Pantheon

Chapter Twenty-five

London

Taylor had shuddered with boredom when he first heard of the job his father had arranged for him. It sounded so technical, as if he were going to be a grease-monkey, wearing overalls and thumping away at machines all day. He had been educated expensively enough to expect — no, to deserve — better than that.

And his colleagues were, as he feared, dull as a weekend in Ohio. They barely talked about anything, let alone anything interesting. One spent the lunch hour reading the baseball scores from the Paris Herald Tribune, which might have been tolerable had he not insisted on reading them aloud. Thankfully, since the fall of Paris, the paper only reached London sporadically, if it was published at all.

The consolation came, surprisingly enough, from the work itself. He would tell Anna that he worked in the embassy’s ‘nerve centre’ and, though at first that had been mere self-aggrandizement on his part, he had come to believe it. He had become convinced that there was not a significant document that did not pass through this office, whether coming in or going out.

He used to prefer the incoming traffic, enjoying the thrill of knowing what the rest of London did not, feeling as if he were eavesdropping on the conversations of the most powerful men in the world. Outgoing was often a chore: either it was humdrum stuff about consignments of this and container loads of that or it was rehashing what he had already read in that morning’s London Times. Even the cables which purported to offer the skinny on what was really happening in Whitehall or Westminster rarely offered anything juicy — and nothing to rival what he was picking up around Murray’s dinner tables (or from Anna’s pillow talk, for that matter).

But he was good at his job, faster than the others. He had the advantage of youth, that was what the secretaries said: ‘It’s always the young men who master the new gadgets.’ The machinery did not faze him: he could operate it without thinking about it. And so, before long, he was given the most urgent material, which often meant the most important.

Some of his colleagues didn’t even bother to read the paperwork in front of them. Of course they read each word before rendering it. But they were not really reading it, not taking in its meaning. Taylor Hastings, however, found he could do both, effortlessly. And as he did so, he grew aware that he was becoming supremely well-informed about both the progress of the war — as reported by British officials to the US Embassy, and then passed on by US diplomats to the State Department in Washington — and the shifting moods and sympathies in the American capital.

Of course he knew he was getting only half the picture, and even that half was jaundiced. Most of the Brits were putting the best possible gloss on their efforts for the benefit of their American contacts: telling them that they had detected chinks in the German armour, that it would not take much to bring down the Nazi ogre, that victory was possible. But that message was tempered by the advice given by Ambassador Kennedy, whose thrust, however subtly disguised, usually amounted to the same thing: Britain was doomed and there was no point America coming to its aid, not economically and certainly not militarily. The replies Kennedy received, and which passed through Taylor’s hands each morning, told him which way Washington was leaning that day — towards isolation or intervention — and where the various competing US officials, in State or in the White House, were positioning themselves.

Reading this material first hand, reading it indeed before the principals themselves had laid eyes on it, fed Taylor Hastings’s feeling that he had somehow landed close to the summit of world affairs. Had destiny placed him there? Was this the work of the God his mother worshipped so faithfully? He wasn’t sure. But the sense that he had been granted an opportunity he should not waste, that he was being called to act, was growing within him.

A fresh pile of papers awaited: incoming traffic from Washington that had arrived during the night. His job, here in the cipher room of the London embassy, was to decode the messages, turning each cable of gibberish back into English, to be read by those far above him in the hierarchy, those who would never meet him or know his name. They would read these documents soon enough — but only after Taylor Hastings had read them first.