can.’
‘If your boss asks my boss-’
The interruption was swift. ‘That won’t happen.’
‘It needs a warrant.’
‘What if I were to tell you, Barney, that my boss might be part of the problem, might be working against our own government, what would you say to that, I ask you?’
‘Are you having me on?’
‘God, I wish I was, but the sod has set something up that makes me wonder and I can smell it has something to do with the Czechs who would be quite happy to see us bleed so they can hang on to their miserable little country.’
Just like the Orange Order, Foxton thought, but he kept that to himself. Not that he got much chance to air any thought — McKevitt, a man normally the picture of calm, was close to bursting with rage, no doubt brought on by the drink.
‘We wandered into the last lot, did we not, Barney, and do you think if we had known the cost we would have done so? Well we damn well know the cost now and it’s likely to be worse, what with bombers in the hundreds an’ all. There’s a crisis brewing and it could go either way if we’re not careful…’
‘You’re asking for a hell of a lot, Noel.’
‘And don’t I know it. I can kiss goodbye to my job and pension if this gets out, but I tell you what, to avoid seeing those Flanders fields soaked in blood again, I would do it.’
‘I’ll have to give it a bit of thought.’
‘Do that, Barney, do that, and rest assured, if you want anything from me in return, in the rules or out of them, sure you only have to ask.’
The first thing Barney Foxton did when he got back to his office, following on from a quick and very necessary visit to the Gents, was to tell the switchboard that if Noel McKevitt rang they were to say he was out. Not normally a man to talk to himself he did so when he put the phone back down.
‘You can blow your pension if you want, you Irish nutcase, but I’m not blowing mine.’
Sir Hugh Sinclair looked at the copy of Callum Jardine’s telegram from Prague as well as the reply and he compared them with that which had been given to him by Peter Lanchester. He had no need to decipher the original as long as the cryptic characters compared properly and they did.
Getting the information from MI5 had been relatively easy and had nothing to do with an exchange of favours. Sinclair had spent many years seeking to combine the two services but had been rebuffed time and again. For all that, his opposite number, Vernon Kell, the head of the domestic intelligence service, knew that he had not given up hope, just as he knew that such affairs and infighting tied everyone up in such a Gordian knot of bureaucratic nonsense as to be a nightmare.
So any request that seemed reasonable from Sinclair was met, and if Kell wondered at the secrecy surrounding the application for telegram transcripts, and the demand that it stay strictly between the two of them, that too was easy to accede to.
His secretary entered to advise him his car was waiting, with a frown that was intended to impart that keeping waiting a high-powered delegation from Paris, including the French PM and Foreign Minister, was very bad manners indeed, but he was less concerned than she.
They were with their political equivalents and that always went on too long; such people were too fond of the sound of their own voice to adhere to a timetable, quite apart from the fact that they seemed to derive some pleasure from keeping in suspense those people they referred to in private, or certainly thought of, as their minions.
Part of the visiting party included his counterpart in French Intelligence and he would share with that man the fact that he had an independent and covert operation going on in Czechoslovakia, one in which he was happy to communicate the results, albeit the French were well placed there themselves.
Naturally he would be expected to ask for something in return and he would, out of a curiosity prompted by what Peter Lanchester had told him on his return, request a record of the calls from abroad made to certain proto- fascist organisations in France; that such records existed he had no doubts.
The telegrams were locked in his desk drawer; his briefcase was waiting for him to take out, within it the latest digest of intelligence from the Central European Desk. Emerging to cross a sunlit pavement, Sir Hugh reflected that it was probably sunny all the way across the continent of Europe. Odd that what he was carrying hinted at dark and threatening clouds.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘ I think the thing that set me up most was the sea journey back to the States.’
Corrie Littleton was talking about her convalescence in what had, so far, been a very pleasant dinner, during which she had, surprisingly, asked for wine; Cal remembered her as a strident teetotaller, but as a result of her serious wounds, she had turned to alcohol to ease down from a possible morphine addiction.
‘And not just the sea air. On the transatlantic there was the dishiest doc you have ever seen in your life. Boy, do those sailor’s whites make a guy look good, especially the shorts.’
‘You should see me in a kilt.’
‘Do you mind, Cal, I’m eating,’ she replied, forking some goulash into her mouth, only speaking again when that had been consumed. ‘So when are you going to tell what game you are playing here in Prague?’
‘Who says I’m going to tell you?’
She threw back her head and laughed. ‘You better had, bud, ’cause I am a hot reporter these days.’
She had been something of a thorn in Cal’s side in Ethiopia, forcing diversions on his objectives in a search for her archaeologist mother, that not aided by a tongue that seemed, in his case, to be made of acid. Yet she could handle a gun, complained little of the discomfort of travelling and proved she was a woman by making moon eyes at an aristocratic, arrogant French flyer.
It was also true she had been stalwart when called upon, helping, without any experience at all, to run a field hospital in which it had been necessary to quickly overcome any natural squeamishness and deal with the horrendous wounds caused by modern weapons. In short, Corrie Littleton was quite tough.
‘So you’d best just open up.’
Recalling the way he had lost contact with Moravec, Cal was thinking right now there was nothing to say. Then Vince nudged him and he saw coming through the tables the bloke his boxing friend had nearly floored. The young man said nothing, just dropped a card onto the table by Cal’s side and carried on. Corrie Littleton tried to snatch it but failed; after a quick look it went into a pocket.
‘Whose side are you on?’ Cal asked as a way of diverting her. ‘The Germans or the Czechs?’
‘I’m supposed to be neutral.’
‘Hard to be that,’ Vince said.
‘I agree, and when it’s the little guy against Goliath there’s really only one side to be on.’
‘Is that the policy of your rag?’
‘It’s not a rag, Cal, it’s a magazine and they don’t have a view either way and nor do they want headlines. What they need is a set of features that sells copies. How the place is, under the threat of invasion — are the locals coping, what do they think of the democracies, not just here in Prague but in the Sudetenland as well? And to do that I need to go there and be free to operate openly.’
Cal did a good job of looking sorry for her; Vince did it better — he meant it.
‘With what’s happening in Nuremberg the Czechs have got kinda jumpy about journalists travelling around the border areas and they’re insisting they need police escorts. I’d need accreditation papers to do my job.’
‘You can go as a private citizen, I think.’
‘What would be the point of that? My request to go there is with the Interior Ministry but they seem to be taking their damn sweet time to process it.’
‘It must be crowded in those parts right now,’ Vince said.
