Saving the Queen (32 page)

“I think,” said Robinson thoughtfully, “that provided you are correct—that there is such a thing—I can probably get you the answer in a week.”

He had, after all, asked the Queen to demand of the Prime Minister that he consult his top scientific advisers. And if
they
did not know what the Teller-Freeze Bypass was, they were in a position to demand of their American counterparts that they be duly informed, according to the terms of the compact between the P.M. and President Truman. All that should flush out before next Thursday's meeting between the Queen and the Prime Minister. He himself could arrange to see the Queen the following weekend.

“I figure approximately ten days, Boris, and I will call you in the usual way. Now, is there anything else?”

“Only the usual: big, big pressures from Moscow. The feeling that the American scientists are moving faster and faster while we are seemingly … stuck.”

“I'll see what I can do to unstick the revolution, old boy. And remember, Marxist dogma will see us over this crisis in due course.”

Boris did permit himself to say, under the cloistered circumstances, “Marxist dogma will not come down and save my head if I don't have the answers for Moscow very soon.”

“Pending Marxist dogma's assuming the role of protector, I, Robinson, will look after you, Boris Andreyvich. I have not failed you yet.”

“No, Robinson, you have not. Your ways are very unusual, but you have never failed us, and have never deceived us, and one day, when you are ready for it, you will be given appropriate recognition.”

“I am perfectly happy, my dear Boris, to make my contributions anonymously. Besides, if I were to accept a medal from your friend Stalin, it would probably make me sick. I need constantly to remind myself how many evil popes there have been when I consider that Stalin was selected by history to guide us through to a socialist paradise. Ah, well, Boris Andreyvich, enough of that. It is late. About ten days, as I say.”

“Good evening, Robinson.”

Fifteen

Rufus studied the report and said to Singer, “Hard to understand why they went into the Farm Street church first. Did anybody check on the priest who was in the confessional with Boris Bolgin?”

“No,” Singer said. “We had only two men on the job; one of them tailed Kirk, the other Bolgin—your hunch about him was right. But Kirk did stay in the church seven or eight minutes, and during that period other people came in and went right into the confessionals, so my guess is the priest was genuine, and Boris walked in there looking for Robinson and had to play out a penitent's role. Probably it was an unscheduled confessional hour, or maybe Kirk just forgot, and they went automatically to the alternative rendezvous.”

“So,” said Rufus, “what do we know?

“One. Oakes is right, and we have our man.

“Two. Kirk is dealing with the top NKVD man in England—rather surprising, really. But less so—

“Three—if my hunch is correct that Kirk
hasn't permitted Bolgin to discover his identity
. Sure, Bolgin could arrange to have Kirk tailed, but chances of exposure multiply geometrically.… It could mean, also, that Kirk is taking great precautions to protect the Queen. Why? Because it's less messy that way? With only himself knowing she is the source of the leaks? Perhaps. But also, maybe, for—sentimental reasons … We need not assume that his hostility to the West is also a hostility to the person of his second cousin, the Queen.…

“Get me everything you can from the newspaper morgues about Kirk and the Queen, how often they see each other—Oakes tells us he is the
only
nonfamily man who actually keeps riding clothes at Windsor Castle. I'd like to know more about him, including any hint of any irregular romantic”—Rufus would, whenever possible, reach for the tushery—“relations. I'm not
sure
what I am looking for, but I need the information fast. Tell you what: Get someone you know to call the foreign office and say that Viscount Kirk has been nominated for a VIP invitation to the United States under the auspices of the State Department, but that because of the McCarran Act—they're used to this—we are required to have a look at the security portfolio, which we are loath to insist formally on doing, given his eminence and his closeness to the Queen—and would they either let us have it or else look it over themselves, and we will gladly take their word for it—just see if there is anything there that catches the eye—anything at all.”

Singer was taking notes.

“And the Sabre man?” Rufus continued, drawing parallel lines on a piece of yellow paper with a sharpened pencil.

“He'll be here on schedule. The army had to be brought in on that one, because the hardware you want isn't just sitting around at Macy's basement.”

“Good night, Singer.”

Singer knew when he was being dismissed, and he never tarried.

“Good night, Rufus.” And yawned—it was after midnight.

Rufus turned down the light, popped a pill in his mouth, which would keep drowsiness at bay for two hours at least. Taking the key from his wall safe, he entered the deserted cryptograph room and sat down at the operator's chair. He opened now the interior safe and brought out a code register, and a second volume, from which he extracted a code number. He turned on the machine and carefully tapped out a message which, under the gravity of the indicated rubric, was decoded in a room in Washington, inserted on a roll of paper a quarter inch wide which, unseen by human eyes, was wound under spring pressure through a slit, on to a spool in a steel box protected by a marsupial envelope within the decoding machine itself. When the clattering stopped, and a bell rang signifying that the dispatcher was finished, a clerk opened a steel door, as if to check the fire within a furnace. Then with a pair of scissors he severed the inch of exposed tape reaching umbilically from the decoding machine to the box's narrow, coin-box aperture, thus leaving the message inside the box unviewable except to the man with the key to open it.

The clerk, carrying the box and followed by an armed guard, proceeded according to regulation down the hall to an elevator, and then into a waiting car, preceded by one car with two armed men and a radio and followed by another car with identical equipment. The caravan drove out and, a half hour later, drew up outside an inconspicuous house in the Virginia countryside. The clerk and his bodyguard, the accompanying men carefully watching their movements, one of them talking into the radio with the guard inside the farmhouse, watched. Two guards let them through a gate opposite the main entrance. As they reached the front door, it opened, and the clerk, always with his escort, was guided to a study. He turned the box over to the occupant of the study, who asked them both to wait outside.

He looked at the number on the steel box and, opening his own safe, tabulated the corresponding code and applied the appropriate combination to open the box. He pulled out the spool of paper, unwinding it and laying it neatly across his desk, dabbing down the ends with Scotch tape. He lowered the desk light and read:

WE HAVE OUR MAN AND I HAVE EVOLVED A SATISFACTORY PLAN. BUT THERE IS A RESIDUAL RISK IN ALLOWING THE SURVIVAL OF OUR YOUNG MAN. I CAN AT THIS POINT VERY EASILY ARRANGE FOR HIS ALTOGETHER LOGICAL ELIMINATION. BUT ON THIS ONE, CHIEF, YOU'VE GOT TO GIVE ME THE WORD, AND I'M USING THIS QUOTE WORD UNQUOTE IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE, AS A DELICATE SUBSTITUTE FOR ORDER. I KNOW IT'S IRRELEVANT TO SAY SO, BUT I LIKE HIM AND TRUST HIM. BUT YOU KNOW MY RULE: NEVER RELY ON YOUR OWN JUDGMENT WHEN THE DOING SO IS TO TAKE A CHANCE WITH THE NATIONAL INTEREST. TELL ME NOW—I AM WAITING AND WILL WAIT THROUGH THE NIGHT IF NECESSARY—“YES,” AND HE GOES TOO; “NO,” HE LIVES TO FIGHT AGAIN. OH YES, HAVE A GOOD SLEEP, BOSS. RUFUS.

He sat down in his armchair and set fire to the crumpled ball of paper. Then he picked out a book from the shelf, an advance copy, sent him by a friend in the publishing business who knew his tastes, which inclined heavily to books about history in which he had himself been involved—
The Diary of a Young Girl
, by Anne Frank. He was halfway through it, and found that his pencil had marked a passage he wanted now to reread. It was from the girl's notes when she was hiding in the attic from the Gestapo, who by concentric deductions were coming closer and closer every day to discovering her. “I wonder,” the little girl had written, “why they let people like them grow so powerful?” He paused and his eyes blurred. People like
them
. People like
whom
? He reached again for his directory, scratched down a code number, and after it wrote out a single word, dropped it into the box, and rang for an aide. “Have the operator waiting outside dispatch the message instantly.” He handed him the locked box, called his wife on the intercom, and said he was ready for cocktails.

Most of Saturday morning Blackford spent on the ground, briefed by the chief engineer on the aircraft and on the agreed-upon drill for the following Monday. The two airplanes would perform a total of six exercises each, three of them in tandem, three individually. The contest would to some extent be judged impressionistically, but also there were instruments, both in the aircraft and on the ground, that would record precise scientific data—obvious things like speed and angle of climb, less obvious things like pressures on the pilot, oil viscosity changes, fuel consumption, and a hundred other metabolic arcana of vital interest to generals, economists, and aircraft specialists. The exercise would begin by a tandem sweep past the reviewing stand at an elevation of fifteen feet, to begin ten miles west and terminate ten miles east of the stand—“Later on we'll fly over to Farnborough and you can look at the actual lay of the land.” This was really pyrotechnical stuff, since the two aircraft would fly at a prearranged six hundred miles per hour, or Mach. 89. In the individual exercises, the Hunter and the Sabre would take turns beginning. The odd-numbered exercises were to be done, like the first, in tandem. The final exercise would have the two airplanes approach the field, loop as narrow a diameter as the pilots dared, and land side by side.

“When do Kirk and I get to practice the duets? We can't walk into that kind of stuff cold.”

“Well, you can, actually, since they're all standard maneuvers, and the radio contact between the two of you is perfect—no outside interference on this one. We're trying out the new closed-circuit radio communication system. But we'll do that on Monday morning. The reason we're putting it off until then is that it won't be until Sunday afternoon that either of you is finally selected.”

“What if we're both turned down?”

“Your father has trained with a Hunter counterpart, and they can go over it again on Monday morning if they want to, or your father with Kirk, or another Hunter man with you—whatever.”

“Well,” said Blackford, examining the reports on the expected performance he was to get out of the Sabrejet, “I'm sure glad that swimming coach at Yale talked me out of four years of booze and tobacco.… On the other hand”—he smiled and looked up—“they don't seem to have hurt my father.”

He spent two hours in the morning and three in the afternoon going through the maneuvers. He mastered the airplane, as his father had predicted, with considerable ease. It was like his old Sabre, except that everything was better, smoother; dozens of adjustments required the use of fingertips instead of clenched fists, and quickly Blackford learned to play these as a pianist learns to reduce the finger pressure on a clavichord. Far from ending the afternoon tired, he was exhilarated, and he wondered how any other flying machine could begin to match the versatility of the new Sabre.

As they set out for London, Blackford said impulsively to Joe: “Ever been to Stratford-on-Avon?”

“No.”

“Well, let's go,” said Blackford, smiling at the thought that his first visit to Stratford was prompted by fear of the NKVD. They got tickets for
Othello
, and at an early dinner Blackford gave Joe the plot, but not the denouement, and as they were driving home Joe expressed himself as genuinely indignant at Iago, and Blackford told him that was really a good sign, because jealousy was no longer so strong a human passion, in part because people loved others less, loving themselves more, so that jealousy was therefore more a form of idolatry, or so it was held by people who scorned patriotism. Joe said that was very interesting, and they reached their flat before midnight, Joe having meanwhile telephoned Vic Luckey to learn that there had been no messages for Blackford during the day except a call from his father telling him he would meet him at the field at 9
A
.
M
.

It was at this session that Blackford was told that for the critical Exercise Six, which called for a mock dogfight between the Hunter and the Sabre, each aircraft was equipped with six simulated cannon from one of which a light beam of sorts shot out in response to the pilot's trigger, the trajectory registering instantly at a console in the reviewing stand, indicating whether a hit had been scored. The two fliers could fire their six rounds at will during the dogfight that must end exactly 120 seconds after it started. The results of their marksmanship would not be known to the pilots until after they landed, at which point the winner would be announced. His father hastened to add that one could easily lose Exercise Six and even so impress the generals as having the better airplane, since the winner of the exercise was showing off not only his airplane but his own prowess. “And there's always luck.… Still, you should try to win them all.”

His father then flew with him for an hour, through the run of the exercises, and pronounced himself totally satisfied.

“We won't do any more. You're going to have to do it all again at two for Averell and the boys. Let's stay fresh.” So they went to a roadside restaurant, Joe having tactfully excused himself, and had fish and chips—and one beer, for Dad, who simultaneously ordered a Coca-Cola for Blackford, and looked, talked, and acted as excited as if Blackford were about to win a Nobel Prize for stunt flying.