Madeleine's War (22 page)

“G.! What—?”

“Am I glad I found you! I thought you might have taken the rest of the afternoon off.”

“Why? You know better than that—”

“Message from Hilary. You are wanted at Number Ten at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.”

“Number Ten? You mean—?”

“Yes, of course that's what I bloody well mean. Eight o'clock sharp, that's what Hilary said. Downing Street.”

I HAD ONLY BEEN IN DOWNING STREET
once before this and my second visit was a very brief one. As I arrived, at two minutes to eight o'clock on the following morning, the door miraculously opened to let me in. In the hall was Hilary standing next to a man with one arm, the sleeve of his naval jacket pinned back more or less to where his elbow should have been.

“Good, good,” said Hilary quietly, in that way of his. “Bang on time, Matt, excellent.” He was in his usual three-piece tweed suit, striped tie, and shiny beer-brown brogues.

He turned to the man beside him and said, “Okay, we can go. Lead the way.” He turned to me, smiling, and said, “Frank here lost his arm at Dunkirk. But all the rest of him is in full working order.”

Frank stepped forward, the main door was opened, and out we went, back into Downing Street. The morning was sunny and fresh.

We turned right and headed west, down a flight of stone steps at the St. James's Park end of the street, and Hilary slowed his stride so that I drew level. “The PM's in his war office, the bunker below ground. Ever been?”

“No. I didn't know there
was
a bunker. Where is it?”

“You'll see. Not far. It's reassuring in its way, but it's not that deep. I'm not sure it would survive a direct hit.”

At the foot of the steps we turned left, along the edge of the park until we came to King Charles Street, running between what I did know was the Home Office building, and the building housing both the Foreign Office and the Treasury. That street also ended in a flight of steps.

“Do these steps have a name?”

“Buggered if I know,” growled Hilary.

“King Charles Steps, sir,” said Frank. “Here we are.”

I suddenly saw what he meant. Set into the wall at the foot of the Foreign Office building was a small door. It was a sooty black, hardly different from the dirty stones with which the Foreign Office walls were faced. There were no markings, and it was wholly inconspicuous.

Like the Downing Street door, it opened as we approached—seemingly all by itself—and we went straight in. A woman with raven-black hair immediately closed and locked it behind us.

We showed her our passes.

“Sign in, please,” she said, scrutinising each one carefully. “You are expected.”

To Frank, she said, “Take them down to conference room E, that's—”

“I remember,” said Frank. “Third on the right round the bend—am I right?”

“Show-off!” she murmured, but she was smiling.

We descended some stairs. Not many, maybe fifteen; so we weren't all that deep. Hilary was right—this bunker would not survive a direct hit.

At the foot of the stairs we turned left. The bunker, I noticed, was built of large breeze blocks, painted over in that universal wartime khaki-green colour. Someone must have made a fortune out of that grey-green paint.

Frank led the way.

The bunker was busy. People were coming towards us, secretarial types, men in uniforms with lots of medals and/or gold braid, including younger men who must have had some special skill—like languages—to save them from being at the front. Off to our right we passed a variety of small rooms, teleprinters coughing out scrolls of paper, people hunched over what had to be coded messages, deciphering one after the other. We passed a cramped bedroom with a narrow single bed; on the open door were the two letters: “PM.”

At the end of the corridor we turned left into a wider passageway. Along its ceiling was a huge, square metal tube running its length and painted matt black. It must have carried air either into or out of the bunker. I was already beginning to feel the heat of being down there.

At last we turned in to a room set with tables and chairs. The walls were made of the same breeze blocks, painted the same grey-green as everywhere else. There were no windows, of course, and no pictures; just a grille where, presumably, the fresh air was led into the room from the great black metal tube in the corridor.

“Take a seat, gents, I'll tell them you've arrived,” Frank said, and went out.

“Can we smoke in here?” I whispered to Hilary.

“I don't know. I shouldn't think so. I wouldn't risk it. Don't want to get off on the wrong foot.”

“What wrong foot? What's going on, Hilary? There hasn't been time to ask.”

He shook his head. “I don't know. All I know is that yesterday afternoon I got a phone call telling me to be at Downing Street at eight this morning, and to bring you with me, without fail. That's all—I was told nothing more. Then, when I got to Number Ten, about three minutes before you did, I was told we were coming on here. And that's all—aha!”

He broke off as two men filled the doorway. One was tall and thin, with silver-grey hair. The other wasn't quite so tall, but was still bulkily built, with a cigar wedged in his mouth.

I leapt to my feet and so did Hilary.

The bulky man was Winston Churchill himself.

He stepped forward and held out his hand.

The PM took the cigar from his mouth.

“Sorry to drag you down into this hellhole but it's a busy day today.” He put his hand on the shoulder of the man standing next to him. “Colonel Hathaway will explain what all the cloak-and-dagger is about but I wanted to meet you and to ask you one question.”

I looked at him.

He waved his cigar. “You have only one lung but you go on smoking. No problems?”

“Not so far, sir,” I said.

“In that case, do you want one of these?” He fished in his jacket pocket and took out a cigar.

“Well, I…”

“Go on, take it. For good luck in France.” He chuckled.

“France?” I said.

“Hathaway will reveal all,” he countered, still smiling and preparing to leave. “Hilary, you come with me, will you?”

The prime minister gave me a small nod and led Hilary out into the corridor, closing the door firmly behind him. I could see that Frank was stationed right outside.

The thin, silver-haired man held out his hand and as I shook it, he said,
“Rupert Hathaway. I'm the PM's ‘fixer,' his
consigliere
, as the Mafia say.” He grinned.

He sat down on one of the upright chairs and put a manila folder on the table. I could see that stencilled across it were the words
TOP SECRET
.

He nodded to the cigar. “Quite a memento, eh? I don't have one and I have
two
lungs.” He smiled. “Right. Down to business and my first task is to remind you that you've signed the Official Secrets Act. Whatever comes out of this meeting, what went on here can never be revealed. I mean that. Am I coming over crystal clear?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

He unbuttoned his jacket, crossed his legs, and sat back. “Good. In a minute I am going to tell you one of the biggest secrets of the war but first some background. The PM—he won't mind me saying this behind his back—is a bit of a cowboy. He likes daring, innovative schemes, and some of the things SC2 have done have caught his imagination. He also likes people who have ‘the nous'—his words—to turn adversity into an opportunity. So he was impressed by your scheme—when you found out that some of the SC2 circuits had been penetrated—to feed the Germans false information about D-Day. He thought that showed his kind of ‘low cunning'—his words again.

“Then there was all that hoo-ha in Parliament about SC2 using women agents, followed by MI6 moving in and taking over.”

I made a face but said nothing.

“The PM wasn't too happy about that himself—after all, he authorised the use of women as agents in the first place and he still can't see what's wrong with it. But he didn't want our agencies squabbling at such an important time of the war, with the invasion just beginning, and he had his mind on that, so he let it ride.

“Now, however, the situation has changed, something has cropped up, something we must put a stop to. We think you are the man for the job. It means going to France. Immediately, I mean—sooner than that, in fact. Just as soon as we can set up your cover.”

I still said nothing. But Madeleine flashed into my mind.

“One general question before I go on. Do you know much about science, physics in particular?”

I shook my head. “I understand electricity well enough, and magnetism, osmosis, all that kind of thing, and I've heard about electrons and neutrons and Albert Einstein and Arnold Rutherford, but that's about it—”

“Ernest Rutherford,” he said. “Ernest. Not Arnold.”

“There you are,” I said. “That's how much I know.”

He nodded. “You know more than most. It probably won't matter. Now, let's get down to it.” He cleared his throat. “The nasty part.

“The war will go on for several months yet, maybe longer, maybe longer in the Pacific than here in Europe. We, on our side, are pretty sure of winning now, but nothing is certain and we want to conserve as many lives as we can. And we can't yet be sure what shape the peace will take. All these factors come into what I am about to tell you—the greatest secret, I can't stress that enough.

“For several months now, in the New Mexico desert, in the United States, Allied scientists—American, British, Canadian, Danish, and one Frenchman—have been working together on a new kind of bomb. It's called an atomic bomb, and it works—if it does work, it hasn't been tested yet—it works by splitting an atom of radioactive uranium, releasing untold amounts of energy. These split other atoms in a geometric progression, a larger and ever more powerful chain reaction. So much energy is released, I am told, that one bomb—one single bomb, one explosion—can destroy an entire city, killing tens of thousands of people and mortally wounding as many again from radioactive burns that still kill but more slowly, causing cancers and other diseases.”

He looked at me. There was total silence all around.

“We are, of course, hoping that we do not have to use this bomb, we are hoping that when we tell the Germans or the Japanese that we
have
this weapon—that they will see sense, avoid needless killing, and surrender. But we can't be sure.

“That's the basic scenario. Here's where you come in. As I said, one of the scientists in New Mexico is French. He has a particular speciality, which I won't go into, since you don't need to know and it will only confuse matters, but his role in the project, while vital, is now coming to an end. Since the invasion has started and parts of France are now liberated, he—quite naturally—wants to return home as soon as he can and to join in the fighting. He wants to see some action at home.”

He uncrossed and recrossed his legs.

“Here's the difficulty. This man—his name is Daniel Legros—is well-known among his fellow French physicists, and is especially close to one man—François Perrault—whose name you may know. Have you heard of
him
?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

“It doesn't matter—in fact, it might even help, given what I'm about to say. What you do need to know is that, just before the war, when he was professor of physics at Belfort University, in the east of France, Perrault won the Nobel Prize for physics. He is a brilliant man, and was the first person to demonstrate the rate at which uranium decays. You don't need to know what that means either.”

Hathaway rubbed his chin.

“Legros was able to take part in the New Mexico business—it's called the Manhattan Project, in case you ever hear it referred to, though even that name of course is top secret—he could take part in the project because, when France fell in 1940, he happened to be at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge here in Britain, and so he simply stayed. Perrault, however, was in France. And that's what makes this so awkward. He was in France and he was very brave. He abandoned his laboratory work at Belfort immediately and went underground, helping to organise the Resistance. He has been very successful, has never been caught, has helped with a lot of sabotage, and is a specialist in intelligence and communications. He is now in Paris as one of the ex-leader-heroes of the Resistance. He may go into politics when the war is over.”

He leaned forward and put the palms of his hands on the table.

“Now we get to the real meat, the killer fact.” He fiddled with a gold ring on his little finger. “François Perrault is a communist, a very fervent, dedicated communist. In the 1930s he visited the Soviet Union several times and made many contacts there, and some close friends.

“Step back again. It's already clear that Stalin and his generals will almost certainly meet our forces somewhere in Germany. After the war, then, even if we win, Europe is going to be divided—into American- or British-style democracies, in the western part, and Soviet-ruled communist countries in the east. This will be the new reality, the new division, the new shape of Europe, after the war. Obviously, it won't be a stable situation—although the war will be over, rivalries, possibly very deadly rivalries, will almost certainly continue. Hitler will be out of the way, we hope, in some jail somewhere, if he doesn't get killed or kill himself, but we'll still have Stalin to contend with, and he is just as murderous as Hitler, maybe even more so. You'll be aware of all these stories coming out about Stalin's so-called purges—thousands of people killed in Russia because their faces didn't fit?”

I nodded.

“The logic of the situation, therefore, is that Stalin must not learn about the Manhattan Project. He must not know about the bomb until we are so far ahead, until we have built so many of these bombs, that he will never be able to catch up and will have to do as he is told.”

He opened the file in front of him and took out two photographs.

“It is a foregone conclusion that when Legros”—and he placed a finger on one of the photographs—“gets to Paris, the first thing he will do is tell what he knows to Perrault.” He pointed to the other photograph. “And, before long, Perrault, with his sympathies, will tell the Russians. That must not happen.” Hathaway looked at me directly. “I'll repeat what I said: That. Must. Not. Happen. Legros or Perrault, or both, must be killed before they meet.”