by Len Deighton
‘In space there are clouds of hydrogen. They vibrate to make a hum of radio noise. You pick it up on any radio set at 1,420 megacycles. My theory is that this would be the best frequency to use for our first messages to outer space. Other civilizations are certain to notice any change in that hum of hydrogen vibrations.’
‘Sure to,’ said Mann.
‘Not on that exact wavelength,’ added Bekuv. ‘They would be obliterated. We must transmit near to the wavelength, not on it.’
‘Near to it; not on it,’ said Mann. He nodded.
‘It would cost very little,’ said Bekuv. ‘And I could have it working inside six months.’
‘That’s well before the flying-saucer men go to summer camp,’ said Mann.
Bekuv looked up at Mann. His voice was harsh, and it was as if he was answering a long list of unspoken questions when he shouted, ‘Twice I have attended meetings of the 1924 Society. Only twice! The last time was nearly five years ago. Science is not the cosy little club you believe it is. Don’t keep pressurizing me. I recognized no one, and we did not exchange names and addresses, for obvious reasons.’
‘For obvious reasons,’ said Mann. ‘Because those sons of bitches were betraying the whole of America’s military electronics programme.’
‘And will it get your secrets back if you keep me a prisoner here?’ yelled Bekuv. ‘Not allowed to go out … Not allowed to make phone calls.’
Mann walked quickly to the door, as if frightened he would lose his temper. He turned. ‘You’ll stay here as long as I think fit,’ he said. ‘Behave yourself and I’ll send you a packet of phonograph needles and a subscription to Little Green Men Monthly.’
Bekuv spoke quietly. ‘You don’t like cosmology, you don’t like high-fidelity, you don’t like Shostakovich, you don’t like blinis …’ Bekuv smiled. I couldn’t decide whether he was trying to needle Mann or not.
‘I don’t like Russians,’ explained Mann. ‘White Russians, Red Russians, Ukrainians, Muscovite liberals, ballet dancers or faggy poets – I just don’t like any of them. Get the picture?’
‘I get it,’ said Bekuv sulkily. ‘Is there anything more?’
‘One thing more,’ said Mann. ‘I’m not an international expert on the design of electronic masers. All I know about them is that a maser is some kind of crystal gimmick that gets pumped up with electronic energy so that it amplifies the weakest of incoming radio signals. That way you get a big fat signal compared with the background of electronic static noise and interference.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bekuv. It was the first time he’d shown any real interest.
‘I was reading that your liquid helium bath technique, that keeps the maser at minus two hundred and sixty-eight degrees centigrade, will amplify a signal nearly two million times.’
Bekuv nodded.
‘Now I see the day when every little two-bit transistor could be using one of these gadgets and pulling in radio transmissions from anywhere in the world. Of course, we know that would just mean hearing a DJ spinning discs in Peking, instead of Pasadena, but a guy collecting a royalty on such a gadget could make a few million. Right, Professor?’
‘I didn’t defect for money,’ said Bekuv.
Major Mann smiled.
‘I didn’t defect to make money,’ shouted Bekuv. If Mann had been trying to make Bekuv very, very angry, he’d discovered an effective way to do it.
Mann took my arm and led me from the room, closing the door silently and with exaggerated care. I didn’t speak as we both walked downstairs to my sitting-room. Mann took off his dark raincoat and bundled it up to throw it into a corner. From upstairs there came the sudden crash of Shostakovich. Mann closed the door to muffle it.
I walked over to the window, so that I could look down into Washington Square. It was sunny: the sort of New York City winter’s day when the sun coaxes you out without your long underwear, so that the cross-town wind can slice you into freeze-dried salami. Even the quartet echo-singing under the Washington arch had the hoods of their parkas up. But no street sounds came through the double-glazing; just soft Shostakovich from upstairs. Mann sat in my most comfortable chair and picked up the carbon of my report. I could tell that he’d already been to his office and perused the overnights. He gave my report no more than a moment or two, then he lifted the lid of my pigskin document case and put a fingertip on the Hart and Greenwood files that had arrived by special messenger in the early hours. They were very thin files.
‘The car had a foreign consul plate?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you read that stuff on the telex?’
‘The two Russians are staying in a house leased to the Second Secretary of the Soviet Trade Delegation … Yes, I read it, but that doesn’t make them KGB or even diplomatic. They might just be visiting relatives, or subtenants or squatters or something.’
Mann said, ‘I’d like to bring in the owners of that car and sweat them.’
‘And what would you charge them with? Leaving the scene of an accident?’
‘Very funny,’ said Mann. ‘But the foreign consul plate on that car ties them to the stick-up artists.’
‘You mean KGB heavies lend their official car to three hoods?’
Mann pouted and shook his head slowly, as if denying a treat to a spoiled child. ‘Not the way you’d arrange it, maybe,’ he said. ‘But there was no reason for them to think it would all foul up. They figured it would be a pushover, and the official car would provide them with the kind of getaway that no cop would dare stop. It was a good idea.’
‘That went wrong.’
‘That went wrong.’ He ran his fingers through the urgent paperwork inside my document case. ‘Are we going to get some of this junk down the chute today?’
‘Does that “we” mean you’re about to break the seal on a new box of paper-clips?’
Mann smiled.
I put the case beside me on the sofa and began to sort it into three piles: urgent, very urgent and phone.
Mann leaned over the sofa back. He lifted a corner of the neatly stacked documents, each one bearing a coloured marking slip that explained to me what I was signing. Mann sucked his teeth. ‘Those typewriter commandos downstairs don’t know a microdot from a Playboy centrefold but give them a chance to bury you in paperwork and – goddamn, what an avalanche!’ He let the paperwork slip out of his hands with enough noise to illustrate this theory.
I moved the trayful of papers before Mann decided to repeat his demonstration; already the slips and paper-clips were falling apart.
‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ Mann said. ‘I’ve got to catch an airplane. Anybody wants me tell them to try the Diplomat Hotel, Miami, Florida.’
‘Don’t use your right name,’ I said.
‘I won’t even be there, bird-brain. That’s just being set up.’
I reached for the first pile of paperwork.
‘Before I go,’ Mann said still standing in the doorway watching me, ‘Bessie says will you spend Christmas with us.’
‘Great,’ I said without looking up from my desk work.
‘I’d better warn you that Bessie is asking that girl Red Bancroft along … Bessie is a matchmaker …’
‘You’re checking out a place to hide Bekuv, aren’t you?’ I said.
Mann bared his teeth in the sort of fierce grimace that he believes is a warm and generous smile.
I worked on until about noon and then one of the I-Doc people looked in. ‘Where’s Major Mann?’
‘Out.’ I continued to go through the documents.
‘Where did he go?’
‘No idea,’ I said without looking up.
‘You must know.’
‘Two little guys in white coats came in and dragged him out with his feet kicking.’
‘There’s a phone call,’ said the man from downstairs. ‘Someone asking for you.’ He looked round the room to be sure I wasn’t hiding Mann anywhere. ‘I’ll tell the switchboard to put it through.�
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‘There’s a caller named Gerry Hart coming through on the Wall Street line,’ the operator told me. ‘Do you want us to patch it through to here, and connect you?’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said. If it had taken Hart only twenty-four hours to winkle-out the phone number of the merchant bank in Wall Street that I was using as my prime cover, how long would it take to prise open the rest of it? I pushed the police documentation to one side. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ suggested Hart. His voice had the sort of warm resonance contrived by men who spend all day speaking on the telephone.
‘Why?’
‘There’s a development.’
‘Talk to my boss.’
‘Tried that, but he’s in Miami.’ Hart’s tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t believe that Mann was in Miami.
‘You could just make that flight where they serve free champagne in tourist,’ I suggested.
‘You really in Wall Street? Or are they patching this to some number in Langley, Virginia?’ He gave a little chuckle.
‘What’s on your mind, Gerry?’
‘Listen! I wanted to avoid Mann. It’s you I want to talk to. Spare me thirty minutes over a cream-cheese sandwich. You know the Cookery? – University Plaza? Say one o’clock? Don’t tell Mann – just you alone.’
He had chosen a restaurant about as close to the CIA safe house in Washington Square as it was possible to get. It could have been a coincidence – the Cookery was one of my favourite haunts, and Gerry Hart might well know that – but I had a feeling that he was trying to cut me down to size before hitting me with his proposition. ‘OK,’ I said.
‘I wear a moustache nowadays. Will you be able to recognize me?’ he said. ‘I’ll be reading today’s New York Times.’
‘You mean with two peep-holes cut in the front page?’
‘Just make sure you don’t bring Captain America with you,’ said Hart and rang off.
Gerry Hart pinched his trousers at the knees, so that he wasn’t putting any strain on his twelve-ounce wool-and-mohair suit. That done, he eased his shirt sleeves far enough to reveal his cufflinks, but not so far that his black-faced Pulsar wrist-watch was hidden. The file said he was an authority on New Orleans jazz. ‘Can’t be all bad,’ Mann had remarked at the time.
‘I’m in politics now,’ Hart said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘I thought perhaps you were playing the horses.’
‘You always had a great sense of humour.’ He smiled for just a fraction of a second. ‘I’m not so touchy as I used to be in the old days,’ he said. He fingered his new moustache self-consciously. I noticed the manicured fingernails. He’d come a long way from that nervous, opinionated State Department clerk that I remembered from our first meeting.
The drinks came. I put extra Tabasco into my Bloody Mary and then offered the same to Gerry. He shook his head. ‘Plain tomato juice doesn’t need flavouring,’ he said primly. ‘And I’m certainly surprised you need it with all that vodka.’
‘My analyst says it’s a subconscious desire to wash my mouth out with disinfectant.’
Hart nodded. ‘Well, you have a lot of politician in you,’ he said.
‘You mean I approach every problem with an open mouth,’ I said. I drank quite a lot of my Bloody Mary. ‘Yes, well, if I decide to run, I’ll come and talk to you.’
I knew it would be foolish to upset Hart before I knew what was in his mind. His file said he was a 31-year-old lawyer from Connecticut. I regarded him as one of the first of that growing army of young men who had used a few years’ service in the CIA as a stepping-stone to other ambitions, as at one time the British middle classes had used the Brigade of Guards.
Hart was short and saturnine, a handsome man with curly hair and the sort of dark circles under deep-set eyes that made you think he was sleepy. But Gerry Hart was a tough kid who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink, and if he was sleepy it was only because he stayed up late at night rewriting the inaugural address he’d deliver to Congress on the day he became President.
Hart sipped a little of his tomato juice, and wiped his mouth carefully before speaking. ‘I handle more top-secret material now than I did when I was working for the company – would you believe that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Gerry Hart liked to refer to the CIA as ‘the company’ to emphasize that he had been on the inside. His file didn’t mention service in the CIA but that didn’t mean a thing.
‘Did you ever hear of the 1924 Society?’ he asked me.
‘I’d rather hear about it from you,’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Hart.
The waitress came to the table with the menus. ‘Don’t go away,’ he told her. He ran his eye quickly down the list. ‘Club sandwich, mixed salad with French dressing, regular coffee, and I’ll take the check. OK?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the waitress.
‘The same,’ I said. That made Gerry Hart feel very secure, and I wanted him to feel very secure.
The waitress closed her pad and took the menus from us. She came back with our order almost immediately. Hart smiled at her.
‘We have penetrated the 1924 Society. That’s why we can do it,’ Gerry Hart explained when she had gone.
‘What’s inside a club sandwich?’ I said. ‘Do what?’
‘Bring Mrs Bekuv here.’
‘Is it like a triple-deck sandwich?’
‘Bring Mrs Bekuv out of the USSR, officially or unofficially.’
‘How?’
‘What do you care how?’
I took the top off my sandwich and examined the filling. ‘We don’t have club sandwiches in England,’ I explained.
‘Even Greenwood hasn’t been told that this is a CIA operation,’ Hart said. ‘Sure, we’ll try to get Bekuv’s wife by asking the Russians through the Senate Scientific Development sub-committee but if they won’t play, we’ll make it work some other way.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘What is this CIA operation you’re talking about?’
‘The 1924 Society.’
‘I don’t even know what the 1924 Society is,’ I said truthfully.
Hart smiled. ‘In 1924 Mars came very close to Earth. Scientists said maybe Mars would try to communicate with Earth. It caused no end of a ruckus in the scientific press, and then the newspapers joined in the speculation. Even the US Army and Navy ordered all their radio stations to reduce signals traffic and listen for extra-terrestrial messages. The 1924 Society was formed that year. Twelve eminent scientists decided to pool information about communications from outer space, and plan ways of sending messages back.’
‘And it’s still going strong, is it?’
‘Now there are twenty-seven members – only three of them founder members – but a lot of people take it seriously. In 1965, when three Russian astronomers picked up radio waves on a hundred-day cycle from quasar CTA-102, the 1924 Society were considering the report even before the Soviet Academy got the news, and before the Kremlin ordered them to retract.’
‘And the CIA has penetrated the 1924 Society?’
‘How do you think we got the first indication that Bekuv was ready to defect?’
I polished my spectacles – people tell me I do that when I’m nervous – and gave the lenses undue care and attention. I needed a little time to look at Gerry Hart and decide that a man I’d always thought of as blowing the tuba was writing the orchestrations.
Gerry Hart said, ‘This is a big operation, make no mistake. Bekuv is only a tiny part of it but we’ll get Mrs Bekuv here if that’s what you want.’
‘But?’
He stabbed a fork into his sandwich and cut a small triangle of it ready to eat. ‘But you’ll have to prevent Mann from putting his stubby peasant fingers into the 1924 Society. His abrasive personality would really have them all running for dear life, just at a time when we’ve got it ticking along nicely.’ He changed the fork over to his other hand and fed himself some sandwich.
I picked my sandwich up in my fist, and didn’t
reply until I had a big mouthful to talk round.
‘You’ve been frank with me, Gerry,’ I said, ‘and I’ll be frank with you. You think we are worrying ourselves sick about getting Mrs Bekuv here? I’ll tell you, we don’t give a damn where she is. Sure we have made the right sort of noises and let Bekuv think we are pushing hard on his behalf, but we prefer things the way they are.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Hart.
‘Never been more serious in my life, old pal.’
‘I wish someone had told us this before,’ he said irritably. ‘We have spent a lot of money on this one already.’
‘On what?’
‘We’ve paid some money to a couple of Russian airline people … we have organized travel papers for Mrs Bekuv. There was talk of getting her here by Saturday week.’
‘This is a good sandwich, Gerry. They call this a club sandwich, do they? I must remember that.’
‘Is your pal Major Mickey Mouse really planning to tear the 1924 Society apart?’
‘You know what he’s like,’ I said.
Gerry Hart forked through his salad to find the last pieces of cucumber. He dipped them into the salt and ate them before pushing the rest of the salad away. He wiped his mouth on his napkin. ‘No one would believe that I was trying to help you guys,’ he said. ‘No one would believe that I was trying to solve one of your biggest headaches and trying to stop you giving me one.’
‘Are you serious about being able to get Mrs Bekuv here … getting her here by next week, I mean?’
Hart brightened a little. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and got out a tiny chamois purse. He opened it with his fingertips and dropped the contents into the open palm I offered him. There were two gold rings. One of them was old, and burnished to a condition where the ornamentation was almost worn away. The newer one was simpler in style and inside, where there was an inscription in Russian, I could see the gold was only a thin plating.
Hart said, ‘Bekuv’s wife’s rings: the plated one is their wedding band – with suitably euphoric Komsomol slogan – and the other one is Bekuv’s mother’s ring, inherited when she died.’ He reached out and I returned the rings to him. ‘Good enough for you?’ he asked.
