“Hmmm,” said Macht, a logical sort. “If the agent was originally going to Sur-la-Gane, it seems clear that his ultimate destination would be Paris. There’s really not much for him to do in Bricquebec or Sur-la-Gane, for that matter. Now, how would he get here?”
“Clearly, the railway is the only way.”
“Exactly,” said Hauptmann Macht. “What time does the train from Cherbourg get in? We should meet it and see if anyone is traveling under papers belonging to M. Piens. I’m sure he’d want them returned.”
“Have I been misinformed?” asked Basil. “Are we at war with the Russians? I thought they were our friends.”
“I wish it were as easy as that,” said Sir Colin. “But it never is. Yes, in one sense we are at war with Germany and at peace with Russia. On the other hand, this fellow Stalin is a cunning old brute, stinking of bloody murder to high heaven, and thus he presumes that all are replicas of himself, equally cynical and vicious. So while we are friends with him at a certain level, he still spies on us at another level. And because we know him to be a monster, we still spy on him. It’s all different compartments. Sometimes it’s damned hard to keep straight, but there’s one thing all the people in this room agree on: the moment the rope snaps hard about Herr Hitler’s chicken neck, the next war begins, and it is between we of the West and they of the East.”
“Rather dispiriting,” said Basil. “One would have thought one had accomplished something other than clearing the stage for the next war.”
“So it goes, alas and alack, in our sad world. But Basil, I think you will be satisfied to know that the end game of this little adventure we are preparing for you is actually to help the Russians, not to hurt them. It benefits ourselves, of course, no doubt about it. But we need to help them see a certain truth that they are reluctant, based on Stalin’s various neuroses and paranoias, to believe.”
“You see,” said the general, “he would trust us a great deal more if we opened a second front. He doesn’t think much of our business in North Africa, where our losses are about one-fiftieth of his. He wants our boys slaughtered on the French beaches in numbers that approach the slaughter of his boys. Then he’ll know we’re serious about this Allies business. But a second front in Europe is a long way off, perhaps two years. A lot of American men and matériel have to land here before then. In the meantime we grope and shuffle and misunderstand and misinterpret. That’s where you’ll fit in, we hope. Your job, as you will learn at the conclusion of this dreadful meeting about two days from now, is to shine light and dismiss groping and shuffling and misinterpretation.”
“I hope I can be of help,” said Basil. “However, my specialty is blowing things up.”
“You have nothing to blow up this time out,” said Sir Colin. “You are merely helping us explain something.”
“But I must ask, since you’re permitting me unlimited questions, how do you know all this?” said Basil. “You say Stalin is so paranoid and unstable he does not trust us and even spies upon us, you know this spy exists and is well placed, and that his identity, I presume, has been sent by this absurd book-code method, yet that is exactly where your knowledge stops. I am baffled beyond any telling of it. You know so much, and then it stops cold. It seems to me that you would be more likely to know all or nothing. My head aches profoundly. This business is damned confounding.”
“All right, then, we’ll tell you. I think you have a right to know, since you are the one we are proposing to send out. Admiral, as it was your service triumph, I leave it to you.”
“Thank you, Sir Colin,” said the admiral. “In your very busy year of 1940, you probably did not even notice one of the world’s lesser wars. I mean there was our war with the Germans in Europe and all that blitzkrieg business, the Japanese war with the Chinese, Mussolini in Ethiopia, and I am probably leaving several out. 1940 was a very good year for war. However, if you check the back pages of the Times, you’ll discover that in November of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The border between them has been in dispute since 1917. The Russians expected an easy time of it, mustering ten times the number of soldiers as did the Finns, but the Finns taught them some extremely hard lessons about winter warfare, and by early 1940 the piles of frozen dead had gotten immense. The war raged for four long months, killing thousands over a few miles of frozen tundra, and ultimately, because lives mean nothing to Communists, the Russians prevailed, at least to the extent of forcing a peace on favorable terms.”
“I believe I heard a bit of it.”
“Excellent. What you did not hear, as nobody did, was that in a Red Army bunker taken at high cost by the Finns, a half-burned codebook was found. Now since we in the West abandoned the Finns, they were sponsored and supplied in the war by the Third Reich. If you see any photos from the war, you’ll think they came out of Stalingrad, because the Finns bought their helmets from the Germans. Thus one would expect that such a highvalue intelligence treasure as a codebook, even half burned, would shortly end up in German hands.
“However, we had a very good man in Finland, and he managed somehow to take possession of it. The Russians thought it was burned. The Germans never knew it existed. Half a code is actually not merely better than nothing, it is far better than nothing, and is in fact almost a whole codebook, because a clever boots like young Professor Turing here can tease most messages into comprehension.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” said the professor. “There were very able men at Bletchley Park before I came aboard.”
What, wondered Basil, would Bletchley Park be?
“Thus we have been able to read and mostly understand Soviet low- to midlevel codes since 1940. That’s how we knew about the librarian at Cambridge and several other sticky lads who, though they speak high Anglican and know where their pinkie goes on the teacup, want to see our Blighty go all red and men like us stood up to the wall and shot for crimes against the working class.”
“That would certainly ruin my crease. Anyhow, before we go much further, may I sum up?” said Basil.
“If you can.”
“By breaking the Russian crypto, you know that a highly secure, carefully guarded book code has been given to a forthcoming Russian spy. It contains the name of a highly important British traitor somewhere in government service. When he gets here, he will take the code to the Cambridge librarian, present his bona fides, and the librarian will retrieve the Reverend Thomas MacBurney’s Path to Jesus — wait. How would the Russians themselves have… Oh, now I see, it all hangs together. It would be easy for the librarian, not like us, to make a photographed copy of the book and have it sent to the Russian service.”
“NKVD, it is called.”
“I think I knew that. Thus the librarian quickly unbuttons the name and gives it to the new agent, and the agent contacts him at perhaps this mysterious Bletchley Park that the professor wasn’t supposed to let slip—”
“That was a mistake, Professor,” said Sir Colin. “No milk and cookies for you tonight.”
“So somehow I’m supposed to, I don’t know what, do something somewhere, a nasty surprise indeed, but it will enable you to identify the spy at Bletchley Park.”
“Indeed, you have the gist of it.”
“And you will then arrest him.”
“No, of course not. In fact, we shall promote him.”
It was a pity the trip to Paris lasted only six hours with all the local stops, as the colonel had just reached the year 1914 in his life. It was incredibly fascinating. Mutter did not want him to attend flying school, but he was transfixed by the image of those tiny machines in their looping and spinning and diving that he had seen — and described in detail to Basil — in Mühlenberg in 1912, and he was insistent upon becoming an aviator.