Flight From Honour (8 page)

“Ye’d be needing a machine-gun to be much use, sure, but—”

“What about the weight? The Maxim gun runs to around a hundred pounds – and one thing I do know about aeroplanes is that they can’t carry much weight.”

“They’ll get better,” O’Gilroy said defensively. “And machine-guns’re getting lighter. There was talk in Brussels about one invented by an American. Lewis, his name was. Weighs jest twenty-five pounds with a magazine, not a belt, so it should fit an aeroplane jest right.”

“Really?” Ranklin was affronted, since he prided himself on keeping up with weaponry gossip; it was his bedrock of knowledge in the shifting sands of Intelligence.

O’Gilroy’s voice took on an infuriating tinge of superiority. “Been around some time, I’m thinking. Anyways, they’re making it in Belgium, same as Browning pistols, but it’s not going so well, I heard, so BSA here’s making ’em, too.”

“Birmingham Small Arms?” Now Ranklin really was annoyed: it had got as far as
Birmingham
without him noticing.

“That’s right,” O’Gilroy smiled. “I was talking about it on the boat, and Falcone made out he’d never heard of it, but he was carrying a catalogue of ’em in his baggage.”

Ranklin frowned, but no longer in annoyance. “So the Senator’s looking for aeroplanes and hiding the fact that he’s heard of a lightweight machine-gun. D’you think he wants Italy to have a secret armada of armed aeroplanes?”

O’Gilroy shrugged but was obviously taken by the idea. “And other fellers’ secrets being our business . . .

“Quite. Mind,” Ranklin remembered, “Major Dagner’s seeing the Senator for himself, so he may come back with the whole story. Still, it’s something to watch out for if you’re still taking the Senator to Brooklands this weekend.”

O’Gilroy got up to find his cigarettes and an ashtray, asking over his shoulder: “What d’ye make of the Major?” The hand-crafted casualness of his tone suggested that Ranklin would have no qualms about discussing a senior with a junior.

“I fancy he knows the game inside out; he’s been at it far longer than either of us.”

“In India.”

“Espionage is adjusting successfully to circumstances. And in India the consequence of failure to adjust can be more prolonged and painful than in most parts of Europe.”

“Ye know some lovely long words, Matt.” O’Gilroy sighed. “I’ll give ye some short ones: he don’t trust me.”

“In India,” Ranklin said thoughtfully, “the Intelligence wallahs may have had more choice of volunteers. He’ll have to learn that here, he uses who he’s got. Like you. And me.”

O’Gilroy breathed smoke slowly. “And why d’ye all call it a ‘game’?”

“To try and get the English to take it seriously.”

8

Looking back on that Thursday, Ranklin came to the self-pitying conclusion that the only person who enjoyed it less than himself might have been Princess Sophia of Saxe-Weimar, because she committed suicide that day. On the other hand, she thereby let herself off part of the day. He got it all.

It began innocuously with Dagner giving the new recruits a brief, chatty but pointed talk based on his own experience – in this instance, with journalists.

“Resist your immediate instinct to despise them, borne are pretty good at their job, and all of them have been doing that job longer than you have yours, at the moment. But remember that journalists have opinions, even if they may try not to let them show in print. And more: after years of listening to the policy-makers, they want – perhaps secretly, even unconsciously – to make policy themselves. One way, of course, is to publish a demand for such-and-such a policy. But that’s open, nailing your colours to the mast – and their editors may not let them do it anyway. The other way is
not
to publish: To support the policy-makers they believe in by withholding unpleasant facts about them, facts that might ruin their careers and place in society. And those, gentlemen, are the stories you want to hear. They may be well worth the price of a drink.”

He paused, swinging one long leg from his perch on the edge of a table. “Only – don’t fall into the same trap. Don’t conceal, in your own reports, the nastier side of people you have come to like or believe in. Show you are more reliable than journalists by reporting without fear or favour, and leave policy to your country’s policy-makers.”

He left them to clip or précis a pile of learned foreign-affairs journals, and Ranklin to get on with drafting the training programme.

Lock-picking,
he wrote. Probably safe-breaking was an art that took years to acquire, but it would be useful if they could open ordinary doors, drawers and luggage without leaving traces. Perhaps Scotland Yard could recommend a reliable criminal to give a demonstration . . .

Forgery:
The Commander presumably had access to the Government printers for elaborate and official-looking documents, but a spy in the field might need to alter a name on a passport or write his own letter of introduction. Again, the Yard should be of help, but British forgers might be a little insular. They really needed to study the slanting French script, the upright and rather childish Italian styles, the angular German . . .

Personal weapons . . .
But then Dagner came out of the inner room with a letter from someone in the War Office. “I’ve got a chap here asking us to explore the suitability of the terrain in Schleswig for cavalry operations. He says we’re the experts on invasion by sea – are we? And is somebody proposing to invade North Germany?”

Ranklin pushed back his chair and relit his pipe. “As I understand it, an important argument for setting up the Bureau was to explore the threat of being invaded
from
North Germany—”

“We heard about that scare even in India. What did we conclude?”

“Oh, it’s rubbish, of course. But our elders and betters have a vested interest in keeping any sort of war scare going, realistic or not, to justify increased spending on new ships and things – even on us I suppose. So it isn’t in their or our interest to
conclude
that it’s rubbish. We just report – provisionally – from time to time that it’s unlikely to happen this week.”

“I see.” Dagner glanced at the letter again. “So that makes us the acknowledged experts at something we don’t believe in. It sounds positively theological. But do we believe in ourselves invading Germany?”

“I doubt it. But when a general gets a bee in his bonnet it can fly both ways. I’ll handle it if you like.”

Dagner passed the letter over but also asked: “How?”

“Sit on it for a week or so in case we need to send someone to Schleswig for a good reason as well. Otherwise, get someone – like Lieutenant P, he reads German well – to see what he can dig out of libraries. There was probably some cavalry action there in 1848 or ‘64. Finally, send in a report that’s coy about its sources.”

Dagner looked uncertain, so Ranklin added: “It helps the cause: shows willing but doesn’t waste too much of our time.”

Dagner sighed. “I suppose so.” He went back into the inner office.

Personal weapons
– then it was the telephone girl with a call from a manufacturer of phonographs wanting to speak to the Commander. Ranklin got the call routed to himself and discovered, by roundabout questions, that the Commander was thinking of buying such equipment – presumably for mechanical eavesdropping. On the instant, he became the Commander’s assistant, hinted that it was to do with wireless training in the Navy, swore the manufacturer to secrecy, and said the Commander would be in touch when he returned.

Personal weapons
– only now he had to support Dagner at a meeting with an Admiralty accountant over a proposal to set up a bank account in Amsterdam. It turned out that the accountant couldn’t authorise this himself, merely recommend it if they convinced him it was necessary. The argument quickly dwindled to whether “necessity” was an absolute concept like having a rudder on a ship or a sensible precaution like having a lifeboat. It was unlikely that the Admiralty accountant had ever seen a ship, but it seemed polite to use nautical analogies. Such tact meant the proposal was at least still breathing when it was shelved indefinitely due to the pressures of lunch.

“I hate to say this,” Ranklin observed as they walked back across Whitehall, “but the simplest solution would be to produce a document – code or technical drawing or order of battle – and swear we paid five hundred pounds for it in Brussels. And start the account with that.”

After a moment, Dagner said: “But don’t you think that, in our situation where nobody can really check on whether we’ve been strictly honest in our claimed expenditure, it behoves us to
be
strictly honest?”

“Perhaps,” Ranklin said, who no longer thought so.

Personal weapons,
Ranklin resumed after lunch, and waited for the next interruption. It didn’t come, so he moved on cautiously. Carry a pistol only if your (adopted) persona would carry one in those particular circumstances. And then avoid anything exotic that suggests you care about pistols. Don’t carry a knife, but know how to use one. It’s not an Anglo-Saxon weapon, but it’s usually easy to come by. You only need a” four-inch blade to reach a man’s heart, thrusting slightly upwards through his ribs—

How the
hell
do I know that? he wondered, staring at the page as if it had spat at him. I certainly didn’t know it a year ago. Did someone in the Greek Army tell me? Or O’Gilroy? Or was it one of those odd scraps of knowledge that seem to settle and cling to me now I have the stickiness of a spy?

He shrugged mentally and tried to think of other personal weaponry that was both effective and unsuspicious – but then Lieutenant M got back from lunch having learnt from an old friend of his father’s that the Japanese were trying to stir up the Finns to revolt against their Russian masters—

“Really?” Ranklin put on an impressed expression. “What instances did he cite? And names?”

The point, Lieutenant M bubbled on, was that the Japs wanted to keep the Russians busy in the West while they machinated in the East. Surely the Cabinet should know about this
immediately.
Others could supply instances and names.

“The point,” Ranklin corrected gently, “is that those others are us. The Government can usually come by its own rumours. When it does, it should turn to us to verify or deny them by supplying the details. So can you go back to this chap and see if he knows any hard facts?”

“He’s rather a tetchy old boy.” Lieutenant M looked dubious. “I don’t how he’ll like some whipper-snapper like me cross-examining him . . .”

“But isn’t that our job?” Ranklin smiled sweetly. “We’re sp . . . secret agents, remember? We use tact, flattery, bare-faced lies – whatever’s appropriate – and we come back with the details, don’t we?”

Sometimes, Ranklin told himself when Lieutenant M had gone, I seem quite good at this job. Now:
Personal weapons—

So then it was O’Gilroy with an aeronautical magazine and eager to explain the arguments for and against the Dunne ‘inherently stable’ biplane. Ranklin, who privately felt that anyone who got into an aeroplane was inherently unstable to start with, sent him out with any recruits he could find to practise shadowing again.

Personal weap—
and now Dagner again, leaving the office in Ranklin’s charge while he went off first to meet Senator Falcone at the Ritz, then change into mess kit for a dinner at the officers’ mess in the Tower of London. Ranklin politely wished him joy of it and turned back to his notepad.

He hadn’t even got his mind into gear when the senior secretary came in, looking for Dagner and waving an official buff envelope that had just been forwarded from the War Office. The handwritten addressee was
The Officer Commanding the unit to which Lieut.
P
—(their own Lieutenant P, in fact)
is currently attached
. And marked both
Urgent
and
Private and Confidential.

Ranklin made chewing expressions as he looked at it. The secretary said: “Shall I keep it for Major Dagner in the morning, sir?”

Ranklin certainly wasn’t P’s CO, but strictly speaking, neither was Dagner. And he was getting bored with
Personal weapons.
He stuck a finger under the gummed flap and raised his arm at the secretary. “Jog my elbow, will you?”

She smiled frostily and gave him a nudge that wouldn’t have shifted a fly. He tore the envelope open. “Oops, look what I’ve done now. Oh well, I suppose I may as well see what it’s all about . . .”

But if the secretary thought she had earned a look, too, she was disappointed, and hobbled away with a distinct sniff.

What the letter and its enclosures boiled down to was that when Lieutenant P had left his last posting he had also left (a) an unpaid mess bill and (b) a young lady who claimed he had promised marriage, but taken (c) a motor-car of which he was only part-owner. Ranklin sat still until he had worn through surprise, indignation, amusement and arrived at exasperation, then went to look for P.

He had just got in, having failed to shadow O’Gilroy through the Piccadilly traffic. “Simply not your day, is it?” Ranklin said, handing him the letters. P skimmed them, smiled ruefully, and began: “About the motor—”

“Don’t tell me,” Ranklin said. “Just sort it out. You can’t marry without your colonel’s permission, and with any luck he’ll refuse it if you pay your mess bill, promptly. If that doesn’t work, write to the girl’s father asking will he lend you a thousand quid to pay your gaming debts. Now about the motor-car: where is it?”

“Here in London.”

“And who else part-owns it?”

“Two chaps from my battalion who—”

“Fine. It’s about time the Bureau had the use of a car. Tell them it’s being repaired in Scotland. Any questions?”

A bit dazed, P asked: “Are you going to show these letters to Major Dagner, sir?”

“What letters? I haven’t seen any letters.
But
. . . you won’t be much use to us until you learn not to get into trouble that’s going to catch up with you.”

In other words, solve life’s greatest problem by teatime tomorrow. Oh well . . . he had a feeling that Dagner might take the whole thing too seriously. And the Commander? He just couldn’t tell.