I Can't Begin to Tell You (34 page)

Thank God, Vinegar still observed his skeds to the second. Please, she sent him a silent message, keep to the rules. Keep your mouth tight shut and cover your traces and tracks.

In idle moments, Mary fleshed him out. Her mental construct was of a man who was not particularly tall or good-looking, but someone who was generous, physically adept and clever. From time to time, the details altered but one thing was for sure: he was nothing like the men with whom she worked. Vinegar wouldn’t be wearing uniform and there would be none of that strutting that went with it.

This, she knew, was to create a soft-focus image. Yet now that she could picture him in her mind, the moments of loss and despair, experienced so often by Mary, began to dissolve. Thus, she arrived at the beginning of another life.

All thoughts of anything else were driven from her head when, during one shift towards the end of May, Mary was making a routine patrol of the emergency frequency and Mayonnaise came back on the air.

Thank God. Thank God.

Every sense straining, she took down the Morse. The signal was good, the best she had heard it for some time. Then, quite suddenly, Mary’s stomach lurched.

This wasn’t Mayonnaise. Halting, uneven, and with none of his characteristic confidence.

This fist was quite, quite different.

Ruby’s frustration was growing. As far as she could make out, nothing was being done about the problems of the poem code.

She had learned one thing. Even an organization like The Firm became clotted with systems and bureaucracy, however much it protested that it was different.

‘How does anything ever get done anywhere?’ she demanded of Peter.

‘By patience,’ he replied. ‘Cunning. Guile.’

‘For God’s sake’, she whipped back, sharp and sarcastic. ‘Changing the agents’ coding practice isn’t caprice. It isn’t bloody-mindedness.’

Patience. Cunning. Guile.

First off: employ mathematical principles to clarify the position, define the problem and improve the reasoning.

Shifting onto the moral ground, she asked the question: Why rank knowledge that would save lives below obedience?

Thirdly … thirdly … it was more than the sum of those two. Weren’t they – and by that Ruby meant all of them who worked in The Firm – collectively responsible? On to their consciences would be stamped the pain and the terror of the agents.

If the agents were prepared to take risks, those on the home front were morally obliged to do so, too. Anyway, it would give her a great deal of satisfaction to force all those arrogant, blinkered males to look at the problems again.

Knowing all too well that if she was caught, or made a mistake, her life would disappear into a black hole, Ruby worked out a plan.

The
timing was crucial. Calculating that, after a fiendish early morning start, the galley slaves in Intelligence would be gasping for tea and their guards would be down, she phoned at eleven o’clock precisely and requested all the Danish back traffic since 1942.

‘Permission?’ said the male voice at the end of the phone.

‘Major Martin.’ She was amazed how the lie tripped off her tongue. ‘I can bring up a tray of tea.’

Pause.

Please do not ask for a signed memo
.

‘Not strictly allowed,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘But I’ll give you an hour and a desk.’ He laughed. ‘We like visits from a cipherine.’

‘Good.’ She did not add,
you patronizing bugger
.

Having got herself there, Ruby was faced by a desk, her two sharpened pencils, her notebook and a pile of messages. Now she had to get on with it, and she was terrified.

But she had her wits. Her sharp, twitching wits.

Compared to other sections, Danish back traffic turned out to be pitifully sparse. With regard to the agents and any intelligence it revealed that nothing much had flourished in Denmark until early 1943. It appeared that there had been four wireless sets in total operating for The Firm. Two had gone silent in the summer of 1942. The two pianists who remained, Mayonnaise (call sign ZYA) and Vinegar (call sign XRT), had been operating since the autumn of 1942.

Flexing her fingers, Ruby detailed the procedures and protocols in her head.

All agents were issued with two security checks which came in the form of deliberate mistakes – for example, they would make a mistake with every sixteenth letter. The first of these was a bluff security check which, if necessary, they could give to the enemy if they were captured and tortured. The second was the real security check which they should try to keep back.

Stacked
in date order, the messages were criss-crossed in blue crayon by Intelligence.

Message Number: 8

25 November 1942

REGRET TO INFORM TABLE LEAF CAUGHT AT RADIO BACK IN JUNE
stop
DIED BY OWN HAND
stop
SET CAPTURED
stop
MAYONNAISE

Both security checks included. One mistake in transmission which the signal clerk had corrected.

Message Number: 9

4 December 1942

URGENT NEED FOR RADIOS
stop
TOO DANGEROUS TO MOVE SETS AROUND
stop
RECRUITING GOING WELL
stop
MAYONNAISE

Both security checks in place.

And so on through a sequence of numbered messages.

Message Number: 38

27 April 1943

MUSTARD HAS BEEN WIPED OFF PLATE
stop
MAYONNAISE

Both security checks were present. Message had several coding mistakes.

Message Number: 39

2 May 1943

DROP PARTIAL SUCCESS
stop
LYING LOW
stop
INJURED
stop
NON LIFE THREATENING
stop
HAVE WIRELESS
stop
MAYONNAISE

Neither
security checks were present.

Message Number: 50

50? Ruby noted the leap in numbering.

SUGGEST NEW DZ 1004993
stop
PLEASE CHECK IT
stop
NO MORE MESSAGES FOR FORESEEABLE FUTURE
stop
ON THE RUN
stop
MAYONNAISE

This one was a mess. No security checks were present. There were seven coding mistakes and five mistakes in transmission. Intelligence had noted the omissions.

Ruby glanced at her watch. Her pencils were wearing down and the minutes were ticking by. From time to time, some of the clerks sent her a curious glance. Sweat sprouted under her arms but she pressed on.

She turned her attention to Vinegar, who had sent forty-five messages, many of them quite short. Having taken the precaution of looking at Vinegar’s test coding exercises, she checked over a few of the more typical messages. She realized that something did not quite add up. Was it the content of the messages?

Vinegar’s traffic suggested that, to all extents and purposes, he was having an easy time. He was almost lyrical about the smooth running of his network, repeatedly requesting an arms drop and money. He fed in snippets of information about train and troop movements – although nothing very substantial, Ruby noted. However, when he was requested to return to London for briefing, he refused on the grounds that it would compromise the circuit.

Of Mayonnaise’s messages three were indecipherables – which was about the norm for agents in the field – and the final one was, frankly, a puzzle which would have to be investigated. Apart from the last two, both the bluff and real security checks were always present and correct.

A rapid check of Vinegar’s back traffic revealed that both bluff and real security checks were always in place. Further
more, in direct contrast to Mayonnaise,
there had not been one single coding mistake in the transmissions
.

This was highly unusual.

How would an agent never make a coding mistake, unless they were a demigod? Good question.

Another odd thing was that very often in the later transmissions Vinegar always spelled ‘stop’ incorrectly:
stip
,
stap
,
stup
. Why was that? Given his exactitude, it was uncharacteristic and odd. Atmospherics?

She ran a second check. None of the earlier transmissions showed this mistake.

Stubbornly, to the last second, Ruby continued to comb back through the traffic. What was nagging at her? What was she failing to see?

Time up.

Knees like jelly, she made her way back to her own desk and dropped her head into her hands.

Her mind was full of images … choking … fearful …

Shots. An agent fleeing. The darkness of a prison cell. Dying on the run. An agent dropping out of the sky while the enemy waited below. A broken leg being twisted round as a preliminary …

The air in the office was stale … almost stifling. Ruby sprang to her feet. ‘I need some exercise,’ she told Gussie.

‘Is that what they call it?’ Gussie did not raise her head.

Ruby paced up and down the corridor. Restricted, stuffy, dim and dingy the office may have been, but at least it was in the free world.

Think
.

What was eluding her? What had she not understood?

What do agents do under pressure? How do agents behave under pressure?

She remembered that during one of their many meetings Peter had told her: ‘No agent in the field is ever perfect, particularly if he has a variable training record.’

Use
her knowledge. What did she know for sure? She recollected Eloise, so anxious and unsure and frightened that she would not match up to the task.

Human beings tended to plump for easy options at the best of times, let alone when their confidence was low. Eloise had taught Ruby that lesson. Under pressure, agents were almost certain to choose: a) the shortest words, b) the easiest to spell, c) the words which held emotional meaning whether they were aware of it or not.

Above all, they made mistakes.

On the way back to her office, she stopped off in Stationery and requested typing paper.

‘You need a docket,’ said the clerk, a youth in badly fitting khakis. He was not only spotty but looked the obstinate type.

‘Tell you what,’ said Ruby. ‘I’ll take you out for a drink.’

She got the paper.

The hours came and went and Ruby typed on late into the evening.

As she did so, conclusions fell into place.

Eventually, the night duty officer, a bouncy type who always set her teeth on edge, sidled up to her desk. ‘Time for the off, miss.’

Frowning she looked up. ‘Two minutes.’

He gave Ruby the once-over. She could read his thoughts:
Double agent and/or conducting an affair with one of the top brass still in conference upstairs?

Rumour had it that a major and a FANY lovely had been found
in flagrante
on a desk.

Had this charmer been the one who found them?

‘Righty-ho,’ he said, which meant:
Which one is going to get his hand up her skirt?

At nine o’clock the following morning, she put in a request to see Peter in his office and was allocated ten minutes. Gussie shut Peter’s diary with an emphatic click. ‘And not one second longer.’

She
stepped into his office. It was dusty, smoky and stacked with files marked ‘Top Secret’.

‘You could do with a cleaner,’ she said.

Peter was writing rapidly with a fountain pen. He held up a finger. The sight of the thick dark hair brushed back hard against his head stirred up feelings which Ruby had no wish to deal with at this moment.

Gussie stuck her head round the door. ‘Sir, I’m booting her out in ten minutes.’

Ruby looked over to the map on the wall which was covered with different-coloured pins. Agents? Several clusters in France. Far fewer in Greece and Albania. A couple in Italy. One in Germany – how did anyone survive there? Not enough to constitute a cluster in Denmark.

This war had gone on for so long. Could anyone remember houses with lights shining through windows at night? Or a city without rubble? Although the situation had taken a turn for the better with Monty’s progress in North Africa and with Italy’s surrender, there didn’t seem to be much comfort on the home front. Could the unsubstantiated, but persistent, hints of atrocities in Eastern Europe be true? Other than Peter, the one or two people with whom she had discussed it had been adamant that such things were not possible.

Surely they were possible. But probable?

‘Ruby?’ Peter looked up with a smile that said:
I’m glad you’re here
.

She placed her typewritten report in front of him. ‘Read this.’

He rifled through. The smile switched off. ‘Christ Almighty, where did you get this information?’

She was perfectly straight with him. Peter leaped to his feet. ‘They hang people for less.’

‘So?’

He swung round to face her. ‘I don’t think you understand. Quite apart from the position this places you in, complete and
utter secrecy between departments is crucial. If the wall is breached, the trust is gone.’

‘The agents trust us.’

A shadow passed over Peter’s features.

‘Listen to me, Peter.’

Ruby extracted Vinegar’s test coding exercises from a file and spread them out over the desk. ‘We have to entertain the possibility that the Germans are playing back one of our radios. Vinegar’s training records told us he is a reasonable wireless operator but a bad coder and decoder.’ She stabbed a finger down on a training paper. ‘Tell me honestly. How likely is it he will have improved in the field?’

‘Not very likely.’

‘We don’t have a record of his fist so we can’t make comparisons. I think … I think there is more than a possibility that the enemy have tortured the poem code and the security checks out of Vinegar and are making him transmit their messages.’

For a second, Peter was stricken and she experienced an untidy mix of triumph and apprehension. He glanced at the data and his face darkened. ‘You should have consulted me, Ruby.’

She was shocked by his fury, and the old resentments erupted. ‘Because you’re senior? Because you’re a man? I’ve done important work for you. Good analysis. You should be pleased.’

‘For God’s sake.’

They glared at each other.

She couldn’t help it. ‘
Is
it because I’m a woman?’

‘Shut up.’

Peter was right. Her sex was irrelevant and she must think strategically. ‘There
is
something wrong. You must see it there. Furthermore, I think he was trying to tell us something.’ She banged her hand down on the papers.

Stip, stap, stup
…

‘That’s not proof,’ said Peter.

‘There’s a pattern. Patterns are what we look for.’

‘I
don’t know what to say to you.’

The cold and objective part of her thought:
He’s a fool like other men
.

‘You could say that I have a point. You could say that I’m right,’ she said.

‘You haven’t proved it.’

‘That’s the point. I’m trying to show it to you but, because we deal in the shadows and with unknowns, I can’t give it to you all wrapped in birthday ribbon. You, of all people, understand that.’

The dark eyes trained on her were bitterly angry.

‘Go,’ ordered Gussie, who had walked into the office. ‘He’s due at the meeting.’

‘Can I come back?’ she asked.

He was as icy as she was. ‘No.’