what we need, and those plans do just that.’
Once everything was tidied away and Vince had gone back to his own room, Cal sat down with the laborious task of composing another telegram to Peter Lanchester, this time outlining what he thought was on offer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Peter Lanchester’s ‘chat’ with Noel McKevitt had not started well and ended badly, though he had noticed on entering the Ulsterman’s office that there was a strong smell of drink on his breath. His eyes also had that slight glaze which comes from a too-liquid lunch and perhaps it was that which led to a surprising loss of control from a man so well known for the lack of passion in his demeanour.
There had been a seemingly interminable discussion of Brno and what he had observed there, tedious because Peter had nothing to say which he suspected McKevitt did not already know, but eventually it led to where it was clear he wanted to go, even if he said he was no longer concerned: had Peter found out the identity of the fellow who had illegally bought those weapons?
‘You didn’t question anyone at the arms factory?’ McKevitt asked, for the first time slightly querulous when the answer was negative.
‘That was not my brief, Noel, and besides, given we surmise that the End User Certificate was known to be false by the managers, I doubt asking questions would have got me very far. They would have just clammed up, while I was not inclined to seek out and interrogate your source.’
‘Not your brief,’ was the response, accompanied by a slight frown. ‘You were given this job by Quex himself-?’
A sharp interruption was necessary. ‘I do think that is a question you should put directly to him, Noel.’
‘Would it be breaching any confidentiality to tell me what the parameters were? For instance, was your mission to stop the shipment or just to track it?’
‘As you know,’ Peter responded, prevaricating, ‘it had already left Brno when we were alerted to the transaction.’
‘Which makes me wonder, Peter, if the man we pay a stipend to there is either as quick or as loyal as we would hope. We should have known about this deal before it was concluded.’
The idea that the fellow’s loyalty might be to the country of his birth was not one to raise; it may well be he had done the minimum instead of the maximum.
‘I’m curious, Noel, where this is leading. I am happy to talk to you about Brno, even if there’s not much to say, but I am less so to discuss an operation with anyone not directly connected with it. It would, in fact, be a breach of both confidence and protocol.’
‘Do you not see, Peter?’ McKevitt replied, rather pedantic in the way he used that expression. ‘We have been made to look like fools.’
‘We cannot be certain of that; there’s no evidence those weapons ever got out of France.’
Maybe it was the drink, maybe the way he was being stalled, but the man lost some of his habitual detachment.
‘Christ, we would be a poor Secret Intelligence Service if we relied on evidence. You have admitted you were in La Rochelle on the trail of those bloody machine guns. One phone call to the French would have put the kibosh on any attempt to get them through France, never mind out of the country. Why was that call never made?’
The temptation to ask if he had made any calls around the same time was so hard to resist.
‘Now if you did not do that,’ McKevitt continued, ‘there had to be a motive for it, and I am curious as to what that could be. I am also curious, Peter Lanchester, why a few days after your return from this particular cock-up you are in receipt of a telegram from Prague?’
‘That is none of your business.’
‘Anything to do with Czechoslovakia is my business and the list of such telegrams and the recipients lands on my desk as a matter of course. What I want is the contents.’
Peter stood up. ‘Have you never heard of Chinese walls?’
The tone of the response was icy. ‘I’ll give you Chinese walls, or maybe they’ll be prison walls. I am not a man to mess with, Lanchester, as you may find out, and don’t be sure that there is anyone, however high and mighty, who can protect you. There’s something going on that I should know about and I intend to find out what it is. Maybe you would like the weekend to think that over.’
‘We are all here on sufferance, Noel, including you, but I will pass on to Quex your concerns as to how he runs SIS.’
There was pure devilment in what Peter said next and he had no knowledge of what Quex had been up to.
‘And while you are busy monitoring the telegram traffic from Prague don’t be surprised to find there are certain communications between London and France that are also under surveillance, by the Deuxieme Bureau if not by us. I’m wondering if a request to them for certain information would go unacknowledged.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ McKevitt replied, his face expressionless.
‘I wonder,’ Peter barked over his shoulder as he went out of the door.
After a day of endless talking at Downing Street, during which many a bellicose statement had come from the French delegation about standing up to Hitler, meeting more measured assertions from their British counterparts, it was fairly plain to Sir Hugh Sinclair that matters had not moved on one centimetre, never mind an inch; it was all talk and no go.
There had been no time to beard his French counterpart, Colonel Gauche, during the day, both men being too busy advising their own superiors, but as usual there was a formal dinner in the evening and they were seated next to each other, where, conversationally, they competed to see who could most mangle the other’s native language.
For all the difficulties that entailed, communication was achieved as they discussed what might come out of the forthcoming gathering of the Nazi bigwigs in Nuremberg. Gauche had a very good intelligence operation in Czechoslovakia — hardly surprising given they were formal allies, with a proper signed treaty and France had bankrolled a lot of the Czech armaments through loans and subsidies — but when it came to Germany the British had the upper hand.
A free flow of shared information was never possible with two intelligence agencies — not even internally did they always cooperate — but within the bounds of mutual jealousies and natural Anglo-Gallic mistrust they did help each other and the Frenchman saw nothing to trouble his conscience in having one of his men examine the records of foreign calls made to such outfits as the Jeunesses Patriotes.
‘The call,’ Sinclair said, ‘ C’est from Angleterre, dans le middle de Aout.’ Then he flicked a finger over his shoulder. ‘ Votre glass c’est empty, Colonel.’
The Frenchman replied, but not in words Sinclair was sure he understood; the man was nodding and that would suffice.
While Vince was reading his day-old News Chronicle Cal had his nose buried in the freshly delivered German newspapers that had come in on the overnight trains which still ran over the disputed border as though there was no problem. It was one of the features of Prague that you could buy almost any newspaper published in the world if you didn’t mind old news.
The Czechs prided themselves on being internationalists, as people with a world view, not a narrowly parochial one, and in the cafes and bars in normal times you could get into a well-informed discussion about what was happening in the four corners of the globe; not now — even the foreign press was full of what was taking place in Bavaria.
If there was a deep fascination, allied to a visceral fear of what the Nazi Party was up to in Nuremberg, it certainly, in Cal’s mind, would never extend to the speeches, which were the usual Aryan claptrap mixed with justifications for no freedom, low wages for workers and the need for vigilance against foes, who would be manufactured if they did not exist, all wrapped up in nice language about the beauty of their ideology.
