The Spy (14 page)

“It's De Gaulle, I think,” Lord Louis heard him say. “The girl herself seems to be clean. No way
she
can bolt, of course. She signed for it, under pain of death.” True, the girl was a new experiment, but was she a link already locked? What about the other links? Inconsistency had been noted in the Baker Street Irregulars. Their action was in the back rooms, the most likely place for duplicity of loyalties. Mountbatten could sense it: in England, something had gone wrong.

“The best defense may be disclosure.”

Had Mountbatten missed something?

Churchill continued. “Seems that someone may be mucking about in our porridge. David reported an outside surveillance, fellow in a trench coat, following the girl. Herbert Marshall type, I'd say, from the Report.” The Prime Minister had classified his own right hand man, Sir William Stephenson, that way. “Girl claims she couldn't see his face. Could be somebody who knows what he's doing. Since we got her in a deal, someone may be trying to extract extra credit before Sunday's launch makes it irrevocable. Can't think of who, though, except—?”

“Free French?” Lord Louis offered. “Could be LeClerc.”

“Well, let's not point fingers,” said the caller, who had just jabbed the air with his own. Mountbatten could sense it, the black Havana. “If we hope to lock in with the Underground, there are things we will just have to put up with.”

“Yes? For example?”

“For one, to get her in, we will have to go with the Frenchman. The entire working information, intact in her
memory
, is what well need to look at. We
are
in accord there, are we not?”

“Absolutely.”

“Splendid! Then she is still our best shot. Personal motivation is what we're gambling on this time. You might give some thought to having one of your people call her on the Code Override, just before the mission. Means a lot you see, to one of these shop girls, to hear from her government personally. Much like you or I getting a call from His Majesty, I would imagine.”

“Yes,” said Mountbatten, enjoying the dig, “I would certainly imagine that you would.”

The Prime Minister grinned, he did it with his bottom lip. “Just so we understand each other, Louis.”

“That we do,” Mountbatten admitted. “Now, about the Code Override. Is that—?”

“Yes,” said Winston Churchill.

The Code Override, the ultimate device for aborting this mission, was in four parts, arranged so that any caller holding one part, would have to disclose it to the officer he was calling, in exchange for disclosure of the next completing part. Each call following would be verified by the one preceding it. Thus, to override Hamilton's Security at The Red Lion, preset by MI.5, four keys would have to cojoin to fit one lock, forming the Overriding Code. Each of the four designees had been issued one of the four parts. The Royal Navy, however, controlled three of them, including the one for the turnkey. Able to block the sequence in either direction, they had made it mathematically impossible for anyone on Eisenhower's staff to obtain the completed Override. From the British view, the value of mathematical reality was the value of the men who could make it work. Accessed to MISSIONS, Ike had been excluded from this one.

Created for Churchill by Alan Turing, it was the ultimate insurance policy: serving to tighten the net around Sinclair while protecting the identity of the caller, and keeping the Americans at bay. With the Southampton office holding one of the parts, it would be Hamilton's job to make sure that she received the call and that she kept it confidential. At the same time, any knowledge of its source should be kept from his own Operatives. For the Commander's sake, Mountbatten suggested, Hamilton's Security Team should be apprised that she had been called, after the fact, of course; and that the call was unprecedented.

Credit to Churchill.

“David Hamilton has worked damned hard for us,” Mountbatten said. “I should think it's the very least we could do for him.”

“GOLDILOCKS is not just any mission,” the Prime Minister reminded him. “Best that one hand not tell the other.” If the girl were to hear from them, Mountbatten would decide.

“Anyone in mind?”

“Why, yes,” Mountbatten said, “it's Bridley, I'm thinking of. He's about as personable as they come, and would leave just the right impression with the girl. He certainly has Edwina eating out of his hand. She insists on calling him James, you know.”

“Yes, of course, one has to call them
something
,” Churchill shot back. He was thinking of Turing. Sarah brought him small bits of gossip now and then, like unexpected lumps of sugar, dropped into his tea. Clementine, too, had taken an interest. Relegated increasingly alone by war and its demands upon their men, or busy knitting socks, the ladies wanted to talk, and were demanding someone to talk to.

“Bother and drat!” Churchill put it.

Mountbatten, half a world away, agreed. Bridley, The Boffin—filling voids as mysterious as his own comings and goings, his Blackmail List, if not his heart, an open book for thirsty wives—proved an unexpected windfall for the husbands. Wives and daughters, when not in the services, in hospitals, or on bond-raising platforms, retreated into their own parlors, eager for news of the “child spy,” being a female like themselves. Excluded from the purposes of the mission, they had become anxious in recent weeks to know if Valerie Sinclair were being well-treated. It was Bridley, of course, who assured them that she was.

“Listen to this,” Churchill said. He had just finished reading Blackstone's Report containing David Hamilton's
Review of the Girl
, an assessment he was looking forward to sharing with Clementine. The fact that it was important to the Prime Minister brought Mountbatten's seasoned attention back to the specter of an outside interest. They discussed the press, centering on CBS and Paley. The American correspondents had treated Winston Churchill like royalty; Mountbatten, like a regular guy. Murrow and Seldes, for starters, might have a beef with Bletchley, or Blackstone perhaps; but their devotion to the British struggle was beyond dispute.

“I understand, Winnie, but where there is smoke—”

“—there is usually,” Churchill chimed, “a really good cigar. No, Louis, put it out of mind. Otherwise, next thing thing you know, one of our more enterprising writers will be describing you as paranoid.”

Mountbatten blinked.

Hanging onto a previous statement, and getting an unfamiliar picture, Lord Louis was thinking quickly. Of course, the Prime Minister didn't
say
that GOLDILOCKS was being monitored by an outside Operative, known to Churchill but not to himself, which would have been an affront to their relationship. He merely said that the mission wasn't as tight as it could be: it seemed to have widened. Their chances of pulling it off, for which he was sticking his neck out, were predicated on keeping it contained. Mountbatten would not relish any change in plan, were he not first consulted as to its direction. The inferred outside Operative, the fellow in the trench coat, didn't register as a Gestapo profile. Hamilton would have said so: Winston would have known. The fact that they did not was troubling. Mountbatten frowned. Ike had called Churchill, not the other way around. It was looking like a narrow field. Could it be somebody on the inside talking?

Bridley?

But Bridley was here. Here, in Kandy, was he not? Of course he was! Lord Louis liked having him around. He was such a comfort to Edwina, especially when they traveled. His thoughts darkened. Trench coat, be damned! If counterespionage, which Bridley should have foreseen, had arisen in his absence, then...?

It could be anyone!

Thunder boomed, shaking glass. The clouds opened, making a racket; it was on the palace roof. Something inexplicable had entered on their phone line. Not being tapped, were they? Wouldn't be Eisenhower, would it? Lord Louis listened.

Vibration of some sort
...

Sounded like a ship's bell. Mountbatten banged his receiver. No problem. All was right on the line. Both men were back on it.

“You still there, are you?”

Mountbatten said that he was.
A weather phenomenon
... So! The P.M. had them protected.

“Work it out in England,” its Prime Minister was saying. “You do your part, we will complete ours, the mission will go off as planned. I sense worry, try to relax. What time may we expect you?”

Lord Louis told him.

The rain was louder. “I suspect David may have had enormous problems with Blackstone over his choice, for the girl.” Both men agreed. “He liked the other one, the Frenchman, though.”

“Hamilton's department,” pointed out the Navy man. He was thinking of Eisenhower... an unwelcome hand, tapping him on the shoulder. From the first mention of him, since that interruption, the clock seemed to have jumped. He would be anxious to get home, quartered at Beaulieu Abbey. “David Hamilton, you see, does what he does best. It's unfortunate though that Dwight...”

“Found out?”

About his Weather Directive?

Mountbatten said: “I don't see how he could. If you would like me to...”

Yes, he would like him to: That is why he'd called.

“Well, Supremo, what are you going to tell Mm?”

“That would depend on how nice he is, wouldn't you think?” Churchill hadn't missed a beat. Four hundred years of Windsors were in the tone.

Cigar smoke billowed, touching the thick leaves of books. “Precisely. Between us, and GOLDILOCKS, is where one finds the paradigm, the
conscience
of the war. I wouldn't call it negotiable, would you? Of course not! It is
our
neck, not De Gaulle's, not Eisenhower's!” Winston Churchill had no love for the French.

An American intrusion, either.

Mountbatten said it: one did not throw the Empire out, to throw an American in. De Gaulle's position, on the other hand, was that of the man in the dark. In the Royal Navy's production of Punch-and-Judy, the French clown entered last.

Churchill had made an exception: Hamilton's department, SOE. He might have to jiggle things a bit, rearrange their portmanteau, as it were, to insure a proper fit. Should it come to that, SOE's inflexibility,
fifteen previous failed missions
, could be traced directly to the Chief French Occupant of the green Rolls Royce. The Prime Minister, rummaging through his pantry of political savoir-faire, would come up with just the right bone to toss to the French.

“I understand,” Lord Louis assured him, removing Hamilton from his Blackmail List. In times of crisis, there could be no Middle; the Middle, personified by Hamilton, had just disappeared into the Top.

As they talked, Mountbatten distant, Commodore Blackstone kept coming to mind. If Blackstone saw Mountbatten as competition, so much the better. For a man to serve as a goat, he should begin to smell like one. One mentioned it, the other answered. Churchill flicked his ash. “Aye?”

“Thinking,” Mountbatten said.

Aware that Blackstone's office had conveniently, and stupidly, branded Eisenhower as England's Number One Security Threat, an attempt to make something of Ike's alleged affair with his personal driver, Kay Summersby, Mountbatten of Burma, sensing an alternative motive, was listening intently.

The insult to Eisenhower threatened like a parang.

Churchill was pressing. Whoever got nailed in the Middle, it was not going to be Winston. The words from the Prime Minister were coming slowly, intentionally: an intermixture of courtly references with soft courtesies.
The velvet glove
. Behind the oatmeal words, stood a man of impenetrable steel.

“Are we in accord, Louis?”

“By God, yes,” Mountbatten said.

Ike's Packard, the Irish girl installed at the wheel, could not be the issue now. Perhaps the Baker Street Irregulars, Bridley taking the heat, if necessary, could quite simply just back off. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister, one eye peeled for emergent justice, was having the entire mission closely monitored, including any sudden change in Valerie Sinclair. They would scrap her, if it came to that. It wouldn't, of course. Important Mountbatten fly back at once. “You have seen worse, Louis.” Memories arose; he had put them away—explosions, the tilting deck of a destroyer.

Corsica. He had known fear.

Lord Louis agreed.

Churchill, making the point, made it without smiling. While they must have the atomic information, it simply could not be had by splitting the Allies. The Prime Minister was making it clear to Mountbatten that the wheels of the gods, grinding slowly, were running out of men to grind. Lord Louis, obligingly, was thinking of candidates. Presuming Whitehall would be able to position General De Gaulle, it would be Mountbatten's responsibility to find an honorable exoneration, after the mission of course, for key links in his chain-of-command. He remembered Grimes, easy that one, sought by Hamilton as a hedge against Parker. He was the one who'd had him transferred. Snatched from under Blackstone's nose, he would make sure that Hamilton's personal spy was quartered at Beaulieu. If Blackstone got wind, however, it would be Hamilton who would bite the bullet. “I will vouch for the integrity of my Staff,” Mountbatten reminded his caller. As head of the Commandos, Royal Marines were for the using.

Quite dependable, actually: British, at least.

England's undisputed leader, who had called to determine the cast, was rising word by word above the cause of his own intrigue: as peachy clean, Lord Louis concluded, as a baby's bottom. The Prime Minister's exhortation of “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” was either efficiently understated, or generously overwhelming, depending on whose blood he had in mind. His message to the Commodore was as logical as two Aces over a Jack: Eisenhower's oxfords were
not
the toes that they could afford to step on. Plenty of chaps yet, untapped for suspicion. There, but for the grace of God, would go somebody else. Accepting reality as a valid excuse, Churchill was writing their new axiom. It was life at the Bottom, at the Top.