He greeted them amiably, fraternally, and told them they all knew that there was one major question on the agenda—namely, how should the Soviet Union react in the matter of the scheduled recognition by the Western powers of the sovereignty of the state of West Germany? As they all knew, he said, looking away from Lavrenti Beria who was seated directly opposite, he had issued invitations to the principal Western powers to a summit meeting to consider the implications of the planned diplomatic step, but although there were encouraging signs, he could not now report that his diplomatic initiative had worked—had worked, that is, in such a way as to give the Soviet Union the opportunity to use its great resources to stall the German demarche planned by the Western powers—
He was interrupted. It was Beria. ‘My dear Georgi Maximilianovich, you must understand that there is only a single way in which to deal with the West in this matter, and moreover we have the advantage here of its being singularly plausible. If they exercise the power to declare West Germany a sovereign state, we quickly and instantly retaliate by declaring East Germany a sovereign state. We then declare that it is up to East Germany to decide the status of Berlin. Ulbricht instantly announces that immediately on the formal recognition of East Germany, his government will incorporate Berlin as a part of its territory.
‘And that means’—Beria leaned back, triumphant—‘that means, gentlemen, that the same day President Eisenhower signs the diplomatic instrument recognising the sovereign state of the German Federal Republic, we shall sign a complementary instrument declaring the Democratic Republic of Germany an independent state. And that same afternoon, Herr Ulbricht will sign an instrument declaring that Berlin, as a part of East Germany, is hereinafter under the political domination of the government of the Democratic Republic of Germany!’
Beria all but stood at this moment, as though promulgating his great geopolitical coup to a huge admiring throng. Instead he got from Malenkov:
‘But Lavrenti Pavlovich, you are aware that the West has frequently reiterated rights of conquest in the matter of Berlin, denying to any single co-liberator the right to dispose of the area without the agreement of the others—’
Beria laughed. His laugh was a blend of truculence and condescension. ‘I am aware, Georgi Maximilianovich, of the legal wiles by which the imperialist powers further their designs. We paid no attention to those when the time came to face up to their objections over our understanding of the Yalta treaty, at which point our great Comrade Josef Stalin’—he paused here, as if invoking a moment’s reverence in memory of his mentor—‘waived the little legal points and kept his eye on the main business. Our main business in Germany, gentlemen, is to incorporate Berlin, which is a seedbed of bourgeois poison in our system.’
Nikita Khrushchev intervened. ‘But listen, Lavrenti Pavlovich, even if it is true that you are correct about what should ultimately be done on the Berlin question, it is not a position we can take now unless we are prepared to counter the probable response of the West, which would be military.’
There was whispering about the long table, much of it animated. Beria broke in: ‘I answer you in this way, Nikita Sergeyevich. In the first place, it is doubtful that the West would mobilise the will to fight for Berlin. In the second place, it is totally unlikely that they would resort to nuclear force. And in the third place, if they do not, our own tactical preponderance on the ground is more than sufficient to deal with the puny NATO forces.’
Marshal Voroshilov at this point intervened. He said: ‘Comrade Beria, I would not dispute that the Soviet forces would triumph. But surely it is wrong to designate as “puny” a NATO ground force west of Berlin that consists of forty-eight active divisions, over five hundred tanks, and one half again as many bombers as we command. To overcome such a force would require a major, protracted effort.”
‘So who is against a major effort on behalf of socialism?’ Beria asked. He snapped his fingers at an aide sitting behind him. The aide rose, presented him with a cigar, and lit a match under it. Beria puffed. ‘The point is, surely,’ he addressed himself to Malenkov, ‘that if we permit the West to get away with this—this—rape of West Germany, there is no knowing where they will stop. I say stop them now!’ There was muted applause from three or four members of the assembly.
Malenkov looked pleadingly to Bulganin. The marshal rose and spoke. He said that these were difficult times, that the paramount need was for unity, that nothing could so greatly jeopardise the great Soviet endeavour as to get into a war at a moment when the Soviet Union was not really prepared for war. Under the circumstances, he concluded, sitting down, ‘as a marshal of the Soviet Union, whose patriotism has been extensively tested, I would vote in favour of Comrade Malenkov’s plan, and resist the temptation to use force over Berlin.’
Malenkov tormented itself, wondering whether to take a vote. During the first few self-concious months when they met without Stalin they made it almost a sacramental point to take a vote, subtly to distinguish between the ways of the new order of the Soviet Union and the old. But gradually the habit of a single dominance had made the vote less and less frequent. And now, Malenkov thought, was hardly the moment to revive the moribund tradition.
Accordingly, after an hour’s discussion during which almost everyone contributed views on the question, he said that as chairman of the Council of Ministers, he had been very glad to have the invaluable advice of his invaluable colleagues, which advice he would take thoroughly into account before deciding on a course of action.
Malenkov paused. He sensed that if there was to be mutiny, this would be the moment for it. But Beria sat still, puffing on his cigar and making notes. Malenkov involuntarily shivered at the thought of the use those notes might one day be put to.
He called the meeting to an end, quickly involved himself in conversation with Bulganin, and walked out of the velvet-curtained room feigning a self-confidence he did not feel. He sensed that Beria would make his move soon.
It was at five that morning, Eastern Daylight Time, that the Director was awakened by Rufus with the news of Blackford Oakes’s meeting with Bolgin. On hearing it he drew a deep breath. He had been many years in the intelligence system. He had never before come across high jinx at such a level.
28
Neither Blackford nor Anthony Trust was present during the wrangling between CIA and MI5, though Rufus reported on it when he got back, acknowledging, in his fatalistic way, his frustration. Privately, Rufus had told Blackford that the Director had agreed that no one—no one at all—should be told of Bolgin’s conversation until Blackford heard again from him: or, in the unlikely event he did not, until a few hours before the scheduled visit by Malenkov. Attention once again focused on apartment 516, its secrets, and its nefarious occupant.
But Blackford absolutely had to break away, he explained to Anthony. He had to go to dinner with his mother. He could not, he excused himself to Anthony, put this off. ‘Besides, there isn’t anything I can think to do until Rufus brings our friend Sir Gene around. Fleetwood is due back from Stockholm in five days. We’ve got to get into apartment 516 before that, I’d say—but what the hell.’
He was tired. Anthony Trust attempted to cheer him up. Sprawled out on the couch, he raised his head as if addressing the cracked ceiling and said, ‘Remember. The Brits have promised to keep round-the-clock surveillance on apartment 516. And if anyone tries to jump ship, they’ll arrest him: they’ve got the warrants. We shouldn’t be faulting those guys after the job they did shadowing Fleetwood. Attwood is anxious to move. He doesn’t like Rufus’s idea of waiting. Too dangerous, he says. Might jeopardise the whole operation.’
‘Well,’ Blackford said. ‘Round and round we go.’ He said good night and told Trust he would be at James Street early in the morning. But the following morning he did not appear at all at James Street. He did not appear until the late afternoon, shortly before dinner.
Carole Oakes had married Sir Alec Sharkey after divorcing, as she had more than once
described him, her ‘gifted, wayward, sweet, irresponsible flyboy’—Blackford’s father—after he had disappeared one too many times. He was always away—in search of an odd aeroplane design he triumphantly announced he would sell to some country or other in order to make the million dollars he had been certain—absolutely, volubly certain—he would make ‘any day now.’
It had been so every month during their eighteen-year marriage. By contrast, Alec Sharkey was a tidy man, portly, formal, shrewd, civic-minded, a British architect who kept teemingly alive any number of associations: with his old public school, Greyburn College; with Jesus College at Cambridge, of which he was a Trustee; with Cambridge’s scientific centre, Cavendish Laboratories; and, always, the Coldstream Guards, in which he had served as a major and artillery officer during the First World War. He was intensely patriotic, a fervent royalist, an intense student of public affairs.
He was very fond of his stepson, though occasionally put off by his dishevelled—though never rude—informality. And although habituated to Carol’s demonstrative, indeed melodramatic, fondness for her boy (almost unseemly by British standards), he was always faintly unnerved by it. Carol was capable of making her son positively blush listening to her discourse on his courage, intelligence, physical beauty, his feats as a fighter pilot during the war, the grades he achieved at Scarsdale High School and Yale. Sometimes Sir Alec simply had to stop her. Blackford, as at the garden party a few days earlier, always attempted halfheartedly to do so, but after years of trying he would, with doleful eyes, dumbly acknowledge his inability to restrain her.
As usual, it was black tie. There were three couples invited. Blackford brightened on learning that one of the guests would be a professor under whom he had studied at Yale, a gifted particle physicist, Drummond Weiss, whose most endearing pedagogical manner—widely imitated, and caricatured, at Yale, by students and professors alike—was the heated argument he would stage with himself during his lectures, arguments that sometimes reached insane ad hominem levels, arguments so robust that students were often genuinely baffled as to which of the two sides of the vivid dialectical exchange was the one that Professor Weiss himself believed in. He gave the lie to Max Beerbohm’s bon mot, that the Socratic manner is not a game at which two people can play. Professor Weiss, Blackford learned, was a visiting fellow at the Cavendish Laboratories, where he had met Sir Alec at one of the joint meetings of trustees and fellows. They had become friends.
Blackford loved his mother dearly, and permitted half a minute of her dizzy shower of affectionate and admiring garlands, congratulating himself on his prudence in arriving ahead of the guests. ‘But, darling, I told you just the other day at the garden party that you were thin. I knew you would get thin, spending so much time in Germany.’ Blackford asked why she came to that conclusion, given that German food is widely associated with the high incidence of obesity, and she replied with that sweet vague smile that all that was before the war, but that food in Germany was very scarce, that everything had been rationed since V-E Day, ‘Isn’t that right, Alec?’ Sir Alec Sharkey had long since abandoned any effort to impose chronological order on the mind of his wife, who last week was overheard in a conversation over the telephone with an old friend to say that she could not exactly remember when it was that Charles Lindbergh—‘my Blackie’s godfather, you know, Mildred’—had crossed the ocean, but she thought it was ‘at least seven or eight years ago.’
Blackford contented himself with patting his mother on the head, hugging her again and telling her not to worry about food in West Germany, that they were eating very well there now, and that the reason he had lost a few pounds was that he had been doing a great deal of travelling. She let it go.
Professor Drummond Weiss greeted his former student with great enthusiasm, demanding to know in detail what he had been doing during the four years since ‘we studied together.’ Blackford was well trained in handling such queries, but he was not often questioned by such a searching curiosity as that of Drummond Weiss, who, after listening to the boilerplate about foundation work and reports on antique architecture for an engineering society, sniffed, in a low voice, that he guessed Blackford was engaged in confidential work of some sort—never mind, Drummond Weiss would not rat on him.
The other guests were also associated with the Cavendish Laboratories, two of them fellow trustees. One was a banker who liked to tell jokes about bankers, and exhausted on Blackford what Blackford hoped was most of his repertoire. His wife smiled wanly through it all, refilled her glass of sherry, and eventually eased herself away to talk to the wife of the third member of the Cambridge community, the loquacious Mrs. Floreat England. Mrs. England was as animated as her husband—a researcher in chemistry looking forward to his retirement the following year—was laconic.
It was quite suddenly, when the gentlemen were seated languorously about the table with their brandy, that the thought occurred to Blackford. ‘Mr. Weiss,’ he said quietly, as at the other end of the table the banker told the dismayingly familiar story of what Willie Sutton, the bank robber, said to the judge when asked why he robbed banks, which was on the order of asking what had Little Red Riding Hood found on approaching her grandmother.
‘Call me Drummond.’
‘Uh. Okay, thanks—Drummond. Are you familiar with the work of Alistair Fleetwood?’
‘Haven’t personally examined his Zirca over at the observatory, but I am of course familiar with the papers published on it. Before you get a Nobel Prize, Blackford, the community of your peers needs to know what it is you’re getting it for.’
On impulse Blackford said, ‘Will you be in your office tomorrow?’
Drummond Weiss slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out his diary. ‘All day. What do you have in mind?’
‘Might I come to see you? It is very important, actually.’
Drummond Weiss’s pen was in his hand. ‘What time?’
‘Ten o’clock?’
Professor Weiss wrote down the time in his book. ‘You will of course stay for lunch?’
‘Thanks.’
Sir Alec Sharkey had risen. ‘Shall we join the ladies? That really was a most amusing story, Allan, most amusing. I shall remember to tell it to Carol.’ He led the company into the pleasant Victorian living room, with the hunting prints and the signed picture of George V decorating Sir Alec for conspicuous bravery on the field of battle of Ypres.
Blackford left 50 Portland Place at 10:45 as the other guests were leaving, went back to the safe house at James Street, opened the door, disarmed the burglar alarm and climbed the stairs to his Op-Ox office. He leafed rapidly through the log record of Alistair Fleetwood’s visits to the Greenwich Royal Observatory. He ran down his finger to where the agent, on his first visit, had written the nature of the conversations Fleet-wood had had with his colleagues. He came to the references to the ‘model,’ or ‘mini-Zirca,’ which Fleetwood had said he intended to reassemble in order to probe an insight that was scratching at his consciousness. And then, six pages later, to the passage in the log that related to the loading of the crate with the mini-Zirca, and the stopover at Robertsbridge where two men had appeared, driving off in the large station wagon with the crate, leaving Fleetwood’s Ford car, the driver’s seat of which Fleetwood had casually slipped into on leaving the café. What MI5 had not done was follow the station wagon that drove off with the crate. Their orders had been to stick with Fleetwood.
It must be so, Blackford thought. The mini-Zirca must be the key.
He needed to take one formal precaution, silly though it seemed, but a hard and fast rule within the Agency.
And so he looked at his watch. It would be seven at night in Washington. He called the special number, and gave his identification. And then spelled out ‘W-e-i-s-s, Drummond. Professor of Physics, Yale University.’ He waited impatiently, but in a few minutes the voice came in, ‘Nothing negative.’ ‘Thanks,’ and he put down the telephone.
Drummond Weiss sat in his office
wearing a sweater and grey flannel trousers, his unruly red hair falling over his black-framed glasses. His welcome was warm but also functional, distinguished from the kind of welcome Blackford had been given the evening before, about which all Professor Weiss now said was, ‘Awful bore, that banker.’ Motioning Blackford to sit down opposite, he turned his ruddy face down to a journal on his desk, open where a paper clip had been inserted.
‘I gathered you wanted to talk about Fleetwood and his Zirca, so I got out the journal Astronomisc her Jahresbericht—April, 1953—which has the most comprehensive treatment of it. What is it you have in mind?’
‘I am wondering,’ said Blackford, who, having experienced the directness of his old teacher, had taken care to rehearse his questions, ‘whether a miniature form of the Zirca, using the same principles, could be got to read—’ he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of paper three inches wide with dots punctuating it. It looked like a narrow player piano roll. He identified it as eight-channel punched tape, produced by a special teletype, which in due course was fed into an encoding machine.
‘At what distance did you have in mind?’
‘Concretely, we harbour a suspicion of an apartment ostensibly being used as a photographer’s darkroom. It is four hundred feet between the window of the darkroom and the window of the cable office of the United States Embassy.’
Drummond Weiss began his characteristic self-examination. But since he was not in class he spoke less didactically than Blackford was used to hearing him speak. It sounded rather like this:
‘Hmm. You could, with the Zirca, project a very fine high-frequency non-visible beam of small-circumference cross section—’ He twisted around his fingers the paper roll Blackford had handed to him, staring at its small punched holes—‘like holes the size of a pencil lead. We know the Zirca incorporates enough electronics to fill many equipment chests, implying an extraordinary capacity for accuracy. The beam’s aim—’ he paused and looked down at the journal, ‘and focus—and movement—are each under ultra-precise control of these electronics.
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