XPD

21

The phone connection that Boyd Stuart used in London to speak to Los Angeles was the highest priority ‘crypto-ciph B’. The crypto-ciph network (A for America, B for Britain) is a scrambler phone. The encryption machines take the varying frequencies of the human vocal chords and, converting them first into fluctuating electrical current, use computer technology to rearrange each fraction of sound, a microsecond at a time, into new patterns. At the other end, similar machinery reconstructs the impulses and recreats a facsimile of the original sounds. Although the American National Security Agency owned and operated the network, they were so far not able to decipher intercepted conversations without knowing the day’s code. Thus London advised Boyd Stuart to use the ‘crypto-ciph B’ to speak to his contact clerk.

‘Sorry I’m a little late. The machine was in use until a few minutes ago,’ said the voice from Los Angeles.

‘It doesn’t matter, I was only sleeping.’

‘Well, I said I was sorry. Anyway you’d better make sure you are fully awake. It looks like we have a breakthrough on the Stein documents.’

‘Speak on.’

‘A call to Stein from London. A man named Paul Bock wants to talk to Stein about the papers. He says he works for a German bank in London. He says it’s a matter of life and death.’

‘Oh, he does, does he?’

‘He won’t give his address but he’s left the phone number of a secretarial agency which will take a message for him.’

‘Where did this call come through to?’

‘He was phoning Stein.’

‘All the way from London?’

‘That’s right. It’s gone on to Stein’s answering machine. Our people here have been trying to wipe the message off the tape so that Stein doesn’t get it.’

‘What’s the number he left?’ Boyd Stuart wrote it down on the message pad. It was bad enough getting access to the encryption machines only at these absurd hours when the senior civil servants and the politicians were in bed and asleep, but he did not enjoy being kept waiting for nearly two hours in the Foreign Office communications room deep under the traffic of Whitehall. He thanked the machine operator who had made the connection for him and then went to follow the smell of coffee.

He came up through the basement of 10 Downing Street. It is not a hive of industry so soon after dawn. The upstairs apartment which provides a residence for the Prune Minister was not occupied. He could hear the policemen chatting together in the entrance hall; their voices had that special hush that night workers acquire. An elderly woman was making coffee in a small kitchen at the rear of the building. She poured him a cup almost before he had asked for one, she had mistaken him for one of the plain-clothes detectives from the ground floor, or one of the coding clerks from the basement.

Boyd Stuart looked at his watch. It was 6.40 a.m., Monday, July 16. The only sound he could hear was the press service teleprinter firing off its occasional bursts of news.

Boyd Stuart went to one of the telephones and dialled the phone number of the secretarial agency. They answered. At least they worked all round the clock. ‘I’m trying to contact Paul Bock,’ he said when the girl replied.

‘Your name?’

‘Stein. Charles Stein,’ said Boyd Stuart.

‘Yes, I have the message for you. Go to Jimmy’s Militaria. It’s in York Way near King’s Cross station. You can’t miss it, it says here.’

‘OK, thanks.’

He hung up. He walked from 10 Downing Street through the connecting doors that gave access to the whole street of houses to emerge from the front door of No. 12. Even at this time in the morning there were sight-seers standing on the opposite side of the road hoping for a glimpse of someone important. Boyd had left his car near the foot of the steps that led down to St James’s Park. He wondered what time Jimmy’s Militaria opened. He decided that it was too late to go home and catch up on his sleep. He drove through Trafalgar Square and headed north up Charing Cross Road.

You can’t miss Jimmy’s Militaria. Its shop-front is part of a row of Victorian houses sited between a pet shop and a launderette. It’s not as busy as the launderette nor as smelly as the pet shop, but it’s painted in black, red and white stripes, and the name board is surmounted with fretwork Iron Crosses. In one window there are dummies dressed in military uniforms and equipment; on the other side of the door, the smaller window is packed tightly with steel helmets, swords and daggers, buttons and badges, swastika armbands and trays filled with broken model soldiers.

The bell push was marked ‘Upstairs flat’ in red felt-pen lettering on a torn scrap of paper. Stuart pressed the button. Nothing happened, so he pushed it again, and kept on doing so until a miserable figure in a torn dressing gown made his way slowly through the life-size inanimate soldiers and draped flags to pull back the bolts of the front door.

‘We’re not open,’ he said. He was in his twenties, bespectacled, with long hair and a half-grown beard adorning his white, pimply face.

‘I’m looking for Mr Paul Bock,’ said Stuart.

The man took a cigarette from his mouth. ‘You ain’t the law, are you?’ He coughed and spat into the street. He had a strong south London accent.

‘I’m here because he wants to see me.’

‘At this time of day?’ said the man with disgust, but he stood back and opened the door. ‘You’re not Stein, are you?’

‘Charles Stein,’ said Boyd. ‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘You don’t have an American accent.’

‘I was at school in England,’ said Stuart.

The man looked Stuart up and down before saying, ‘Well, come in. Paul will be surprised to see you. He’s frying himself an egg upstairs.’

‘The message went on my answering machine,’ said Stuart. ‘I phoned to see if there were any messages, and I have a device which makes the recording play back over the phone.’

‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ said the man. ‘By the way, I’m Jimmy.’ He led the way up a creaking staircase to a landing with cracked lino. Small plastic dishes of ancient food scraps were placed in the corner, and a black cat stretched itself and came to look at the visitor. They went up another flight of stairs before entering the kitchen. A century of ground subsidence had given the doors and windows a curious rhomboidal shape and the stained wallpaper bulged with accumulations of loose plaster. A small plastic-topped table was set with crockery of mixed patterns, and a large economy-size packet of Kellogg’s cornflakes was its centrepiece. On the wall behind the square china sink there was an old Rolling Stones poster. At the ancient, cast-iron gas stove a second man was frying six eggs in a bent frying pan. He seemed fully occupied with his task, tipping the pan in each and every direction and using a spoon to baste hot fat over the yolks.

‘Here’s your Mr Stein,’ said the bearded man.

The man at the stove put down the teaspoon and, still holding the tilted frying pan, offered his hand. Stuart shook it.

‘Charles Stein,’ said Stuart. ‘I was in London.’

‘Phoned his home and got your message using one of those whistle gadgets,’ explained Jimmy.

‘That’s right,’ said Stuart.

‘Jimmy is a communications engineer,’ explained Paul Bock, the man at the stove. ‘I’m just an amateur, but I’ve been using my little microcomputer to get into main frames by telephone for years.’ He had a soft German accent.

‘Are you political activists?’ Stuart asked.

‘COMPIR,’ said Jimmy. ‘Computer pirates. We’ve no political ideals. Our idea of having fun is accessing password files. We’re a sort of club… ’

‘The bank where I work has got a really big computer,’ said Bock. ‘It took us months to crack the “bug fixes” and find our way inside.’

‘What are “bug fixes”?’

‘Modifications that the manufacturers keep adding to stop people like us,’ said Bock. ‘Do you want an egg? Soft or turned over?’

‘Soft.’

‘Jimmy eats them turned over. They taste like plastic.’

There was an open packet of cigarettes on the table. Jimmy leant across and nipped the end of one and tried to tease it out of the packet. When it did not budge he shook it more fiercely like a terrier with a rat. Finally it came free. ‘Help yourself,’ he said and pushed the packet towards Stuart.

‘No thanks,’ said Stuart. ‘It’s too early for me.’ He watched Jimmy light the new cigarette from the stained, misshapen old one.

‘Tell me everything you know about Operation Siegfried,’ said Bock. He turned round with the frying pan and tipped the eggs on to the plates, two at a time. He was a muscular boy with a short haircut and a carefully shaved face. Under a shabby silk dressing gown he was wearing a clean blue shirt and the trousers of a grey suit. He saw the puzzled expression on Stuart’s face. ‘I have to go to work,’ he explained. ‘Jimmy is lucky he doesn’t have to disguise himself in these absurd uniforms.’

Stuart became painfully aware of the ‘uniform’ that he himself was wearing. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Now tell us about Operation Siegfried.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘We can get rough, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock. ‘You might find that hard to believe, but we can get very rough.’

‘I believe you can get rough,’ said Stuart. ‘So why don’t you believe me when I say that I’ve never heard of Operation Siegfried?’

Jimmy took the bread knife and roughly sliced some bread. He tossed a slice to each of the other men. Stuart dipped a piece of it into the soft yolk of his egg and ate in silence.

‘If you’ve got something to tell me, then tell me,’ said Stuart.

Paul Bock cut his egg into rectangles and ate it section by section between his fingers. ‘I work in the bank-a big German bank-no matter its name at the moment. We got this information from the bank’s computer.’

‘Is that difficult?’ asked Stuart.

‘This computer was a beauty,’ said Jimmy, rubbing his hand over his half-grown beard. ‘Could be this is one of the most complex of its sort anywhere in Europe.’

‘But we cracked it,’ said Paul Bock. ‘Or Jimmy did.’

‘Paul got the hardware keys,’ said Jimmy. ‘Until we could physically unlock the machinery, I couldn’t even begin. And he completed the first codes for the terminal keyboard. Then it got trickier. The bank have performance-measuring consultants who tune the computer; they notice the access per programme, and we didn’t want them to get suspicious. We had to trickle the stuff out bit by bit; spread it over a few weeks.’ He coughed and thumped his chest with his fist still holding the cigarette.

‘This material is ultra secret,’ said Bock. ‘There were many software keys, each one opening up more and more secret stuff.’

‘It’s like a series of doors,’ explained Jimmy. ‘You’ve got to unlock each and every one to get into the inner sanctum. And every door has a sort of burglar alarm that will close down the terminal and store a message saying that someone has attempted an unauthorized access.’

‘And you managed all that?’ said Stuart, not without a trace of genuine admiration.

‘Jimmy’s a wizard,’ said Paul Bock.

‘So what is Operation Siegfried?’ Stuart asked.

‘We are not quite sure,’ admitted Jimmy. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and began to eat.

‘There is a secret fund-a Trust, they call it-formed by some of the most powerful organizations of the Bundesrepublik,’ said Paul. ‘Steel companies, armaments, car-parts manufacturers, insurance companies, publishers and very big banks. We know that the senior trustee is a man named Böttger, who is president of a bank based in Hamburg. Like all the other men involved, he has never been associated with any post-war political party. That’s significant.’

‘In what way significant?’ asked Stuart.

‘If you were going to resurrect the Third Reich,’ said Paul Bock, ‘would it not be a good idea to tell your agents to avoid all political activity?’

‘The war was thirty or more years ago,’ protested Stuart. ‘You mean they’ve been asked to wait that long for Operation Siegfried?’ It all seemed highly unlikely.

‘They are patient and full of cunning,’ said Paul Bock. ‘The Third Reich was planned to last for one thousand years; Hitler himself said so. What is thirty or forty years to such people?’ He got up to put his plate in the sink. A floorboard creaked under his weight.

‘And you think these people are starting a Fourth Reich?’ said Stuart. ‘In what way is my name involved with such plans?’

‘We got your name from the computer,’ said Paul Bock. ‘We got a print-out and committed it to memory before destroying it. There were many names, each with a code word, the significance of which we have not yet decided; your name was the only one which sounded unmistakably Jewish It seemed to us impossible that you would be a supporter of their aims. Therefore you must be an intended victim.’

The two men, Jimmy and Paul Bock, looked at one another. They realized that they were not convincing their visitor. It had not been planned this way: to see Charles Stein up here in this grubby little house with the smell of yesterday’s boiled cabbage coming from next door. The plan had been to meet with him in the lobby of some luxurious hotel in central London, or even take him for a meal in a restaurant. Paul Bock looked round the greasy kitchen. Why should anyone take them seriously once they had seen this dingy slum?

‘It’s all true,’ said Jimmy. ‘You may not believe it, but it’s all true.’

‘We’ve done all we could,’ said Paul Bock, continuing the conversation with his friend as if their visitor had already departed. ‘We warned him.’

Boyd Stuart finished his egg. ‘What about some hard information?’ he said. ‘What about more names?’

‘We wondered if you could be on some sort of death list, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock politely.

‘And I’m wondering if you have been watching too much late night TV,’ said Stuart.

‘Get stuffed,’ said Jimmy. ‘We told you, and that’s that.’

Stuart pushed his plate aside and stood up to get a paper towel to wipe his fingers. Through the rain-spattered windows he saw a grim industrial landscape and the Grand Union canal, its stagnant water littered with ice-cream wrappers and floating beer cans. A narrow boat, timbers rotting, had settled low enough for scummy water to lap on to its deck.

Beyond the canal, the rusting tracks and rained shed were the remains of a railway system which had once made the world gasp with envy. A diesel locomotive came into view, hooted and stopped. Stuart tossed the paper towel into the bin under the sink and said, ‘What about a little more evidence?’

Paul Bock said, ‘We’ll talk about it.’ He took Jimmy out of the room and when they returned Bock was wearing the jacket of his smart grey suit.

‘Can you give me a lift to the tube?’ Bock said, looking out of the window. ‘I think I’ll need my raincoat.’

‘Certainly.’ Stuart turned back to Jimmy when he got as far as the landing. ‘But why the swastika badges and the Nazi decorations?’

Jimmy smiled. ‘Then I don’t have to feel bad about lying and cheating my customers.’

‘I see,’ said Stuart. He followed Paul Bock down the narrow staircase into the gloomy shop and out of the front door. Summer seemed a long way away; the clouds were still grey and there was only the faintest glimmer of sunshine on the horizon. They got into the Aston and Stuart followed the insane maze of one-way streets to the underground railway station.

‘I wish you’d give me more information,’ said Stuart as Paul Bock got out of the car. ‘Give me some details of the Trust: what is its address? Do you know how it is funded?’

The German leant close to the window. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he said.

‘Why not now? If my life is in danger the way you say it is, why not now?’

‘Because we don’t believe you are Mr Charles Stein,’ said the German. ‘Jimmy thinks you’re the police. I’m not certain who you are, but the computer print-out shows nearly one hundred million dollars against your name… I’ve worked in banks. You are not a man who’s ever had use of a fortune. Men who handle such money don’t come knocking on doors in King’s Cross early in the morning; they send others to do it for them. You tell Mr Stein to come in person.’ He smiled and was gone in the crowds hurrying into the station.