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, a
nd 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.”
“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.
Saving the Queen Page 24