'Care for a coffin nail?' Aloha Shirt asked, producing a pack of American cigarettes.
'No, thanks.'
Aloha Shirt smiled affably. 'No need to get uptight, Dr. Hemlock. You struck out, but everything's going to be A-okay.'
'What about the girl?'
'She's fine and dandy. No sweat.' Aloha Shirt smiled again. 'I should make introductions. The driver there is Henry.'
The driver stretched to seek Jonathan's reflection in the rearview mirror and grinned in greeting. 'Good to meet you, sir.'
'Hello, Henry.'
'And my burly sidekick there is The Sergeant.'
'Not 'Bullet Head'?'
The Sergeant scowled and turned to stare out the windscreen, his jaw set tight.
'And I'm called Yank.' He grinned. 'It's kind of a weird moniker, but they call me that because I dig American things. Clothes. Slang. Everything. For my money, you guys are where it's at.'
In the space of a few minutes, Yank had used slang sampling a thirty-year span of American argot, and Jonathan assumed he got it from late night movies. 'Where are we going, Yank?'
'You'll see when we get there. But don't worry. Everything's cool. We're from Loo.' He said this last with some pride.
'From where?'
'Loo.'
The Olde Worlde Inn
As they rushed along the motorway, Yank sketched in the history and function of the Loo organization. Though his instructions allowed him to impart no information beyond this, he said they would meet a man at their destination who would clarify everything.
Following the typical pattern of development for espionage organizations in democratic countries, England's earliest felt need was for a domestic agency to ferret out and control enemy espionage and sabotage within its borders. Building up its information files on real and imagined enemies, and occasionally stumbling onto a genuine spy cell while groping about for a fictive one, this bureaucratic organism grew steadily in size and power, justifying each new expansion on the basis of the last. From a single cluttered desk in the Military Intelligence building, it swelled to occupy an entire office: Room #5. And by the simplistic codes of the service, it became known as MI- 5.
It eventually occurred to the intelligence specialists that they might do well to assume an active as well as passive role in the game of spy-spy, so they set up a sister organization to control British agents operating abroad. The traditional British penchant for independence dictated that these two agencies be fully autonomous, and the rivalry between them extended to refusal to admit of the existence of the other. But this resulted in a certain erosion of manpower, inasmuch as the agents of each organization spent much of their time spying on, thwarting, and occasionally killing the agents of the other. In a master stroke of organizational insight, it was decided to open communications between the two agencies, and the international branch was installed in the next office down the corridor, becoming known in official circles as MI-6.
In harness, they muddled their way through the Second World War, relying largely on the French organizational concept, 'systeme D.' Their agents earned reputations for bravery and enterprise, which qualities were vital to survival, considering the blunderers who insisted on parachuting French-speaking agents into Yugoslavia. No energy was spared in the rounding up of Irish nationalists on the basis of the rumor that Ireland was a secret signatory of the Axis Pact.
At home, their operatives uncovered spy rings that were passing information by means of cryptic keys in the knitting patterns of balaclavas that women's institutes were supplying to troops in Africa. And they captured no fewer than seven hundred German parachute spies, nearly all of whom had been trained with such insidious thoroughness that they spoke no German at all and pretended to be innocently pushing their bicycles to work in munitions plants. It was obvious that these were agents of the highest importance, because their controls had gone to the trouble of giving them covers that included homes hit by the blitz and county clerk records supplying them with generations of British ancestors.
In Europe, MI-6 agents blew up bridges in the path of the advancing Allied armies, thus preventing hasty and ill-considered thrusts. It was they who uncovered Switzerland's intention to declare war on Sweden as a last resort. And on three separate occasions only bad luck prevented them from capturing General Patton and his entire staff.
When the war was over, each agent was required to write a book on his adventures, then he was permitted to enter trade. But the romance surrounding MI-5 and MI-6 was tarnished somewhat by a pattern of defections and information leaks that embarrassed British Intelligence almost as much as the existence of that agency was an embarrassment to British intelligence. Clearly, something had to be done to prevent these defections and leakages and to maintain the honor and reputation of the organization. Following the fashion of the day, the government turned to the United States for its model.
At about the same time in America, the 102 splinter spy groups that had sprung up in the Army, Navy, State Department, Treasury, and Bureau of Indian Affairs were merged into a vast bureaucratic malignancy, the CII. This organization, like its British opposite number, was having its share of defections and its share of witch-hunting self-examination spawned by the McCarthy panic. In reaction, it organized an internal cell designed to police and control its own personnel and to protect them from assassination abroad. This last was achieved by the sanction threat of counterassassination, and the cell that performed these internal and external sanctions was known as the Search and Sanction Division—popularly known as the SS Squad. It was for SS that Jonathan had worked, before he managed to release himself from their coils.
Emulating the American structure, the British developed an elite inner cell which they installed in the next room up the corridor, which room happened to be a toilet. Despite the fact that they refurbished the space to accommodate its new function, wags immediately gave the assassination group the nickname: The Loo.
'...and that ought pretty much put you into the big picture,' Yank concluded. 'At least you know who we are. Any questions?'
Jonathan had been listening with only half an ear as he watched the countryside flow past his window, a grimy twilight beginning to soften the line of the background hills. They had left the motorway and were threading through country lanes. When they passed through a village, Jonathan noticed the arms over a public house: vert, three blades of grass proper, a bend of the first. Obviously they were still in Wessex and had been weaving through back roads without making much linear progress. He glanced out the back window to make sure the car carrying Maggie was still following close behind.
'No sweat,' said Yank, 'they know where they're going. Everything's real George.'
'That's wonderful. Now, why don't you tell me what this is all about?'
'No can do. The Guv will lay it on you when we get there. You'll like the Guv. He's old school and all that, but he's no square from Delaware. He's hip to the scene.'
The Bentley turned in at a roadside inn called the Olde Worlde and crunched over a gravel drive to the back where it stopped against a retaining log. The car carrying Maggie followed and parked twenty yards away. Two young men conducted her to the back door of the inn.
'Well, what do you think of it?' Yank asked as Jonathan stepped out and was flanked by The Sergeant and Henry. 'Nice pad, eh?'
Jonathan scanned the sprawling warren. It was phony Tudor, built at the end of the last century by the look of it, and certainly not originally designed to be an inn. Dozens of details had that inorganic applique quality of a style imitated. But where taste and constraint had been lacking, funds had not, for the glass, the wood, the brick were of the best quality available in the 1880s—that last moment before craftsmanship fell victim to the machine and the union.
'This way, sir.' Henry's accent had the chewed diphthongs of the working class. They conducted Jonathan around to the front of the inn where, at the reception desk, they were greeted by a healthy, overly made-up young lady wearing a tight sweater and a mini so short that the double stitching of her panty hose showed. Her accent,
