for Thorn to go past while he observed his superior’s impotent rage with silent amusement.

But today Seaforth seemed unable to resist going further. ‘How was C?’ he asked with a mean smile. ‘Gave you a pleasant reception, I hope?’

‘None of your damned business,’ snapped Thorn. How the hell did Seaforth know where he’d been, he wanted to know. Except that he wasn’t going to give his enemy the satisfaction of asking. He understood exactly what Seaforth was trying to do: the bastard knew he had nothing to fear from C, so he was using Thorn’s impotence as an instrument to needle him with.

Thorn swallowed his anger and turned away, but Seaforth hadn’t finished with him yet.

‘Ava sends her regards,’ he called after Thorn in a mock-friendly voice.

It was too much. Thorn’s self-control snapped and he clenched his fists, mad with rage. He wanted to pummel Seaforth, to pound him into bloody submission. It was his worst nightmare – the thought of Ava giving in to this charlatan’s advances. He’d thought of little else since he’d found them together on the day of Bertram’s arrest. ‘It isn’t what you think,’ she’d said. And he still didn’t know whether to believe her or not. But even if she was telling the truth, he sensed that she wouldn’t hold out for long. Seaforth clearly had a hold over her, and with Bertram out of the way, there was nothing to stop him from making her his next conquest.

Thorn found it hard to acknowledge, but losing Ava was probably the greatest regret of his long, melancholy life, although it was hard to say he had lost what he had never really tried to win. The intensity of his feelings for Ava had rendered him tongue-tied, utterly unable to tell her how he felt.

It didn’t help, of course, that he was older than her and that he was certain that any declaration would earn h
im the lasting contempt of Ava’s father as well as
rejection
by the daughter. But her sudden, unexpected marriage to the
awful Bertram changed everything. It convinced Thorn that he might have succeeded at the same time that it made the woman he loved forever unobtainable.

To him, but not to Seaforth. It turned out that a handsome face and an easy way with words were all that was apparently required to win the heart of the woman he had set up on an unreachable pedestal. And now Seaforth wanted to rub his face in it. Thorn was consumed with hatred. He turned to face his adversary, determined to have a final reckoning. It didn’t matter that he was no match for Seaforth; he needed an outlet for his rage. But then at the very last moment, just as he swung his arm back to strike, he caught the look of malicious triumph in Seaforth’s eyes and realized that he was playing into his hands. An assault would give C just the excuse he needed to suspend Thorn and replace him with Seaforth. At a stroke, everything would be lost.

Thorn dropped his hands to his sides and smiled. It was the opposite of what Seaforth expected, and for a moment his mask slipped and Thorn could see the hatred burning in his enemy’s pale blue eyes. But only for a moment. Seaforth recovered his self-possession almost instantly and inclined his head, as if acknowledging a good move in a game of chess, and then went on up the stairs, disappearing from view at the top without once looking back.

Thorn enjoyed his brief moment of elation, but it had passed by the time he returned to his office on the floor below, replaced by a renewal of the angry frustration he’d felt after the interview with C. Encounters on the stairs meant nothing. Seaforth held all the cards. Thorn might hate his enemy, but he had no idea what Seaforth was planning or thinking. Wearily, he lit a cigarette and reached across his desk for the file he’d been studying before he went up to see C.

Personnel file for Charles James Seaforth. Opened – September 1933. Last updated – January 1940. Date of birth – 18th November 1900. Place of birth – Carlisle Hospital. Thorn knew the entries by heart.

Seaforth had gone as a scholar from his local grammar school to London University, with two years in the Army in between, missing the horrors of the trenches by a few months at most. Thorn thought that maybe the fact that Seaforth had never fought the Germans explained how he could bring himself to spy for them.

He’d graduated with a first-class degree in modern languages, French and German, following it up with a stint at Heidelberg University teaching English before he came back to London and placed second in his year in the annual Civil Service exams. Which was pretty damned impressive, Thorn had to admit. No doubt as a reward, he was given a plum posting with the Foreign Office, serving as an under-secretary at the embassy in Berlin, where his in-depth reports on the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic in the early thirties earned him positive notice in Whitehall. And then a few months after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Seaforth was recommended for transfer to the Secret Service and began recruiting his network of German spies, which included the staff officer whose recent blow-by-blow reports of Hitler’s military conferences had fuelled Seaforth’s meteoric rise through the ranks of MI6.

Each step along Seaforth’s path of advancement was accompanied by glowing letters of reference. One by one, Thorn turned them over with disgust, thinking what he would like to write if his opinion were asked. It was an exceptional career, containing nothing that anyone checking back could take exception to. And it was just the same with Seaforth’s background – father deceased, killed at Passchendaele in 1917; one sibling also deceased; mother remarried and living in the same small northern town where her son had grown up. No political affiliations, and interests listed as hill walking and stamp collecting. Unmarried – he was a confirmed bachelor just like Thorn, living alone in an apartment in Cadogan Square. This last was the only surprising entry in the file. It wasn’t apparent whether Seaforth owned or rented his flat, but either way it seemed much too expensive an address for someone at his salary level, unless he was receiving money from elsewhere, of course. But Thorn knew that living in an upmarket flat wasn’t enough to warrant an investigation. There was nothing in the file that gave him any kind of opening.

Thorn was under no illusions. He knew that he had neither the backing nor the evidence to defeat Seaforth with a full-frontal attack. His appeal to C had been something he’d had to try on the principle of leaving no stone unturned, but C’s rebuff had come as no surprise. Thorn knew that henceforward he was on his own, and would have to keep his own counsel, because any premature move against Seaforth ran the risk that the traitor would act straight away. Whatever that action might be. Ten days on and Thorn was no nearer to finding out.

‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.’ Time had to be running out. The written report would have been sent a long time ago. Orders would be on the way from Berlin if they had not already arrived. From C – this unknown other C whom Thorn couldn’t identify, although not for want of trying. When he’d first read the radio message, the letter name had echoed faintly in his mind, but the more he’d pursued it through his memory, the more elusive the echo had become, until now he wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t imagined a connection to something he’d once heard. All he was left with was his recollection of the imperative need he’d felt, on the day he first saw the message, to take it to Albert and seek his opinion. Perhaps Albert had said something once that had stuck in Thorn’s mind, or perhaps it had just been his awareness that Albert knew more about the gangsters that ran Nazi Germany than anyone else. Whatever the case, Thorn had rushed over to Battersea and left the note with the downstairs neighbour, setting in train the series of events that led inexorably to his old friend’s death a few hours later.

Every day Thorn was tormented with guilt for what he’d done, thinking of all the ways that the day could have turned out differently – if he’d waited for Albert to return; if he hadn’t left the note; if he’d left work a little later. All the wrong turnings, yet he’d been right about one thing. Albert
had
known who C was. That’s why he’d rushed over to HQ as soon as he got the note. Thorn knew he’d been right to go to Albert, even if he’d been wrong about everything else before and since.

He missed his friend. Angry, acerbic, curmudgeonly – never easy to be with. Yet they had been united by a deep, unspoken patriotism that never had to be acknowledged. And now he was gone. Thorn looked across the corridor to where Albert’s office had once been. It was bigger than Thorn’s room, and with C installing himself in the next-door building, he’d had the opportunity to move offices when Albert left, but he hadn’t wanted to. There were too many memories he needed to put behind him, of late-night conversations and fruitless searches through the yellowing pages of old files, looking for maggots in the woodwork, while the indifferent moon watched them through the as yet unblacked-out windows.

So Hargreaves had taken over the office instead, and Albert had become forgotten, swept away into oblivion by the new regime. Once the war started, Thorn had hardly seen his old friend. There was no time and Battersea was out of the way, and he hadn’t wanted to meet Ava and think of what might have been.

Thorn was eaten up with regrets. He felt like a rudderless boat drifting on the open water, cut from its moorings. His childhood home had been taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture, requisitioned for the war effort. His crippled, titled brother spent his life soaking in brandy and soda and self-loathing at his London club. The agents Thorn had recruited on the continent were either dead or in labour camps. And the woman he loved had no interest in him.

It was his determination to get the better of Seaforth that kept Thorn going. That and a stubborn, instinctive refusal to give in to his own self-pity. Sometimes he doubted himself. He knew he
wanted
Seaforth to be the traitor. Because of Ava; because Seaforth’s star was rising just as his was falling; because they would have hated each other even if there had been no reason for their antipathy. But always his certainty returned. Seaforth had killed Albert. He was sure of it; utterly sure.

Quaid looked up from writing his report for the prosecuting lawyer on ‘the case of the falling professor’, as he’d decided to call it for filing purposes, and noticed the worried look on his assistant’s face.