Flight From Honour

10

Ranklin was up early next morning, first telegraphing to the only hotel he could find near Brooklands – the Hound and Spear at Weybridge – to book a room, then sending O’Gilroy off without waiting for a reply. For the first time, he had seen the Irishman really taken aback by good fortune. Tailored clothes, grand meals and travelling by the Orient Express were things O’Gilroy had not so much shrugged off as on. As some men feared their name was on a bullet, he accepted that his was on a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. That was how he passed unquestioned in his new life since the world, lazy as ever, accepted him at his own valuation.

But being sent to learn to fly was an entirely new rainbow.

Even if he was, in part, paying for it himself. Dagner had been right in thinking that – at least legally – Ranklin no longer had any money of his own. However, he and O’Gilroy jointly shared some ?600 tucked away in a Versailles bank, acquired by selling a false codebook to the Austrian embassy in Paris. Ranklin had tried to persuade himself that cheating a potential enemy was pure patriotism, and been alarmed at how easily he had succeeded. Not telling the Bureau about it had been . . . well, it was O’Gilroy’s secret, too.

Anyway, the Bureau expected its agents to have some money of their own. Its blinkered attitude to their expenses showed that.

Oddly, when they had discussed payment the night before, it had been O’Gilroy who had been the more concerned. “But if yer putting up money of yer own, won’t he be knowing . . . I mean thinking . . . ?”

“I can’t stop him thinking.”

“But if’n he thinks ye . . .” The trouble was O’Gilroy wasn’t supposed to know about the bankruptcy. But it was one of those secrets that, like Army-issue trousers, had worn until you could see right through it.

“What he believes is his business.” Ruthless as Dagner might be, Ranklin didn’t think he’d risk the shame of prying into a brother officer’s financial affairs.

O’Gilroy didn’t understand this. But then, he knew Ranklin didn’t share his desire to fly – or many other things. Their partnership had never been based on the self-deception of mutual understanding.

Only when O’Gilroy had gone did Ranklin realise Dagner had got in even earlier and was sitting at a table in the Commander’s room surrounded by books and newspaper cuttings. At first he assumed this was preparation for Sir Caspar Alerion’s lecture – he was due at eleven – but then saw one of the books was Jane’s Fighting Ships.

He apologised for barging in, but Dagner waved that aside. “I’m just checking on some rather disturbing naval news I picked up last night . . . Though strictly, naval affairs aren’t really our business, are they?”

“Well, coming under the Admiralty and them with an Intelligence department of their own . . .”

“Hmm.” Dagner shut the book with a snap. “You got O’Gilroy off, then? Then you probably want to talk about Sir Caspar, late of the Foreign Office . . .”

Looking at Sir Caspar, Ranklin rather hoped he’d led a life of indulgent wickedness; otherwise, nature and age had been cruelly unkind. He was short and very fat, had several chins, a bulbous mottled nose, watery eyes and a skin mapped with broken veins. Yet he carried himself with immense dignity, his waddle seemed an imperial strut – provided you ignored his wheezing – his frock-coat was perfectly cut and his waistcoat, if a trifle artistic, at least suggested a fashionable portraitist rather than a Bloomsbury daubster.

They met in the dining room of the Whitehall Court flat: Sir Caspar, flanked by Ranklin and Dagner at one end, the four recruits along the sides.

“Had to be awake rather early to get up from the country,” Alerion said, unashamedly spiking his coffee from a hip flask. He drank, looked at the four young faces at the other end of the table and, slowly, beamed. “Gentlemen, you have no idea how glad I am to see you. You represent, to me, the end of a long road from the Battle of Fontenoy, nearly two hundred years ago. Where Lord Charles Hay of the Grenadiers invited his opponents: ‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, fire first.’

“Luckily the French commander was just as much of a blithering idiot and he returned the invitation so the British ended up taking the first shot. That would have come too late for me if Lord Charles had been my commander, because I’d have been over the hills and far away instanter. But that attitude that it’s unfair to take advantage of an opponent, even to the point of scouting out his strength and positions, has taken longer to die than the tens of thousands of men it got killed. We still have our Lord Charles’s.”

He gave a little grunt of pain and moved with fragile stiffness in his chair, then sighed and relaxed slightly. “Your business, gentlemen, is not secrets but the men who know the secrets. Every nation has a class entrusted with secrets and the power to create them. Such men are usually obvious, and often their weaknesses are, too – a love of drink, women, money, little boys – but let me point out another: their ideals.

“In the past century there’s been a great rise in nationalism – call it patriotism, if you like – replacing the Continental outlook of the old aristocracy, family and class loyalties that didn’t bother with frontiers. Lord Charles wasn’t thinking of his men’s lives or winning the battle for England, just upholding the honour of his own – and the French commanders – kind.

“You may find this patriotism quite splendi-” it was clear that he had reservations; “-but, like all things, it comes with a price. The more loyalty a man gives his country, the more he expects it to be worthy of his loyalty, and the more he can hate the way it’s being governed. The monarchist in a republic, the republican in a monarchy – extreme examples of men who consider themselves the only true patriots. And by upholding their ideals, are already halfway down the road to treason. It may be your task to drag them the rest of the way. Patriots, gentlemen, are your prey.”

This was strong stuff, and expecting a surge of distaste to cross the new boys’ faces, Ranklin was surprised to see them looking either amused or curious. He quickly adjusted his own face.

“Since you’re going to spend much of your working life lying to people,” Alerion said pleasantly, “it’s perhaps only fair that you’ll also spend it listening to lies. Some told in all innocence because someone believes, yearns, for them to be true. This is dangerous. But far, far more dangerous if you also yearn for them to be true, because you will have joined him in his cosy, warm fantasy.”

He smiled suddenly. “For instance, that story about Lord Charles Hay at Fontenoy is almost certainly untrue. We believe it because it makes us feel superior to Lord Charles – and because it comes from Voltaire, who’s known to be a great writer. But he became one by shaping stories to fit his own ends. Truth is a lonely business, gentlemen.”

Two more cups of coffee later – both improved from the hip flask – Alerion slumped back in his chair, exhausted. It wasn’t the sort of occasion for clapping, but after a silent moment, an appreciative mumble came from the dazed and surfeited audience.

Dagner said gravely: “Thank you very much, Sir Caspar.” Then he leant forward, hands clasped on the table-top, face hard and even more inscrutable than usual. “Gentlemen: Sir Caspar has given you some down-to-earth advice. I want you to think about it, and the change it marks in your lives. Some of us have been in battle. We know it’s not like The Boy’s Oum Paper, that it’s nasty, messy, muddled and brutal. I’m sure it was always so, that Caesar’s wars were no different: De Bello Gallico was a political tract. His soldiers would have written a very different book. War is brutal – yet all of us here have found ways to avoid becoming brutalised by it.

“You can now forget these.

“Forget the idea that you’ll just be following orders. In this game orders can’t cover every eventuality and you’ll be beyond reach of any extra help. Forget the comradeship of battle: from now on, you will be acting alone. Forget the duty you had to save your men and friends from danger: on this battlefield, you have no men, and your friends will have their own battles elsewhere. I cannot stress too strongly what Sir Caspar said about being alone. And alone not even with your conscience, because you have no conscience save that of your country. You will be acting outside the law, even the laws of war.

“Yet, just as we learn not to be brutalised by battle, we must practise deceit, dishonesty and dishonourable behaviour without ourselves taking on these qualities. Because to be of any value to our country we must remain loyal, trustworthy and honest. No easy task, gentlemen.” He smiled thinly. “Yet, I believe that if we can learn to cope with battle we are already halfway there.

“And one more thing to forget: any hope of reward. But in that, I believe, lies our true strength. Because unlike self-seeking generals and bickering politicians, unlike civil servants chasing vapid honours and businessmen piling up money, we are working only for what we believe in. The simple knowledge that our country will not reward us makes us free to act for it without any thought of self. It is a great freedom. Cherish it.”

It was a good, an appropriate, speech, Ranklin had to agree. So what was wrong with him that his own reaction was to think Yes, but . . . and be glad O’Gilroy wasn’t here?

The new recruits were gone, out to lunch or back up to the office, but the three of them still sat there because Alerion didn’t seem to want to move. He was staring vaguely at the disarranged and empty chairs at the far end of the long table. The room was as bright as it ever got with daylight, but it was indirect, that cool interior light that the Dutch painters understood so well.

“Can I get you some fresh coffee, Sir Caspar?” Ranklin offered.

“No, you can get me a damned great whisky and soda.” He roused himself and lit a small cigar while Ranklin went to the sideboard. “So those are tomorrow’s unsung heroes, off to secret battle armed with my ramblings and your clarion call of King and Country-”

“I don’t think you’re being quite fair,” Dagner protested mildly. “If I’d become overtly patriotic, they’d have fidgeted and looked at their bootlaces. But an agent does have to have a clear idea of who he’s working for, far clearer than a soldier. History’s full of mercenaries who fought, and fought well, just for love of battle and a shilling a day. But espionage has to have a purpose that you can believe in when you’re out there on your own, facing far worse than battle. And we, sitting safe here on our backsides, have to know that they believe, or how can we trust them?”

Alerion let out a mouthful of smoke with a long humming noise. “I want to see this Bureau of yours survive – and prosper. It’s come nearly a hundred years late, we threw away everything we learned in the eighteenth century and the French wars . . .”

He saw the glass Ranklin had quietly placed by him, nodded his thanks and then addressed him for the first time. “You haven’t been in this game very long, have you, Captain?”

Ranklin, who had isolated himself in his ‘Yes, but . . .’ mood, was disconcerted by the prospect of being asked his opinion. But then Dagner said: “Captain R is one of our most senior agents.”

That may have headed Alerion off. But while he was looking at his glass, and taking occasional sips, he didn’t seem to be addressing Dagner. Indeed, he might even have been talking to himself, in short disjointed phrases: “I mentioned the fantasies you run into in this business . . . It takes another form, too . . . When you’ve uncovered so many secrets that you think that now you know . . . Like an actor who’s played the king too long comes to think he can change the world . . . Dare say we all want our dreams to come true, but mostly there’s someone looking over our shoulder, messing it up, making it just another day’s work . . . Probably just as well, really . . . Soldiering does destroy soldiers. How can we expect spying not to destroy spies? . . . Only how can you tell if you can’t see any blood . . . ?” He shook his head impatiently. “I’m starting to ramble.”

By now Ranklin was feeling thoroughly uneasy, and it was a relief when Dagner brought the conversation smoothly down to matters of fact. “I believe you know Italy well, Sir Caspar.”

“Knew it, knew it . . . Always been a good place for the English to go to seed. I suppose I shouldn’t ask if you’ve got a ploy going on there?”

“Do you feel we should have anything going on there?” Dagner turned the question deftly.

“Hm. You won’t find much competition from our embassy, not under Rennell Rodd.” He chuckled, then frowned. “But looking for secrets of Italian policy is looking for a haystack under a needle. In my day there was a policy on every cafe table and a couple of secrets underneath it and I doubt much has changed. Bismarck said it all, thirty years ago: ‘Italy has a large appetite and very poor teeth’.”

“Something I learned only last night,” Dagner said casually, “and that rather surprised me. It probably shouldn’t have done, but most of my soldiering’s been done a thousand miles from the sea . . . That the Navy’s pretty well pulled out of the Mediterranean.”

This surprised Ranklin, too, but Sir Caspar just nodded. “Ah yes, that. You’re thinking of the route to Suez.”

“And India beyond.”

“Of course. And you aren’t the only one who’s concerned about us passing that responsibility to the French.”

Still befogged, Ranklin remembered that the only stupid question is the one you’re ashamed to ask. “Was this something official, sir? – and when?”

“Not officially announced, good Lord no. But it happened about a year ago. One fine day the Royal Navy virtually vanished from the Med, and the French fleet vanished from the Channel and the Atlantic. The Kaiser didn’t need any informers to tell him a deal had been struck on who guarded what for the other.”

Ranklin nodded. A year ago, he hadn’t been in this business, and his own problems were blotting out any interest in naval doings anyway.

Alerion went on: “The thinking goes that now Russia’s our ally, she’s no threat to India so there’ll be no need for quick reinforcement out there. Meanwhile, von Tirpitz is certainly building a damn great fleet on our own doorstep and that has to be the Navy’s greatest concern.”

Dagner said thoughtfully: “But it does seem to mean that the Italian and Austrian navies, if they combined, would control the eastern end of the Med. And the route to Suez.”

“Technically, Italy’s already allied with both Austria and Germany in the Triple Alliance, but I doubt that means much. Italy’s bound to join in a major war, out of sheer pride at becoming a new European Power – but who’s going to pay the bill? That’s Giolitti’s problem; he’s been their Prime Minister, on and off, for twenty years and it looks as if he’ll get back at the November elections. And he’s a rogue but no fool, and knows his best policy is to wait and see who’ll pay Italy the biggest bribe to take sides. And his worst fear is his own fanatics pushing him into a war with France or Austria – or even us – out of nationalist pride and without bribes.”

“But meanwhile,” Dagner reminded him, “the route to India . . .”

“I think we’re realising that we can’t be powerful everywhere. We have to leave some things to diplomacy – and your Bureau, of course,” Alerion added politely.