That work was so humdrum that I would scarcely have been human if I had not felt that I was cut out for more exciting things. Without telling Holmes, I had offered my skills to the War Office the previous year as a military surgeon, on the basis of my experience in Afghanistan. To my chagrin I was turned down as being at least twenty years too old! At least, if I became a make-believe agent, I should find myself on active service. I recalled the famous saying of Dr Samuel Johnson that a man always thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. In Holmes’s wistful adventure, I might answer the call to arms.
Sir John Fisher summoned me several days later. He assured me that our enemies were ravenous for whatever information might come their way, provided their appetites were suitably stimulated. I knew that he had just been talking to Sherlock Holmes
“How will you know if they believe what is given them?” I asked.
He chuckled.
“If they believe it, they will come back for more. That is to say, they will continue to pay for it. Oh, yes, doctor. Our most successful and most valued agents in neutral Europe are those who have posed as traitors with secrets to sell. The money that comes to them from the German Abwehr, as their military intelligence is called, goes into our special fund at Room 40. We shall share it out among deserving causes when we celebrate victory at the end of the war.”
“Then you are offering them a traitor?” I had not liked the sound of this.
“I think not, on this occasion. We may have played that card too often.”
“Then whom?”
“We need a…” His eyes wandered a little as he avoided the words “fool” or “buffoon.” Then he smiled. “An innocent is what we want. One who appears naive enough to have information stolen from him.”
Within two more days, Holmes had put to Fisher a plan for selling to German Intelligence a bound volume of a counterfeit Secret Emergency War Code. Its contents had been devised by my friend, as a permanent means of introducing false information to the Wilhelmstrasse, including variations in codes and ciphers, for as long as the war might last. The way would be cleared by one of our best double-agents in Holland, working under the cover of being an importer of Sumatra tobacco, but in German pay since before the war began.
This agent was fastidious. He did not claim access to British intelligence. He was merely an international businessman and an admirer of Germany who had an old school-friend in the Foreign Office, William Greville. From this garrulous source, he was now able to alert his German clients to the forthcoming revision of our Secret Emergency War Code. Copies would be restricted to a handful of officers authorised to receive it. On previous occasions, the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse had no hope of laying hands upon it.
The tobacco importer did nothing so foolish as to offer the code himself. That would have alerted German suspicions at once. He merely passed on a piece of information that his easy-going friend at the Foreign Office had let slip. As the threat of war spread, the distribution list of the code would include for the first time the British Consul in neutral Rotterdam. Greville, a Foreign Office courier who had acted in the past as a King’s Messenger, was to deliver it at the beginning of August. The story had only come out between trusted friends because this affable diplomat had let slip that he was greatly looking forward to a weekend of peacetime luxury in the neutral Dutch city. So much for William Greville, the long-serving Foreign Office courier, an old Army man, genial but not formidably sharp-witted.
So I was to travel as “William Greville.” Before I assumed that role, our own people had watched me at home for several weeks and found no visible interest in me on the part of German agents. With the addition of horn-rimmed glasses, the temporary absence of my whiskers, a darkening of the hair, and an inch or two added to my height by the aid of built-up heels, I became the emissary and an assistant secretary to a junior Foreign Office minister. Or so my diplomatic passport described me.
Before I left the Pool of London on a Dutch ship, the nature of my mission was allowed to leak out by means of several loud and indiscreet conversations in hotels and bars frequented by neutrals with German sympathies. I was not convinced that this would be sufficient bait but my guardians thought otherwise and, after all, they knew best. The proof of the pudding would be in the eating. It was in this frame of mind that I sailed for Holland on the first Friday evening in August.
In Rotterdam, rooms had been booked for me at a hotel near the docks, where the hall-porter was known to our naval intelligence as being in German pay. By the time I came ashore, I could be assured that my presence in the city was not unnoticed. The time of my arrival was of the essence. It was the Saturday afternoon of an August bank holiday weekend, observed in England but nowhere else. The British Consulate behaved as though it were in England. In other words, it had shut on Saturday morning and would remain closed until Tuesday.
I acted the part of a frustrated emissary, spending my time reading newspapers in the hotel foyer, drinking whisky and twiddling my thumbs. After an hour or two, the hall-porter fell into conversation with me, as hall-porters are apt to do in such places when business is quiet. I complained of a tedious wait, caused by offices that did not open on the first Monday in August. After that, there could be little doubt who I was or where my business lay. In any case, the porter had only to glance at my passport which now lay behind the hotel desk. Whether or not he knew that the British consul was due to receive a copy of the Secret Emergency War Code, I could not say. I was quite sure by now that his masters had been warned.
Nothing more was said until the following evening-Sunday-when the obliging porter suggested that it was a pity I could not have a little “fun” while delayed in Rotterdam. I complained again, this time that I was a perfect stranger in the city and had no idea of where fun was to be found. He tendered the name and address of a house, also near the port, where a warm welcome and a good deal of amusement could be depended upon by the lonely stranger. I began to brighten up at this information. I went up to my room and changed. While there, I opened the locked briefcase with its code-book and papers, in order to take out some cash. In my apparent eagerness to experience the delights on offer, I omitted to lock the case when I put it back, clumsily hidden under a pile of clothes in the wardrobe drawer.
I now followed the plan prepared for me. It was simple in the extreme. I made sure that I was not followed immediately I left the hotel. Then I ordered a cab from the rank and loudly gave the address of the “house” recommended to me. Once round the corner and out of sight, I ordered the driver to drop me as I had decided to have my dinner first. He shrugged and drove off. Making sure again that no one had followed me, I diverged from the hall porter’s route. On my way to the hotel the previous day, I had noticed a pleasant enough quayside brasserie and now took a table outside it. This looked directly back across a stretch of water, giving me a view of my own window.
The window of that room was the third along from the right on the second floor and I had naturally left it in darkness. I waited for more than an hour, drinking my schnapps slowly on the quayside. Another twenty minutes passed and then, to my relief and excitement, the light went on in my hotel window.
This was no visit by a maid, turning down the bed. The light remained on for over an hour, quite long enough for someone to photograph every page in the Secret Emergency War Code, as well as to search my effects and confirm my assumed identity as William Greville. Before they began the search, the intruders had allowed me time to get to the house where amusement might be found and to immerse myself in it. No doubt the hall porter was on guard at the desk, watching for any unexpected return, but they had every reason to believe that there was ample time in hand, more than enough to copy the bound cipher volume.