Spy and the Thief (4 page)

“No.”

“And yet he must have expected us to read it. What about those rebel leaders you mentioned? Who are they?”

“Well, there’s Rama Blade. His father was British and his mother was Indian—both parents are dead now. He came to the island from India just after the war, and almost immediately started organizing the poorer classes. He had the idea we’d leave him in charge after we pulled out, but when we didn’t he took to the hills with a couple of hundred followers. The people like him. We’d always considered him our friend until last year.”

“And the other man?”

“Blade’s bitter enemy—a fellow of vague nationality named Xavier Starkada. He was the first to accuse Blade of being a Red Chinese spy. Starkada is a giant of a man, almost seven feet tall. He wears a full beard and has been known to kill men with his bare hands. Nobody knows just where he came from, but he’s a fighter and he claims to be on our side.”

“You’re sure one of them is an enemy agent?”

Colonel Nelson nodded sadly. “It has to be. The evidence is too conclusive. Our man Montgomery was certain of it too.”

“How do you know he sent you the right name in this message?”

“I think his murder proves he identified the right man.”

Rand picked up the message again. “Perhaps a quotation from something. There might be a word missing between
in
and
is.
I’ll check on it. Is there any urgency?”

“Quite a bit. The government feels it must recognize one of the rebel factions by Sunday—either Starkada or Blade. They’re depending on us to uncover the enemy agent before they announce their decision.”

Rand sighed and stared out the window at the gray curtain of fog. “Do you often get jobs like this, Colonel?”

“There have been factional situations everywhere, of course—India, Cyprus, Cuba, the Congo. The classic example was probably Yugoslavia during the war. There we had Mihajlovic and Tito, both killing Germans, both claiming to be patriots. There were reports that Mihajlovic was collaborating with the enemy, and yet the government knew next to nothing about Tito. Some even claimed Tito was really a young woman of unusual beauty.

“We sent a secret mission there, landing them behind enemy lines, and on the basis of their report we decided to back Tito. As you may remember, Mihajlovic was later tried and executed by Tito’s people. I leave it to history to determine whether we made the correct choice. The situation on Buhadi is quite similar, and we
must
make the correct choice there.”

“Is Buhadi that important?” Rand asked. “A small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean?”

The Colonel got up to leave. “Cecil Montgomery thought it was important. He died for it.”

Rand spent the afternoon in the library, poring over slim books of verse and thick volumes of quotations. There seemed to be no known author named Starkada or Blade, and some time spent on the writings of St. Francis Xavier yielded nothing.

He left the library near closing time, shaking his head in dismay. So it wasn’t a quotation after all—at least, not one that he’d been able to locate.

Father come our art in is earth bread.

In the morning he put the cryptanalysis boys on it, and waited all day while they came up with one dead end after another. “It looks like code, but if he wrote the message hastily, just a few minutes before he was killed, it almost has to be some sort of cipher. But breaking it without knowing the system may be impossible because the message is so short. We don’t have enough to work with.”

Rand stared hard at his fingernails. “And yet it is something he expected us to read.” It can’t be complicated. It has to be simple.”

“Then I’m afraid we’re stumped, sir.”

“Look, I’ve given you the message and I’ve given you the only two possible names we’re looking for—Rama Blade and Xavier Starkada. It must be one or the other—so get back at it.”

But by late afternoon Rand was depressed. The art of cryptography was a dubious one at best, even in this age of ciphering machines and scrambler telephones. He looked up the master file on Cecil Montgomery and found that the dead man had a sister living in Chelsea. A half hour later he signed out a government car and drove over there through the fog.

It was a pleasant little house with a garden in front, the only one on the street. Rand stared at the dead earth with its rosebushes and tulip bulbs waiting for another spring. Then he sighed and knocked on the door.

The woman who answered was still young, and a vestige of beauty showed through a face and body beginning to settle into middle age. “My husband’s not home,” she said, starting to close the door.

Rand cleared his throat. “I believe it’s you I want to see—if you’re Cecil Montgomery’s sister.”

She blinked her eyes but didn’t change expression. “My name is Linda Jones. Cecil was my brother. He was killed last Monday.”

“I know. I’m very sorry. May I speak with you?”

She motioned him inside and indicated a worn straight-backed chair. “You’re one of them, I suppose—one of the men he was working for.”

Rand seated himself gingerly. “You know a great deal, Mrs. Jones.”

“I know my brother was a spy.”

“That’s hardly the word for it. Your brother was a minister, a medical missionary. He supplied a certain amount of background information to Her Majesty’s government.”

Linda Jones lit a cigarette and started to pace the floor. “There were others here before you. Yesterday. They talked about giving
him
a medal, only I’d never be able to show it to anybody. They said I’d have to keep it a secret.”

Rand shrugged and said nothing. He was sorry he’d come.

“Cecil wasn’t any older than you,” she went on. “You took his wife and child, and then his life.”

“We didn’t take them, Mrs. Jones.”

“You sit here in London pushing buttons, and people like Cecil go out and die! For what, I ask? For
what?”

Outside, the night was beginning to mingle with the fog. Suddenly the little house seemed no longer pleasant. It was a place of death, and the memory of death.

“I’m sorry,” he told her again. “I’m only trying to do my job.”

“What is your job?” She had calmed a bit, as if the spark of bitterness had died as quickly as it flared.

“Your brother left some information for us,” he told her. “It’s my job to decipher his message. Could you tell me a little about him, about his interests?”

She sat down and began to twist her handkerchief, nervously staring out the window at some memories Rand could never share.

“I saw him only once in recent years—when he returned to England briefly after the death of his wife and child. He was a different man somehow—still deeply religious, but with new interests too. He was reading books on politics and world affairs, and even one on codes.”

“Codes? Which book was it?”

“I don’t remember the name. I just noticed because it seemed an odd thing for him to be interested in. I suppose he was already involved with you people.”

“I think your brother was involved with the whole human race, Mrs. Jones.”

“He was a good man,” she said, and then fell silent, staring at the window where now only her own reflection looked back.

“One more question. Does this sentence mean anything to you?
Father come our art in is earth bread.
”

She thought a moment. “No! Should it?”

“Did he ever write to you and mention the names of Xavier ; Starkada or Rama Blade?”

“He wrote rarely. I know those names from the newspapers, but he never mentioned them in any of his letters. Mostly he wrote about his wife and child. He loved them very much.”

“I have to be going,” Rand said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Will someone else be going out there now, to take his place? To die?”

“That’s not my department, Mrs. Jones. My job is communications.”

He left her still staring at the window, and went back through the fog to his office overlooking the Thames.

Rand was much more at ease tracking an enemy agent across London to a secret meeting place, or discovering the location of a hidden radio transmitter. Sitting at his desk, staring at Cecil Montgomery’s last message, he had a feeling of utter frustration as bleak and blanketing as the weather. The man had been trying to tell him something with those eight words, trying to reach back from the grave and leave an important message. It was a code that Cecil Montgomery had thought they would recognize, perhaps one he’d remembered from the book he’d read.

But Rand couldn’t read it. And in a few hours it would be Sunday, the government’s day of decision.

At midnight he went down to the cryptanalysis room and found two of the younger men still working on it, chalking letter combinations on the green blackboard. They were tired and discouraged, and about to give up. “We’ve tried it backwards and sideways and gotten nowhere. We’ve cut the words apart and shifted them around. It must be a substitution cipher of some sort, but we can’t crack it.”

Rand nodded sadly. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe we’ve been wasting our time.” But he didn’t really believe that. “Go on home and get some sleep.”

He stayed on for an hour or so after they left and then started home himself. In a few hours he’d have to phone Colonel Nelson to report failure. Perhaps the government would choose the right man anyway; they had a 50-50 chance.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, while a breeze from the Thames was beginning finally to dissipate the fog, Rand stopped at a little church in Oxford Street. He stood far in the rear, trying to imagine the final thoughts that might have crossed Cecil Montgomery’s mind.

When he left the church the sun was beginning to break through the mists low on the eastern horizon: He shielded his eyes from it and stood there in the center of the street, thinking that truly “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform”; for now he knew what Cecil Montgomery had been trying to tell them.

Colonel Nelson came downstairs in his robe, looking unhappy. “It’s Sunday morning, Rand—quite early Sunday morning.”

“I know. I thought you’d want to know we broke the cipher.”

“Montgomery’s message?”

Rand nodded. “The men in cryptanalysis are so young these days. None of them remembered a simple substitution cipher used in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. It used the first twenty-six words of the Lord’s Prayer, not counting repetitions, to stand for the letters of the alphabet. That was the kind of cipher a minister would know by heart and think of in a crisis. I should have spotted it long before I did.”

Colonel Nelson ran his tongue over dried lips. “I’ll phone the Prime Minister immediately. Which one is it—Blade of Starkada?”

Rand held out a sheet of notepaper. “The twenty-six different words, in order, are: Our-Father-who-art-in-heaven-hallowed-be-Thy-name-kingdom-come-will-done-on-earth-as-it-is-give-us-this-day-daily-bread-and. The message
Father come our art in is earth bread
becomes just eight letters:
BLADE SPY.
”

T
HE BIG JET CAME
in low over Hoihong harbor, and Rand got his first look at the familiar clutter of junks and barges that was home to one-tenth of the city’s population. Hoihong was a city much like Hong Kong, both in geography and politics—a place where East and West met, touched uncomfortably, and tried unsuccessfully to turn away from each other.

Though the British had given up territorial rights to Hoihong in the last decade, there was still an almost Colonial atmosphere about the crowded streets and shops with their lingering touches of Britannia. Rand disliked travel, and he especially disliked the Far East with its too-bold mixture of old and new; but from his first hour in Hoihong he knew there was something different about this place.

The difference began with Arthur Fraze, a career man who had been the chief British Intelligence agent in Hoihong since the time of the Korean War. Fraze wore a white suit and smoked a calabash pipe, but there was about him little of the quiet efficiency which Rand had come to expect in London.

“Terrible place,” he told Rand by way of greeting. “You should have stayed home.”

Rand smiled and took out his sunglasses against the noonday glare. “I thought you sent for me.”

Arthur Fraze motioned him toward a waiting embassy car. “The new Ambassador. He was looking through my reports and decided that Double-C should be consulted on the Kudat affair. I didn’t realize they’d send somebody out here.”

They climbed into the air-conditioned car and Fraze gave a quick command to the driver. Rand settled back to enjoy the strangeness of the unfamiliar countryside. “It can’t be too bad,” he observed. “You haven’t been back to England since you came out here.”

Arthur Fraze shifted the big pipe to the other side of his mouth. “I’m pleased they still remember that back in London. Sometimes I feel like ‘the forgotten man’ out here. I spend my days conferring with CIA agents and my nights drinking toasts at the Russian Embassy. I keep track of people like Ivor Kudat, and count the number of Red Chinese in town, but mostly I just sweat and curse the weather.”

“Doesn’t it ever rain?”

“In the rainy season, it rains. Then the streams overflow and flood out the peasants and they come clamoring to us for aid: That’s why a lot of them give up and live on junks in the harbor.”

They swung past a large gray building that stood in silence behind an iron fence. “The Russian Embassy?” Rand asked remembering the pictures he had studied.

Fraze nodded. “They’re having a reception tomorrow night for our new Ambassador. You can get a look at the place then.”

“Would it be wise for me to attend?” Rand asked.

“Why not? They had a man at the airport watching your arrival. It’s no secret.”

Rand settled back in the seat. The ways of the Far East were indeed puzzling, and not at all like London. He was beginning to wonder just how important the affair of Ivor Kudat would prove to be.

The new British Ambassador was a smooth-talking white-haired man whose skin was tanned and creased from two years in Iran. He shook hands firmly and spoke with quick precision. “I’ve heard a good deal about the Department of Concealed Communications, Mr. Rand. I think there may be something here for you. Arthur can fill you in on the details.”