“I don’t smoke,” she frowned, disapprovingly. “Which I’m sure you already know.”
“But you always bring Joseph cigarettes?”
Marija’s frown deepened and the Englishman shrugged. He lit up, inhaled long and deep, unhurriedly, before exhaling raggedly. He almost coughed.
“I can’t kick the habit. I cough like a coal miner in the morning. Probably all the dust I swallowed when I was buried under the Embassy in Ankara last year.” He grinned rather grimly. He took another drag of his cigarette. “The thing is that my principals want to know who they can talk to when the time comes to mend the fences ISD and idiots like them have broken in the last year.”
“You are speaking in riddles.”
“Yes, force of habit, sorry. I’m not a real commander. I’ve never even been in the Navy. I’d get sea sick on the Sliema to Valetta ferry, probably.” McNeil screwed up his face, relaxed. “I’m in the Intelligence game. I’m not a spy, or anything that glamorous. You’d think the war changed everything but actually, in my bailiwick, nothing much really changed at all. The thing is to know who your friends are. The people whom one can trust. I was sent here to find people my principals can trust. People with whom they can do business.”
“And you think I’m one of those people?” Marija didn’t know whether to be flattered or appalled.
“You are a minor a saint among your own people…”
Marija blushed and the displeasure flashing in her hazel eyes momentarily distracted the man.
“You are, whether you like it or not,” he carried on, quickly. “You’re the little girl who rose from her sickbed, endured the unendurable, became a nurse and in the last year a midwife. And now you are a leader of the dispossessed. After today you will enjoy the additional cache of having been arrested and interrogated by the brutal agents of perfidious Albion.”
Marija suppressed a childish urge to stick out her tongue at the Englishman. She avoided the man’s gaze, elected to watch a passing whaler from one of the destroyers in Sliema Creek progressing sedately down Marsamxett.
Peter! He was going to talk to her about Peter!
Renewing eye contact she didn’t trouble to veil her suspicion.
“Having identified you as a potential friend,” the man confessed, “it behoves us to strengthen your influence amongst your own people whenever the opportunity arises.”
“Is Sergeant Siddall one of you?”
“One of us? That’s an interesting question. Honestly, I don’t know. I strongly suspect that his own people tolerate him because they believe he spies on you rather more than he actually does. If, that is, he spies on you at all. Like your esteem in the eyes of your friends, his contact with me will raise him in the esteem of his people. It will put him beyond suspicion. Those who will have been whispering about where Jim Siddall’s loyalties really lie will be looking a little bit sheepish this afternoon. As for the good sergeant, well, he’ll be a much happier man now that I’ve rescinded the order requiring him and his friends to read your — albeit censored — correspondence with Peter Christopher.”
Marija’s jaw hung slack for a second.
“You were…”
“Your letters to Peter and his to you were being steamed open, read, copied and resealed prior to onward transmission. I gather a number of letters, which you presumably assumed had been lost in the post, were detained indefinitely by ISD on ‘security grounds’. This will not happen in future. I informed the local ISD Sector Chief that your mail is being analysed in England and that the people back home don’t want his ‘grubby fingerprints’ all over the evidence. The file I had on the desk in the office back there is ISD’s ‘correspondence digest’ on you two young lovebirds.”
“We are not lovebirds!” Marija protested without real passion. “We have always been friends. That is all!”
“Have it your own way. I plan to take the file with me back to England. If it was within my gift I’d extract the letters that didn’t get through to you. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. Sorry. Peter being related to who he is related to means that my hands are tied.”
Marija got to her feet very stiffly, crossed her arms across her breasts.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to know that my principals and I have a vested interest in the wellbeing of your brother, your family, and you.”
At the same time McNeil’s principals wouldn’t hesitate to use their letters to blackmail Peter’s father.
Marija was silent.
Chapter 7
“The Americans want to know why we haven’t issued an official response to Kennedy’s Moon Speech, Prime Minister?” Sir Henry Tomlinson spoke with a brisk patrician confidence that many of his previous political masters had found more than a little disconcerting over the years.
“Cakes and circuses,” the imposing, impatient man in the armchair by the window guffawed. He’d been listening to Elgar when Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet and the Head of the Home Civil Service, had knocked on his door to deliver his daily ten o’clock briefing. “When the Foreign Secretary has calmed down I’m sure he’ll want to draft something emollient.”
Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Earl of Home, since July 1960, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was one of the few Tory grandees from Harold MacMillan’s cabinet to have survived the cataclysm, and the only one to still be in his old post.
“I took the liberty of discussing matters with Tom Harding-Grayson, Prime Minister,” Henry Tomlinson replied.
“Oh?” The Prime Minister reluctantly dragged his gaze away from the grey circle of the Chiltern Hills beyond the Race Course. Cheltenham Race Course was rapidly disappearing under the concrete runways of the new airfield. He’d never been a man of the turf but he regretted having to sweep away so much sporting history and tradition. Thankfully, most of the building work was out of sight of the ever-spreading and proliferating compounds of the relocated heart of Government. The view from his first floor office window was the reason he’d chosen it from all the other available rooms in the sprawling old mansion. In his darkest moments he found a kind of solace staring out over that unburned, unblasted vista of an England that by and large no longer existed. Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson was the man who ran the Foreign Office apparatus and pulled Alec Douglas-Home’s strings. Poor Alec, he’d never come to terms with what had happened, he’d always live in the past. Notwithstanding, he needed men like Alec, good men who could hold the Party in line behind him even if what they’d once called ‘foreign policy’ was a luxury they couldn’t afford in this mutilated brave new world. The Foreign Secretary had backed Kennedy’s stance before the crisis despite having received advice from the Government’s law officers that the American blockade of Cuba was illegal under international law. An innately calm, rational man who’d been perhaps the only immovable, unbreakable pillar of the MacMillan Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary increasingly retreated to his estates in Scotland. “What does Tom think, Henry?”
“He thinks if the Yanks want to throw untold treasure into putting a man on the Moon we should let them get on with it, Prime Minister.”
“He does?”
Henry Tomlinson was fifty-five years old. Harrow and Cambridge — Trinity College — educated he’d spent Hitler’s war in MI5, and risen to be the acting number two at the Cabinet Office on the eve of the Cuban disaster. He and his family had been at their cottage in the Brecon Beacons when three-quarters of the government and the senior Home Civil Service had been wiped out. Of the survivors, he was head and shoulders primus inter pares, first among equals. He’d become the natural leader of the administrative side of the Provisional Government — the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration — in exactly the same way the Prime Minister had known himself to be, false modesty notwithstanding, the natural leader of his surviving political contemporaries.