Saving the Queen (20 page)

The Duke of Gloucester returned. Blackford stood. The Duke asked his niece if she would care to dance. She didn't really want to, but of course she did, and as they rose and approached the floor, the other dancers drew back, without themselves missing a beat—it is so prescribed by convention—leaving their sovereign a wide semicircular berth. She and the Duke went round and round, but did not move six feet from where they first touched the ballroom floor, so that they remained like the tip of the handle of an outspread, ornate fan, and from the table where he stayed sitting, Blackford was struck by the ornamental splendor of the scene, with the huge chandeliers, the gilt-red balcony, the steps behind him ascending to the regal eyrie whence Queen Caroline had descended, the muted whispering and laughing of the dancers and the popping of the champagne bottles, mini-drums written into a secret, melodic score firmly directed by the conductor.

“I guess,” Blackford thought to himself, “the time has come to call Singer Callaway.”

The contact was routinely established, and Blackford found himself back at Park Street on the afternoon of January 15.

“I knew you were making progress,” Callaway said. “Your name has been in the social pages, and I've seen your photograph two or three times. I liked in particular the picture of you and the ambassador's daughter at the Aldershot Tattoo, though I must confess I felt a certain pang when the ambassador asked me at a staff luncheon the other day, “Who is this Blackford Oakes, Callaway?'

“‘Don't rightly know, Mr. Ambassador. Seems a pleasant-looking fellow.' I think you should know that he turned to his secretary and told him to remind him to make some inquiries. Anyway, since I gather you are pretty well launched, it might be a good idea to disengage a little from Helen.”

“What for?”

“There are two disadvantages to being with her too much. First, everyone will begin to think of you as her property. Second is that old Hanks, if he thinks you are serious, will bring together a picture of you—in microscopic detail.”

“So what?” said Blackford. “The Company did, and wasn't deterred.”

“The only slightly frail reed in your tightly thatched cover, Blackford old shoe, is the American foundation's munificence. Hanks is not beyond calling in a top scientist and asking him to assess your mission. We would not welcome that. In fact before we permitted it, we'd have to consider bringing Hanks into the operation. The best thing is to ease away from Helen. She's scheduled to spend six weeks in Arizona with her father beginning in February, so that will help.… Now tell me.”

“I was in Buckingham Palace last night. The Queen invited me to sit at her table. She subsequently invited me to inspect the engineering archives at Windsor Castle. I was told to call her personal secretary, Lady Lunford, to make an appointment, and it was not clear, when the invitation was tendered, whether the Queen would be around when I went over the papers. It became very clear this morning. Lady Lunford—she's the Queen's personal secretary—a little prim-sounding, but you get the feeling whatever Her Majesty wants, Lunford baby wants at least as badly—told me the Queen would herself introduce me to the keeper, that it would require at least three days for me to inspect the documents, that the Queen had reserved a suite of rooms for me at the castle and would look forward to welcoming me for dinner on Wednesday night.”

Callaway whistled. “My God, Oakes, your instructions were to penetrate society, maybe the court. Not the Queen.”

“What did you want me to do? Run off with Lady Lunford?”

“No, but I want you to leave here now, because there is nothing I can do at this point without consulting my superior. And Black, you know I mean, really … congratulations. Say, what's she like?”

“The kind who stays with you after you've gone. Everything about her. And of course the thing is to ask yourself: Is it the Queen business that makes her eyes that way, the voice intriguing, the skin luminous—her hair looks as if one shake of her head would make it all come down, it's that light. At nineteen she was a tomboy, riding horses all the time. You wouldn't know that now, though she rides all the time. You'd guess she was queenly when they changed her diapers. She is
something.
”

“Be at your flat tomorrow at noon,” Callaway said. “If you don't hear from me, then come here at two. You will be introduced then to the exact nature of your assignment.”

After Blackford left, Callaway made a telephone call.

“Yes, I can be there in fifteen minutes—hell, I can walk there in fifteen minutes,” which he did, rounding the park going west at Knightsbridge past Basil Street and the little hotel he had first stayed at in London, and on to number 28 Walton Street. The door opened as he approached it, and he walked down the staircase to the study of the man whose principal responsibility during the war had been to co-ordinate the deceptions that led Adolf Hitler to anticipate that Eisenhower's crossing would be to Calais, rather than a landing in Normandy.

His code name then had been “Rufus,” and before Eisenhower gave the final command, he demanded that Rufus, whom he had never laid eyes on and whose whereabouts were never exactly known, should be put on the phone. This was done in about fifteen minutes, which was longer than General Eisenhower liked to wait, particularly in the hours before D-Day. “Rufus, goddammit,” Eisenhower had said, in the presence of his five most immediate associates, “it's in your hands more than anybody else. If your deception has worked, we go. If you smell a rat, we'll call the whole goddamn thing off and save a hundred thousand lives.” The disembodied voice at the other end of the telephone paused, then said, “Get going, General. The coast is clear, and I'm giving you information less than five minutes old.”

“All right, Rufus. And when this is all over I want to meet you. And when I do, it'll be either to give you my dog tags or to plant a bayonet through your gut.”

After the war, Rufus had retired to France, but when in January of 1952 he was visited late one afternoon at his farm near Haudon by Allen Dulles, Rufus greeted him cordially and, somehow, was unsurprised. When he offered Dulles tea or a drink, Dulles said no, he wanted him to come along and visit a neighbor. Rufus's wife would not have been surprised if Dulles had told him to go circle a galaxy in an unidentified flying object, and so she said nothing, stepping silently into the hall closet to bring her absent-minded husband his raincoat. In the car, Dulles whispered to his driver and lifted the separating glass.

“General Eisenhower wants to see you, and he's waiting for us at Villa St.-Pierre.”

There being no man, ever, who looked like Allen Dulles and wasn't Allen Dulles, the guard, after squinting through the window, did not demand identifying papers, but ushered the car straight through to the residential compound of the Supreme Commander, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in the old modernized villa. It was after six. Eisenhower was in his study, the fire crackling. He told the butler to bring them whiskey, pushed a key on his telephone, and told his secretary he was not to be disturbed.

Then he rose, and clasped his arms around Rufus. “That's the way I feel about you, Rufus—and I've only laid eyes on you once before.”

“I was awfully relieved, General, that that other time you had your dog tags in your hand, not a bayonet.”

“Do you still have them?” Eisenhower's expressive face looked up inquisitively.

Rufus unbuttoned, lowered his T-shirt, and pulled them out. Eisenhower reached for his pocket, put on his spectacles, and examined them. “E
ISENHOWER
, D
WIGHT
D
AVID
0-3822.” He smiled. “I was issued those in 1915. I never thought I'd give 'em away. I don't know anybody—anybody—who did more than you did, Rufus, to save lives and help win the goddamn war. I had a funny feeling about you—couldn't explain it. Tried to once with General Marshall, and he thought maybe you had me spooked.” Ike laughed. “I told Mamie. She understood. But that's the trouble with Mamie. She understands everything. But you've got to admit, Rufus, I could get through to Churchill or the President easier than to you, and I sometimes thought, goddammit, Rufus, that you didn't talk to me because you didn't
want
to talk to me. The Supreme Goddamn Commander!”

Rufus smiled. “I'd make a bad Prime Minister.”

Rufus was clearly pleased that the years hadn't obliterated in Eisenhower's memory the awful responsibility Rufus had taken; and he hoped he would be dead before it ever became known all that he had done to accomplish his mission.

They sat down.

“Rufus, we are in the goddamnedest diplomatic mess I have ever known. Or ever heard of—does that go for you too, Allen?”

“Yes, Ike—
never …
”

“Look, let's not fart around. We
can't prove
it, but we
know
that some of our top secrets, our big-time stuff, are getting to the Soviet Union on a regular basis by someone at the top—the Home Minister, the Defense Minister, the goddamn Prime Minister, for all we know, and conceivably it's somebody around the Queen.”

Rufus, though American, had lived in England, and all four of his grandparents were British. He stood up.

“Now wait a minute, Rufus; sit down. We're
not
saying that the P.M. or Queen Caroline is a Soviet sympathizer. We don't think so. On the other hand, we can't as a
theoretical
matter—I'm talking
your
language now, boy—exclude any possibility. That is, everything about this case is so bizarre you have to begin by forcing yourself to consider every conceivable goddamn possibility.

“Here's what we
do
know. Over the past couple of years, information that our people have given to the Prime Minister has regularly ended up in Soviet hands.”

Rufus sat down.

“Not just
one
piece of information, or
two
, or a half dozen; but maybe thirty, forty items of information. What the hell am I calling it information for? Our
most vital secrets
.

“At first we all assumed the stuff had passed through Fuchs, and then Burgess and MacLean. Then we got comprehensive reports from British security on what those three bastards knew, and they knew a hell of a lot. But what we're talking about
now
, they
didn't
know, it turns out. In fact, a lot of the stuff we're talking about now
hadn't even been developed
when they took off.

“I'll give you an example.” Eisenhower rose, and poked the fire. “Two weeks ago, Urey and Teller came here, on Truman's orders. They give me up-to-date information on the H-bomb, so that we can make preparations in NATO in accordance. They came directly from California, no stopping even in Washington. Just before leaving, they told me they had collated reports from various labs and interviewed a few technicians, and
on the airplane
the two of them made projections—that the bomb would be ready to test by the first of November. They gave that information to
me
. No one else was in the room, not even Beedle Smith, Dulles's boss. I didn't send the information to the White House, because they were both due to stop off there in a week, on the way back from the atoms control business in Geneva. They are the tightest-lipped guys in America, but even so, the Bureau keeps a routine eye on them, partly to watch them, partly to protect them. There has never been a single leak traceable to either of them.

“The day after they left here, the Prime Minister was in Paris on an official visit, and the next afternoon he visited with me here. He asked me when the bomb would be ready, and I told him. You know, Rufus—or do you—the President, in consultation with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Senate people, ordered a complete pooling of scientific information between us and the Brits, provided they adopt our style security. I then asked the Prime Minister with whom would he share the information I had just given him. He told me he gives it out strictly on a need-to-know basis. So I said:
Who
needs to know?

“‘Something like this, General,' he said, ‘
nobody
needs to know. Because the bomb will be something for NATO to deploy, not the British. We're poking along on our own in the direction of the hydrogen bomb, but we're several years behind you.'

“
One week later
, we pick up a defector in Prague. He's a young well-placed scientist at the Lossa laboratories where they're working on heavy-water something or other.
He
told
us
that the day before he cut out into West Germany, he and the six top scientists in his lab were taken into the director's room and told they would have to work overtime because word had just come in from the Kremlin that the United States would be ready to detonate on November first! I am not exaggerating when I tell you that a junior scientist working on a Communist bomb had that information before the President of the United States!

“I flew right away to No. 10. Theoretically to protest the budget cut announced in the House of Commons for NATO—dumb bloody thing to do, Rufus—I didn't want the P.M. to know we had figured he must have been the leak, so I said that Teller and Urey, returning from Geneva, had revised their calculations, and figured now it might not be until February 1, 1953, before we could safely detonate. Then I asked him—just like that—whether the November date had been given out to anyone.

“He replied: ‘Only to the Queen.'

“‘The
Queen?
' Obviously I looked surprised.

“‘Oh yes, General. Queen Caroline does not like to talk to me, at the weekly audience, about royal charities, horse shows, or honors lists. She treats me the way your man does, on your program, what is it on Sundays?'

“‘
Meet the Press?
'