by Manda Scott
And so Laurence, too, is verging on sober by the time the orderly stamps to attention and snaps his overly crisp salute. ‘Beg pardon, sir, but the Brigadier would like a word.’
Oh, God. ‘Now? Are you sure?’
‘Brigadier’s orders, sir. There’s a car outside.’
Damnation. Laurence won’t show distress, though, not here. With a wink, he throws back his brandy, claps Patrick Sutherland on the shoulder and shouts, ‘I’m off to France! See you all in Paris!’
The energy of this keeps him buoyant, humming all the way down the road towards Surrey. Even when they turn off towards Godalming, it is possible to imagine that they are heading for yet another of the anonymous stately homes the Firm has requisitioned for their comfort and delight.
They head over the Hog’s Back, past Thursley to the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and then it is impossible any more to pretend.
‘We’re going to Ridgemount?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
Of course not. He grips the last shreds of hope until the car turns off the road and sails between the tall sandstone gateposts.
He’s known these since childhood. The family crest is carved in weathered relief on each: a pair of wyverns erect embracing the motto: Familia Supra Omnia. There has never been anything subtle about the Vaughan-Thomases, even as they made the move from the Welsh border reivers to the core of the English Establishment.
A long avenue of poplars leads to the house itself. Bigger, older, kept in better condition than any of the Firm’s mansions, there is no likelihood that this one might ever be requisitioned.
There is, however, a gang of men digging up the croquet lawn to the right of the main drive. The Brigadier is there, in boots and mackintosh, overseeing the mixing of concrete. Clearly, then, this is not some vanguard of the German invasion, shipped in by U-boat to assault the heart of government. Still, it’s quite a shock. Gardeners of ancient standing have been given notice for failing to keep this lawn pristine.
Laurence steps out of the car and comes to attention.
‘Sir.’
‘At ease, Larry, no need to play toy soldiers at home. What do you think of our excavations?’
‘Seems a bit drastic, sir. Aunt Lydia won’t be amused.’
‘Most perceptive of you. She’s gone up to town to escape the horror. Won’t you come in? Unwin has the coffee ready.’
Laurence surveys the scene as they pass: eight men, a reel of cable of the kind he has been learning to cut. The trench they have dug is twice the height of a small man and concrete is being mixed on the drive.
‘Might I ask why you need to bury your telephone line ten feet deep under reinforced concrete when Uncle Charles has his going in from a telegraph post outside the house?’
The Brigadier keeps walking; a man in a hurry. ‘What do you think?’
In the drawing room, with the butler gone and the coffee rich, sweet and hot, Laurence answers. ‘I think Uncle Charles is not in the Secret Intelligence Service.’
‘Ah.’ His uncle looks down at his hands and back up again. There’s a weight of sorrow in his eyes. ‘Did your father tell you?’
‘Father told me very little, as you ought to know. I was informed by a particularly resourceful colleague, Captain Patrick Sutherland, formerly of the Black Watch, now of the Firm.’
‘The Firm?’
‘The Outfit. The Thing. The training section that nobody will name, that we thought at first was shaping us up to be a commando unit and increasingly appears to be fitting us out to be Boys’ Own saboteurs in France. Father would turn giddy cartwheels in his grave, but I imagine we are, in fact, all now members of the Secret Intelligence Service, of which you are a senior member?’
‘Correct in the last part, not in the first, unfortunately. Would that you were.’ The Brigadier makes a foray to the window and stands there, framed in the light, hands clasped behind his back. ‘You know, I could have brought a dozen of your contemporaries here, and I don’t think they’d have made that link.’
There’s a warning in his voice. Laurence feels the kick of it, and straightens.
‘You underestimate us, sir.’
‘I sincerely hope so.’ There is a moment’s wretched silence, a last shard of hope, breaking his heart. Then, turning: ‘I’m sorry, Larry. You do realize France was never an option?’
‘With respect, sir, I feel it could be. I have passed—’
‘Of course you have. That was the point. Neither you, nor any of your instructors or teammates, will ever be able to say you didn’t cut the mustard. For you and for them, this was essential. But we cannot send you into France. You’re too valuable to us alive.’
‘To be honest, sir, I think Theo would make a better heir.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Theodora. Uncle Charles’s daughter. She joined the Nursing Yeomanry three months ago and they have already deployed her.’ His mother, source of all information regarding the family, was most displeased, but not, apparently, as much as Aunts Lydia and Dorothea.
‘I know who she is and what she does. I fail to understand her place in this conversation.’
‘She’d be a better vehicle for the family name. A more worthy heir to … all this.’ Now that Chris has gone. He doesn’t say this. He thinks it is obvious, although, by the way his uncle is looking at him, he is evidently wrong.
‘Larry, sit down and drink your coffee. This has nothing to do with the family name.’
He hadn’t realized he was standing. He does not sit down. ‘Then let me go to France.’
The Brigadier sits, heavily. ‘Dear boy, you just sailed through a course that has crippled standing members of the land regiments. You took the coding apart and rebuilt it. You speak French, German and Italian fluently, and your Spanish, I gather, is passable if we said you were Minorcan. We do not need you to end your days hanging by your thumbs in a Gestapo cell in Paris.’
‘Sir, I—’
‘Laurence, sit down and tell me what you thought of the ciphers you were given to use in the field.’
He can’t sit; sitting would be surrender. He stands behind the chair, gripping the back with both hands. ‘They are insanely easy to break.’
‘They look like blocks of numbers to me.’
‘They are blocks of numbers; it’s the way they are generated that’s beyond stupidity. The agent picks a poem that he knows by heart and lets his controllers know what it is. In the field, he chooses five words from that poem and uses them to form the basis of the cipher. Provided the people in the cipher unit back home know the correct five words, they can reverse the process and arrive at the plain text.’
‘As long as he gets the numbers right. They’re having a devil of a job with the ones that come in jumbled because someone got a letter wrong.’
‘Yes, but that might at least be safer. How many of Hitler’s cryptographers do you suppose know the words to the first verse of “God Save the King”?’
The Brigadier’s face freezes in surprise. His eyes narrow. ‘Dear God, tell me nobody has used—?’
‘Hughes-Symmonds reckons it’s the only thing he can reliably remember under duress and that composing double transpositions in the field when the Hun might be breathing down his neck is the very definition of duress. Castlemaine is going to use lines from Hamlet, and yes, they do begin, “To be or not to be”. Young Devereaux at least allowed himself be talked out of “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”.’
‘And the Huns—’
‘Have some very, very bright chaps. I know, I went to university with several of them. They have their Shakespeare by heart and anything they may be unsure of can be found in any good compendium of common English verse. You may as well write out the plain text and telegraph it to them clipped to an arrest warrant.’
‘Good God.’ His uncle is up again, pacing. Half a room away, he turns. ‘Laurence, you will sit. That’s an order. And drink the coffee. Unless you need some made fresh?’
So
we’re not playing soldiers until we are. He sits. The coffee is still perfectly hot. He drinks. He feels sick.
‘Sir, I can at least begin to solve that problem. All you need is to make up a new poem for each agent, something easy to memorize, but not in the common canon. The more risqué you can make it, the greater its chance of being remembered. The result won’t be unbreakable, but it’s a decent start. And now that you know this, there is no reason to keep me from going to France.’
His uncle returns to the table, places his elbows upon it and steeples his fingers.
‘Let me be clear. You are not going to France. You are not going anywhere near the line of battle. This, too, is an order. You are too valuable to us alive, and your compatriots, I am sorry to tell you, are very unlikely to survive. No, listen to me. There are times when the war effort is better served by keeping people of your calibre in places where they can do the most good. Tell me honestly, what do you think of the men who trained you? Not the ones in your unit – the ones who taught you?’
‘They were charming. They were very well meaning. By and large, they were amateurs.’
‘So we are in agreement about this, if nothing else. The Firm needs an injection of professionalism. You shall provide it.’
‘With respect, sir, I’m as much of an amateur as they are.’
‘With respect, Laurence, you are not. You are Archie’s son. Whether you like it or not, you’ve been training in this game since the day you were born. Accordingly, you will go from here to Bedford where the chaps in the government codes and ciphers department will give you eight weeks’ training in cryptography, most of which I suspect you will already know, but you need to have the right pedigree on paper. At the end of this time, you will take up a position in the Signals Unit of the Special Operations Executive, that outfit you call the Firm, and which is most certainly not a part of the Secret Intelligence Service.’
Of this whole great catastrophic bombshell, he fastens on the last fragment: his Firm is not a part of his uncle’s firm. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Those higher up, in their wisdom, wanted to give the Labour Party a bite of the intelligence cherry as a thank you for entering the government, and none of the rest of us wanted to be run by a bunch of socialists. In his infinite wisdom, therefore, our prime minister magicked up the SOE so he could give them something that at least had three letters to its name.’
In his perambulations, the Brigadier pauses by the window, standing so that he can be seen only in silhouette.
‘The problem is that the orphan child is rapidly outgrowing its origins and making a nuisance of itself. It needs chaps like you to make sure that the chaps they send into the field have at least half a chance of returning alive. Or at least, have a chance to die cleanly when they are caught. More importantly, we need to make sure they don’t interfere with the business of winning the wars.’
‘Wars? I wasn’t aware there was more than one.’
‘There is always more than one war, Laurence. It’s just that some are briefly more pressing than others. Hitler is an inconvenience, I grant you, but Stalin may have more staying power in the long run and none of us wishes to wake up one morning and find ourselves staring across the Channel at a soviet of socialist republics, of which France is a willing part, allied to a communist Greece and an Italy led by partisans who care for nobody who isn’t immediate family. So yes, we are fighting on many fronts and I would prefer it if your Firm was prevented from throwing too many spanners into the works.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘You will answer to whatever passes for their usual chain of command. If you have any sense at all, you will never mention my name in the hearing of your new colleagues. They don’t like us. We don’t like them. It would be unfortunate if they believed you to be a stool pigeon.’
‘Which I will not be. And to suggest otherwise is—’
‘Larry, I am not impugning your honour.’
‘Then what will I be doing, exactly? Assuming they are going to give me a real job and not just a desk to sit at so I can spy on them in comfort for the duration?’
‘You’ll be making up workable ciphers that aren’t a liability to the men that use them. And doing your damnedest to unscramble the most badly scrambled of those coming in from the field, so your erstwhile colleagues won’t have to send them twice. That’s what most of the Signals people seem to do. And while nobody is looking, you and I will make sure that our respective services actually cooperate and there are no snarl-ups in the field. I don’t want your friend Sutherland to be shot by a British agent because he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. You, I imagine, do not wish it either. We shall collaborate. We shall prevent disaster. It’s what our family does best. The car you came in will take you directly to Bedford. Your kit will follow from Hampshire. You may go.’
At the door, he turns. ‘What about the others, sir?’
‘They will jump as soon as conditions permit. I’m sorry, Larry, but you are better off like this, I promise you.’
CHAPTER SIX
ORLÉANS
Sunday, 18 March 2018
09.30
GROUP CAPTAIN LAURENCE Vaughan-Thomas is a man who husbands his grief with the skill of long practice. It shows in the increased stiffness of his neck and a flat tension about his eyes, but even these might as easily be age. He has set his mind to an unburdening, to a telling of long-harboured truths, and he will not let one more death dissuade him.
He says this: one more death. There have been many of those in his past, too many to count. As with McKinney, Picaut has not told him the details of all that was done to Sophie Destivelle, but nevertheless, he is, she thinks, deeply upset. She sees an undertow of anger, particularly when Clinton McKinney drops in the fact of Colonel Paul Rey’s death – Laurence’s former comrade in arms – as an afterthought. She meets the old man’s eye and they share a moment’s despair. She asks, ‘How well did you know Sophie?’
‘In 1944, I trained her for her role as an agent of the French section of the Special Operations Executive. She was eighteen, and about to return to France to undertake one of the most dangerous assignments of the war. I was in awe of her courage. Some months later, I was a member of the Jedburgh team that aided her Maquis, but we were never close. In those days, it wasn’t a good idea to get to know people too well.’
Laurence purses his lips against old, remembered pain. His gaze flickers to Clinton McKinney and back. ‘Paul Rey – he was a major then – was in my Jedburgh team. I knew him much better.’ Briefly, he looks away.
Picaut says, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you. Paul’s death, at least, was not unexpected. If you would excuse me? I ought to talk to Clinton.’ He leaves her with Martin Gillard, who is far harder to read.
Gillard is deeply unhappy at the news of Sophie’s murder – of this, there is no doubt. His gaze is still flat and holds hers without tremor, but there’s a rage that rolls off him and seethes across the floor. She thinks he might call the CIA: certainly he will know they are in town. She wants to put a tap on his phone but has not yet got a good enough reason. Instead, she invites him to join the queue to have his fingerprints taken when the technicians arrive, and submit his gun for ballistics examination.
This, at least, gets a reaction.
‘You have a suspected weapon? It will not be mine, I assure you.’
‘We have no details yet. This is a routine. Everyone who is armed will be treated the same.’
‘Still.’
‘There are no exceptions, Mr Gillard.’
She raises Gillard several notches up her persons of interest list. His anger is not all counterfeit, but there is a current beneath it of something else he does not want to show, and she wants to see.
The rest of the Radical Mind team is broken. Even before McKinney stands on a chair by the window to address them, a sense of tragedy spills out into the main room. When he gives them news of the two deaths, they weep, alt
hough it is unclear whether this is for Sophie Destivelle’s murder – she is, after all, a hero of their film even if none of them has ever met her in person – or the death of Paul Rey, whom they regard, evidently, as their own surrogate grandfather.
Back upstairs in his office, McKinney is restless. ‘I must call our backers. Elodie is in the air and cannot be reached. I am alone with this and it’s all a mess. Captain Picaut, if you’ll excuse me?’
‘Of course. But I need to start collating details from your employees. Is it possible to use an office? Just temporarily?’
That stops him. He chews the edge of his thumb. ‘I am not fully familiar with police powers in France, but I expect you could commandeer the entire building if you felt like it.’
‘I’m not here to destroy your business, Mr McKinney, I just need somewhere to sit down, preferably with a phone line, an internet connection, a desk and four chairs.’
‘The office next to Elodie’s is empty? It won’t take long to fit it out.’
The office next to Elodie’s is a plain space with a vast window looking out over the parking lot. Martha conjures up an office desk and chairs that look as if they cost thousands, while one of the gamers comes to set up the broadband connections for her phone and iPad. Picaut tests out the biggest of the chairs, which feels every bit as expensive as it looks.
Martha makes coffee that jolts a kick from halfway across the room, although, when McKinney decides he has, after all, got time to join them, she brings him green tea in a tiny fluted cup the size of a shot glass and the colour of mutton fat jade. The scent is light, airy and pleasingly acerbic.
McKinney has brought his iPad with him. ‘I have some original stills of Laurence that I thought you might like to see. And our first action sequence. We only shot it last week; the rough edits just came through. It’s not long, a couple of minutes at most, but it shows our band of brothers in their best light, I think. You can feel the bond that they had.’
He’s like a child bringing a gift to a difficult teacher. The early images are sepia-toned stills of a young man with a ready smile, wide, pale eyes and shining blond hair. One shot shows him to the left of another young man; the pair stand with their arms over each other’s shoulders in front of a wartime plane with RAF roundels.
