by Len Deighton
Those present for the final part of the meeting were a deputy secretary of the Cabinet Office representing the Prime Minister, the co-ordinator of intelligence, Sir Sydney Ryden, and his opposite number, the DG of MI5.
The only important such person missing was the chief of GC HQ, the head of the department which obtains intelligence from orbiting satellites and radio monitoring. The reason for his absence was that nearly all his best hardware had been financed by the American government, an investment secured by the presence of American National Security Agency employees in the most sensitive posts in his department. The chief of GC HQ had departed early. He always did when the agenda included as a last item ‘non-electronic systems’. It was a polite way of asking him to leave the room. It was better that he did not know what was discussed, rather than have to feign ignorance to his American colleagues.
‘In the absence of any hard and fast evidence we have to assume certain things,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden as soon as the GC HQ chief had departed. ‘We must assume that a large body of documentary evidence has fallen into private hands. We have to assume that this material has not been noted, indexed, inventoried, photocopied or seen by the US State Department …’
‘How can we be quite sure of that?’ said the man from MI5.
Sir Sydney turned and, raising a hand to press his hearing aid, scowled. The MI5 man seemed ready to cower under the threat of the upraised hand. ‘I have people there,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘We have scoured the State Department archives.’
‘Even the classified ones?’
‘What else would be of use?’ His voice was low and resonant.
‘Quite,’ said the MI5 chief, and was able to convey in that one syllable all his doubts that Sir Sydney Ryden had penetrated the secret archives of the US State Department.
‘We assume that the US government have no knowledge of it,’ continued Sir Sydney, glowering at his opposite number. ‘The material in question includes messages, telegrams, cables and conversations between various representatives of His Majesty’s government and the German leaders during the year 1940.’
The deputy secretary from the Cabinet Office looked at his watch. He had a great deal to do before lunchtime, and that included briefing the Prime Minister on this meeting. ‘I think we can all dispense with the euphemisms, Sir Sydney,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about the Hitler Minutes, aren’t we? We’re talking about the undated document headed “Framework for a negotiated settlement” that was passed to the German Foreign Office …’ he paused and wrinkled his brow, ‘via Stockholm, if my memory serves me correctly, in late May 1940.’
It was about time, thought Sir Sydney Ryden, that his colleagues started to share some of the nightmares that he had borne for the last few weeks. It was time for them to hear his worries. ‘How I wish that were all we were talking about, gentlemen,’ he said after a long silence. ‘But I can assure you that that dissertation of well-intentioned gobbledegook would never cause me to lose a wink of sleep at night. There would be no great difficulty in passing that off as a clever way of playing for time during the Dunkirk evacuation.’
‘What then?’
‘We’re talking about top-level exchanges in which specific concessions were discussed. The map of Africa was to revert to its nineteenth-century colours: German East Africa, German South-West Africa, Togoland and the Cameroons would reappear. And the British government would support German demands for a return of the Caroline Islands, the Mariannes and the Marshalls.’ He bared his teeth. ‘Samoa and German New Guinea would be transferred to them of course.’
‘My God,’ said the deputy secretary. Sir Sydney looked round the room, and was not disappointed with the horrified faces of the others. There was little need to detail the cataclysmic portent of such revelations.
Relentlessly, Sir Sydney continued his grim story. ‘The whole of Ireland was to be placed under what was to be known as an Anglo-German administration – you know Winston’s feelings about Ireland of course – and Cork and Belfast were to become permanent German naval bases for a newly created German Atlantic fleet. The ships for this would of course have been ours …’ He hurried on through the gasps of dismay and shouts of no. ‘Worldwide port facilities of the Royal Navy, from Hong Kong to Gibraltar, would immediately start refuelling and revictualling any German warships as required, as well as any merchantmen flying the German flag.’
The co-ordinator was flushed in the face by now. He clenched his fist on the table top. ‘If this is some sort of joke, Sir Sydney …’
‘No joke,’ said the DG. ‘How I wish it were.’
‘And the PM has been told?’
‘She is particularly distressed about the Irish dimension,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘You can see how this could be manipulated by the Dublin government or by the IRA.’
‘Hardly any need for manipulation,’ said the deputy secretary with uncharacteristic bitterness. He was the youngest man there and felt that this was a legacy that his elders and betters should not have left for him.
‘And credit guarantees,’ continued Sir Sydney. ‘Several hundred million pounds sterling was to be advanced for German purchases from Canada and the USA. This to be backed by the British gold reserves already there. And Churchill most unwisely discussed the use that the Germans might make of elements of the French fleet.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said the MI5 man. ‘Every last bloody friend Britain has in the world would be enraged overnight if this sort of stuff was ever made public.’ He took off his spectacles and polished them with exaggerated energy. In spite of his distress, he could not help feeling some gratification that this had landed on Sir Sydney Ryden’s desk rather than his own.
‘Any rumours that we were prepared to hand over parts of Africa to save Britain would certainly stiffen anti-white attitudes about Rhodesia,’ said the deputy secretary.
Sir Sydney nodded. ‘It’s a political problem of the first magnitude. It’s containable if only rumours emerge – such rumours have surfaced several times over the past fifteen or twenty years – but if there was written proof …’ Sir Sydney let it go.
‘Worse than Suez,’ said the deputy secretary, who was just old enough to remember that political upheaval. He had pencilled an elaborate maze all over his agenda sheet. Now he blocked off the beginning and end of it so that there was no way out.
‘Do you realize what this would do to our delicately balanced economy?’ said the co-ordinator. ‘Foreign investors would flee from sterling and the stock market would crash … the social consequences of that would be terrible to contemplate. The Kremlin is well provided with friends in our trade unions and on the shop floor who would welcome any opportunity for creating chaos.’
‘Our finest hour!’ said the co-ordinator. ‘Poor old Winston would be turning in his grave.’
‘I’m not sure you understand me,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’m referring to decisions in which Sir Winston Churchill played a major role. I’m referring to exchanges between Sir Winston and the German leader himself.’
‘Hitler?’ said the co-ordinator, his face reflecting his incredulity. ‘Adolf Hitler and Churchill?’
Sir Sydney Ryden stood up and closed the locks on his document case with a loud click. ‘Let’s not meet trouble halfway, gentlemen. Pray that my people get their hands on these wretched files before the press see them.’
The MI5 director also got to his feet. ‘I think we’ll have to point out that these documents are not authenticated.’ He looked at Sir Sydney meaningfully.
‘I take your point,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘I think it would be as well if we talked about the preparation of a couple of items.’
‘Forge them, and then prove to the press that they are forgeries, to discredit the rest of the material?’ The MI5 man nodded. He had a department which employed some of the most meticulous engravers, paper technicians and handwriting experts in the world. ‘Tomorrow lunch, eh? The Travellers’ suit you?’
Sir Sydney Ryden hesitated. It
would mean rearranging his morning but this was urgent. He was not an inveterate clubman and he would have preferred a private dining room in his own building, but he nodded his agreement. At least they would get a decent claret at the Travellers’ Club. ‘One o’clock then. I dare say we’ll find somewhere to hide ourselves away, after we’ve eaten.’
The MI5 man noted the appointment in his tiny diary and replaced it into his waistcoat pocket.
‘It’s damnable timing,’ said the co-ordinator looking at the calendar. ‘Suppose it all leaked out while the Queen and Mrs Thatcher were both in Africa. Could it possibly be a plot with exactly that in mind?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ said Sir Sydney.
The deputy secretary picked up the agenda sheets and fed them into a shredder with a hand which visibly trembled. Like all shredders for top-secret waste, it reduced the papers to narrow worms then cross-chopped them before dropping the confetti into a large transparent plastic bag. ‘Churchill discredited. It would mean the end of the Tory Party,’ he said miserably. ‘That’s what I can’t bear thinking about.’
Chapter 17
Charles Stein was a happy man. The son of a Polish-born trade union official in the garment industry in New York City’s West Side, Stein had grown up in a house where a strike meant a bare dinner table. In such times the young Steins were fed on left-overs from the table of their equally penurious next-door neighbours.
Charles had never shared the interest in books that his father had stimulated in his brother Aram, but that did not mean that he grew up illiterate. Charles – or Chuck, as he was more usually called at the garment factory where he was eventually employed as an assistant to a senior salesman – could find his way through an order book or an account sheet with the natural ease that some untutored men bring to the intricacies of horseracing. And he was a generous boy who never begrudged the money that he paid each week into the family expenses, which in turn enabled his mother to send Aram cinnamon khvorost and some money to supplement his meagre scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. But Chuck was not entirely benign. From his father, Chuck Stein got an all-pervading hatred of Hitler and on Pearl Harbor day he joined the long line of men in Times Square who waited patiently to join the US Army. So did his young brother.
Charles Stein’s political convictions had now faded, but his natural ability to read an account book remained. It was this facility, together with the unmistakable power of his personality and the energy that even his immense bulk could not disguise, that had made Stein the leader of the men who called themselves ‘the Kaiseroda Raiders’. In spite of the military etiquette, the nostalgia and the respect that all of them showed towards Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third, every last man of them knew that the important decisions were made by Charles Stein. And they preferred it that way.
‘You’ll like the bau,’ Charles Stein told his son. ‘They have shrimp inside. The chicken ones are not so tasty.’ He wiped his mouth on his napkin. That was the worst of eating ‘small chow’, one always got fingers and face covered in soy and sauce and bits of food. At least, Charles Stein always did.
‘I’ve had enough, thank you, dad. Why don’t you finish it?’
‘They’ll wrap it if you want to take it home.’
‘You have it, dad.’
‘I hate to see food wasted,’ said Stein. He wrestled with temptation. ‘I’ve had enough to eat really, but it’s a crime to see food wasted.’ He gulped a little of his jasmine tea and then filled the tiny cup again. ‘Paper-wrapped shrimp?’
‘No thanks, dad. I couldn’t eat another thing.’
‘These little eateries in Chinatown are the only places where you find the real thing. The Breslows took me to eat in a fancy Chink joint on La Cienega last Monday. Waiters in claw-hammer coats, finger bowls with lemon slices, linen bibs to protect your necktie, and everything. But at the end of the line, what have you got?’
Stein’s son shook his head to show that he didn’t know.
‘Chop suey. That’s what you’ve got,’ Charles Stein pronounced sagely. ‘Not these delicate little specialities that the cooks up here on North Broadway know how to put together.’
‘Is Breslow going to make that movie?’ said Billy.
‘He’s spending money on pre-production,’ said his father.
‘I’d like to see one of the majors getting involved in it. If Paramount or Universal put their machine into action …’
Charles Stein reached for two paper-wrapped fried shrimps and put them in his mouth in rapid succession. He crunched them in his teeth and wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘What do you do, when you are not writing your column in Variety?’ said Stein with his mouth full.
‘But I don’t write any …’
‘It’s a joke, son,’ said his father wearily. Oh, my god, he had heard about the generation gap but this was the San Andreas fault! ‘If Breslow puts together a halfway decent little film, he’ll take the rough-cut round the world and get back his money four-fold, five-fold, maybe, and still have a piece of equity. He couldn’t hope for anything like that if he takes this deal to the majors.’
‘Here, dad,’ said Billy. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about movie financing.’
‘Movie financing is no different from any other kind of financing,’ said Stein. ‘Anyone who knows the difference between red ink and the black kind can understand the movie industry.’
‘You’re seeing a lot of the Breslows lately.’ A girl came into the restaurant. The dining room was large and crowded with local Chinese clients. The waitress seated her in a booth on the far side of the room. Billy Stein admired her tailored suit of cream-coloured silk, its yarn slubbed to make a texture in the weave. On the lapel there was a small gold brooch. The brightly coloured silk neckerchief completed the effect. She slid her large sunglasses up on to the crown of her head in order to scrutinize the menu and then looked at the tiny gold wristwatch on her suntanned wrist.
For a moment there was a pause in the activity. Staff and customers alike watched the beautiful young woman as she produced a packet of cigarettes from her handbag. An elderly Chinese waiter hurried forward to strike a match for her. She was out of place in this run-down restaurant on the wrong side of the freeway. She belonged down in the ‘golden triangle’ or at the Bel Air country club. But this was Los Angeles and even the sight of a radiantly beautiful woman does not halt business for more than a moment or two. The three dark-suited Chinese men in the next booth went back to discussing insurance, the two blue-shirted security men at the corner table took up again the issue of Dodger Stadium tickets, the barman finished mixing four vodka martinis and the Steins went back to the subject of Max Breslow.
‘I’ve been seeing a lot of the Breslows,’ said Charles Stein, ‘because I want to keep an eye on what the little son of a bitch is doing.’
Billy Stein took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. The lenses were corrected for his vision and in spite of the coloured glass they gave him a better look at the young woman across the room. She was stunning, he decided. He flicked a couple of pastry fragments from the front of the faded blue denim jacket and glanced down to be sure that the large gold medallion was visible in the unbuttoned front of his shirt. He was wearing his favourite boots – light brown suede from Italy with criss-cross laces all the way up the front to the knees. The young woman must have noticed the movement for she looked up from the menu. He caught her eye but she looked away quickly. ‘I thought you were getting to like him.’
‘I said he was a good businessman,’ said Charles Stein, while chewing. He waved one of the little minced pork dumplings in a horizontal movement to show that his son had got it wrong. ‘That doesn’t mean I like him.’ He dipped the second dumpling into the dish of soy and put it into his mouth. ‘Means I got to watch out for what he might try to pull.’
‘For instance?’ said Billy.
‘Did it ever strike you, Billy, that if Breslow could get his hands on all the documents we
got out of the mine, he wouldn’t need me?’
‘He wouldn’t need any of us,’ said Billy, still giving some of his attention to the woman, who was now ordering a meal. Perhaps she was not waiting for some companion after all, thought Billy. It was unusual for a woman so stylishly dressed to take lunch over here in Chinatown; for her to have come here to lunch alone was unthinkable. Even so …
‘Right,’ said Stein. ‘He wouldn’t need Colonel Pitman, wouldn’t need me. Wouldn’t need any of “the Raiders” for anything at all. And that would suit him very well because he doesn’t enjoy having me looking over his shoulder, and interfering with everything he’s doing and planning.’
‘If he stole your papers,’ said Bily, ‘if he stole them and then didn’t pay the money you need …’ He tugged on the gold chain round his neck, and tightened his fist in anger. ‘I’d take that old Mauser pistol you brought home from Germany and blow him away.’
‘Now, now, Billy.’
‘You think I couldn’t do it, dad. You’re wrong. I took that old gun out into the desert last year and spent a little time learning how to handle it. That’s a wonderful pistol, that Mauser. You should see what I can do to a row of cans …’
‘Breslow ain’t going to stand around like a row of tin cans, Billy. You forget any idea of rough stuff. I don’t even like to hear you talk that way. What would momma have said if she’d lived to hear her son talking like some cheap hoodlum?’
‘OK, dad, but what are you going to do to make sure he doesn’t rip us off?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking of that, Billy. First, you’ve got to understand how much trouble we’ve gone to in order to prevent Breslow finding out where the files and papers and everything are hidden. It’s essential that we keep the location a secret from him and from anyone associated with him. And that goes double for that Brit!’