by Gavin Lyall
“Yes.” Ranklin wished he hadn’t said that so vehemently.
“Ye’ll be needin’ some help, then.”
“I need to dispose of Piatkow. The channel here should be quite deep, in the middle.”
O’Gilroy nodded. “And the fact is, I’m needin’ some help meself, not fancyin’ bein’ shot by me own friends or hanged by yourn.”
A man under sentence of death from two sides has little left to lose. And, Ranklin reflected, no good reason to keep any secrets he may have stumbled on.
“I’m prepared to get you out of this,” he said carefully. “But you’ll have to tell me how to do it. This is your home ground.”
“I mean out of Ireland, Captain.”
“That, too.”
“Good enough. It’ll mean yer tellin’ some fancy lies, now.”
“I’m supposed to be getting used to that,” Ranklin said coldly. “Now, can we …?” He walked over to Piatkow.
O’Gilroy threw away his cigarette and followed. “Remember a dead man floats, Captain.”
“Not one as rich as he’s going to be.” Three thousand pounds in Admiralty gold, he had calculated, should keep Piatkow at the bottom until any buoyancy had rotted.
“Jayzus!” O’Gilroy whispered as the awesome cost of the idea sank in.
“It’s only Navy money. Ends up on the bottom anyway.”
With Piatkow sunk, O’Gilroy rowed back to the shore. Ranklin wasn’t surprised to find he was a competent oarsman: he found he was assuming the man was competent at all such things, as well as being good at dreaming up an escape plan combined with a tale for Ranklin to spin to the Navy. And even that was a form of competence, he supposed.
“What are you going to do when you reach England?” he asked. “You daren’t go near the Irish communities in the big cities. The story could get there even before you do.”
O’Gilroy pushed the empty dinghy back into the ebbing tide; that was part of the plan. “Been thinking about that meself, Captain. Seems mebbe ye could lend me the passage money to America …”
“You might be no better off there.”
“… or give me a job.”
Ranklin stared through the darkness, then exploded. “Good God Almighty! Are you serious?”
“Ye said ye needed help. Judgin’ by tonight, I’d say yer right.” He wiped some of the thick mud off his boots on the coarse grass and tramped back towards the car. Ranklin followed in a daze.
But after a time he realised his shock was more at O’Gilroy’s effrontery than at the idea that the man could do the job. If tonight was in any way typical, he was perfectly suited to such work. And the Bureau’s recruitment policy, he thought bitterly, was none too delicate.
He made a half-hearted attempt to clean up his own shoes on the richer grass away from the water’s edge. “You didn’t exactly start this evening on our side.”
Perhaps O’Gilroy’s shadowy figure gave a shrug. “I wasn’t fightin’ for yer Queen and Empire in South Africa, Captain, and I’m not offerin’ to start now. I was fightin’ for me pay. And for some fellas, mebbe – like yeself.” He paused. “And a bit for meself, besides.”
How would the Bureau feel about taking on a pure mercenary? But hadn’t it found him on the Salonika road, selling the only talent he had? Hard times make for soft principles, it seemed.
“Have you got a criminal record?” He found he had said it formally, as if to a new recruit.
“No.” O’Gilroy was positive enough. But that might only mean that he was cleverer than the police. But again, isn’t that what the Bureau wants?
“Oh hell, this is the most ridiculous …” He shook his head. “We’ll get to England and let them decide. But it could turn out to be just another helping of roasted rat.”
“And ye was always a most gen’rous man wid that, Captain. Now, could ye be lendin’ me a coupla sovereigns ’til payday? I’m not wantin’ to go near any house or shop I’m known.”
With a sour glance at the remaining bags of gold, Ranklin took them from his own pocket. “And we meet somewhere near the railway station?”
“At the bottom of Spy Hill. That sounds about right.”
A LONDON CLUB
8
Lunching at this club was always a hazard for the Commander. He had just decided on the curry when an angular Brigadier-General of the Royal Artillery, wearing the red tabs of a staff job, folded himself into the chair opposite and gave him a conspiratorial smile.
Oh God, thought the Commander.
“And how are things not going in that non-existent Bureau which you don’t command?” the Brigadier asked, twinkling at his own well-rehearsed wit.
This was the hazard, although even worse were the handful who honestly didn’t know the secret and simply asked what he was doing these days. On the other hand, kidnapping being illegal, he depended on fellow club members for a flow of recruits.
That thought got garbled in the thinking, he reflected grimly. For “flow” read “drip”, as with a faulty tap, and the results were usually as annoying.
“Well enough,” the Commander said, grinning falsely. Even out of uniform, he would have looked like a Naval officer: in his fifties, solidly built, with bright eyes in a large head whose nose and chin seemed prevented from meeting only by the briar pipe he usually wore in between. His usual expression was aggressive but amused and he was trying hard to keep the balance: he did owe the Brigadier something.
“How’s the recruiting drive coming along?” the Brigadier asked.
“Splendidly,” the Commander began, then had to break off to order his lunch. The Brigadier chose lamb chops, was told it was too early in the season, and opted for pork instead.
“And half a bottle of the Beaune,” he added. “You’ll join me in a glass? Did I hear you say ‘splendidly’?”
“If I were recruiting for a concert party to tour the better lunatic asylums, yes.”
The Brigadier laughed. “The dear old Army game of pass the parcel; sooner or later it’s everybody’s turn to be the Dead Letter Office. But in all seriousness, you can’t expect us to send you our best officers, chaps we’ve been training for fifteen or twenty years. We’re only human.”
“Which is more than can be said for the people you do send me.”
“Oh, come now – what about the last chap I put you on to?”
“At no great sacrifice to yourself, since you’d dropped him and he was serving in the Greek Army at the time.”
“Well, you can’t keep a chap who’s about to be hauled into court for bankruptcy, even if it was allowed. His brother officers … well, they wouldn’t … it would be an embarrassment to …” He was grateful that the arrival of the soup stopped him.
“Anyway,” he resumed when the servant had gone, “I noticed you’d got him back in the Army List as attached to the War Office. Does that mean you solved his money problems for him?”
“To an extent.” The Commander was ready to leave it there, but the Brigadier obviously wanted more, so he went on: “We – our bank – offered his creditors a cast-iron Deed of Composition so that they get paid off in instalments and only care about the bank, not him.”
“By that, d’you mean nothing has to come out in public?” The Brigadier fixed on the only aspect of bankruptcy he knew or cared about.
“That is correct.”
“Good. We look after our own, in the Gunners.” The Brigadier, who had done nothing but gossip Ranklin’s name to the Commander, gulped soup smugly. “I hope he isn’t resenting our efforts as being an act of charity or something damn fool.”
“I think he resents it rather more as being an act of blackmail. He’s not a bloody fool, not entirely. He certainly resents working for me. But he’d like the alternatives even worse.”
The Brigadier frowned uneasily and dabbed soup off his moustache. “Look, I hope you’re not being too hard on the chap. He seems to have been a perfectly good officer until …”
“Well-travelled,
languages, able to mix in respectable society – I can use all that. And he can pretend he’s still got money, even to himself if he wants. I want good pretenders.”
The Brigadier didn’t like this turn in the conversation. “It isn’t as if he was an absolute blackguard, spending it all on women and horses. I expect you went into the details, but I understood it was really his elder brother getting into the wrong crowd at the Stock Exchange and then shooting himself when it all went wrong. I thought our chap just signed some papers that got him involved, and if you can’t trust your own brother …”
“Splendid lesson. I don’t want him to trust anyone.”
The Brigadier looked at him warily. “Aren’t you being rather ghoulish? I know you expect your chaps to dress up in disguise and so forth, but surely you want men of good character underneath. ”
“Do I?” the Commander asked blandly. “You may be right, but I really don’t know. Not yet.”
“Good God. Why don’t you go the whole hog and hire some of these Irish fanatics?”
“How can you be sure I haven’t?” The Commander smiled wickedly. “They’ve certainly got the experience, and Irishmen make good mercenaries: the ‘Wild Geese’ tradition. Continental armies are full of Irish names. And all I ask is a full day’s skulduggery for a full day’s pay.”
“Good God,” the Brigadier said again. Just then their main courses and wine arrived and there was a lull of serving, pouring and tasting. The Brigadier chewed thoughtfully for a while, then said: “Of course, it is rather difficult to imagine what sort of person would actually want to be a spy.”
“Agent. We prefer ‘agent’.”
The Brigadier raised his eyebrows, acting more surprise than he felt. “Really? I don’t imagine your chaps introduce themselves as ‘agents’ any more than they do as ‘spies’. However, if you feel their self-esteem needs such unction …”
The Commander said nothing.
“When I was younger,” the Brigadier mused, “it seemed to me that we had the best Secret Service in the world. It never got mentioned in the newspapers, its – ah, agents never got caught, it seemed to function perfectly, in perfect secrecy. Only later did I realise that this was because we had no Secret Service at all. Oh, a few ad hoc arrangements in India and Ireland, but no organised Service until you were asked to set up your Bureau. And I suppose a myth has fewer practical problems than the real thing.”
“Quite,” the Commander said.
“Such as finding the right personnel.”
“Exactly.”
“Particularly if you have a clearer idea of what you don’t want than of what you do.” The Brigadier looked down at the haggled bits of pork on his plate. “As with this chop.”
“As with that chop, you just have to make do with what you’ve got.”
The Brigadier laid down his knife and fork. “When I reached General rank, I decided there were some things I no longer had to swallow.”
“Lucky you,” said the Commander.
KEEPING THE CODE
9
They got a first-class smoking compartment to themselves on the train to Newhaven, carrying three copies of the Anglo-French military code “X” parcelled up in Ranklin’s hand baggage. It wasn’t the genuine code: that was the “W” one, three copies of which were being carried by Lieutenant Spiers of Military Operations in the next compartment. And somewhere else on the train was a gentleman with three copies of the equally false code “Y”.
It was all overcomplicated and uncertain and Ranklin didn’t like it. Why, for instance, wasn’t the code simply going by Diplomatic Bag?
“Because,” the Commander had explained, “the Foreign Office doesn’t know about it. Half the Cabinet doesn’t know we’ve got as cosy with the Frogs’ Army as to need a joint code. Their Liberal morality would be outraged and their mistresses would have told all of London by lunchtime. And we don’t want two years’ work thrown away.
“Mind you,” he had added, “damn few secrets last that long, especially when they involve the Frogs’ Ministère de la Guerre. That’s why we’ve undertaken to deliver the code ourselves, right to their front door.”
“Does the Ministère know when the code’s supposed to arrive, sir?”
“Oh, yes. So if there’s been any leak, it’ll come from their end, and it’ll be your job to prove it. Spring any ambush, fall into any trap. I envy you: should be jolly good sport.”
Sport?
“I want two volunteers to go ahead until they get shot, then report back,” O’Gilroy interpreted.
“Apart from that word ‘volunteers’, that seems to be the case.”
“And just what will we be doing when somebody tries to relieve us of our precious burden?”
“We’re supposed to use our discretion.”
“By that d’ye mean yer little gun?”
“No, I haven’t brought that.”
“That’s the first good news I’ve heard about this job. If somebody found that on ye, specially taped behind yer knee, it’d be a badge saying Secret Service. Ye don’t happen to have such a badge, do ye?”
“Of course not.” Ranklin was too ashamed to admit that he had once asked the Commander if such a thing existed – a distinctive signet ring or cigarette case, even something pasted inside a watch – to identify brother agents to each other. The Commander had said with threadbare patience: “I thought I told you when you joined the British Secret Service that Britain has no Secret Service. Therefore, how can it have a badge?”
O’Gilroy was saying: “Fine, but then what will we be doing with him? – just kick the right to vote off’n him?”
“Well, try to find out who he is and who he’s working for. No, I don’t imagine anybody’ll just jump at us from a dark alley, that sort of thing …” But he had no idea of what the unknown anybody might do – nor of what he would do in their place …
“And don’t smoke your cigarettes down that far,” he snapped at O’Gilroy’s lean and exasperating smile.
The idea of treating O’Gilroy as an equal – another country gentlemen, albeit an eccentric Irish one – had at first struck Ranklin as impossible, but in fact came easily. His great weakness as an officer, one which made him an indifferent leader, was that unless he treated a man as his equal, he had little idea of how to treat him at all. He had often blessed the juvenile whim that had made him pick the Artillery when the inflexible pattern of life had forced him, as second son, to join the Army.
Trying to be a conscientious infantry officer, he now realised, would have been a life of constant doubt and embarrassment. He had learnt that he could cope in battle, steadily and thoughtfully if not with much dash. He could order men to risk their lives or kill others: that, after all, was what they were there for. But listening to a man’s marital troubles, or his lame excuses for horrible misdeeds, just terrified him. It wasn’t the gross details, it was the expectation that he should give advice that would do some good. Why should it? Who on earth was he to judge? And the Army had far more marital problems than battles.
But in the Guns, the rapidly evolving world of breech mechanisms, recoil buffers and sighting systems, the interlocking problems of range, muzzle velocity, trajectory, convergence and probability theory – all this created a firm ground on which he could meet other minds. And, largely, let their incontinent bodies look after themselves.
Perhaps that was why he had taken to O’Gilroy at Ladysmith. Pressed into service as a replacement gun number, the lad had been unforthcoming about himself even when there can have been little to forthcome about, but hungrily anxious to learn about the guns’ mechanisms and routines. In teaching him, Ranklin may have been trying to create another equal, but the infantry had swallowed him up again once the siege was lifted.
And now, after thirteen years and some weeks of careful coaching, he had O’Gilroy back – as an equal.
The equal smiled wickedly and took another cigarette from his gold case – second-hand, as were his watch and wa
llet and thus well worn – and having stared carefully at its length, lit it. Ranklin clamped his mouth on his pipe and said nothing.
It had been easy to get O’Gilroy shaved, barbered and into the right tweedy clothes, and not too difficult to fit him with the general air of an Irish gentleman of leisure. He had known the genuine article well, having been chauffeur for a big house in Waterford (though how he had learnt to drive, Ranklin had no idea). And he obviously enjoyed life in first class.
But there lay the problem: he enjoyed it because it had only just come to him, and constantly forgot to waste it: to leave drinks, meals and cigarettes half-finished, the change from a sovereign uncounted. Oh well, Ranklin shrugged mentally, perhaps the French would simply think O’Gilroy was untravelled. He hunched down in his seat and stared unseeing at the damp April landscape rattling past the misted windows; he had been thinking too much of O’Gilroy and not enough of the job ahead.
And after a time, he said: “I’ve been a bit slow: they aren’t going to steal this code from us. If we knew it had been stolen, we’d change it. A damned nuisance, but nothing worse than that, not in peacetime.”
“Ah-hah? I’ve had no dealing with codes, but what ye say makes sense. So what would they do? Try to get a look at it and copy it without us knowing?”
“It’d have to be something like that. But again, how …”
“I’d think we watched who tried to make friends with us, then.” He held up his cigarette to make sure it was precisely half-smoked, and ground it out. Ranklin pretended not to see.
10
Newhaven was a bad photograph of itself, colourless, grimy and blurred by steam and smoke. Despite the spatter of rain and a wind that creaked the lines holding the Channel steamer to the dock, Ranklin waited to see Spiers safely on board and then acted the worried traveller by watching their luggage – registered through to Paris – unloaded from the guard’s van. If they were bait, he reasoned, they should be visible.