Secret Kingdom (4 page)

‘We are killing our own people,’ she says suddenly. She doesn’t know where the words are coming from, this isn’t what she came to say; it is as if someone were speaking through her. She has never spoken out like that before. ‘If we go on like this we will destroy ourselves. We’ve got to stop before it’s too late.’

‘I do as I’m told,’ he says. ‘Do you imagine I could do such a thing myself?’

‘Who gave you instructions to change the name on the file?’ she asks again. This time she senses a conflict between some residual sense of right and wrong and his fear of betraying the authority he works for.

‘My superior officer,’ he says quietly.

The anonymity of the chain of command. The best hiding place of all. Responsibility is a secret buried deep in the complex hierarchy of the system, and talking to clerks will lead her nowhere. But she has learned one thing of importance. She now knows what previously she could only suspect. An instruction was given to change the names and Janosi carried it out.

‘There is nothing to be gained by asking questions,’ he says quietly. ‘Those you can ask don’t know the answers. Those who have the answers you will never meet.’

She is depressed, deflated, exhausted. The fight has gone out of her, not that there was much to start with. She allows Janosi to guide her to the front door. What will he do now? Will he betray her by reporting her visit to his superior officer? Or will he keep silent to protect himself?

‘Forgive me,’ he says suddenly. ‘These old people depend on me. I am all they have. You must understand that.’

‘Follow me.’

Martineau led the way, head bent forward in eager authority, faded blue Aertex shirt tucked unevenly into an ancient pair of corduroys. On his feet he wore canvas plimsolls which must once have been white. Now they were grey, the uppers split in two places. Hart could see his feet. He was not wearing socks.

Martineau paid for them both, exchanging a few words in Hungarian with the women in the ticket office, then ushered him into what Hart would thereafter describe as a temple to the body, a huge hall with dark wooden floors (reminding him of the gym at school), marble walls (school chapel), niches with statues of sturdy, naked young women (schoolboy dreams), holding what looked like bathing towels (though not to hide their modesty), a stained-glass ceiling extolling the virtues of the healthy life (more naked bodies, more towels).

‘Come on.’

Past fierce-looking women in white uniforms who inspected their tickets, issued them with dressing gowns and towels and nodded them forward, down stone stairs, along a dimly lit corridor tiled in white, all the time the air getting more humid and stifling, past signs in Hungarian urging them on, Hart imagined, then at last up some steps into refracted daylight and the sounds of echoing voices and the splash of water.

‘We change here.’

An elderly woman unlocked the door of a cubicle and gave him a key.

When he came out, Martineau was already undressed, wearing a loose-fitting navy-blue bathing trunks that had seen better days. He
still had on his plimsolls, though now the laces were undone.

‘We’re going outside,’ Martineau said in a voice that intimated there could never be any question of swimming in the indoor pool.

Down more steps, and Hart caught sight of the movement of the water distorting the wavelike pattern of blue ceramics on the floor of the outdoor pool. More sturdy naked young women, this time in bronze, priestesses of health and hygiene standing in alcoves set in the wall above them, gazing guilelessly down on the bathers below.

‘Just the ticket.’

Martineau was already swimming an inelegant breaststroke. Hart followed him in. The water was bracing.

The swimmers were mostly elderly, a few children in the care of grandparents, two young men and a woman in a black bathing suit and cap swimming seriously across the width of the bath. At one point she nearly collided with Martineau, though he appeared not to notice.

It was as she climbed out of the pool that Martineau’s attention was caught. Hart saw him stand upright, the water reaching to his shoulders. He heard him murmur ‘Good God,’ and rapidly make his way to the ladder at the edge of the pool where she was standing. The woman looked about thirty, maybe a year or two more, brown-skinned, sturdy, with finely muscled shoulders and thighs. She stood on the side of the pool, removed her cap and shook her hair free. It was dark brown, thick and full, and as it fell across her face it transformed her, softening her, making her alluring. She turned round and looked down at the figures in the dancing water. Was she noticing them? Or wanting to be noticed?

He saw her drop her bathing cap. She made to catch it as it fell into the water but Martineau was already there. He retrieved it and climbed out, an incongruous figure, thin and white-skinned, beside the muscular tanned body of the woman. He gave back her bathing cap with a smile. She smiled briefly in return, Martineau nodded and got back into the water.

As she walked away, Hart saw her put her thumb inside the edge of her bathing costume to pull it down over her backside, a gesture that made him notice a large red swelling at the back of her thigh. Only recently she must have sustained a nasty sting.

The applause is more cautious than enthusiastic, a measure of respect rather than endorsement. The chairman asks for questions from the floor. A few hands are raised. Watson-Jones is fluent in his answers. David Lander, sitting beside Pountney, smirks with pleasure. ‘Simon’s on great form,’ he whispers.

The questions come to an end, the chairman thanks Watson-Jones for sparing the time from his busy ministerial schedule to speak to them, and the audience breaks up into small groups to consider the implications to be drawn from his lecture.

Watson-Jones has avoided recommending what action might be taken, preferring to let his deliberate imprecision work on the imaginations of his audience. Given his hawkish reputation, few present are in any doubt what his choice would be. Suez, it seems, is more serious, the stakes are higher and Nasser a greater threat than many of those gathered in the small conference room have reckoned.

Can we stand by, Watson-Jones’s argument runs, and let an upstart Egyptian put the economy of our country at risk by threatening the legitimate passage of the world’s shipping through the Suez Canal? If he chose to, Nasser was now in a position to undermine our investments in the Middle East, deny us access to essential supplies of oil from the Persian Gulf, bring our manufacturing industry to its knees and disrupt the economic life of the nation. Were the British people prepared to let one man dictate where and how we trade with the rest of the world? Recent history, he warns, has some interesting lessons about the dangers of letting dictators off the hook.

‘Suez may yet turn out to be a greater test of this Government’s nerve than any since the end of the Second World War.’

‘Strong words,’ an unfamiliar voice whispers in Pountney’s ear. ‘I’m glad someone has the guts to say what needs to be said. You can tell Simon he’s made some important friends today and done his prospects no harm either.’

Where is Watson-Jones? Frantically he searches the crowd. With relief he spots him at the other end of the room, moving among his audience, shaking hands, gripping elbows, whispering confidentially, dispensing the promise of favours or friendship in his efforts to win the support of the sceptics in the audience. Wasn’t it the duty of the Private Secretary never to be more that one inch from his
Minister’s side? For a moment instinct defeats duty and holds him back. He wants to observe his master from a distance, to watch his politician’s tricks. He has never seen him in action before.

‘A little bird tells me you’re sitting on the fence when it comes to telling Nasser and his cronies where to get off.’ Lander is at his side once more. The light laugh does not disguise the seriousness of his intent.

‘I remain unconvinced,’ Pountney says diplomatically. He drafted Watson-Jones’s speech and had put up some resistance to the revisions he was instructed to make. Watson-Jones was having none of it.

‘There’s no guts in this, Gerry. You’re going soft on the issue. I want to shake people, stir them out of their complacency. Nasser’s a threat to this country, and threats to the liberties of the British have to be disposed of. I want to touch that feeling of outrage that the nation shares, how all we’ve given to these people over the years is being turned on its head because of the bemused railings of an Arab backstreet boy who needs to be thrashed till his eyeballs drop out. That’s the sentiment I want you to put into plain English for me.’

Instead of continuing the argument, Pountney had kept his mouth shut and redrafted the speech, burying his own disquiet with the practised ease of a man skilled in the arts of concealing what he felt.

‘I thought Simon put it very well, didn’t you?’ Lander continued. ‘We have serious commercial interests in the Middle East; we can’t let some jumped-up Egyptian nobody tell us what we can and can’t do.’

He’d first met David Lander years before at the two-day recruitment event at Burlington House, since when he had never found any reason to revise the dislike he had formed on their first encounter. Lander had progressed fester up the ladder, which Pountney concluded said more about the Foreign Office’s qualifications for promotion than it did about Lander’s abilities. Initially baffled by this (few of his contemporaries rated Lander highly), he discovered that Lander’s old school tie was one of the flags of convenience the Foreign Office quietly recognized. He used his anger at the ease of Lander’s ascent as a secret spur to his own ambition. If he had to work twice as hard – ten times as hard – he would do so, anything to prove his ultimate superiority.

‘Letting ourselves be dragged into a squabble with a local spiv would be absurd if it weren’t so dangerous,’ Pountney replied.

‘Simon gave us a very clear warning. If Nasser brings the Soviets into Africa, the Cold War will spread across the dark continent. None of us wants them to get a toehold in Africa, do we? Something has to be done.’ Lander is frowning. ‘The sooner the better.’

‘It doesn’t have to come to that,’ Pountney says. ‘Not if we take a more reasonable approach.’

‘You don’t bargain with upstarts who want to play in the big boys’ league.’ Lander’s voice has risen. ‘You tell them where they get off and send them packing. If that calls for strong-arm tactics before they see you’re serious, so be it.’

No quarter, no compromise. Lander’s world was black and white.

‘Gerry?’ He feels a pressure on his arm. Margaret has come to his rescue. ‘I’m so sorry to interrupt, but the Minister has moved on to the East India Club and he’d like you to join him for lunch.’

‘We’ll finish this conversation some other time, Gerry. I’ll give you a bell. There’s a lot to talk about.’

A week before he left for Budapest Hart had been invited to lunch by Nigel Carswell, deputy head of Directorate C, whom he had met briefly when he lectured to the New Entry course during their time at the Vicarage in New Malden. Over lunch they discussed the state of preparedness of the West for war with the Soviets, whether the balance of power was tilting or sliding in Moscow’s favour and how much influence Britain now truly maintained ‘in a show dominated by the Yanks’. Twice Carswell called him Hugh.

‘Moscow and Washington are playing a hell of a risky game, seeing how close to the brink they can push each other. It calls for fine judgements, an inch here, an inch there, with a terrible price to pay if one of them gets it wrong.’

‘How do you rate our chances of keeping the balance?’ Hart asked.

The intensity of living on the knife-edge between peace and catastrophe had preoccupied the New Entry in the early weeks. How close to war were they? If that war was nuclear, what would
be left at the end of it for either victor or vanquished, other than a sterile sea or a desert of irradiated ash?

‘Whatever we like to say about it,’ Carswell replied, ‘the real power’s in Washington and Moscow now. All we can do is occupy the middle ground and try to stop the Americans and the Soviets from poking each other’s eyes out and blowing us all to kingdom come. Keeping the peace between the pair of them when they’re both as keen as mustard to knock the hell out of each other is a bloody difficult and unrewarding game. Sometimes I’m not sure it’s worth the candle. Coffee?’

Carswell led the way into the library. ‘If we have an early lunch,’ he had told Hart on the telephone, ‘we’ll have the place to ourselves. Give us a chance to talk without being disturbed.’ At each stage, drinking at the bar, eating in the dining room, now coffee in the library, they were well ahead of the game. (‘Little likelihood of intruders.’) Carswell was after privacy, not secrecy.

‘I understand you’re going to work for Bobby Martineau,’ he said, stirring his coffee thoughtfully. Was this at last the reason for the invitation? ‘He and I go back a long way.’

Contemporaries, but that was where the similarity ended. One career had flourished: Carswell had ascended the ladder, his copybook unblotted, a ‘safe pair of hands’ – the ultimate Service accolade – while the other’s uneven record had ruled him out of the race for any senior post and he’d ended up beached in a satellite state behind the Iron Curtain, out of sight and out of mind. Early promise never fulfilled. Hart had been doing some research of his own.

‘You may hear some harsh words about Martineau.’ Carswell began the elaborate ritual of lighting his pipe. ‘Don’t listen to them. In the last months of the war he brought us Peter the Great, and we learned many good things from that source until it all turned sour. Whatever people may tell you, what happened to Peter wasn’t Bobby’s fault. You can take my word for it.’

A top source within the Russian High Command, codenamed “Peter the Great”, began working for British Intelligence early in 1945. After a bumpy ride in the initial months, Peter provided the Service with an invaluable seam of intelligence for almost two years, much of it from deep within the Soviet nuclear programme.