The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  “I understand,” said Professor Turing. “But you must understand as well. Book codes work with books, don’t they? Because the book is a closed, locked universe—that is the point, after all. What makes the book code work, as simple a device as it is, is, after all, that it’s a book. It’s mass-produced on Linotype machines, carefully knitted up in a bindery, festooned with some amusing imagery for a cover, and whether you read it in Manchester or Paris or Berlin or Kathmandu, the same words will be found on the same places on the same page, and thus everything makes sense. This, however, is not a book but a manuscript, in a human hand. Who knows how age, drinking, debauchery, tricks of memory, lack of stamina, advanced syphilis or gonorrhea may have corrupted the author’s effort? It will almost certainly get messier and messier as it goes along, and it may in the end not resemble the original at all. Our whole assumption was that it would be a close enough replica to what MacBurney had produced twenty years earlier for us to locate the right letters and unlock the code. Everything about it is facsimile, after all, even to those frequent religious doodles on the pages. If it were a good facsimile, the growth or shrinkage would be consistent and we could alter our calculations by measurable quantities and unlock it. But it was not to be. Look at the pages, please, Captain. You will see that even among themselves, they vary greatly. Sometimes the letters are large, sometimes small. Sometimes a page contains twelve hundred letters, sometimes six hundred, sometimes twenty-three hundred. In certain of them, it seems clear that he was drunk, pen in hand, and the lines are all atumble, and he is just barely in control. His damnable lack of consistency dooms any effort to use this as a key to a code contained in the original. I told you it was a long shot.”

  Again a long and ghastly silence.

  “Well, then, Professor,” said Gubbins, “that being the case, I think we’ve taken you from your work at Bletchley long enough. And we have been absent from our duties as well. Captain St. Florian needs rest and rehabilitation. Basil, I think all present will enthusiastically endorse you for decoration, if it matters, for an astonishing and insanely courageous effort. Perhaps a nice promotion, Basil. Would you like to be a major? Think of the trouble you could cause. But please don’t be bitter. To win a war you throw out a million seeds and hope that some of them produce, in the end, fruit. I’ll alert the staff to call—”

  “Excuse me,” said Professor Turing. “What exactly is going on here?”

  “Ah, Professor, there seems to be no reason for us to continue.”

  “I daresay you chaps have got to learn to listen,” he said.

  Basil was slightly shocked by the sudden tartness in his voice.

  “I am not like Captain St. Florian, a witty ironist, and I am not like you three high mandarins with your protocols and all that elaborate and counterfeit bowing and scraping. I am a scientist. I speak in exact truth. What I say is true and nothing else is.”

  “I’m rather afraid I don’t grasp your meaning, sir,” said Gubbins stiffly. It was clear that neither he nor the other two mandarins enjoyed being addressed so dismissively by a forty-year-old professor in baggy tweeds and wire-frame glasses.

  “I said listen. Listen!” repeated the professor, rather rudely, but with such intensity it became instantly clear that he regarded them as intellectual inferiors and was highly frustrated by their rash conclusion.

  “Sir,” said General Cavendish, rather icily, “if you have more to add, please add it. As General Sir Colin has said, we have other duties—”

  “Secret code!” interrupted the professor.

  All were stupefied.

  “Don’t you see? It’s rather brilliant!” He laughed, amused by the code maker’s wit. “Look here,” he said. “I shall try to explain. What is the most impenetrable code of all to unlock? You cannot do it with machines that work a thousand times faster than men’s brains.”

  Nobody could possibly answer.

  “It is the code that pretends to be a code but isn’t at all.”

  More consternation, impatience, yet fear of being mocked.

  “Put another way,” said the professor, “the code is the absence of code.”

  No one was going to deal with that one.

  “Whoever dreamed this up, our Cambridge librarian or an NKVD spymaster, he was a smart fellow. Only two people on earth could know the meaning of this communication, though I’m glad to say they’ve been joined by a third one. Me. It came to me while running. Great for clearing the mind, I must say.”

  “You have the advantage, Professor,” said Sir Colin. “Please, continue.”

  “A code is a disguise. Suppose something is disguised as itself?”

  The silence was thunderous.

  “All right, then. Look at the pages. Look at them!”

  Like chastened schoolboys, the class complied.

  “You, St. Florian, you’re a man of hard experience in the world. Tell me what you see.”

  “Ah…” said Basil. He was completely out of irony. “Well, ah, a messy scrawl of typical eighteenth-century handwriting, capitalized nouns, that sort of thing. A splotch of something, perhaps wine, perhaps something more dubious.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I suppose, all these little religious symbols.”

  “Look at them carefully.”

  Basil alone did not need to unlimber reading spectacles. He saw what they were quickly enough.

  “They appear to be crosses,” he said.

  “Just crosses?”

  “Well, each of them is mounted on a little hill. Like Calvary, one supposes.”

  “Not like Calvary. There were three on Calvary. This is only one. Singular.”

  “Yes, well, now that I look harder, I see the hill isn’t exactly a hill. It’s segmented into round, irregular shapes, very precisely drawn in the finest line his nib would permit. I would say it’s a pile of stones.”

  “At last we are getting somewhere.”

  “I think I’ve solved your little game, Professor,” said General Cavendish. “That pile of stones, that would be some kind of road marker, eh? Yes, and a cross has been inserted into it. Road marker, that is, marking the path, is that what it is? It would be a representation of the title of the pamphlet, The Path to Jesus. It is an expression of the central meaning of his argument.”

  “Not what it means. Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf?”

  The general was taken aback by the ferocity with which Professor Turing spoke.

  “I am not interested in what it means. If it means something, that meaning is different from the thing itself. I am interested in what it is. Is, not means.”

  “I believe,” said the admiral, “a roadside marker is called a cairn. So that is exactly what it is, Professor. Is that what you—”

  “Please take it the last step. There’s only one more. Look at it and tell me what it is.”

  “Cairn…cross,” said Basil. “It can only be called a cairncross. But that means nothing unless…”

  “Unless what?” commanded Turing.

  “A name,” said Sir Colin.

  Hello, hello, said Basil to himself. He saw where the path to Jesus led.

  “The Soviet spymaster was telling the Cambridge librarian the name of the agent at Bletchley Park so that he could tell the agent’s new handler. The device of communication was a 154-year-old doodle. The book-code indicators were false, part of the disguise.”

  “So there is a man at Bletchley named Cairncross?” asked Sir Colin.

  “John Cairncross, yes,” said Professor Turing. “Hut 6. Scotsman. Don’t know the chap myself, but I’ve heard his name mentioned—supposed to be first-class.”

  “John Cairncross,” said Sir Colin.

  “He’s your Red spy. Gentlemen, if you need to feed information to Stalin on Operation Citadel, you have to do it through Comrade Cairncross. When
it comes from him, Stalin and the Red generals will believe it. They will fortify the Kursk salient. The Germans will be smashed. The retreat from the East will begin. The end will begin. What was it again? ‘Home alive in ’45,’ not ‘Dead in heaven in ’47.’ ”

  “Bravo,” said Sir Colin.

  “Don’t bravo me, Sir Colin. I just work at sums, like Bob Cratchit. Save your bravos for that human fragment of the Kipling imagination sitting over there.”

  “I say,” said Basil, “instead of a bravo, could I have a nice whisky?”

  CHARLIE’S SHELL GAME

  BRIAN GARFIELD

  THE AUTHOR OF seventy novels and scores of short stories, Brian Francis Wynne Garfield (1939–2018) was not only prolific but also versatile and accomplished. He wrote numerous westerns, beginning with Range Justice (1960), written when he was eighteen. He eventually was chosen to be the president of the Western Writers of America. He also wrote adventure, war, sea, and historical novels, as well as nonfiction.

  It is for his mystery, crime, and espionage fiction, however, that Garfield is best known. His first great success was Hopscotch (1975), which won the Edgar as the best novel of the year and was made into a very successful motion picture in 1980 with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. The book was a tense suspense film set in the Cold War era and seemed a natural for the movies. Several attempts with various screenwriters failed until Garfield became involved and helped turn the story into a comedy.

  As popular as the movie was, Garfield was even better known for the 1974 motion picture made from his novel Death Wish (1972). It stars Charles Bronson as a New York man whose wife and child are brutalized and who turns into a vigilante, putting himself in dangerous positions and exacting vengeance when attacked. Set in a time of seemingly relentless street violence, the film divided liberals, who loathed the notion of a citizen taking the law into his own hands, and conservatives, who applauded what they regarded as street justice. The tremendous success of the film spawned four sequels. A decade after the first film was released, Bernie Goetz, a mugging victim, also became a vigilante in events reminiscent of Garfield’s novel and the film adaptation. Though largely vilified by the media and New York’s politicians, “Bernie for Mayor” buttons sprouted all over the city.

  Nineteen films were inspired by Garfield’s work, though none had the impact of Death Wish or the critical acclaim of Hopscotch. Perhaps the best was The Stepfather (1987), a low-budget suspense film for which he and his longtime friend Donald E. Westlake had created a story that was remade in 2009 with more money but less suspense.

  His short story collection Checkpoint Charlie (1981) was a sequel to Hopscotch that featured Charlie Dark, an inept CIA agent whose main fear was losing his job.

  “Charlie’s Shell Game” was originally published in the February 1978 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Checkpoint Charlie (New York, Mysterious Press, 1981).

  CHARLIE’S SHELL GAME

  BRIAN GARFIELD

  BY THE END of the afternoon I had seen three of them check in at the reception desk and I knew one of them had come to kill me but I didn’t know which one.

  Small crowds had arrived in the course of the afternoon and I’d had plenty of time to study them while they stood in queues to check in at the reception desk. One lot of sixteen had come in together from an airport bus—middle-aged couples, a few children, two or three solitary businessmen; tourists, most of them, and sitting in the lobby with a magazine for a prop I wrote them off. My man would be young—late twenties, I knew that much.

  I knew his name too but he wouldn’t be traveling under it.

  Actually the dossier was quite thick; we knew a good deal about him, including the probability that he would come to Caracas to kill me. We knew something of his habits and patterns; we’d seen the corpses that marked his backtrail; we knew his name, age, nationality; we had several physical descriptions—they varied but there was agreement on certain points: medium height, muscularly trim, youthful. We knew he spoke at least four languages. But he hadn’t been photographed and we had no fingerprints; he was too clever for that.

  Of the check-ins I’d espied at the Tamanaco desk three were possibles—any of them could be my intended assassin.

  My job was to take him before he could take me.

  * * *

  —

  Myerson had summoned me back from Helsinki and I had arrived in Langley at midnight grumpy and rumpled after the long flight but the cypher had indicated red priority so I’d delivered myself directly to the office without pause to bathe or sleep, let alone eat. I was famished. Myerson had taken a look at my stubble and plunged right in: “You’re flying to Caracas in the morning. The eight o’clock plane.”

  “You may have to carry me on board.”

  “Me and how many weightlifters?” He glanced at the clock above the official photograph of the President. “You’ve got eight hours. The briefings won’t take that long. Anyhow you can sleep on the plane.”

  “Maybe. I never have,” I said, “but then I’ve never been this exhausted. Have you got anything to eat around here?”

  “No. This should perk you up, though—it’s Gregorius.”

  “Is it now.”

  “I knew you’d wag your tail.”

  “All right, you have my attention.” Then I had to fight the urge to look straight up over my head in alarm: Myerson’s smile always provokes the premonition that a Mosler safe is falling toward one’s head.

  “You’ve gained it back. Gone off the diet?” Now that he had me hooked in his claws he was happy to postpone the final pounce: like a cat with a chipmunk. I really hate him.

  I said, “Crawfish.”

  “What?”

  “It’s what you eat in Finland. You take them fresh out of a lake, just scoop them up off the bottom in a wooden box with a chickenwire bottom. You throw them straight into the pot and watch them turn color. I can eat a hundred at a sitting. Now what’s this about Caracas and Gregorius?”

  “You’re getting disgustingly fat, Charlie.”

  “I’ve always been fat. As for disgusting, I could diet it off, given the inclination. You, on the other hand, would need to undergo brain surgery. I’d prescribe a prefrontal lobotomy.”

  “Then you’d have no one left to spice your life.”

  “Spice? I thought it was hemlock.”

  “In this case more likely a few ounces of plastique. That seems to be Gregorius’s preference. And you do make a splendid target, Charlie. I can picture two hundred and umpty pounds of blubber in flabby pieces along the ceiling. Gregorius would be most gratified.”

  He’d mentioned Gregorius now; it meant he was ready to get down to it and I slumped, relieved; I no longer enjoy volleying insults with him—they cut too close and it’s been a long while since either of us believed they were jokes. Our mutual hatred is not frivolous. But we need each other. I’m the only one he can trust to do these jobs without a screw-up and he’s the only one who’ll give me the jobs. The slick militaristic kids who run the organization don’t offer their plums to fat old men. In any section but Myerson’s I’d have been fired years ago—overage, overweight, overeager to stay in the game by the old rules rather than the new. I’m the last of the generation that puts ingenuity ahead of computer print-outs.

  They meet once a month on the fifth floor to discuss key personnel reassignments and it’s a rare month that goes by without an attempt being made by one of the computer kids to tie a can to my tail; I know for a fact Myerson has saved me by threatening to resign: “If he goes, I go.” The ultimatim has worked up to now but as we both get older and I get fatter the kids become more strident and I’m dubious how long Myerson can continue the holding action. It’s not loyalty to me, God knows; it’s purely his own self-interest—he knows if he loses me he’ll get the sack himself: he hasn’t got anybody else
in the section who knows how to produce. Nobody worthwhile will work for him. I wouldn’t either but I’ve got no choice. I’m old, fat, stubborn, arrogant, and conceited. I’m also the best.

  He said, “Venezuela is an OPEC country, of course,” and waited to see if I would attend his wisdom—as if the fact were some sort of esoterica. I waited, yawned, looked at my watch. Myerson can drive you to idiocy belaboring the obvious. Finally he went on:

  “The oil-country finance ministers are meeting in Caracas this time. Starting Thursday.”

  “I haven’t been on Mars, you know. They have newspapers even in Helsinki.”

  “Redundancies are preferable to ignorance, Charlie.” It is his litany. I doubt he passes an hour, even in his sleep, when that sentence doesn’t run through his mind: he’s got it on tape up there.

  “Will you come to the point?”

  “They’ll be discussing the next round of oil-price hikes,” he said. “There’s some disagreement among them. The Saudis and the Venezuelans want to keep the increase down below five percent. Some of the others want a big boost—perhaps twenty-five or thirty percent.”

  “I plead. Tell me about Gregorius.”

  “This is getting us there. Trust me.”

  “Let’s see if I can’t speed it up,” I said. “Of course it’s the Mahdis——”

  “Of course.”

  “They want Israel for themselves, they don’t want a Palestinian peace agreement, they want to warn the Arab countries that they won’t be ignored. What is it, then? They’ve arranged to have Gregorius explode a room full of Arab leaders in Caracas? Sure. After that the Arab countries won’t be so quick to negotiate a Middle East settlement without Mahdi participation. Am I warm?”

  “Scalding. Now I know you’re awake.”

  “Barely.”

  The Mahdi gang began as an extremist splinter arm of the Black Septemberists. The gang is small but serious. It operates out of floating headquarters in the Libyan desert. There’s a long and tedious record of hijackings, terror bombings, assassinations. Nothing unique about that. What makes the gang unusual is its habit of using mercenaries. The Mahdis—they named themselves after the mystic who wiped out Gordon at Khartoum—are Palestinians but they’re Bedouins, not Arabs; they’re few in number and they’re advanced in age compared with the teen-age terrorists of the PLO. The Mahdi staff cadre consists of men who were adults at the time of the 1947 expulsion from Palestine. Some of the sheikhs are in their seventies by now.