Dead Letter Drop

17

The nerve centre of British Intelligence consists of just over 3 square miles of atom-bomb proof knowledge. It lies several hundred feet underground, below the vast acreage of greenery in the centre of London that is Hyde Park. It lies deep down beneath the famous underground car park, beneath the lowest reaches of the underground railway network, and is encased in an awesome tonnage of concrete and lead.

Underneath the calm green of the park and the dim gloom of the police car pound — where my rent-a-wreck was no doubt languishing — and the layers upon layers of concrete, are some 5,000 men and women, all with faces pallid from lack of sunlight, from an eternal diet of civil service coffee and civil service ham sandwiches, and made worse by the cold stark glare of the neon strip lighting.

In this weird white-walled, white-lit, white-sound-deadened grotto of corridors and windowless rooms, computers clatter and flash as far away into the distance as the eye can see; people move from department to department on electric tricycles, always clutching wads of files, always in a desperate rush. The casual observer would rapidly form the impression that everyone down here knows exactly what they are doing — much like the impression given to the casual observer of a column of ants — not that there were any casual observers down here; none that British Intelligence knew of, anyway.

When Ian Fleming wrote his Bond books the futuristic headquarters of the lunatic megalomaniacs that adorned the finales of many of his books did not come entirely from his imagination, but in part from his own direct observations of this place during his own service in Intelligence.

Down here everything works; in a matter of seconds one can find out what the weather was like at 3.30 pm on 8 May 1953 in Botswana; or the political affiliation of any professional football-player in the world; or the names of all the owners in England of cars made behind the Iron Curtain, their political affiliations, and probably, if one looked hard enough, the favourite colours and shoe sizes of their grandmothers. At the push of another button the name of the 927th convicted housebreaker in Durham would appear, where he bought his cigarettes from, what his favourite television programme was and what he ate while watching it. Another button would reveal all the known and suspected Communist schoolteachers there were at the present time in Wooton-Under-Edge, or in Ongar, or in Bognor Regis, together with details ranging from their family trees, down, sometimes, to as much as their menstrual cycles or which after-shave their wives gave them for Christmas.

These 3 square miles make Big Brother look like the village idiot. The only thing I wouldn’t be able to find out down here would be when the next 2 x 4 would come swinging my way so that I’d know when to duck; on the other hand, it might be able to give me a lot of clues.

Arthur Jephcott was a jolly fellow, tweedy and slightly clumsily built, with a thin bony head, an unkempt beard at the bottom and a short pile of tangled hair on top, sparkling eyes, and a pair of hands he never knew quite where to put. He looked as if he would have been more at home marching country lanes with a stout stick, or buried behind piles of dusty books and yellowing manuscripts, in an office crammed full of curios, in a publishing company in Bloomsbury; behind him should have been a window with a view out over dismal, murky streets, and the office should have had an overriding smell of faded leather, damp and dust.

Instead, the door to Arthur Jephcott’s office opened into a precision-honed vacuum of sterility; there was a desk, a chair in front and a chair behind, an extractor fan, a computer terminal built into the top of the desk with a display screen that could be seen from both sides of the desk, two overhead strip lights, and absolutely nothing else; not a picture on the walls, nothing — complete clinical nothingness.

Arthur gave me an odd look, just for a fraction of a second, as I entered; it was a look I couldn’t immediately explain and it vanished as quickly as it appeared. He stood up, and a broad beam sprang across his face. ‘Good to see you again, dear fellow. Looking good! Trifle peaky under the gills, perhaps, but good!’ His greeting was warm, and he meant it.

‘You too,’ I said enthusiastically. I liked him. Always had. He often gave me snippets of news that he shouldn’t have done, little bits of classified information that gave me insights into the members and activities of the Department. Arthur was one of the best-informed men in British Intelligence, and I knew that what scraps he imparted to me were but tiny raindrops in the ocean, but I nonetheless eagerly and greedily devoured them; they helped give me a rough idea of what some of the other agents, of similar experience to my own, were up to, and generally what was going on; I would have given anything to have taken him out and got him stinking drunk and pumped his head for all it was worth. He knew so damn much because of his job. In effect his job was that of senior librarian for British Intelligence data: he controlled everything in Intelligence that involved computers, which was just about everything; all records, all incidents, all details, however small or large, about England, the British Isles and every other country in the world, anything at all in fact that could remotely be considered as concerning national security would be filed under Arthur’s personal supervision, and he would know how to retrieve it — normally within seconds; if it was particularly old or insignificant, it could take as long as one whole minute. Stored down here was every word of newsprint the Soviet Union had ever produced; every word ever printed in any language about any dissident; duplicates of all Scotland Yard’s crime records; Interpol’s records; personal dossiers on all the members of the US CIA; personal dossiers on everyone in every form of public life in every country of the world. There were dossiers on everyone in the world with a criminal record and on most of those without one who probably deserved one, from the bosses of organised crime down to the last crackpot. If it hadn’t been for the invention of the computer, both Arthur and I would have been standing knee-deep in dossiers.

Arthur pointed me into the empty chair, and I sat down. ‘So tell me, what have you been up to?’ Arthur leaned over, smiling. I smiled back.

‘A bit of this and a bit of that.’

‘Have you indeed?’ He grinned.

‘I would have thought you might be able to tell me!’

He looked taken aback. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

I waved my arm at the surroundings. ‘I thought this lot kept such a close eye on everyone, it knows what they’re going to do even before they do it.’

Arthur laughed heartily. ‘Heavens, what a thought. The time it takes before information is handed to us to file… I often think we’d get it quicker by going out and buying history books.’

I gave him a look which told him that I knew what he’d said was rubbish; he caught the look, but moved away from the subject. ‘What can I — or rather, Wotan — do for you?’

Wotan is the nickname given to the computer that is the brain of this entire headquarters.

‘How is Wotan?’

‘Not too bad, not too bad; like wine, improving with age. The amount of things Wotan doesn’t know are getting fewer and fewer; won’t be long before there’s little left that’s not in his brain that will be worth knowing. But the trouble is there’s so much happening these days, so much, it’s a constant struggle to keep pace. That’s why the likes of you are so important to us, damned important. Don’t ever forget it.’

I asked him some technical questions about recent increases in Wotan’s capacity, which sent him off on a ten-minute eulogy on modern science, leading to a dramatic climax of how all the greatest inventions of man had come together, culminating in one gigantic orgy of knowledge, and the child this orgy produced was Wotan. He was more excited than any child talking about his new train set could ever be. He was beaming as he talked and vibrating in the pauses. Wotan evidently turned him on.

When he finished he leaned forward once again. ‘Well, now you know the latest, what would you like us to do for you?’

I pulled out the chip. ‘First thing, I want to leave this with you. I need it back tomorrow, and want you to tell me everything you can about its contents.’

He turned it over in his palm. ‘A familiar enough face. What do you already know?’

‘Not much,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a few ideas and I’d like to see if yours tally. It’s vital we find out exactly what its purpose is.’

Arthur nodded.

‘The next thing,’ I said, ‘is this.’ I produced a letter from Fifeshire and handed it to him.

He looked at it. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said after reading it through.

‘Carry out the instructions in it.’

Arthur looked quizzically at me. ‘Where do you want to begin?’

‘Doesn’t it say?’

‘Haven’t you read it?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’d better.’ He handed the letter to me.

I read it. I had asked Fifeshire to authorise Arthur to make certain classified information available to me. Fifeshire had gone one further, and instructed Arthur that he was to make available to me absolutely any information about anyone, however senior they might be, not only in MI5, MI6 and all the other areas of Intelligence but also the Government and the armed forces and anywhere else I wanted to look. I was to be allowed access to any files I cared to see, from the Prime Minister downwards. I read the note with more than a little surprise. ‘Where I would like to begin,’ I said, ‘is with the name and records of everyone employed in British Intelligence.’

Arthur looked staggered. ‘Wouldn’t you like something simpler,’ he said, ‘like last year’s cup final result?’

I grinned.

‘You know what they call you in the Department, Max?’

‘No.’

It was Arthur’s turn to grin. ‘The Digger,’ he said.

‘The Digger? What’s that supposed to mean?’

It was his turn to grin. ‘You seem to have a reputation for thoroughness — not leaving stones unturned, digging away until you get to the bottom, never letting go. To tell you the truth I don’t think anyone thought you’d make a very good spy. You’ve changed their minds for them very neatly.’

‘Who’s ‘‘everyone’’?’

Arthur smiled. ‘Word gets around,’ was all he would say. ‘Right, shall we make a start?’

‘Have you some paper?’

He looked at me ruefully. ‘When were you last here? We don’t use it any more, not in this office. If all the information that goes in and out of this office went down on paper, England would be 3 feet deep in the stuff in a month.’ He tapped the computer terminal. ‘Much cleaner. Much kinder on trees too. Any notes you want to make you’d better jot down on whatever you have on you. That’s Arthur’s Law.’ He smiled. ‘Anyhow, it’s bad for the old brain to write things down. Remember them up here,’ he tapped his head. Then he leaned forward and tapped the keyboard. The word R-E-Q-U-E-S-T- followed by a string of meaningless letters appeared, then the word P-E-R-S-O-N-N-E-L appeared. The words disappeared, there was a brief pause, and then the words reappeared again, by themselves, with one additional word: R-E-A-D-Y. It was reassuring to know computers could be so banal.

‘Want some tea?’ said Arthur.

I nodded, and he gave an order into an intercom on the back of his desk. Then we started. For the next ten minutes a succession of names followed by personal details poured onto the screen. They appeared in a clinical lettering that was oblivious to the fact that human lives was the subject matter: ‘Dallyn. June, Sally. Nee Wick. B. 16-3-38. Widow. Late husband: Kevin, Eric. Cause of death: coronary arrest. Place of death: Black Lion Lane, London W1, prostitute’s apartment. Prostitute: Nola Kebbit. Children: Daniel Henry Nigel, Susan Margaret Anne, Mary Angela Jennifer…’

It was all there; the dates, the schools, the hobbies, the family friends, where they spent their holidays, who they slept with, the charities they supported; all the good and bad and the skeletons in the closets; all the facts not originally entered on the job application forms, that had been gleaned by the team of agents whose sole job, unsavoury but necessary, was much the same as that of ordinary private eyes operating throughout the country: to pry out all the facts. The only difference between these agents and the private eyes was that private eyes mainly worked on jobs concerning marriage fidelity; the agents worked on jobs concerning a different type of fidelity: fidelity to the country.

Tea arrived. It wasn’t served by a robot but by a tea lady who looked like she’d been kloned from an original mould, produced by a factory that supplied railway and factory canteens throughout the land. As she opened the door the screen went blank, and would remain blank until after she had departed and Arthur pushed the reset button.

Arthur sat awkwardly, confused by the presence of this lady as she shuffled about, placing first saucers, then cups, then spoons in front of us, then pouring first milk into the cups, then tea, then putting down a plate and then putting biscuits onto the plate. He swivelled his head as if it was on a mechanical pivot, to look at her, at the tray, at me, at the table, then back to her again. For the last hour he had brimmed with information, glowed like a light bulb while Wotan spewed forth, and now, suddenly, he had shrivelled up, as if another coin needed to be put into his meter.

I looked at his bushy face and thought about the extraordinary life he had spent so much of, and would continue to spend a great deal more of, down here in this bright hole, going home at night in his Ford Cortina to another bright hole, to a bright little wife to whom he no doubt waxed lyrical about the latest advances in microprocessor technology, about Josephson junctions and packet switching and finite state theory.

Arthur, with his walking holidays in Snowdonia, and his £12,000 a year pay packet, would no doubt go on for many years to come, waking with a bushy smile in the mornings while I would wake a shaking wreck, diving for my gun, trying to remember where I was each morning; in 30 years’ time Arthur would still be waking, smiling, in his own bed, slitting open his mail, reading his papers, and I would probably be long since buried — silently, quietly killed and buried in some far-off lonely land.

A bag was thrust under my nose. It contained Turkish delight: green ones with white icing. It was a crinkly paper bag of the sort sold at any confectioners. Crème-de-menthe-flavoured Turkish delight was his one vice in life, so he had previously told me; he never smoked, never drank, but ate incessant quantities of crème-de-menthe Turkish delight. I took one from the bag, and it laid a little trail of icing sugar across the glistening table-top.

I had a couple more lumps. That little paper bag and the growing trails of icing sugar, the plate of biscuits and the steaming cups on the table were all a welcome intrusion into this strange twilight world that, but for this array of items from the ordinary world outside, could well have been on another planet altogether. Thinking about Wetherby’s crinkly bag of peanuts, I idly wondered whether a crinkly bag of goodies was an essential item of equipment for employees of British Intelligence.

We settled back down to work again. We were about a quarter of the way through the A’s. Arthur put a Turkish delight and half a gingernut into his mouth, and chewed them happily. ‘Curious taste, the two together; mix very well. Did you bring your overnight bag?’

‘No, I’ve taken a 6-year lease on this corner of your office.’

‘Well, I hope the lease is renewable, because it’s going to take all of that.’ He was longing to ask me what it was I was looking for, and then to be able to point me straight to the answer — if it lay in here at all, which I doubted; but he knew it wasn’t his job to ask, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.

An hour and a half later we got to my name. The file was up to date to the start of my assignment in the States. No one had been able to find out very much of interest about me and there was certainly nothing there that upset me. There was nothing under Jephcott that upset him either. He’d probably made sure of that himself, not that there was likely to have been anything much anyway.

We finished that particular job at eleven o’clock. Arthur looked blearily at me; the hair in the immediate vicinity of his mouth was almost white with icing sugar. I hadn’t slept for two nights and right now, as far as I was concerned, another one wasn’t going to make much difference. I wanted to get my job done and to be gone from England before anyone else found out I was here, and news didn’t travel slowly in my particular company.

Arthur telephoned his wife for the third time. He had missed the cocktail party they had been going to, he’d missed the dinner party she’d decided to go on to and meet him at, and he was becoming resigned to the fact that there was every likelihood he was going to miss breakfast as well. He talked to his wife with all the tenderness of someone dictating a letter to the rates officer. He put the receiver down and looked up at me. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

‘Orchnev,’ I said.

He looked thoughtful. ‘Rings a bell. Can’t place it, though. Does ring a bell.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Russian. Wanted to flog some secrets. Something like that.’ He tapped the keyboards and a short dossier appeared, much as Karavenoff had described, but more detailed. The dossier ended with a written letter to Fifeshire dated 15 July — exactly one month before Fifeshire was shot. The letter was short and to the point. Orchnev introduced himself as being a senior member of the Science Council of the Politburo. He wished to defect and live in England, and would be willing to trade information for cooperation on the part of the British authorities. He stated he would be prepared to provide evidence of the calibre of information he had, and asked Fifeshire to reply to an address in West Germany.

The letter had been delivered by a complicated route; it was brought to the United States by a bribed Aeroflot stewardess, it then went to the British Embassy in Washington, who passed it on in the diplomatic bag. It was marked ‘Received’ by Whitehall on 12 August — three days before the shooting. It was not the sort of letter Fifeshire would have forgotten, yet he hadn’t mentioned it when I saw him, in spite of my showing him the second letter.

‘You must have a reply to this letter,’ I said.

Arthur shook his head. ‘It would be here if there was one. Maybe Sir Charles didn’t have time to deal with it before the shooting.’

‘Then surely someone else would have…’ I trailed off. I was saying it to myself as much as to Arthur. Who dealt with whose correspondence wasn’t his division. ‘Could the reply be in another file?’

‘If it was there’d be a copy here too. Everything in Wotan is cross-referenced to everything else. Everything with the name Orchnev in it would be duplicated here.’

‘Wotan could be fallible.’

Arthur’s tiredness was beginning to show. ‘Most unlikely,’ he said, almost bitchily, springing to Wotan’s defence. ‘And where do you suppose you’d start looking?’

‘I don’t know, Arthur, I don’t know.’ I did know, but I too was tiring now, and I had a pretty strong feeling that Wotan probably hadn’t made a mistake and I wasn’t going to find anything else here. I knew one thing for certain; from the wording of the letter that was in my pocket there must have been a reply to Orchnev and most probably quite a bit of correspondence with him. It wasn’t in Wotan because someone hadn’t wanted it in Wotan.