Horse Under Water. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ did he say?’ Jean asked.

      ‘I’m riding shotgun on the noon stage,’ I said. Jean made a noise and continued to paint a finger-nail flame orange.

      Finally I said, ‘The cars belong to a Cabinet Minister named Henry Smith and to a little thug named Butcher who does a cut-price service in commercial espionage on the “seduced secretary” system.’

      ‘What a lovely system,’ Jean said.

      ‘You haven’t seen Butcher,’ I said. ‘My file, incidentally, went to D.N.I. on September 1st.’

      ‘Butcher,’ Jean said. ‘Butcher. I know that name.’ She painted another nail. Suddenly she shouted, ‘The ice-melting report.’

      What a memory she had. Butcher had sold us an old German laboratory report about a machine to melt ice at an amazing speed. ‘What can you remember of that report?’ I asked her.

      ‘I couldn’t understand it properly,’ she said, ‘but the rough idea was that by rearranging the molecular structure of ice it would instantaneously become water. Or vice versa. That’s something the Navy might be keen on now that there are missile submarines that have to find a hole in the polar ice-pack before they can fire them.’ She held her hand at arm’s distance and studied the orange nails for a minute.

      ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Butcher had the report. Navy want the report … That’s the connexion. I’m a genius.’

      ‘Why are you a genius?’ Jean asked.

      ‘For getting myself a secretary like you,’ I said. Jean blew me a kiss.

      ‘What about Mr Smith the Cabinet Minister?’ Jean asked.

      ‘He’s just having his car borrowed,’ I said. But I wasn’t sure about that. I looked at Jean and stubbed out my cigarette.

      ‘My nails are still wet,’ Jean said, ‘you mustn’t.’

       5 No toy

      My two weeks at Portsmouth passed quickly and I came home with a small Admiralty shallow-water certificate suitable for framing, and incipient pneumonia, although Jean said it was a sore throat. Monday I stayed in bed all day. Tuesday was a cold bright morning in September that warned you that winter was all set to pounce.

      A letter from the Admiralty arrived authorizing me to take possession of the R.N. underwater gear from the school and charged it to me! The same post brought me another bill for the repair of the refrigerator and a final demand for the rates. I nicked my chin while shaving and bled like I’d sprung a leak. I changed into another shirt and arrived at Charlotte Street to find Dawlish in a quiet rage because I had made him late for the Senior Intelligence Conference that takes place in that strange square room of the C.I.G.S. the first Tuesday in each month.

      It was a terrible day and it hadn’t even begun yet. Dawlish went through all the rigmarole of my new assignment: radio code words and priorities for communicating with him.

      ‘I’ve persuaded them to give you the equivalent authority to Permanent Under-Secretary, so don’t let them down. It might be useful if you deal with Denning^fn1 or the Lisbon Embassy. You’ll remember that after last year they said they would never give us a rank above Assistant Secretary again.’

      ‘Big deal,’ I said, eyeing the papers on his desk. ‘P.U.S. and they send me on a Night Tourist aeroplane.’

      ‘All we could get,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t be so class-conscious, my boy, you don’t want us to demand that they off-load some unfortunate taxpayer; why, you’d have the whole of Gibraltar polishing its blanco – or whatever soldiers do.’

      ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right, but you don’t have to be so bloody gay about it all.’

      Dawlish turned over the next paper on his desk. ‘Equipment.’ Before he could read on I interrupted.

      ‘That’s another thing, they’ve put about two thousand quids’ worth of Admiralty equipment on my personal charge.’

      ‘Security, old chap, don’t want those career-mad Admiralty people to know all our little secrets.’

      I nodded. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll need your signature if I am to draw a pistol from War Office armoury.’ There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Dawlish blinking.

      ‘Pistol?’ said Dawlish. ‘Are you going out of your mind?’

      ‘Just into my second childhood,’ I said.

      ‘That’s right,’ said Dawlish, ‘they are nasty, noisy, dangerous toys. How would I feel if you jammed your finger in the mechanism or something?’

      I picked up the air ticket and underwater-gear inventory and walked to the door.

      ‘West London 9.40,’ he said; ‘try to have the Strutton report ready before you leave, and …’ He removed his glasses and began to polish them carefully. ‘You have a pistol of your own that I am not supposed to know about. Don’t take it with you, there’s a good chap.’

      ‘Not a chance,’ I said, ‘I can’t afford the ammunition.’

      That day I completed my report for the Cabinet on the Strutton Plan. The plan was to have a new espionage network of people feeding information back to London. All of them would be telephone, cable, telex operators or repair engineers working in embassies or foreign government departments. It meant setting up employment agencies abroad which would specialize in this type of employee. As well as describing the new idea my report had to outline the operations side, i.e. planning, communications, cut-outs,^fn2 post boxes^fn3 and a superimposed system^fn4 and, most important as far as the Cabinet report was concerned, costing.

      Jean finished typing the report by 8.30 p.m. I locked it into the steel ‘out’ box, switched on the infra-red burglar-alarm system and set the special phone system to ‘record’. Next door was our telephone exchange: Ghost, used in the same way that the Government used Federal exchange. Anyone dialling one of our numbers by mistake heard about a minute and a half of the ‘number obtainable’ signal before it began ringing. After that the night operators next door challenged the caller, then our phone rang. There were advantages; I could for instance call a number on Ghost from any phone and have the operator connect me to anywhere in the world without attracting attention.

      Jean put the typewriter ribbons into the safe. We said good night to George the night man and I put my tickets for B.E.A. 062 into my overcoat.

      Jean told me about the carpet she’d bought for her flat and promised to fix me dinner when I returned. I told her not to leave the Strutton Plan report with O’Brien, suggested at least three different excuses she could give him, and promised to look out for a green suede jacket in Spain, size 36.

       6 Ugly rock

      The airport bus dredged through the sludge of traffic as sodium-arc lamps jaundiced our way СКАЧАТЬ