Between Silk and Cyanide (12 page)

'We already do something of the sort. I'll make sure it's done on a regular basis.'

'Colonel Buckmaster'—he'd just been promoted—'is there anyone in particular you're worried about?'

A microdot of hesitation. 'It was a general question. I'll consult you if I am.'

I knew that part of Peter Churchill's and Bodington's mission was to check up on the security of a circuit run by Carte (Andre Girard), which was causing F section great concern. That night I went through the back traffic of all the F section agents. It contained the usual mixture of Morse mutilation, wrong checks, right checks, no checks.

If I were Buckmaster, I'd be worried about all of them and I was convinced that he was.

I wondered why he and the Free French refused to pool their anxieties.

It was time to say goodbye to the Grouse. They were on their final standby and were to parachute into Norway no matter what the weather.

I'd already phoned Wilson to discuss the clusters of poems on soluble paper which I wanted to give them. His reply was explosive, even by his standards: 'I've told you they'll be passing hardly any traffic. They're to use the poems they've learned and nothing else. Is that clear? Or do you want me to confirm it to Ozanne?'

I told him that would not be necessary.

'Very well then. Just make certain they send no indecipherables. Thank you.'

This time he wasn't waiting at Chiltern Court to greet me. Halfway down the corridor I could hear the Grouse laughing. They stopped as soon as I entered the room. An only child worries more than most about laughter stopping and I asked if I could share the joke. They showed me a poem in Norwegian and English contributed by Wilson. It was untranslatable in both languages.

I took each of them to one side to discuss their security checks and run through their poems with them. The one thing the Grouse couldn't share was their coding conventions.

The session was only a formality but towards the end they produced another example of their silent Morse. A feeling more than a look seemed to pass between Poulson, Helberg and Kjelstrup. Poulson then said they had to leave to have some special skis fitted but Haugland asked if he could stay behind to talk to me—his skis had already been fitted.

Since it was time to say goodbye to his companions and I didn't now the Norwegian for 'merde alors', I had to rely on my handshake to say it for me. From their slight looks of surprise the message was received and understood.

I wondered what Haugland wanted to talk about. This extraordinary man, as slender as the steel skis which he said had been fitted, saw the time when he'd have to brief agents in the field on their coding—Norwegian patriots who hadn't his good fortune to be brought to London for training. He wanted to make absolutely certain that he'd absorbed everything I'd tried to teach him. I was to be cowed my one-to-one briefing after all.

I was sure that, if Haugland encoded a message as he jumped from an aeroplane, he'd have double-checked it by the time he reached the ground but I took him through the entire process from beginning to end.

I was also sure that his need to see something new was almost as great as mine to provide it so I opened my briefcase, which I'd had the foresight not to lock, and produced a mocked-up version of a WOK. He was only the second agent to have seen one (Tommy was the first) and, with a great deal of practise, spread over a great many years, I might conceivably handle a WOK half as well as Haugland did.

He asked a little shyly when these 'worked-out codes keys' would be ready, and I promised that it would be soon, and that they'd be printed on silk. I knew then that somehow I was going to make it happen. 'This would be very good code for us' he said quietly, and listened patiently while I stressed the importance of destroying the keys as soon as they'd been used.

He then spent another half an hour making sure he understood the security checks.

We shook hands until we nearly exchanged them and I walked to the door.

'Mr Marks…'

I turned back.

He made scissors of his fingers—and carefully went through the motions of cutting his silk.

Many of Baker Street's major crises occurred long after those equipped to deal with them had gone home and it was a strictly enforced rule that everyone of officer status (including civilians) had to be available at short notice to act as night duty officers. The only excptions to this rule were members of the Executive Council, which I had not yet been invited to join.

If an NDO were unfortunate enough to be given an entire building look after, he had to sit in a minute office from six in the evening until eight the next morning with a Top Secret list of private telephone numbers in front of him, a camp bed behind him and potential chaos around him. In emergencies he had authority to contact anyone from CD downwards but it was tacitly agreed that anything short a calamity could wait until morning. The definition of calamity was a matter for the NDO. But his duties were not wholly sedentary.

Escorted by an armed escort, he had to inspect every office in the building to ensure that the desks and safes were securely locked and that all documents had been put away. He had also to retrieve any peices of paper left lying around which should have been disposed of in the confidential waste. He had strict orders to put these unburied treasures in a special satchel and deliver them to the security department when he handed in his report. All breaches of security, however I, had to be specified in this report with the names of the culprits, irrespective of rank.

In spite my imminent dismissal, or perhaps because of it, I was given two days' notice to act as night duty officer for Michael House. An ominous prospect for the building and me.

•       •       •

My parents did not need an NDO for the subversive activities they were in the habit of conducting from their Park West base. Every night, including Sundays, they engaged in a series of clandestine operations which were half black comedy and wholly black market, and they conducted their drops and pick-ups with a security-mindedness which outdid C's and SOE's combined.

Since my impossible pair were in the habit of boasting of their only child's slightest achievement, I'd convinced them that I worked at the Marylebone branch of the Ministry of Labour and National Service. Anxious that I should stay there, they loaded me up every day with enough illicit provisions to start a four-star hotel which I was ordered to distribute to colleagues in need. Amongst those qualifying for relief—and getting it—were the main-line coders, the coders of Grendon, Dansey, Heffer and Owen, and a growing number of country section officers who'd heard that the code department at teatime had a direct line to the Almighty. I gave credit for the largesse to my revered Uncle Simon, whose premises I was shortly going to safeguard.

I reported to the security department at precisely six o'clock for a briefing on an NDO's duties. It proved to be an object lesson in non-communication. The captain who instructed me was so full of himself that I spent the entire session trying to determine the reason for his self-esteem and failed to take in a single word of his instructions, except for 'Any questions? Right. Get on with it.'

I'd been assured by Owen that my armed escort would 'know the drill backwards' and would give me whatever guidance I needed. A young corporal, fully equipped for a march on Berlin, was waiting for me outside the NDO's office. An instruction seemed to be called for. 'At ease?' I suggested.

He substituted one hostile stance for another and mounted guard while I went into the NDO's office to assume control of my building.

The NDO's desk was so small, it was like keeping vigil on a splinter. The camp bed creaked with the disturbed nights of my countless predecessors. I put my lovingly wrapped dinner on it. The only redeeming feature anywhere was a poster on the wall of Churchill, the nation's NDO.

I phoned Grendon to see if there were any indecipherables. They'd just broken one from Julien (Isidore Newman, one of Buckmaster's best operators) after 1,100 attempts. I congratulated them, then identified myself to the Michael House switchboard and announced that the NDO's patrol was about to begin.

'Have the rules changed, sir?' she asked. 'They don't usually start till twenty hundred hours.'

'My watch must be fast. Thank you.'

I wondered if I should ask the corporal to come in and sit down but was uncomfortable in the presence of his artillery.

The phone rang. It was someone anxious to warn me that Hitler had just been seen parachuting in the direction of Baker Street. I I thanked Tommy for the information and invited him to call in later for a cigar. He said he was going home early.

I believed that home to Tommy was a fair-haired WAAF called Barbara. I'd twice glimpsed them walking down Baker Street, which they brightened considerably. He was trying to get her a job in Duke Street and undoubtedly would. His own job prospects (the only one he wanted was in the field) were in the balance. His mission to France with Passy was still in the planning stage so Tommy had improvised one of his own. Captain Molyneux (his former employer) kept a powerful motor yacht in Monte Carlo and Tommy proposed to hijack it, take it to Gibraltar, and hand it over to the navy, who badly needed small craft of this class. Tommy was to be infiltrated by felucca or dropped in by Lysander. The mission had been officially sanctioned by SOE and welcomed by the navy. Tommy had been given the codee-name Sea-horse. I hoped he'd have better stables for the night than I had.

The phone rang again. I answered it with relish:

'This is an official announcement. If Hitler's been sighted in the Norgeby House bog he can bloody well stay there.'

Unfortunately it wasn't Tommy this time. It was Hutchison with enquiry about one of his messages. I told him what he needed to know.

'That's Marks, isn't it?'

I was obliged to confirm that it was.

'I might look in and see you.'

Hoping to be out if he did, I picked up my NDO's satchel and assumed command of my forces. 'Right, Corporal! Lead the way.'

He looked at me in bewilderment.

'What way, sir?'

'What do you mean "What way, sir"? Where do we start?'

'No idea, sir. I've never done this before, sir.'

I nearly fell over his sten-gun, if that's what it was, and requested an explanation.

'I'm standing in for the sergeant, sir. He's hurt his foot, sir.'

'But surely he gave you some instructions.'

'Yes, sir. He said I'm here to protect you, sir. And you'd tell me what to do, sir.'

'Of course,' I said. 'Quick march then.'

The plumber and his mate went walkabout in Michael House. I knew nothing about the geography of the place and very little about its natives. The third floor, I believed, was where merchant bankers in profusion practised their daily diabolicals and I suspected that members of the Executive Council weren't far away. I knew that amongst the giants who had offices in my building were CD himself, his deputy, Brigadier Gubbins, and his other right hand. Colonel Sporborg—who was principal private secretary to SOE's minister, Lord Selborne, on all matters concerned with SOE. It was rumoured that between these two right hands CD could afford the luxury of knowing what his left was doing.

I decided to start the paper-chase in the one office I did know and halted the patrol outside the door of the narcissistic captain who'd tried to brief me. There was no light on inside. 'Corporal, if I'm not out in five minutes, come in shooting.'

Something clicked behind me. I couldn't get inside fast enough.

(Official procedure, subsequently discovered, was for the armed escort to go in first, search behind the curtains and anywhere else intruders might be lurking, and for the NDO then to enter.)

The captain's office had more scraps of paper in it than a royal park. I put them gleefully into my NDO satchel. I wouldn't report him, but first thing in the morning I'd paper his ego. The rest of the security department's offices were almost as insecure. One officer had left a blotter full of ink-marks on his desk. I removed it and made a note to hold up a mirror to the culprit in the morning.

The next six offices I went into were all empty and I wondered if it was early closing. One desk was full of rotten apples, a mirror-image of its occupant? Another contained a personal letter which didn't seem to be in code. (SOE used a code called Playfair for concealing secret messages in innocent letters. It was an innocent's code, and offered little more security than invisible ink when the right kind of heat was applied).

One door at the end of a small ante-room had a light on inside. Perhaps it had been left on by accident. I knocked.

'Come.'

A brigadier and a colonel with an eye-patch sat side by side at a desk. Gubbins and Sporborg. They glanced up from a document they were studying.

I was tempted to say that I'd looked in for a chat about the poem-code. I announced myself instead. 'Night duty officer. Is this room exempt from inspection, sir?'

They stared at me. Gubbins's eyes made de Gaulle's seem placid. Sporborg saw more from his single orb than most people with two.

Gubbins answered. 'The whole floor is exempt.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'Start from the top and work downwards.'

The story of my career.

'Thank you sir.'

'Who are you?'

'The night duty officer, sir.'

I had an instinct that I should withhold my name if I could get away with it. Gubbins gave Sporborg a look which said: 'Is this what we've come down to?' and Sporborg smiled. They returned to their document.

The intelligence in that room was like a vibro-massage and an iota their combined brain-power seemed to have infected my corporal. I stopped outside a door which I hadn't even noticed and put his fingers to his lips. 'There's something funny going on in there, sir. Noise, but no lights.'

I couldn't hear a sound but didn't want to discourage him and went inside.