Len Deighton
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
'I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.'
Chapter One
'Smell that air,' said Major Mann.
I sniffed. 'I can't smell anything,' I said.
'That's what I mean,' said Mann. He scratched himself and grinned. 'Great, isn't it?'
There's not much to smell when you are one thousand miles into, the Algerian Sahara; not much to smell, not much to do, not much to eat.
For those travellers who know the swimming-pools and air conditioning of the government hotels along the northern edge of the Sahara, Adrar comes as a shock. Here the hotel has no more than tightly drawn curtains to protect the tourist from the sun, and the staff have noisy arguments about who should siesta on the cold stone floor of the entrance hall. Only Europeans stayed awake all day, notably four bearded Austrians who, night and day, played cards in the shuttered dining-room. They were waiting for a replacement petrol pump for their truck. Between games they swigged sweet, warm cola drinks. There was no alcohol on sale, and smoking was frowned upon.
Even on this winter's evening the stones and the sand radiated the heat of the desert day.
There was no moon but the stars were so bright that we could easily see our vehicles piled high with stores and sextant and a sign that said 'Dempsey's Desert Tours'. They were parked on the huge main square of Adrar. Mann walked round the vehicles just to make sure the supplies had not been plundered. It was unlikely, for they were outside the police station.
Mann stopped and leaned against the Landrover. He took out a packet of cheroots; there were only four left. 'Look at those stars,' he said.
'The Milky Way — I've never seen it so clearly. A spaceship travelling at 100,000 miles per hour would take 670 million years to cross the Milky Way,' I said. 'There's a hundred thousand million stars there.'
'How do you know?' said Mann. He put a cheroot in his mouth and chewed it.
'I read it in the
'Twinkle, twinkle, little spy,' I said.
Mann looked at me to see if I was being insubordinate. 'Let's go back inside,' he said finally. He decided not to light the cheroot. He put it away again. 'I'll buy you a bottle of Algerian lemonade.' He laughed. Mann was like a small, neatly dressed gorilla: the same heavy brow, deep-set eyes and long arms — and the same sense of humour.
The dining-room is large, and although the big fans no longer turned it was the coolest place for hundreds of miles. The walls are whitewashed light blue, and crudely woven striped rugs are tacked to floor and walls. Overhead, the wooden flooring rattled like jungle drums as someone moved. There was the sudden roar of the shower and the inevitable violent rapping of the ancient plumbing. We helped ourselves to soft drinks and left the money on the till.
That Limey bastard takes a shower every five minutes.'
'Yes, about every five minutes,' I agreed, Major Mickey Mann, U.S. Army Signal Corps, Retired, a C.I.A. expert on Russian electronics and temporarily my boss, had showed no sign of discomfort during the heat of day in spite of his tightly knotted tie and long trousers. He watched me carefully, as he always did when offering criticism of my fellow countrymen. 'That particular Limey bastard,' I said quietly, 'is sixty-one years old, has a metal plate in his skull and a leg filled with German shrapnel.'
'Stash the gypsy violin, feller — you want to make me weep?'
'You treat old Dempsey as if he's simple-minded. I'm just reminding you that he did four years with the Long Range Desert Group. He's lived in Algeria for the best part of thirty years, he speaks Arabic with all the local dialects and if it comes to real trouble in the desert we'll need him to use that sextant.'
Mann sat down at the table and began toying with the Swiss army penknife that he'd bought in the souvenir shop at Geneva airport. 'If the wind starts up again tonight…' he balanced the knife on its end, 'sand will make that road south impassable. And I don't need your pal Percy to tell me that.'
'Even in the Landrover?'
'Did you see that three-tonner down to the axles?' He let go of the knife and it stayed perfectly balanced. 'Sand that bogs down a three-ton six by six will bury a Land-rover.'
'They were gunning the motor,' I said. 'You bury yourself that way.'
'You've been reading the camping-in-the-desert section of the boy scout handbook,' said Mann. Again he banged the folding knife down on to the table, and again it balanced on its end. 'And in any case,' he added, 'how do we know the Russkie will be able to steal a four-wheel drive? He might be trying to get here in a Moskvich sedan for all we know.'
'Is he stupid?'
'Professor Bekuy's intellect is not universally admired,' said Mann. 'During the time he was with the Russian scientific mission at the U.N. he wrote two papers about little men in flying saucers, and earned his reputation as a crank.'
'Defecting cranks don't get the department's O.K.,' I said.
'Looking for messages from little men hi flying saucers probably motivated his work on masers,' said Mann. 'And Bekuv is one of the world's experts on masers.'
'I'm not even sure I know what a maser is,' I said.
'You read the Technical Brief.'
'Twice,' I said. 'But not so as to understand it.'
'Maser,' said Mann. 'It's an acronym — 'm' for microwave, 'a' for amplication, 's' for stimulated, 'e' for emission, 'r' for radiation.'
'Do you mind if I take notes?'
'Listen, dummy. It converts electromagnetic radiation — from a whole range of different frequencies — to a highly amplified, coherent microwave radiation.'
'Is it anything to do with a laser?'
'Well, a maser is a laser but a laser is not necessarily a maser.'
'Is it anything to do with that guy looking in a mirror who says 'Brothers and sisters have I none'?'
'Now you're beginning to get the idea,' said Mann.
'Well, somebody must be very interested in masers,' I said, 'or they wouldn't have sent us two down here to provide Bekuv with a red-carpet reception.'
'Or interested in flying saucers,' said Mann.
'If this Russian is such an idiot, what makes anyone believe that he's capable of escaping from that Russian compound, stealing a roadworthy vehicle and getting all the way up here to meet us?'
'Don't get me wrong, pal. Bekuv is crazy like a fox. Maybe he is a flying-saucer freak, but when he was in New York with that U.N. scientific set-up he was reporting back to the K.G.B. He joined the 1924 Society — crackpots maybe, but they have some of the world's top scientists as members. Bekuv was only too keen to read them long papers about gabfests through the galactic plasma by Soviet scientists, but he was listening very
