Secret Kingdom

by Francis Bennett

  ‘The Prime Minister has this thing against Nasser. He won’t hear his name mentioned. It’s got personal.’ The rumours, someone told him, emanated from Number Ten. Pountney remained unconvinced. If this was an attempt to build a consensus in favour of military intervention, he wasn’t buying it. Nor, he imagined, were many others.

  ‘Nasser’s a challenge we’ve got to meet,’ Lander was saying, ‘if we’re to show the rest of the world we’re still in the big league.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you, David?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  Despite all the clues around him, he had misjudged Lander. His pattern of beliefs, his certainties that we were still a major power, remained unchallenged by events. His money and his class insulated him and others like him from any threatening reality. This club was his world in microcosm, an orderly society that continued its old ways undisturbed behind closed doors, whatever the commotion outside in the street. No wonder Lander asked him to lunch here, and no wonder he felt out of place. The gulf between them, their lives, experiences, beliefs, gaped open at their feet. It had never been so wide.

  ‘Is it realistic to imagine that either the Russians or the Americans think of us in those terms?’

  ‘If you’re saying we don’t count any more, you’re wrong,’ Lander said sharply.

  Lander couldn’t accept that so much of what they did every day of their working lives was little more than a game of bluff to conceal the condition of decline into which the country had fallen. If Pountney was to say what he believed, he would have to emerge undisguised from his bunker, guns blazing. How he disliked being put on the spot like this.

  ‘The world is divided into two camps,’ he replied, ‘and we’re not the dominant partner in either. Isn’t it better to own up to that and operate from a position we can legitimately defend, rather than deluding ourselves that we hold a power that everyone knows we don’t?’

  The atmosphere had shifted from chilliness to ice. Lander, no longer interested in finishing what remained on his plate, lit a cigarette.

  ‘If I believed that,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to face myself in the shaving mirror each morning.’ All pretence of reconciliation was finally absent from his voice. ‘We are and must remain a great power. I’m with Watson-Jones on that, and so is everyone I know. You aren’t suggesting we allow an upstart like Nasser to knock us from the top table, are you?’

  The arguments boiled angrily in his mind, too many to make sense of in the heat of the moment. In ways Pountney didn’t fully understand, Lander’s easy assurance intimidated him. In his presence he felt insubstantial, weak, devoid of the self-control that was his hallmark in the office. It was an emotional response, he knew that, but one he found himself unable to fight. Too shaken to reply, he stared blankly at Lander, hoping his silence would push him into saying something.

  ‘Look, Gerry,’ Lander said, ‘it’s all very noble, sticking your head above the parapet, but where’s the gain? This isn’t a time for heroics. You’re not going to change anything on your own. Opposing Suez is a lost cause. You must see that, surely.’

  There were arguments to use against him but he couldn’t marshal them. Infuriatingly, they evaded his grasp.

  ‘Risking your career for a policy that’s not going to change isn’t worth it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Pountney said, hating himself for saying it. It wasn’t what he believed nor what he wanted to say, but too long on Lander’s territory and he began to lose his nerve. Better to end it quietly now, ready to fight another day, if you had to. That was as good a way out as any.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  How he hated himself for saying it.

  2

  The telex machine burst into life, the printer’s sudden chattering breaking the silence. Martineau looked up as the coded message began to come through. He knew the opening words by heart.

  ‘Top Secret (every message began that way). For information only. The contents of this document may not be disclosed to anyone other than a duly authorized recipient. No extract from …’

  ‘No extract from, or summary of, or reference to its contents,’ he said under his breath, ‘may be made except under such conditions as may be generally or specially approved by the Director-General, Secret Intelligence Service. And so on and so forth.’

  That was followed by all the usual administrative garbage, the date, the number of the telex, the names and departments of those to whom copies of the telex had been sent. The same old crew: Director; Directorate C; Deputy Director; C, Nigel Carswell, none less, good old Nigel. How they loved his kind in London; Carl Brotherton, a new name, he’d no idea who he was; the SIS representative on SSC. What the hell was SSC? You needed a dictionary these days to keep up with all the acronyms they invented. Probably deliberate policy to confuse the Sovs. It certainly confused him. Last of all, who’d sent the telegram: Duty Officer, London, always anonymous, probably some boy genius in short trousers they’d pulled off his mother’s tit a couple of weeks ago, and to whom. In this case, R. Martineau, Budapest. Yours truly.

  All right. Let’s see what London has to say for itself today.

  YRS 25/6 RECD STOP NO ACTIONS REQD STOP MESSAGE ENDS

  Damn them.

  Every time he reported on the situation in Hungary, he got the same reply. Take no action. Do nothing. Sit on your hands. No further questions. No reaction. No advice. Did they take no notice of him because they didn’t believe what he told them? Couldn’t they cope with the truth any more? Perhaps it was policy now to ignore what you didn’t want to hear. He scanned the bleak message of the telex again. Apparently so. On all fronts.

  Why not tell him not to bother, that they weren’t interested in what was happening in Hungary? It would save a lot of unnecessary work, possibly even some lives. Merton House was fixated on Suez, like everyone else at home. What the hell were they trying to do to him? And what about his Borises? They were risking their lives for this lot in London. Why didn’t they give a thought to them? Bastards, the lot of them.

  Why bother? Except you had to bother. That was the point. That was why you were here, in Budapest. To do something that had to be done. It was only a question of time, surely, before London woke up and heard what you were saying.

  3

  ‘I know Joe’s in Budapest and that something bad has happened to him,’ Esther had said with striking certainty as they walked from Lincoln’s Inn to Kingsway.

  How she knew she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Anna, and Anna knew that nothing she could say would shake the older woman’s conviction. She wanted to trust Esther’s intuition, but believing without evidence was alien to her. Despite her father’s remonstrations against her doubting nature when she was young – ‘Listen to your heart, Anna, trust what it tells you’ – she had defended herself against his forceful irrationality by seeking refuge in her own haven of good sense. Security lay in organization, preparation, reason. Instinct had no part in that. You couldn’t know something was true simply because that was what your heart told you. That was absurd, impossible. Seeing it with your own eyes was what counted. Verification.

  Yet she found herself drawing comfort from Esther’s words. In her moments of doubt, now all too frequent, she wanted to believe that at least Joe was alive. Esther gave her something to hope for.

  ‘That man knows more than he say.’

  Esther was right about Sykes too. He knew far more than he was telling them. The difficulty was, his defences were too secure for her to penetrate. He’d been ready for their visit, he’d worked on his position, he’d known what he wanted to tell them, and though he appeared to be very open with them, in fact he’d given nothing away. She and Esther had been wholly unprepared. They’d said nothing that he couldn’t deal with. They’d presented him with no surprises, letting him dictate the interview. She couldn’t let that happen again.

  She spent the afternoon on the telephone, hoping some enqui
ry would yield a clue that might help her begin to unravel the mystery of what had happened to Joe. But she learned nothing, not even from Joe’s companion at the Institute, a conspiratorial White Russian who in his guttural English complained to her that since Joe’s absence, his workload had doubled without his pay going up. Instead of worrying about Joe, what could she do to help him?

  There were too many blank walls, too many dead ends. She was missing something obvious, overlooking a simple truth, probably because she was trying too hard. She always tried too hard. She was thinking within limits that were too narrow. Relax, she told herself Don’t strain at it. Let herself flow with the problems, don’t try to fight them. Then something might turn up. How easy it was to say that, she thought, fighting back tears, how hard to achieve.

  Then she remembered Sykes’s one unscripted remark, that his brother-in-law worked at the Foreign Office. It wasn’t much but it was all she had. She held on to it with all the power at her command.

  4

  Hart stood at the window of his apartment and watched the electrical storm rage round the city. For the last hour the thunder had been rolling in from the east behind waves of black clouds. The sky had gone dark long before dusk. Now the city across the Danube was obscured by blinding sheets of rain. Budapest was under siege from a storm bent on its imminent destruction.

  It wasn’t working out as he’d expected. From the moment of his arrival, Martineau had treated him as a raw recruit, ignoring what the months of training at New Maiden had taught him, techniques and skills Martineau knew nothing about but which Hart was bursting to put to the test. (When Martineau had joined the Service, training was rudimentary.) Not surprisingly, Martineau hadn’t wanned to his remark that he’d joined the Service because he’d failed to get into the Foreign Office. Was he now being punished for a momentary indiscretion by a man of a different generation, who simply didn’t understand that after the intensive weeks at the Vicarage all his energies were tuned and ready for battle? He was ready to be let loose on the enemy. Why didn’t Martineau give him his head?

  He was to spend his first weeks ‘getting his feet under the desk’, Martineau had instructed. The consular duties he was engaged in were necessary to ‘develop his cover’, a euphemism, as Hart saw it, for administration, filing, typing, answering the telephone, making tea, office work and office hours. He might as well have been clerking in Leadenhall Street. The only difference was, in Budapest you couldn’t talk about what you were doing. He assumed clerks in Leadenhall Street were under no such restraining order. What had he learned that he could betray? Did it matter if the Sovs knew how many sugars Martineau took in his tea?

  ‘We’re fighting an undeclared war against a formidable enemy,’ Martineau said. ‘He is as intent on preventing us from reading his mind as we are on learning his secrets. Any information, however trivial it may seem to us, is grist to the Soviet mill.’

  So Martineau’s two lumps of Tate & Lyle’s best granulated were classified information, though for the life of him Hart couldn’t work out why. During his time at the Vicarage, they had concentrated on matters of an altogether higher seriousness. Whichever way he looked at it, he could hardly call what he was doing the secret life. His training had omitted the one significant truth he’d learned in his first week on duty in Budapest, that working for the Inland Revenue would be more exciting.

  The lightning flash was so bright that for an instant, from his vantage point on the fourth floor of his building, the city across the river became a negative, a reverse image in black and white. Then the thunder broke with a huge crash directly overhead and the apartment shuddered. He was in the eye of the storm.

  Did Martineau never have doubts about the value of the tasks they had to perform? After a sweltering day filled with pettiness and frustration when he had come close to losing his temper more than once, he put the question to Martineau. Perhaps by getting him to talk about what he believed in, he might get closer to the man, understand him better, learn how to deal with him.

  ‘Our role is to safeguard the society we both grew up in,’ Martineau replied. ‘If we are to do that successfully, we must be able to read the enemy’s intentions. We must know his mind, study his behaviour, note the smallest changes in his routines. That is the never-ending task we are entrusted with. What could be more important than that?’

  ‘How do you equate these high-sounding words with the mundane nature of what London asks us to do?’ Hart asked, putting forward an edited version of his own frustration. More tactful, he thought, to appear to blame London for his condition than anyone closer to home. Did Merton House really want to know who had arrived from Moscow? Was it worth all the risks of running agents under the nose of the AVH for the sake of trivial information like that? Who read it? Who made use of it?

  ‘They have analysts in London,’ Martineau replied. ‘Their job is to interpret the information we gather. Making policy depends on that. Without us, without the information we supply, nothing happens.’

  He wasn’t going to dent Martineau’s armour that way. The disciple was sticking to his faith with the fervour of the true believer.

  ‘Be grateful,’ Martineau warned, trying to outflank Hart’s evident restlessness. ‘Thin gruel is better than no gruel. And then, in this game, you never know when your bowl will be filled to the brim.’

  Give it time and the breaks will come. He’d heard that one before and it sounded no better with every day that passed. Hart bit his lip as he entered the embassy each morning and prayed his patience would resist the onslaught of condescension and irritation that assailed him. Things will change, he heard. Give it time. He struggled to put a brave face on it and concealed his growing frustration in his letters home.

  He set about ‘learning the ropes’, Martineau’s other favoured expression. He made friends at the embassy; found himself an apartment, three rooms on the top floor of an ancient building under the lee of the Royal Palace; took part in the embassy tennis ladder and did rather well; explored Budapest; learned enough Hungarian to get by (‘the most impossible language in the world’); familiarized himself with the territory. But the question posed in his first week gained in volume all the time. Surely he’d been prepared for more than this?

  Deprived of the answers he wanted, he turned his attention to understanding the political situation in Hungary, the names and recent histories of the players – Rakosi, Nagy, Gero and others. He recognized the style of Martineau’s ‘Borises’ (he called his agents ‘Borises’, a practice he’d presumably adopted during his Moscow posting): ‘Vardas’, a senior civil servant in one of the ministries; ‘Pluto’, the lecturer in physics with connections in the government; ‘Martha’, a politician’s mistress who occasionally came up with gems of pillow talk. Their reports were gathered and analysed by Martineau, coded up and sent on to London with the appropriate gloss. Martineau knew his territory and his people were good. Hart’s quarrel wasn’t with Martineau himself, the man had his respect, but with his overprotective attitude. His mothering was torment.

  The rain had started again, throwing itself in wild bursts against the window with the ferocity of a machine gun. Hart saw water racing through the gutters in the street below, and he wondered how long he could resist the humidity and keep the window shut.

  The first signs that the tension between them might break out into a quarrel arose, unexpectedly, over a discussion about possible Soviet responses to the threat of an uprising.

  ‘Any popular insurrection is bound to demand the removal of Rakosi,’ Martineau was saying. ‘That’ll face the Soviets with an uncomfortable choice between letting the people dictate who governs them or putting tanks on the streets to suppress the people.’

  ‘I can’t see the Soviets removing their own man. They’d lose too much face.’

  ‘If they send in the tanks,’ Martineau argued, ‘will the West stand by and let them get away with it? Surely not?’

  ‘I don’t believe for a moment we’d ris
k any kind of confrontation that could lead to war, merely to save the lives of a few Hungarians who don’t like living with the Russians. Do you?’

  Hart sounded more aggressive than he felt, but his anger was dangerously close to the surface.

  ‘A policy of inaction is very risky with the Soviets. It tells them that whatever they do, we don’t have the nerve to oppose them.’

  ‘In this case I’d prefer to call it prudence.’

  Martineau wasn’t convinced. ‘What if, as a consequence of that inaction, thousands of innocent people go to their deaths? How do you square your conscience with murder on that scale?’

  ‘Isn’t that called realpolitik?’ Hart replied. Was that really what he believed? ‘The Hungarians have the bad luck to live in the Soviet sphere of influence. The world’s not going to square up to the Soviets and risk blowing itself to bits because of what might happen in the streets of Budapest, is it? Things just don’t work like that.’ Realizing that he may have gone too far, he added, ‘Just as well we aren’t faced with such a decision, isn’t it?’

  The thunder had retreated. There was an occasional distant rumble from behind the hills, but that was all. The street lights had come on. An illuminated Budapest, city of blown opportunities, swam wetly before his eyes.

  Somehow, he didn’t think he’d presented himself in the best possible light.

  5

  Extract from the Daily Express of 12 June 1956:

  MISSING ENGLISHMAN

  Foreign Office sources today refused to confirm or deny that there is growing concern about the fate of an Englishman who has been reported missing on the continent for the last four weeks. Joseph Leman, a Cambridge graduate and fluent Russian speaker who works at the Institute of Soviet Affairs, was last heard of setting off for a short trip to Vienna.