Codename Wolf

by Gil Hogg

  There was plenty to say on my side in these many interviews. I rambled through my illustrious family. As Marius had said, the officials liked dynasties, and I gave them a good measure of Charles the gambler, and even Charles’s father, the shipping magnate. I had school and university well researched and digested and my story off pat. I gilded the lily a little on my work, but told no untruth in explaining that I was a self-employed businessman, trading in machinery. Amongst these bureaucrats, a self-employed person was a wonder of self-reliance. On the sporting side, I confined myself to the second XV at school, and the actual county championship achievements on the track of James Conway.

  My academic curriculum vitae was supported by a reference from a retired tutor at Oriel whom I knew slightly. The tutor was senile and confused me with my half-brother. I supplemented that with a reference from Marius Jacob, who had a destructive liking for being misleading. He knew no more of me than he had learned during our drinking sessions, but wrote of me glowingly as a friend, and a man of integrity with an acute brain. The two latter attributes may have been true, but Marius could hardly have known.

  In all this, my military record was the clincher. I guessed that MI6 would have access to my file, so I had rounded it off with a letter from General Sir Humphrey Fraser, Colonel of the 102nd, rather than my sour CO in Kabul. Sir Humphrey kindly repeated what he had told me in the officers’ mess; that I might well have been decorated for Operation Moonlight.

  As the interviews drifted on, seemingly without end, I became confident that I would pass, but felt indifferent. I submitted to batteries of tests of intelligence and personality and leadership potential, always knowing what MI6 wanted to establish, and reacting appropriately. I have no doubt that I emerged as the strong, calm, reliable leader they were seeking. I found my questioners stodgy, snobbishly hidebound, and gullible. My anticipation of joining a service full of exciting projects, carried forward by dynamic and interesting people, had faded. But despite these dreary preliminaries, there was a cachet about being a secret agent. I was still determined to give it a chance. There was plenty of time in the future to think of that job in the City of London or New York, probably in an investment fund, and all the money it would make for me. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan could wait.

  4

  My early months in MI6 are better forgotten, eighteen of them in a seemingly endless series of courses and conferences, everything from pistol practice to electronic surveillance. I didn’t even have a desk, but was one of a rabble of trainees stabled in a common room at a dilapidated town house in Wimpole Street. In the short intervals between courses, we sat on tattered couches, with bare boards under our feet, drank coffee and mused privately on our suspicions about each other. Naturally, I set out to be pleasant and agreeable to everybody, including the crabby old woman who made the coffee.

  The pay, I found, was pitiful but I had a useful sum in the bank – my inheritance from Gladys, the damages I won for her untimely demise, and the profits from my car dealing which were largely free of taxes in the manner in which I managed them. I added a couple of tailor-made suits to an already adequate wardrobe, and sauced them with a few shirts and silk ties from Gieves & Hawkes. My dress wasn’t appreciated at the Mill (as the Wimpole Street base was called). My colleagues, when they were not wearing jeans, trainers and anoraks and looking as though they were going to a football match, affected sack-like off-the-peg suits, check flannel shirts and spurious club ties, like the crumpled Norrington.

  I let my Oxford apartment and rented furnished rooms in a mews house off Welbeck Street, spacious, comfortable and quiet. I had to garage my Porsche 911; it was quite useless in London, but I kept it, thinking I might be invited to the occasional dinner in the home counties, and I could arrive in passable style. I enhanced my goodwill with my fellow trainees with two modest champagne parties over this period, and even by lending the Porsche on occasions. My colleagues regarded me as an upper crusty military type, but a ‘decent chap’ and good company – I was particular about being good company.

  I was beginning to get bored and restive, thinking that even the world of used cars had more excitement in it than the intelligence service, when I received my first appointment. I was posted to US Liaison. It was considered to be a valuable appointment, and in my view, no less than I deserved. The appointment also usefully raised my stakes with my peers.

  I flew to New York in high anticipation. The flight itself caused a slight problem. Determined to begin my new career with a flourish, I upgraded my mean economy airline ticket. I thought, why stop at business class on such a momentous occasion? I flew first class. At Heathrow when I boarded, I settled myself in the soft and roomy seat, attended by a dutiful hostess with a tray of delicate appetisers and a glass of champagne. I looked up to see a man in the cabin doorway. He was studying me. He looked irritable. Rather than a famous actor or politician, it was Cyril Hornby, with his sallow, egg-shaped head and tiny spectacles, clutching a worn, civil service-issue briefcase. Hornby, the head of my section in the US, whom I had met briefly in London, did not speak but tore himself from the cabin doorway and disappeared into the belly of the plane with the crowd.

  At thirty-five thousand feet, I reflected upon this unpropitious sign with an ice-cold vodka, and a portion of lobster.

  I did not see Hornby at Kennedy airport, having disembarked long before him. I presented myself, after an expensive cab ride, at the Rockefeller Plaza suite of my department. I was allowed to cool in the waiting area with my suitcases, for half an hour, with occasional refreshment kindnesses from the receptionist. Hornby himself did not materialise, but a smiling, flame-haired Cornishman named Yarham eventually appeared. He showed me my desk, in a glass-partitioned open-plan office and stood back while I admired its minimalist lines and cramped position.

  “Not much, sir, is it? But I expect you’ll be out a good deal.”

  “I hope so,” I said, concealing my disappointment with a tight smile.

  “Well, let me show you the apartment,” Yarham said, with a knowing look that gave me a stab of concern.

  Yarham took me in a cab, with my luggage, to a one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment at the top of an old building, high-ceilinged and badly in need of decoration. The furnishings were mean and the place had the odour of the last occupant, a nauseating wet-dog smell.

  Yarham looked at me, cocked his head on one side and said, “Not very salubrious, Captain Conway?”

  “Or very clean.”

  “But it’s a very good address, sir.”

  Later, Hornby received me coldly and made no reference to the flight. He lay back in his chair, looked out of the window, fourteen floors above Fifth Avenue, and fingering his ear, began to lecture. What emerged from his drone was that my lowly function would be to receive published reports from US departments of state, and to analyse and comment upon them. To me, US Liaison had implied hobnobbing with CIA field officers and cryptographers from the National Security Agency, hearing all the latest plots and plans of the most diverse intelligence services in the world. When I asked Hornby why the analysis I was supposed to supply couldn’t be done from London, he regarded me pityingly.

  “Oh, dear, you are virginal. Yes, it’s perfectly possible to do this in London, and a lot cheaper, but always remember, Captain Conway, you have to find out as much as possible about what our American friends are doing.”

  “You don’t think they tell us?”

  “Not the truth, my dear Conway.”

  “But we have a special relationship.”

  “So does a grandfather with the granddaughter he is seducing,” Hornby said wanly.

  Hornby later introduced me to a number, but not all of the rest of the department. I thought that it was implicit in each meeting that I should speak to that person about work only when I had to; their work was something I wasn’t entitled to know about, and shouldn’t ask. It seemed that my colleagues would be wraiths who passed me in the corridor.

  I was in
New York. I was a spy. A spy with a growing pile of reports on his desk about new proposals for the postal service, the national cost of gas and oil production, the projected demands on the public transportation system over a ten-year term, the effect of legislative reforms on the insurance industry, and many other such absorbing subjects. At a glance, I could see very little intelligence potential in any of them. And I couldn’t understand how, buried in these reports, I would even get time to have afternoon tea with my American contacts in the many departments that produced the reports, let alone spy on them.

  It was at this point that Herbert Yarham came into my consciousness in a serious manner. He had been appointed as my assistant. In the absurd lottery of departmental life Yarham was assigned to me, although there would be times when I would feel that I was assigned to him. He appeared at first as the man who would help with my files; he was a clerk, an administrator (although a trained intelligence agent). I had hoped for a Miss Moneypenny and I got Yarham. He was about five years older than me, and as tall, but bony and ungainly, with a hugely prominent chin, a thick stand of red-gold hair, and shining light blue eyes.

  My first impression of Yarham as a worker was that he was dangerously enthusiastic, but I soon found that his knowledge of the form-filling, box-ticking and icon-clicking empire of intelligence was encyclopaedic. I also began to detect a particular subtlety and originality in his work which appealed to me. He knew the system, and took particular delight in outwitting it. He was drawn to puzzles and problems with nerdish pleasure. He was happy to sort out the paper – and computer-work messes I was beginning to create. With Yarham’s help, I would gradually gain the reputation of producing comprehensive and well-written reports containing valuable insights.

  Yarham’s ability to concentrate on a small issue and gain enjoyment from it was refreshing, intent as I was on scaling the heights of the secret universe and pulling off great coups on the way. His ambitions at work seemed to be readily achieved each day, while mine were always short of fulfilment.

  I found I could delegate most of my analytical work to Yarham. I would read the executive summary at the front of a report on, say, copper production and we would confer briefly. “Shall we say this? Or that?” I would ask. He would reply, “I would put it this way.” A matter of a few minutes, a few notes on a scrap of paper, and he would retire to his modest corner to complete the task. Most of our work disappeared without trace into the sink of bureaucracy, but occasionally, Yarham’s acidic analysis earned me some congratulations.

  Apart from a few hours spent with Yarham each week, I was free. I had met a girl who was a courier for MI6, Laurie Hayes, and she began to stay with me when she was in New York. My Oxford and London girlfriends sent me affectionate cards and threatened to visit, but I always replied that I would be out of town at the time.

  At first, with the flush of a new boy, I arranged to meet some of the researchers and civil servants who were involved in the reports Yarham was analysing; they were happy to elaborate their thinking to this British civil servant, and to have a winey lunch, stumbling over the list of questions which Yarham had invented. Since the authors of the reports were scattered across the US, there was an opportunity to travel out of New York and see the country. Sometimes Yarham accompanied me.

  We recognised quickly that as a real means of intelligence-gathering, the visits were a nonsense and began to apply what we called the Travel Test. Yarham marked all incoming reports with the address of the authors and kept a list. If there was a place either or both of us wanted to visit for a few days (say San Francisco, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park), Yarham could be relied upon to find a report which would pass the Travel Test by relating to that location. We would then fix meetings with the authors of the report, concoct a slate of questions, and make the visit, allowing generous time for sightseeing. With Yarham’s manipulation of the travel and expense account arrangements, we had regular and comfortable short breaks. And we did not neglect to include in our (really Yarham’s) analysis of the reports, a snippet of information obtained from the authors which was not in the text of the report.

  For a few months, these diversions, my girlfriend, the bars of New York, and some potentially useful connections at the Oxbridge & Ivy Club held my attention, but I was rapidly becoming disillusioned. The prospect of being a transatlantic version of the dyspeptic Norrington began to trouble me.

  Then Nick Stavros called me at the office.

  5

  I met Nick Stavros at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch; we ordered Manhattans straight up and contemplated each other. Nick, from Wapping, looked strained. He was short and broad-bodied, olive-skinned, with black curly hair, and usually an infectious lover of life like his Greek forebears. One of the more able and amenable of my intake of recruits, he had secured a prized appointment in Washington.

  Nick leaned back, sipped his drink and said, “You look as though you’re enjoying the life, Roger.”

  I saw no reason to hide. “Well, I’m not enjoying the job, Nick. No. Don’t be fooled by my cheery disposition. New York’s the greatest, but you know, after a while you get choked on the parties, the bars, the movies, the galleries, the concerts – if you don’t have a job. I analyse reports about the funding of interstate highways, and fascinating subjects like that. I’m thinking of getting out. Give me something real – real intelligence work I mean – to do here, and I’m the happiest man in the world.”

  “Uh-huh, could be useful, what you’re doing,” Nick said seriously.

  I could see he was comparing his own pitch. “Then they can get somebody else to do it. What about you? What are you up to?”

  I thought Nick had been appointed to liaise with the Central Intelligence Agency, but he explained it wasn’t quite that. He was with C3, which I had never heard of. He said they kept in touch with certain overseas trade associations, and then his voice trailed away as he realised the evident nonsense of this spiel.

  “Sounds like my job,” I said.

  If one rule had been hammered into the new recruits at every opportunity since we joined MI6, it was that we should shut up about our work to everybody, including colleagues unless it was a team effort. Nick was obviously trying to follow the rule. I felt no such constraint, because my small task at USL could be done by any member of the public, US or foreign. I insisted to Nick that my work was quite boring and almost useless.

  I didn’t mention my sense that things weren’t right with Nick either, and our talk drifted to the pleasures of New York and Washington. Assisted by the lobster blinis and the bottle of Chardonnay we had ordered, I was beginning to appreciate the opulence of the shining walnut panelling and the frescoes, and trying to imagine the Dorothy Parker days, when Nick, encouraged perhaps by my frankness, startled me with a question.

  “Do you know anything about The Disciples, Roger?”

  At first I thought I hadn’t been paying enough attention, and we had lurched into a spiritual discussion. Nick leaned over frowning at my confusion. “I mean the so-called club of Ivy League and Oxbridge operatives.”

  “Never heard of it. What do they do?”

  “It’s only rumours of course,” Nick said weakly.

  “What we live on. What do they do? Of course I can imagine all the professors and rocket scientists getting together and thinking they’re a lot smarter than anybody else.”

  “Yes, maybe that’s all it is, a sort of mutual arrogance club,” Nick said thoughtfully.

  “How about the name, The Disciples? Sounds… pretentious.”

  “That’s what the rumours call them. I don’t know if that’s what they call themselves.”

  “So you think they do exist?”

  Nick didn’t answer directly. “I suppose the name suggests the game in a sneering kind of way. Disciples of what they would call Reason, disciples of Knowledge… or maybe disciples of nothing very much except their own collective ego.”

  “Guys who believe they know best how to run the planet?”
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  “Yes.”

  I was interested. “What are the Disciples reputed to actually do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they have a brand of patriotism that’s entirely their own.”

  “It’s come up?”

  “Yes, in a way.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I better not. I may be getting it out of proportion. Tell you what, come to Washington in a couple of weeks; things might be clearer by then, and we’ll talk some more. I trust you, Roger, and I wouldn’t like this conversation to get out.”

  I thought that Nick felt he’d imparted a special confidence, but actually he’d hardly said anything; it was no use trying to budge him to tell more. We closed the lunch with cognac and coffee, and reflections about the success or failure of some of our peers. I left him in Times Square slightly tipsy. Nick’s words about trusting me remained in my mind, and seemed to suggest the importance he placed on the Disciples. I resolved to ask Yarham to find a report which passed the Washington travel test, fix the necessary meeting and book me a flight.

  A week later, when Yarham and I were getting positioned at my desk for one of our lightning surveys of the latest crop of reports, Yarham said, “I was very sorry to hear about the death of your friend Mr Stavros, sir, and I’ve taken the liberty of cancelling the Washington visit.”

  I was shocked. “What happened? It’s the first I’ve heard.”

  “Heart attack. The memo I saw said a British Embassy official died of a sudden heart attack.”

  Nick Stavros was my age and he had been passed into the service with the required high level of fitness. “Where did it happen? Do you know any more?”