In 1929 the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters was on the top floor and rooftop of a residential building across the street from the War Office, in Whitehall Court. When Andrew and his mother stepped off the lift on the seventh floor, they were in the building’s eastern turret; through a narrow window the boy could see some formal gardens in sunlight below, and Hungerford Bridge spanning the broad steely face of the Thames beyond. The lift had smelled of latakia tobacco and hair oil, and the warm air in the turret room was spicy with the vanilla scent of very old paper.
Andrew didn’t know what place this was, and from the frown on his mother’s thin face as she glanced around at the paneled chamber he guessed that she had never been here and had expected something grander.
The man who stepped forward and took her arm had been in his late thirties then, his raven-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead, his jawline still firm above the stiff white collar and the knot of his Old Etonian tie. “Miss Hale,” he said, smiling; and then he glanced down at Andrew and added, “And this must be… the son.”
“Who has no knowledge that would put him at peril,” Andrew’s mother said.
“Easier to do than undo,” the man said cheerfully, apparently agreeing with her. “My dears, C wants you shown right in to him,” he went on, turning toward the narrowest, steepest stairway Andrew had ever seen, “so if you’ll let me lead you through the maze…”
But first Andrew’s mother crouched beside him, the hem of her linen dress sweeping the scuffed wood floor, and she licked her fingers and pushed back the boy’s unruly blond hair. “These are the people who got us home from Cairo,” she said quietly, “when… Herod … was looking for you. And they’re the King’s men. They deserve our obedience.”
“Herod!” laughed their escort as Andrew’s mother straightened and led the boy by the hand toward the stairs. “Well, Herod is no longer in the service of the Raj—and he’s doing any harrying of Nazrani children in Jidda nowadays, for an Arab king.”
Hale’s mother snapped, “Uskut!”—an exclamation she sometimes used around the house to convey shut up. “God blacken his face!”
“Inshallah bukra,” the man answered, in what might have been Arabic. He and Andrew’s mother nearly had to shuffle sideways to climb the tight-curving counterclockwise stairs, ducking their heads around a caged and buzzing electric light, though Andrew was able to tap up the stairs comfortably.
Andrew was excited by the air of secret knowledge implicit in this place and this man, and he was impressed that his mother had had dealings with whoever these mysterious King’s men were; still, he didn’t like the cruel sort of humor that seemed to be expressed in the lines under the black-haired man’s eyes, and he wondered why these stairs had evidently been built to keep very big men from ascending.
Their escort stopped at a door on the first landing and pulled a ring of keys from his trouser pocket, and when he had unlocked it and pushed it open Andrew was startled at the sudden sunlight and fresh river-scented air. An iron pedestrian bridge stretched away for twenty feet over the rooftop to a rambling structure that looked to Andrew like a half-collapsed crazy old ship, patched together out of a dozen mis-matched vessels and grounded on this roof by some calamitously high tide. Partly the structure was green-painted wood, partly bare corrugated metal; Marconi radio masts and wind-socks and the spinning cups of anemometers bristled on its topsides, and interrupted patterns of round windows, and several balconies like railed decks, implied stairs and irregularly arranged floors within. From various brick and iron and concrete chimneys, yellow and black smokes curled away into the blue sky.
The three of them strode clattering across the bridge, and Andrew watched his mother’s graying brown hair toss in the wind. Got us home from Cairo, he thought; when Herod was looking for you. And the man she called Herod is with an Arab king now, in a place called something like jitter.
Andrew’s mother had instructed him in geography, as well as mathematics and Latin and Greek and history and literature and the tenets of the Catholic faith, but except for the Holy Land she had always dealt cursorily with the Middle East.
At the open doorway on the far side of the bridge two men stood back to let the trio pass, and Andrew saw what he guessed was the steel-and-polished-wood butt of a revolver under the coat of one of them. His mind was whirling with potent words: Cairo and revolver and the Raj and the body and blood of Christ, and he wondered anxiously if it was a sin to vomit after taking Communion. He did almost feel seasick.
The black-haired man now led Andrew and his mother through a succession of doors and narrow climbing and descending hallways, and if Andrew had known where north was when he had come in, he would not have known it any longer; the floor was sometimes carpeted, sometimes bare wood or tile. Then they turned left into a dim side-hall, and immediately right under a low arch, and scuffed their way up another electrically illuminated staircase, this one turning clockwise. Net zero, Andrew thought dizzily.
At the top was a door upholstered quilt-fashion in polished red leather, with a green light glowing above it. Their guide pressed a button beside the door frame, and by this time Andrew wouldn’t have been very surprised if a trapdoor had opened under them, sending them to their destination down a slide; but the door simply swung open.
The black-haired man swept a hand into the little room beyond. “Our Chief,” he said. Andrew was the first to step inside, his nose wrinkling involuntarily at the mingled smells of curry, oiled metal, and a cluster of purple foxglove flowers that stood in a vase on the big Victorian desk.
A stocky man in the uniform of a British colonel was standing beside the room’s one small window, and he appeared to be trying to disassemble a spiderweb with a brass letter opener. Without stepping away from the window he turned toward his visitors; he was bald, with bristly gray hair above his ears, and his weathered jaw and nose were prominent like granite outcroppings on a cliff face. After a moment his chilly gray eyes narrowed in a smile, and he held out his free right hand. “Andrew, I think,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, crossing the old Oriental carpet to shake the man’s callused hand.
“Splendid.” The old man returned his attention to the spiderweb then, and Andrew watched him expectantly, soon noticing that the loose left thigh of the old man’s uniform trousers, though clean and pressed, was riddled with little half-inch cuts; but after half a minute had passed Andrew let his eyes dart around the dim room. Six black Bakelite hook-and-candlestick telephones hung on extendable scissors-supports against the wall, and several glass flagons half-filled with colored liquids stood on a table beside them; one wall was all shelves, and models of submarines and airplanes served as haphazard bookends and dividers for the vast collection of leather-bound volumes and sheaves of paper that were crowded together and stacked every-which-way on the shelves. On the walls were hung rubber gas masks, tacked-up maps, diagrams of radio vacuum valves, and a photograph of a group of European villagers lined up against a wall facing a Prussian firing squad.