‘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.
Any discussion about what they might be asked to do had been put to bed; Vince had been reassured that Cal would do nothing without having a good look at any problems first, but he had persuaded his boxing friend that what was on offer might fulfil the requirement of what he had been sent here to do, without the need to cross into Germany. Quite apart from that, if it could be done it was too good to pass up.
When Moravec phoned, Cal was translating some of the more florid and ridiculous bits from the newspapers to Vince in a cod German accent that had them both laughing. The call put an end to that; he advised Cal to take a tram to a station called Geologica for noon, probably chosen, Vince ventured when he looked at the tram routes on his town map, because it was the only one a foreigner could pronounce.
For Cal, having sent off his telegram to London and with a bit of spare time before the rendezvous, it presented a good opportunity to look over their own means of emergency extraction, that ugly Tatra car parked in a side street gathering dust. Having ensured it was untouched, it was back on the busy tram system to the aforementioned station, in his hand his canvas bag containing the information that had arrived the night before.
When they alighted Vaclav was waiting, as if an aspiring tram passenger, but once they had moved away and he had checked no one was following, he spun on his heel and walked quickly to get past them. With all the usual precautions he led them to where Moravec was waiting in a very different vehicle, a limousine; this time Vaclav was the driver.
Naturally the talk turned to what he had sent them and Cal’s impression of the information, to which there was only one reply — that it was comprehensive enough to qualify for praise as to the amount of detail, but it did not answer the pertinent question, this while he was vaguely aware, by the position of the sun and the time of day, that having originally travelled south-east they were now heading north in a wide arc around the city.
‘I am taking you to meet someone who might answer any questions you have.’