Saving the Queen (31 page)

The relief in the room was celebrated by a concerted silence.

Rufus then said, “Singer, we must put a tail on Kirk, and try to bug his flat. But use only your top man, or nobody. It would be better, at this point, if we lost him than if he caught on that we are on to him. Get that started right away.” Rufus's intensest emotions, like J. S. Bach's, were rendered pianissimo. Again Singer left the room.

Rufus, though looking at Blackford, was actually talking to himself.

“So far, they don't know we've got our man. But there's something
we
don't know, and that is: What precautions has Kirk taken?”

“You mean to get away?”

“That's one kind of precaution. Another is to neutralize us. He has a hell of a lever: the reputation of the Queen of England. The unity of the West is a fragile thing as it is. Institutional stability, in Europe, is practically a monopoly of Great Britain, West Germany, and Monaco. The demoralization that would follow from the exposure of the Queen as inadvertent agent of the Soviet Union is something Europe would have a hell of a time adjusting to. You can imagine what it would do to the British. Abdication. A huge, iconoclastic assault on the monarchy, general hell. The problem now is less Kirk—he has to be disposed of, of course—than saving the Queen—I repeat, and we don't know what precautions, if any, Kirk has taken. And we don't know how deep the NKVD's knowledge is of the relationship between Kirk and the Queen.…”

“Isn't it safe to assume they know everything?” Blackford asked.

“Has it occurred to you, Blackford,” Rufus stared into space, “that the NKVD
may not even know who Kirk is
? That, really, is the principal purpose of our tailing him—to try to establish if there
is
any face-to-face contact with any of the known NKVD agents.”

The bell rang in the next room, and Singer came back with a fresh communication from Trust.

“It sure is moving fast today,” he said excitedly. “Here's the latest.”

WALLACK JUST CALLED BACK. MAN IDENTIFYING HIMSELF AS FBI AGENT SAID HE WAS DOING ROUTINE INQUIRY ABOUT B. OAKES WHO IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR SECURITY ASSIGNMENT AND LISTED WALLACK AS A FORMER EMPLOYER. WALLACK GAVE PRESCRIBED ANSWERS AND AGENT, WHO GAVE HIS NAME AS WILLIAM FURCOLO, SAID THANKS. AND SIGNED OFF. QUERY: DO I NEED TO GO TO NEW HAVEN AND GIVE WALLACK MORE INFORMATION?

“Tell him no,” Rufus said, “but ask him to have Wallack telephone in any other inquiries relating to Oakes and tell him whoever his current assistant is, Wallack's impression is he trained at MIT and was recommended by Oakes; and to report any inquiries on that front also.”

Rufus resumed his thinking, silently. He turned again to Blackford, this time with instructions.

“You must go ahead with the training on the Sabre airplane. It is, I assume, too late to fly it this afternoon. Go to your flat, and telephone your father's people and tell them you will fly it tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon, and Sunday morning before you exhibit for the Sabre officials on Sunday afternoon. Let me have the key to your flat.” Black handed it to Singer, wordlessly, and Singer walked into the code room and, a few minutes later, returned with quadruplicated keys.

Rufus handed the original and two duplicates to Blackford. “Two young men will have dinner with you tonight—‘old college pals.' You'll put them up for the weekend. They are plausible-looking and acting young men, but also very highly trained. The two of them together could blow up the Tower of London and make it look like an earthquake. Certainly they can look after your own safety. One of them—because, so the story will go, he has nothing else to do, is avocationally interested in flying, and would prefer staying with you to going to Madame Tussaud's or Westminster Abbey—will accompany you to Northolt tomorrow while you fly the Sabre. The second will stay in your flat, and answer, and record on tape, all calls. Introduce them to the doorman as old college chums who will be staying with you a few days. If I need to see you before Monday morning, Singer will get word to you. If not, come here at
nine P.M. on Sunday
for a briefing. If the Sabre committee rules against you on Sunday afternoon, advise Singer, and stand by at your flat between five and seven. If there is
any
unlikely action—anything at all that makes you feel you are being followed—go to the second rendezvous in the list you already have, and travel from there to the airfield for the next practice session. You will ostensibly be taking your companion to Stratford for a little Shakespeare. There will be a standing reservation at the inn in your friend's name—Joseph Amundson. The appropriate room will be assigned to you. Now: If there is an unambigous effort to interfere with your movements—that, Blackford, is Company talk for anything from blackmail through mayhem to attempted assassination—
leave the country
, following the prescribed route.”

Blackford rose, tipped his hand in mock salute, which, before his fingers reached his eyebrow in the old-time fly-boy casualness, had suddenly transformed into a salute suggesting something between respect and reverence. Rufus had been his appointed superior. He had become his leader.

Blackford, after the routine cautionary look through the side window, walked out of 28 Walton Street.

Rufus sat with Singer, the door to the cryptograph room—following a nudge by Rufus—tightly closed.

“What I am trying to do is obvious to you, Singer. What is not so obvious is that I am also trying to figure out a way to come away from it without disposing of young Blackford Oakes. He has performed for us at least faithfully, at best brilliantly. I suspect he has not told us everything, but I am confident he has told us everything he conscientiously believes we need to know in order to do our part of the job. But he is too inexperienced to know, fully, what our strategic responsibilities are. I want to reason my way through to a solution that leaves Oakes alive. So far I haven't discovered a way. I hope to find one.

“Meanwhile, get me a top-security Sabrejet weapons engineer. Fly him in from the States, if there isn't one of them around already. And have him arrive with a
full inventory
of all the weapons the new Sabre is designed to use. I will need him here by Sunday afternoon. Let's say five
P
.
M
. unless you tell me it can't be done, in which case please resign and go work in some university.”

Singer rather liked it that way. It was how it was seven years ago; and he knew that Rufus would try very hard to save Blackford, but that saving him could not stand in the way of the successful operation. “Too much is at stake” was the way Rufus would put it. Singer appreciated it that Rufus never tried for fancy formulations of terribly basic statements. A cliché, used by Rufus, had crawled back into aphorism.

Blackford told Joe Amundson and Victor Luckey—who had silently and systematically swept the apartment and, finding it clean, authorized direct conversation—that they were free to carouse, either ostensibly or in fact; that a great many of his visiting friends did—there was the bar, there the record player, there the magazine rack, there the telly, but that he, Blackford, would be going to sleep. He must be in shape tomorrow for his flying. Joe told him he and Victor would be alternating watches. They examined Blackford's bedroom, and after looking out the bedroom window, slightly rearranged the position of his bed. He was told to lock the door from the inside and open it only on hearing a prescribed signal.

Blackford called his mother on the telephone, told her briefly his plans for Monday (“provided I persuade the Sabrejet people I'm a better flier than Dad!”). His mother was not at all pleased, but said that he must understand if Alec, who had been invited to the trials, rooted for the Hunter—“After all, Alec's bank is heavily involved.” Blackford said that would be okay, and he simulated a kiss over the telephone, and hung up. He turned off the lights, and daydreamed about a bedroom not thirty miles away, in Windsor Castle, empty at the moment; and of another bedroom, not two miles away, in Buckingham Palace, whose design he did not know, could not guess at—here Crawfie had let him down—where, he agonized with longing, he might find himself, this moment, stark naked, his staff at stiff attention, prepared to build yet one more Anglo-American bridge, however urgent his need for sleep.

Kirk cursed himself for having forgotten that at the Immaculate Conception Church on Farm Street the priests regularly heard confessions between five and six on Fridays. He had given five forty-five to Boris as the time for their meeting. But, of course, there were contingency arrangements. On discovering that there was a queue of the faith, or, even without a queue, if it happened that, entering the penitent's compartment, Boris discovered that it wasn't Robinson who slid open the opaque screen, but a priest, Boris would simply leave the church and proceed directly to the next numbered church on the carefully memorized list, reporting to the equivalent confessional box
exactly
one half hour later—having, at the original rendezvous, confessed his sins or not, according as he found himself stuck, speaking to a live priest, or in a position, having observed the queue, to abort the engagement in advance. On leaving the church, Boris knew to take the nearest church exit, keeping his eyes down, under no circumstances looking about him, lest his eyes fall on the intangible, impalpable Robinson. Kirk, who had arrived at the Farm Street church only to discover the priest pre-empting Kirk's compartment, moved diagonally across the dimly lit church and knelt down, to await Boris's arrival, and observe, while he had the opportunity, whether Boris would follow his instructions exactly. He had no complaint—the queue having disappeared, Boris did, as it happened, step confidently into the compartment expecting to speak to Robinson, and Kirk amused himself wondering what he might appropriately be saying now to the priest.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I last went to confession before the Revolution. Since then, I have killed directly four hundred and seventy-two men, ordered the execution of approximately twelve hundred others, and participated in a corporate effort to kill somewhere between four and seven million more. I have also been lacking in charity, and missed my morning prayers. For these and other sins, I beg forgiveness.
” In a minute or two, Boris emerged, and walked, head dutifully bent down, out the Farm Street entrance. One or two other men, and two young girls, sauntered into the church and queued up outside the confessional, three on each side, while Kirk reflected. He might as well stay where he was for another five minutes, which would leave him exactly enough time to walk to St. James's on Spanish Place, to arrive there at six-ten, five minutes ahead of Boris. With five minutes to kill, he found himself, suddenly, wondering whether, if Miss Oyen had, during those long intervals in the hospital, been reading, alternatively, the Bible, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, and St. John of the Cross, and even the moderns—Newman, Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Merton, Belloc—he, Peregrine, might have found himself in this quiet chapel not, in his search for a better world, frustrated by the queue of penitents, but lining up along with them, confessing to a priest a microcosmic, rather than a macrocosmic responsibility for the troubles of this troublesome world. Peregrine was imaginative enough to consider the alternative without emotion, but he was decisive by character, and five minutes proved ample to reinforce his determination. Shit, he said, the Christians have had it for two thousand years. The Communists have had less than fifty years. As a confirmed redistributionist, I'll call time on St. Mark, and give St. Marx equal time.

He strained to read his watch in the light, and presently rose, and walked out briskly. He followed the far perimeter of Hyde Park, loped off into Manchester Square, slowed his pace a little, and walked into the main entrance of St. James's, which was dark except for candles on both sides of the sanctuary, the four dim lights overhead for tracing the aisles and the pews, the lights inadequate for reading one's missal or breviary unless you knelt directly below them. There was no one in sight and, counting clockwise from the left, he slipped into the priest's compartment in the second confessional, and waited. In exactly five minutes, he felt the weight of a penitent and slid open the partition, which allows the ear to hear, but not the eye to see. After establishing that it was Boris, Boris stepped out and submitted to the routine frisk. The formalities disposed of, Boris, back in the penitent's box, said, “You are talking, Robinson, to someone who has just received absolution.”

“God is more forgiving than Stalin, Boris Andreyvich.”

Boris's voice changed quickly, pursuant to his role: no participation in any jocularities involving Stalin.

“You have a message for me?”

“No, but
you
should have a message for
me.
”

“I do. And it comes exactly ten minutes before I come out to meet you. Your friend Blackford Oakes, whoever he is, did not, it seems, lie to you. He worked for Professor Wallack, and we discovered even that Professor Wallack asks him to stay on.”

Peregrine felt greatly relieved. Inordinately relieved, from which he deduced that his suspicions about Oakes had been more than perfunctory.

“Good show, Boris; bloody good show. Did you find the answer to whether Wallack's current assistant is an MIT man?”

“No, but in good time, Robinson, in good time … Now, Robinson, you were going to try especially hard to get for me a description of the Teller-Freeze Bypass. You have succeeded?”

“I have not. I have made inquiries which would ordinarily bring results, and I am now wondering whether it is possible that you have the term right. Or perhaps it is a recently coined scientific nickname? Or a fresh code word for a process we have already investigated?”

“I don't think it is any one of these things. There is much excitement over the Bypass and the easy solution it has provided for serious problems.”