The Innocent (11 page)

Leonard whispered “Yes,” but his reply was lost to the sound of the pumps.

Running along the tops of the twin banks of sandbags were power lines, the air-conditioning conduit and the lines from the recording room, encased in a lead sheath. Along the way there were telephones mounted on the wall, and fire extinguishers,
fuseboxes, emergency power switches. At intervals there were green and red warning lights, like miniature traffic signals. It was a toytown, packed with boyish invention. Leonard remembered the secret camps, the tunnels through the undergrowth he used to make with friends in a scrap of woodland near his house. And the gigantic train set in Hamleys, the toy store—the safe world of its motionless sheep and cows cropping the sudden green hills that were no more than pretexts for tunnels. Tunnels were stealth and safety; boys and trains crept through them, lost to sight and care, and then emerged unscathed.

MacNamee murmured in his ear again. “I tell you what I like about this project. The attitude. Once the Americans decide to do a thing, they do it well, and hang the cost. I’ve had everything I wanted, never a murmur. None of this can-you-get-by-with-half-a-ball-of-string nonsense.”

Leonard was flattered to be confided in. He tried to be humorous in agreement. “Look at all the trouble they take with the food. I love the way they do their chips.”

MacNamee looked away. It seemed this puerile observation drifted with them down the tunnel until they reached the steel door.

Beyond it was air-conditioning equipment banked up on both sides to make a narrow corridor of the railway lines. They edged past an American technician who was working there and opened a second door.

“Now,” MacNamee said as he closed it behind him. “What do you think?”

They had entered a brightly lit section of the tunnel that was clean and well ordered. The walls were lined with plywood that had been painted white. The railway lines had disappeared under a concrete floor, which was covered with linoleum. From overhead came the rumble of traffic on the Schönefelder Chaussee. Wedged between racks of electronics were tidy workspaces, plywood surfaces with headsets and the monitoring tape recorders. Neatly stowed on the floor were the cases Leonard had sent down that day. He was not being
asked to admire the amplifier. He knew the model from Dollis Hill. It was powerful, compact and weighed less than forty pounds. It was about the most expensive item in the lab where he had worked. It was not the machine, it was the sheer quantity of them, and the switching gear, all down one side of the tunnel, stretching ninety feet perhaps, stacked head high, like the interior of a telephone exchange. It was the quantity MacNamee was proud of, the handling capacity, the amplifying power and the feat of circuitry it implied. By the door, the lead-sheathed cables broke into multicolored strands, fanning out to junction points from which they emerged in smaller clusters held by rubber clips. Three men of the Royal Signals were at work. They nodded at MacNamee and ignored Leonard. The two men passed along the array at a stately pace, as though reviewing a guard of honor. MacNamee said, “Near on a quarter of a million pounds’ worth. We’re drawing off a tiniest fraction of the Russian signals, so we need the best there is.”

Since his remark about the chips, Leonard was confining his appreciation to nods and sighs. He was thinking about an intelligent question he might put, and only half listened while MacNamee described the technicalities of the circuitry. Close attention was not necessary. MacNamee’s pride in the bright white amplification room was impersonal. He liked to see the achievement afresh through the eyes of a newcomer, and any eyes would do.

Leonard was still working on his question as they approached a second steel door. MacNamee stopped by it. “This one is a double door. We’re going to keep the tap room pressurized to stop the nitrogen leak.” Leonard nodded again. The Russian cables would have nitrogen sealed within them to keep moisture out and to help monitor breaks. Pressurizing the air around the cables would make it possible to cut into them undetected.

MacNamee pushed open the doors, and Leonard followed him in. It was as though they had stepped inside a drum being beaten by a wild man. Road noise was filling the vertical tunnel and reverberating in the tap chamber. MacNamee stepped
over empty sacks of sound insulation piled on the floor and took a torch from a table. They stood at the base of the access tunnel. Right up in its roof, picked out by the narrow beam, were the three cables, each four or five inches thick and caked in mud. MacNamee was about to speak, but the pounding intensified to a frenzy and they had to wait. When it subsided he said, “Horse and cart. They’re the worst. When we’re ready, we’ll use a hydraulic jack to pull the cables down. Then we’ll need a day and a half to cement the roof for support. We won’t make the cut until all the backup is in shape. We’ll bridge the circuits first and then break in and lead off. There’s likely to be more than a hundred and fifty circuits in each cable. There’ll be an MI6 technician laying the actual tap, and three standing by in case something goes wrong. We’ve one man off sick, so you might have to be in the support group.”

While he was speaking, MacNamee rested his hand on Leonard’s shoulder. They came away from the shaft to be out of the worst of the noise.

“Well I have got a question,” Leonard said, “but you might not want to answer it.”

The government scientist shrugged. Leonard found that he wanted his approval. “Surely all the important military traffic will be encoded and telegraphed. How are we going to read it? These modern codes are meant to be virtually unbreakable.”

MacNamee took a pipe from his jacket pocket and bit on its stem. Smoking, of course, was out of the question.

“This is what I wanted to speak to you about. You haven’t been talking to anyone?”

“No.”

“Have you heard of a man called Nelson, Carl Nelson? Worked for the CIA’s Office of Communications?”

“No.”

MacNamee was leading the way back through the double doors. He bolted them before they walked on. “This is level four now. We were going to let you in, I think. You’re about to join an exclusive club.” They had stopped again, this time by the first rack of amplifying equipment. At the far end the three
men worked on in silence, well out of earshot. As MacNamee spoke he ran his finger along the front of an amplifier, perhaps to give the impression that he was discussing it. “I’ll give you the simple version. It’s been discovered that when you electrically encode a message and send it down the line, there’s a faint electronic echo, a shadow of the original, of the clear text, that travels with it. It’s so faint that it fades out after twenty miles or so. But with the right equipment, and if you can tap into the line within the twenty miles, you can have a readable message coming straight onto the teleprinter, no matter how well the material has been encoded. This is the basis for the whole operation here. We wouldn’t be building something on this scale just to listen to low-priority telephone chat. It was Nelson’s discovery, and the equipment was his invention. He was walking about in Vienna looking for a good place to try it out on the Russian lines when he walked right into a tunnel we had built to tap those same lines. So, very generously, we let the Americans into our tunnel, gave them facilities, let them make use of our taps. And you know what? They didn’t even tell us about Nelson’s invention. They were taking the stuff back to Washington and reading the clear text while we were knocking our brains trying to, break the codes. And these are our allies. Bloody incredible, don’t you think?” He paused for confirmation. “Now that we’re sharing this project, they’ve let us in on the secret. But only the outline, mark you, not the details. That’s why I can only give you the simplest account.”

Two of the Royal Signals people were walking toward them. MacNamee steered Leonard back in the direction of the tap chamber. “On the need-to-know basis, you shouldn’t be getting any of this. You’re probably wondering what I’m up to. Well, they’ve promised to share whatever they come up with. And we have to take that on trust. But we’re not prepared to live off the crumbs from their table. That’s not our understanding of this relationship. We’re developing our own version of Nelson’s technique, and we’ve found some marvelous potential sites. We’re not talking to the Americans about them. Speed is important because sooner or later the Russians are
going to make the same discovery, and then they’ll modify their machines. There’s a Dollis Hill team working on it, but it would be useful to have someone here keeping his ears and eyes open. We think there might be one or two Americans here who know about Nelson’s equipment. We need someone with a technical background, and not too highly placed. As soon as they see me, these people run a mile. It’s the details we’re after, odds and ends of electronics gossip, anything that might help things along. You know how careless the Yanks can be. They talk; things are left lying around.”

They had stopped by the double steel doors. “So. What do you think?” It almost sounded like “fink.”

“They’re all very chatty in the canteen,” Leonard said. “Even our own chaps.”

“You’ll do it, then? Good. We’ll talk more later. Let’s go up and have some tea. I’m freezing to death.”

They went back along the tunnel, into the American sector, up the incline. It was hard not to feel proud of the tunnel. Leonard remembered before the war when his father built a small brick extension onto the kitchen. Leonard lent a child’s token assistance, fetching a trowel, taking a list to the hardware shop and so on. When it was all finished, and before the breakfast table and chairs were moved in, he stood in the new space with its plaster walls, electrical fittings and homemade window, and he felt quite delirious with his own achievement.

Back in the warehouse, Leonard excused himself from tea in the canteen. Now that he had MacNamee’s approval, his gratitude even, he felt confident and free. On his way out of the building he looked in at his room. The absence of tape recorders on the shelves was itself a small triumph. He locked the door and took the key to the duty officer’s room. He crossed the compound, passed the sentry at the gate and set off for Rudow. The road was dark, but he knew every step of the way now. His greatcoat gave poor protection against the cold. He could feel the hairs in his nostrils stiffening. When he breathed through his mouth, the air stung his chest. He could sense the frozen flat fields around him. He passed the shacks where refugees
from the Russian sector had set up home. There were kids playing in the dark, and as his steps rang out on the cold road, they shushed each other and waited until he had passed. Every yard away from the warehouse was a yard toward Maria. He had spoken to no one about her at work, and he could not talk to her about what he did. He was not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void traveling between two points. Only on arrival, at this end or that, would he assume or be assigned a purpose, and then he would be himself, or one of his selves, again. What he did know for sure was that these speculations would begin to fade as his train approached his Kreuzberg stop, and that as he hurried across the courtyard and took the five flights of stairs two or even three at a time, they would have vanished.

L
eonard’s initiation happened to coincide with the coldest week of the winter. By Berlin’s harsh standards, the old hands agreed, it was exceptional at minus twenty-five degrees. There were no clouds, and by day even the bomb damage, sparkling in rich orange light, looked almost beautiful. At night the condensation on the inside of Maria’s windowpanes froze into fantastic patterns. In the mornings the top layer on the bed, usually Leonard’s greatcoat, was stiff. During this time he rarely saw Maria naked, not all of her, all at once. He saw the gleam of her skin when he
burrowed down into the humid gloom. Their winter bed, top-heavy with thin blankets, coats, bath towels, an armchair cover and a nursery quilt, was precarious, bound only by its own weight. There was nothing large enough to keep the whole together. One careless move and single items would slide away, and soon the ensemble would be in ruins. Then they would be standing facing each other across the mattress, shivering as they began the reconstruction.

So Leonard had to learn stealth as he burrowed down. The weather was enforcing an attention to detail. He liked to press his cheek against her belly, taut from all that cycling, or to push the tip of his tongue into her navel, as intricately convoluted as a sunken ear. Down here in the semidarkness—the bedclothes did not tuck under the mattress, and there was always light leaking in from the sides—in the closed and clotted space, he learned to love the smells: sweat like mown grass, and the moistness of her arousal with its two elements, sharp but rounded, tangy and blunt: fruit and cheese, the very tastes of desire itself. This synaesthesia was a kind of delirium. There were tiny blades of calluses the length of her little toes. He heard the rustle of cartilage in her knee joints. In the small of her back was a mole out of which grew two long hairs. Not until mid-March, when the room was warmer, did he see they were silver. Her nipples sprang erect when he breathed on them. On the earlobes were the marks left by her earring clasps. When he ran his fingers through her babyish hair he saw the roots parting in a three-armed whorl about the crown, and her skull looked too white, too vulnerable.

Maria indulged these
Erkundungen
, these excavations. She lay in a daydream, mostly silent, sometimes putting words around a stray thought and watching her breath ascend to the ceiling. “The Major Ashdown is a funny man … that’s good, put your fingers between all the toes, yes, so … every four o’clock in his office he has a cup of hot milk and a boiled egg. He wants the bread cut one, two, three, four, five, like so, and do you know what he calls them, this military man?”

Leonard’s voice was muffled. “Soldiers.”